"Not like Sealock, huh?"
She grinned. "Well, he started out incomprehensible. I think he would be no easier to understand now, no matter what happens. There have been positive changes in him, but I don't know to what effect."
"I haven't seen any of these 'positive' changes. He seems worse than ever!" Shaking her head, Ariane said, "Just because you can't perceive a thing doesn't mean it isn't there." Cornwell felt a little upwelling of uncharacteristic anger. "Tell me how he's changed, then. Convince me."
"I ... can't." She looked pained. "Something's going on in him. I don't know what. The violence and anger seem to be receding. I think maybe he sees himself more clearly now. I don't know what the end result will be. . . ."
Demogorgon surfaced from the Illimitor World, called back to his body by the safeguards that Sealock had helped him build in long ago, monitors designed to prevent damage to organs by neglected bodily functions. A ruptured bladder would be a poor ending to a fine adventure. He stretched. Prynne and Berenguer were sprawled motionless on the soft floor before him, left to their own devices in a self-sustaining inner Universe. He heard a muted sound and looked up. Aksinia Ockels was leaning against the open doorway, naked, watching them all through her chemically brightened eyes. He nodded to her as he stood up.
She approached and touched him, running her fingers down the length of his chest, toward his groin.
"Want to make love with me?"
He shook his head. "No. I've got to piss. Besides, you may have heard, I'm queer."
"I thought you were changing."
He shrugged and gestured at the other two. "I don't really want to leave them in there alone for too long. The world is too mutable for novices. They might get lost."
She looked slightly nonplused. "It's the same thing as drugs, you know."
"I know," he said. "Everyone has their own way out. This is mine." He looked at her speculatively, and asked, "Want to give it a try?"
"I'm still under Beta-2." There was a hint of fear perceptible in her voice.
"Doesn't matter." He picked up a circlet and held it out to her. "Come on."
"I don't know . . ."
He grinned and put it over her head, then donned his own. "It's easy. I won't let you fall." Under the wire, they sank swiftly through the cottony-dense data layers of the 'net and reappeared in the fantasy-flare skies above Arhos . Axie cried out with delight at the interaction between the effect of the machines on her mind and the drug on her brain. Demogorgon changed her into a great, metallic-green eagle-like creature, a sort of harpy, really, and let her go, with the injunction, "You can fly!"
She fell like a bomb from the heavens, a vengeful cry tearing the quiet clouds asunder, then her wings snapped open and she flew, enthralled.
Called back to the surface by his monitors once again, Demogorgon stepped out into the corridor, intent on his need for physical relief. He went to the refresher stall in his room and began the mechanical evacuation, thinking, with amusement, Pissing's a pleasure when you've really got to go. It's the simple things that make life worth living. A crackle came into his mind, and, somehow seeping through Shipnet's circuits, he heard a low cry of dismay. It had a flavorof Sealock about it. Strange, he thought, feeling a small jolt of anticipatory dread. Sadness and a sense of his continual isolation flooded over him, and he went to rejoin his apprentices in Arhos .
John was again out on the ice, trying to reconcile the way he felt with the way he thought he should feel. He wasn't as devastated as he should have been and, indeed, had cried less than half an hour altogether. He found that the whole incident was already beginning to feel remote, dreamlike, and all of the DR even more so. Was he an unfeeling monster, a bastard, a mechanism driven by forces unwholesome and unhumanistic? It had taken him a brief while to readapt, to restructure his rationalizations; and here he was on the other side of it all; still functioning when by all rights he should have been destroyed. Stripped of his illusions, what was the difference? He stared up at a dim-cored Iris and the sun now so near to it, yet the squint didn't feel wet.
He was beginning to look forward to the eclipse.
SEVEN
Jana turned the flat knob counterclockwise and the silent engine shut down. Through the windshield, the unbalanced triad of the Iris system hung just twenty-five degrees above the salt-white waste. The glaring pinpoint of the sun stood canted only seconds from the upper right limb of the blue infrastar, throwing little scintillae across the clear barrier. Here, at the far eastern edge of the ocellus, she could watch the eclipse without straining her neck. With rather too much care she pulled the hood of her suit over her head and adjusted it precisely. It hardened against her and she made a change in the thermal generator that would slowly drop her body temperature to a critical level, then disconnected the control element. After a moment she evacuated the driver's compartment and threw open a door. The conjunction of the two stars hurried toward first contact.
In a neat row a hundred meters from the CM dome, Cornwell had prepared a little surprise. Ten pieces of bubbleplastic, bent to form dark chaises longues , arrayed themselves across the rubbly ice. "I didn't know if Brendan would be joining us or not," John said apologetically.
"Yeah, well, where's Jana?" asked Ariane.
"Good question," said Tem. "She's not within range of the Clarke, or else she's just not answering."
"It wouldn't be the first time," said Beth, mounting one of the chairs and twisting into a supine position.
"I'd bet she's found her own place to watch from; after all, there are observations to be made out in the highlands." Her voice was hoarse, and she looked at no one.
"OK," said Tem, after checking Shipnet Inventory, "she's taken the 60vet and a regular suit. That means she's disconnected the homing signal in the car. No science material is missing." Axie cleared her throat, then thought out loud. "I guess I must have been the last one to see her, about three hours ago. Something—"
"Wait a second, wait a second!" John seemed a little hysterical. "Here it is!"
"Forget the fucking eclipse!" said Harmon. "What's she doing with my car?" But for a moment the eclipse was difficult to ignore, the sun diffusing into a spectrum-fringed splotch under the still distinct blue top of Iris' atmosphere. It was moving slowly and wouldn't make the complete transit of Iris' four degrees for almost six hours. Still, like looking at an ancient clock face, there was imperceptible motion that accumulated into discrete changes in appearance.
"I'm very worried about Jana," said Axie. "She's changed, gotten . . . weird. I could see her, well, aura before, but it went dark. I know that sounds stupid to you, but the induction tech has side effects, sort of; anyway, I'm scared. She might do something bad."
"Like what?" said Ariane, gently but with sarcasm creepinginto her voice. "She's got a lot invested in this exploration. I doubt if she would sacrifice that for anything."