It was not until the following dekahour , the loss of Brendan still not fully realized, with the eclipse long passed and the sun and Iris well apart in the sky, that they could assess the full damage wrought by the storm. They discovered Jana, frozen solid, out by the ocellus rim; she was brought back and preserved in a cold-exposure capsule, and the idea of reading out her personality programming was discussed, as if in a daze. If feasible, that would come later.
Beyond the ocellus rim, at that point where Iris hung perpetually overhead, localized cataclysms had wrecked the neon-rich features: the liquid neon had flowed across the irregularities in the icy crust, leaving erosion features in form not unlike the valles of Mars. Great fields of neon ice, featureless but for occasional alluvium deposited by the limited load capacity of the neon flow, covered much of the sub-Iris terrain, erasing the smaller craters and filling larger ones. At one point a flow of the liquid had broken through the ocellus rim and spread across the already smooth water ice like a fresh coat of paint. Never again would Ocypete be subjected to the hot eclipse light, since the changing aspect of the Iridean ecliptic would put the sun to a near miss the next time around.
EIGHT
Krzakwa and Methol sat across a complex console from each other in Sealock's chamber. The other six survivors were there, but silent, for the two remaining technologists were the principal actors now. Sealock's still living body lay against one wall, enmeshed in its now necessary life-support equipment. The console was a composite of all that had gone before: Shipnet's Torus-alpha CPU, the quantum conversion scanner, and Sealock's nameless final act of creation. It would have to act in concert, under the direction of their will.
"Well," said the Selenite. "We have two people effectively dead, and possibly a chance to save one of them. We may be able to read Jana's personality out of her dead brain . . . but we have no body to put it in. Yet." He glanced at Sealock. "In any event, Jana will keep." It was a grim, unnecessary sort of humor.
"We have to try for Brendan first. If we fail to reclaim him, then he is dead, and Jana's image will have a place inwhich to resume its life." He frowned and stared at the machine. "We're as ready as we'll ever be. I'll go in after him and Ariane will maintain a lifeline on me . . . better, we hope, than the one I held for Bren." He sighed. "The rest of you can observe via the circlets, but keep out of our way! Let's do it." They went under and down, and the eight, trailing each other like a madly whipping human kite tail, fell through the circuits and out into the emergent wave fronts of the scanner, down into darkness, then light. A tongue of data reached out to scoop them in, but the electronic lifeline held and they unreeled into the unknown like a spider descending on its web.
—See anything?
The light flooding their senses was blinding but could not be shut out. It was a side effect of immersion in the QC wave front.
—No. I'll try to turn down the gain. Maybe clean up the clutter around us a little.
—Good idea. A little artificial image enhancement might help. If we . . . It struck. The imagery cleared and they were pinned, helpless before a flood of complex data, become mere observers.
Brendan Sealock was afloat in the dark sea of Iris. The initial trip down, the shock of being detached from his body, left him in a fog, a state of confusion and deadly lethargy, but he was alert again now, drifting in an immense crystalline sea, suspended in the center of a great blue-green sphere in which floated other remote, indistinct shapes. His first conscious thought was the classical one, Where am I?
then he remembered. The ship! This was what it had to be: the great mother vessel that had spawned the enormous mystery of the Aello lander and the once radiogenic material beneath the ocellus on Ocypete. The answers had to be close at hand now. Where are you? he cried out silently, but there was no answer. The masses of data that had seemed too imposing without were invisible within. A globule of some dark, oily substance floated before his eyes and he began to look around. There was a haze against an all-around sky that, when stared at long enough, resolved into a mass of filaments; one filament, perhaps, endlessly folded in upon itself. It was studded with a variety of tiny, dim shapes. Far away, at an unguessably remote distance, was an immense blue-gray sphere, a planetoid-sized mass afloat in the icy/warm sea. He reached out and touched the globule of oil. It popped, Hello, and was gone.
Ah! Contact . . . Who are you?
Another oily sphere boiled out of nowhere before him, writhing, then was still, waiting. He touched it. Pop.
Centrum.
Sealock glanced uneasily at the distant sphere and understood. Yes, there it was: the source of all data, the source of his present complex reality. Can we speak?
Droplets machine-gunned out of nonexistence and splattered across his face. Yes. Easily. Come to me.
It's a long way.
More droplets. Not in the now space. Journey with me into the past.
Sealock was incredulous. Time travel? How is that possible? Our physics denies it!
Pop-pop-pop.
Think! Where are you now?
He thought, and then felt amusement at his own stupidity. Oh. Of course. I see what you mean. Roiling effervescence.
Let us be about it then. I am eager to meet you in a more fruitful fashion. That was an excellent machine you inhabited. He felt himself begin to move and change as the imaginary years reversed themselves in an imaginary land.
It was to be an even trade, history for history, culture for culture. With the wonders of modern technology, most extractions are painless. But not all ...
New York Free City was one of those aberrations that still abounded in the world; a remnant, a holdover from the days before the Insurrection. Over the span of a single generation, as the datanets grew in complexity, most of the world formed into the systems of semi-independent enclaves that now stood for nations and communities. In a sense, the city was one of these, but in some very important way it was different. New York was all that remained of the bright dream that had once been America. People spoke of crime and terror when the subject of the free cities came up, but these were just unavoidable by-products of the reality that they espoused. Paris, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Calcutta and San Francisco. They all had that indefinable Something. Freedom? The willingness of their inhabitants to do and be, whatever the cost? New York was Earth's premier city. Its population seemed to hold, of its own accord, at a constant twenty-seven million.
Because of the strict and official limits that the enclaves placed on themselves, what passed in these days for a world government grew out of the free cities, where the laws were light. It was a powerful irony. The rigid dictatorship of the Contract Police had its headquarters in the chaotic whirl of happy Paris. All the manifold threads of the world's data system had their ultimate source in the Metro Design—Comnet, a function of New York Free City. The maddened souls who could not live within the confines of a normal society came there to be free, and so became a fruitful force in the world that they despised.
Mankind was haunted by ghosts of its own making.
Brendan Sealock stood alone on the flat, black, shiny, false ebony floor of Grand Central Station, surrounded by a human horde. Eighteen and alone and freshly run from the iron-thumb benevolence of Deseret. His little collection of emergency luggage was piled about his feet, valises containing mostly notebooks, and he was incredibly tired. "Oh, God . . ." Misery. "What am I going to do?" It was said aloud and nobody turned to look. His eyes were grainy andblurred from days and nights spent awake and all of his awareness seemed to be concentrated in the tight band of an almost headache about his temples and forehead. He crushed his hands into his hair and stared up at the starry sky embossed on the inside of the domed ceiling. Why not? "Fuck the world!" he screamed, his voice pitched high.