"Sure. How's it work?"
"The datanet acquisition is through a powers-of-transfinite series array ..." Krzakwa looked puzzled. "I don't see how something like that could be made to work."
"Well, it doesn't." Sealock crumpled his cup into a ball and grinned at the look on the other man's face.
"At least, not the way it's supposed to. No one could get any function at all above Aleph-null. It was hilarious when the news of our fine little piece of vaporware escaped. . . . Talk about humiliation! That's why I brought all that gear. I thought maybe I'd be able to get something working on my own, away from all the other assholes on the MCD."
"OK. Give me a rundown on the basics. And remember, I'm a physicist, not one of your ilk."
"At the level we'll be working, there's not a hell of a lot of difference." Soon the two of them were immersed in a discussion that no one else aboard would have been able to follow. After a while they plugged into a gang-tap and went into partial rapport for an exchange of concepts. The ship flew on without them.
Shut up in his chamber, Demogorgon prepared for masturbation. It was a form of the Illimitor art, in fact, the very thing that had led him to this new form of expression. Though the full complexity of the Illimitor World, the world of Arhos, of Mereqxi, Larys, and the Kaimodrang Empire, took Tri-vesigesimal, this was simple enough to be handled by duodecimal subunits of the 'net. He could have entered via circlet, he supposed, but somehow preferred to use an induction lead. The images, the feelings, were crisper.
As he plugged in a wall-tap, Demogorgon was amused, remembering Brendan's inevitable pun about
"jacking off." New meanings to old words . . .
He submerged.
In a soft, rumpled bed of silken sheets he was joined by two other people, abstracted from their normal functioning as denizens of Arhos. One was a slim, magnetic presence, a man, Chisuat Raabo, ebon-haired and ethereal, his mate in the Land of Kings. The other was a woman, Piruat Nahuaa , pale blond, thin and boyish-looking, the swell of her breasts almost nonexistent, her pubic hair so fine and transparent as to give her a preadolescent look. But for coloration, the two might have been taken for brother and sister. They were both very young.
In the Jeweled City on the Mountain, at the place where the skies converged, it was the Soldier's Way—to have a bisexual lover and, with him, a female counterpart, an heir-maker. . . . They lay tangled together in a joyous maze of limbs, running their hands over smooth, warm flesh, inhaling the tactile perfumes that this world made; and the man and woman paidspecial attention to the muscular body that was so much a part of Demogorgon's persona here. . . . When Raabo's huge penis rose, they attacked it together with an avid, ferocious hunger. Slowly, Demogorgon felt his soul begin to spread out, meshing with his lovers, enveloping them, and the usual thoughts were still there:
With Comnet, he need never be alone. What could the world have been like, not so long ago, before the advent of this alternative reality, before he had created it? How had he lived? Just before a sensory explosion took his mind away, he tried to imagine life without this ready availability of human contact; to imagine a world where he couldn't plug in and reach out for love.
He failed.
Deepstarfell on a long, complex curve around Iris and back up into space, shedding many thousands of metric tons of fuel and several hundred kilometers per second of relative velocity. The Element 196
had been stored in an energy-stabilized form resembling degenerate matter, compressed into a very small volume, but nothing could alter its mass, or the necessity of expending it. Newton always won out in the end, though centuries of science and engineering had taken some of the sting from his fiats. The ship threaded under Iris' ring, its heavy-ion drive vaporizing a path through the downward-spiraling ice particles that ever so slowly depleted the structure, and swept just a few hundred kilometers above a bellying azure sky. When they approached apirideon , not far from Ocypete itself, they kept the dense beam oriented to one side of their destination, avoiding damage to their future home. The plume of intense sub-c radiation stabbed toward interstellar space and was gone. A properly instrumented observer many parsecs away and generations removed would have noticed it, since these bursts of semicoherent energy emerging from the Solar System advertised the presence of Man as never before.
Deepstartook up a vastly elongated orbit around Iris that would evolve, via the judicious expenditure of Hyloxso, into a nearly circular ellipse of some hundred and eighty kilometers' radius about Ocypete. Ariane and Brendan disengaged from the control subprogram of Shipnet, though the latter still maintained a lesser link to keep an eye on their progress. The common room was completely destructured now, a giant padded cell, and they were all gathered to one side, where, punctuated by the hatches of personal compartments, a hundred and twenty degrees of wall had been made transparent. Beyond that wall the dim, gray sphere of Ocypete loomed, no longer an idea, no longer an astronomical body, but a place. The world that turned slowly below was a sea of low-walled craters, a vast marsh of ancient, partially healed wounds in a circular shield of chemical ice. They lay shoulder to shoulder, overlapping, defacing one another, craters within craters like beer-glass rings on a veined marble bar. If there had been other processes involved in the making of this surface, they had left no evidence.
"This is the leading hemisphere," said Jana, "long gardened by impacts and mantled with the former atmosphere."
Demogorgon looked out on Iris III from fathomless dark eyes and thought, Is this a land for mystic adventure? No . . . yes. He didn't know, but it did have a deadly sameness about it that disturbed him. Was this all there was?
As if to answer his unspoken question, he noticed a bright, crack-reticulated bulge creeping over the eastern limb. Perhaps there will be something, he thought.
The bright cracks gave way to a darker, smoother terrain that came creeping over the edge of Ocypete. Somewhat broken and jumbled, it was essentially crater free. As they watched, this morphology grew more uniform, a vast, flat plain, and they could see the edges of it curving back to form the great basin that dominated the little moon's surface.
"Mare Nostrum," murmured Demogorgon. "Like the sunrise."
"And so you've named our new home," said Beth.
Jana said, "The official policy is that we must submit names for the most prominent features. If you prefer, I will name the rest...."
"This place would be a lot of fun if you could get into pill-mixers' Latin," said Prynne.
"Or if you were one of those demented nomenclature addicts," said Jana. "Do you know there are over four million named features in the Solar System? And that's not counting Earth. It's become an onerous task."
"If you want," said Demogorgon, looking intently at her, "I've developed several self-consistent mythologies for my Illimitor art. You're welcome to use them."
Jana's gaze shifted back to Ocypete. "It's an idea."
Brendan sighed and stretched, rubbing his eyes. "Come on, shitheads, it's time. Let's get down there." Krzakwa grinned. " 'Shitheads,' he says . . . you want to fly this monster or shall I?"
"Yeah," said Sealock. "Bend over, Tem. I'll drive you home." They plugged into Shipnet and were gone.
In a little while, no more than a hundred minutes, they were in a perfectly circular orbit some ten kilometers above the fast-moving craterscape. Great broken features, too complex to absorb fully, slid past quickly, frictionlessly, and the clear wall again drew spectators. Suddenly the fretted terrain that surrounded the water ocellus broke into their view, and then the giant basin swept under them like a convex serving dish, featureless save for a few wandering rilles. After a few more moments Jana pointed out shadows on the mare. Someone called up a higher gain on the window optics and a cluster of translucent, dark-nippled cones filled the view.