Iris

His laughter echoed eerily in the dome, perhaps magnified by his awareness that he was essentially alone at this moment in the whole Iridean system. Everyone else was away on some other ethereal electronic plane, one most ethereal. Listen to me, he thought with a touch of self-directed bitterness. What should I do, apologize for my own being? Sorry, Jana; sorry, Brendan; sorry, Beth? It's a foolishness of its own sort.

Should I grovel and promise to do better? Another laugh. This is just me, wallowing in the dung heap of self- generated guilt. No one else has even noticed what's happening to me,despite what Tem said. They're too busy writhing in their own night soil to notice my fetid breath. . . . My, how poetic we are in our bereavement! It's a damned good thing I'm laughing at myself. What an asshole! A total fucking moronic little head-up-the-ass shit-in-the-ears bloody little sniveling Lunatic. . . . He sobered then and thought about it, images without words. There is that, he subvocalized, watching all the scenes of Brendan and Beth mingle together in his head. He did talk that way, didn't he? I wonder what he meant by it all? The same thing as I? I doubt it. All I can do is turn him into another subset of my own image. We are what we project.

He stretched, yawning against a sudden weariness, and to no one in particular said, 'The only time I'm myself is when there's nobody with me.'

He went back down to the kitchen module then for a snack, hoping to keep his mind blank, in preparation for the moment of their return and the scene that he imagined would come then. I wonder what they'll have to say for themselves?

Who cares?

Who the fuck cares?

He saw himself in a paroxysm of nonchalance and smiled, his lips twisting in self-derision. Go ahead, Big Asshole Artist! Keep thinking like that. You'll talk yourself into a ticket home alone yet!

He went below.

They sailed down through the golden skies of the Illimitor World in a long, singing arc, holding hands as they fell. The heavens were a burnished shell of the brightest brass around them and they had no idea where they were going, what was happening to them. They had entered as a unit, headed, it seemed, for the Jeweled City on the Mountain, the portentous lands of Arhos in the midst of many seas and rivers, and this had happened. They fell and fell, and the sky beneath their feet gave no intimation of a landing. Demogorgon was stunned and, he supposed, a thrill of fear should have come. But they had designed it together, he andBrendan, and he thought he knew all its byways. He remembered the Sealock-mimicking GAM subunit and wondered . . . and programs could mutate of their own accord, even in the efficiencies of Shipnet. Perhaps especially there. Systems grew more complex, as in Comnet and Centrum, and the chances for diversion and change multiplied. What was happening?

They fell together, linked as they had come in, slowly forming into a circle until the nether ends joined hands. They became a sort of Midgard serpent, laagered against the coming of Fenris and Fimbulwinter, and the skies began to change. Fiery tongues of lavender and fabled heliotrope began to intrude into their golden world, a wash of mad color that sucked away all sense of separate consciousness and fear. Something that presaged Ginnunga-gap? Unknown . . .

They had come in together, linked in ways that Demogorgon had never experimented with before, and so there was a result. Some higher, unsuspected routine in Bright Illimit had seized control, plunging them down this long, horrible way, to some unfathomable experience. When their hands came together, completing the circle, their minds did too. The sky was shot with bolts of momentary black lightning, twisting rivers of ebon darkness, vines of ink, and the background pattern of the world shifted to a dark cerulean hue, with an overlay of honeyed amber. They saw each other again, as they had seen Sealock and the cohorts of Centrum in their unwilling journey to the beginning of time. It's not the same, thought Demogorgon, but it might as well be. I don't understand what's happening, yet I cannot fear. I must not. This is my thing, my place in the universe, the creation of my own heart and soul. If I fear it, then I fear myself. The sky around him brightened with the thought, sending beams of warmth deep into him, as if the circuits were responding to his courage and trust. He and Brendan had made this place! The stars above Arhos were real. He felt a little smug sense of, I knew it all along. . . . Achmet Aziz el-Tabari felt himself as a whole being, as he always had, with no overlay of the cultural biases against him. The value of Self stood out strong and the sky colored with a transparentoverlay of rosiness in response. The 'me-ness' of his character rewarded him with gestalt happiness, no words, a distillate of feeling. The others were with him, holding him in arms of thought, and he smiled. Who would not feel this way? He transferred, the sky writhing with the shift.

Aksinia Ockels looked about her in wonder and the sky responded brightly, filling the incandescent shell through which they traveled with a whirl of indigos and greens, metallic hues that almost covered the blue that formed its base. Fading. Fading. She had been almost a day without her usual dose of Beta-2

and the drug was rapidly being flushed from her system. Dark, jagged streaks of an ugly red momentarily flashed all around, then were gone. All the years lost to me, she thought, lost to it all. I made my world as they all did, and it almost blotted me out. A tiny sphere of brown appeared and was gone without a sound. For the first time a sort of soft wind sighed in their ears, the movement of rushing air tugged at their hair. They felt its coolness. Axie laughed without sound and pictured the dead Seedees. The bacteria, the structure of a typical primitive cell, all of it came to the forefront of her consciousness, coloring the sky a brilliant peach that overwhelmed all that had gone before. Tiny ships, carrying the culture of the Beginning. Then the inheritors arise and go forth. I am myself again, at last. The sky flashed in brilliant red-orange hues and she transferred.

Harmon Prynne fell with them all, in his usual way almost unthinking. The sky dulled, began to turn gray and then, suddenly, reversed itself, waxing to a brilliant cobalt blue. I am not less than the others, he thought, neither more nor less within myself. Strip away the geas that was placed upon me at birth and I am one with them all. There is no less of me than there is of any other human being. Our identities and values manifest in different ways.... He remembered the people on the ship when they'd left Earth, the retardates, heading out. In another age their dysfunction would have gone unnoticed. I was less than the others only because I bought the propaganda that my childhood sold me. All my fears and failures were groundless. The sky grew momentarily blinding, and he transferred.