Iris

degrees above the eastern horizon. It was close to four degrees across, eight times the size of the full Moon seen from Earth, and it dominated the sky like a huge jewel, in first impression like a cat's-eye sapphire. Peering more closely, however, it looked more like a bright fingernail paring nestled in a dim blue sphere, its nightside obliterated by atmospheric scattering. In the close, sparkling blackness there were two very tiny crescents, Podarge and Aello, ever falling and escaping in the balanced dance of orbital mechanics. The sun was a blinding tick near the arrow point of the barely visible ring.

The world in the sky surpassed by far his expectations. Nothing in the Solar System combined the stark solidity and ethereal beauty of Iris.

Cornwell turned away. He was not here just to sightsee. 'Ariane, would you monitor this transmission and see that I get it right?'

Upon receiving an affirmative, he began: 'Under the aegis of the Pansolar Conventions, edition 2067, specifically Paragraph N6of the Colonizing, Homesteading, and Exploring Guidelines, I claim Ocypete homesteading guarantees for the Deepstar Company: full CIDs to follow proclamation. Total travel distance was 6.2977 terameters; diameter of homestead world is 1.923 megameters. Crew homesteads to be apportioned alphabetically, spokewise from longitude 311.57756 defined from sub-Iris point at periastron, and latitude 12.6546, defined from equator at 2097.664 years.'

'It was successfully recorded and transmitted, John,' said Ariane. 'I guess that makes us permanent.' The man looked back at Deepstar. Clinging to a girder far above, Sealock and Krzakwa, clad in bulky powered worksuits that augmented their strength and made them nearly invulnerable, were already working on opening one of the container modules. They seemed intent on the business at hand, but one of them paused to wave. He waved back.

Finally, suddenly, something like happiness spilled over him. He activated the gyro on his belt and, with a hard kick, jumped into the star-prickled sky. There was little sensation of motion as the ground receded, dreamlike. In a huge arc, he flew across the steely white, frozen sea, head kept up by the gyro, and, after a time sufficient to fully experience the sensation, he landed with a jolt a full twenty-five meters from his starting point.

A few more jumps put him a great distance across the ice, though its featurelessness provided no real indication as to how far. He turned back and was surprised to see Deepstar shrunken considerably, almost halfway to the horizon. This time he pushed harder, back toward the ship, each minute-long leap gaining a little height and more speed. With no way to stop quickly, he bypassed his goal, slowing himself in aseries of jumps, until he came to a stop. He made his way back in little tiptoeing hops, covering two meters at a time.

With his earlier acrophobia gone, climbing the structure of the ship was a simple matter of swinging from girder to girder, brachiating upward. Soon he was bark on the platform from which he had looked down so cautiously before. The two inhabited worksuits saluted him. Their thick, flexible joints segmented the grayish, stove-bellied exoskeletons into small, mostly cylindrical components. Since the suits had no faceplates, relying on four 3V photorecorder cells mounted at ninety-degree intervals about the helmet canister, he could not distinguish who was inside. A quick look into Shipnet's Status Registers told him what he wanted to know.

Brendan Sealock, still habituated to postures he'd developed on Earth, sat on a structural girder. Krzakwa, used to Lunar conventions, remained on his feet. Despite all the bulk of the suits, they looked quite comfortable. Krzakwa turned, light on his feet but not fully adjusted to the suit's large moment of inertia.

'Well, what can I do?' asked John.

Sealock pointed toward the hatch of the airlock. 'Stay out of the way. Tem and I and the work-packs will handle what needs to be done.'

John shrugged and said, 'OK. I'm going in.' He made his way through the airlock hatch and it closed behind him.

Tem watched as the musician was occulted by the vignetting door. 'I guess we'd better get busy, huh?'

'Christ!' said Sealock. 'I thought there'd at least be some craters!'

'There are a few,' said Tem, 'small ones, scattered here and there, not to mention the hydro-volcanic structures in the center of the mare. Haven't you tapped Jana's report?'

'Sure. . . . What does that have to do with my expectations? I'm just talking about what I wanted to see here. Hell, if we went on a hike up into the highlands, before you know it we'd be up to our assholes in neonated methane.' He laughed softly, to himself. 'We'd be drowned alive in a mess of phase-changing that'd drain the thermos in ten minutes.

. . . And then there's this parking lot. Some world to conquer, huh?'

'I read an article about boil gliding once, by some guy living on Pluto. You dive into a pool of volatile material with wings strapped to your suit—the stuff vaporizes and acts as both atmosphere and propellant. That would be pretty easy in neon.'

'Mm . . . Whatever became of this guy?'

'Killed, I think, in a boil-gliding accident.'

'Nice. Sounds like my kind of sport! Anyway, you saw our friend Johnny out there—you