can fly, after a fashion. Bouncing around on the ice ought to keep us imbeciles happily occupied for years ....' Krzakwa laughed. 'Well, there's lots to screw around with, when the time comes to confront our ultimate sense of boredom. You know as well as I do that these worksuits can be equipped with a thermodynamic damper field. We can trudge up into the neon crags if we want to.' Sealock sighed heavily. 'Yeah, yeah. I know all that. I think I'm just having some kind of laziness attack.'
Krzakwa thought about it for a moment, realizing that wasn't quite the word for what seemed to be going on. 'You mean, other-world weariness?'
'Right.' The man laughed. On sudden impulse, he had Shipnet construct an image of Krzakwa's head through his suit optics. Processing made it look as if the man's opaque, equipment-packed helmet had turned to glass. He seemed to be smiling. 'We might as well be off,' he said, 'though why I don't know. There's no hurry. . . .'
'No. This place isn't going to run away.' Tem had a sudden, uneasy visualization of the long decades ahead, isolated together. 'I guess it'd make sense to set up the boom crane first?'
'Yup.' Activating the proper circuits, they made for the downlink channels and submerged in Shipnet's maze.
The basic structure of Deepstar was made of metal-plastic girders that had been extruded by an automatic industrial beam-builder machine, for over a century the indispensable workhorse of space construction. The skeleton of the shipwas an inexpensive matrix to which almost anything could be attached, so ... There were isostatically stabilized supplies of ion fuel, Hyloxso matrices, a peak-pulse toroidal astrodyne, a small beam-builder, a bubbleplastic mixer, and a big storage cell for the raw goo that it used. Among the various pressurized modules there was a decorative hydroponic garden, and a terrarium whose genetically tailored creatures could produce certain organic substances for the kitchen most efficiently. Of necessity, there was the inevitable complexity of a Magnaflux generator. Human beings had evolved across billions of years wrapped in the comforting arms of Earth's magnetosphere. When space travel came, they began to leave it, and at first there seemed to be no great problem. The years flowed into decades and the colonists of the inner Solar System began to complain of unexplained torpor. Low gravity, the experts said, no exercise, poor diet, even Weltschmerz. . . . Odd diseases and neuroses appeared, and colonies did not do well. Children died or grew up 'weird,' and people had to go home, if they could. The future of space as a human habitat began to look endangered. The electromagnetic screens had originally been designed as powerful force fields to ward off the charged particles continually bombarding the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Because em was not fully understood in those days, Quantum Transformational Dynamics and the Unified Field Theory still being a bit foggy, the engineers carefully tailored the inside of the force screens to resemble the magnetic environment of Earth. Inside the shields, people flourished. Now, wherever man went, there Magnaflux went also.
Sitting on the dull, metallic ice, the ship began to change. Under the urging of the two men, mechanical spiders, scuttling at impossible angles and hanging upside down like their arachnid prototypes, attacked the structure of the tower. They crawled along the edges of one of Deepstar's four protruding arms and, with particle-beam torches flaring blue-white, cut through all the girders on one internal vertex. On the other side of the structure they modified the density and molecular format of the material until it could flex along oneplane. When they finished, the nacelle swung slowly open, exposing its contents to the outer world.
Sealock and Krzakwa unfolded the arms of the crane, extending the slender, shining manipulators down to the ice so that the machine could walk itself into an upright position. The first real step in unloading the ship was, perhaps, also the most tedious. It was necessary for the barely mobile crane to attach and lower its own components, in order for it to assemble itself into its real, complex shape, to walk into magical life.
Assembled, its various segments unfolded, the crane was a huge, square thing of rods and pulleys that rumbled about on heavy treads. It crawled around the base of Deepstar, lifting down poles and cargo pods and the endlessly refolded fasciae that would become dome bases. When most of the smaller items that made up their manifest were piled haphazardly on the ice, it was time to begin a major task: Sealock and Krzakwa set up a relay module from which they ran a network of wire-thin power conduits, black spaghetti scattering formlessly around them, growing into a structured web. This was not yet an environment that could tolerate even narrowcast energy. There was still plenty of ambient neon gas around, enough to absorb and reradiate the contents of a strong microwave beam. They set up a trivetlike base about a kilometer from the ship. It was the surface mounting platform for the hot, heavy fusion reactor. They installed the insulating-field generator that would keep its heat from getting at the ice, then decided to break for lunch.
Inside, Tem and Brendan sprawled on the edge of the crater room, dank and sweaty, tired more from the idea of hard work than its reality, and ate. They were joined by the remainder of the crew. To Sealock, they seemed oddly posed, almost as if they were waiting for commands. Cornwell, stung by the curt dismissal that his attempt at volunteering for work had brought, said, 'Well. Are you ready to let us participate yet?'
Brendan looked up from his vulturelike pose over a bowl of noodles and cheese and peered quizzically at the musicianfrom eyes almost hidden beneath shaggy, red-blond brows. Hadn't the man been paying attention? He seemed to remember there being more than just himself out there. . . . Now what? Oh. He grinned, said, 'Sure,' and slurped up another butter-slimed mouthful. Harmon looked back and forth between their faces for a moment, sensing some oddity going on, then asked, 'You've gotten a good look out there. What do you think of our new home?' Sealock turned to stare at him. 'I think it's Hat.'
Demogorgon looked at him reproachfully. 'Brendan . . . be nice.'
'Well, what the hell does he expect me to say? I mean, really! Sometimes I feel like I'm up to my asshole in all this bullshit....'
'How appropriate,' murmured Hu, with a malevolent, slit-eyed smile. Sealock glared at her for a second, then let his face relax into a toothy grin. 'You just love it when I talk dirty, don't you?'
'People . . .' Cornwell said.
Turning to look at him, Brendan said, 'Still want your question answered? There are five worksuits aboard. In order to do anything useful, you'll need one of them, so three of you can help, at any given time. If anyone else
