Iris

Sealock puffed on his cigar, spewing out a broken string of little gray clouds, and said, 'I don't think it's ever been any different, not now, not at any other time in history. How much difference is there, really, between Genghis Khan and Henry Ford?'

'Hey,' said a voice from the ether, 'what're you two doing in there?' It was Axie, and the crane optics showed her waving to them.

'We're having a smoke,' said Brendan. 'Take a break. We'll pick it up later.'

'I'm kind of surprised that you see things so much like I do,' said Tem. 'Somehow, I visualized it being different on Earth. Enclaves, free cities, all that hellfire and brimstone . . .' Sealock grinned at the imagery. 'I can see how it might look different from the outside. Put in the vernacular: it ain't. I lived in enclaves, where they kept me safe. In order to preserve that safety, they had to control me. I lived in a free city, where I was free to do whatever I felt like. So was everybody else, and that freedom controlled me too.'

Krzakwa scratched his chin, rooting through the tangled beard hairs. 'I know what you're talking about, I guess, but what the hell does that have to do with the existence of a bureaucratic state and a system of interlocking corporate directorships?'

'Nothing, maybe, but I think it has a whole lot to do with it. People can't seem to exist without something controlling them; they can't get along 'on their own,' unless they are alone. . . . All my life, I've been as wild and goofy as anyone I ever met, and I can't do it. Why should anyone else?' Krzakwa tried to interrupt, to offer an observation, but Sealock's words rattled on: 'What difference is there between the control modes of an empire or a company, between a Communist directorate, a representative democracy, a military hierarchy, or, for that matter, the magical dreams of John Fucking Harry Cornwell?'

Krzakwa felt taken aback once again by the man's ragelike behavior. Now what had brought this on?

Why would anybody want to say something like that? 'I don't get you. A hell of a lot of difference, it seems to me....'

Sealock's breathing had quickened, his face darkened, but now he sat back, eyes closed, and took a deep drag on the cigar, pulling its heavy smoke far down into his lungs. Finally he let it out with a soft rush, the smoke reduced to a phantasm of its original self by systemic adsorption. 'Ahhh . . . Boy, these things are really great. They grow the tobacco down in what used to be Guatemala, from twentieth-century Cuban seed stock.' He looked at the Selenite and smiled. 'Yeah. Maybe Cornwell believes that too. Shit. He'd have to, or else he'd be nuts. History tends to repeat itself in exact patterns. People quit corporations and enclaves all the time, take their knowledge and set up on their own. If they fail, no loss to the organization they ran out on. If they succeed, they're co-opted, brought back into the fold as more or less equal partners. Same thing goes for interplanetary colonies. Our descendants, if any, will one day join the Contract Police.'

'Really?' Krzakwa laughed suddenly. 'Our descendants are going to be pretty far from here someday. Iris' orbit is hyperbolic....'

Sealock sat up and slowly took the cigar out of his mouth. 'Christ ... I forgot! Maybe we'll have to start our own Contract Police.'

'Will we? I don't know. Will we be joined by others out here? Probably, but maybe not. Right now, we're a tiny crew on a great big starship.'

Brendan nodded slowly. 'I always wanted to run away on a starship. All those wonderful old stories .

. . There always has to be somewhere else to go.' He looked at the Selenite. 'You remember what happened to the Prometheus?'

Rolling the cigar to the corner of his mouth, Krzakwa said, 'Sure. The stupidest thing that anyone ever did. Fourteen months out, it entered the Oort cloud at a little over 0.2 c and ran into an object the size of a pea. . . . My father was on Geographos then, setting up a mass driver for Off-Lunar Ops. He said the explosion was brighter than the 2017 supernova in Aquila .' It was a litany of what seemed to be man's ultimate limitation.

Brendan nodded slowly into the silence. Human engineers could, it was true, design and build ships capable of accelerating to relativistic speeds. The energy was there. But space was full of debris, no one knew quite how much. The huge sphere that spawned the comets also teemed with tiny bits of ice and rock that had been swept outward by the sun's Tauri winds in the early days of the Solar System. At 0.99 c, a golf ball has the mass of a planet—and how do you dodge a planet moving toward you at near the speed of light? Probes were moving outward, through the Oort cloud, across interstellar space to the nearby stars, and man would follow, but slowly. . . .

'Well,' said Sealock, 'we'd better get busy. Hey, Demo! You going to get off that thing so we can move it?'

The Arab waved from his position atop the 'dyne. 'I'd like to ride it over,' he said. His voice, fed to their auditory centers, sounded conversational.

'OK. But sit down and hold on.'

'Why bother?' asked Krzakwa. 'He won't get hurt if he falls off, not in this gravity.' He put one crane arm on the bottom of the reactor, grabbed an upper attach point with the other, and wrapped two steadying limbs about the fuel tanks for extra stability. 'All right,' he said, 'let her go.' Sealock directed his spiders to disconnect the last two