Iris

'Oh, Christ . . .' Cornwell turned and looked at Krzakwa. 'What the hell is going on here?'

'This is important, John. It's important to him, and to me. Please don't interfere.'

'I don't understand.'

'Well . . . shit. I don't know. . . . Think about all the daydreams you ever had. How much did they ever mean to you?'

Cornwell looked puzzled. 'Daydreams? You mean fantasies?' He thought about it. In his teens there had been many, covering an enormous field. 'A lot, I guess. But what does that have to do with anything?'

Scratching at his beard, meditative and distant, Tem said, 'I don't know. A few days ago I would've said that too. Now . . . I've been thinking. . . .' He yawned and turned back to look at his food, then began eating, obviously having tuned out John and the rest of the universe.

Brendan sat in his room, cross-legged on a floor mat, facing Demogorgon. 'Come on, Achmet ,' he said. 'It's not going to happen right now, and it's not going to take forever. We'll be gone for a few weeks, total. No more than a month.'

The Arab nodded. 'I know. You keep saying that. It doesn't make me any happier. What if something happens to you?'

'What if? We're not fucking immortal, you know.'

'Please don't be mad at me, Bren.'

'I'm not. I just wish you weren't so dependent on me for whatever it is that you want.'

'That's a hell of an easy thing to say. It doesn't mean much.'

'No, I guess not.' He sighed and leaned back, stretching. 'Notice anything funny?'

'What do you mean?'

'Where's Ariane?'

'I ... don't know. In her room?'

''In her room'? That sounds like a pretty clever deduction.'

'Does being mean make you feel good?'

'Yeah. Pulling the legs off grasshoppers is OK, too. You're missing the point. Why isn't she here?' Demogorgon shrugged.

'No curiosity about the matter? She says she loves me, just like you do. . . .' He shut his eyes suddenly, muscles tensing under the skin around them, making rounded ridges above and below the crow's-feet at their corners, making a small hump above his nose, where his eyebrows grew together.

'So she's not here, like you. Something keeps her away. What do you suppose it is?' Staring at him, Demogorgon thought, That's not what he intended to say. He was going to give me some damned sophomoric pep talk about how Ariane wasn't so dependent on him, so why should I be?

The Arab smiled faintly, and a glimmering of it came to him. What was the distraction that made him stop? I love him, he loves her. . . . Who does she love? Brendan? Herself? No one? What the hell . . . we're all so stupid!

After setting up a forty-meter dome next to Prynne's 'garage,' they began the construction of the vehicle they'd brought for transporting passengers and heavy cargo about their new home. Called the Multiple Person Transport, it was little more than a Hyloxso tank segment mounted in a girder tripod. Grappling devices of various kinds hung from an open platform that bridged the three legs, perhaps a third ofthe way down. An expansion-valve reaction motor was mounted on a swivel track that could be raised and lowered to match the mutable craft's center of gravity. It was, in essence, a vacuum-riding helicopter.

Their first cargo was a mass-driver for launching small satellites. Its ammunition was to be a relay transponder that would be placed near Ocypete's inner Lagrange point. They called it a 'Clarke' satellite, for that was its function, but synchronous orbit was impossible for anything circling a tidally locked body. They had decided to loft it from a point on the equator, which intersected a part of the ocellus some 275

kilometers to the south. While the 'driver could easily handle the energy requirements, they wanted to minimize the amount of equipment in the satellite. The L1 halo orbit was mildly perturbed by the gravitational influence of Podarge, so station-keeping would be required. The more fuel with which it arrived at its new home, the fewer