Iris

If only I could tell what she wants from me, John thought. A night of friction? The solution to the world? She'd sounded very independent, with her desires seemingly focused on saving humanity from, first, sickness and death, and then, itself. He laughed to himself. I don't know what she wants, and I don't know what I want either. How can I believe that the situation is more complex than it seems, when I don't have the slightest idea what's going on? Her skin feels so warm ... so pliable ... I could do worse than to be in her arms. . . . Deliberately, he took hold of her hand and drew her to a place beside him. Almost immediately his penis began to rise, an independent entity invading his space, and he looked at the glossy surface of her eyes, glitters in the darkening oval of her face. He wanted to relax, but his nerves were standing on end. He shivered slightly.

She kissed him. Already there were the familiar tingles and warmths in her lower torso, and she was disappointed not tofeel him molding his body to hers. She reached into his pants, past the modest constriction of a belt, and found him ready. Am I misreading his body language? Have I been? She said:

'Shall we go test that old mattress?'

Strike now! The DR program moved, grappling with the elusive surfaces of thought, and from the shifting memories drew forth his reactions.

Something in the taste of her mouth, in the fluid reaching of her tongue, touched a chord in him. They kissed more, deeper, and he could feel an urgency of passion pass between them, a quality he'd not known before. It clarified things. He could tell, or thought he could, that her motivations were simple and profound. She wanted to love him, whatever that meant. Suddenly things were overwhelmingly clear. Nothing in the world was more significant than satisfying her desires and, if the truth were known, his own. 'Sure,' he said.

After three days in space, watching Iris grow imperceptibly bigger, Brendan and Tem were firmly in the grip of boredom. They were beginning to feel much as they had during major portions of the 60vet expedition, and, here, there was no ice to go twirling on. Time seemed to flow like slowly crystallizing honey.

Krzakwa was wedged into the lower equipment bay, humming softly to himself as he unwrapped a low-eel snack. He closed the sandwich bin with a click and took a big, irregular bite out of the corner of his little meal. He wondered how long he could go without shitting. He stretched in a space that was barely larger than his own body and found himself wishing that he could move some of the equipment around. It was possible, of course, the stuff was only bolted down, but why bother? It was in a fairly efficient configuration, deliberately emulating an early Soviet spacecraft, and any changes they made would achieve nothing. He floated, bumping into things repeatedly. Zero g was still an appealing phenomenon, and he suddenly wished that he could access a significant volume of it. He could put on a spacesuit and go outside, of course, but that would be a major hindrance when it came to stuffing his face with food.

'Will you quit making so much fucking noise? I'm trying to sleep!' Tem grinned at him with greasy lips. He was tempted to start chewing with his mouth open, to start making a symphony of wonderful slobberings, but then bits of the sandwich would have escaped, making the effort hardly worth while. He marveled at his thoughts: Maybe being a deliberately annoying asshole is contagious! Sliding another bite between his teeth, he gazed around and wondered, for the thousandth time, why they'd made an opaque CM. Bubbleplastic could as easily be made transparent. . . . There was something to be said against verisimilitude, and old science fiction was probably as valid a model as antique technology. He remembered the stories about see-through spacecraft and started sinking into a pleasant reverie.

Sealock squirmed into a more comfortable position on his couch, tugging at the restraining straps and trying to get them back into their proper positions. Boredom could be less than terrible to a man with a memory. Though he'd kept relatively busy, there had been periods in his life when he'd had nothing to do and, worse, hadn't wanted to do anything. Those times had had to be dealt with, and habits had emerged from the telltale fog. Even without Comnet-reinforced cross-referencing, he was still able to link with the major scenes from his past. Long practice made it easy: he simply picked a distinctive memory, however trivial, and rolled forward from there, into more misted times, events leaping out of the past as if they'd never been forgotten. . . .

He'd talked to other people about it. They marveled, they agreed, they called him mad. . . . The ones who liked to remember just smiled and nodded, holding him off that private space that was all their own; the rest, the fanatical forgetters, stared at him coldly, or with derision, and sometimes told him that he was obsessed. The MCD people were sometimes accessible to him, or had been. It seemed as if only personalities that were nearly on his own level were willing to risk ... He stopped thinking, retreated from the onset of past-life, and squirmed to looked down on Krzakwa. Two years and I never thought to ...

'Hey, Tem,' he said. 'You want to try trading a few memories with me? Like telling stories?'

'What do you mean?' It puzzled him. Despite their growing friendship, Sealock was still rather remote. For him to suggest . . . 'Come on. This 'net element is barely adequate for—'

'Nah. You're looking at it wrong. This is a duodecimal element, kind of small, but it's got a lot of good conveyance properties so that we can run the ship's instrumentation. We're experienced controllers, so we ought to be able to manipulate the i/o systems to transmit what we want, instead of what's real.' Tem nodded slowly. 'I see what you mean. Sort of visual images . . . sensory data and the like, maybe a conceptual narrative like an entertainment 'net production. . . .' It seemed possible, and less than dangerous. He wasn't really letting the man into his head, just trading deliberately released and carefully edited data. It would be entertaining . . . and interesting to see just how much Sealock would be willing to reveal of himself. Tem's lips twisted under the hair that hung from his mustache even in zero g. —And it'll be interesting to see how much I'm willing to reveal, too. . . . 'You know,' he said, 'this could be fun.' The programming was a simple matter of setting up the right feed mechanisms. Self-confident and experienced, they left out all the various GAM levels and complex subsystem controller channels that would have made up a commercial presentation. They would be relying on their conscious minds to perform whatever editing functions they felt they needed. When they were done, they hooked up, Tem using induction leads and Sealock plugging direct-connect waveguides into his head. 'You go first. . . .'

Tem was strapped into a seat in the ballistic transport Scotland, feeling the gentle forces of Lunar gravity and inertia. He was seeing a passenger hold, arrays of head-tops in varying colors, and the venerable 3V that occupied the front wall was displaying a shallow representation of the familiar circle-pocked landscape of the Lunar highlands, vast Oceanus falling behind them, drifting out of view. The antique, windowless