Iris

ship had been designed to transport people in some comfort, but over the years it had been adapted to hold as many occupants as possible. Fortunately Tem had managed to grab one of the older, more luxurious seats, and the cushions under his back and buttocks were adequate for a 0.8-g takeoff. The bitter complaints from some of the others, feeling their normal weight multiplied on hard plastic chairs, made him feel lucky. . . .

He felt lucky for other reasons, too. Just a mesomoon before, he'd thought his life fully defined, rigidly set until old age put him in the pits, a Met-stat apprenticeship dragging toward its close. Perhaps not such a bad life; but, already, he was chafing, waiting for those rare opportunities when he'd be assigned to do an exoroutine and could see the outside world. Even his nonwork life was becoming more and more of a drudge, conforming to Sandy's notions of 'terran' living, cluttering their apartment with origami crap and his life with stupid ideas. Their sex was great, however, and he knew he'd miss those brief, spontaneous couplings.

On the screen, the terminator was coming up at them, and the huge ripples that marked Orientale's rims were keeping pace with it. Just before they passed into night, Tem made out a tiny bit of order among the ruins. The crater Einstein was that curious anomaly, an astrobleme that had received an impact at its very center. The result was a concentric pair of circles that, this close to the line of dark/light interface, looked amazingly like an eye.

Tem had felt old, like an adult, in the world he was leaving, yet he was only sixteen. He had spent his entire life in the vicinity of Picard Crater, in Crisium , only once ranging the two-hundred-odd kilometers to Dorsa Harker and the Fahrenheit Rail Terminus. That seemed far . . . but this! He was headed into the deepest, darkest heart of the Lunar wilderness to study at Heaviside Academy. A wild feeling of freedom wanted to surge up in him, defying the seat restraints. Beyond the stricter controls of the maria subcities , Heaviside had a hint of the subversive about it. Now, thanks to his test scores, he'd been granted an unlimited travel pass and expense-free enrollment into the physics curriculum. It was worth never seeing Earth in the sky again.

Now the craft fell over night. It was not the muted darkness of Earthlit night, but the utter blackness of farside. Stars came out on the half of the screen that showed the sky. He wished he knew their names; they were an uncommon sight on the contrast-washed maria.

He was glad he'd never spend another night trying to sleep locked in Sandy's sweaty arms. Though he sweated too, sometimes like the proverbial pig, his skin crawled when he remembered the heat of those nights, when the sun baked Picard and the Meteorology Works strained to get rid of the caloric flow. When the guilt was gone, he knew he wouldn't think of her once in a month. On arrival, Tem was among the first to unstrap himself. Some here would require a medic's services before they could do so, but he didn't care. He climbed down the rung-floor of the now upended chamber and, with several other people, began to shuffle through the rear port. He pulled his rucksack from the balloon grasp in the baggage bin and slung it over his shoulder, glad to be pressed into the queue.

His mind focused on one abrupt idea: I never want to go home again. . . . And he never had.

Sealock opened his eyes and stared at Krzakwa, smiling faintly. 'So,' he said, 'that was your coming of age.' His thoughts were wandering a little bit, and important parts of him seemed to be in retreat. He struggled to control that, and his smile broadened, becoming a conscious thing. 'Mine came just a little earlier in my life ... or, at least, part of it did.' He'd been surprised at the complex and subtle revelations that the Selenite let him have—there had been a lot of detail slipped in there that could have been left out, a lot of really personal stuff. 'How much do you know about Transition Era Earth? Not much, huh? Well

. . .' We'll see about this. . . .

Tem was pleased with himself. The question is, how surprised am I going to be?

'My turn?' asked Sealock. 'Or do you want to wait awhile?'

'I'm . . . listening.'

At first it seemed like a horribly disorganized thing. . . .

They fell, through tunnels of light, into a deep and sunless past, a bloody place, full of horror and mist. Emotions coalesced around them until they drowned in a sea of feeling. Krzakwa felt himself curiously detached, his mind clear, free of it all, and he felt a faint, ironic smile tugging at the corners of his lips. It disturbed him, and foreshadowed much that was to come. Where are we now? Am I going to hear ghostly voices wailing? That upset him too. How much of this is my thinking? How much is imposed?

Impressions began to come at last, unfolding out of the past like two-dimensional sheets, deprived of reality, indexed. He had one last coherent thought, This seems improbable, and then it took him. . . . There was one indistinct idea: something about being eight years old. . . . A black sky formed from a microdot, swelling, filling his field of vision too fast for him to recall the original backdrop. It filled with stars. A blue disk appeared, folded into dimensionality, then rushed toward him, bulging, then real. He fell, alone, through bright sky and clouds, toward integrating overlay scenery.

A garish, angular landscape broke out, sunrise, dark red stone and sand, overtopped by a peach-colored sky, a few dots of stars visible down near the horizon. He knew this scene! Where?

There were ruddy hills near the edge of the world, and the winds blew delicately about. . . . Mars? It matched his memories of the historical tapes, though he'd never been there. . . . They drew closer, now only a hundred meters up, and he could see life, thin, scraggly vegetation, a dead bush rolling across the sand, in a place where the air was too thin for any wind to push such a mass. Was this the future then, after the planetary engineering projects had finished their task? No. It was too bleak. They moved into the east, and the sun rose, fat, orange, then bright. The color of the desert floor lightened and the sky turned to blue, andboth colors were of a searing intensity, as if the saturation level had been turned up. The mountains came up on them, low here, higher in the distance, the sun rising over them, and the colors changed. They were following a road, rutted deep into yellow soil. They crossed a steel bridge over a turbulent brown river and went into the mountains. They went into the canyon lands, where desert lay on the surface, still, but the deep gouges were filled with streams, and the streams brought life. Where? A soft voice, deep and sensual, started whispering in his ear, carried on the wings of a damp wind.