was dark. Their only light came from a small chink in the window shade and the blinding emblem it etched on the floor. She was wet enough, but not sexually aroused. Not really. He'd been fumbling down there for so long . . .
'I can't do it,' he said. 'I mean, I already did it.' She sighed, familiar with the problem. She'd beenexperimenting with sex a lot. She and Angelo had gone their separate ways until, just a few hours ago, a chance meeting at a midsummer barbecue had brought them back together. It was no big deal, she thought, but she knew his vulnerability made this happen, against her will, and she was angry.
'All right,' she said sharply. 'There are other times. Let's get back outside. We're missing the party.' She felt astonished that she could deal out pain so easily.
The program was at a loss. Strong embarrassment formed an overlay and its parameters were overloaded again. It had been designed for a dominant/submissive psychiatric environment, and the maintenance of a strictly mutual gestalt seemed impossible for any length of time, especially at this sensitivity. It needed a closer association with its GAM, a simultaneity, a sharing. They were back in the cubicle. John, too, was surprised and hurt, almost as if he'd been Angelo instead of Beth. He opened his eyes on moist darkness. 'But why?' he said, and it did not echo. No answer was forthcoming. This isn't what I expected. . . .
He felt Beth bumping against his side, still motionless, but the program was concealing her thoughts, denying him access. He assumed it was at her request, and imagined he understood. It must be very hard for her. Somewhere in the machinery, ideas behaved reflexively.
Podarge was a much smaller satellite than Ocypete, less than seven hundred kilometers in diameter, not much larger than Enceladus. Sealock and Krzakwa were plugged into their duodecimal element, looking out through the exterior stereovidicon as if through their own eyes. They weren't asterologists, so there wasn't much to see, though its status as a 'new' world compelled their interest. It was a white, meteoroid-blasted ice moon, its surface an indistinct turmoil of circles, gaining in apparent relief as one looked toward the terminator, now near the leftmost limb. Brendan reached out through the optical circuitry and imposed an appropriate set of judgmental color filters. With the color-gain stretched, with a bit of magnification, Iris IIbecame a pale world, blue-green and brown, with definite continents and patches of diverse terrain. Like many of the outer-System satellites, Podarge had experienced periods of resurfacing, when volatile materials had bubbled out of the interior, making fresh plains that were ready to be cratered anew. They were all very different in composition and degree of pock-saturation, and made an overlapping patchwork of colors on the enhanced moon. The little world, composed of a greater variety of volatiles than anything in the Solar System, had a turbulent history during its first aeons. As it cooled, one material after another had solidified, either on the surface or at the bottom of some cold epeiric sea. In the end, there had been periods during which impacts and tidally produced fractures had brought the last of the liquids pouring out onto the surface. Most of these new terrains were masked by meteoric gardening, but the differences were still there. In the northern hemisphere, near the pole, there were cirruslike wisps strung along a barely visible fracture, fresh neon ice that had been expelled from the mantle during the last quiescent phases of Podarge's freezing.
Polarisslipped toward the nightside slowly. The moonlet's minuscule gravity made their orbit seem terribly sluggish, and they were tempted to accelerate, to go into forced-orbit mode, but the notion of conserving fuel was there to be pondered. Shadows began to grow long beneath them, and the blackness closed down like a helmet visor. Brendan turned up the ship-optics gain and changed over to a view dominated by imaging radar and deep infrared. Krzakwa kept following his protocols, watching. This hemisphere, which trailed in Podarge's revolution about Iris, was somewhat less cratered than the other, and there were even some small gaps in the rubble, areas which looked pristine. To the south, Brendan saw a large, new-looking astrobleme, darkish in the IR, with tall, clean walls and a complex pinnacle at its center. It was surrounded by an asterisk pattern of black rays, composed of new, fine-grained material, which could be traced across much of the visible globe. He liked the pattern it made.
'It really is rather pretty, imaged like this,' said Tem. 'I didn't notice it in Jana's data.' He rummaged through their memory device and pulled out a sunlit version. 'It's not so prominent in the daytime. Jana called it ' Soderblom,' after an early planetologist.'
'Southern Flower? That's pretty appropriate.'
He looked at it, admiring a faint rillelike structure that cut through the pattern of rays. 'You know, we
'I don't. I thought that was a stupid idea when it was first brought up. The Illimitor World mythology is largely a random scrambling of French and Arabic phonemes, based on a few simple rules that I made up. They mean something to him because of his history. . . . Anyway, if the harpies' story has any complexity, I don't know it.'
There was a long silence, then Krzakwa said, ' Kickaha!'
Sealock opened his eyes and looked at the man in realtime. 'Son of a bitch. I read that too.'
'Want to land?'
He closed his eyes and looked out at the little moon thoughtfully, watching a sliver of daylight start to ooze over the horizon. 'No. I don't think so. We can let Jana be first.' The Selenite nodded, his beard floating up before his face, to be pushed down with a wave of an abstracted hand. 'OK. It's off to Aello, then.'
'Right.' Sealock stretched and said, 'You know, with a little mass-wastage, we can boost a fast Hohmann and get there in eighteen hours. She's near opposition now.'
Beneath a silver dome, Axie, Ariane, and Jana sat at the edge of a pool that hadn't existed four hours earlier. Jana said: 'I think he's a damned hypocrite! It amazes me that, after all his talk of abandoning pair bonding, he can get caught up like this without even
