Iris

Harmon Prynne and Vana Berenguer had finished making love and were silent as an assortment of tacky secretions dried on their bodies. Finally the man said, 'Vana?' He was trying to frame his thoughts, wondering how to bring the subject up once again, then lay back and turned his gaze to the ceiling. At length, when he had exhausted his capacity to make up a scenario that came out the way he wanted, he rubbed his eyes and said, 'Tell me why you're keeping on with him.' He heard her sigh—that same exasperated release of breath that he'd heard so often before, and had come to dread. 'You mean Demogorgon, don't you?

'Yes.' He nodded slowly, not wanting to look at her again and realizing he was almost afraid to hear her answer.

'Damn it, Harmon, I told you before. You should see it! The time I'm spending with Demo is in there

—and it's . . . it's, well, it's not as if we're off fucking all the time. You can come too, if you want to.'

'It's his world, Vana. I'm no superhero.'

'You don't need to be. Besides, he needs someone!' Harmon put his back against the smooth, neutral plastic of the opaqued wall, bringing his knees up to his chest. 'So do I,' he murmured.

'You dumb shit.' She reached up and grabbed him by the chin, forcing his head around until he was facing her. 'You've got someone!'

He closed his eyes, almost involuntarily. 'Yeah. So they tell me,' he said, thinking, A small share of what they say comes in unlimited quantities but never does. 'Sometimes I wish I'd let you come out here alone.'

Vana released him and, after a while, got up, got dressed, and left the room, leaving him with his bitter imaginings.

From orbit, Aello was even more of a disappointment than Podarge had been. It was tiny, only a little more than four hundred kilometers in diameter, about the size of one of the larger asteroids. It had never been hot enough to melt any of its volatile constituents, so no regional differences were noticeable even in enhanced view. The primary surface was neon, for as Iris cooled from its initial contraction the last particles to be welded into the small gobs that rained down on the satellites were the most volatile. While Ocypete and Podarge were the result of aeons of geologic activity which had long ended, Aello was that asterologist's dream, a world on which the great majority of materials had never been processed by an active geology. Most things were still almost identical to the way they had been in the very earliest stages of planetary formations. In the Solar System, scientists had looked for such a world in vain. As they moved outward from the sun, the promise of tiny, cold, pristine bodies was shattered by the increasing amounts of volatile material scattered through them. Even the surfaces of Pluto and Charon had been melted in their early history, and still outgassed and changed when they were at perihelion. There were plenty of really small bodies that were in an unaltered state, but finding materials that had been emplaced on the surface of a moon-sized world at its birth had been the quest of scientists since the first days of the Apollo Moon landings. Aello was that world.

It looked much like Mimas: a small, spherical worldlet punched open by deeply inset bowllike craters. Unlike those on Podarge, the craters were deep enough relative to the curvature of the satellite to show perceptible shadows well away from the terminator, making the moon appear even more ravaged. There was a disproportionately large crater on its leading hemisphere. It was not so relatively large as Herschel, Mimas' great eye, but it still stood out from the rest, had stared at them as Polaris closed in. They remembered how Jana had remarked that this crater, Sayyarrin byname, was unusual not only in its size but in its shallowness, given the fact that Aello had no viscous relaxation to buoy up the middle. Now Sayyarrin was over the limb, in night. Here too, orbiting was a very inefficient process, and they were accelerating downward, watching the broken surface come up to eclipse the large blue circle that was the

'day' side of Iris.

'Not very impressive, huh?' said Brendan,

'I don't know,' said Krzakwa. 'Maybe our expectations were just too high. After Podarge, I'm developing a more philosophical approach.'

Sealock stared at the cold, dim worldlet through the ship optics for a while, then said, 'We're going down, this time. That should be something.'

'Are you kidding? This is it, Bren! We're going down onto that most elusive of all things, a primordial world. What we'll be seeing down there has never been seen before.'

'Come on!' said Sealock, grinning as he continued to inspect the vista that was unfolding below them.

'That's a pretty fine distinction, if you ask me. I mean, you can have all the planetesimals you want out in the Oort belt—what difference does it make if we pick them up here?' Krzakwa wondered if Sealock meant what he'd said or was merely being aggravating. He decided it didn't matter. 'Well, Iris doesn't have a cometary ring, for one thing, so this is it as far as Iridean planetesimals go ... but it's more than that: this isn't even a piece of the Solar System! Aello not only has all of its materials intact, but they are laid down in the same order they originally came in. It's like a Grand Canyon—you can dig directly into the history of Aello and, in effect, into the history of the formation of Iris and its moons. Things are disturbed by the craters, but only a bit.'

'OK. I give up. I'm impressed. So what do you want to do?' he asked, sitting back in his harness.

'Looking at this thing, I begin to realize just how difficult it would be to land our ship. It'd be pretty hard to come