bodies touched and his cold hands were enfolded within the damp warmth of her armpits. Their wet clothing was strewn across the floor, and waves of heat billowed up from the vents. Snow tapped against the window. Their faces were still flushed from the cold, his a ruddy orange and hers an empurpled brown. Despite the physical closeness, they were in sealed, isolated worlds. John was struggling to overcome a feeling of futility, and the emotion emerged into the world as a series of quick, occasionally savage ripostes. Beth swallowed these outbursts quietly, if only because they were so unlike what she had come to expect in his behavior.
'That's the point, Beth. The money keeps coming. Something should be done with it; something purposeful. And I . . . I've lost a context. I know I say things about living for the moment. At one time I could do that, but not now. The time has come to do something.' He laughed. 'I've come back to the place where I started, and for the first time I know it's boring.'
'If your music isn't an accomplishment, I don't know what is.' How could he explain to her that the time of their courtship, when he had felt a context, largely defined by their passion, had ended? That he needed to break through into something deeper, something to convince himself death wouldn't come sneaking up and claim him unawares? He thought about the money again. 'What have I done with the money? Bought a house, two houses, an asteroid? What good is it all?' A new bond was growing between them, out of their disparity. The unresolvable dilemma had been resolved, and the truth was being found out. Gladness filled him.
They broke. 'Well,' Cornwell said, 'hello again.' His voice was quiet but amused, 'How are you?' They kissed, briefly, without passion. He stood, woozy even in the low g. Beth was staring at him. She felt tired. 'All right,' she said.
'Let's go get something to eat.'
Shutdown.
They had to don the worksuits and exit one at a time. Though the things were not terribly bulky, no larger than theordinary vacuum suits of a century earlier, they were rigid and maintained their fixed shape. It was in stark contrast to the usual sort of spacesuit, which could be crushed into a tiny ball when not wrapped around the form of a human being. Sealock went into the airlock, which was a cylindrical chamber two and a half meters across by two high and looked around. The two suits were like two extra men, and there was no room for the Selenite. He sighed, wondering why they simply hadn't made it a little larger. Some aesthetic pressure. Who knew? This had just seemed like the right size and shape to use, and that seeming had obviously been wrong. Krzakwa closed the hatch, cutting him off from the CM, a last view of him looking like a troglodyte in his cave. Temporarily, Sea-lock had donned a communications circlet, though he'd always ridiculed the things. 'I'll let you know when I'm done,' he said. The suit was permanently made in one piece, its helmet and backpack already attached. Before climbing in through the opening that split the front, Sealock reached up into the helmet and unreeled the twelve brain-taps that marked this suit as his alone. He discarded the circlet and quickly plugged himself in, powering up the suit. 'Do you read me?' Affirmative. He crawled in through the opening, squirming as he put his arms and legs down their proper holes. It was difficult, though possible, and he wondered just how Krzakwa managed to do it, fat as he was. The designers probably could have come up with something better, but . . . this was as sturdy a system as twenty-first century could come up with. By using appropriate settings, a man in a worksuit could walk around on Mercury or go for a stroll beneath the soupy seas of Titan. . . . He closed the front, lit off the life-support systems, and established a link with the ship's 'net element. 'I'm going out now.'
'OK.' The pressure in the airlock dropped swiftly and was gone, the gases pumped back into a storage tank.
When the vacuum was fully established, he popped the outer hatch and floated into the night. The hatch closed behind him, leaving him physically isolated, floating beside the smooth length of
After a while the hatch opened again and Tem emerged to join him. Things were about ready. Wordless, they floated away from the ship, orienting themselves so that the primary cold-gas thrusters of their suits' OMS/RCS harnesses were facing in the direction of orbital travel. The suits' internal logic units were designed for this sort of operation, and so they would lose little information if they had to disconnect from the ship's systems. Hopefully, they would be able to maintain communication with the more powerful 'net element but, if not, it would probably be all right. They watched the craft drift away from them. The surface of the moon was as dark as the starry sky around them, and only the great burning crescent at Aello's limb gave any sort of perspective. The mind tends to place itself as the stationary center of the universe, and here, hanging between
The sun rose, its rays washing over them in streamers. The broken rim of Sayyarrin was visible now, and the terminator came on like the edge of a fragmented planet. Another moment for action came: what in a normal landing would be the high-gate procedure was required, so they initiated a continuous 'burn' that stopped their forward movement and dropped them toward the surface. Through the suit optics they saw their spaceship flying away. In a matter of minutes it was gone beyond the horizon. Aello, dominated by bright-lipped pools of black, looked like a shallow mud puddle through which a hundred childrenhad run. They were no more than two hundred meters up, and the little world suddenly seemed very big. Sayyarrin, a dark, crumbled rise preceded by a great apron of shadow, came to meet them. Tem noted that it seemed a normal enough impact crater, shallow, as Jana had said, but having a general morphology well in accord with what he knew about large impacts on worlds of this sort. Its lack of a central peak was not strange, given the volatile nature of the target—the energy of impact easily liquefied the neon, causing a flowback that would drown the rebounding bed-ice. If the hot spot on Ocypete was caused by a radioactive infall, wasn't it possible that a similar object had somehow caused a shield cryo-volcano? He wished he knew more about all this. Sayyarrin certainly didn't look like Olympus Mons, or even Eblis Mons on Ariel.
They were over the relatively new, randomly peppered floor of the sunlit crater, and the anomaly was now coming over the horizon. In a matter of minutes they had come to a stop about a hundred meters over its center, their suit systems registering only a slight drop in the minimal heat flow emanating from deep within the moon.
