Iris

Brendan pointed to a place on the hole's wall, where a thin, dark, ruler-straight line over 250 meters high was embedded. It went almost all the way back to the surface. Tem was laughing uncontrollably. He finally got control of himself, breathing heavily, tears running down his face. 'That's a fucking fin. This is getting ridiculous.'

'Guess so. I feel peculiar.' Brendan stood, followed by the other.

'Want to dig it out with Polaris?'

'No. We might get killed—that would be an irony I could do without. Let's go home and get the ion drill—also some friends.'

'Good thought. Shall we call ahead?'

'Uh . . . somebody might be listening.'

The idea penetrated, and they turned to go.

FOUR

Brendan ate the last of his sandwich as he looked back at Aello. Returning to Polaris had been fairly easy, though the jets had thrown enough heat to widen the hole even further. When they got to the level of the surface, it was obvious they wouldn't have to go out of their way to obscure the Artifact— neon snow had taken care of that. A naked-eye view showed just the tiniest blemish at the center of Sayyarrin—and any telescopes that happened to be trained on Iris I would have poorer resolution than his eyes from this distance. The blurring of Aello's surface might be attributed to equipment malfunction. The first thing they had done was tightbeam an 'incommunicado' signal back to the colony. If they had agreed upon an encryption formula for their communications, all this silence wouldn't have been necessary. But they couldn't have had the foresight to predict a situation like this. They had not brought sufficient fuel to take a quick route back to Ocypete. The modified Hohmann would take days. . . . Speculation about what they had seen was futile: an ancient artifact . . . How did it get here? Was it related to the heat source on Ocypete? Did it just so happen that the Iridean system accreted from material already laden with the throw-offs of some alien race? Or is it something else? Is it a spaceship?

The answers were more a reflection of imagination than any hard evidence. Tem came forward and got into his rigging. 'Brendan. Let's talk about it.' Sealock said, 'OK. You go first.'

'What I want to know is, how are we going to play this? Are we going to reveal this to the Union?'

'Not for a while.'

'It's going to be a hard secret to keep—especially after we blast it out of the ice. Even from Smith they'll be able to tell something funny is going on.'

'Let 'em wonder. The real problem is the USEC ship. That shortens our time considerably.'

Walking across the blank, black floor of the second dome, Ariane Methol was trying to understand just what was happening to them all. She was not unintelligent, yet it was as if she had to think long and hard to unravel the simplest of connections where her behavior was concerned. At times her memories provided her only clues as to who, or what, she was. It was frustrating. Just when she believed that she had discovered something important about herself, Brendan would start to work on her, to turn everything around. . . .

Now she was alone, with the time to think. Not only were Brendan and Tem gone, the others were wrapped up in their own emotions. Beth and John were totally out of reach, Jana was morose and hostile, Axie spent her time reading and sleeping and was generally too drugged to be of any use. Even Vana, upon whom she could usually depend, was spending more and more of her time in Demo's electronic world, at times even without his guidance. Some society they had created here!

The evening before she had been trying to find areas of mutual interest with Harmon and they had ended up in bed. He'd been competent enough, but it was easy to tell that his mind was elsewhere—and that he was probably just trying to take revenge on Vana. Afterward he seemed ill at ease with her and, violating her preconceptions of his placid, all-accepting nature, almost angry. Any attempt she made at talking about his problem directly was shunted aside. It was frustrating and, worse yet, it made her think about her own relationship with Brendan.

'Ariane, up here.'

A voice from somewhere above her head made her look up. It was Demogorgon, sitting alone within the light- spreading mirror at the apex of the girder tower.

'So you decided to visit the real world?' she said. 'What are you doing here?'

'Just bringing a little bit of fantasy out with me. I've been designing the colors of the holograph that will fill out the dome. I'm importing a bit of the Illimitor World, compressing it. Want to help?'

'Certainly,' Ariane said, and leaped halfway up the tower, clambering lightly the rest of the way. She had known it was the plan for this dome: a simulated environment that would bring a little of home into this world of ice. For some reason she hadn't realized they wouldn't just be using one of the commercially supplied ones from Comnet. It was easy to forget that Demogorgon was skilled at precisely this art. Beneath them, the dark irregular floor of the