Iris

throat.

'Demo!' said Vana, looking at him over the man's shoulder, appearing a little embarrassed. 'I didn't expect you . . . here . . . now.'

'What? Ho—' called Qasartun, continuing his vigorous thrusting. 'If it isn't my fellow liege lord Demogorgon en Arhos! Well met, if I must say so myself!'

'Stop. Qassi, stop!' said Berenguer.

For a moment his face was transfigured with rage, then, somewhat cowed, he complied with her request. His rampant penis was of a size that an irrationally greedy woman might dream about. Vana, in this setting, seemed to have acquired a bit more modesty—she covered herself with a corner of the picnic cloth.

Demogorgon was unable to keep from laughing. He wondered how he would react to being interrupted during one of his trysts with Raabo by a real person. 'Dear Vana,' he began, 'do not feel any embarrassment on account of my presence. After all, Qassi, as you call him, is, in a sense, merely my representative. And gratifying one's desires, as you were doing, is a major part of the reason this world exists.'

Qasartun looked back and forth between the two, then said, 'I can see that I am not wanted here.' He made a sort of humble gesture to Demogorgon. 'If it please you, my lady, I will be off.' So saying, he buckled on his jewel- encrusted codpiece and strode off toward the west without a backward glance.

'Well, anyway,' said Demo, 'I'm sorry for the interruption.' Vana gave the departing kinglet a quick glance. 'There are more where he came from.' Demogorgon laughed. 'That's very, very, true.' He paused, then said, 'How are you getting along here in general? I really haven't been giving you the supervision I ought to.'

'Fine. I think I've figured out everything I need to know. I have assumed my title, and everybody knows of me ... it couldn't be better.'

'Good. You probably ought to come back to Ocypete with me, though. Things are getting a little lonely there. Especially for Harmon.'

She was pulling on her clothing now. It did not do much to conceal her nudity but made a great difference in her demeanor. She stood and stretched. 'Speaking of Harmon—' she said.

'Yes?'

'What are we going to do about him?'

'What do you mean?'

'He's, well . . . he's jealous. Of you.'

'Me?' Demogorgon looked incredulous. 'He has nothing to fear from me!'

'Think about it. This is you.' She spread her hand in a wide gesture.

'No, it's not me—it's you! If he's jealous of anything it's your fantasies, and your inability to satisfy them through him. This is just a means to an end.'

'That's easy to say, but how do things look? And how do I get it across to him?' Demogorgon sat down on the grass and stared at the sky. 'How do you tell anything to anybody? Get him in here, if you can ... if you want him—here.'

'Can you talk to him?'

'Look, this is going to have to work out in its own way, just like . . .' She saw the unhappiness spread across his features. Somehow it seemed inappropriate, here. 'Just like you and Brendan?'

He felt her hand cool on his neck. 'Yeah. Just like that.'

Jana Li Hu looked down. The squat cylinder that housed what had been a redundant thruster from Deepstar's original configuration sat in a classic graben and was the hub for three hundred-meter metal cords which were affixed to mousetrap pitons that had been dug very far into exposed sections of the bed-ice. She found, to her surprise, that she had been holding her breath, and she let it out into the suit slowly. The worksuit she wore was large for her, and its spaciousness made her feel clumsy, hard to control. Once again she scanned the surrounding terrain with her photochips and was awed by the spirelike , only slightly rounded water-ice massifs that clustered closely here, broken shards of the world thrust upward by the colossal forces which had fought during the period when Mare Nostrum froze and expanded.

It was something only water would do, pushing the partially collapsed Ocypete back into a spherical shape. Unlike what had happened on Ganymede and other Solar moons, the unmelted crust of the area surrounding the mare was already too thick to produce the regional grooves caused by wave systems of extensional faulting during the time of melting. Instead more 'Earthlike' oblique-slip faults had spread in a finely reticulate pattern back into the