Back in the Illimitor World, Demogorgon and Vana lay naked together in the purple-cushioned rear section of his royal skimmer. They were drifting without power above the glittery azure waters of the Gevrainhal Sea, far to the northwest of Arhos, flowing with the wind beneath an almost featureless cornflower sky, tracking with the great red suns. The air was blood-warm above the equatorial ocean and fresh, clean sweat dappled the skins of their flawlessly imaginary bodies. Somewhere, in a hidden corner of her consciousness, Vana could imagine how this worked. There were many tricks to the Illimitor World program, enough alternate realities to satisfy the needs of many participants. If a hundred people submerged themselves here together, they would have a common experience, yes, but tailored to a hundred sets of needs. It would be the same but different. Here was a perfect world where everyone got not what he wanted but what he needed. Demogorgon had explained to her the mechanism for it all: a Tri-vesigesimalloop can make an almost infinite number of tracks from every decision point, with three layers of meaning derived from the twenty gradations of choice. The reality was that sex, like everything else, was better here than in the real world. There was no sick feeling, stemming from the initial sensations of desire: it just began. Instead of a gradual building to the trigger-spray release of an orgasm, it began full strength, one long flood of raw, elemental pleasure that ended only when the need for it was gone.
When it was over there were no frustrations, no aches, just perfect satiation and contentment—and if you wanted it to begin again, it did.
In the contented languorous moments here, time was seemingly suspended, and the simple comfort of her relationship with Demo put no pressure on her to act or speak in any particular way. They'd come here again and again to escape the social pressures building in the colony. Somehow, the Thing they had found on Aello meant little to her, here, now ... all her links to the outer world were dissolving. Perhaps not so strangely, she missed Harmon most of all here. But she knew he couldn't accept all this. The perfect pleasures of the Illimitor World were building something between her and Demogorgon. Things were changing. What they were building seemed good, but she didn't know quite what it was. Not yet.
Vana took a sip of her fizzy gin and tonic and watched a broken cloud pass in front of the lower sun. Whatever was going on here, she thought, it was
Sealock fell to his knees beside the hole in the floor that had eaten Jana, fighting the force field, which, in the vicinity of the opening, seemed to want to pull him in. It was a cushiony black below, the chamber-light that spilled through the opening seeming to be swallowed by nothingness. He called up an image of her, based on telemetry signals. There she was, falling slowly away—no, not falling. She was on a ballistic trajectory created by a momentary acceleration as she'd gone through the hole. She was a hundred meters away and receding. 'Jana!'
'Yes.' The woman's voice was calm. 'Brendan, I can't see anything down here. I've turned the scale enhancers all the way up, but it doesn't help. This must be an awfully big room. I'm going to activate my microwave emitter.'
'OK.' Sealock switched over a portion of his suit optics to short-wave sensing, thoughtfully chose an array of false-color generators, and waited. Hu's suit suddenly went bright, then dimmed again as his rectifiers normalized the image. Lightflickered on in the chamber below. Looking over his shoulder, Krzakwa gasped.
Jana was a flyspeck drifting through space toward a tilted platform more than a half kilometer away. What they could see of the room below made no sense beyond the sheer enormity of it. Sealock turned the holding em of his gloves all the way up and splayed his hands on the deck, then stuck his head over the edge, lurching as the force field tried to draw him downward, and looked around. Jana's radiation was quite sufficient to illuminate the entire chamber, which, by rough estimate, seemed to extend the length of the ship. Though the room was of constant width, the outward-bending walls dwindled into the distance, following the converging lines of perspective, and seemed to almost meet many kilometers away. The floor was cluttered with angularities, incomprehensible objects that changed from a monumental array directly below to a foreshortened jumble in the distance. Sealock turned off his right glove and reached down through the hole. He touched the underside of the floor and, feeling his hand stick, guessed that it too possessed a gravity-like field. He hung his torso down through the opening and quickly got a grip on the surface opposite. Inching his body forward, he suddenly reached a point where the field in the hole and beyond overcame that of the airlock, and he was propelled in a head-over-heels arc that left him sprawling on the other side. Above him the world inverted, and he looked up at the underside of the sky.
Dizziness assailed him, and he shut his suit optics down for a moment, then took a deep breath and brought them up again. The surface to which he was bound was like an immense game board, slightly convex, and populated by a regular array of man-sized white obelisks, for all the world like the bishops of his first chess set. At the level of his eyes they sprouted in great enough profusion to cut off vision about fifteen hundred meters away. So much for form and function, he thought.
'Come on through,' Brendan said, extending a hand toward what seemed to be once again 'down' through the opening. 'Grab my hand and I'll swing you through.' Carefully, the others flipped up and through, roughly deposited on the flypaper inner surface. When they were ready, they stood, which by now evoked hardly any vertigo, and looked up in awe. Sealock felt a sudden deterministic frustration at this rapid alteration of his directional sense. He needed to think of this as a zero-g space, but the presence of the gravity-like field prevented him from doing so.
'OK,' he said, 'up/down is dangerous here, and totally inapplicable, folks. As discomforting as it may be, forget it.'
'Jana?' That was from Krzakwa. 'Your Doppler telemetry indicates you're going about five m/s, so you're in for a pretty hard landing. If the field doesn't exist on the other side, you'll bounce. . . . Please remember the electromagnetic features of your worksuit. Your wrists . . .'
'I'm not stupid!' she said, sounding angry.
'I know, but I ...'
'More experience in low g, right? But you don't have
