Iris

walked back toward the dais.

'That was an easy one,' said Ariane. 'At least I think I did it. It happened about twenty seconds after I touched this node. Do you think I should touch it again to see if they go off?'

'Sure,' said Jana. Nothing happened.

'We seem to have established that they don't believe in toggle buttons,' said Tem. 'Try this one next to it,' he said, reaching out to touch one of the dark spots. As he did so, something huge began to move in the distance. A sea of cables shimmered, where before there had been nothing, and beneath them the unknown machine glided a small distance and stopped. Sealock smiled grimly. 'Be a hell of a note if we accidentally turned on the rocket engines, wouldn't it?'

Watching without expression, Hu said, 'It would be interesting to discover that they still worked, that they still had fuel. And that a fuel would indeed still be potent. Most that I know work by the release of stored entropy . . . and time will have its effect.'

They touched other buttons, which made other objects move, and Sealock was struck by a sudden analogy: they were like small children, playing with the controls to an older child's complex toy system. It did things that they were too young to understand. They couldn't see the real relationshipbetween cause and effect. And any theories that they may have formed were neither enforced nor disproved.

Harmon Prynne sat in his cubicle in Deepstar's CM, alone, as he had been, now, seemingly for so long. And Vana . . . she was under the wire again with that God damned fagwog ! The black anger built in him and he wanted to rage, to smash things, destroy them. . . . He wanted to throw things, hurl them against the walls of his room, but in this low-g environment they would only ricochet around inanely, making him want to laugh when he needed to cry. He chewed his knuckles in frustration and stared hard at nothing. Why did it have to happen this way?

I'm alone again, he thought, and remembered endless nights he had spent alone as a younger man, when he lived in his ancestral Key West Monad. He'd never fitted in there, or in any of the other places he'd tried to live— he'd always been an outsider, cut off in the midst of his own culture . . . unable to join in the simple, joyous games of the other adolescents. If it is difficult to be strange, how much more difficult can it be to be strange and stupid?

He couldn't fit in with their impersonal ideas about human relationships, the ideas about absolute freedom within the restrictive framework of the Monad. He needed someone, and needed that person to need him. . . .

When he went to Montevideo in the pursuit of his career, when he met Vana Berenguer and loved her

. . . he'd tried so hard to make it work, and now she was slowly being taken from him. He wanted to kill them, or himself. . . . He wanted all life to come to an end. . . . Oh, hell. He couldn't think which way to turn. He didn't know what to do. Maybe when the USEC ship came, he could get away.

Having exhausted their patience in playing with the alien control panel, the four explorers had walked back to the edge of the platform and, in keeping with the topsy-turvy nature of the place, continued to walk down the side to the thing's base. Before the omnipresent lighting came on, this place had been buried in the shadows, but now that they could seeit well they discovered that there was nothing to see. Around them were virtually featureless blue- green rhomboids of various sizes lacking even the circles which allowed one the luxury of imagining that the thing was at least marginally understandable. Alleyways strung with occasional cables led in all directions. Finally they came to an attach point for one of the cables, and Ariane climbed up to it and said, 'I wonder what it was for? It seems to go just about everywhere. . . .' The surface of the thing had a strange oily sheen, a faint coruscation of colors that gave the illusion of movement. She reached out to touch it. 'You know, it has the same force field that we've found on all the flat interior surfaces.' She encircled the ten-centimeter-thick cable with her fingers and let them slowly clamp down. 'I wonder if they're all really continuous with each othAAAAaaaa . . .' The scream was a trailing diminuendo, for as soon as her fingers made contact with it she was jerked off her feet and sucked away on the cable, manifestly under rapid acceleration.

Sealock cursed and, throwing himself on the thing, was sucked away in his turn. The other two, unwilling to be left behind, followed suit. Obligingly, the device brought those behind up at a faster pace until they were traveling in a little cluster, like dried raisins on a bare stem.

'Well,' said Brendan, 'I guess we know what it does now.' Ariane laughed weakly. 'This is a novel sort of transportation device. I wonder how we get off?' Krzakwawas looking around, trying to make something of the things about them as they soared through alleyways with increasing numbers of cables hung almost within reach. It was as if they had been on a spur of the system that was being fed into the terminal nexus for a large network. Below them, instead of solid bulkhead, was an undulating river of larger-diameter cables. 'At this speed,' said Tem, 'if we did manage to let go, we'd get hurt. Maybe we'd better just ride it to wherever it's going.'

'Like a Westerner, you pretend to be in control of a force when in fact you are totally helpless,' said Hu. 'Let us hope that it remembers how to stop when it does get somewhere.' Brendan laughed. 'How droll. Be funny if we all got killed in here.'

'What an encouraging thought,' said Tem. 'You're a real optimist, aren't you?' In the end the machine worked as they supposed it should. When they neared the port-side wall their speed of travel dropped. It brought them to a terminus near the floor and let them go. They dropped lightly and were grabbed only at the end of their descent by the now familiar field. The wall in front of which they had been deposited looked like a gigantic honeycomb, an endless array of identical hexagons about one and a half meters across by three deep. Sea-lock crawled into the nearest one and said, 'Looks like there's a set of electrical connectors coming in the back end. These are sort of like little garages. . . .'

'Or maybe circuit plug-ins,' said Methol. 'That'd fit in with the scale of the ship.' Jana Li Hu sighed. 'The worst of