Krzakwa broke from the pack in the central pit and made a little dive into a low recliner that subsided to receive him. 'Well, it was a gamble. They should've been satisfied with the data we're sending back. Leave it to some militarist to call up photos a hundred times less sharp than those available simply because they were firsthand. What do we do now?'
The focus of the conversation began to shift toward the center of the central room as, one by one, Krzakwa was joined in the comfort of the programmable floor. Soon everyone except Harmon was there.
'Even if we tell them the truth, there isn't anything they can do about it. At least until the
'It's a risky business, all right,' said John. 'Presumably the least that would happen is that we would forfeit our homesteading rights. We could also be placed under ship arrest and held for return to Earth. But the damage is already done. . . . I'm not arguing with the rationale—'
'They wouldn't have authorized us to explore the Artifact, we all know that,' said Demogorgon.
'As far as I'm concerned, they have no authority out here,' said Brendan. 'We can defend ourselves with what we've got. If we have to . . .'
Krzakwa was amused. 'That would be a bloody little war.'
'Shall we stall them or tell them the truth?' asked Ariane.
'I can't see what difference it would make,' said Jana, 'and I am ready to release my full monograph on the Iridean system, including everything.'
'Go ahead and tell them,' said Brendan. 'It will be very interesting to hear what threats they come up with.'
Within twenty hours the conversion scanner was complete. Sealock twisted himself in the cramped confines of his equipment-stuffed quarters and stretched, grabbing on to a handhold buried in multicolored waveguides to pull out the kinks in his arm and shoulder muscles. The final stages of microprogramming had been totally up to him, and, though he had managed to purchase several off-the-shelf utility programs from Earth, it was more difficult than he had thought it would be. Even with Tem's encyclopedic knowledge of the physics involved, there were almost insoluble problems in adapting standard-grade circuits to the task.
Well, he thought, either it'll work or it won't.
He settled into the machinery, latched the program nodes, and thought, Run, you bastard. And, within the limitations of the device's resolving power, things became transparent. Small-scale variations in mass for a megameter around were sensible to him. Ocypete was like a vast onion of ice with a discontinuous eye and a heavy core. And resting on the surface of the core like a nipple on a breast was the second artifact: just a lump of26 magnesium sharply differentiated from the surrounding material. It was what remained after a container of radioactive26 aluminum more than a kilometer in diameter had decayed and released the heat which had melted their world. Sealock slowly let out his breath. It was obviously some kind of fuel cell. But for what? Not Artifact I, that was certain. His gaze traveled to Podarge. As far as he could ascertain there was nothing anomalous in the makeup of this little moon. Early heating during its period of accretion could account for its structure. Onward to Aello; the mess they had left on the innermost satellite disquieted him. There were no significant peculiarities other than the shocked material and deep-seated cracks formed by the great disruption they hadproduced. Artifact I sat silently in its great crater and told no more of itself. Brendan looked deep into Iris. Down through the cold layers of hydrogen and helium. Down past the neon and carbon monoxide to the thin bank of nitrogen cirrus, then through the cirrus and into a supersaturated layer of nitrogen gas. The sheer size of Iris necessitated peeling back the strata one at a time. Here, as the temperature rose, pressure more than compensated. In the end there was a sea of pressure-contained liquid hydrogen. Beneath that, fractionation could no longer operate. He came to a mixed crust of water and methane ice. Brendan could sense that the scanner had shifted to higher energies. He looked harder and the center of the infrastar was revealed to him. . . . It was there, in the
>0.5 megabar region.
It seemed nothing more for a moment than a small bubble. A hollowness at the middle point of everything. But it must be more than that, he thought, rejoicing, to withstand the pressure, it must be a supercraft of unbelievable technology.
'The torus is starting to drain, Bren,' Ariane burst through, startling him. 'Anything yet?' Brendan smiled to himself, but his thought projection did not betray his emotion. 'Take this feed,' he said.
Somehow, the thought of actually being Beth afforded John an exotic exhilaration. Sitting on a little rise in the moor dome, looking across the ten or so meters of small-flowered heather, he could see himself sitting with the others around the pool. Only it wasn't really he, since all sensory inputs had been cross-circuited between the two of them. For all practical purposes, he was inside the body of the woman and she was in him. He could see that his body was looking at him now, and he waved. He had felt more of a loss than he would have cared to explain upon finding that between his legs was a vulva. But only initially: when he realized that it was only 'for a day,' so to speak, a feeling of warmth and sexiness came. Perhaps in heavier gravity he would have felt awkward and clumsy adapting to the different center of gravity. But not here. The onlyawkwardness came from interacting with the men of the colony, since he had no intention of fucking them, at least for the moment. He wondered if Beth was having a similar problem—they were not in contact for this experiment.
Suddenly Ariane appeared at the interdome arch, waving a hand over her head. 'Everybody!' she shouted. 'The scanner works! Bren's found the main Artifact at the center of Iris!' John leaped up, halfway to the ceiling. Abruptly he was back in his own body, looking across the glistening water of the pool to where Ariane was running toward them. The change of perspective was difficult to deal with and he seemed to black out for a second, though not long
