Iris

enough to fall. When he had recovered, he checked to see if Beth was all right. She had not yet landed from his startled leap, but he could see that she had herself under control. His attention turned back to Ariane.

'It's something approximately five hundred kilometers across located at Iris' center. Bren can't tell anything specific about it because of the limitations of the scanner.'

'Oho!' said Tem, swishing his bare feet around in the water. 'This is shaping up into an AIWL

situation—curiouser, und so weiter! It's a shame that we'll never lay hands on the thing. It might as well be in Andromeda.'

'Can we do any better on sharpening the resolution?' asked Aksinia, pulling herself by one hand out of the water to perch on a strut of the light tower.

Tem thought for a moment, staring into the clarity of light in the pool. After a moment a hint of that gleam came into his eyes. 'You know, I bet we can. But we'll have to disable an even larger segment of Shipnet and reprogram it. That'll be inconvenient. . . .'

'I think we can do with a little inconvenience,' said John.

Vana Berenguer and Demogorgon lay in bed together, alone in the latter's CM chamber. They had finished making love and were quiescent now, the sheen of sweat collecting into little beads on their bodies and evaporating. The man was wooden-faced, flat on his back and still, staring at theceiling, enmeshed in a web of unspoken thought. The woman lay curled about his side under one arm, looking up at his face, as if totally absorbed in the reality of his presence. It was a classic, ritualized pose, dictated by an ancient culture, placing the two in roles they had never before occupied.

'Demo?'

The Arab looked down at her and saw that she appeared happy. He smiled.

'I love you.' It seemed like the thing to say. From all the times past, men and women had said that to each other when they had nothing else to say. It was comforting, like being under a warm blanket on a cold night. Centering on a physical act that should have had no more meaning than the consumption of a satisfying meal, it generated the emotions that it was supposed to stem from. In that sense, love was akin to music.

Demogorgon nodded and squeezed her to his body. 'Yes,' he said, 'I love you too,' and thought, But I love Brendan. It made him want to laugh. What am I? he wondered. What are we all? These emotions, whatever their source, had a comforting feel to them. It was a primitive sort of thing, like hoarding trade goods against an expected social collapse, when other human currency would be valueless. That was it. Selfishly collect all the good moments now, for the bad ones will be coming someday soon. Collect them now, all you can, not caring that others may be suffering from your greed. He rolled over a little and kissed Vana, intending to initiate another round of sex. She put her hand on his abdomen, pressing lightly. There was a harsh sound from the door, randomized periodic noise, and the quatrefoil panels fell open. Harmon Prynne was standing there, holding a lockpick circuit tracer in his hand. He threw the device down and stepped through the portal.

Demo and Vana were frozen in their tableau, trying to think of words, looking like a stopframe from a pornodisk .

Prynne stared down on them for a long moment, face motionless, then he snarled, 'Bastard!' and, seizing Demogorgon by the hair, dragged him upright. Releasing his hold,he punched him in the face, knocking him down and throwing himself off balance.

The Arab bounced to his feet in the low gravity and said, 'Wait . . .' Prynne flailed his arms wildly, fighting to maintain position, and threw another punch. It missed and he went into an uncontrollable pirouette.

Demo felt a surge of sourceless anger and tried to kick the spinning man, but he missed, lost his footing, and bounced off the ceiling. When he came down he fell on Prynne and the two melted together into a single grappling mass, clawing at each other and trying to strike. Vana threw herself on them, trying to separate them, but succeeded only in becoming part of a struggling ganglion of limbs and bodies that floated around the room, rebounding from furniture and walls. In the end their personal version of entropy ran down and they drifted to the floor in a gasping, insensate-seeming heap. Prynne and Demogorgon were unharmed. Vana Berenguer had a bloody nose from bumping into some unknown hard object. She remembered that it was not a fist or other human thing, just a hard, flat surface. Their breathing slowed, evened, and they gradually came apart, becoming individuals once again.

Vana put her arm around Demo and said, 'Harmon, how could you do something like this? Why?' The man stared at them for a second, then his face crumpled. 'Vana, why are you leaving me like this?

I'm so alone out here. I'm not like the others. . . . Without you ... I only came because of you!' He was in tears and almost unrecognizable.

Demogorgon looked at them both and heard the kinship in his words. He thought of Brendan gone and then gone again, thought of him making love with Ariane, the two of them closing him out.

'Join us then,' he said. 'Join us.'

Sealock and Krzakwa sat in the tangle that was the makeshift nerve center of the quantum conversion scanner