Iris

they'dbuilt together and worked on their continuing attempts to probe the alien Artifact in the center of Iris. Though it was nearly invisible to everything they'd tried so far, there was still the surface scan to be worked on.

'Not too much detail here,' said the Selenite.

Sealock nodded, concentrating on his task. Both men were loaded down with far more waveguides than they could legitimately handle. In addition to the twelve direct brain-taps that he usually used, Brendan had added a score of induction leads to the back of his head, focusing on the occipital lobe and his visual cortices. There was another little jungle of wires coming off the left side of his head, centering on Wernicke's Area, where a great deal of neurolinguistic processing could take place, and on the important interconnections of the arcuate fasciculus underneath. Other leads were aimed deep into his limbic system, in an effort to tap certain automatic processes that were rarely, sometimes never, used in Comnet operations. Krzakwa, similarly but less heavily arrayed, was controlling the support system that fed the other man's work.

The outside of the Artifact had shown itself to be virtually free of meaningful surface detail. True, there was some kind of a mast reaching upward almost forty kilometers from the north pole and a big raised grid in the south, but that was about all. There were hints of surface irregularity under the thin, metallic layer that covered the thing's impervious skin, but nothing resolvable.

'Why can't we see inside?' muttered Krzakwa. 'Even if the hull were made of neutronium , which it isn't, we should be able to see ...'

Sealock thought about that. Yes, we should be able to. Why not? There were several alternative explanations. 'Maybe,' he said, 'we're looking too hard.' Krzakwa opened his eyes and stared in the real world, seeing the other through a miasma of superimposed images. 'So?'

'We'll find out. Switch over to the W± virtuosity input.'

The Selenite complied. There was a brief instant of statickysilence on the readout channel, then both men jerked convulsively and went rigid.

Krzakwa found himself embedded in a sea of rushing data —it came in over every waveguide, invaded every corner of his brain, and it made no sense. It was so all-pervasive, it almost took away his ability to perceive what was going on in a linear fashion. What was it? Not analogue. Numbers maybe. Numbers based on some concept he did not understand. He tried to reach out through the circuits and manipulate the net and found that he could not. Trapped? Perhaps the danger of an on-line discharge was close at hand. Am I almost dead?

It was growing increasingly difficult to think and he felt something groping at him, tendrils caressing his circuitry with a thin, keening cry as some kind of a *shutdown* command cried for his attention directly out of Sealock and earned a *can't* reply along with a joint *we've*got*to*do*something* fear. He began reaching out with almost lost physical hands to begin ripping off leads in a frenzy. When he could see again, he saw that the other man was doing the same. He was startled to notice that Sealock's eyes were bleeding. In control again, he reached out for a mechanical switch and silenced the entire system.

They sat in that silence, breaths at a whisper.

Finally Brendan turned to look at him. 'Temujin?'

'It's alive.'

Sealock laughed and began trying to wipe off his face but succeeded only in smearing the thin, sticky blood. 'Is it? Tell me what that word means.'

Krzakwa made mute agreement. 'We'd better go to the infirmary. We may be badly hurt.'

Krzakwa and Methol had been making love. This time it had come to naught, no conclusion, and gradually their muscular activities had run down and come to a halt. The woman was lying on her back and the man was curled semifetally , his head on her stomach. He had one eye pressed into her flesh and with the other was gazing down across the vista of her groin, surveying an expanse of short, curly black hair. He shifted slightly, blank-minded, and then he was looking at herwith an eye at skin level, the other one shut. It was like staring into underbrush on a symmetrical beige hill. Why can't I think? he wondered. He moved again, a little farther, so that his cheek rested on her little pad of hair. Ariane reached down and ran her fingers through the outer layers of his beard.

'What happens now?' she asked.

'I don't know.' He strained for an idea and finally said, 'We're lucky we weren't hurt more by the overload . . . and nobody even knew you could get that kind of physical damage via Comnet.'

'Just minor capillary rupture from a rapid systolic pressure spiking.'

'We could've died.'

'What can you do?'

'Better filtering, a much larger support infrastructure . . . we'll figure out something.' He turned his face inward and nuzzled against her body, feeling its complex structure with his skin. There was a sense of newness in it for him, brought on by a passage through the filmy gauzework of death. 'You know what he really wants to do?'