Iris

She didn't answer and he went on: 'He wants to modify Polaris for a direct descent into Iris, to make physical contact with the thing.'

'What?' Ariane sounded as if she simply hadn't heard him.

'I told him that it was certain death, that even if we made it down we'd never get out again. He said he didn't care.'

Sealock and Krzakwa were making modifications to the quantum conversion scanner. The things that they had done necessitated pulling apart a lot of the circuitry needed for the full operation of their little electronic world, and much of what had been Deepstar, along with what was available to its occupants, was temporarily reduced to functioning on a shrunken level. Many of the ship's components were tracked to a binary alternate trunk.

The banks of Torus-alpha transfinite numeric-base generators that Sealock had brought from Earth were now hookedinto the QCS, in hopes that it would be able to sort through the data mass for them and present it in some kind of coherent fashion. When the last connections were made, the stage was set for a final experiment.

They sat for a while staring at the massive mess they'd created.

'Think this'll work?'

Sealock shrugged. 'Who knows? It'd better.' He thought for a moment, then said, 'With each discrete data system going into a fully packed multibase array variable, it ought to be susceptible to some kind of transfinite analysis. That's what Torus-alpha was supposed to be for . . . but then, we couldn't make it work right on Earth, either.'

'And what if it doesn't?'

He smiled. 'What if ... good phrase for a lot of stupid situations. Hopefully the automatic biosensor switching system will pull us out of the net before our heads explode.' Krzakwa frowned. 'Your grisly imagery isn't what I needed to hear.' He sighed. 'OK. Let's do it.'

'Right.'

They began plugging in their hordes of leads.

'Ready?'

'Sure.'

They switched on and went under.

This time it was different.

In place of the floods of raw data, they were interacting through the culturally energized formatting system of the 'net element they'd created.

It was still incomprehensible, but it was something. . . .

An infinite sea of clear, cold, viscous oil.

Liquid helium, cooled to near absolute zero, perhaps. . . .

No, it was a perceptualized vision of the plenum, the ever increasing background of almost, but not quite, massless neutrinos on which all things material rode.

Vacuum boilers.

Bags.

And on down the scale.

A multidimensional matrix of free radicals, all the kinds that could be. The things that bred reality. Quadriformiccharge, the physicists called it.

Long vectors three, the photons, gluons, and gravitons. Their complementary short vectors. The supershort vector and its mirror identity. The hypershort vector, complete unto itself . . . And somewhere, unseen and stretching to infinity, the ultrashort vector that comes into being only at the grand flux-gate threshold, unifies the forces, sucks up the universe, and vanishes to the nowhere/when from which it came.

-Temujin? -Yes? -What the hell is this? He gazed around, ethereally. -It seems to be a theoretical