Iris

are just barely understood to begin with. I don't have the slightest idea as to what he's really doing.'

'To be honest with you, I don't think anyone except perhaps Tem does. I certainly don't.'

'You know, I'm ashamed to admit it now. But at first, for a while, I thought this whole thing, the Artifact on Aello anyway, might be a hoax—or even a delusion of Brendan's. With his programming abilities, he could certainly falsify all Shipnet sensory feeds. He could do anything he wanted with us, change anything into anything else, as long as we were all hooked up to Shipnet. If he really wanted to. This could still be a hoax.' He laughed to himself. What a horrible joke if even what had happened with Beth had been somehow produced by Sealock. And yet he almost wished that it had been.

'I can vouch for the reality of the thing on Aello. I know the difference between reality and 'cast images.'

'Do you, really? Is there a difference? For really well-crafted images? I know that experimental subjects have been able to discern the difference most of the time. But that was simple commercial-grade stuff. With more complete programming . . . who knows?'

'I know that Brendan isn't like that. He wouldn't do that even if he could. The actions you're describing are those of a monster. Brendan is a man, even if he is different from you. Just a man.' A memory came back to him, reluctantly, that he and Beth had never shared. There was something in it that held an intuition he was reaching for.

In the mood of the moment, John Cornwell had almost forgotten the two obsessions which created his long-term motivations. The sky was a vast overspreading ice floe, broken clouds laced through with fingers of indigo. From the west a burst of haloed intensity showed the sun behind the clouds where the arch of the sky, bent by the knowledge that it must come to rest on the edge of the world, was a quick corner. He breathed warm, dry air with a flavor of mimosa and honeysuckle. Beth nuzzled more firmly against him, and her smell, like clean lavender, mixed with the others. They were sitting under a middle-aged tulip tree, at a point where the Appalachian Trail had left its more mountainous way for a hillyverge of old fields and replanted forests. Long grass dried by the rainless summer gave the wind's hushing more authority. Occasionally the whispering gargle of a passing lifter could be heard in the distance, yet it was easy, though bustling civilization was less than four miles distant, to imagine the world as primeval.

'You know, Beth, much as I'd've liked to see the way it was, back in the last century, I can't help but think that Lonicera and the rest make a nice version of nature.' This was a point that Beth couldn't let go. 'I suppose you think pigeons, starlings, and English sparrows are adequate representatives of the bird population, as well.'

'Point taken. Growing up in the North, where everything has such a tenuous grip on life, tends to make all this a little intoxicating. Nature seems so, well, natural here.' He laughed and rubbed a forefinger on her neck, under the dark curtain of hair. 'It's difficult to imagine the way it was.'

'I think the first people who could wander alone through a forest without the slightest fear of being eaten lost a real idea of nature and substituted this. When there is nothing really left but dandelions breaking up through the pavements, it will still be enough to satisfy that urge to be with nature for most. That is, if they suppress the travelogues.'

'How can you come with me into space? There'll be no dandelions—not even natural E. coli on Triton. Just people and that which people have made.'

'You know the answer to that. It's because I want to be with you. I love you.' Beth said the last as a litany, oft repeated.

John squirmed, 'And yet . . . well, we both know my answer to that.' The image of Beth's refusal to DR hung between them. To John, it represented an unwillingness to give, a fearful secret interior life that the woman just wouldn't share with him. He sat up and took hold of his ankles, pulling his knees together under his chin. The rough ground pushed him from beneath.

'You won't do it. I can accept that. I'm just not sure I can . . . love you without knowing you. You can feel us growing further apart over the last months, I know. It's just that I don't feel I can ever know you like this. Language is soclumsy; and our sex together, not that it's not tremendous, but it's a blind, nonsentient thing. It's just skin and groin with us as observers. How many times do you want to go through this? We can't understand each other's views on this—and that's why we should.'

'John. Y'know, I get these images from the entertainment 'net, in the old days, when a boy tried to go

'all the way' with a girl; to 'get in her pants.' Why can't I preserve a part of me from you, why can't I have just a corner private to myself?'

'You can. It is your decision to make. But until you do, don't ask me to say that I love you.' He stood.

'Am I such a bastard for that?'

'John, I don't judge you.'

'Let's get back to the lifter, OK?' He took her hand, small and dark, and pulled her up. They made their way slowly through the wavering brownish grass and the sun broke out to throw long buckling shadows before them.