Iris

John shook his head, incongruously, as the question he had asked was answered for him. Methol was still sitting with him, although he had been ignoring her. She was looking out the window at Iris in the sky. With each passing 'day' the planet grew more closely aligned with the bright spark of the sun and they knew that an eclipse was coming, but they had already discussed that. It seemed a minor thing in the midst of everything else.

John was saying, 'I'm beginning to feel totally lost, Ari . It was bad enough on the long trip out here, trying to keep afloat in this tiny sea of locked-up people, half of them seeming like lunatics to me, but now! All this business about Iris and the Artifacts, which still seem so unreal, the things that have gone down between Beth and me . . . Brendan going crazier every day and taking Tem with him! I can't keep track of it all!' He shook his head and grimaced, a sort of wry smile. 'Here Demogorgon is dragging people off to that imaginary world of his and Jana is acting weirder than ever. I thought I understood her on the trip out. . . . The only one who seems the same as at the beginning is Axie, perhaps because she does so little, just stays a simple dope fiend . . . and you, of course.' Methol sat through his rambling monologue, listening sympathetically. The ramifications of what had happened to them all were enough to confuse anyone. You could understand a part of what was going on, but the whole was chaos. Perhaps, she thought, that's how normal people stay sane. They attend to whatever they can understand and ignore the rest. Certainly a sensitive, artistic mind like Cornwell's, accustomed to seeing his surroundings with a gestalt perception, would be disturbed by an overload of detail. She smiled at his last remark. 'I'm not unchanged, John. I'm just not complex enough to be rendered incomprehensible by the changes that occur within me.'

'Not like Sealock, huh?'

She grinned. 'Well, he started out incomprehensible. I think he would be no easier to understand now, no matter what happens. There have been positive changes in him, but I don't know to what effect.'

'I haven't seen any of these 'positive' changes. He seems worse than ever!' Shaking her head, Ariane said, 'Just because you can't perceive a thing doesn't mean it isn't there.' Cornwell felt a little upwelling of uncharacteristic anger. 'Tell me how he's changed, then. Convince me.'

'I ... can't.' She looked pained. 'Something's going on in him. I don't know what. The violence and anger seem to be receding. I think maybe he sees himself more clearly now. I don't know what the end result will be. . . .'

Demogorgon surfaced from the Illimitor World, called back to his body by the safeguards that Sealock had helped him build in long ago, monitors designed to prevent damage to organs by neglected bodily functions. A ruptured bladder would be a poor ending to a fine adventure. He stretched. Prynne and Berenguer were sprawled motionless on the soft floor before him, left to their own devices in a self-sustaining inner Universe. He heard a muted sound and looked up. Aksinia Ockels was leaning against the open doorway, naked, watching them all through her chemically brightened eyes. He nodded to her as he stood up.

She approached and touched him, running her fingers down the length of his chest, toward his groin.

'Want to make love with me?'

He shook his head. 'No. I've got to piss. Besides, you may have heard, I'm queer.'

'I thought you were changing.'

He shrugged and gestured at the other two. 'I don't really want to leave them in there alone for too long. The world is too mutable for novices. They might get lost.'

She looked slightly nonplused. 'It's the same thing as drugs, you know.'

'I know,' he said. 'Everyone has their own way out. This is mine.' He looked at her speculatively, and asked, 'Want to give it a try?'

'I'm still under Beta-2.' There was a hint of fear perceptible in her voice.

'Doesn't matter.' He picked up a circlet and held it out to her. 'Come on.'

'I don't know . . .'

He grinned and put it over her head, then donned his own. 'It's easy. I won't let you fall.' Under the wire, they sank swiftly through the cottony-dense data layers of the 'net and reappeared in the fantasy-flare skies above Arhos . Axie cried out with delight at the interaction between the effect of the machines on her mind and the drug on her brain. Demogorgon changed her into a great, metallic-green eagle-like creature, a sort of harpy, really, and let her go, with the injunction, 'You can fly!'

She fell like a bomb from the heavens, a vengeful cry tearing the quiet clouds asunder, then her wings snapped open and she flew, enthralled.

Called back to the surface by his monitors once again, Demogorgon stepped out into the corridor, intent on his need for physical relief. He went to the refresher stall in his room and began the mechanical evacuation, thinking, with amusement, Pissing's a pleasure when you've really got to go. It's the simple things that make life worth living. A crackle came into his mind, and, somehow seeping through Shipnet's circuits, he heard a low cry of dismay. It had a flavorof Sealock about it. Strange, he thought, feeling a small jolt of anticipatory dread. Sadness and a sense of his continual isolation flooded over him, and he went to rejoin his apprentices in Arhos .

John was again out on the ice, trying to reconcile the way he felt with the way he thought he should feel. He