wasn't as devastated as he should have been and, indeed, had cried less than half an hour altogether. He found that the whole incident was already beginning to feel remote, dreamlike, and all of the DR even more so. Was he an unfeeling monster, a bastard, a mechanism driven by forces unwholesome and unhumanistic? It had taken him a brief while to readapt, to restructure his rationalizations; and here he was on the other side of it all; still functioning when by all rights he should have been destroyed. Stripped of his illusions, what was the difference? He stared up at a dim-cored Iris and the sun now so near to it, yet the squint didn't feel wet.
He was beginning to look forward to the eclipse.
SEVEN
Jana turned the flat knob counterclockwise and the silent engine shut down. Through the windshield, the unbalanced triad of the Iris system hung just twenty-five degrees above the salt-white waste. The glaring pinpoint of the sun stood canted only seconds from the upper right limb of the blue infrastar, throwing little scintillae across the clear barrier. Here, at the far eastern edge of the ocellus, she could watch the eclipse without straining her neck. With rather too much care she pulled the hood of her suit over her head and adjusted it precisely. It hardened against her and she made a change in the thermal generator that would slowly drop her body temperature to a critical level, then disconnected the control element. After a moment she evacuated the driver's compartment and threw open a door. The conjunction of the two stars hurried toward first contact.
In a neat row a hundred meters from the CM dome, Cornwell had prepared a little surprise. Ten pieces of bubbleplastic, bent to form dark chaises longues , arrayed themselves across the rubbly ice. 'I didn't know if Brendan would be joining us or not,' John said apologetically.
'Yeah, well, where's Jana?' asked Ariane.
'Good question,' said Tem. 'She's not within range of the Clarke, or else she's just not answering.'
'It wouldn't be the first time,' said Beth, mounting one of the chairs and twisting into a supine position.
'I'd bet she's found her own place to watch from; after all, there are observations to be made out in the highlands.' Her voice was hoarse, and she looked at no one.
'OK,' said Tem, after checking Shipnet Inventory, 'she's taken the
'Wait a second, wait a second!' John seemed a little hysterical. 'Here it is!'
'Forget the fucking eclipse!' said Harmon. 'What's she doing with my car?' But for a moment the eclipse was difficult to ignore, the sun diffusing into a spectrum-fringed splotch under the still distinct blue top of Iris' atmosphere. It was moving slowly and wouldn't make the complete transit of Iris' four degrees for almost six hours. Still, like looking at an ancient clock face, there was imperceptible motion that accumulated into discrete changes in appearance.
'I'm very worried about Jana,' said Axie. 'She's changed, gotten . . . weird. I could see her, well, aura before, but it went dark. I know that sounds stupid to you, but the induction tech has side effects, sort of; anyway, I'm scared. She might do something bad.'
'Like what?' said Ariane, gently but with sarcasm creepinginto her voice. 'She's got a lot invested in this exploration. I doubt if she would sacrifice that for anything.'
'All right, all right,' John said slowly, inadvertently taking on the role of leader, 'I guess we'd better go look for her.'
Ariane looked at the suit containing Cornwell with surprise. Perhaps the DR with Beth had had a beneficial effect on their musician-financier. 'Two of us can follow the car's heat trail with no trouble. Why don't the rest of you just relax and watch the show?'
'I'm going in and check on Brendan,' said Tem. 'I've given him enough time.'
The eclipse is moving along excellently, Jana thought. The sun was becoming increasingly blurred as it was swallowed by the Iridean sphere. It was also beginning to elongate a bit, forming into a fuzzy crescent with a rainbow edge. As the sun passed behind ever denser gas with a higher refractive index, its image grew more hazy.
Jana felt good. Despite the fact that her body was dying, the enkephalin derivative that she had taken before leaving preserved her awareness and vision. She hoped that she had successfully predicted the behavior of her co- colonists; otherwise she would indeed be very sorry.
'Cocksuckers,' muttered Brendan Sealock as he worked feverishly, alone. On the trip out, to sustain the hobbies that were expected to fill his remaining life, the man had brought a great deal of electronic gear. The bulk of it consisted of blank, mutable circuit boards, to be thought of merely as machines in potential. They were waveguide grids, waiting for some external force to impose form on their nebulous void. Sealock built them into a wall-filling maze, made the interconnections, each one to every other, and set to work. The structural writer was positioned by the first grid. He was sent through it by the highest functions that the ship's version of Comnet had to offer, translating his ideas into hardware on an instantaneous fiery line. All things related now and the writer walked alone, formulating. There are assemblers which writeassemblers. Each command says, 'Do these things,' and each
