Iris

of those actions breaks down into another set of still smaller functions. Tiny increments happen. All the little bits slowly pile up and, in the end, giant complexes emerge.

Sealock came out of a haze of creation and the thing that he'd built over the hours seemed to sparkle before him. He was exhausted and triumphant. It was. The construct he'd sought for so long now existed. Krzakwa stood in the room by his side, looking at the tangled, involuted mass of electronics before him.

'What is this?'

'It doesn't have a name.'

The Selenite took in the circuitry, then began following along the waveguides with his eyes. What the hell . . . 'You've got everything plugged into everything else!'

'That's the idea.'

'But . . . which way are the data going to flow?'

A bemused look from the tired eyes. 'I don't know.' A supreme act of creation in that, when the world exceeds the capacities of its maker and yet proceeds on its own.

'How are you going to control it, then?' Krzakwa was beginning to feel little twinges of bizarre fear creeping along the back of his head.

'I'm not. I wrote it using the physical structure of my own brain as a template.' Sealock smiled wearily.

'But wherever I had the variable decision-gate of an axon/dendrite junction I used two transfinite number-generator arrays. There's nothing but free-will connectors here.' Krzakwa felt a sudden dawning of comprehension and, with it, an overlay of terror. 'These are Turing circuits!' But the old, outlawed machines had been based on a primitive OS strictly limited by the number of simultaneous relations that they could make. They had been somewhat smarter than men, but still comprehensible. This . . . 'What are you planning to do?'

Sealock laughed quietly. 'Don't look so upset, Tem. This thing is only a classical tabula rasa; a blank mind of not quite infinite potential. I'll use my own mind as software, then, with me acting as a metacompiler , I'm going to let the contents of the Artifact flow in on top. If there's anything there, I'll get it.'

'Shit.' The Selenite looked at him dubiously. 'You're going to get killed.' A shrug. 'Could be.'

'But ... no controls, Brendan! No GAM, no Redux? What happens if you can't handle it?'

'I guess we know that one, don't we? Bury me in the sun and try to publish my work. I've been an asshole all my life.' He passed a hand over his brow, felt the connectors embedded in his hair. 'Well, it's ready. Want to hold my hand?'

'But I ...' A long, shaky sigh. 'OK.' The two men reached for the waveguide terminals and began plugging in.

'Ready?'

Krzakwa answered with an electronic nod. Sealock entered the circuitry in a long, smooth flow, and the Selenite felt his mind expand and grow vastly attenuated as it filled a space infinitely larger than that which had spawned it.

A ghostly voice spoke to him. 'There's a lot of room in here. Room to grow. I like it. Here goes . . .' He opened a communication channel through the QC scanner to the Artifact and felt its presence, a lurking, massive dybbuk awaiting his action. He opened himself to it. A swift tongue of data flowed in, then retreated; there was a diminishing, triumphant cry, then: gone. Krzakwa opened his eyes and stared at Sealock's still form with horror. He made a frantic search of the circuitry, but it was empty. He stole a quick look into the man's head: there was a heartbeat, he still breathed, the limbic system still sparkled and fired metronomically, but the higher functions were flat, blank. The amygdala had nothing to coordinate and the corpus callosum had no messages to transport. The being had fled to an unknown distance.

'Discharged . . .,' Tem whispered, aghast, and began the series of actions that were all he could do to try to reach in after the receding personality. He brought in the GAM-and-Redux that should have been there in the first place and began a bit-by-bit download of the periphery of the hole inthe circuitry through which Brendan had fallen. It would be a long and tedious search. Brendan Sealock fell away into darkness, then light.

Riding the MPT, John and Ariane skimmed along the surface in a complex series of ballistic course changes, following a trail of vestigial heat tracked by the infrared scanner. Every so often the musician would steal a glance back at the eclipse in progress, but more often he watched the ice pass below, looking for craters.

'I suppose you've thought of the legal ramifications of our discovery,' he said. 'Under the homesteading provisions, anything that even looks like an artifact must immediately be reported and is confiscated by the IAAU pending secondary confiscation by the Pansolar authorities. We're treading on some pretty bad stuff here, though of course the possible material benefits, not to mention the adventure, make it a hundred times over worth while.'