Iris

'It seems to me,' said John, 'that the demands of keeping our friendships intact are very much increased by this pair-bonding stuff.' He glanced involuntarily at Beth. 'You can call it 'love' if you want to, but jealousies naturally arise from people forming couples and excluding others from their emotional life.'

Beth spoke for the first time. 'I have given all of this a lot of thought—all of you know what happened between John and me on the way out. You know he wanted to do Downlink Rapport with me, right?

Although I think that's going too far, there is much that he has said that I think is good. We planned this colony together, and the possibilities were so ... Look. It's simple enough—he wants us to drop all our preconceived notions of what the word 'relationship' means. You know: we should all be available for one another's needs, care for one another, sleep together. He wants us all to experience the kind of intense, pain-free friendship that he imagines must exist and, in so doing, share it with him . . . to triumph over despair. To do away with what he calls 'willful pain.' I wish him luck. I'd like a world like that.'

'I guess this is kind of dumb,' said Krzakwa, 'but I do remember how it felt with my ex-wife, back in the beginning. I imagined that I could live selflessly. I suppose it was all some kind of a lie. It certainly didn't last long. But I don't have any objections to giving a more shared life a try. . . .' There might have been more, and John was feeling some small glimmerings of hope, but Ariane, who had been monitoring a timeline curve, suddenly said, 'Now.'

Sealock reintegrated with a start and said, 'Right.'

Krzakwa and Methol bowed their heads, their eyes going unfocused. Brendan smiled faintly, abstractedly, as if he'd thought of an amusing scene from the far past, and reached out to grasp their hands in a seance-like parody. They made a momentary tableau, motionless. His eyes rolled back, leaving the others to contend with the blank- eyed visage of a madman.

The air seemed to change. What had been ' Trois Gymnopedies' gave way to a gurgling roar that was being transmitted through the structure of the ship. The ion drive was firing, allowing Deepstar to fall along a parabola around Iris.

Hand in hand, like three magic jinn on a flying rug, Methol, Sealock, and Krzakwa guided Deepstar toward its goal. In an earlier generation, a simpler age, it would have been done by the automatic will of preplanned machine action; but with Comnet's ship-borne child in their fingertips, they did it all themselves, consciously. At the close of the twenty-first century, still riding the bow shock of an ever growing distaste for what had been called 'robots,' what a computer program might have done was often accomplished by the linkage and direct extension of human minds. So they skittered along with their souls in the wires, in the polyphase modulation waveguides, and did what had to be done. It was precise, it was fast, and it was fun.

Why ride in a spaceship when you can be one?

To a hypothetical observer outside, the approach of Deepstar would have been impressive. Falling toward Iris across a star-stippled backdrop, the ship was just a subtly glowing maze: a regular array of girders and struts, studded heavilywith the metal and plastic polyhedrons of life system, cargo, and equipment. The blunt cylinders that were fuel tanks and Hyloxso propellant canisters threw back light in sharp lines and the whole was topped by a dark, squat canister that caught something of the dim, distant sun.

Suddenly there was a dazzling glare. A great actinic burst defaced the velvet darkness, diffuse and white around its periphery, tinged a hard red-violet in the opaque core. To a mind fed vaster quantities of semi-raw data, the fire haze would resolve itself into the blazing exhaust plume of a heavy-ion motor; a dense beam of Element 196 nuclei, almost coherent as it jetted from its emission nozzle at relativistic speed. It would fluoresce in the far ultraviolet as the artificial ions decayed into alpha particles only attoseconds after their impulse was spent. While the three engineers indulged in the almost gratuitous joy of flying the ship they had, in large measure, built, the others moved about in the sudden novelty of renewed gravity. Deepstar was decelerating at something like 0.1g, and it felt strange. They had been pressed to the floor by their responsive em-suits, but now they could feel organs settling and twinges from muscles that had had no natural exercise for almost two years. The inertial field pulled at them like an alien presence. After the others wandered off, together and alone, Harmon Prynne stayed and, donning his circlet, adjusting it like some old fedora, tried to follow what was going on. He was a competent technician but, as what amounted to a household appliance repairman, he was far out of his depth even in the lowest reaches of Octa-deka Prime. Riding far above his usual duodecimal limits on the wings of a 'Guardian Angel' monitor program, he was able to sample what it must be like to fly in space, a man/machine integration, with the power of an astrodyne in his muscles and the beautiful symmetry of physics doing a fire dance at his command. Somewhere, inside yet far away, he felt Ariane Methol's smile. As Brendan, Ariane, and Tem flew their ship down and around the solid-ringed, blue-haloed core of Iris, the stars clustered thickly about their heads, running in brightstreamers through their sun-blown hair, and the dusty darkness of the cold sky assumed a palpable texture as it brushed against their skins. They talked and joked and worked in this sea of midnight mist, while a forlorn, eagle-winged man circled far below.

Sealock reached down from the heights and, grappling with the mind of Harmon Prynne, hauled it up to sit among them. The man was terrified, gazing about at an unfamiliar landscape.

'Like the view?'

He nodded. 'Yes.' It seemed as if his words were reverberating among the worlds, thrilling him. From here, at the heart of the highest subnet the ship had to offer, he could feel all the workings of Deepstar relayed to him through an electronic complexity, almost as if they were parts of his own body. It had a certain familiarity, was like some aspects of the work he'd done in Florida, but with a subtlety and detail that he hadn't imagined would exist. In two years, no one had invited him here before. . . . He could feel Brendan's eyes on him somehow, cold, calculating . . . beady, glittering things that measured the content of his soul and found it lacking. . . .

'You want to fly this pile of shit?' A simple question, flat, it was said with condescension, perhaps with contempt, but underlying all that was a genuine, sympathetic offer.