Iris

a little distance away, alone, and John was the most distant of all, equally alone. Jana was nowhere to be found. The Selenite continued speaking:

'I'm not sure what we can do about Brendan, maybe nothing but execute his will. Under ordinary circumstances, a discharged personality can sometimes be recovered intact from the 'net if swift action is taken. That's what a Redux program is for. In this case, I don't know. We don't have any way of knowing where he went. The best I can do is try to punch open a QCS channel to the Artifact and see if anything is going on down there. Theoretically, he has to have gonesomewhere. If his personality had been erased in situ it would've left definite signs: a big lesion in his amygdala, for one thing. I ... I'm not hopeful.' He shrugged, feeling helpless.

It was not until the following dekahour , the loss of Brendan still not fully realized, with the eclipse long passed and the sun and Iris well apart in the sky, that they could assess the full damage wrought by the storm. They discovered Jana, frozen solid, out by the ocellus rim; she was brought back and preserved in a cold-exposure capsule, and the idea of reading out her personality programming was discussed, as if in a daze. If feasible, that would come later.

Beyond the ocellus rim, at that point where Iris hung perpetually overhead, localized cataclysms had wrecked the neon-rich features: the liquid neon had flowed across the irregularities in the icy crust, leaving erosion features in form not unlike the valles of Mars. Great fields of neon ice, featureless but for occasional alluvium deposited by the limited load capacity of the neon flow, covered much of the sub-Iris terrain, erasing the smaller craters and filling larger ones. At one point a flow of the liquid had broken through the ocellus rim and spread across the already smooth water ice like a fresh coat of paint. Never again would Ocypete be subjected to the hot eclipse light, since the changing aspect of the Iridean ecliptic would put the sun to a near miss the next time around.

EIGHT

Krzakwa and Methol sat across a complex console from each other in Sealock's chamber. The other six survivors were there, but silent, for the two remaining technologists were the principal actors now. Sealock's still living body lay against one wall, enmeshed in its now necessary life-support equipment. The console was a composite of all that had gone before: Shipnet's Torus-alpha CPU, the quantum conversion scanner, and Sealock's nameless final act of creation. It would have to act in concert, under the direction of their will.

'Well,' said the Selenite. 'We have two people effectively dead, and possibly a chance to save one of them. We may be able to read Jana's personality out of her dead brain . . . but we have no body to put it in. Yet.' He glanced at Sealock. 'In any event, Jana will keep.' It was a grim, unnecessary sort of humor.

'We have to try for Brendan first. If we fail to reclaim him, then he is dead, and Jana's image will have a place inwhich to resume its life.' He frowned and stared at the machine. 'We're as ready as we'll ever be. I'll go in after him and Ariane will maintain a lifeline on me . . . better, we hope, than the one I held for Bren.' He sighed. 'The rest of you can observe via the circlets, but keep out of our way! Let's do it.' They went under and down, and the eight, trailing each other like a madly whipping human kite tail, fell through the circuits and out into the emergent wave fronts of the scanner, down into darkness, then light. A tongue of data reached out to scoop them in, but the electronic lifeline held and they unreeled into the unknown like a spider descending on its web.

—See anything?

The light flooding their senses was blinding but could not be shut out. It was a side effect of immersion in the QC wave front.

—No. I'll try to turn down the gain. Maybe clean up the clutter around us a little.

—Good idea. A little artificial image enhancement might help. If we . . . It struck. The imagery cleared and they were pinned, helpless before a flood of complex data, become mere observers.

Brendan Sealock was afloat in the dark sea of Iris. The initial trip down, the shock of being detached from his body, left him in a fog, a state of confusion and deadly lethargy, but he was alert again now, drifting in an immense crystalline sea, suspended in the center of a great blue-green sphere in which floated other remote, indistinct shapes. His first conscious thought was the classical one, Where am I?

then he remembered. The ship! This was what it had to be: the great mother vessel that had spawned the enormous mystery of the Aello lander and the once radiogenic material beneath the ocellus on Ocypete. The answers had to be close at hand now. Where are you? he cried out silently, but there was no answer. The masses of data that had seemed too imposing without were invisible within. A globule of some dark, oily substance floated before his eyes and he began to look around. There was a haze against an all-around sky that, when stared at long enough, resolved into a mass of filaments; one filament, perhaps, endlessly folded in upon itself. It was studded with a variety of tiny, dim shapes. Far away, at an unguessably remote distance, was an immense blue-gray sphere, a planetoid-sized mass afloat in the icy/warm sea. He reached out and touched the globule of oil. It popped, Hello, and was gone.

Ah! Contact . . . Who are you?

Another oily sphere boiled out of nowhere before him, writhing, then was still, waiting. He touched it. Pop.

Centrum.

Sealock glanced uneasily at the distant sphere and understood. Yes, there it was: the source of all data, the source of his present complex reality. Can we speak?