Iris

Prynne's heart leaped, half fear and half elation. 'Is that possible?'

'Sure.' Sealock suddenly passed over the reins and the technician flew on, alone, become a stellar phoenix.

'Brendan!'Dim, in the background, that was Ariane's voice. It was a faint buzz-saw whine, a mosquito that he could ignore. 'What're you doing? He can't handle that!'

'The fuck he can't. He can do whatever I say he can. Watch.' Harmon Prynne flew on, his body, his nerves, his senses, grown into the subsystems of the ship. He knew nothing, needed to know nothing, with the 'net teaching him as each moment arrived, letting him forget the past. He soared, singing, before the world. A timeline of necessary proceduresappeared in the sky before him, but it was an alternative sky, not defacing the real sky, the ocean of stars through which he moved. Dimly, he could sense the presence of many such skies, differing presentations of the cosmos and information, to his expanded senses. He flew, imagining glory.

And somewhere, deep beneath it all, reason glimmered. Shipnet opened its senses and listened to the babble of human conversation, listened and learned. The machine mind didn't wish it had been consulted, for it had no sentience, only potential, and so had no wishes. It had, however, strong imperatives, preset urges that made it strive to fulfill its many goals. There was complexity here, and recursive logic that made up a capacity to create new goals out of synthesized data.

Deep within the ethereal circuitry of Shipnet little illegal modules stirred. Program fragments contrived in such a way as to escape the notice of the Contract Police assembled themselves bit by bit, as their functions were called upon by the crew of Deepstar. Finally the GAM-and-Redux monitor awoke, took stock of the situation, and spoke to Shipnet.

Much to its own surprise, Shipnet replied.

Satisfied, but not knowing why, Brendan said, 'He'll be all right. Just stay with him, Ariane. Don't let the little goof get lost in the machinery. Hey, Tem. Let's take a break.'

'Right.'

The two men broke rapport and reappeared in their respective brains. They stretched, looking around, grimacing and blinking hard. Beth and Vana were still seated near the window. The stars appeared motionless, but the vast form of Iris, preceded by a sliver of shadow-sliced ring, had begun to creep over the sill.

They unplugged and leaped up to the kitchen, a feat made just a little more difficult by their small weight. They each drew a cup of black coffee, Sealock's flavored with anise, and dropped back to the floor below, calling up a pair of chairs as they did so. Brendan deopaqued another wall segment, this one framing a view of distant Ocypete's tiny disk.

They sipped at the hot, bitter drinks for a while, staring out

into the void, looking at their new home. Finally Brendan said, 'You handle OdP pretty well.' Tem looked at him, expressionless. 'Is that so surprising? I have a higher influx potential than Ariane, you know.'

'Yeah, but I rode after her with a GAM-and-Redux subplot until she'd been down all the essential pathways. You can't have done that—we both know that Luna's access to Comnet is strictly limited . . . unless you lied about never having been to Earth.'

Tem smiled, showing a flash of teeth through the curly overfall of his untrimmed mustache. 'Nope Lewislab—and old Maggie herself—trained me pretty well. Monitoring experiments like the Mini-null-omega Research Torus is, for the most part, like controlling Deepstar. Our tools aren't all that backward and there were several of us on the Development Team who probably would have qualified for MCD . . . if we'd been allowed access.'

'Could be.' Sealock nodded. 'I don't know if you could've handled NYU at the same time, though. Free Cities can be pretty difficult.' He looked pensive. 'I understand there was a refugee from the Moon who took up residence in the Brosewere Barrens. One night they found him hanging from a street lamp, with a seppuku dagger rammed through his guts. Seemed kind of extreme to me.' He grinned at Krzakwa. 'Anyway ... I guess maybe we should've worked together a little more during this trip, huh?'

'I guess so.' There seemed neither room nor need for further comment.

'Did you have any trouble on your first key-in? OdP's a lot different from Tri-vesigesimal ...' Krzakwa laughed. 'I'll say! I almost discharged on my first downlink!' Interfacing with an unknown and complicated 'net element was an excellent way to die, come away with a drained cortex and burnt-out amygdala. 'But the idea of basing a relinguistic setup on a prime numbers generator was —how shall I put it? Inspired.'

The other man seemed pleased with this praise. 'OdP was the Comnet Design Team's first project after I joined. Quite abaptism.' He was silent for a moment, then said, 'You haven't had a chance to key-in on Torus-alpha, have you?'

Tem shook his head, gesturing ironically. 'How could I? I'd heard about it, of course. We drooled over the stuff you people were bringing out on Earth! How simple it would have made things for us! You should have heard the lame excuses the Lunar government kept pulling out of their fucking hats. . . . 'You can't enter a restricted experimental sector of Comnet without a license from the Contract Police.