fearing that would diminish his sense of the reality it brought. He hated the feeling of remoteness that persistently engulfed his life.
As dusk fell and the streetlights came on, he found himself staring at a new addition to the group. She was tall, nearly as tall as he, and clean shaven all over. Though she bore no adornment, her tan skin had been lightly oiled, so that it shone, throwing off highlights in the dim ambient glow. Her eyes had the slight epicanthic folds of a Eurasian. She had high cheekbones, a smooth skull, and her ears were small and symmetrical. She had a long neck and was naturally thin, without being emaciated. Her stomach, beneath small, domed breasts, was flat and her hips were narrow, barelyflaring out from her waist. He could see the delicate tracery of her pelvic bones shifting slightly beneath her skin as she walked. Her legs were long and muscular. Her groin was like three soft fingers, parallel at the juncture of her thighs. She came to stand before him and he could see that her nipples were pale and pink. She smiled at him. Very slowly, she lifted one long leg until her heel was resting on his left shoulder. He stared down the length of it into the shadows of her vulva. The position held her open and he could see a little way inside. He could feel his penis slowly begin to rise.
Reaching into his pocket, he produced the little coin and held it out to her. She took it and said,
'Thank you.' Her voice was soft and throaty.
Taking down her leg, she turned away as he removed his scant clothing. She bent over before him and he stepped forward into the lethe of her body.
7red had another task. The message had been transmitted to him from Centrum, a globe of oil that swept up along the Wavy Matrix and leaped across to him while he was still engrossed in his conjunction with Cooloil. It burst upon his shell and soaked into the receptor tissues of his integument. With a pang of regret, their circulations closed off from each other and they separated, become two beings once again. There was still a commingling of inner substance, but the differences would accumulate now, as their natural selves were reasserted, a part of the pheromonic oil generating organs in their bodies. 7red touched Cooloil's tail-sheath once, a parting gesture, and flew away.
The content of the globule had been a complex one. Outside, it had said, and all the appropriate technicians were being called to action. The lander was being prepared for a voyage of its own. A Messenger came for him as he flew and whisked him away toward the south pole. 7red felt a small surge of growing excitement disturb the mating- tranquilized flow of his idea circulation. He had never been called upon to do this particular task before, but he was the right sort of being for the job. Centrum was a caring sort of overlord and shared theassignments around as fairly as it could. Now, his turn to go Outside had come at last!
The Messenger let him off at the Lander Bay nexus, where perhaps a hundred thousand Seedees of various types were milling about in a random-seeming horde, preparing for the job ahead. A semisentient exterior work vacuole approached him and halted.
The leathery-skinned golden sphere drew closer and then carefully engulfed him. He sank into a pouch of its outer membrane, which then detached itself with an interiorward thrust. The inner skin dissolved, freeing him to his task within the CH4-filled confines of his device. Here, within the limits of a space hardly larger than himself, 7red could practice the most difficult and rewarding task that a technician might face: the direct control of a construct with his own freed mind. The interior of the vacuole was lined with a sheath of receptor material. 7red took a figurative grasp on himself and, opening his valves, released the entire contents of his pheromonic circulation.
His mind pulsed outward and he became the vacuole. Its senses were his. Its capabilities were his. He became immensely tougher and stronger, able to withstand the rigors of total vacuum and near-absolute zero, able to resist the hard radiation of a nearby star that was doubtless just recently emerged from a wild T-Tauri youth.
He swept over to an 'airlock' and passed through its membranes to the interior of the Lander Bay. The huge compartment had already been evacuated and the outer door was ajar. 7red went to the edge and looked out with his new amplifications. Without the vacuole he would have been insensitive to the grandeur, dead, in fact, but now he could see the horrid wash of electromagnetic radiation. There was a terrible bright star only a few light-minutes away, a high K or low G, he thought, and Mother Ship hung in the skies above a dense silicate world. The place was disturbingly hot and glowed on its own in the far infrared. He understood it well. It was a death place. A whole system bornfrom the ashes of a recent supernova. This sort of a place meant the handling of dangerous hydroxyl- cloud materials, and Seedees would soon die, perhaps already had. He was glad he didn't have to do
The triangular, finned shape of the lander banged out of its hold and drifted a short distance out. Its LiH -fueled engines flared luridly and it began to shrink away, descending. It would skim into the thin, hot gases of this newborn planet and return, having discharged its cargo of microminiaturized Composites, surrogates of the Mother Ship and Centrum itself. It would return, and the Grand Design would be advanced another tiny notch.
7red's oil writhed in ecstasy.
The drain and fill of emotion-laden interiors came quickly now, a liquid kaleidoscope of scenes and impressions first from one life and then the other. Though feeling himself ever more the nameless Time Traveler, he was alternately burdened by flaring ego identities, swirling through the experiences of Sealock and 7red like a molecule of water in a red-raging sea. The concatenation of personalities struck him like a song sung in rounds, a horde of bells being rung through their changes. He saw Sealock in swift progression, the man growing quickly older as he expanded into his electronic world, coming to the fateful time when he had mastered all that was Comnet and joined the Design Board, intent on expanding the horizons in the wires beyond what it had been. The man grew quickly wiser as he fought in the ring, aiming arrowlike at that series of matches in Montevideo . . . the defeat by the Cuban, the silver medal, the meeting with Ariane Methol.
