You can't get a license without coming to Earth for capacitance testing. . . .' And as an indentured engineer at Lewis-lab, I was 'needed' on the Moon into the foreseeable future.' Bitterness gave an edge to his words. 'Assholes . . .' He spat, then sighed. 'Of course, contract-breakers don't get high-level licenses, even if they do avoid extradition and jail. Now I
'Sure. How's it work?'
'The datanet acquisition is through a powers-of-transfinite series array ...' Krzakwa looked puzzled. 'I don't see how something like that could be made to work.'
'Well, it doesn't.' Sealock crumpled his cup into a ball and grinned at the look on the other man's face.
'At least, not the way it's supposed to. No one could get any function at all above Aleph-null. It was hilarious when the news of our fine little piece of vaporware escaped. . . . Talk about humiliation! That's why I brought all that gear. I thought maybe I'd be able to get something working on my own, away from all the other assholes on the MCD.'
'OK. Give me a rundown on the basics. And remember, I'm a physicist, not one of your ilk.'
'At the level we'll be working, there's not a hell of a lot of difference.' Soon the two of them were immersed in a discussion that no one else aboard would have been able to follow. After a while they plugged into a gang-tap and went into partial rapport for an exchange of concepts. The ship flew on without them.
Shut up in his chamber, Demogorgon prepared for masturbation. It was a form of the Illimitor art, in fact, the very thing that had led him to this new form of expression. Though the full complexity of the Illimitor World, the world of Arhos, of Mereqxi, Larys, and the Kaimodrang Empire, took Tri-vesigesimal, this was simple enough to be handled by duodecimal subunits of the 'net. He could have entered via circlet, he supposed, but somehow preferred to use an induction lead. The images, the feelings, were crisper.
As he plugged in a wall-tap, Demogorgon was amused, remembering Brendan's inevitable pun about
'jacking off.' New meanings to old words . . .
He submerged.
In a soft, rumpled bed of silken sheets he was joined by two other people, abstracted from their normal functioning as denizens of Arhos. One was a slim, magnetic presence, a man, Chisuat Raabo, ebon-haired and ethereal, his mate in the Land of Kings. The other was a woman, Piruat Nahuaa , pale blond, thin and boyish- looking, the swell of her breasts almost nonexistent, her pubic hair so fine and transparent as to give her a preadolescent look. But for coloration, the two might have been taken for brother and sister. They were both very young.
In the Jeweled City on the Mountain, at the place where the skies converged, it was the Soldier's Way—to have a bisexual lover and, with him, a female counterpart, an heir-maker. . . . They lay tangled together in a joyous maze of limbs, running their hands over smooth, warm flesh, inhaling the tactile perfumes that this world made; and the man and woman paidspecial attention to the muscular body that was so much a part of Demogorgon's persona here. . . . When Raabo's huge penis rose, they attacked it together with an avid, ferocious hunger. Slowly, Demogorgon felt his soul begin to spread out, meshing with his lovers, enveloping them, and the usual thoughts were still there:
With Comnet, he need never be alone. What could the world have been like, not so long ago, before the advent of this alternative reality, before he had created it? How had he lived? Just before a sensory explosion took his mind away, he tried to imagine life without this ready availability of human contact; to imagine a world where he couldn't plug in and reach out for love.
He failed.
Deepstarfell on a long, complex curve around Iris and back up into space, shedding many thousands of metric tons of fuel and several hundred kilometers per second of relative velocity. The Element 196
had been stored in an energy-stabilized form resembling degenerate matter, compressed into a very small volume, but nothing could alter its mass, or the necessity of expending it. Newton always won out in the end, though centuries of science and engineering had taken some of the sting from his fiats. The ship threaded under Iris' ring, its heavy-ion drive vaporizing a path through the downward-spiraling ice particles that ever so slowly depleted the structure, and swept just a few hundred kilometers above a bellying azure sky. When they approached apirideon , not far from Ocypete itself, they kept the dense beam oriented to one side of their destination, avoiding damage to their future home. The plume of intense sub-c radiation stabbed toward interstellar space and was gone. A properly instrumented observer many parsecs away and generations removed would have noticed it, since these bursts of semicoherent energy emerging from the Solar System advertised the presence of Man as never before.
Deepstartook up a vastly elongated orbit around Iris that would evolve, via the judicious expenditure of Hyloxso, into a nearly circular ellipse of some hundred and eighty kilometers' radius about Ocypete. Ariane and Brendan disengaged from the control subprogram of Shipnet, though the latter still maintained a lesser link to keep an eye on their progress. The common room was completely destructured now, a giant padded cell, and they were all gathered to one side, where, punctuated by the hatches of personal compartments, a hundred and twenty degrees of wall had been made transparent. Beyond that wall the dim, gray sphere of Ocypete loomed, no longer an idea, no longer an astronomical body, but a place. The world that turned slowly below was a sea of low-walled craters, a
