Iris

Hu Li-jiang was seventeen. She sat alone in her dorm room at Ulaanbaatar's Reflexive Institute at night, conducting her studies. This place, remote in the relatively backward wastelands of Central Asia, was positively archaic, but she enjoyed the work, enjoyed learning nonetheless. Perhaps she would stay forever. The big observatory at Uliassutai was not the most modern in the world, and was ridiculous in comparison to the off-world-scopes that dominated modern science, but half the time they went unused, having cataloged the entire universe to the limits of man's desire to fund. For all she knew, she might discover something new, something not yet noticed by the pattern-recognizers in the few continuously operating projects.

The Comnet lines had only been run in here a few years ago, had still not gotten to her home in Tibet, but she had learned how to use them quickly and well. Her professors, in considerable difficulty themselves over the new mode of learning, looked upon her as a star pupil. If only the others would leave her alone. Their slimy attentions were unwelcome. They debased her as a person. She thought about her roommate, a tall blonde girl of Russian stock who had grown up in Tannu Tuva

. She was a beautiful young lady, Darya Anni , and the object of every male eye on the campus. In the late evenings Jana sometimes watched her undress, prepare herself for a date or for sleep, and it felt very strange. She admired the woman's large breasts, with their delicate pink nipples, and found herself staring at her bright starburst thatch of pubic hair with some strange, formless sense of regret. What am I becoming? she sometimes wondered. She wanted nothing to do with any of it, most of the time, but the sleek wilderness of the woman's body reached out to her nonetheless. She thought of Klaus, the Volga-German boy who lived two floors up. She had gotten to know him fairly well, and sometimes liked him. He was a good student in the newly named Department of Asterology , land of the star-studiers,second, perhaps, only to her. She felt good when he gave her work his seemingly awestruck compliments.

She sighed. He was known far and wide across the campus as something of a pervert. So far as anyone could tell, he was still a technical virgin, and he seemed to be more or less impotent. No one had even seen him masturbate, or ever seen the telltale tenting evidence of a nocturnal erection, but there were things he liked to do. . . . And he did them well! She had spent a few nights groaning beneath the tireless lash of his tongue, wishing that her desires would just go away. She envied him his apparent inability and wondered why he bothered to perform.

The door suddenly popped open, swinging inward as she looked up. A broad, heavy Mongol face peered in, eyes slitted beneath a particularly massive epicanthic fold. Bayan Joghu from next door. " Anni in?" he asked in Gwo-yu , the dorm's official language.

She shook her head. "Too bad," he said, and retreated. Before the door could swing shut another figure burst through it, a short, slim Japanese boy whose name she could not remember. His fly was down, his long penis dangling out, swaying ludicrously, one of his pockets turned inside out. "Hey, Hu!" he cried, breathing out the dense fumes of some smoky drug. "Look! It's a ..."

". . . one-eared elephant!" she snarled, reaching for the square glass paperweight that she knew she would throw at him, knocking him unconscious and bloodying his brow.

The action went uncompleted. Her hand swung past the object and clutched at his groin. She heard his squawk of surprise and delight as she seized the organ and stuffed it into her eager mouth. A ring of stunned faces appeared in the door, watching what she did with dazed astonishment, with total disbelief.

"Will you look at that!" came an awed whisper.

"The ice queen's blowin' him," said someone else.

They cheered as she swallowed and her popularity began to ride on the crest of a dramatic upswing. Far in the future, Jana tried to still her rampant horror. I knocked him out, she sighed to herself. I fractured his skulland almost got kicked out of school! I did! I remember it! Is that merely what I should have done, or is it what someone else, in my place, would have done? Who am I becoming? And still it went on....

A melange of memory ... a mosaic of moments. All the times she had known, the cascading changes, flooded through the minutes, the hours, that had known no meaning. Only when it reached a kind of watershed did it pause and enact a painful reliving. Hu Li-jiang was twenty. She had recently been granted an assistantship at the Reflexive Institute and now she had power over some of the students. She had told the girl to meet her on the quad after sunset, it being one of the few good nights of high summer on the Gobi Plateau. She savored the meeting with quick anticipation and felt the flesh loosening between her thighs. Obey Cadre held nothing to the things she could do now. She waited patiently, smiling to herself. The girl wanted a perfect grade, and she was willing to pay for it in an excellent coin. . . . The man appeared. He was tall and thin, a dark-haired Caucasian of Armenian stock, something of a rarity in these parts. He was hawk-handsome and his slickly oiled hair shone in the waning light. She found her gaze riveted upon him by an unaccountable, unfamiliar magnetism. He held out his hand to her and she went to him, molding her body against his alien sleekness. He ran his hand between her legs and she thrilled to his touch.

They strolled away together, arm in arm, leaving the student girl to stare after them, perplexed. She had come prepared to debase herself and felt cheated that this gigolo had stolen away the chance. Li-jiang gave her the grade nonetheless.

Jana cried out in the darkness. I made her have sex with me! I remember it! I made her pay for what I could give out! Didn't I? She suddenly realized she could no longer remember it as well as she'd thought. Why is it all fading away? How can this be happening to me? She moaned. . . . And that same year Li-jiang remembered receiving the com message, watching as the self-decoding cipher she haddesigned did its work. The Free University at Vancouver was proud to offer such a fine young savant its riches. She whooped with joy, danced with unaccustomed merriment. They were offering her a full professorship, with unlimited access to remote observations, the chance to direct her own research program!

I'll need a new name, she mused, something to separate me from the old life I'm leaving behind. No more am I a creature of the Institute. Who shall I be? I want to blend in. Jiang . . . Jana! That's it! Dr. Jana Li Hu, Chinese-Canadian asterologist . . .

No, a faint voice whispered. You have a name. Your real name is a good enough label . . . Hua

-hung.

She changed her mind.

No! I am Jana! I've been Jana for half of my life! She sobbed in her eternal darkness and, for just a moment, swore that she could feel the slow crawl of tears worming their way across the ruined landscape of her frozen face. What was it?

Impossible.

Li-jiang was a hundred years old. She lay on a silken divan surrounded by a diffuse gauze of sea-green mosquito netting somewhere in the tropics. She was immortal and the endless life served her well. She was gifted by eternal youth and had become completely given over to the pleasures of the flesh that had tried to claim her since childhood.

The advances of surgery had changed her, augmenting her beauty until it was an unearthly thing. Between her legs there was a great iridescent flower of flesh. She had become a perfect androgyne , able to take enjoyment wherever she would. The flower would open to accept men or compress for the swift penetration of compliant women. She used them by the dozen, reeling her ancient way through a thousand and more orgasms in a single day.

They fed her, bathed her, and she never had to stir from the airy, gently swaying bed that was her home. The great people, the famous ones, came to enjoy her uniqueness from all over the inhabited universe. In the distances a great hard squid lurked, waiting its turn. She sought the discharge of its anchorelleswith breathless anticipation. She used her experiences at a prodigious rate, secure in the knowledge that the universe was truly infinite, that all the newnesses could never be exhausted. In the hot confines of her darkness Jana cried, pleading for death to end the torture, for the world to turn her loose and let her fall end over end down into the vast night of nonbeing.

She awoke.

Through the thin skin of her closed eyelids the world was a sea of light. She felt her lips curve in an unfamiliar smile. She sighed, and the resonances of her breath sounded strange. Her chest felt light, somehow tighter, as if the negligible weight of her small breasts was gone, amputated. Maybe they have been. The extremities would have taken the most damage, she thought.

She stirred, and felt that her limbs were still there, all her fingers and toes accounted for, still willing to wiggle. They felt strange and angular, longer and thinner than they had been. Prostheses? Am I back on Earth? No. She felt the lightness of Ocypete's hold.

Her hips felt wrong. Narrow. The legs seemed connected at the wrong angle, far too acute. She seemed bony. She sighed again, listening to the hoarse rasp. Might as well face it now, she thought. I wonder what this lump between my legs could be? Probably a catheter. I must be pretty sick. . . . She opened her eyes and Brendan Sealock's dead face swam into view, smiling at her. Oh! She lurched upward, off balance, and clutched him to her nonexistent bosom in a fierce hug. Strong emotion, unfamiliar emotion, washed over her. To see him once again! She felt a powerful desire to pull him down on her, to feel the swift penetration of his burgeoning manhood, to submit herself to his will. She buried her face in his chest and said, "I knew you'd come in time, beloved!" in a voice far too deep.

Jana's screams seemed to echo for hours in the cold spaces of the CM. Her horror on awakening to find herself bothdead and changed was uncontrollable, a raving madness of whirling motion that brought them down on her in moments. Her wild, glaring rage out of Demogorgon's lost eyes took them away from her, transformed her to a thing, and seemed to make them all impersonal and remote. It transferred them all into the past for a brief time.

Lightly sedated, she went to sleep for a time, dreamless, and awoke, as always, alone within herself. She lay there in her bed, hunkered down in the warm, drowsing comfort that fills in the chasms of a slow awakening. I had the strangest dream, she whispered to herself, a slight smile marking the lines of her face. How bizarre I can be at times, how artistic! One of her hands drifted across the expanse of soft sheets warmed by body heat and touched a soft flank, her own. She rubbed her fingers across the gentle flesh and her smile broadened. Now, she thought. . . . The hand lifted upward of its own accord and descended on her abdomen. It drifted across a delicate expanse, headed for her groin, intent on the soft pleasures of sleepy masturbation. The fingers glided through a dense tangle of crisp, curling hair, feeling for the sensitive skin of swelling labia, for the moistness of engorging tissues and . . . Her eyes snapped open to stare hard at the ceiling rimmed with stark whiteness, and her breathing quickened, expressing itself in short gasps of renewed terror. No dream. She felt herself again and shuddered. The unexpected organ was there, a stiff temple of flesh growing like some alien symbiote from her body, pulsating with a ready eagerness that defied logic. Her fingers jerked away, her hand clawed in upon itself, then slowly, inexorably, went back to its exploration. Long, thick, knob-ended, a heartbeat exposed to public view. Ridged on the upper surface, pulpy and softer below, vanishing into folded flesh as she progressed. It hardened still more under her touch, as men always did, souls out of control, and she felt a strong sense of pleasure that made her feel sick. Her breath rasped! in her throat and grew deeper.

The madness wanted to close in again, but something, some indefinable factor from deep within, was holding it at bay. The fingers of her right hand continued in their course,following the well-marked route of an old, familiar trail. She stroked slowly, gently, feeling the little ridge that marked the beginning of the bulbous end, touched the little hole gently, and backed away from an unexpected tenderness. She squeezed hard and moved more quickly, felt the skin of her face tighten, then grow slack. The forces from within made her gasp against her will, uncontrollable. How odd, how odd... Muscles deep within her body suddenly clenched, nausea closing in. Oh, she gasped, wondering if she'd somehow injured herself. The thing tightened and tightened ... it pulsed and she felt a strong surge of warmth rush away from the center of her body, reaching out to her extremities in a fraction of a second. Another pulse followed on the heels of the first and she felt a sensation a little like urination. The warmth increased, making her flush. The pulses went in rapid waves, tearing her mind apart, and she felt puddles of hot wetness forming on her stomach.

Her mind came back with a sickening rush, bringing with it a feeling of tiredness, of collapse. She felt like a suddenly punctured balloon. It was over, almost as if it had never happened. She felt strange, horrid. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, her thoughts fragmented and unreal. Who am I, where am I, and why? It was all too terrible for rational contemplation. Do I deserve to think?

She sat up and looked around. Oh, God . . . for some reason they had put her in Demogorgon's room. His effects surrounded her on every side. She looked at all his things and felt warm, comfortable. Somehow, they made her feel calm. She got up and began to walk around aimlessly, and after a while her wet stomach began to feel cold.

She stood in front of his full-length antique mirror and looked at herself, at the alien reflection in the mirror.

At him . . .

She stared at the slim, dark man in front of her, his face mimicking her most usual expression, his brow taking on the lines that had always creased hers. Her thought furrows were reborn. How did this happen? She thought she knew. Theexplanations had been made. She was intelligent and could piece the story together on her own. She shook her head and Demogorgon's head made the same moves in return, an instant response. She touched the mirror and he reached out to her. . . . She burst into tears and watched him cry unashamedly before her gaze.

What is my name? she wondered. Li-jiang. No Jana. No Achmet Aziz el-Tabari. No Demogorgon. Those people are all dead. She stared at the curdled semen still sticking like cold glue to her skin, shining at her eyes, mocking her. Something far within felt like laughing.

Slowly, she turned and walked out the door of her chamber, still naked, to walk the halls of the CM, seeking an unneeded, unheralded absolution. And to give it forth in lieu of honor. . . .

Reluctantly, with a numb dread that actually felt like friction against his shoulders and neck holding him back, John moved to the chair that he used for composing and sat. He rolled back the headrest and lay his head back, looking blankly at the ceiling. Every part of him recoiled from the idea that he could actually go back to music after all that had happened—deep inside he felt the total inadequacy of the medium—and, further, he felt somehow that using the pain that filled him for the task would somehow be trivializing it, and himself in the process.

A quick, almost abstract vision appeared in his head, accompanied by a riveting, stirring sensation of deja vu. It was blue above, green below, with an almost sourceless yellow light everywhere in between. He was tumbling, moving across the soft, perfect lawn, enchanted with the new concepts of himself and the world and the joyous intermingling of the two. It was his earliest memory. He couldn't have said when, or where it was, or who had been there, for he seemed to be alone, out of time. And then the second memory, in a room at night, the impossibly bright face of the three-quarter moon staring in at him, scaring him beyond his little ability to reason, hanging there, a specter or icon so far removed from what heunderstood as to reduce the world and himself to symbols in the dark misunderstanding.

The memories passed. He thought he understood something of what it all meant. Calling up his overlays, he began with a first note.

Vana, Harmon, and Ariane sat in the latter's room, talking far into an ersatz night of their own making. Their flesh needed a comforting touch, a renewal of contact, but still they held off, filled with questions without answers and a formless dread that had no name.

Prynne sprawled bonelessly on the bed, his arms and legs lying in the positions to which they had fallen, listening, without speech, without ideas. The time within Centrum had made him whole, but it had also left him empty. He knew himself for what he was now, and knew that he would never go beyond those limits. It was enough. It had to be.

Berenguer sat cross-legged at his feet, looking at the other woman. "What does it all mean, Ariane?" She laughed at the age-old question, a soft sound, giving them some sense of the destruction that had been wrought upon her. "Mean? It means nothing, Vana. The changes that have been made in us are all illusory. We're still the same, we just see each other more clearly now. Brendan's still what he always was ... I just never knew it before." She laughed again, a harsher, bitterer sound. "I called him a god once! I was in love with what I thought was the depth of his soul. It's not there and never was. I loved what I thought I saw, and that was just a construct, a blank space filled with images from the depths of my own longing. . . . I'm glad it's over. Seeing the truth has made me freer than I ever dreamed possible." The others nodded wisely at that, imagining that they understood. Finally Prynne sighed and said, "I wish Demo was still here. I'd like to go into the Illimitor World once again . . ." Ariane smiled, then reached out and touched them both softly. "We don't need it anymore," she said,

"for we have each other." She stretched slowly before them, watching theradiance of her beauty grow in their eyes. "And Demogorgon will always live on in our hearts." Because she said it, for the moment it was so.

Axie and Tem were having dinner together, enjoying one of his lesser creations. They tasted it and praised the food, smiling often at each other. Somehow they were thrown together, the man made whole by his experiences, the woman restored to what she perceived as her original "self." It made them similar, after a fashion, and they converged. Some repressions are, in the end, beneficial.

"Do you suppose she'll ever be the same?"

The Selenite shrugged. "You probably know as much about it as I do, Ax. We won't know how much we rescued until she calms down a little."

The woman nodded meditatively, thinking back about what she knew, drawing on the resources of a more complicated past. "Yes. And until we know how much of Demo's true self resided in the cells of his brain. It's a pity things had to turn out this way. We should never have come out here like this."

"I know what you mean. I'm sorry I had to leave the Moon, but there wasn't any other way. While I stayed there I could never be free. I could never find out about who I was."

"So it all had to take place then, for us all to grow. If I'd stayed on Earth, my life would've killed me. I took the drugs, ate all the experiences I could grasp, and ran and ran. I had to flee from a heritage that was strangling me, and at last it brought me here." She rested her chin on small, delicate hands and smiled across at his bearded bulk, her eyes seeming to glisten in the subdued light of the room they were in.

"We've become adults, Tem, after a too long adolescence. I wonder: is it too late?" He shook his head, his smile slowly fading as he gazed into the depths of her vision. "Never. Only I have to ask myself— what happened to us in there? Was this feeling of ... happiness . . . somehow imposed from without?"

"Does it really matter? Or, to put it another way, is therereally a difference? From the moment we were born everything has been, as you say, imposed from without."

"If it were a hundred years ago, I'd ask you to marry me, Aksinia." Her cheeks dimpled at the compliment. "If it were a hundred years ago, I'd accept, Temujin Krzakwa."

They laughed, together, and moved on.

Jana stood before a clear, cold window, looking at the crystal pulp that remained from her body, seeing the death that she'd bought for herself. It was an unreal sight, steaks frozen, thawed, and frozen again. Her hair had turned to a stiffened spikiness, limned with frost and ice crystals. The beloved physical processes which shaped the world beneath her feet were responsible for this transformation. Ice queen —how appropriate that she had come to study and love the geology of the outer Solar System. But it wasn't that simple, not by a long shot. And, indisputably, the woman that she had been was dead. Did I feel it? she wondered. Did it hurt? It was more than just that, of course. Am I still in there? You can record a song over again, then burn the original tape, and the song still lives . . . but is it still the same song? Is a recording ever real? Does a song vanish forever when the singer's breath runs out, when the last echoes die down? What's left of me? She sighed. Probably nothing. I'm Demogorgon, with a rebuilt personality. . . .

Then something in her rebelled, a heat rising out of nowhere, a flame rising to devour her doubts. It cannot be! But she deflated again. No. Jana is gone. Demo is gone. Just little Li-jiang remains to carry on in their stead, making a little pretense of life.

Li-jiang strode from Jana's mausoleum, not wondering what had become of the one whose body she now owned. Process instructions cascaded down the sequences of a mind in turmoil, unwinding, and the self-image, rising out of the depths, recognized itself as male, if nothing else. The various impulses coalesced, melting together to form a coherentwhole, because the alternative was a permanent and incurable madness.

Demogorgon and Jana had survived the exacting demands of their own lives, separate. Now, together, Li-jiang would survive because he had to.

Purpose came, and drove him on into the darkness.

Brendan Sealock sat at his desk going over the hard copy of Bright Illimit that he'd made before leaving Earth. It was a heavy, cumbersome volume printed on expensive paper only tens of molecules thick, with more than twenty thousand pages, and would probably have been impossible to get for someone not in his position on the Design Board. These things were archaic, but they had their uses. You could hold an entire entity in your hands, access it by essential feature and taxon , scan it without an explicit overlay.

He was going through it now, marking off the places where conjoiner programs would have to be inserted. If he assumed that everything was actually intact, then all that was necessary was to sew the damned thing back together.... He came to the section that handled the GAM-and-Redux functions and smiled, feeling strange. He'd put himself into that, in a way, but the program lacked the externals that made other people invent their personae for him. Just, be smart and helpful. He could see how it had begun to manifest higher functioning once Torus-alpha had been booted. Now, he thought, once I get this thing up and running again, it'll know where to start and what to look for. The pieces of the rest should still be there for it to latch onto. . . . And, what the hell, I can preserve the resonance within Centrum as a reward . . . The door crackled open.

Brendan looked up, almost absent-mindedly, and winced. The form of Demogorgon was standing within the opening, staring at him rather somberly. He sat back and took a deep breath, then said, "Come in, Jana."

The man came in and walked slowly across the room, feet gliding bare centimeters from the floor.

"Please don't call me that anymore," he said.

Brendan nodded. "OK. I, uh . . . I'd rather not call you Demogorgon, though." That made the man smile. "That's no more correct than Jana was, is it? I'd like to be known as Li-jiang, from now on."

Sealock's lips twisted in a parody of a grin. "That doesn't really fit your appearance too well either."

"No." Li-jiang laughed in a light, pleasant baritone. He closed the remaining distance to Brendan and sat down at his side. The other man seemed to squirm away from him slightly, as if avoiding his touch. Li-jiang slid his arm around his shoulders and said, "I need to talk to you, Bren ." Sealock tried to force his tightening muscles to relax, but they kept getting away from him, one winding up as another loosened. He gave up and sat there, stiff, looking steadfastly at the book. "What do you want?"

Li-jiang looked up at him, at the scarred irregularities of his face. What do I tell him and how do I begin? he wondered. "I thought I'd come in here and tell you that I loved you," he said, "but I can see that's not it. . . ."

Brendan's face turned to look at him, a bland mask. "That's probably a good idea. Jana was in love with John. Demogorgon . . ." He turned away again.

"That's not so. Jana loved no one. She was trying to fool you all, and accidentally got killed in the process. This is a new person beside you."

Brendan nodded slowly once again. "If you want to become, uh, Li-jiang, well, think about it in any way that makes sense to you," he said. The man put his other arm around him, embracing the thick barrel of his chest. Brendan ruffled a hand through the sleek black hair, nuzzling him softly. "We can't do this, you know."

"Why not? Jana was no heterosexual, but she could be physically moved by some men, and Demo . .

." Li-jiang thought about the dreams that had accompanied his resurrection and felt a touch of the madness return: if only I had my old body back, I'd know how to use it now!

"It's not that." He paused, holding the man tight up against him. "It's no use. Doing this would hurt me too much, now that it's too late."

"I'm sorry...."

"So am I. You deserve better than this. We all do." He began leafing through the book again with his free hand.

Li-jiang relaxed and slowly released his hold on him. "What are you doing?" It seemed like a good time to talk of other things: Jana and Demogorgon had both understood pain.

"I'm working on a solution to Demo's little problem."

"Is that possible? I thought he was all tangled up in the ruins of Centrum."

"He is. So was I, and here I am."

Li-jiang felt a little stab of terror, night and death threatening to return. "But . . . he's got no body to return to! I mean ..." Will they put me back?

Brendan laughed softly. "Don't worry, we won't erase your soul. I've got something a little better in store for him than what we came up with for you." He contemplated the symbols he was marking among the pages, then said, "Look, why don't you go find some of the others to talk to, learn to find your way among people again? I think you have unfinished business with John." Li-jiang nodded. "I do." He rose, stood gazing at Brendan for another little while, then turned and left without another word or a backward glance.

Brendan sighed and continued working. After a while he began to whistle a Parisian street song that Demogorgon had taught him long ago. Someday I'll just be a sentimental old fool, he thought. The program swiftly took shape.

Hours later, Tem and Brendan sat before their equipment boards again, getting ready to play out a final act of their prolonged saga. The Selenite thought he understood what they were going to try but felt a need to talk it over nonetheless. Sealock's schemes seemed to grow ever more complex and so incomprehensible.

"Once again: do you really think this is going to work? I thought Centrum's problems, going off course and all,stemmed from a gradual breakdown of its equipment with the passage of aeons. How can Demo live on in there?"

"All that's true only in a limited sense. What broke down on it was the evolution and development of the Seedees. It lived off them, relied on them for correcting the deficiencies of its self-wired circuits. When they fell, it did too. Most of what was in the Mother Ship was life support for the crew, if we can call it that. Most of the ship's actual machinery along the axial core, the propulsion units and so on, are probably in pretty good shape. Once we send down some good programs, things can probably be made to work again."

Tem looked dubious. "If you say so."

"I do. The changes I've made in Bright Illimit should be enough to get the ball rolling along, then Demo can take over and organize things to his own satisfaction. He'll know what to do. Shall we get started?"

"Whenever you're ready . . ."

They plugged in, went under, and down, riding the black winds of eternity like velvet eagles on a dark, fluid tide,

The instructions that they went in on were simple, the symbolism that they led to was not. The process counter fed in through the quantum conversion scanner and began tabbing across the bare tag ends of data that it was able to touch, inspecting, identifying, looking for the one thread that would allow it to begin untying the snarled knot that it faced. The hunting went on and on until all the candidates were identified. Any remaining consciousness in Centrum or its subroutines would have helped, but there was nothing left. The place was grave-silent. The machine paused, watching its timer count away, considering its options, then it fell down all the trails at once, following the delicate spoor down an endless series of branching trails, coming ever closer to some kind of center, like a nut caught in a swift whirlpool. The great drain approached.

Far below, the dark sea of Iris waited. It was, as it had been, a flat, black, dead surface, quiet, tideless, engulfing a moonless, starless sky. The data were puddled into a formless mass. Though there was nothing present to look upward, noliving thing to see, still the scenery was there. Ghost clouds formed above, faint luminescences that swirled and moved, presaging some unknown event to come. The clouds took on form, bringing order to the void, little silvery masses in which some kind of grainy structure could be seen. Streamers of vague light reached out from each cloud, wafting across the sky in webworks of ever increasing complexity until the skies were linked together. On the surface of the sea, patterns of restive wavelets began to form. Energy accumulated as the Searcher came in on its guidepath

.

A spot of dim, golden light appeared in the heavens and waxed, watching its own reflection in the mirror surface of the sea. Agitation on the water disturbed it, throwing off majestic scintillae that conspired to drown out the heavens. The golden spot continued to brighten, growing ever larger behind the silver clouds, discoloring them, peeling them back layer after layer, reversing the gauzework process that had enveloped this world so long ago. The aeons reversed themselves, and the tension became a palpable thing.

The sky broke open. The heavens around the golden spot, now a molten pool of brassy, burnished metal, were riven by a diamond flash of light, soundless, hazy rays flashing briefly away in all directions. A beam reached down, slowly, like cold fire streaming toward the surface of the dark sea. It stretched out, with agonizing slowness approaching the ebony waters, now thrashing about beneath the lash of an infinite energy. It touched.

The sea contracted suddenly, drawing the darkness inward from all directions, pulling the cosmic-event horizon in upon itself to form a dimensionless point, filling its surround with a heavy wash of gray static, a flannel screen upon which all images could then be drawn. The beam vanished, leaving the black spot alone in all of creation.

It waited, gathering its strength, and considered what it might do. The internal timers found themselves and began to tick away of their own accord. Given a structure, the program counters began to process their work, sort through the data in their channels, seeing what might be done to resume their long-forgotten tasks. GAM-and-Redux awoke and began looking for a host to parasite itself upon, and succor.

The black spot contracted itself to that unimaginable density beyond which it could not go, and then it exploded. The gray world fragmented, glassy shards roaring away to the far reaches of space, colliding with a faint, melodious tinkling, smashing into ever smaller pieces, filling the universe with light and life. Riding the bow shock of a fleeting electromagnetic wave, all the entities that had ever been came alive, awakening, and fled outward in a great host to populate a multitude of worlds. He awoke, dark eyes opening on the dim, swirling canvas of an interior existence, and in a soft, wondering voice whispered, I still live. . . .

Achmet Aziz el-Tabari.

I can hear you, Brendan. Thank you for calling me. I miss you.

I know. I too.

Can you still not say it?

No. I'm sorry. Believe me.

I do.

Do you understand what has happened?

I think so. What am I going to do?

Whatever you want. Fly. Live. Be happy.

You almost said it, didn't you?

Yes. Almost. Are you ready?

Yes. . Then: hold out your hands to me.

What is happening? I'm frightened.

Don't be, little one. I am passing over control to you. The world is yours, to do with as you please. You are to be the God at last.

At last?

To the end. Good-bye, Demogorgon. Take care of yourself.

Good-bye, Brendan. I love you.

The scene evolved out of nowhere, filling itself with the necessary denizens of life. In the highest spire of the Jeweled City on the Mountain an instrumentation chamber sprang full-blown into existence, already filled with the principal actors of the play it was about to perform. Demogorgon en Arhos , King, Lord of all he surveyed, Irrefutable Commander of the Universe, sat in a chair before his subjects, surveying them with satisfaction.

People sat before their instrument boards, reading information from archaic screens, all the people of Arhos and the world that surrounded it. Chisuat Raabo read the data for him, the beauty of Piruat Nahuaa by his side. Floating off to one side of the great chamber, as if supported by some viscous, invisible fluid, were Cooloil and her eternal companion, Seven Red Anchorelles. They might have been as they always had been, but they were changed. On the conic frustum of each hard-tentacled body lay a pair of slanted, glowing red eyes, that they might see at last by the light of the outer world. They waited together, overjoyed to live again, to be together, and to have each other for all time. The adventure for them was begun again.

In one dim corner of the room, lurking before the console of a mighty computer, squatted a great, lizardlike biped called Over Three Hills, one truly dead, reborn from the contents of a mere recollection. Demogorgon let his throne spin slowly about. Standing behind his shoulder, hands clasped behind his back, feet planted slightly apart, Brendan Sealock, GAM-and-Redux, gazed calmly out across the scene, proud of the role he had played in making it come true.

Demogorgon looked around, smiling at his handiwork. It was done. "This is it," he called out. "Begin Systems Survey."

The two Seedees—the People, they called themselves now —swung into action. They swept to their work station, jetting through the very air, and plugged into an Action Panel, anchorelles foremost. Comnet-like, information flowed into their bodies, whirling meaningfully through their oil. Pheromones arced outward, forming audible words for the rest. "The repair work is complete," they said in unison. "All is in readiness."

The King nodded. It was good. Should I let it take them by surprise? What a surprise that would be!

The expression on Brendan's face would be worth the cost of his immortal soul, for such it now was. No, that would be petty of me. The effect of a warning might save their lives, at no cost to the drama of the thing.

He turned to face the GAM replica. "Contact the humans on Ocypete ," he said. "Tell them that starship Iris is ready to move. Warn them."

"At once," said the GAM. It tilted its head back to stare into the sky. Pearlescent oceans sprang forth, penetrating the crystal dome that topped the spire, and burst outward to the very ends of creation. Klaxons hooted and the footfalls of hurried men thudded on through endless corridors. Technicians sweated over their minute task. Computers thought and the various enslaved functions that survived from the construct of Centrum worked at keeping up their end of the charade. Energy sources were concentrated and great ducts opened in the hull of Mother Ship, drinking in the lower atmosphere of the enfolding planet that had trapped them all in its womb for so long.

Imagination played its part, circuits working on overdrive, and the reality that it was derived from hurried to catch up with the commands that drove it. Deep in its matrices of data, the reborn mind of a child spun forth the web of its dreams, and the dream stuff caught fire and burned with a terrifying flame.

Beth sat in the common room, brooding before a deopaqued wall, staring out across the flat vistas of Ocypete and the vast expanses of the ice ocellus they had so long ago named Mare Nostrum. Who called it that? Demogorgon? She tried to call up a memory of that first thrilling orbit about their new world but failed. I can't remember. She thought about the little Arab, now, she supposed, dead within the electrochemical depths of Iris and Centrum. She looked up at the planet, still hanging in the sky. It was unchanged, still blue and semiclear, its rings undisturbed. A strange thing, that. She knew that Brendan and Tem were up to something but didn't know what. They never explain anything to me. Reasonable, I guess. I really wouldn't understand anyway. The man was dead and his body lived on, powered by fragments of Jana. How much of him is still alive in that body? Axie talked a little about it. Most of him is in there. Only the "I" part thinks of itself as Jana.

The events of the recent past warred powerfully against five hundred years of humanism. She knew that each human being was a unique, powerfully ensouled entity, an unpredictable absolute. Every moment of her consciousness proved it as surely as if it were etched in stone. There is a me that goes beyond my leaden flesh, and, even though I will die one day and it will stop, that doesn't mean anything. Why shouldn't it be so? My love of existence and other people, all the things that go into making me an individual? She had an image of herself as a machine, all the things that she truly was recorded on an old-fashioned reel of tape, able to be transferred at will to another machine, another muddy hulk. The idea was repellent. Things that lack meaning aren't things.

She passed on to gentler yet still more troublesome ideas. She had become united with the others during the battle in Bright Illimit. They had fought together and, she knew, facing the adversity and triumphing over it had made them close. What would the future bring to them? Undoubtedly they would return to Earth, and she had no doubt the feeling could be broadened and she would be strengthened by the knowledge that intimacy could be achieved through understanding. She puzzled over the strangest void, however— Brendan, Jana, and John were somehow totally excluded from her view of a common, joyous humanity. In fact her reaction to Sealock's resurrection was one of near revulsion. She felt infinite pity for poor Demogorgon, yet it did not extend to his repopulated body. And of course her feelings toward John were vasty complicated by all that had happened between them. She thought of John and wondered, Did I do the right thing? I know we can never be right for each other. Our ideas about love and life are just too different. We can never come together, be one, like Seven Red Anchorelles and his Cooloil. How delicious to think of it being that way. . . . An image of John floated up before her face, still handsome and dark, brooding deep within his intelligence. Strange to think of him as such a cold, remote being at times, and so filled with his own uncertainties. It wasn't just nonsense that the fullness of him ate away at the very soul of her existence during DR. He existed in such a way that she couldn't exist as well. His ideas always ran away with him. Instead of feeling his emotions he felt about them. I cannot imagine, still cannot comprehend, what it must be like to truly be such a person. But it was more than that for him. Could it be for her as well? The very existence of another person lacked the all-important criterion of meaning. She shuddered. What an awful idea! That can't be right.

There was a noise and she looked up, jumping slightly, fearful that it would be John, come to try for her yet again. What would I say?

The slim form of Demogorgon stood there naked, in his sleek nonmuscularity somehow the perfect image of a human being. There was nothing about him that bespoke his history and his current secrets.

"Hello, Beth," he said. "Can I come in?"

She nodded. "Hello, Dem ... uh ... Jana? Yes." She felt the hated confusion welling up. How do I deal with this?

The man smiled, walking toward her, and she found herself almost mesmerized by his slow stride. "It's hard, isn't it?" he said. "Call me Li-jiang. That's the name my parents and playmates had for me when I was a little . . . girl. After the break." He laughed softly.

"OK." She felt slightly breathless. She had been thinking very depressed thoughts, and she needed a diversion. "Li-jiang. Is that your real name?"

"No. My birth certificate read Hu Hua -hung. Changing names has always been a common pastime in the Sinified Orient . . . Mao Ze -dong. Ho Chi Minh . Chiang Kai-shek.

All made up, just like the names I used. It'd be pretty coincidental to have a Chinese revolutionary leader really be named Hair Enrich-East, don't you think?" Li-jiang was grinning. "Did you know that caesaries means 'a head of hair' in Latin? Very inscrutable."

"Very. I can imagine it, though. It's no more fantastic than having a French national hero being named Charles de Gaulle. Did Le Gros Legume make up his cognomen too?" Beth wondered at the course of their conversation. He's putting me at my ease, she thought. He? She? Ohhh . . . Li-jiang was sitting at her side, still smiling, eyes shining with an eerie light, something of a reflection from Iris. He was running his fingers gently across her thigh, using just the right pressure, just the right feather touch, and Beth was horrified to notice that he had the beginnings of an erection. Demo? No, Jana. This can't be happening!

She clutched at his fingers, stopping their gentle, persuasive motion. "Demo, ah . . . Li-jiang. Please. What . . ."It was hopeless. The situation was making her totally inarticulate, gagging her from within. From nowhere, images from the depths of Centrum overwhelmed her. She saw all the times that this body had knelt before Sealock, begging for some kind of human response. She saw all the times that it had been taken advantage of, used and then sent away to suffer in silence. She felt like crying for him. The memories led to other images, the old, horrible scenes from Sealock's life, the whirling miasma of impersonal sexual contacts, the life-views that took such a narrow focus, zooming in on close-ups of women's bodies, yawning moist chasms of red flesh, ready receptacles for an insensate lust. She felt sick, and said, "Please. I can't."

Li-jiang'sface, still smiling slightly, flattened out, then twisted with an evident dismay. "Beth. I ..." He turned away for a moment, then returned to stare earnestly at her, eyes projecting some overwhelming emotion. "God, Beth. Please don't turn me away. Not now."

She felt a cold remorse, some being from deep within showing her stop frames from that last falling descent through the Illimitor World, and all the things they'd learnedtogether. She thought of Demogorgon, then of Jana, and reached out to embrace Li-jiang, shaking.

John stood in the open doorway, undetected, invisible, watching the animals mate. Think about it, he told himself, consider it carefully and let the old emotions be pushed far, far down, where they ought to be. It might be moisture that was welling up in his eyes, but nothing spilled over, and everything could be denied. Watch her recede.

Taken as an absolute, what they were doing looked foolish. From the outside, there was none of the transcendent glory, no physiological overrides to stop the mind. He watched their rubbings and listened to them gasp, saw them burst into an athletic sweat, saw their faces become unintelligent, begin to gape and stare. It should have brought on a natural revulsion, but he felt that curious emptiness begin to fill him up once again. Talk to me, a voice whispered in his brain, but there was nothing to reply with. Self-conversation facilities can fall mute.

He pressed his cheek to the cool plastic liner of the doorway and watched, never quite aware of the things that were boiling below the event-horizon of his consciousness. Beth and Li-jiang moved against each other, grappling like gentle wrestlers, stroking, breathing, whispering to each other in what looked like some kind of planned cadence. Beth wrapped her legs around the man's slim thigh and ground herself against his flesh, cooing absurdly.

John felt a silent rage well up swiftly and then recede, consciously pushed back down into his depths by a desperate, rational hand. I could hate them, he realized, astounded. I feel almost . . . betrayed. Why is that? The hatred came back up, moving fast to avoid his clutches, and he was riven by its dense, boltlike quality. It seemed that Beth was hurting him purposely, in the most effective way, by now doing what he had wanted of her. He briefly imagined himself strangling the man's dark, slender throat. Deja vu plucked at him.

Where have I experienced this before? He cycled back into his newfound memories, taken away from the tableau of man and woman, not quite hearing the sweet, awful words that Beth was whispering now. I was in that room, talking to Ariane, back at the beginning, she seemed so nice and straightforward, I ... No. This isn't. I'm not remembering something from myself. Who? It came. He was Brendan, pressed flat to an outer wall of the chamber that contained them, hating and imagining for all that he was worth. Images of Ariane and John coupling in the room, invisible eyes focused on sliding, horrid genitalia, words of love and devotion whispered in the darkness, close to the traitorous wells of inhuman, uncaring ears.

He looked out of his own eyes again, watching Beth and Li-jiang make love with an uncanny joy and happiness written large enough to perceive on their bodies. I would never have minded like this before, he thought wonderingly, so why is it this difficult now? I was always in favor of a free access, everyone with everyone, within the limits of some conceptual naturality . This is bad; I ... I love her and want her for myself. I ... He suddenly thought about Brendan and swam back through that recurring scene that seemed to be the man's worst-ever moment.

I see, he thought. We did nothing together, that night in that room, but his mind supplied all the images that it needed to generate those emotions, to feel so bad. He loved her more desperately than I ever loved Beth, or anyone, and every moment that took her away from him was a moment of agony to be endured. Every experience that she had without him was an experience lost to him, an agony to be endured. Love leaves its own special scars, I guess. I thought Beth and I were closer than Bren and Ariane could ever have been. Her denial of me seems that much more profound. We know each other. It's silly, he realized, inexcusable, but . . . human. Now what do I say? I'm sorry? To whom? Beth?

Brendan? Everyone? Maybe it doesn't matter. This hurts too much.

Li-jiang'spenis, slimed with ichor , withdrew from Beth's body and the two embraced fiercely, laughing. They broke apart after a while and looked into each other's faces, smiling uncontrollably, and John turned back into his room, hoping that they didn't hear the soft whisper of his feet on the floor.

Brendan Sealock sat alone in front of the quantum conversion scanner and its attendant communication system, working. All indications had it that the experiment had been successful, and telltale signs on the various wave fronts seemed to say that the various subunits of Centrum, Bright Illimit, and Demogorgon were up and running. Krzakwa had gone away repeatedly during the course of the labor, drawn by some mysterious magnetism that was invisible to the other. Now he seemed to have departed for good. Sealock worked on through his cranial taps, whispering into the void, trying to reestablish communications with Demo in whatever guise he might manifest now as the primary controller function in Centrum.

It was a little bit like sitting in front of an old-time radio, a desperate air traffic controller, clutching a microphone, staring out of a stone tower into a fog-locked night, calling, "Flight X51A5, this is Mystery Lake Tower. Come in, X51A5. Do you read me? For God's sake, are you there, boy? Come in!" Brendan smiled faintly at the image. He's out there somewhere.

He scanned through the channels, seeing all the activity, trying to find the one that would let him talk to the man within again. At the moment of turnover, Demo's personality had been snatched away from him, rushing off to take its place somewhere within Centrum's complexity.

A bright light grew out of the mazy world that he searched, pulsing with insistent ruddy glow, calling his attention. He tapped onto it and listened. It said, "Hello, Bren ," in a strange voice, an unknown one.

"Demo?"

"This is BI GAM/Red SRA 051B:08R0:A0N7."

"Oh." Visuals came on now and the face floated in front of him: it was his own, projected in reverse of its mirror image, real and so faintly alien to him. "Can I talk to Demo?"

"The Master is engaged in Assembly setup and is currently dealing with the Interpreter SRAs . He sent me to communicate certain things to you in his stead."

Brendan felt vaguely disappointed, knowing he'd wantedto talk to the Arab, no longer caring about why. Still, this was probably better than nothing. "What things?"

"A preliminary survey of the working propulsion equipment in Iris indicates that most systems are functional. The power plant converter is, of course, still functional, and proves capable of using the lower Iridean atmosphere as fuel. The photon drive grid projects above the lithosphere and should be fireable , though it is currently immersed in dense, fluid hydrogen. We intend to light off shortly."

"You're going to fire off the engines?" He had a sudden memory of the thing they'd done to Aello , visions of fiery chaos, and thought of Jana. "What if the planet explodes?"

"Then it explodes. We're prepared to take that risk. This communiqué is a friendly warning to you all; it is a chance for you to place yourselves out of harm's way."

"What are the chances of success?"

"Odds of failure are calculated at 1:2027.048."

Brendan felt himself relax. All things considered, the chances of it working were pretty good. This would be something to see indeed. "OK. We'll begin our preparations immediately."

"Very well . . ."

"Wait a minute!"

"Input Queue NMI received. Proceed."

"Why are you doing this? I thought just being in control of a Bright Illimit-dominated Centrum would be enough for him."

"Long-term survival under those circumstances would have been a chancy thing. We mean to revive the mission. Enough submodules of Centrum itself survive to make that decision imperative."

"I see." He thought about it. It was probably a wise choice; Demogorgon would be giving himself a good reason to go on existing. And fantasies grow best in the hothouse climate of real adventure. "How long do we have?"

"Depending on the condition of the Uplink command system and how much rewrite the light-off procedures take, forty-seven hours, plus or minus eighteen minutes." Brendan could have laughed—a week ago he would have.

They would have to get Deepstar reassembled more or less overnight. "I'd still like to speak with Demo."

"At the moment, impossible. Call me on this wave interface after the light-off procedures are up and running. We may be able to manage it then. End transmission."

"Good-bye."

The ruby light pulsed once, then went out, and the world within Iris withdrew from his grasp.

Brendan walked across the moor by the pool, his feet drifting, lightly touching the surface, propelling himself along with a minimum of effort, immersed in the complexities of now and then. Things had changed, and with them himself, and with him the others. Are the changes great ones? Do I really feel different? Do they? What have we all become? Something new? I wonder. Are we really different or is this just another masque? Perhaps we are just fooling ourselves, rationalizing away any responsibility for feeling any pain, our own and that of each other. I know now that I am capable of lying to myself. I saw that facility in other people all along, and saw it in myself . . . but I thought I was different. I thought that, so long as I recognized the capacity for self-deceit in myself, it was all right to do it. The lies and fantasies were OK, just as long as I recognized them for what they were and paused every now and again to laugh at myself, to be embarrassed at my own silliness. Perhaps I was right, and this is just that little refreshing pause, that little sense of the "I" in me being renewed.... Or maybe I'm still lying to myself. Again. He walked on, immersed in a steep practicum of rumination, considering himself, both the natural being and the thing revealed by a forced march through his own past. I always used the memories, he mused, to wash away the terrors of any current hour that had grown too dense, too strong for me to handle easily. I reviewed myself mercilessly. He snorted, mirthless laughter emerging from his nose to echo in the silent, ersatz land. I did nothing of the sort! I used my memories in a self-serving way to absolve myself of any feeling I might have had about anything. Is that bad? Perhapsnot. A human being must have a means of survival, at all costs. Perhaps my greatest flaw lay in my lack of generosity toward others. They needed their lies and it was small of me to sneer at them. How much of that was unnecessary flaw and how much grew from my own needs? Did I serve a useful function in the midst of the others? I wonder if I really needed to . . . who am I to judge and who are they to judge me? Would I be happy in an existence divorced from all human needs, left to float my own way in a solitary jungle of thought?

He stood still for a while, drifting to a slow stop. Do I really need to consider myself as relating to other people, or is this all foolishness, self-torture? Maybe I've been right all along. Perhaps I should go with my old feeling, continue as I always have until death eats me up. Another bit of snide self-derision at that. No sense letting that poetic imagery louse up a fine bit of introspection. Those sorts of conventions are the ways people begin lying to themselves, whenever they find it necessary. He felt like remembering then, and did, wondering if all the quietness, the need to forgive and forget and move on, were just a slow healing process, a recovery from the shock of his long fall through Centrum. When I emerge, will I be what I was before? What will that be? Am I sane or mad? Does it matter?

Memory struck.

Brendan Sealock stood atop the barrier wall of the Summit Garden of Prometheus Tower, the thousand-meter-high monad that stood astride St. James, looking out across the world, his land, hair blowing in the wind, fluffing it out so that each strand found a new position. He was barefoot, clad in a pair of blue bathing trunks and a white tank top emblazoned with the scarlet logo of Blood Street Skull, the music ensemble whose partisans had been terrorizing Long Island for the last few weeks. The wind was cool and pleasant, in a summery sort of way.

From here, from this vantage point, the world should have been green and beautiful, but it was ugly. The great towers ofthe eastern boroughs of New York Free City stood high in the west, growing out to meet him, steel and plastic monstrosities that glittered in the morning sun, throwing back rays of light, little flashes to catch his eyes. To the north, on the Connecticut shore, the low, sprawling outriders of a lawless Boston Megalopolis glared at him, layer upon endless layer of repulsive, antique buildings. In the south, the Atlantic Ocean was steel gray, and dead. The surface winds were calm and the sea was a worthless mirror.

There was a distant, echoing rumble from the northeast, and Nantucket Cosmodrome threw up a small rocket ship, a silver speck that climbed atop a spike of smokeless flame, narrow-swept wings that rode into the sky, accelerating, dwindling, as the man-made thing went to connect with low Earth orbit and the opening tendrils of the Deep Space Transport Network.

He looked down at the earth, far below. The square height of the shiny building gave him an odd, dwindling perspective. It looked like a triangle set on its apex. Small at first, he told himself, and then ever larger. The land was green about its base, another park, looking ridiculously small from a height, a narrow ribbon of jungle, then the concrete warrens of an older town.

I think, he realized, that I could jump from here. He imagined the wind whistling in his ears, the windows flashing by, the ground approaching, specks turning into people, looking up at him, mouths open in little Ohs of horror, scattering from the point of explosive impact, flinching from a splash of blood, crying out as they were wounded by bits of flying bone. I would become a gory crater in the ground. He knew it wasn't so, of course. There was terminal velocity to consider. I'd turn into a big, messy cross in the grass, nothing spectacular. Another asshole, trying to fly, flapping his arms and screaming to the end. He turned to go away, to return to the woman who awaited him in the garden, waiting to collect him body and soul, to carry him off as a trophy, into the hinterlands. He went, shivering.