"Come on, you three," said Ariane, "grab a plate and join us. The buntings are perfect!"
"What's a bunting?" asked Prynne.
"It's a bite-sized bird," said the Selenite. "You mean you made the ortolans thing? I always wondered how that would taste." A smile broke through the tangled undergrowth of his beard. "I was getting pretty tired of that low-eel stuff."
"Wait for me," said Prynne. "I have to go put on some real clothes." He hopped rather clumsily up the ladder, back into the CM, and reappeared a minute later in shorts and a T-shirt. Sealock and Krzakwa were already seated, nude.
"Here's a toast," said Vana, brushing a curl of springy hair back where it belonged and raising her goblet. "To us."
Everyone drank. Beth noticed that John was keeping his eyes on his plate. Sealock had finished his ortolans but showed no inclination to get seconds. His face was dark, and there was an angular lumpiness to it, as if the light were unflattering. Finally he looked up and spoke.
"OK. I've been stewing about how to say this. I can't think of any gentler way, so, if this upsets any of you . . . tough shit." He grinned, momentarily, then shook his head slowly. "Um . . . Tem and I will be leaving you shortly. Going on another little trip." Demogorgonstirred, a look of dismay on his face, but the man went on: "We've decided that we're going to put the moonship together a little ahead of schedule and go have a quick look at the rest of this frozen merry-go-round. . . ." Jana pounded a hand on the table in front of her, smashing her food paquette with a loud crack.
"What?" She rose to her feet, leaned her small weight forward onto her hands, and looked at him intently. "I am going with you! There's no way you're going to leave me out of this! I promised the IAAU
I'd get samples from I and II as soon as it was possible, and I'm going to get them." Her face was reddening, turning a sallow brick color. "If you land on either of those moons I will not be responsible for the consequences."
Tem said, "We'll get them for you, Jana. You can guide us just as well from here as from the ship. Any instrumentation you want, we'll take."
Hu's voice was steady and flat now, emotionless, but her eyes were wild. "I will stop you if I can. Those moons are under my jurisdiction. You will regret this."
Sealock laughed. "I'll try to keep all that in mind."
Cornwell stood up. "I don't like this. By just what processdid you arrive at this 'decision'? It seems to me that Jana is certainly the most qualified to go. If you two are going to force something like this down all of our throats, an injustice is being done."
Sealock smiled gently. "Well ... try and stop us, then." He turned and stalked toward the CM, a rather delicate, balletlike maneuver in the low gravity.
Demogorgon said, "But, Brendan!" and hurried after him.
Jana rose to her feet, swept the lot of them with a contemptuous glare, stared at John for a long moment, then walked away, also toward the CM. Ariane stood and began walking slowly toward the CM, seeming downcast. Vana stared after her for a second, then got up to follow.
"Oh, Christ . . ." Cornwell turned and looked at Krzakwa. "What the hell is going on here?"
"This is important, John. It's important to him, and to me. Please don't interfere."
"I don't understand."
"Well . . . shit. I don't know. . . . Think about all the daydreams you ever had. How much did they ever mean to you?"
Cornwell looked puzzled. "Daydreams? You mean fantasies?" He thought about it. In his teens there had been many, covering an enormous field. "A lot, I guess. But what does that have to do with anything?"
Scratching at his beard, meditative and distant, Tem said, "I don't know. A few days ago I would've said that too. Now . . . I've been thinking. . . ." He yawned and turned back to look at his food, then began eating, obviously having tuned out John and the rest of the universe.
Brendan sat in his room, cross-legged on a floor mat, facing Demogorgon. "Come on, Achmet ," he said. "It's not going to happen right now, and it's not going to take forever. We'll be gone for a few weeks, total. No more than a month."
The Arab nodded. "I know. You keep saying that. It doesn't make me any happier. What if something happens to you?"
"What if? We're not fucking immortal, you know."
"Please don't be mad at me, Bren."
"I'm not. I just wish you weren't so dependent on me for whatever it is that you want."
"That's a hell of an easy thing to say. It doesn't mean much."
"No, I guess not." He sighed and leaned back, stretching. "Notice anything funny?"
"What do you mean?"
"Where's Ariane?"
"I ... don't know. In her room?"
"'In her room'? That sounds like a pretty clever deduction."
"Does being mean make you feel good?"
"Yeah. Pulling the legs off grasshoppers is OK, too. You're missing the point. Why isn't she here?" Demogorgon shrugged.
"No curiosity about the matter? She says she loves me, just like you do. . . ." He shut his eyes suddenly, muscles tensing under the skin around them, making rounded ridges above and below the crow's-feet at their corners, making a small hump above his nose, where his eyebrows grew together.
"So she's not here, like you. Something keeps her away. What do you suppose it is?" Staring at him, Demogorgon thought, That's not what he intended to say. He was going to give me some damned sophomoric pep talk about how Ariane wasn't so dependent on him, so why should I be?
The Arab smiled faintly, and a glimmering of it came to him. What was the distraction that made him stop? I love him, he loves her. . . . Who does she love? Brendan? Herself? No one? What the hell . . . we're all so stupid!
After setting up a forty-meter dome next to Prynne's "garage," they began the construction of the vehicle they'd brought for transporting passengers and heavy cargo about their new home. Called the Multiple Person Transport, it was little more than a Hyloxso tank segment mounted in a girder tripod. Grappling devices of various kinds hung from an open platform that bridged the three legs, perhaps a third ofthe way down. An expansion-valve reaction motor was mounted on a swivel track that could be raised and lowered to match the mutable craft's center of gravity. It was, in essence, a vacuum-riding helicopter.
Their first cargo was a mass-driver for launching small satellites. Its ammunition was to be a relay transponder that would be placed near Ocypete's inner Lagrange point. They called it a "Clarke" satellite, for that was its function, but synchronous orbit was impossible for anything circling a tidally locked body. They had decided to loft it from a point on the equator, which intersected a part of the ocellus some 275
kilometers to the south. While the 'driver could easily handle the energy requirements, they wanted to minimize the amount of equipment in the satellite. The L1 halo orbit was mildly perturbed by the gravitational influence of Podarge, so station-keeping would be required. The more fuel with which it arrived at its new home, the fewer times the satellite would have to be attended to or replaced. John hooked into the primitive 'net element that made the thing go. It began to move slowly away from the ground, riding on its single jet. He accelerated gently, until he was traveling at a little under Ocypete's escape velocity. At the same time he rolled the vehicle so that its rocket was pointing upward. A ballistic trajectory was simply too slow on a tiny ice moon like this. This way, it would be a quick trip: the equator was only about thirty-five minutes away. It was a wasteful way to travel, but they had water to burn. In order to stop, it was necessary to tip the bottom of the transport forward so that the gas jet worked against acquired velocity. It slowed to a halt about a meter above the ice and settled the rest of the way with a gentle yet visceral crunch John noticed the neon receding quickly from the craft, but he was already beginning to take this phenomenon for granted. The pristine nature of the ocellus was not going to last much longer. He pictured the enormous swath that 60vet had cut during its voyage. The magnetic induction catapult was about ten meters long, and not particularly massive, so it had to be well anchored in the ice. This was accomplished with a particle-beam drill and a set of long, threaded pitons. When he finished, the latticework tube was raked back at a steep angle, pointed directly at Iris. The parameters of the launch were already programmed into the machine; Cornwell just activated the system.