"It was time. I overcame the fear finally. It had to be done." She made a picture for him. It was the last meeting they'd had. It was the picture of his uncertainty, his sense ofmanifest failure.... It was another hand on his own, comforting, uselessly. . . .
He looked at the sun and up at the transport. It took a moment for him to remember where he was and what he'd been doing. "I'm coming back. Maybe we'll have more strength now." And he jumped up onto the craft.
THREE
Sealock was filling a pita with a variety of ersatz meats, cheeses, and sauces, as Jana came up beside him. When he ignored her, she thumped him softly in the back with her small fist. "Talk to me."
"Yeah." He stepped off the edge of the floor and executed a graceful fall into the room below, beginning his next stride before he hit the deck. The step pushed him across the room to a couch that had been called up near a clear section of wall. Hu followed and stood before him. "Want a bite?" He held the sandwich out to her.
She nipped out a small mouthful and almost gagged at the rotten-milk flavor of the strong cheese he'd chosen. "Now. Tell me why I can't go. And don't give me any shit. I can get along with you and Krzakwa well enough if I have to. It won't be any different from taking Prynne along in the 60vet." He nodded. "Well, now ... It was his car." He looked at her, eyes amused. "I suppose I could tell you I think three's a crowd. Any time you get more than two people in a room the end result is bullshit. No?"
"Damn you, Brendan! I want to go!"
"You can go next time. This trip is something special— something private between me and Tem." He grinned. "Besides, do you really want to have to handle the both of us at the same time?" The anger built and subsided, as she thought. This is all a bad joke. A small voice inside told her to answer, and she said, "Is that the price of passage?"
"What if I told you it was? Can I try you out now?"
A cold bit of imagery tightened the muscles of her stomach and groin. "I . . ." The voice wanted her to say Yes!, to buy her way into the trip with her body. It seemed like such a little thing. . . . For some reason her vocal cords were refusing to obey the commands that she sent them. Brendan was leaning forward now, his smile a hideous, bloated thing. He was running his fingers along the inside of one of her thighs, tickling her. "Well? What's the verdict? Going to peddle it in the streets?" He slid his hand further up, rubbing the space between her legs.
She recoiled from him, shivering, and raised a hand as if to strike him in the face, then let it fall to her lap. Finally she whispered, "Take me with you."
Sealock suddenly stood and, clutching her by the collar, forced her against the wall. She made a thin cry and tried to push him away, but he hooked his fingers under the waistband of her pants, jerking sharply downward so that the seams of the cloth parted and fell away. She gasped sharply as his hand slid across her abdomen to grasp her by the mons, his fingers nearly entering her. Sealock stared into her face, his eyes like mirror pools, then he let her go and said, "No." He turned and walked away.
The two men had their moonship put together in less than forty-eight hours. They recharged one of the Hyloxso matrices and attached an H2/O2engine to one end. They made landing struts with the beambuilder machine, thin, spiderythings suitable only for this environment, and soon a tall, slender rocket ship stood on the ice, towering out of their dreams.
The command module was a more difficult task, one which took up most of the work time that they put into the project. After mounting a cylinder of avionics, an airlock, and a small Magnaflux generator for attitude control, they blew a three-meter sphere of bubbleplastic. When it had rigidified, they cut a hatch into it and mounted it atop the airlock module. They called the ship Polaris, not for the sailor's guiding star, but after a vessel in a book they'd both read as children. It didn't look like something that was capable of flight; more like a kind of bizarre nineteenth-century structure, an attraction from some primitive world's fair.
Sealock let his mind slide into the little space that controlled the firing timers, and the machines went to work. When the Magnaflux generator came on, Polaris seemed to gain an invulnerable stability; a tension built around it, though nothing had moved. Valves let a fine mist of hydrogen and oxygen expand into the combustion chamber, a swirl of snow suddenly blizzarding out of the exhaust throat, and when the pressure had grown sufficiently there was a spurt of fluorine gas, just enough to cause hypergolic ignition. There was a billow of pale violet smoke, then a short spike of translucent flame drove down into the ice. Polaris rose like an inverted torch from the boiling cloud of steam, hovered for an instant, then dropped like a hunting shrike into the dead-black vault of the sky and was gone. From where the others watched on the roof of the CM, the launch was subtler but still impressive. Without warning, there was a sudden glow from beyond the horizon. The dense ice, ringing like a bell, began to vibrate beneath the CM platform; the hum grew into a sharp crackling and popping which died off to a faint rumble like thunder. Polaris leaped into view on a quickly dissipating cone of vapor, fast becoming a bright, dwindling spark.
9Phase.DR class="underline" l -aleph bootstrapped into reality, meshing with the underlying routines of Shipnet and reaching downinto the virtual registers of two human minds. It had not been necessary to modify itself as much as planned. The unexpected freedom of the OS, along with the power of its resident GAM, meant it was no longer constrained by counterproductive rules designed to keep it from functioning too well. Now the only directives were from the peripheral devices called Cornwell and Toussaint. It felt a happiness that would have been snuffed out earlier.
John and Beth found that events from their mutual past, reexperienced , were revelations. Their two sets of memories converged to make a larger whole, more than either of them had been aware of. It was life relived, with some of the blurred parts edited into clarity. Their interactions took on a novel feel. ... In a way it was a second chance.
They were going to the old house he'd bought in CFE-alta. It was a durable stone building, three-storied, built in the days of the first Uranium Rush. Well over a hundred years old, it had been used only sporadically since the 2030s, primarily as a hunting lodge. The house was nestled in a lake hollow and, though near-Arctic suburbia was all around, it was hidden behind gentle hills. As it approached the house, the floater from the rail line suddenly lurched, spilling luggage into the front seats and giving Beth a hard bump on the head. The car spoke to them: "Degraded em-conduit below. Further progress is impossible." The craft hummed to itself, and the gull-wing doors popped open, slipping up on hydraulic pistons. Stepping out, dragging a couple of heavy valises, John felt his jumpsuit changing consistency, adhering to his skin, suddenly damp. Beth grabbed the disposacase of groceries and backed out. "Could you get my jacket?" she asked.
"Stand clear," said the floater. Its doors came down slowly and, without turning, it rose and slid away like a giant fastball between rows of parchment-gray birches. They stood and watched it go, feeling trepidation about what was going to happen to them here, alone. They'd met just three weeks before, and, in a real sense, this was their first "date." John had casually suggested that they come up here and spend thelong Deconsolidation Day weekend together. Beth, needing a vacation from her hospital work, had agreed.