It was Beth's turn to swim freely through the depths of John's mind, in effect "being him," and she was amazed at how he spent his moments, how little memory grazing he really did. He rarely consulted his own experience, as if he believed the past had nothing to teach him. . . . She felt as if she were plumbing new territory.
It was 2083, three years before they'd met, and John was pacing about the apartment he'd purchased in one of the more modern sections of NYFC. It was in a needle monad built during the brief ascendancy of the World Unification/DuPont Deathmarch Party, and its official address was still Grand Concourse, South Bronx. He stopped at an iridescent wall and deopaqued it, the colorful patterns disappearing with a swirl. He could see the Jersey shore standing beyond the tiny towers of the World Trade Center. The sun was falling into the west, and the massive shadows that spread from the great buildings of Hoboken were already beginning to engulf the island.
In spite of the huge structures that surrounded Manhattan on three sides, the historical buildings, the formerly glorious "skyscrapers," were still special. They'd been shorn of the grimy soot color they had in old pictures, but the blocky little spires, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the rest, still retained the primitive strength of the people who'd first walked on the Moon. He'd still not recovered from the shock of Reflection Counterpoint's success, though the money had been rolling in since 2080, and nothing seemed quite real to him. He turned from the window and surveyed the apartment he'd bought. Spacious by urban standards, it was still rather cramped when compared to his home in Port Radium. The field-stress rainbow was the best he could do with the programmable walls— he had never had acrophobia before, but the height of the rooms weighed on him when they were clear, opaque, or 3V'ed. The sunken living console held the promise of safety, and he let himself fall into the plush, springy surface of the hole. Pulling himself backward with a kind of swimming stroke, he summoned Pamelia, his new courtesan. . . .
The program's focus controller popped them back from that brink and recreated reality, as Beth broke off: "No. No sex memories. Not yet."
"Don't worry. With Pam, it was nothing but an unfulfilled yearning. It was clumsy and tedious for me, with only the orgasm to make it seem worth while. Maybe you should experience it. Compared to us . .
."
It seemed as if her ideas about John were bursting, like soap bubbles from a solution too dilute. They shared a sudden realization about just how often the impressions they'd had of each other had been wrong.
. . . and an apprehension grew. No shred of their relationship would survive DR unchanged. . . . The program pushed harder, suddenly aghast. This was what they wanted?
The uneasiness fed on itself. Any emotion could suffer feedback like this. They were two mirrors staring into each other, new reactions building upon earlier ones.... A paradox-solution routine from the GAM winked on and took control. The feedback damped into neutral calm, and it letgo. John was starting to become familiar with the different ways in which Beth's mind was organized, but the way she interfaced with her unconscious perceptions was strange, alien to him. He found it all so very hard to assimilate. . . . The program strained once again, changed nodes. Hegrabbed hold of a memory. To his surprise, he recognized the place. It was a park at the source of the Mackenzie, where Great Slave Lake suddenly constricted into a sluggish, blue-brown river. From here, it would travel more than a megameter before burying its waters in the frigid Beaufort Sea. The land here was low, bare of trees, and planted with a hardy grass uniformly cut to golf-course perfection, except where stripy gneiss showed through. The lake was vast, rippling with white-gold, a horizon of water. The low sun dominated a morning sky flecked with small, elongated clouds. Despite her sleeveless blouse, Beth felt warm. Midges were everywhere, becoming obtrusive.
Beth looked level-eyed at her companion. He was a young boy, perhaps fourteen, curly-haired, blond, handsome in an almost funny way. She was feeling a kind of nobility— a self-righteous pride-in-behavior possible, perhaps, only in one her age. The boy looked very unhappy and had been crying. Finally he said, "But how can we stop seeing each other? What will our friends think?" For a moment she almost relented, but the memory of the night before, when she'd been awakened by the discomfort of some lump beneath her hip, was there. She started to get out of the tent, stopped at the opening. He was there, masturbating into the embers of a dying fire. She watched, then got back into her sleeping bag. Perhaps she was still in love with her fathers, or perhaps she just wanted to disassociate herself from the path her body was thrusting before her. With Angelo, she'd felt safe, had thought sexuality wasn't going to be a problem. Obviously she couldn't think that any longer. She said, "No, Ange . Of course we'll still see each other, that's impossible to avoid. Just: no more walks."
Segue. Angelo was there, above her. He was older now, eighteen at least, and had a sparse mustache. The room was dark. Their only light came from a small chink in the window shade and the blinding emblem it etched on the floor. She was wet enough, but not sexually aroused. Not really. He'd been fumbling down there for so long . . .
"I can't do it," he said. "I mean, I already did it." She sighed, familiar with the problem. She'd beenexperimenting with sex a lot. She and Angelo had gone their separate ways until, just a few hours ago, a chance meeting at a midsummer barbecue had brought them back together. It was no big deal, she thought, but she knew his vulnerability made this happen, against her will, and she was angry.
"All right," she said sharply. "There are other times. Let's get back outside. We're missing the party." She felt astonished that she could deal out pain so easily.
The program was at a loss. Strong embarrassment formed an overlay and its parameters were overloaded again. It had been designed for a dominant/submissive psychiatric environment, and the maintenance of a strictly mutual gestalt seemed impossible for any length of time, especially at this sensitivity. It needed a closer association with its GAM, a simultaneity, a sharing. They were back in the cubicle. John, too, was surprised and hurt, almost as if he'd been Angelo instead of Beth. He opened his eyes on moist darkness. "But why?" he said, and it did not echo. No answer was forthcoming. This isn't what I expected. . . .
He felt Beth bumping against his side, still motionless, but the program was concealing her thoughts, denying him access. He assumed it was at her request, and imagined he understood. It must be very hard for her. Somewhere in the machinery, ideas behaved reflexively.
Podarge was a much smaller satellite than Ocypete, less than seven hundred kilometers in diameter, not much larger than Enceladus. Sealock and Krzakwa were plugged into their duodecimal element, looking out through the exterior stereovidicon as if through their own eyes. They weren't asterologists, so there wasn't much to see, though its status as a "new" world compelled their interest. It was a white, meteoroid-blasted ice moon, its surface an indistinct turmoil of circles, gaining in apparent relief as one looked toward the terminator, now near the leftmost limb. Brendan reached out through the optical circuitry and imposed an appropriate set of judgmental color filters. With the color-gain stretched, with a bit of magnification, Iris IIbecame a pale world, blue-green and brown, with definite continents and patches of diverse terrain. Like many of the outer-System satellites, Podarge had experienced periods of resurfacing, when volatile materials had bubbled out of the interior, making fresh plains that were ready to be cratered anew. They were all very different in composition and degree of pock-saturation, and made an overlapping patchwork of colors on the enhanced moon. The little world, composed of a greater variety of volatiles than anything in the Solar System, had a turbulent history during its first aeons. As it cooled, one material after another had solidified, either on the surface or at the bottom of some cold epeiric sea. In the end, there had been periods during which impacts and tidally produced fractures had brought the last of the liquids pouring out onto the surface. Most of these new terrains were masked by meteoric gardening, but the differences were still there. In the northern hemisphere, near the pole, there were cirruslike wisps strung along a barely visible fracture, fresh neon ice that had been expelled from the mantle during the last quiescent phases of Podarge's freezing.