they could see the low rim of Sayyarrin and its rather smooth floor. Perhaps it was just a tiny bit darker, colder, than its surroundings: a dim shape under the ice. Then it was gone over the horizon. Brendan violently spun Polaris around, inertia tugging at their bodies, and lit off the engine. The craters slowed, stopped, and the bright line that was day receded back behind the world. Sayyarrin popped over the horizon and, when they were directly over it, Sealock repeated his action, this time slowing the ship to a dead halt over the center of the crater. Tem could only tell from his instruments that they were falling, gently, toward the ice less than half a kilometer below. Brendan turned up the gain on the photochip , isolated a narrow region in the far infrared that would best define the heat differences they had seen, and, yes, there it was.
He pushed the ship back into an orbit, paying little attention to its parameters. When they were flying above the ice once more he turned to look at the Selenite. "So. You're saying Sayyarrin is a caldera?" He called up some imagery from the Shipnet element and its source files, staring so hard into the image in his brain that he squinted malevolently. "That sort of contradicts the picture you were drawing before." Krzakwa nodded slowly. That was the way it seemed, but . . . Damn it, there had to be some kind of reasonable explanation. "I don't know. Day comes in about three hours. It will take about half an hour to suit up. I say we get Polaris back in the right orbit and go down in the suits. There really is no telling what will happen if we try to land in that stuff. It might be the most effective way to reach the lower stratum—but the ship could easily be damaged by the violent sublimation, even in this paltry gravity." Brendan seemed to pull back into himself somewhat. "Mmm. Yeah. We turn up the heat of our suits and fall through the neon. Any turbulence that creates, we can certainly deal with. OK—full speed ahead."
Downlink Rapport wasn't getting any easier. Insofar as the thoughts and feelings of John and Beth were couched in linguistic or sensory terms, the transfer was without effort. But underlying personal emotions and states of being were more difficult, flooding into the brain as strange, ephemeral data. Understanding required a great deal of work. Memories were a lingua franca between them, perhaps because, even in an individual, memories come from somewhere far off, separate from the "self." It was easiest to tap into the full experience of being another person through the facility of the past. It came: they were annoyed. No matter what subject John tried to initiate, Beth would turn it aside. In bed, back in her condo in Yellowknife after a long winter walk through the streets, their bodies touched and his cold hands were enfolded within the damp warmth of her armpits. Their wet clothing was strewn across the floor, and waves of heat billowed up from the vents. Snow tapped against the window. Their faces were still flushed from the cold, his a ruddy orange and hers an empurpled brown. Despite the physical closeness, they were in sealed, isolated worlds. John was struggling to overcome a feeling of futility, and the emotion emerged into the world as a series of quick, occasionally savage ripostes. Beth swallowed these outbursts quietly, if only because they were so unlike what she had come to expect in his behavior.
"That's the point, Beth. The money keeps coming. Something should be done with it; something purposeful. And I . . . I've lost a context. I know I say things about living for the moment. At one time I could do that, but not now. The time has come to do something." He laughed. "I've come back to the place where I started, and for the first time I know it's boring."
"If your music isn't an accomplishment, I don't know what is." How could he explain to her that the time of their courtship, when he had felt a context, largely defined by their passion, had ended? That he needed to break through into something deeper, something to convince himself death wouldn't come sneaking up and claim him unawares? He thought about the money again. "What have I done with the money? Bought a house, two houses, an asteroid? What good is it all?" A new bond was growing between them, out of their disparity. The unresolvable dilemma had been resolved, and the truth was being found out. Gladness filled him.
They broke. "Well," Cornwell said, "hello again." His voice was quiet but amused, "How are you?" They kissed, briefly, without passion. He stood, woozy even in the low g. Beth was staring at him. She felt tired. "All right," she said.
"Let's go get something to eat."
Shutdown.
They had to don the worksuits and exit one at a time. Though the things were not terribly bulky, no larger than theordinary vacuum suits of a century earlier, they were rigid and maintained their fixed shape. It was in stark contrast to the usual sort of spacesuit, which could be crushed into a tiny ball when not wrapped around the form of a human being. Sealock went into the airlock, which was a cylindrical chamber two and a half meters across by two high and looked around. The two suits were like two extra men, and there was no room for the Selenite. He sighed, wondering why they simply hadn't made it a little larger. Some aesthetic pressure. Who knew? This had just seemed like the right size and shape to use, and that seeming had obviously been wrong. Krzakwa closed the hatch, cutting him off from the CM, a last view of him looking like a troglodyte in his cave. Temporarily, Sea-lock had donned a communications circlet, though he'd always ridiculed the things. "I'll let you know when I'm done," he said. The suit was permanently made in one piece, its helmet and backpack already attached. Before climbing in through the opening that split the front, Sealock reached up into the helmet and unreeled the twelve brain-taps that marked this suit as his alone. He discarded the circlet and quickly plugged himself in, powering up the suit. "Do you read me?" Affirmative. He crawled in through the opening, squirming as he put his arms and legs down their proper holes. It was difficult, though possible, and he wondered just how Krzakwa managed to do it, fat as he was. The designers probably could have come up with something better, but . . . this was as sturdy a system as twenty-first century could come up with. By using appropriate settings, a man in a worksuit could walk around on Mercury or go for a stroll beneath the soupy seas of Titan. . . . He closed the front, lit off the life-support systems, and established a link with the ship's 'net element. "I'm going out now."
"OK." The pressure in the airlock dropped swiftly and was gone, the gases pumped back into a storage tank.
When the vacuum was fully established, he popped the outer hatch and floated into the night. The hatch closed behind him, leaving him physically isolated, floating beside the smooth length of Polaris, with the cold landscapes of the small moon running by below, an unending vista ofexcavated features, all of them similar. He could see the ragged terminator coming up over Aello's horizon; and Sayyarrin wasn't much beyond that.
After a while the hatch opened again and Tem emerged to join him. Things were about ready. Wordless, they floated away from the ship, orienting themselves so that the primary cold-gas thrusters of their suits' OMS/RCS harnesses were facing in the direction of orbital travel. The suits' internal logic units were designed for this sort of operation, and so they would lose little information if they had to disconnect from the ship's systems. Hopefully, they would be able to maintain communication with the more powerful 'net element but, if not, it would probably be all right. They watched the craft drift away from them. The surface of the moon was as dark as the starry sky around them, and only the great burning crescent at Aello's limb gave any sort of perspective. The mind tends to place itself as the stationary center of the universe, and here, hanging between Polaris and Aello, it did its best to define their situation thus. It tended to view Aello as "down," but, in little bursts of alienness, they could see themselves as suspended below a dark sky with a curiously inverted sunrise rushing toward them, flying above their craft on silent wings. Their orientation was very dependent on which way their feet pointed, and they tried to keep them toward Aello. As they applied the jets, their speed dropped and they fell, moving away from the ship. It became a small, dark thing with inappropriate-seeming highlights.