Macroscope

It lengthened, and ridges along its side developed into fins, and one hole gravitated to the nether area. Patches manifested near the front and became true eyes, and it was a fish.

The fins thickened; the body became stout, less streamlined. The fish gulped air through an ugly, horrendously-toothed mouth and heaved its snout momentarily out of the fluid, taking in a bubble of air. It continued to grow, and its head came into the air to stay. Its near eye fixed on Ivo disconcertingly. Now it was almost reptilian, with a substantial fleshy tail in place of the flukes, and claws on well-articulated feet. The mouth opened to show the teeth again, fewer than before, but still too many. It was large; its mass took up half the fluid at this stage.

Then it shrank to the size of a rodent, casting off flesh in a quick reliquefication. Hair sprouted where scales had been, and the teeth became differentiated. Ratlike, it peered at him, switching its thin tail.

It grew again, as though a suppressant had been eliminated. It developed powerful limbs, heavy fur, a large head. The snout receded, the eyes came forward, the ears flattened onto the sides of the head. The limbs lengthened and began to shed their hair; the tail shriveled; the forehead swelled.

It was begi

Rather, a woman: multiple teats assembled into two, traveling up along the belly to the chest. The hairy face became clear, the muscular limbs slim. The pelvis broadened, the midsection shrank. The hair of the head reached down; the breasts swelled invitingly.

Goddess of fertility, she lay upon her back and contemplated him through half-lidded eyes.

Age set in. Her middle plumpened; her fine mammaries lost their resiliency; her face became round.

The beam cut off.

“Is it over, Ivo?”

He started, ashamed to be caught staring. “Yes.”

He turned his back upon Beatryx so that she could dress in privacy. The reconstitution had not been as alarming as the dissolution, but it had had its moments. Worst was his impression of awareness throughout. The entire evolution of the species recapitulated in—

He checked the time.

— four hours. It had seemed like four minutes.

“I will fix lunch,” she said. That was how he knew that she did not want to watch any other reconstitutions.

Groton revived next, and this time Ivo knew it was four hours. Finally Afra, and it seemed like eight.

“Check me,” she said immediately. She had not forgotten.

The two men handled her in turn, hardly embarrassed this time around, and pronounced her real. “Yes,” she said. “I was sure I was.” The transformation was a subjective success.

Nothing was said about Brad. By mutual unspoken consent they let him remain as he was, in suspended animation or storage. What point reviving him now?

CHAPTER 6

They sped toward Neptune, a scant two million miles distant. Ivo needed no instrument to contemplate its grandeur. From this point in space the planet had an apparent diameter twice that of Luna as seen from Earth, or a full degree. It was a great-banded disk of green speckled with dots and slashes, as though a godlike entity had played a careless game of sprouts upon its surface.

They were in free-fall, with Brad’s container sealed and aerated by an electric pump.

“Dull,” Afra murmured facetiously. “Just a minor gas-giant nobody would miss.”

Dull? Ivo appreciated the irony, for he had never seen a more impressive object. As he concentrated he was able to discern more detail: the comparatively bright, yellowish equatorial belt, blue-gray bands enclosing it above and below, mottled green “temperate” sections merging into the black poles — a rather attractive effect. Earth, compared to this, was a bleak white nonentity. Neptune’s spots were concentrated in the central zone and were mostly dark brown or black, and he almost thought they moved, though he had no objective evidence. A single dark blue oval showed near the horizon in what he thought of as the northern hemisphere. The planet was not visibly oblate, yet his eye filled in what he thought was there. He imagined a celestial pair of hands compressing the planet so that its midriff bulged, the belt taut.

Now he studied the surrounding “sky.” It was seemingly sunless, with fiercely bright and crowded stars. The largest object, apart from Neptune itself, was a disk several diameters to the left.

“Triton,” Afra said, observing the direction of his glance. “Neptune’s major moon. There’s a smaller one, Nereid, that’s farther out than we are now. Nereid’s orbit is cometlike; very unusual for a planetary satellite. Of course, there may be other moons we haven’t discovered yet; new ones keep popping up around the major planets.”

“This is all very interesting,” Beatryx said, obviously only marginally interested. Ivo suspected that she still suffered from the shock of the melting procedure, but tended to internalize it. “But now that we’re here, what do we do?”

No one answered. Neptune loomed larger already, green monarch of the sea of space around them.

“It looks so big,” Beatryx said. “And — wild. Are you sure it’s safe?”

Groton smiled. “Neptune is seventeen or eighteen times as massive as Earth, but it is a lot less dense. What we see is not really the surface of the planet — it is the cloud cover. So it is large and wild, but don’t worry — we won’t try to land on it. We’ll take up orbit around it.”

“We’ll just love a year of free-fall,” Afra said.

Ivo watched the crumbs of their meal floating elusively in the currents of the forced-air circulation and knew what she meant. Free-fall was fun to visit, but not to stay. The space was too confined for long-term residence of four people, and muscles would atrophy in weightlessness if the body didn’t malfunction in other ways first. And keeping Brad aerated yet contained would be tedious, perhaps dangerous. The melting was supposed to be a high-gravity alleviant, and might be vulnerable to prolonged weightlessness.

No — an orbit around Neptune was no answer.

“How about Triton?” Groton said. “It’s about the size and mass of Mercury, I understand. Surface gravity should be about a quarter Earth-normal, and there might even be a little atmosphere. We’ll need a base of operations, if only to process hydrogen for the tanks. And it would be fairly simple to intercept Triton at this angle, since we’re coming up behind it.”

“That does sound very nice,” Beatryx said.

Groton was just warming up. “Now as I see it, our original purpose was to rescue the macroscope from deactivation or worse by the UN. To accomplish this it was necessary to remove the instrument from the immediate vicinity of Earth in a hurry. This much has been accomplished. Our main responsibility now is to keep ourselves advised of the situation at home, and to be ready to return the scope when the time is appropriate. Meanwhile, we can utilize the scope for reco

Ivo smiled. “You mean Super-Duper Poo—”

Afra quashed him with a glance. Oh, well. Call it reco

“What’s this?” Afra demanded. They looked at her, startled. She had apparently been reorganizing her purse during the preceding dialogue, and now was looking at a page of a little stenographer’s notebook.

Ivo saw strange squiggles on the sheet.

“It’s in stenotype — a script version,” Afra said. “I never heard of such a thing! I use Gregg.”

“Oh, shorthand,” Groton said. “Can you make it out?”

Afra concentrated on the half-familiar symbols. “It doesn’t make much sense. It says ‘My pawn is pi

“Another message from Schön!” Beatryx exclaimed.

“He must have planted notes all over the station,” Groton said. “That polyglot, then the Neptune-symbol, and now this. He could have written them all at once and distributed them for us to find randomly—”