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should have been the most exciting time at DOS Center since the end of the Great War a quarter of a century ago, a far-off hand had been able to reach in and disrupt everything.
    Her mind repeated the same thing over and over again. Someone wanted David Lammerman back on Earth; someone was in a position to make it happen, whether David wanted to go or not. And for whatever strange reason, someone was no more willing than David to divulge his or her identity.
    * * *
    Twelve hours later, Camille was at the computer again. Part of her mind was locked into detailed fusion calculations. The process felt automatic, a hindbrain function. The rest of her, the deepest inner core, was elsewhere.
    David was going to Earth. More than that, he was going for reasons that he had not discussed, would not discuss— could not discuss? —with Camille.
    What now of her complacent belief that she knew David better than anyone else in the system? She knew his family background, his education, his likes and dislikes, his fantasies and phobias. And she didn't know him at all. Didn't understand why he was upset, why he was going to Earth, why he wouldn't talk about it. Was it—could it be—another woman? Even if it were, what right had she to be jealous, she who had held on so firmly to her own independence?
    Amid her emotional turmoil, the calculations went on and on in a complex dance between woman and machine. No one was there to observe the odd partnership and the way that the roles of the two shifted, minute by minute, into an unfathomable kind of oneness.

3 The Sun King
    By the time that he was twenty years old, Jon Perry had become convinced of two great truths: Life in the water world of the deep oceans made sense; it was logical and predictable and calm. And life in the world of air, on the surface or above it, was none of those things; it was random, baffling, and bizarre.
    Now he had new proofs of that. One of them walked half a dozen paces in front of him. He stared at the back of Nell Cotter's red-dyed head, gleaming in the benign December sun, and puzzled over the mystery of her presence. She had no right to be there. Not after what had happened in the deeps of the Pacific Antarctic Ridge.
    As the Spindrift had returned to the surface, neither of them had found more than a few words for the other. He was worried and perplexed by the sudden order to return to surface base without explanation, while she had been badly shaken by the shock of the seaquake, two kilometers down. She did not have Jon's confidence in the Spindrift , or in his powers as pilot and navigator. To him, the episode of the seafloor eruption was clear in memory but already remote in feeling, an experience seen through a glass that screened emotion. To Nell Cotter, the episode had been direct, new, and terrifying. Her euphoria when she realized that she was not going to die in the depths only emphasized that point.
    At the surface she had insisted that she had recorded everything that she needed. The taping of the video show was complete. When they parted at the jetty of the floating base, there had been no expectation on Jon's part that he would see her again. He had gone forward to make his report. And there he had encountered a typical piece of Admin irrationality. He was told that he was to head at once for Arenas, and the office of the undersecretary.
    Why? No one in the administrative offices of the base would or could say. That was baffling and disturbing enough.
    And the undersecretary ? What did a high-level politician have to do with Jon Perry, with hydrothermal vents and the study of benthic life forms? Absolutely nothing, according to the pinhead lieutenant who had given him his flight papers. But the man could provide no more information.
    Jon had slowly walked the length of the thousand-meter floating deck to the short, sloping runway and the waiting aircraft. And there, mystifyingly, Nell Cotter had appeared ten yards ahead of him. She was strolling