Iris

by William Barton

  Iris

  William Barton

  Michael Capobianco

  IRIS

  WILLIAM BARTON and MICHAEL CAPOBIANCO

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS, INC.

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1990 by William Barton and Michael Capobianco

  Cover art by Chris Moore

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-32501

  ISBN: 0-380-73038-3

  www.avonbooks.com/eos

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Avon Books, Inc.

  First Avon Eos Printing: September 1999

  AVON EOS TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES. MARCA REOISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  WCD 10 98765432

  Dedicated to

  The Voyager 2 Computer Command Subsystem

  Ave atque vale

  The Falsehood that exalts we cherish more

  Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

  —pushkin

  IRIS

  ONE

  Load. Uplink. Begin.

  Achmet Aziz el-Tabari, who called himself Demogorgon the Illimitor Artist, was on his knees before Brendan Sealock, scientist, engineer, gladiator. . . . Cultural labels made a miasma between them that was too thick to be thrust aside. It made them things, defying understanding. He looked up at the man. He looked at the curly, dirty, reddish-blond hair, the acrid green eyes almost hidden in deep, dark wells beneath shaggy brows, at the broad face, with its high, heavy cheekbones, at the flattened nose, the wide, frowning mouth framed with shadowy lines, and the massive jaw. He looked at the thick neck above powerful, rounded shoulders, the heavily muscled chest, and the broad waist with its solid stomach, lightly padded with fat. He looked at the long arms, roped with vein-netted muscles that stood out like an anatomical chart. He ran his hands over the corded tree-trunk legs through a thin layer of light cloth.

  So ... His own voice whispered to him from far away, rhyming rhymes, naming names. Culture, it said, and tradition . . . "Brendan. Tell me again why you won't do anything with me?" The man smiled faintly. "You're the faggot here, not me. Besides, I'm your . . . what is it you call me?"

  "You're my 'Great Dark Man,' Brendan. It's from a book that was written more than a hundred and fifty years ago."

  "Yeah." He laced his fingers through Demogorgon's coarse black hair and jammed his crotch forward into the man's face. "So get to work."

  As the man's sharp nose began to jab rhythmically against his abdomen, Sealock settled back to look out through the deopaqued section of wall opposite him. Iris was a bright light in the star-sequined perpetual night and it attracted a deep longing in him, the way so many other things had in the past. Perhaps this too would be a disappointment—but he had to go on trying until success or death made an end to things. Why do they want me to feel their pain? he wondered. Isn't it enough that I feel my own?

  Against a rising tide of orgasmic inevitability, he saw images of himself in the prize ring, bloodying opponents, and this was supplanted by the dark, carved-ivory face of Ariane Methol. Almost alone, he thought. Almost, but not quite.

  Sealock wiped the sweat from his brow, running blunt fingers through the dense snarls of his own hair, and once again felt the twelve sockets embedded in his skull.

  Dreams without number laid themselves down in concentric tracks throughout John Cornwell's mind. Music . . . Not music, just the idea of music. The effect alone, hot the thing itself. It was 2097 and now humankind was irrevocably changed. Those manifestations of the physical world that had entertained and ravaged people were ebbing away, becoming less important. Reality had become an eerie technological ocean, and mankind a frenzied swimmer in its electronic deeps. Only a little more than a generation before, an easy and acceptable means of plugging human minds into the already vast information processing and retrieval networks had been invented. Its ramifications were universal and its tendrils extended into virtually every phase of human endeavor. Comnet had been born in 2063. It was the ultimate networking system, finishing off a task begun over a century before, and it grew effortlessly until it had engulfed the world. Parents had lived their lives mediated by computers, voice actuators, and 3V screens, long accustomed to the devices that surrounded them, but the children . . . increasingly, humanity lived with its minds in the wires, and the momentum of change followed a quickening tempo.

  For now, men and women might live lives recognizable to their ancestors. Similar things would make them unhappy, similar things would seem unpleasant; but life was changing. A tender trap was engulfing them, drawing the subjective world in step by step, with neither will nor collective acknowledgment. The mental echoes of the last barrage went away, and John relaxed, disengaging from RedShipnet, his composition program. He energized his suit and the em-field stuck him to his chair with a creaky plop. His new piece, the induction-music suite Rose of Ash, was finished. Tallish and wiry, Cornwell's tonus was a testament to the procedures they had used to cope with almost two years of weightlessness. His face was slightly oriental, with dark brown eyes and a strong chin that showed his mixed heritage. His great-grandmother had been an Innuit from the Baffin region of the Canadian Archipelago. His hair was black, cut short enough for the pate to show through and lighten it. He was wearing red fullbodies, with a Deepstar/Iris logo on the chest. Around his head was a metal diadem holding an array of focus nodes for induction transfer and his Shipnet interface. Induction music, a subset of the induced entertainment industry that had brought him fame and a vast fortune, was something more than audio music and, for many, something less. A more appropriate term might have been "data music."

  Although most 'net access was via a feed to the various sensory nexi, it was sometimes useful to choose an adaptable area in the subdominant parietal lobe and feed it data. He had been one of the first to realize that this data feed was accompanied by certain emotions, analogous to those of music input. The bandwidth for induction music was much greater and there was some spatial perception within the sequential flow. To his astonishment, he'd found that most people responded strongly to his "music." An industry and an art had been born. The playback of the music had brought up strange emotions in him. Right there, in the middle of it, was his breakup with Beth. They had been acting the part of strangers now for months, yet in the limited confines of the Command Module they saw each other constantly. It was all too much for him. Everything was mutating into the opposite of what he wanted.

  There was a tiny crackle of static and the hatch of his personal compartment opened into four spreading segments which retracted into the bulkhead. Jana Li Hu, Chinese and naked, appeared in the entrance. "Finished?"

  He phased back into Shipnet and gave the command to transmit. "It should get there in six hours or so. I've got the best scramble money can buy, but circpirates'll probably get it anyway. What's up?" Hu pushed her way into the room, a baby crawling in three dimensions. She was short and built compactly. Her face was central Chinese: round, with high cheekbones and a small, flat nose. A dull black, 50 cm. ponytail floated behind her head. Cornwell looked into her eyes and noticed, for the thousandth time, a hard, unchanging quality that unnerved him. This woman was his new girlfriend?

  "Why do you care about piracy?" she said. "You've said yourself that money will have no real use where we're going. Residuals on Triton alone will buy all the data we'll ever need." She assumed a stable float about two m
eters over his head, with her body at a forty-five-degree angle to his own. Normally self-conscious, she was playing a little game. "Turnaround's coming." He called up the present high-mag view of Iris and accessed pertinent data concerning the voyage. The information flowed via electromagnetic induction to the optical centers of his brain and was presented to him in a complex visual array, superimposed over his view of the room like a fantastic, detailed afterimage.

  The sight of the planet was riveting. Every time he looked at it, Cornwell was amazed by the continually more resolved image. As with Luna, there was something that fought against seeing it as a sphere. It was simply a white circle, three-banded, surrounded by a dim, blue disk maybe a diameter bigger, and cut by the ever more obvious ring, which, since they were coming in close to its plane, was just a thin line. The ring shadow was obliterated somewhere in the immense blue atmosphere and never made it to the "surface."

  He scanned the data coming out in the lower right-hand segment of his vision field, not feeling the muscles of his eyes move, yet not aware of the projection's unreality. They were 41.947 AU from Sol and 0.229 AU from Iris. Here, far from the sun, it was dark, lonely, and cold. They might just as well be in the depths of interstellar space.

  The numbers told the story. It was 701.891 days since they'd detached their little ship from the Jovian transport Camelopardalis and 696.668 days since they'd shut down Deep-star's engine. The ship would soon be turned around to fire the heavy-ion reaction drive for Iridean orbital injection. "It's just about ten hours and forty-one minutes away." Computers bred precision; language didn't.

  "I can't believe the trip's finally ending," said Hu, clinging to a no-g handhold on the back edge of a console/desk. "I feel like the world is coming to an end."

  John nodded slowly. "That's a thing about long trips I first realized when I was about twelve. When a journey ends, it's like a confirmation your life will end too. I tried to deal with that a little bit in Rose." Jana seemed not to be listening. "The parameters for the satellites are scary," she said. "Despite what theory predicts, bodies this volatile-rich are something new."

  "We've been through this all before."

  "I'm just trying to tell you," she said, "I can't certify that we'll be safe." Cornwell wanted to reach out and make contact, but something held him back. The subject was raised and the conversation had to be finished. "We've discussed the problems of trying to build on highly volatile material. We're going to need an area of water-ice, and Ocypete's huge mare—"

  "Ocellus."

  "Ocellus, bull's-eye, basin, whatever you want to call it. Even though it's buried under a thin regolith of neon ice, I've seen your analysis of how it was produced. It looks like a good place to me."

  "The ocellus is an anomaly, John. It shouldn't be there. I can explain it, sure enough; but I have to make up an extremely unlikely scenario to do so." She pulled herself down into his reference vertical.

  "We've got the equipment to handle a large uncertainty. You know that." Jana shook her head and reached out, caressing John's neck. "I know it ... but I've been running this garbage through my head over and over, ever since we passed by Triton for this . . . adventure. It's an oddness in the pit of my stomach."

  Cornwell laughed and released himself from the em-field. He gave the woman a push and then launched himself after her. She sailed past his sleeping module and lodged in a corner, catching hold of the resilient, almost mushy wall surface. Ducking under his embrace, she leaped away, and they caromed about until he had her cornered. He grabbed her by both arms and was, as always, surprised to find that she wasn't joking, she was fighting for real.

  A small fist, half balled, caught him on the cheek, spinning them slowly in opposite directions. "Stop it!" he said, helplessly hanging near her, unable to reach a wall. "What's the matter with you?" Jana's face, half wild, slowly moderated, softened. She reached out for a handhold, then for him, steadying, a delicate touch. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know. I guess I do need you." She pulled on his hand, drawing them together.

  He looked into her face, trying to fathom whatever it was that he saw there. What to say? Nothing. John felt a little pang of self-dread. Whatever came out next, it would lack the tone, timbre, and meaning that should be there. He tried. "Isn't this what we left Earth for—uncertainty? Maybe it's an adventure, maybe not. No matter what you and the others think, we are doing something. Triton would have been one thing—a fairly new colony at the edge of terrestrial influence —but we'll be the first at Iris. . . ." The little line editor in his head was agonizing over this. Their interaction was following its own course, beyond his understanding. He began to feel aroused. "In a way we'll be the first people to reach another star, if you want to call it that. Doesn't that make you want to stop and say, 'Gee whiz,' or something?" He wanted to cringe, to laugh at himself and give up the ghost of effort. Talk was only a pleasant noise, after all, and he was already working his way downward, touching her, brushing at the nearly invisible hairs on her back and buttocks. The attention, the touching were communication, very likely what she really wanted. Things were hard to see in the absence of real closeness. The thought snagged at him, briefly. Downlink Rapport was available, but these people shied away, always pulled back from the brink. It was too personal. Too close.

  Cornwell sighed. This relationship had fallen into a pattern that mirrored what had developed among the ten passengers aboard Deepstar. He pleasured her, yes, as she wished, and got very little in return, save for her presence in his life as a confidante. She acted the part of his friend, but he doubted whether she was capable of such a thing. In the void that had formed after he and Beth broke up, he had wanted Jana, and had gotten her. . . .

  She controlled the sex and had aversions to many things, penetration perhaps not the least of them. His enjoyment would be limited. Sometimes, in the midst of her strange, hoarse cries, he would have an idea for a data-motif.

  Suddenly the feelings that Rose had brought came again, more strongly. He remembered the last time he and Beth had made love. Her response to him, though much diminishedfrom the early days back in CFE, was still almost magical. He missed her. Guiltily, he called up an image of her, all the while caressing Hu.

  Elizabeth Toussaint's dark, oval face hung before him in a kind of timeless space, framed by small black ringlets, barely showing the diagonal cheek lines that, from certain angles, gave her a rare beauty. She had a broad, pixy-like nose and her eyes, dark with cosmetic mystery, were large and happy. Looking at this image, he couldn't help but notice that her chin was weak and her pouting lips over-large. The tenderness gave way to cold anger. It was her fault. The image winked out. Enjoying the feel of the sheet of warm rubber that was her skin, he kissed Jana's stomach, stroked her hips, her thighs, and went on.

  In his compartment, Harmon Prynne lay meshed in the em-field of his bed, like a fly trapped on the surface scum of a butterscotch pudding. He was a delicate-seeming man, though robust; Irish-looking, with reddish-orange hair and freckles. His pale blue eyes were shiny and bloodshot. He was a mere technician, universally regarded as the stupidest person on the ship, and everyone liked him. Through his Shipnet connection, he watched what transpired in a sparsely appointed room. It was eavesdropping, easy to do, hard to resist.

  Two people were locked together, tumbling end over end in the absence of gravity. The circumstances made their nudity all the more interesting. One was Vana Berenguer, a short, thick-waisted woman with swarthy skin and long clouds of coarse dark hair. The other, Temujin Krzakwa, was tall, fat, and hairy, with an immense curly beard the color of brown sand that flowed luxuriantly around the woman's thighs. Their mismatched heights and Krzakwa's paunch made it difficult for the woman to reach him. Prynne shut his eyes and tried to make the image go away, but it wouldn't. He thought the words

  "channel down," and, one by one, images of amazing vividness but little or no portent filled his brain. He stopped at an image that reminded him of his home in Florida. A quiet,
sun-washed shore presented itself, and a turquoise-blue sea rolled into foam upon it. The vantage point was maybe five meters in the air and slightly inshore, and here there was another couple making love. They were different . . . somehow cleaner. And yet, as they held each other and looked out at a sunrise that he could see in their eyes, he couldn't stand to watch anymore. He shut his eyes again, hard, and said, "Off," this time vocally. As the image died, he felt globules of water hanging without weight on his eyelashes, making them clump together.

  Aksinia Ockels put down her "book," a loosely bound sheaf of pages she'd had printed up, and took a gulp of the smoky creosote called Lapsang Souchong . She was a tall woman, light-complexioned, and had a rather strange face, flat, square-jawed, with a ski-jump nose. Her hair was a mousy brown, loosely curled, and she had cheeks that were often naturally flushed. The taste of the tea never failed to call up visions of her days living at the Hotel Lisboa , reading book after book on the beach, burning despite generous applications of paba , and waiting endlessly for her mother to decide to leave. At twelve, she was not yet pubescent, and the world seemed clean and fantastic. The years she had spent in schoolplant were far in the past and life had been without unpleasant intimations.

  For the thousandth time she wondered, How did I get here?

  She remembered the quick and cumulative wilting of her world-view during the following years. When she met Daniel, and he'd deflowered her in Paris Commune, at thirteen, she had substituted love for happiness. When it didn't last, she had nothing. Her wandering had started only after many hideous, interminable shouting matches with her parents, and in the many years since then she'd lived amicably, alone. Only Beta-2, a complex brain-chemical derivative, supplied her with the inner vision she'd had as a child. And the time had come for her shot.

  The apothecary mounted in her mag case made a tinychirring noise and burped forth a blistersac containing her standard dose of Beta-2. For the briefest moment she beheld the capsule, regretting the social side effects that had come with her addiction. Anticipation coursed along her nerves, a velvet static electricity.