Sealock wasn't smiling, not even his usual contemptuous smirk, as he said, "I imagine we all saw this coming. You're dissatisfied with your life. Now you want to tinker with the rest of us. . . ." Taken aback, John started to say something, but another voice interrupted.
"It's just boredom!" said Harmon Prynne.
By this time Aksinia had broken out of whatever trance state was keeping her quiet, and she reacted to the previous remark. "Come on, Brendan. He's right, of course. We're turning into a bunch of jerks. It seems to me that not one of us has come to grips with the reality of this situation."
"Reality?What the hell ..." Sealock grinned at her and shook his head. "I wonder how many of you really understand your own perceptions?" He nodded at Prynne. "It's not boredom, and I refuse to speculate on the nature of someone's reality perception. . . . Sure, there's a lot of friction here. Some of it comes from an unwillingness to recognize that different people have different interests. Sometimes, when I say something, even something I'm supposed to be an expert in, people act like it's some kind of personal reproach."
"Maybe it's the way you do it," said Prynne. "You make me feel like shit sometimes."
"That's exactly it. Your feelings are magnified by what you imagine other people think. That doesn't need to happen." John gave Sealock a pained look. "That's your idea of a joke, I suppose. . . . Look, certain individuals may or may not be the primary instigators of ill feeling on Deepstar. Nonetheless, every one of us has some kind of relationship with every other person here. Those relationships don't seem to be working too well.... I have to believe that we're all decent, intelligent people. We all have good traits. Why can't we all be friends?"
Sealock was staring at him, slit-eyed, face frozen. It was an unpleasant look to be the target of, and he wondered just what it was he'd said to offend the man this time.
"Are you sure that's what we want?" asked Vana.
Cornwell looked at her in surprise. Over the months, he'd come to see her as a pleasant, unmotivated individual who didn't know what she wanted, maybe didn't know much of anything. . . . She went on: "All this random fucking that we do is all right with me.... I mean, it's sort of my specialty, after all." She gazed at Sealock, whose expression was even more unreadable than it had been. "I really don't know how I'm supposed to feel toward you all. Sex is one thing, sure. It's fun. But . . . friends? I just don't know. You're all so ... demanding."
"Out of the mouths of babes . . ." muttered Sealock.
Ariane broke in. "I guess I agree with Vana. We know there's sex, and something people call love, whatever it may be, and an even more ethereal concept called friendship. . . . To integrate any two of these, much less all three, seems like a very large undertaking. I'd like to think it was possible, though."
"None of you talk about love very much," said Prynne "and, when you do, you act like it's something you can control. . . . But you can't."
"I'd settle for a little more sex, if I have any choice," said Sealock, but the others ignored him, and suddenly he was awash in a flood of unwanted memories. Krzakwa caught a bit of it through the Octadeka Prime control circuit that they shared and looked at him with astonishment. He was, apparently against his will, sending out an image of a day three years before, somewhere in Tupamaro Arcology, in Montevideo. Cornwell had come to discuss the Deepstar venture with Ariane Methol, and the two of them had gone to her room . . . And there was Sealock, pressed against a cool outside wall of the chamber, visualizing the woman locked in a tight embrace with the handsome musician. His eyes shut and he was riven by a dense bolt of hatred. The image snapped out, buried under a mountain of recontrol. No one else seemed to have caught it. Krzakwa shook off the alien emotions, still a little startled, and listened again.
"It seems to me," said John, "that the demands of keeping our friendships intact are very much increased by this pair-bonding stuff." He glanced involuntarily at Beth. "You can call it 'love' if you want to, but jealousies naturally arise from people forming couples and excluding others from their emotional life."
Beth spoke for the first time. "I have given all of this a lot of thought—all of you know what happened between John and me on the way out. You know he wanted to do Downlink Rapport with me, right?
Although I think that's going too far, there is much that he has said that I think is good. We planned this colony together, and the possibilities were so ... Look. It's simple enough—he wants us to drop all our preconceived notions of what the word 'relationship' means. You know: we should all be available for one another's needs, care for one another, sleep together. He wants us all to experience the kind of intense, pain-free friendship that he imagines must exist and, in so doing, share it with him . . . to triumph over despair. To do away with what he calls 'willful pain.' I wish him luck. I'd like a world like that."
"I guess this is kind of dumb," said Krzakwa, "but I do remember how it felt with my ex-wife, back in the beginning. I imagined that I could live selflessly. I suppose it was all some kind of a lie. It certainly didn't last long. But I don't have any objections to giving a more shared life a try. . . ." There might have been more, and John was feeling some small glimmerings of hope, but Ariane, who had been monitoring a timeline curve, suddenly said, "Now."
Sealock reintegrated with a start and said, "Right."
Krzakwa and Methol bowed their heads, their eyes going unfocused. Brendan smiled faintly, abstractedly, as if he'd thought of an amusing scene from the far past, and reached out to grasp their hands in a seance-like parody. They made a momentary tableau, motionless. His eyes rolled back, leaving the others to contend with the blank-eyed visage of a madman.
The air seemed to change. What had been " Trois Gymnopedies" gave way to a gurgling roar that was being transmitted through the structure of the ship. The ion drive was firing, allowing Deepstar to fall along a parabola around Iris.
Hand in hand, like three magic jinn on a flying rug, Methol, Sealock, and Krzakwa guided Deepstar toward its goal. In an earlier generation, a simpler age, it would have been done by the automatic will of preplanned machine action; but with Comnet's ship-borne child in their fingertips, they did it all themselves, consciously. At the close of the twenty-first century, still riding the bow shock of an ever growing distaste for what had been called "robots," what a computer program might have done was often accomplished by the linkage and direct extension of human minds. So they skittered along with their souls in the wires, in the polyphase modulation waveguides, and did what had to be done. It was precise, it was fast, and it was fun.
Why ride in a spaceship when you can be one?
To a hypothetical observer outside, the approach of Deepstar would have been impressive. Falling toward Iris across a star-stippled backdrop, the ship was just a subtly glowing maze: a regular array of girders and struts, studded heavilywith the metal and plastic polyhedrons of life system, cargo, and equipment. The blunt cylinders that were fuel tanks and Hyloxso propellant canisters threw back light in sharp lines and the whole was topped by a dark, squat canister that caught something of the dim, distant sun.
Suddenly there was a dazzling glare. A great actinic burst defaced the velvet darkness, diffuse and white around its periphery, tinged a hard red-violet in the opaque core. To a mind fed vaster quantities of semi-raw data, the fire haze would resolve itself into the blazing exhaust plume of a heavy-ion motor; a dense beam of Element 196 nuclei, almost coherent as it jetted from its emission nozzle at relativistic speed. It would fluoresce in the far ultraviolet as the artificial ions decayed into alpha particles only attoseconds after their impulse was spent. While the three engineers indulged in the almost gratuitous joy of flying the ship they had, in large measure, built, the others moved about in the sudden novelty of renewed gravity. Deepstar was decelerating at something like 0.1g, and it felt strange. They had been pressed to the floor by their responsive em-suits, but now they could feel organs settling and twinges from muscles that had had no natural exercise for almost two years
. The inertial field pulled at them like an alien presence. After the others wandered off, together and alone, Harmon Prynne stayed and, donning his circlet, adjusting it like some old fedora, tried to follow what was going on. He was a competent technician but, as what amounted to a household appliance repairman, he was far out of his depth even in the lowest reaches of Octa-deka Prime. Riding far above his usual duodecimal limits on the wings of a "Guardian Angel" monitor program, he was able to sample what it must be like to fly in space, a man/machine integration, with the power of an astrodyne in his muscles and the beautiful symmetry of physics doing a fire dance at his command. Somewhere, inside yet far away, he felt Ariane Methol's smile. As Brendan, Ariane, and Tem flew their ship down and around the solid-ringed, blue-haloed core of Iris, the stars clustered thickly about their heads, running in brightstreamers through their sun-blown hair, and the dusty darkness of the cold sky assumed a palpable texture as it brushed against their skins. They talked and joked and worked in this sea of midnight mist, while a forlorn, eagle-winged man circled far below.
Sealock reached down from the heights and, grappling with the mind of Harmon Prynne, hauled it up to sit among them. The man was terrified, gazing about at an unfamiliar landscape.
"Like the view?"
He nodded. "Yes." It seemed as if his words were reverberating among the worlds, thrilling him. From here, at the heart of the highest subnet the ship had to offer, he could feel all the workings of Deepstar relayed to him through an electronic complexity, almost as if they were parts of his own body. It had a certain familiarity, was like some aspects of the work he'd done in Florida, but with a subtlety and detail that he hadn't imagined would exist. In two years, no one had invited him here before. . . . He could feel Brendan's eyes on him somehow, cold, calculating . . . beady, glittering things that measured the content of his soul and found it lacking. . . .
"You want to fly this pile of shit?" A simple question, flat, it was said with condescension, perhaps with contempt, but underlying all that was a genuine, sympathetic offer.
Prynne's heart leaped, half fear and half elation. "Is that possible?"
"Sure." Sealock suddenly passed over the reins and the technician flew on, alone, become a stellar phoenix.
"Brendan!"Dim, in the background, that was Ariane's voice. It was a faint buzz-saw whine, a mosquito that he could ignore. "What're you doing? He can't handle that!"
"The fuck he can't. He can do whatever I say he can. Watch." Harmon Prynne flew on, his body, his nerves, his senses, grown into the subsystems of the ship. He knew nothing, needed to know nothing, with the 'net teaching him as each moment arrived, letting him forget the past. He soared, singing, before the world. A timeline of necessary proceduresappeared in the sky before him, but it was an alternative sky, not defacing the real sky, the ocean of stars through which he moved. Dimly, he could sense the presence of many such skies, differing presentations of the cosmos and information, to his expanded senses. He flew, imagining glory.
And somewhere, deep beneath it all, reason glimmered. Shipnet opened its senses and listened to the babble of human conversation, listened and learned. The machine mind didn't wish it had been consulted, for it had no sentience, only potential, and so had no wishes. It had, however, strong imperatives, preset urges that made it strive to fulfill its many goals. There was complexity here, and recursive logic that made up a capacity to create new goals out of synthesized data.
Deep within the ethereal circuitry of Shipnet little illegal modules stirred. Program fragments contrived in such a way as to escape the notice of the Contract Police assembled themselves bit by bit, as their functions were called upon by the crew of Deepstar. Finally the GAM-and-Redux monitor awoke, took stock of the situation, and spoke to Shipnet.
Much to its own surprise, Shipnet replied.
Satisfied, but not knowing why, Brendan said, "He'll be all right. Just stay with him, Ariane. Don't let the little goof get lost in the machinery. Hey, Tem. Let's take a break."
"Right."
The two men broke rapport and reappeared in their respective brains. They stretched, looking around, grimacing and blinking hard. Beth and Vana were still seated near the window. The stars appeared motionless, but the vast form of Iris, preceded by a sliver of shadow-sliced ring, had begun to creep over the sill.
They unplugged and leaped up to the kitchen, a feat made just a little more difficult by their small weight. They each drew a cup of black coffee, Sealock's flavored with anise, and dropped back to the floor below, calling up a pair of chairs as they did so. Brendan deopaqued another wall segment, this one framing a view of distant Ocypete's tiny disk.
They sipped at the hot, bitter drinks for a while, staring out
into the void, looking at their new home. Finally Brendan said, "You handle OdP pretty well." Tem looked at him, expressionless. "Is that so surprising? I have a higher influx potential than Ariane, you know."
"Yeah, but I rode after her with a GAM-and-Redux subplot until she'd been down all the essential pathways. You can't have done that—we both know that Luna's access to Comnet is strictly limited . . . unless you lied about never having been to Earth."
Tem smiled, showing a flash of teeth through the curly overfall of his untrimmed mustache. "Nope Lewislab—and old Maggie herself—trained me pretty well. Monitoring experiments like the Mini-null-omega Research Torus is, for the most part, like controlling Deepstar. Our tools aren't all that backward and there were several of us on the Development Team who probably would have qualified for MCD . . . if we'd been allowed access."
"Could be." Sealock nodded. "I don't know if you could've handled NYU at the same time, though. Free Cities can be pretty difficult." He looked pensive. "I understand there was a refugee from the Moon who took up residence in the Brosewere Barrens. One night they found him hanging from a street lamp, with a seppuku dagger rammed through his guts. Seemed kind of extreme to me." He grinned at Krzakwa. "Anyway ... I guess maybe we should've worked together a little more during this trip, huh?"
"I guess so." There seemed neither room nor need for further comment.
"Did you have any trouble on your first key-in? OdP's a lot different from Tri-vesigesimal ..." Krzakwa laughed. "I'll say! I almost discharged on my first downlink!" Interfacing with an unknown and complicated 'net element was an excellent way to die, come away with a drained cortex and burnt-out amygdala. "But the idea of basing a relinguistic setup on a prime numbers generator was —how shall I put it? Inspired."
The other man seemed pleased with this praise. "OdP was the Comnet Design Team's first project after I joined. Quite abaptism." He was silent for a moment, then said, "You haven't had a chance to key-in on Torus-alpha, have you?"
Tem shook his head, gesturing ironically. "How could I? I'd heard about it, of course. We drooled over the stuff you people were bringing out on Earth! How simple it would have made things for us! You should have heard the lame excuses the Lunar government kept pulling out of their fucking hats. . . . 'You can't enter a restricted experimental sector of Comnet without a license from the Contract Police. You can't get a license without coming to Earth for capacitance testing. . . .' And as an indentured engineer at Lewis-lab, I was 'needed' on the Moon into the foreseeable future." Bitterness gave an edge to his words. "Assholes . . ." He spat, then sighed. "Of course, contract-breakers don't get high-level licenses, even if they do avoid extradition and jail. Now I am forsworn. Unlike the rest of you, I can't go back home if this fails. Sure, the Police writ reaches only as far as the asteroids, but they have a mutual extradition treaty with the Jovian System MultiCorp . . . the outer worlds are my home for good." Sealock drained the last licoricy dregs of his coffee, enjoying the absence of the zero-g membrane for the first time in many months, then said, "Sounds like hard luck.... Look, I've got enough random-coplanar number-generators in my share of the hold to adapt Shipnet for Torus-alpha, once we're down on Ocypete. Want to get into it?"
"Sure. How's it work?"
"Well, it doesn't." Sealock crumpled his cup into a ball and grinned at the look on the other man's face.
"At least, not the way it's supposed to. No one could get any function at all above Aleph-null. It was hilarious when the news of our fine little piece of vaporware escaped. . . . Talk about humiliation! That's why I brought all that gear. I thought maybe I'd be able to get something working on my own, away from all the other assholes on the MCD."
"OK. Give me a rundown on the basics. And remember, I'm a physicist, not one of your ilk."
"At the level we'll be working, there's not a hell of a lot of difference." Soon the two of them were immersed in a discussion that no one else aboard would have been able to follow. After a while they plugged into a gang-tap and went into partial rapport for an exchange of concepts. The ship flew on without them.
Iris Page 3
