Iris

by William Barton

  Shut up in his chamber, Demogorgon prepared for masturbation. It was a form of the Illimitor art, in fact, the very thing that had led him to this new form of expression. Though the full complexity of the Illimitor World, the world of Arhos, of Mereqxi, Larys, and the Kaimodrang Empire, took Tri-vesigesimal, this was simple enough to be handled by duodecimal subunits of the 'net. He could have entered via circlet, he supposed, but somehow preferred to use an induction lead. The images, the feelings, were crisper.

  As he plugged in a wall-tap, Demogorgon was amused, remembering Brendan's inevitable pun about

  "jacking off." New meanings to old words . . .

  He submerged.

  In a soft, rumpled bed of silken sheets he was joined by two other people, abstracted from their normal functioning as denizens of Arhos. One was a slim, magnetic presence, a man, Chisuat Raabo, ebon-haired and ethereal, his mate in the Land of Kings. The other was a woman, Piruat Nahuaa , pale blond, thin and boyish-looking, the swell of her breasts almost nonexistent, her pubic hair so fine and transparent as to give her a preadolescent look. But for coloration, the two might have been taken for brother and sister. They were both very young.

  In the Jeweled City on the Mountain, at the place where the skies converged, it was the Soldier's Way—to have a bisexual lover and, with him, a female counterpart, an heir-maker. . . . They lay tangled together in a joyous maze of limbs, running their hands over smooth, warm flesh, inhaling the tactile perfumes that this world made; and the man and woman paidspecial attention to the muscular body that was so much a part of Demogorgon's persona here. . . . When Raabo's huge penis rose, they attacked it together with an avid, ferocious hunger. Slowly, Demogorgon felt his soul begin to spread out, meshing with his lovers, enveloping them, and the usual thoughts were still there:

  With Comnet, he need never be alone. What could the world have been like, not so long ago, before the advent of this alternative reality, before he had created it? How had he lived? Just before a sensory explosion took his mind away, he tried to imagine life without this ready availability of human contact; to imagine a world where he couldn't plug in and reach out for love.

  He failed.

  Deepstarfell on a long, complex curve around Iris and back up into space, shedding many thousands of metric tons of fuel and several hundred kilometers per second of relative velocity. The Element 196

  had been stored in an energy-stabilized form resembling degenerate matter, compressed into a very small volume, but nothing could alter its mass, or the necessity of expending it. Newton always won out in the end, though centuries of science and engineering had taken some of the sting from his fiats. The ship threaded under Iris' ring, its heavy-ion drive vaporizing a path through the downward-spiraling ice particles that ever so slowly depleted the structure, and swept just a few hundred kilometers above a bellying azure sky. When they approached apirideon , not far from Ocypete itself, they kept the dense beam oriented to one side of their destination, avoiding damage to their future home. The plume of intense sub-c radiation stabbed toward interstellar space and was gone. A properly instrumented observer many parsecs away and generations removed would have noticed it, since these bursts of semicoherent energy emerging from the Solar System advertised the presence of Man as never before.

  Deepstartook up a vastly elongated orbit around Iris that would evolve, via the judicious expenditure of Hyloxso, into a nearly circular ellipse of some hundred and eighty kilometers' radius about Ocypete. Ariane and Brendan disengaged from the control subprogram of Shipnet, though the latter still maintained a lesser link to keep an eye on their progress. The common room was completely destructured now, a giant padded cell, and they were all gathered to one side, where, punctuated by the hatches of personal compartments, a hundred and twenty degrees of wall had been made transparent. Beyond that wall the dim, gray sphere of Ocypete loomed, no longer an idea, no longer an astronomical body, but a place. The world that turned slowly below was a sea of low-walled craters, a vast marsh of ancient, partially healed wounds in a circular shield of chemical ice. They lay shoulder to shoulder, overlapping, defacing one another, craters within craters like beer-glass rings on a veined marble bar. If there had been other processes involved in the making of this surface, they had left no evidence.

  "This is the leading hemisphere," said Jana, "long gardened by impacts and mantled with the former atmosphere."

  Demogorgon looked out on Iris III from fathomless dark eyes and thought, Is this a land for mystic adventure? No . . . yes. He didn't know, but it did have a deadly sameness about it that disturbed him. Was this all there was?

  As if to answer his unspoken question, he noticed a bright, crack-reticulated bulge creeping over the eastern limb. Perhaps there will be something, he thought.

  The bright cracks gave way to a darker, smoother terrain that came creeping over the edge of Ocypete. Somewhat broken and jumbled, it was essentially crater free. As they watched, this morphology grew more uniform, a vast, flat plain, and they could see the edges of it curving back to form the great basin that dominated the little moon's surface.

  "Mare Nostrum," murmured Demogorgon. "Like the sunrise."

  "And so you've named our new home," said Beth.

  Jana said, "The official policy is that we must submit names for the most prominent features. If you prefer, I will name the rest...."

  "This place would be a lot of fun if you could get into pill-mixers' Latin," said Prynne.

  "Or if you were one of those demented nomenclature addicts," said Jana. "Do you know there are over four million named features in the Solar System? And that's not counting Earth. It's become an onerous task."

  "If you want," said Demogorgon, looking intently at her, "I've developed several self-consistent mythologies for my Illimitor art. You're welcome to use them."

  Jana's gaze shifted back to Ocypete. "It's an idea."

  Brendan sighed and stretched, rubbing his eyes. "Come on, shitheads, it's time. Let's get down there." Krzakwa grinned. " 'Shitheads,' he says . . . you want to fly this monster or shall I?"

  "Yeah," said Sealock. "Bend over, Tem. I'll drive you home." They plugged into Shipnet and were gone.

  In a little while, no more than a hundred minutes, they were in a perfectly circular orbit some ten kilometers above the fast-moving craterscape. Great broken features, too complex to absorb fully, slid past quickly, frictionlessly, and the clear wall again drew spectators. Suddenly the fretted terrain that surrounded the water ocellus broke into their view, and then the giant basin swept under them like a convex serving dish, featureless save for a few wandering rilles. After a few more moments Jana pointed out shadows on the mare. Someone called up a higher gain on the window optics and a cluster of translucent, dark-nippled cones filled the view.

  "They look like half-melted volcanoes," said Vana.

  Hu called for a still closer view, with definition precise enough to see the summit openings for what they were. She stared in silence, then said, "Not impossible. Once the meltwater in the ocellus crusted over, the sea below could have behaved as a magma source, though erupting liquid water, even at these temperatures, is too thin to pile up into domes. More likely some kind of slurry extrusion." Deepstardropped out of the black sky on a downward-pointing fountain of pale yellow fire. It followed a long arc of lessening transverse motion and, when the last of it was gone, went high-gate, slipping vertically toward the smooth, shining ice of the bright mare basin. In the end the ship hovered a thousand meters above the surface, just for a moment, then the Hyloxso engines shut down and the fire was replaced by a much cooler jet of hydrogen. They descended further.

  There was still too much heat to be trusted. At one hundred meters the throttle valves closed entirely, and they fell.

  The gravity gradient of this small world was insignificant, but inertia made a display of the impact nonetheless. The ship bounced high, more than double its own length, kept erect by its gyros and the intermittent thud of RCS thrusters. I
t floated down, rebounded once more, and finally came to rest on the ice. It teetered just a bit on its splay of strut-legs and then was still. To those within, pinioned to the soft plastic floor of the common room by their em-suits, their arrival on Ocypete came with a noise like a small car being eaten by a train. After the second jolt, all was silent save for the faint pings of stressed metal resuming its shape in the crystalline latticework.

  "Son of a bitch," said Cornwell, "we're here."

  Sealock popped the plugs from his head and said, "No shit." They went to the window and looked out.

  TWO

  John Cornwell stood in the airlock and suited up. He pulled on the baggy red coverall and crimped shut the helmet, now a floppy, transparent hood. Checking himself in the safety mirror, he had to laugh. He looked like an anorexic Santa Claus. He touched a control node at his waist, and the fabric leaped up against his skin, shrink-wrapping him in an elastic pressure bandage. The hood inflated into a hard, spherical bubble.

  The mirror now showed him thin, clad in form-fitting scarlet, an archetypal spaceman. Lifesystems was a small cylinder on one hip, containing a thermal regulator and an oxygen reserve held in a Hyloxso-like matrix sufficient for a ten-hour stay outside. Krzakwa had explained that it even contained a powerful gyro platform. It was a marvel of miniaturization beyond his powers of imagination, but it worked. There had been much discussion about the difficulties imposed by an environment that averaged only 25 degrees Kelvin during the daytime, but Tem had quickly dispelled their fears with a lecture on the subject. The problem was not one of dissipating heat, as was the case in the inner Solar System, but of maintaining a core of 40 degrees C simultaneously with a suit exterior temperature that retained full flexibility. Less than 450 kcal/hr was required, easily generated by the suit's sophisticated six-phase battery. Standing on the surface, with both feet in contact with the ice, added only another 10 kcal/hr or so to the total. Even though he admitted that lying down on the surface for long periods might not be wise, it took Krzakwa awhile to convince the less scientific members of the crew that "common-sense" notions of thermodynamics were useless.

  "This is John. Do you read me?"

  Prynne said, "Yes. Go on out. We're all waiting."

  The privilege of being first out had gone to John by virtue of his titular leadership and the others'

  insistence. John sent a command to Shipnet and the air whispered out through a valve. When it was gone, things looked no different, but he knew that he was in a lethal environment. He shivered. Another thought brought the hatch to life, and it irised open to show him the ruler-straight edge between dim gray ice and starry night. On the girders framing the airlock there was a fine white dust. The exhaust air had frozen. OK, he thought. So it's that cold.

  Sixty meters separated him from the ground, and for a moment he considered jumping. His calculator mused: With a surface gravity of 0.027g, he would land with approximately the force of a five-foot fall on Earth. That might hurt, and he certainly wouldn't be able to jump back up. . . .

  "Hey. How am I supposed to get down?" he asked. Insofar as he had been part of the design team for Deepstar, this was one consideration that he'd never heard mentioned. There were handholds studding the ion drive unit, and, if it came to that, they would have to do. It all seemed dangerous. Ariane's voice was in his head. "Sorry. There's a catwalk on the vertex of the frame between the Hyloxso matrix and one of the water tanks. It leads as far as the engine-mountstructure. From there, you can either climb down a landing strut or jump."

  He put a hand on the edge of the hatch and stepped out on the thick metal meshwork that formed the collar holding the CM in place, then looked down. This is foolish, he thought. I'm acting like this is Earth. Even if I fall, there won't be any damage. I could even land on my head! The helmet would protect me. The words rang hollow. It still looked like a deadly sixty-meter drop.

  He stepped down, feeling for a foothold, and descended. Finally he came to the complex quadrigram that bound together the far end of the craft. From there it was a matter of leaping the remaining ten meters, which he did. The fall took a perceptibly long time and resulted in only a modest jar. When his feet touched the ice he felt his skin grow warm as the suit's thermostasis system came on. A shimmering, half-seen mist appeared for a moment around his feet, then instantly dissipated, carrying with it some residual heat that Deepstar's structure had radiated onto his exterior. Concentrating on the actual process of getting down, he had forgotten about the ceremony of arrival on this alien world, of being the first man to set foot on what was, in effect, a planet of another solar system. Whatever possible dignity or formality the moment called for was gone. The words he'd used to begin Triton came into his mind, and he spoke them:

  When the worlds, too few, have been walked; When the outcome is written on the walls of the wind; Come with me, leave the net . . .

  We'll begin again.

  Smelling the soft tang of his sweat, he flexed the material of a glove and rubbed his thumb against his fingertips. Though the increased girth of his hand felt clumsy, feeling was hardly impaired at all. It took an effort of will to come to grips with the intensely different conditions that that thin barrier separated. The material of his bubble helmet was nohindrance at all to seeing. The enormity of the world, even with Ocypete's close horizon, filled him.

  The surface of the ocellus was more pristine and flat than he could have imagined. The ice was a dim, white sheet, like linen, stretching out in a wrinkleless vista. Triton would have been nothing like this.

  "John? Here's something peculiar for you." Ariane's voice interrupted his meditations. The 3V image of a strange bluish blanket retreating appeared, almost like an ocean breaker in reverse, perhaps a meter deep. The trailing edge of the blanket crumpled and shrank in on itself in a fast rush of sublimation, leaving flat ice, like that on which he stood.

  Hu's voice accompanied the vision. "That, John, is the retreat of the regolith; mostly neon but some deuterium as well. Trace amounts of methane, CO, and argon are being left behind. The driving force was our infrared output. It should stop well beyond the horizon, maybe half a myriameter from here. The neon was very close to its sublimation point even before we landed." Harmon said, "I guess that's a good indication of what would've happened if we'd tried to land in the highlands."

  Cornwell was struck by a sense of amazement. Of such insubstantial stuff was this world made! He looked up and traced a few constellations in the sky, almost hidden in the thousands of dimmer stars not visible from the surface of Earth. Draco, Cassiopeia, the Great Bear; they were still there, friends that he'd made in childhood. He felt his composure returning. There was some continuity, after all. Iris hung some fifty degrees above the eastern horizon. It was close to four degrees across, eight times the size of the full Moon seen from Earth, and it dominated the sky like a huge jewel, in first impression like a cat's-eye sapphire. Peering more closely, however, it looked more like a bright fingernail paring nestled in a dim blue sphere, its nightside obliterated by atmospheric scattering. In the close, sparkling blackness there were two very tiny crescents, Podarge and Aello, ever falling and escaping in the balanced dance of orbital mechanics. The sun was a blinding tick near the arrow point of the barely visible ring.

  The world in the sky surpassed by far his expectations. Nothing in the Solar System combined the stark solidity and ethereal beauty of Iris.

  Cornwell turned away. He was not here just to sightsee. "Ariane, would you monitor this transmission and see that I get it right?"

  Upon receiving an affirmative, he began: "Under the aegis of the Pansolar Conventions, edition 2067, specifically Paragraph N6of the Colonizing, Homesteading, and Exploring Guidelines, I claim Ocypete homesteading guarantees for the Deepstar Company: full CIDs to follow proclamation. Total travel distance was 6.2977 terameters; diameter of homestead world is 1.923 megameters. Crew homesteads to be apportioned alphabetically, spokewise from longitude 311.57756 defined from sub-Iris point
at periastron, and latitude 12.6546, defined from equator at 2097.664 years."

  "It was successfully recorded and transmitted, John," said Ariane. "I guess that makes us permanent." The man looked back at Deepstar. Clinging to a girder far above, Sealock and Krzakwa, clad in bulky powered worksuits that augmented their strength and made them nearly invulnerable, were already working on opening one of the container modules. They seemed intent on the business at hand, but one of them paused to wave. He waved back.

  Finally, suddenly, something like happiness spilled over him. He activated the gyro on his belt and, with a hard kick, jumped into the star-prickled sky. There was little sensation of motion as the ground receded, dreamlike. In a huge arc, he flew across the steely white, frozen sea, head kept up by the gyro, and, after a time sufficient to fully experience the sensation, he landed with a jolt a full twenty-five meters from his starting point.

  A few more jumps put him a great distance across the ice, though its featurelessness provided no real indication as to how far. He turned back and was surprised to see Deepstar shrunken considerably, almost halfway to the horizon. This time he pushed harder, back toward the ship, each minute-long leap gaining a little height and more speed. With no way to stop quickly, he bypassed his goal, slowing himself in aseries of jumps, until he came to a stop. He made his way back in little tiptoeing hops, covering two meters at a time.

  With his earlier acrophobia gone, climbing the structure of the ship was a simple matter of swinging from girder to girder, brachiating upward. Soon he was bark on the platform from which he had looked down so cautiously before. The two inhabited worksuits saluted him. Their thick, flexible joints segmented the grayish, stove-bellied exoskeletons into small, mostly cylindrical components. Since the suits had no faceplates, relying on four 3V photorecorder cells mounted at ninety-degree intervals about the helmet canister, he could not distinguish who was inside. A quick look into Shipnet's Status Registers told him what he wanted to know.