Iris

by William Barton

  Brendan Sealock, still habituated to postures he'd developed on Earth, sat on a structural girder. Krzakwa, used to Lunar conventions, remained on his feet. Despite all the bulk of the suits, they looked quite comfortable. Krzakwa turned, light on his feet but not fully adjusted to the suit's large moment of inertia.

  "Well, what can I do?" asked John.

  Sealock pointed toward the hatch of the airlock. "Stay out of the way. Tem and I and the work-packs will handle what needs to be done."

  John shrugged and said, "OK. I'm going in." He made his way through the airlock hatch and it closed behind him.

  Tem watched as the musician was occulted by the vignetting door. "I guess we'd better get busy, huh?"

  "Christ!" said Sealock. "I thought there'd at least be some craters!"

  "There are a few," said Tem, "small ones, scattered here and there, not to mention the hydro-volcanic structures in the center of the mare. Haven't you tapped Jana's report?"

  "Sure. . . . What does that have to do with my expectations? I'm just talking about what I wanted to see here. Hell, if we went on a hike up into the highlands, before you know it we'd be up to our assholes in neonated methane." He laughed softly, to himself. "We'd be drowned alive in a mess of phase-changing that'd drain the thermos in ten minutes.

  . . . And then there's this parking lot. Some world to conquer, huh?"

  "I read an article about boil gliding once, by some guy living on Pluto. You dive into a pool of volatile material with wings strapped to your suit—the stuff vaporizes and acts as both atmosphere and propellant. That would be pretty easy in neon."

  "Mm . . . Whatever became of this guy?"

  "Killed, I think, in a boil-gliding accident."

  "Nice. Sounds like my kind of sport! Anyway, you saw our friend Johnny out there—you can fly, after a fashion. Bouncing around on the ice ought to keep us imbeciles happily occupied for years ...." Krzakwa laughed. "Well, there's lots to screw around with, when the time comes to confront our ultimate sense of boredom. You know as well as I do that these worksuits can be equipped with a thermodynamic damper field. We can trudge up into the neon crags if we want to." Sealock sighed heavily. "Yeah, yeah. I know all that. I think I'm just having some kind of laziness attack."

  Krzakwa thought about it for a moment, realizing that wasn't quite the word for what seemed to be going on. "You mean, other-world weariness?"

  "Right." The man laughed. On sudden impulse, he had Shipnet construct an image of Krzakwa's head through his suit optics. Processing made it look as if the man's opaque, equipment-packed helmet had turned to glass. He seemed to be smiling. "We might as well be off," he said, "though why I don't know. There's no hurry. . . ."

  "No. This place isn't going to run away." Tem had a sudden, uneasy visualization of the long decades ahead, isolated together. "I guess it'd make sense to set up the boom crane first?"

  "Yup." Activating the proper circuits, they made for the downlink channels and submerged in Shipnet's maze.

  The basic structure of Deepstar was made of metal-plastic girders that had been extruded by an automatic industrial beam-builder machine, for over a century the indispensable workhorse of space construction. The skeleton of the shipwas an inexpensive matrix to which almost anything could be attached, so ... There were isostatically stabilized supplies of ion fuel, Hyloxso matrices, a peak-pulse toroidal astrodyne, a small beam-builder, a bubbleplastic mixer, and a big storage cell for the raw goo that it used. Among the various pressurized modules there was a decorative hydroponic garden, and a terrarium whose genetically tailored creatures could produce certain organic substances for the kitchen most efficiently. Of necessity, there was the inevitable complexity of a Magnaflux generator. Human beings had evolved across billions of years wrapped in the comforting arms of Earth's magnetosphere. When space travel came, they began to leave it, and at first there seemed to be no great problem. The years flowed into decades and the colonists of the inner Solar System began to complain of unexplained torpor. Low gravity, the experts said, no exercise, poor diet, even Weltschmerz. . . . Odd diseases and neuroses appeared, and colonies did not do well. Children died or grew up "weird," and people had to go home, if they could. The future of space as a human habitat began to look endangered. The electromagnetic screens had originally been designed as powerful force fields to ward off the charged particles continually bombarding the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn. Because em was not fully understood in those days, Quantum Transformational Dynamics and the Unified Field Theory still being a bit foggy, the engineers carefully tailored the inside of the force screens to resemble the magnetic environment of Earth. Inside the shields, people flourished. Now, wherever man went, there Magnaflux went also.

  Sitting on the dull, metallic ice, the ship began to change. Under the urging of the two men, mechanical spiders, scuttling at impossible angles and hanging upside down like their arachnid prototypes, attacked the structure of the tower. They crawled along the edges of one of Deepstar's four protruding arms and, with particle-beam torches flaring blue-white, cut through all the girders on one internal vertex. On the other side of the structure they modified the density and molecular format of the material until it could flex along oneplane. When they finished, the nacelle swung slowly open, exposing its contents to the outer world.

  Sealock and Krzakwa unfolded the arms of the crane, extending the slender, shining manipulators down to the ice so that the machine could walk itself into an upright position. The first real step in unloading the ship was, perhaps, also the most tedious. It was necessary for the barely mobile crane to attach and lower its own components, in order for it to assemble itself into its real, complex shape, to walk into magical life.

  Assembled, its various segments unfolded, the crane was a huge, square thing of rods and pulleys that rumbled about on heavy treads. It crawled around the base of Deepstar, lifting down poles and cargo pods and the endlessly refolded fasciae that would become dome bases. When most of the smaller items that made up their manifest were piled haphazardly on the ice, it was time to begin a major task: Sealock and Krzakwa set up a relay module from which they ran a network of wire-thin power conduits, black spaghetti scattering formlessly around them, growing into a structured web. This was not yet an environment that could tolerate even narrowcast energy. There was still plenty of ambient neon gas around, enough to absorb and reradiate the contents of a strong microwave beam. They set up a trivetlike base about a kilometer from the ship. It was the surface mounting platform for the hot, heavy fusion reactor. They installed the insulating-field generator that would keep its heat from getting at the ice, then decided to break for lunch.

  Inside, Tem and Brendan sprawled on the edge of the crater room, dank and sweaty, tired more from the idea of hard work than its reality, and ate. They were joined by the remainder of the crew. To Sealock, they seemed oddly posed, almost as if they were waiting for commands. Cornwell, stung by the curt dismissal that his attempt at volunteering for work had brought, said, "Well. Are you ready to let us participate yet?"

  Brendan looked up from his vulturelike pose over a bowl of noodles and cheese and peered quizzically at the musicianfrom eyes almost hidden beneath shaggy, red-blond brows. Hadn't the man been paying attention? He seemed to remember there being more than just himself out there. . . . Now what? Oh. He grinned, said, "Sure," and slurped up another butter-slimed mouthful. Harmon looked back and forth between their faces for a moment, sensing some oddity going on, then asked, "You've gotten a good look out there. What do you think of our new home?" Sealock turned to stare at him. "I think it's Hat."

  Demogorgon looked at him reproachfully. "Brendan . . . be nice."

  "Well, what the hell does he expect me to say? I mean, really! Sometimes I feel like I'm up to my asshole in all this bullshit...."

  "How appropriate," murmured Hu, with a malevolent, slit-eyed smile. Sealock glared at her for a second, then let his face relax into a toothy grin. "You just love it when I talk dirty, d
on't you?"

  "People . . ." Cornwell said.

  Turning to look at him, Brendan said, "Still want your question answered? There are five worksuits aboard. In order to do anything useful, you'll need one of them, so three of you can help, at any given time. If anyone else wants anything to do, there's off-line data analysis to be done." He shook his head, grinning. "I really don't know why anyone would want to be in on this . . . it's mostly going to be an exercise in tedium."

  "I'll do some of the data work," said Ariane.

  "Leave me out of this," said Jana stiffly. "I still have a lot of work to do on the IAAU report."

  "OK. That leaves Vana, Demo, John, Harmon, Axie, and me," said Beth. "Shall we do a random choice?"

  "Sure," said Prynne.

  A quick peek at the 'net's pseudorandom number generator selected John, Demogorgon, and Axie. Consulting the machinery was a very important arbitration method among them, and they all realized that it would be pointless andharmful to question its outcome. In this case, everyone seemed satisfied with the results.

  Sealock scaled his dish toward a vent intake, which snatched it expertly from the air. Tiny globules of oil, which in weightlessness would have followed it, fell away and began to drift about like dust motes. Sooner or later the circulation filters would get them, or somebody's lungs would. "Let's go," he said. They stood, and Ariane said, "You know, when this is all finished, we should have some sort of a real ceremony; maybe a celebration. . . ."

  Vana spun around suddenly, buoyant brown breasts swaying. "I know! Let's have an orgy!"

  "That's not quite what I had in mind."

  John laughed. "Hell, why not? Long as everyone's willing. . . ." Grinning, Sealock stretched, muscles rolling heavily beneath his skin. "A true Berenguerism. Never fails. Steamy crotch juice for the frozen man . . ."

  Demogorgon snickered at the purloined and altered imagery. The ancient poem had been part of the original inspiration for the Illimitor World and, with a little effort, he remembered the original verse. " 'My favorite water,' huh?"

  Sealock bellowed with coarse amusement.

  Ariane, standing close to him, suddenly murmured, "Brendan, could I talk to you alone?" He looked down at her, his smile fading, and said, "Later."

  The astrodyne, built by KMS Fusion System's Aerospace Division at their big, dangerous factories not far from Gamma-enclave Kosmograd II in geosynchronous orbit, was mounted in an exterior pod roughly on the opposite side of Deepstar from the nacelle they'd opened to liberate the crane. It was an octagonal cylinder four meters in diameter by about six long, and housed the heart of their new colony—a 50,000-megawatt, self-maintaining peak-pulse toroidal fusion reactor. External field coils were a thing of the past and the thing had virtually no moving parts. Assuming plenty of fuel, its projected life span was in excess of a hundred thousand years,though the manufacturer would not even guarantee a century of trouble-free operation.

  As Krzakwa drove the crane into position, Sealock, helmet-less in the pressurized cab, directed five work-packs through some preparatory activity. They disconnected the reactor from all but two of its attach points and replaced the current-infeed cable with a much longer one that would be payed out from a reel as the device was moved. There was no provision for putting Deepstar into a powered-down condition. Demogorgonwas suited up and crawling around on the structure, unnecessarily overseeing the work of the machines and, as he said, amusing himself. John and Axie were standing below, unable to do anything but watch.

  When everything was ready, they paused. Sealock lit up a small dark cigar that filled the cabin with thin aromatic clouds which were swiftly swept toward the air-conditioning grille.

  "Give me one of those," said Krzakwa. He lit the stick from the end of the other man's cigar, no easy task, and puffed away on it inexpertly, redoubling the cabin smog. It made him cough, but he sighed.

  "Kind of nice to be able to smoke outside of a restricted solarium." Sealock snorted. "The Lunar authorities are idiots. Those rules were obsolete a hundred years ago." He thought for a moment, then said, "You could smoke in a space suit if you wanted to—just turn the LS

  cycle all the way up."

  Krzakwa nodded. "You're probably right, but that has nothing to do with rules. Environmental Controls and Standards runs the Moon. Any relaxation of regulations, no matter how old and obsolete, lessens their power. You know, when I was an ECS apprentice in Picard, during my teens, I had more authority than as a scientist later on. How often do you hear of a bureaucratic state loosing its grip on the people?"

  "Never. . . . Well, maybe if they thought it'd raise profits a little."

  "Even then it has to be painful for them." He stared up at the image of Deepstar, seeming pensive.

  "You have to wonder why the human race let itself get turned into a system of interlocking corporate directorships."

  Sealock puffed on his cigar, spewing out a broken string of little gray clouds, and said, "I don't think it's ever been any different, not now, not at any other time in history. How much difference is there, really, between Genghis Khan and Henry Ford?"

  "Hey," said a voice from the ether, "what're you two doing in there?" It was Axie, and the crane optics showed her waving to them.

  "We're having a smoke," said Brendan. "Take a break. We'll pick it up later."

  "I'm kind of surprised that you see things so much like I do," said Tem. "Somehow, I visualized it being different on Earth. Enclaves, free cities, all that hellfire and brimstone . . ." Sealock grinned at the imagery. "I can see how it might look different from the outside. Put in the vernacular: it ain't. I lived in enclaves, where they kept me safe. In order to preserve that safety, they had to control me. I lived in a free city, where I was free to do whatever I felt like. So was everybody else, and that freedom controlled me too."

  Krzakwa scratched his chin, rooting through the tangled beard hairs. "I know what you're talking about, I guess, but what the hell does that have to do with the existence of a bureaucratic state and a system of interlocking corporate directorships?"

  "Nothing, maybe, but I think it has a whole lot to do with it. People can't seem to exist without something controlling them; they can't get along 'on their own,' unless they are alone. . . . All my life, I've been as wild and goofy as anyone I ever met, and I can't do it. Why should anyone else?" Krzakwa tried to interrupt, to offer an observation, but Sealock's words rattled on: "What difference is there between the control modes of an empire or a company, between a Communist directorate, a representative democracy, a military hierarchy, or, for that matter, the magical dreams of John Fucking Harry Cornwell?"

  Krzakwa felt taken aback once again by the man's ragelike behavior. Now what had brought this on?

  Why would anybody want to say something like that? "I don't get you. A hell of a lot of difference, it seems to me...."

  Sealock's breathing had quickened, his face darkened, but now he sat back, eyes closed, and took a deep drag on the cigar, pulling its heavy smoke far down into his lungs. Finally he let it out with a soft rush, the smoke reduced to a phantasm of its original self by systemic adsorption. "Ahhh . . . Boy, these things are really great. They grow the tobacco down in what used to be Guatemala, from twentieth-century Cuban seed stock." He looked at the Selenite and smiled. "Yeah. Maybe Cornwell believes that too. Shit. He'd have to, or else he'd be nuts. History tends to repeat itself in exact patterns. People quit corporations and enclaves all the time, take their knowledge and set up on their own. If they fail, no loss to the organization they ran out on. If they succeed, they're co-opted, brought back into the fold as more or less equal partners. Same thing goes for interplanetary colonies. Our descendants, if any, will one day join the Contract Police."

  "Really?" Krzakwa laughed suddenly. "Our descendants are going to be pretty far from here someday. Iris' orbit is hyperbolic...."

  Sealock sat up and slowly took the cigar out of his mouth. "Christ ... I forgot! Maybe we'll have to start our own Contract
Police."

  "Will we? I don't know. Will we be joined by others out here? Probably, but maybe not. Right now, we're a tiny crew on a great big starship."

  Brendan nodded slowly. "I always wanted to run away on a starship. All those wonderful old stories .

  . . There always has to be somewhere else to go." He looked at the Selenite. "You remember what happened to the Prometheus?"

  Rolling the cigar to the corner of his mouth, Krzakwa said, "Sure. The stupidest thing that anyone ever did. Fourteen months out, it entered the Oort cloud at a little over 0.2 c and ran into an object the size of a pea. . . . My father was on Geographos then, setting up a mass driver for Off-Lunar Ops. He said the explosion was brighter than the 2017 supernova in Aquila ." It was a litany of what seemed to be man's ultimate limitation.

  Brendan nodded slowly into the silence. Human engineers could, it was true, design and build ships capable of accelerating to relativistic speeds. The energy was there. But space was full of debris, no one knew quite how much. The huge sphere that spawned the comets also teemed with tiny bits of ice and rock that had been swept outward by the sun's Tauri winds in the early days of the Solar System. At 0.99 c, a golf ball has the mass of a planet—and how do you dodge a planet moving toward you at near the speed of light? Probes were moving outward, through the Oort cloud, across interstellar space to the nearby stars, and man would follow, but slowly. . . .

  "Well," said Sealock, "we'd better get busy. Hey, Demo! You going to get off that thing so we can move it?"

  The Arab waved from his position atop the 'dyne. "I'd like to ride it over," he said. His voice, fed to their auditory centers, sounded conversational.

  "OK. But sit down and hold on."

  "Why bother?" asked Krzakwa. "He won't get hurt if he falls off, not in this gravity." He put one crane arm on the bottom of the reactor, grabbed an upper attach point with the other, and wrapped two steadying limbs about the fuel tanks for extra stability. "All right," he said, "let her go." Sealock directed his spiders to disconnect the last two fittings, and the thing was free. "OK," he said,