Iris

by William Barton

  "pull it out."

  Tem eased the reactor away from the ship and then swung the whole crane about, intent on getting pointed in the right direction . . . but large, dense objects have correspondingly high masses, masses which steadfastly obey the simple, easily forgettable laws of mechanics; laws which begin, "An object in motion . . ."

  Two of the crane arms snapped simultaneously, and the astrodyne went sailing majestically away, apparently undisturbed. One of the flailing booms caught Demogorgon a glancing bow, and he went off into the dark sky, screaming.

  "Holy shit!" Krzakwa was frozen for a moment. He spatthe cigar butt out, gunned the crane's engines, and went lumbering off after the flying reactor.

  Sealock routed himself through Shipnet to the CM's teleoptic system and accessed a monitor grid array showing the object's motion dynamics as a simple trajectory. "No sweat," he said. "Plenty of time." He fed the now generated capture data to Krzakwa. "Shut up, Tabari, you're in a worksuit. Turn on the control-moment gyros and you'll come down on your feet someday."

  Demogorgon stopped screaming and looked around. He realized that he was still flying upward and that the ship was far away. After a while he began to enjoy the view.

  The crane quickly caught up with the astrodyne, though there seemed to be little time to spare. Krzakwa wrapped the remaining arms around the reactor, then set the treads to "freewheel" and slowly applied the brakes. The crane shuddered, vibrating, the pressure of fricative surfaces transmitted to their ears by the various sound-shorts of the vehicle's structure as a high-pitched vibrato squeal. When the kinetic energy had been spent they came to a stop. He carefully drove over to the reactor base, now close, and set his charge down. He looked at Sealock.

  The man had an odd look, almost smiling. "Well," he said.

  "Yeah. What do you suppose would've happened if it'd crashed?"

  "I don't know. There's not too much in there to break. . . . It's a tough machine, but if the cable had come off, Deepstar would've shut down . . ."

  ". . . and then the ion fuel would've exploded." He looked pale. "Maybe we'd better be a little more careful, huh?"

  Sealock wiped the cold sweat from his upper lip and nodded. "Yeah."

  The colonists ate supper in a subdued silence. No one was talking much, though the engineers tried to make light of their near disaster. Afterward, while the others sat around to chat and plan, Sealock rose and went to his private compartment, where he shut himself in. He toyed with some electronic components he'd been working on, trying to concentrate, to regulate his ideas, then sighed and, stringing up a hammock that he particularly liked, lay down. That was one of the good things about getting gravity back. He'd never liked em-beds, no matter how popular they were, and useful for sex. There was something about the sway of a hammock, especially in low g . . .

  Personal lapses of judgment, especially ones that he might consider his own, put him in a bad mood. If they'd still been on Earth, he'd've gone to the gym, found an unsuspecting sparring partner, and beaten the hell out of him. That form of release was not available to him here. He lay there for a while, feeling restless to no effect, then the door chirped at him. "Who is it?" he snarled.

  "Thy aziz , O fated one." The voice was pitched soft and high.

  "Go away."

  "Please, Brendan."

  He clenched his jaws momentarily, considering an array of possible angry responses, then said, "All right. Come in."

  The door quarter-paneled open and Demogorgon slid through. He walked lightly across to Sealock and looked down at him, putting one tapering fingered hand on his broad, ridged chest. He smiled and started to slide his hand downward, but Brendan shook him off angrily. "No. Get out." The Arab looked pained. "I want to help. I know something's wrong. . . ."

  "Nothing's wrong," he snapped in exasperation. In truth, it was such a small thing . . . but how could he have forgotten the basic laws of motion? It wasn't just Krzakwa's lapse, stupidity was to be expected from other people, even the best of them, but he'd forgotten as well.

  "Look," Demogorgon was saying. "I've seen you get into these moods before." He put his hand on the other man again. "I can fix you right up."

  Sealock laughed harshly. "Wrong mood, asshole. Go away."

  "But I want to. . . ."

  "And I don't! Go find someone else."

  "There is no one else. Please."

  "No." Brendan sat up. "There's going to have to be someone else, sooner or later. I told you not to come, but you wouldn't listen to me—now you're the only fag in the world."

  "You're being cruel."

  "I'm being honest. For a change. I can't take care of you forever. I won't." Lying back down. Brendan stared at the wall. "Why don't you go try one of the girls? You'll like it. I promise."

  "You know I can't."

  "I know you won't try. Well, now you have to. Go away."

  After a while Demogorgon did leave.

  Alone again, Sealock's inner turmoil grew until it reached a point that was almost despair. Nobody to beat up, not in a mood for sex . . . shit. People, if they are fortunate, always have a few ways of dealing with inexplicable personal tumult. The accident with the reactor wasn't really bothering him ... he knew that, and knew further that he was suffering from nothing more than a sort of sourceless anxiety, unfocused, a neurosis-like reaction to his attention having been called to the fundamental directionlessness that seems to infest every human life, no matter how strongly patterned, no matter how purposeful and ordered its days seemed to be.

  He rose and, going to a storage cabinet, drew out twelve brain-tap waveguides. Some people take drugs, surrender themselves to the induced monomania of utterly false visions —psychotropic chemistry can erect a structure where none exists. Brendan Sealock had Comnet, and it was a thing he understood well. The past can make the present seem like a logical end point to all that has gone before, even when it is not.

  Lying down again, he plugged the jacks into his skull, each making a satisfying click as it snapped into place. Octa-deka Prime OS flooded into his soul, and he drifted down the long, dark tunnels of his life. One of the functions that he himself had designed, a sort of therapy that he'd pioneered as a late adolescent at NYU, was an absolute mental cross indexing. Now he drifted through abrilliantly colored sea of experience, watching all the things he'd done and been, all the scenes that had passed before his eyes. He waited for a meaningful moment to arrive and, after a while, one did. He seized on it, on a time nearly thirty years gone. They sent me away, he thought, and tears gathered in his eyes, unaware. The word for it is catharsis.

  Brendan awoke, as he always did these days, feeling lost. There was a little surge of chest-tightening fear that died down swiftly as his dominant intellectual drivers geared into life and smothered the ever present whisperings of intuitional modes in shattered disarray. When he sat up in the soft bed, yawning and throwing back the heavy, down-filled comforter, he was himself again.

  "Bren?" That came from the next bed, in a thin, high, rather nasal voice, and he looked over. Kenny Stein was a small, pudgy, flat-faced nine-year-old, with brown eyes and kinky, almost Afrolike hair. He was just another exile here, thrown out of Taho Kibbutz by his people, themselves exiled from the low-tech horrors of Southern California. Sealock didn't like the whining little shit, but then again, he did.

  "Fuck off, Stein." There was a swift wash of anger, demanding a response, on the boy's face, but he said nothing. Brendan in a bad mood was too much for him to trifle with. Out here, at the Phoenix School for Communal Exiles, they lived. There were hundreds of them, children for whom the future had temporarily darkened, sent here from the many corners of one of Earth's largest political entities. They lived here, emotional and psychological "cripples," waiting for their problems to be fixed by men who lurked somewhere in the darkness, waiting like defective machines to be assaulted by the mechanics of the mind.

  The room they were in was part of a therapeutic program that the school had d
esigned, geared like everything else around here toward producing sensible, cooperative citizens who could eventually be slipped back into the collective-effort society of the Deseret Enclave Complex. Ten terribly antisocial little boys lived in the room, allowed to maul one another's emotions and form the naturalistic pecking orderscommon to such groups, while sociobiological technicians used carefully designed behavior-mod pressures on them. It usually worked.

  Seven of the beds were empty, the occupants fled to the comparative safety of a supervised breakfast hall, leaving the dominant clique, perennial late sleepers, to rise alone.

  "Why don't you let him be, Sealock?" Tom Leahy stood up from his bed at the other end of the room, tall and angular, with tousled, curly red hair that matched his freckled, perpetually sunburned skin. He was bigger than Brendan and perhaps stronger, but not quite so fast. They'd fought, in the beginning, and Brendan had given him an efficient thrashing, but not before a knob-knuckled fist had broken his nose. Brendan started to repeat his retort, but Leahy was staring at him with his usual bleak, fearless determination. He glared, feeling a twinge of unease, and said, "Piss on it. Why can't he leave me alone?" Stein stood up and pulled on a pair of white gym shorts. "Because you don't want me to." The other two stared at him, Leahy with his seemingly impenetrable incomprehension, and Brendan with a touch of dismay. Kenny was just a little bit too intelligent, with enough insight to baffle Brendan's worst advances, and he was right.

  The other boys were an excellent tool against him, for, between them, they were his equal. "Let's go eat," he said. Perhaps, somewhere, a social technician chuckled. These little triads were always pretty entertaining, like adolescent love triangles. The focal point snapped his or her fingers, and the lovers danced. . . .

  After breakfast and a mandatory "exercise hour," the three of them retreated to the Games Room. Their objective was a big gray plastic box in one corner, next to an expanse of moss dotted with a variety of exquisite bonsai trees. From a false cliff against the wall a tiny machine-driven waterfall dropped to form a six-inch-wide river that fed a shallow pond, whence the aerated water returned to its source. The whole, about thirty meters square in area, was surrounded by the faint blue shimmer of a selective-pass em-screen.

  The Games Room was more or less empty. A lot of peoplehad classes to go to or had found other interesting things to occupy their attentions. Though occasionally joined by others, the three of them had, by habituation, established themselves as the rightful "owners" of this little domain on many mornings. It wasn't hard to do. . . .

  The boys stepped through into this little world, feeling a slight tingle on their skins, and went to the box. Brendan slid its door aside and peered in. A pair of tiny, red-glowing eyes glared back. There was a soft, reptilian hiss. He reached in toward the eyes and there was a tiny snapping sound that made him whip his hand back. He looked up at Leahy, grinning.

  There was a scratching scuffle from inside and the container's foremost occupant sprang out. It was a perfectly formed, gray-scaled example of Tyrannosaurus rex, all of thirty centimeters tall. Brendan reached out for it, and the tiny dinosaur went for his fingers again. With one quick swipe of a small, fast hand, he cuffed the animal. It fell squalling on its side, then leaped erect on muscular hind legs and dashed off like a jackrabbit, in some peculiar fashion combining the gait elements of both man and kangaroo. Brendan stood up to follow it, calling over his shoulder, "Somebody get the Ankylosaurus !" Leahy knelt before the door and, reaching in, seized the heavy little beast by its bulbous tail, intent on dragging it out. Now the other inhabitants of the box were stirring, ready to emerge of their own accord. The toy dinosaurs, representing everything from the placid Trachodon to a feisty little Cynognathus , were premier examples of modern bioengineering. They had been made in the school's genetic workshop from the zygotes of alligators, crocodiles, tuataras, and a variety of flightless birds. One of the elder students, in part responsible for the work, had delighted in calling the Tyrannosaurus "that kiwi in drag." Like everything else around the school, the dinosaurs were "teaching toys," tools that filled an educational, cultural, and social role in the rehabilitation of those who contacted them. To be certain, robots would have been cheaper, easier to useand maintain, but . . . How many people really have empathy for machines?

  Over by the waterfall, Brendan had the animal cornered. His eyes were bright as he teased it with his hands and his laughter had an unpleasant, almost sexual ring to it. The thing snapped and bit and hissed as it tried to escape, to no avail. Its russet eyes were rolling frantically. After a while Brendan began to tire of this sport and, becoming distracted, thought of letting it go. Suddenly, as if seeing its chance, the dinosaur lunged forward and seized his hand.

  Though no worse than a cat bite, the sharp little teeth hurt, and Brendan screamed with mingled anger and pain. He pried the tiny jaws loose and, picking the creature up, slammed it against the wall. It fell to the mossy floor, mewing and writhing in agony. Brendan sucked at the cuts on his hands, fuming with exasperation.

  "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" At the commotion, Leahy had come running over. Stein was standing well behind him, looking frightened.

  "It bit me!"

  Tom looked at his hand contemptuously. "Serves you right, you little bastard. I saw what you were doing."

  Rage flared in Sealock, along with the usual fear. "Shut up, cocksucker!" The implacable, self-righteous indignation had risen in Leahy now, and he raised his fists. "All right. That's it! I'm going to kick your ass good this time."

  Brendan leaped to his feet and dropped into a fairly creditable boxing stance, both arms high and forward, elbows tucked in. His outrage had suddenly overcome the fear of injury that usually held him back. Tom swung a looping right to his head, but the smaller boy sent a quick jab through his ineffective guard to crack against his mouth, rocking his head back. First blood.

  Unattended, the Tyrannosaurus was trying to creep away. Stein picked it up, hands stroking its soft, pebbly skin, soothing it as he continued to watch the fight.

  Locked in a trance, Sealock followed his train of memory sequences to their seemingly logical end point. When it was over, he felt better, as he always did. He knew no one would understand the forces that drove him, but somehow that didn't seem to matter. He understood himself, and that made it all right. He stood up, stretching, and put his leads away. Time to go do something else. He left the room, dislocated, come adrift in time once again.

  It didn't matter. It just didn't. . . .

  After dinner John had drawn a large mug of hot, brandied pulque and gone to a couch in an alcove that looked out on Iris' quadrant of the sky. In the semidarkness he sipped his drink and watched the ringed, translucent sphere do nothing.

  The news was not good. The Universal Solaris Energy Collective had just dispatched their high-energy freighter Formis Fusion from the fore-Trojans. With a full complement of scientists, it would be here in just a few months. If his colonists had the whole ocellus, and the law said they did, where did the newcomers go? Probably they wouldn't stay. These wouldn't be real settlers, just itinerant asterologists. Probably financed by the Pansolar people, who couldn't leave any pie unplumbed. He called up the latest few 3Vcoms from his father, having neglected to do so for days. The cheerful visage of Ennis Cornwell related various things to him, underlaid with graphics like a twentieth-century weatherman. The early sales figures for Rose of Ash were encouraging. The publicity surrounding the expedition had had its effect on his reputation, and there had been huge amounts of it on the 'net this past week. He would have to talk to Jana about making up a wonders-of-space press release for the masses. There was an exact way to go about that sort of thing, he knew. The trick now was to play the media in an unexpected way and not follow any of the prevailing 'net manipulation programs. He sighed. Aside from feeding publicity to the media, there were also problems of piracy, government interference,and the ever ephemeral nature of the public's interest. The nature
of making a living from music would probably never change. Thankfully, live performances were no longer required; John grimaced as he remembered what a shambles his one attempt at a concert had been. It was a fiasco that had done terrible damage to his career: sales of Reflection Counterpoint were affected by it still. Money was a funny concept out here. He could buy virtually any commodity available, but the cost of transporting it was prohibitively expensive. The RAW memories of Shipnet held virtually all the useful knowledge that man had ever produced, and contained software threads which, when combined, would perform any function that he could think of. Turning off the 'net, he looked out at the chiaroscuro Ocypetan exterior. I bought this, he thought. Still feeling the effects of the alcohol, he began to doze. He awoke with a little start and looked around. Evidently what had awakened him was the crackle of Ariane's chamber door opening. In the dim light of the central room the silhouette of the woman was framed against the brightness that she was leaving. The doorway hissed closed and the room lights came up a little at her command.

  Across the room, Demogorgon was cradled in a raised hollow of the floor that he'd created, apparently oblivious to them. He was wearing a circlet, eyes tightly closed, so John assumed that he was tapping. "Ariane?" he said. "I think it's time we had a little talk." The woman stared at him for a moment, her face flat and expressionless as she came over and sat down against a bulkhead. "What do you want?"

  "We're in trouble, aren't we?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know. There's a lot to think about. Things seem so random sometimes. . . . What makes you think we're in trouble?"

  John found some cold dregs in his cup and drained them. "I don't know. It seems that you're the key to all this."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Let's start at the beginning. All my life I've seen people sitting in judgment of one another. People place themselvesin a hierarchical relationship with others, and society is driven by the resulting pain. That's what's always been wrong with the way people conceive their roles. Judgment of others, judgment of self—it's unnecessary. The tiny gratifications we take from others are stripped from us a hundredfold in the process. You understand?"