Iris

by William Barton

  In the beginning there were two brothers, Deron and Larry Sealock, born in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the midst of everything, in what had been Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. They grew up unconscious of history and lived to see the Turnover as young men. When the localities were triumphant, they bid on the contract to run the Manti-La Sal substation of the Western Power Export Grid, a near-defunct utility, and won it.

  Alix and Diana Cormier had appeared on the scene not long afterward. They were twin sisters, originally from St. Louis, who'd fled after the riots and lawlessness had gotten out of control, heading for the peaceful epicenter that was becoming Deseret. They met in the small town of Moab, more or less naturalistically, and, out of the quadruple-ring marriage ceremony, the Family had been born. Other men and women came to join them, until they were ten in number, and they all took a common surname. It was a normal thing in those days, the way communes became Lines, and soon children followed. By the time Brendan, son of Kathleen, was eight years old, there were fifteen of them.... Somehow, the Sealock children had subdivided into three groups—the adolescents, who interacted with the adults on their own level; the babies, whom the adults took care of; and a middle group, the half dozen ranging in age from six to ten who dealt mostly with each other. There were four boys and two girls, and their lives had evolved into a dream. . . .

  The whispering voice drifted away, and Temujin Krzakwa fell into the world. . . . It was a sunny morning in late summer, and they were having breakfast on the balcony of the underground dining room, where it protruded from the hillside below the mainbody of the house. Brendan sat between his two favorites, ten-year-old Yuri and his sib-sister Lena, who was eight, eating a bowl of soggy Rice Crispies in hot, sugar-laden milk. In the relaxed life of the Line, they only went to "school" every other day, for, in the modern viewpoint, all work and no play made Jack an insane boy. . . . They shared a tutor, really little more than a materials coordinator, with Villa Tomasaki, on the other side of Mount Peale, and it was their turn to suffer with his idiotic notions. Scraping up a last spoonful of oatmeal and molasses, Yuri said, "What'll we do today? The Game?" They nodded their agreement, looking more serious than any adults making laws. Brendan hurriedly slurped down the last of his breakfast, tipping the bowl to his lips and scraping a crunchy syrup of wet sugar onto his tongue. It made his immunized teeth stick together, tackily, as he said, "To the Game, then, Yuri de Jane!" The sib-names had grown up with the evolution of the Game and were an important part of the way they related to each other.

  Jean d'Iana stood up. "Where are we going?"

  Brendan de Kathleen shrugged and looked over at Lena de Jane, who grinned at him, wiping syrupy lips on the back of her hand, leaving a shiny patch. "Valkyrdom?" she suggested.

  "Yeah!" said Tom d'Alix, eight and tousled. "Let's go!" They dropped their dishes into a converter slot and ran back through the house, up past the main level, emerging as a group by the door nearest to the toy shed, where they kept their bicycles. They buckled on their homemade swords, pieces of stiff plastic cut to shape, with hilts of scrap rubber and tape, mounted their pedalable steeds, and were away.

  They rode storm-swift down Via Fluviana, a narrow dirt path that followed the quick freshet of La Sal Creek, past the power plant named Taj Mahal, to Effervescentloch reservoir and beyond. They rode through the cultured forest of Anglewald until they came to the Wilds, where the trees and underbrush grew as they always had, since time immemorial. It was strange here on the interface, where the cacti of the desert and the evergreen of the mountains grew side by side.

  Beneath the soaring cliff Aerhurst, where the shallow cave named Deep Trog lay, Valkyrdom rose proud, standing alone in the midst of a tangled maze of new and old technological debris that was Stalinwood.

  They had to park their bikes outside the junkyard and pick their way in on foot, climbing over the rusted hulks of ancient vehicles, tramping on broken, corroded shapes that had once been machinery, as they walked toward the tree. Stalinwood was an amazing place, filled with a century of refuse from many sources. Though much of it was rubble from the construction of Manti-La Sal, there were many other things, from diverse sources. At the far end there was a military aircraft, an F-38 Sparrowhawk that had last seen service during the early days of the Insurrection, forty-seven years ago. The thing was a shambles, perhaps having made a forced landing here, its lower fuselage crushed in, and Brendan always regretted that the battery-powered fighter could not be made to fly again. Still, the cockpit was reasonably intact, its canopy warped but whole, and it was fun to sit in, to grip the stiff plastic of the two joysticks and twirl them about, making warlike noises, the whistling sound of electric turbines, the hiss of particle-beam weaponry. . . .

  Valkyrdom was a venerable Jeffrey pine, gnarled and aromatic, which had been bent by the winds and earlier generations of children. Its trunk splayed into three sections, one of which grew nearly horizontal, and it was here that the treehouse had been built. Over the years it had been added to, subtracted from, made out of different materials, wood brought from afar, plastic and metal from Stalinwood. Old men sometimes passed by, glanced at Valkyrdom, and smiled, and you knew that maybe they'd put a little labor into this thing when they had been children. It was a complex structure now, floor, walls, roof . . . some of the windows still had clear-plastic "glass" whose origins no one knew. As they stalked through wreckage toward the tree, they drew their swords, feeling the temper of adult-blunted edges on savoring thumbs, alert for the Enemy. It seemed safe, and they went up the tree like a horde of hairless monkeys, still cautious—you never knew. . . .

  Up in the treehouse, they lolled about, giggling, unable to sustain the illusion of the Game indefinitely. Brendan turned away, internalized, keeping his own Game running, wanting it to continue as long as possible. He arose and went out onto a little porch that they'd made, leaned gingerly on a rather rickety railing, and looked around, searching. Suddenly he came alert. Sure enough, there were two tiny figures, walking along the edge of the cliff. . . . "Look! The Starlords have invaded Aerhurst!" Tom d'Alix picked up his sword from the floor and came to stand beside him. "Let's go," he said grimly.

  Brendan took a last look at the tiny figures before coming down. There were other people living in the area. Einsalz Commune was a long but feasible walk away. These ... He peered at them, knowing that they must be Family members. He watched the way they were walking and saw the information that he needed in their respective gaits. It was Roger, who was seventeen, and Elspeth, fourteen. They all headed for Aerhurst, silent as children can be, following separate paths, intent on revenge, and

  . . .

  The world went two-dimensional, then fell away, snatched from their grasp, and the real world reemerged.

  A timer was calling them, telling them that a midcourse correction had become necessary. "Shit," said Sealock. "Maybe we can get back to this later."

  "Maybe." Still festooned with leads, Krzakwa watched the man, feeling him work through their still extant electronic connection. It's not supposed to be that good, he thought. Imagery of that depth and complexity calls for a DR therapy program and a lot more circuitry. . . . Sealock suddenly turned and looked at him, eyes still a little unfocused. "Stop leaking," he said, "it's distracting me."

  Tem was appalled.

  When the correction burn was done, Brendan and Tem were eating a little snack. "That sure as hell works a lot better than I expected," said the Selenite. "What're you using for a control-element matrix?" Brendan shrugged. "The contents of my memory. I've written a number of programs. I know how they work."

  "We don't have anything that could contain and run something of that sophistication. I want to know how you're doing it!"

  "Well . . . Brains are pretty complicated machines . . . they contain natural Turing circuits, even though we don't call them that. I'm just using my imagination."

  Tem nodded slowly, thinking, Maybe so. And he's used to working through the i
nterfaces in ways I'm not. "Can we finish your dream? It was pretty interesting."

  The setup was already there. They were plugged in, the limited program up and running, so he began, in medias res , without preamble:

  Brendan de Kathleen and Lena de Jane were crawling cautiously through the bushes that lined the bluff along the top of Aerhurst, ever alert for the sounds of the invading Starlords . A light, dry breeze was ruffling the vegetation, masking the little scuffling noises that they made as they crept along. Intent on their mission of revenge, they hardly noticed the dark dust adhering to their clothing. They would capture the two aliens and torture them, find out where the main body of the attacking force lay hidden. He figured that the two older children would go along with the Game. Erin, Alix's eighteen-year-old daughter, had once told him that they'd had similar fantasies, that the Game had, in fact, been started about ten years ago by Michael ne Harrison who, though a Father, was not much older than some of the youngsters. He'd joined the Family as a teenager, an immigrant from the still dead ruins of burned-out Atlanta, and had a penchant for evolving fantasies that had apparently sustained him on his two-thousand-mile walk.

  Brendan stopped suddenly and raised his hand, motioning Lena to silence. He could hear them!

  Taking out his sword, he crawled carefully forward, staying silent, sliding over grasses that hardly noticed his presence, until he could see through the bushes into an airy clearing ahead, on the edge of the cliff. They were there, not two meters away. . . . Hesaw, and was transfixed. Lena de Jane crept forward to his side, looked out with him, and they lay there, watching, mute.

  Roger and Elspeth Sealock were the children of Diana and Jane, though who their fathers might be was kept a careful unknown. The boy was seventeen, tall and dark-haired, with a slim, muscular body. The girl was rather pretty, three years younger, and blond. Her breasts were small, high, and her sparse pubic hair was so light as to be almost invisible. The two lay together, naked on a soft blanket, handling each other gently.

  What they were doing was similar to the experiments of the younger children, but with certain subtle differences: they sighed, where the little ones would giggle, and Brendan saw that they were sweating, though it wasn't very hot. Roger's penis was large and hard, reddish brown in the sunlight, not seeming to flex at all under the girl's touch. He could see a shining wetness at the juncture of Elspeth's thighs. They kissed and touched and murmured together, and after a while the girl lay back and the boy crawled on top of her.

  By happenstance, their positioning was just right. Elspeth grunted when the first thrust came, and Brendan's eyes widened as he saw Roger's penis disappear into that odd sealed hole that he knew all his sib-sisters had. The two moved for a while, a strange rocking motion that looked rather silly, gasping with effort as they grew more frenzied, and then they stopped.

  They lay motionless for a while, then Roger rolled off onto his back, and Brendan saw that Elspeth was bleeding from between her legs, a peculiarly watery blood. He glanced at Lena then and saw a certain look of horror in her eyes. He turned back to the clearing and saw that the other two were grinning, stroking each other languidly, and kissing again.

  The spell abruptly broke, the world shattering back into normalcy, and Krzakwa was laughing. "Oh boy! You didn't tell me your family practiced incest, Bren. Look!" He pointed at his crotch, where the bulge of an erection showed. "I'll bet you broke it in a few years later with that Lena kid, didn't you?" Sealock shook his head, still remote in time. "No. I didn'tknow it then, but I had less than a year to go. They kicked me out the following spring. . . ." He wrapped his arms around his chest and shut his eyes, making a quick software-disconnect from the 'net element loop. Silenced, Krzakwa let the matter drop.

  John and Beth had chosen to snuggle together in a small bathing cubical filled with blood-hot salt water. They drifted, face up, their naked bodies occasionally colliding. The lights were extinguished and extraneous sensory input was almost eliminated. It was a disjoint experience. In a way, it was all still superficial, if such an intimacy could be called that. 9Phase.DR strained to supply them with all that they wanted.

  It was Beth's turn to swim freely through the depths of John's mind, in effect "being him," and she was amazed at how he spent his moments, how little memory grazing he really did. He rarely consulted his own experience, as if he believed the past had nothing to teach him. . . . She felt as if she were plumbing new territory.

  It was 2083, three years before they'd met, and John was pacing about the apartment he'd purchased in one of the more modern sections of NYFC. It was in a needle monad built during the brief ascendancy of the World Unification/DuPont Deathmarch Party, and its official address was still Grand Concourse, South Bronx. He stopped at an iridescent wall and deopaqued it, the colorful patterns disappearing with a swirl. He could see the Jersey shore standing beyond the tiny towers of the World Trade Center. The sun was falling into the west, and the massive shadows that spread from the great buildings of Hoboken were already beginning to engulf the island.

  In spite of the huge structures that surrounded Manhattan on three sides, the historical buildings, the formerly glorious "skyscrapers," were still special. They'd been shorn of the grimy soot color they had in old pictures, but the blocky little spires, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the rest, still retained the primitive strength of the people who'd first walked on the Moon. He'd still not recovered from the shock of Reflection Counterpoint's success, though the money had been rolling in since 2080, and nothing seemed quite real to him. He turned from the window and surveyed the apartment he'd bought. Spacious by urban standards, it was still rather cramped when compared to his home in Port Radium. The field-stress rainbow was the best he could do with the programmable walls— he had never had acrophobia before, but the height of the rooms weighed on him when they were clear, opaque, or 3V'ed. The sunken living console held the promise of safety, and he let himself fall into the plush, springy surface of the hole. Pulling himself backward with a kind of swimming stroke, he summoned Pamelia, his new courtesan. . . .

  The program's focus controller popped them back from that brink and recreated reality, as Beth broke off: "No. No sex memories. Not yet."

  "Don't worry. With Pam, it was nothing but an unfulfilled yearning. It was clumsy and tedious for me, with only the orgasm to make it seem worth while. Maybe you should experience it. Compared to us . .

  ."

  It seemed as if her ideas about John were bursting, like soap bubbles from a solution too dilute. They shared a sudden realization about just how often the impressions they'd had of each other had been wrong.

  . . . and an apprehension grew. No shred of their relationship would survive DR unchanged. . . . The program pushed harder, suddenly aghast. This was what they wanted?

  The uneasiness fed on itself. Any emotion could suffer feedback like this. They were two mirrors staring into each other, new reactions building upon earlier ones.... A paradox-solution routine from the GAM winked on and took control. The feedback damped into neutral calm, and it letgo. John was starting to become familiar with the different ways in which Beth's mind was organized, but the way she interfaced with her unconscious perceptions was strange, alien to him. He found it all so very hard to assimilate. . . . The program strained once again, changed nodes. Hegrabbed hold of a memory. To his surprise, he recognized the place. It was a park at the source of the Mackenzie, where Great Slave Lake suddenly constricted into a sluggish, blue-brown river. From here, it would travel more than a megameter before burying its waters in the frigid Beaufort Sea. The land here was low, bare of trees, and planted with a hardy grass uniformly cut to golf-course perfection, except where stripy gneiss showed through. The lake was vast, rippling with white-gold, a horizon of water. The low sun dominated a morning sky flecked with small, elongated clouds. Despite her sleeveless blouse, Beth felt warm. Midges were everywhere, becoming obtrusive.

  Beth looked level-eyed at her compani
on. He was a young boy, perhaps fourteen, curly-haired, blond, handsome in an almost funny way. She was feeling a kind of nobility— a self-righteous pride-in-behavior possible, perhaps, only in one her age. The boy looked very unhappy and had been crying. Finally he said, "But how can we stop seeing each other? What will our friends think?" For a moment she almost relented, but the memory of the night before, when she'd been awakened by the discomfort of some lump beneath her hip, was there. She started to get out of the tent, stopped at the opening. He was there, masturbating into the embers of a dying fire. She watched, then got back into her sleeping bag. Perhaps she was still in love with her fathers, or perhaps she just wanted to disassociate herself from the path her body was thrusting before her. With Angelo, she'd felt safe, had thought sexuality wasn't going to be a problem. Obviously she couldn't think that any longer. She said, "No, Ange . Of course we'll still see each other, that's impossible to avoid. Just: no more walks."

  Segue. Angelo was there, above her. He was older now, eighteen at least, and had a sparse mustache. The room was dark. Their only light came from a small chink in the window shade and the blinding emblem it etched on the floor. She was wet enough, but not sexually aroused. Not really. He'd been fumbling down there for so long . . .

  "I can't do it," he said. "I mean, I already did it." She sighed, familiar with the problem. She'd beenexperimenting with sex a lot. She and Angelo had gone their separate ways until, just a few hours ago, a chance meeting at a midsummer barbecue had brought them back together. It was no big deal, she thought, but she knew his vulnerability made this happen, against her will, and she was angry.