Iris

by William Barton

  Finally, he slept, knowing that it would be more than a year before he graduated. The sequence came to an end.

  "Shit," muttered Sealock. "Was it always like that?"

  "In one way or another. That was the worst of it, though. Later we had more free time, because the planners assumed we would go berserk otherwise. I guess I chose that particular memory because of what you were saying, before, about the way things are on Earth. I don't know what you were complaining about."

  "Yeah. I didn't think you'd understand," said Brendan, smiling. "In some ways you had it lucky. You always knew who the bad guys were."

  After setting up the scene in the dome, Demogorgon decided to look in on Vana. The subsidiary program that allowed her to move among the illusions of Bright Illimit was undoubtedly keeping her out of trouble, but there was no harm in checking. He quickly located the section of the program with which she was interacting and projected himself into it.

  She had been having a picnic on a hill in the southern marches, toward Rin Renala, under a huge spreading sarisdahn tree that provided shade from both the suns. A clothhad been spread out not far from the place where she'd landed her personal skimmer and, not surprisingly, she was humping madly with a huge, dark man Demogorgon recognized as Qasartun, the King of Radhamash. As he approached, smiling wryly, he cleared his throat.

  "Demo!" said Vana, looking at him over the man's shoulder, appearing a little embarrassed. "I didn't expect you . . . here . . . now."

  "What? Ho—" called Qasartun, continuing his vigorous thrusting. "If it isn't my fellow liege lord Demogorgon en Arhos! Well met, if I must say so myself!"

  "Stop. Qassi, stop!" said Berenguer.

  For a moment his face was transfigured with rage, then, somewhat cowed, he complied with her request. His rampant penis was of a size that an irrationally greedy woman might dream about. Vana, in this setting, seemed to have acquired a bit more modesty—she covered herself with a corner of the picnic cloth.

  Demogorgon was unable to keep from laughing. He wondered how he would react to being interrupted during one of his trysts with Raabo by a real person. "Dear Vana," he began, "do not feel any embarrassment on account of my presence. After all, Qassi, as you call him, is, in a sense, merely my representative. And gratifying one's desires, as you were doing, is a major part of the reason this world exists."

  Qasartun looked back and forth between the two, then said, "I can see that I am not wanted here." He made a sort of humble gesture to Demogorgon. "If it please you, my lady, I will be off." So saying, he buckled on his jewel-encrusted codpiece and strode off toward the west without a backward glance.

  "Well, anyway," said Demo, "I'm sorry for the interruption." Vana gave the departing kinglet a quick glance. "There are more where he came from." Demogorgon laughed. "That's very, very, true." He paused, then said, "How are you getting along here in general? I really haven't been giving you the supervision I ought to."

  "Fine. I think I've figured out everything I need to know. I have assumed my title, and everybody knows of me ... it couldn't be better."

  "Good. You probably ought to come back to Ocypete with me, though. Things are getting a little lonely there. Especially for Harmon."

  She was pulling on her clothing now. It did not do much to conceal her nudity but made a great difference in her demeanor. She stood and stretched. "Speaking of Harmon—" she said.

  "Yes?"

  "What are we going to do about him?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "He's, well . . . he's jealous. Of you."

  "Me?" Demogorgon looked incredulous. "He has nothing to fear from me!"

  "Think about it. This is you." She spread her hand in a wide gesture.

  "No, it's not me—it's you! If he's jealous of anything it's your fantasies, and your inability to satisfy them through him. This is just a means to an end."

  "That's easy to say, but how do things look? And how do I get it across to him?" Demogorgon sat down on the grass and stared at the sky. "How do you tell anything to anybody? Get him in here, if you can ... if you want him—here."

  "Can you talk to him?"

  "Look, this is going to have to work out in its own way, just like . . ." She saw the unhappiness spread across his features. Somehow it seemed inappropriate, here. "Just like you and Brendan?"

  He felt her hand cool on his neck. "Yeah. Just like that."

  Jana Li Hu looked down. The squat cylinder that housed what had been a redundant thruster from Deepstar's original configuration sat in a classic graben and was the hub for three hundred-meter metal cords which were affixed to mousetrap pitons that had been dug very far into exposed sections of the bed-ice. She found, to her surprise, that she had been holding her breath, and she let it out into the suit slowly. The worksuit she wore was large for her, and its spaciousness made her feel clumsy, hard to control. Once again she scanned the surrounding terrain with her photochips and was awed by the spirelike , only slightly rounded water-ice massifs that clustered closely here, broken shards of the world thrust upward by the colossal forces which had fought during the period when Mare Nostrum froze and expanded.

  It was something only water would do, pushing the partially collapsed Ocypete back into a spherical shape. Unlike what had happened on Ganymede and other Solar moons, the unmelted crust of the area surrounding the mare was already too thick to produce the regional grooves caused by wave systems of extensional faulting during the time of melting. Instead more "Earthlike" oblique-slip faults had spread in a finely reticulate pattern back into the highlands, gathered finally into the huge chasm that trisected the world. When Mare Nostrum froze, it pushed everything back into place— almost. The healed scars remained—and they would tell much. It was all fascinating, but not quite fascinating enough to override the growing fear in her.

  Despite the fact that it was yet to come on formally, the internal generator necessary to keep the battery warm was throwing out enough heat to sublimate the neon in the cryolith , and the drill, for that is what it was, was sinking slowly, throwing out a blur of mist. The time had come. She pointed the nozzle of the hydrogen-release device and turned it on. Quickly the small white mountains began to dwindle as she rose, and the systematic faults of this orogeny presented themselves to her in detail. Her entire science lay all around her, a great, crumbled sphinx. The vast blankness of the ocellus came up over the horizon, and she made for it. She was obligated to get very far from the drill site, and thus perhaps a minute passed as she gained speed and height. Finally she felt safe and slowed to a stop by sending out a prolonged blast of compressed gas. The curvature of the small moon was already quite pronounced, and from this height she could probably fall for anhour or more. She spun herself about with a command to her gyro, and blinked inside her helmet. In a moment the exhaust plume, a diffuse comet's tail, reached into the sky, slowly spreading a haze outward to engulf the nearby-seeming stars in a web of twinkling. When it was over the cloud vanished like winter's breath. Jana felt regret that this escaping gas would form a deposit on much of the surrounding territory, somewhat altering what would be found there later. But it was a necessary thing, and even asterology suffered from an uncertainty principle, an observer effect. She continued her fall and, suddenly, seemed paralyzed.

  The image of a demolished sphinx again superimposed itself over the ocellus' rim, and she knew that it was entirely in her hands to reconstruct this overwhelming landscape. And not only this one—right at this moment, she knew, Sealock and Krzakwa were engaged on their moronic "adventure," taking the already broken blocks and smashing them into pieces too small ever to fix. They took pleasure in thwarting her. She was, despite her credentials, perhaps the least powerful member of the expedition; even Harmon occasionally had some influence over Vana and, through her, Ariane and Brendan. Now, with John immersed in his asinine DR experiment, the only link she had developed with anyone here had disappeared. Damn him! she thought. I should have known he would go back to Beth eventually; leav
e me completely alone without a second thought. She thought back to moments when she had almost forgotten herself under his persuasive tongue, times when she had trusted him, if only to bring pleasure to her in his own way. But it had only been a game.

  Maybe, somehow, if she let herself DR with him, it would bring about his help. Show him her internal sphinx for aid in studying the Iridean one. It was his colony, after all, even if he did everything he could to avoid admitting it. But if he knew . . . No, he wouldn't help at all. Events and feelings no one could ever know about crowded into her mind. At age nine, after being returned to her parents, she had used their position as blockleaders to lord it over the neighboring children, forming them into an "Obey Cadre" and making them, after an initial period of harmlessly serving her, engage in ever stranger sexual acts. Even now she could feel the strong, almost sensual guilt flow over her. No, DR was impossible. Following in the wake of her guilt there came another sensation, similar in some ways. It was a feeling of exhilaration, and suddenly she knew that she would have the strength to do anything to unravel the mysteries of Iris and her moons. The others were not worthy of any consideration, really. She could squash them like so many roaches.

  The sphinx loomed above her, a woman like herself, and asked the simple question: How?

  Hu was falling rather rapidly now, five meters per second, and she could readily see the expansion of the white texture below her feet. She released some hydrogen until she was motionless again, then began to fall anew. She felt a certain amount of contentment in her purpose. With her heart beating slightly faster than could be explained by physical exertion, she directed herself toward the new-made excavation.

  John and Beth riffled through the scenes of their shared past, images and thoughts randomly sampled and released like a video history database run at search speed. John was amazed how much the link could restore memories he'd assumed lost or at least eroded by the passage of time. Previously he had avoided memlinking programs without fully understanding why—now he knew. In the presence of a fully retrieved memory, he felt enthralled in the frame, lost his sense of distinction between the present and the past, and was overpowered by a feeling of deja vu. Predestination and unfree will dogged him as he watched himself, seemingly fully aware at the time, step into trap after trap, parading down his life like some Chaplinesque tramp.

  Beth's feelings were nothing of the sort. For her, it was simply what had been. She was able to separate her present self from the memories. John drew this strength from her. And the machine reached and grew, still not satisfied. . . .

  They were picking their way through the tourist shops inthe Hvolsvollur section of Reykjavik, dawdling on an old macadam street that led down to the solder-band of the Atlantic. At the very rim of the world was the place from which they had just come: Northern Hemisphere Escape Orbit Docking and Loading. NHEODL, or Noodle as it was called, had been difficult, but they had triumphed over it. It had been a long day of confronting a system designed not for the one but for the millions, and they were lightheaded from the cool, dry air coming down off the glaciers. They had seen Heimaey and the spaceport, and the launch of a GM shuttle in its raucous glory.

  Beth was thinking: how could she shield herself from seeing the patterns that were taking shape in John's feelings and actions? Looking at the space souvenirs in Iceland, it was becoming clear to her in spite of herself. John was not in love with her then, not in any real sense of the word. He had been, she guessed, during the first year, especially during the long cataloging treks across the summer tundra. He had taken joy in her, and she could feel the longings and twinges that kept them together. But had it indeed been love? Now, in DR, she could see that much of it had come back; that their relationship was becoming what it had been. But by the next year there were periods in which the feelings that she recognized in him as love were completely absent, and were replaced by repeated questioning of his real feelings to himself. If he didn't think he was in love, then could he be? Her own feelings had been a consistent, growing passion that could ignite her an average of ten hours out of fourteen, six days out of seven. But in him the spark came and, for increasingly long periods, went. She could see just when the idea of hiring a programmer to circumvent the limitations that he felt, to penetrate the blank wall that was her face, had come. . . . Downlink Rapport was not a possibility within Comnet, and not even all his immense wealth could buy it legally. It was forbidden by the Contract Police on any level of public access—you needed a personal 'net substructure to even approach the problem. That could be had, if you were an MCD-licensed experimenter. . . . They would laugh at the notion that some" bilboartist" might qualify for such a thing. The other was . . . personal 'nets were also made available for purposes of long-range exploration and deep space colonization. Ironically, she had been the one to suggest spending his logarithmically increasing money on building an experimental community in space. The idea seemed a good one as she said it—to start fresh, to get John motivated on something larger than himself. But the reality of it! To leave Earth for a tiny colony on an icebound moonlet far beyond the reaches of the material world! She had been seized with fear when he began taking, one by one, the steps necessary to bring it about, a physical, palpable fear, drawing together the muscles of her back and stomach into hard painful knots.

  And she knew she would follow John if he went.

  There was a backward timeshift and then they were fucking in the flower-spangled waste out beyond the Mackenzie, on a solar blanket nestled in a hollow beneath the foothills of the glacier-carved mountains. Beth was on top, undulating her torso and carefully expelling and engulfing the hard thing that rode on John's hips. It was a position she never really liked, and here, without springs or liquid, it was even worse John resumed his insistent prodding, his face unreadable. She had assumed at the time that he was being moved by those irresistible forces that bring us to orgasm, but now she could see that he had simply been going through the motions of that which had so recently given him joy, watching her face and waiting for the groans that signaled success.

  She was looking at him now/then, wondering what perverse universe would have them groveling like this, each trying to appease the hungry ego in the other, only to see that what was really happening was the ultimate Magianic Gift, a folding in upon itself of mechanical, altruistic ineptitude. Still, somehow, she had reached out and stroked his chest when it was over, when he had finished at last. She had been all right. Sore and . . . happy. How could she have been so blind? And what could she give to become blind again?

  John experienced the growing emotions in Beth with a sense of relief. It was coming out finally, all that had beensubmerged for so long. The truth. And the truth would bring him, them, back from the void. Or was truth the void itself? Beth wondered.

  Polariscame over the horizon, not yet braking from the transfer ellipse that had carried it from Aello. The dim white pinpoint sped ten degrees across the mystery of stars called Berenice's Hair and intruded upon the starkly bright dipper of the Great Bear. Slowly, it became a real thing: a tiny burst of light and it began to fall. Then, a few kilometers up, it began braking in earnest, spearing down as it grew until every detail could be made out. The silent, translucent flame quickly used up delta-v, modifying the ship's velocity so that it nearly matched that of the Ocypetan surface. About half a kilometer up, the flame died and the ship began to fall, as if through pitch. When it was only a few tens of meters up, the engine vented an invisible mist of cold hydrogen gas which swept the ice viciously. No flame would disturb the fragile solidity of the landing area. The ship slowed, stopped dead, and then drifted down, bouncing once in slow motion.

  Sealock and Krzakwa strode into the central room of the CM, exhaustion lining their faces, and looked about at the inhabitants and their varieties of boredom. Cornwell, who also looked tired but resolute, stopped them with a peremptory gesture. Brendan stared down at him, eyes glittering, unreadable.

  "All right," said John. "
You've had your little gadabout. In the time you've been gone we've put the DR

  software to good use, and I've come to some conclusions about myself and the nature of our effort here."

  "That's fine," said Brendan. A few lines etched themselves at the corners of his mouth, evidence of a sudden tension in the muscles of his face.

  "I want you to know that I am not going to be intimidated by your violence anymore."