Iris

by William Barton

  "John—" Tem began, but he was waved off by Sealock.

  "Go on," said Brendan.

  "That's all I have to say," said Cornwell.

  "Anyone else?" asked Brendan. He glanced around the chamber. Demogorgon was coming out of his room. "Brendan," he said, "we have to talk. Alone." Sealock grinned, giving a little laugh that sounded more like a cough or small sneeze than anything else.

  "Don't sweat it," he said. "We will . . . not right now, though." He shook his head slowly, grin broadening and becoming softer. "Tem, why don't you tell them what's going on?" Krzakwa shrugged, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, looking puzzled. "I, uh . . ." He stopped, cleared his throat, and went on: "This is going to be hard to accept. We found something on Aello ..."

  Jana, too, had come out of her compartment and was staring at the two travelers, wondering just what it was that she sensed in their demeanor. "What? What did you find?" He smiled faintly and spread his hands before her, palms up. "Well ... It was a ... thing ... an artifact." There was a moment of silence, a nonreaction that made Krzakwa wonder if they'd heard him, if his statement had somehow failed to penetrate their consciousness. Finally, from his position in the corner, Prynne said, "Huh?"

  "What do you mean?" asked Ariane. She hadn't moved and both her face and voice had remained bland, as if she were asking for the time of day.

  "Artifact is an understatement, Ari. . . ." He looked at her and thought, Jesus. How the fuck am I going to put this? He tried to come up with a way and realized that, whatever he said, it was going to be outre .

  . . . They were going to be talking about something not only outside of human experience but outside of expectability as well. "Hell, why don't I just say it: we found a God damned enormous alien spaceship stuck inside the moon. . . ." He looked at their faces and saw the beginning of incredulity. "I'm not kidding.... It was kilometers across, under the ice of Sayyarrin . . . ." If air could be called dumbstruck, it was this air, now. Jana stood up straight, rising a little into the air. She opened her mouth, as if to speak, then gagged and closed her eyes. She swayed in the air and drifted slowly to the floor.

  Demogorgon went to where she had fallen and propped her torso up, saying, "Jana . . . Hey! Jana?" Her eyes opened, and the look inside the lids was not pleasant to see. She did not speak.

  "I don't believe it," said John. "Why didn't you radio the information to us?"

  "You may not care," said Sealock, "but that thing's ours until we decide otherwise. We decided to avoid the risk of having a signal intercepted, by anyone. I brought the RAW bubble out of Polaris. You can verify everything for yourself."

  "But . . ."

  "Just tap the fucking thing! We'll talk later. Tem and I have work to do."

  They labored and, finally, the rebuilding program was complete. Though they still referred to it as Polaris, it was no longer the same. Where there had been a tall, sleek spaceship form, something that bore a distinct kinship to both the centuries-gone fantasies of a prolonged childhood and the early designs of Sergei Korolyev , there now stood a modernistic girder array, almost the Deepstar reborn. A closer inspection showed the detail of what had been done: the new ship was made of three slim obelisks standing side by side on the ice, encased within a confining structure of beams. In a sense, what they'd built still fitted in with the technological gestalt of their original design. The core of the structure, its middle tower, was the heavy-ion drive unit that had provided Deepstar's principal thrust, encased within its crosshatched metallic housing. The two outriggers, though somewhat differentiated in form, were similar in function. To one side of the engine/drill was one of the Hyloxso matrices that the earlier craft had used, recharged with H2/O2fuel. Beneath it, a high-impulse liquid-fuel rocket motor was secured. On the other side stood Polaris itself, a little longer than it had been, but still largely devoted to being a rocket vehicle, with a module for men to ride in. The added length was necessary, and the story was power. The ion drill/engine was a voracious device, no matter what its intended purpose. Though it used fuel efficiently, it did soat a high cost in electromagnetic energy. It was a pretty little problem for engineers to face, but it had a tractable solution. The ion fuel itself, through its automatic breakdown process, was a form of stored energy, ultimately power-stabilized by the fusion reactor. The complex's Magnaflux generator, intended for attitude control and as an important part of the life-support system, was an em-field manipulation device. Though batteries were no longer a major part of the technological surround, their purpose was still understood, and the generator, by its very nature, could contain stored energy for a certain period of time. It would work, over the short term, recharged from Ocypete via microwave beams, and that was all that they needed to ask of their system. It would work, after a fashion, and accomplish their purposes on Aello. In their haste to return to the Artifact, and what it represented, they had done little to modify the CM

  for its enlarged crew. There were four of them now, possessing what passed for physical-science expertise in their little universe on the edge of the void. Sealock, Krzakwa, Hu, and Methol filled the little ship to near overflowing and made the CM into a crowded place indeed. There were two extra couches bolted into the space athwart the top of the lower equipment bay, and Jana and Ariane would ride there, facing into the backs of the upper berths. They would be little more than cargo during the flight, sitting there, watching the bracing struts flex. Because of their presence there would be no room for extra food lockers here, but the already extant ones could be stuffed fuller, and the ship's vaster superstructure invited much external storage. They would use the same airlock, for instance, but the first two to exit could pass in two more worksuits. Aggravations would probably abound in a ship that was even more claustrophobic than it had been previously. With the firing sequences ended, there was little practical to do but wait.

  Disconnecting the induction leads from his head, Krzakwa rolled over in his seat to a position that left him uncomfortably back-bent, despite the zero-g float, and grinned at the two women. "This must be how it was for the first astronauts. I feel like an elephant in a birdcage." Sealock, still hooked up to the control element, glanced over and said, "That's a consistent visual image, . . . You're going to have to go on a diet if you want to get to the food, you fat bastard." Tem smiled. It was true—he'd never be able to squeeze his bulk between the two women to reach the provision cabinet. "No, but I can have a lot of fun trying. I feel like I'd be a lot thinner if I could just take a good crap. This shitless food is accumulating somewhere inside me. . . . Anyway, these here cabin boys can cook our meals and serve them to us in bed."

  Sealock began unplugging leads from his skull. "They're not boys, my friend, if you haven't noticed. And they should have at least one shit apiece coming, if you would like a little empathic elimination." Krzakwa laughed.

  Grimacing, Ariane said, "This is the grossest conversation I've ever heard! Are you two that bored already?"

  "Just call it ennui," said Brendan.

  Tem said, "Remember, we've been sitting in these very same positions for a good part of the last two weeks. I guess we've been developing ways to entertain ourselves. . . ." Methol laughed. "Well . . . if it's entertainment you want . . . the rest of you can watch me making up for lost time." She peeled off the inertial harness and slithered out between the forward seats, climbing atop Brendan, her legs locking about his waist.

  Krzakwa settled back into his couch with an expression of interest. It was not immediately obvious whether Hu was even paying attention. Her eyes were open but she was looking at nothing in particular. Watching them have sex from a close perspective turned out to be no novelty for Tem. After an initial bout of writhing, held in place by Brendan's harness, they coupled and quickly settled into the slide and grind rhythms of woman-on-top sex. There was no real sound beyond the coarse whisper of cloth on cloth and the even quieter one of meshing organs. Tem stole occasional glances at their faces, but in their fixed expression
s there was nothing new to learn. The only noveltywas the way Sealock pulled apart Ariane's buttocks and inserted his finger between them as far as he could reach, apparently so he could get independent verification of the sensation of his penis being alternately engulfed and decoupled. After a while Krzakwa fell into a sort of reverie. Contained within himself, he was back on the Moon again, thirteen now and starting his apprenticeship. The surging arcana of sex, though fascinating for their strangeness, were distinctly alien —not unlike the behavior of the exotic small particles that, he was learning, represented the even stranger forces that made up that which was. Perhaps he was thinking about Sadie, and what had become of her when she graduated . . . and then again, perhaps not. It was like a waking dream, and a reverie was like DR, but unaided and alone. It was private, and seemed pleasant: he walked alone down the endless dim hallways that led to the underground rooms in which he received his Met-stat training. He was late because of an incident involving an accusation of "overindulgence," so in all probability that's what he was thinking about. He did not walk as quickly as he could have, and perhaps there was more trouble waiting for him at the class hall. Occasionally he had to stop before closed seals and wait for them to slowly iris open. He would be at least twenty-five minutes late, but he didn't really care. He would blame it all on the residence counselor.

  Finally he came to the widening out of the corridor that was the atrium to the Met-stat section. Now he began to skip, hurrying to give the impression that he had run the whole way. He passed through the halls, past the numbered empty rooms, and finally looked into the class hall in which he was supposed to be having a lesson. He looked again, harder; no one was there! Where in the fuck was the class? It reminded him of a dream he had had hundreds of times. Shit!

  Now he really was running. He slammed through the door into the administrative section, then stopped and tried to compose himself, walking up to the secretary's desk. He was a young, balding man who Tem had sensed was rather in sympathy with the students. "Mr. Tamura. I was delayed by my counselor and just got here. Where's the class?"

  Tamura looked up, smiling slightly. "Calm down, Kracka —that's it, isn't it? You haven't missed anything. That is if you've paid attention to the suit-up lectures. They are just going over that material again. In Room K4. Take the Qal7b elevator, that's quickest."

  It took him under five minutes to get there. The corridor ended in a small chamber lined with lockers and benches, like the anteroom to a gym. There was a door there with a round bull's-eye for a window, and by standing on the very tips of his toes he could look through. There was an instrument panel, and another door with an identical window. The light over both doors was green, so he pulled the handle and went in, walked to the other door, and pressed his face to the window. His classmates, all twenty of them, were there, in a room larger than any he had seen. And they were putting on space suits!

  Of course! This was an airlock! His class was being taken on an unannounced trip outside! And, by Christ, he had almost missed it!

  He flung open the door and, going up to his instructor, proffered his planned excuse. "Very well, Krzakwa," the man said, "get a suit from the rack there and put it on—you know how to do that, don't you? You've been lectured enough. Just remember: if you put it on wrong you're dead. Got it?" He nodded.

  The room was large, and it was evident that Met-stat didn't just use this airlock for individual egress. There was a large orange machine mounted on five-meter-wide treads that Tem recognized as a bulldozer. The floor was covered with a dull gritty dust that he knew was dirt. He barely had time to take in what was about to happen as he followed the precise steps and put on the suit, piece by piece, and sealed it. He caught up and had it fully on before some of the slower members of the class. Inside the suit it smelled, but he didn't mind. He looked out through the old-style faceplate, scratched and fingerprinted, and turned on the radio channel with his tongue.

  They gathered before the large pressure curtain that was the far wall. It was bathed in an internal red glow, indicating that the room was depressurizing. There was a diminuendo hiss, and the curtain turned green. The curtain began to slide aside, more quickly than Tem had expected.

  "Oh, my God . . ." You couldn't tell whose whisper that was. The next room had an irregular gray floor and a dead black ceiling decorated by a brilliant blue and white crescent. His breath whispered in his helmet. It wasn't a room . . . and he found himself confronted by the world outside his world:

  TemujinKrzakwa, at thirteen, stood on the headway of a long ramp, under an infinite black sky, dotted here and there with impossibly remote points of light barely visible in contrast to the flat gray surface. This was a parking lot, and, besides the occasional great trucks, there were several rows of small rollagon cars. In the distance another of the cars moved slowly along a road of fused regolith, still raising a small smear of dust. Farther—farther away than Tem had ever seen before—was a row of lollipop coils that marked the beginnings of a mass-driver. His eyes felt fatigued already, but he couldn't stop looking. Back over his shoulder was the hemispherical dome that was a surface manifestation of the universe that had heretofore contained him. Under the Earth, on the horizon, sat a tiny spaceship. As he had been instructed, he didn't look in the direction of the sun. Over the radio the instructor said,

  "OK, boys. This is just to get you acquainted. Take all the time you want to look around. This'll seem like a bore before you know it."

  Somehow, for him, maybe for him alone, that preplanned aphorism turned out to be a lie. He was embarked on a first flight into the unknown, a recognizable sort of adventure. He wanted to look for the exit from this infinite room, not the one that led to his old world, no, but the door to the next world, which would be even grander than this, and even more wonderful.

  They were on the surface of Aello now, standing before the Artifact that had called them here, staring silently at it, andthey had fully implemented the thermal retention feature of their worksuits, so no further erosion was taking place. Neon dust about five hundred centimeters thick hid everything except for the grotesque fin, a dark and foreshortened triangle that towered upward above their heads. It was featureless, looking almost naturalistic.

  Finally their desire for touristic gawking was fulfilled, and they began to wonder, to speculate. Krzakwa was the first to speak. "Well, this is it, I guess. Time to find out what this thing is made of. Brendan?"

  Sealock unhooked a tunable em-wave modulator from his belt and played a tight cone of infrared radiation over the ground in front of him. A great swath of neon simply disappeared, followed by the water nodules that it had contained. They were momentarily surrounded by the haze of a swiftly dissipating cloud of gas, then what was left was a perfectly flat, smooth area, more blue than gray, about the size of a boxing ring.

  Kneeling on the surface, he muttered, "I guess a little neutron activation analysis won't hurt anything. . .

  ." He changed the setting on his suit scanners and exchanged the em-device for a smaller collimated particle beamer. He fired an invisible ray and read its reflection. "Um ..." What the fuck? "This is ridiculous. It's ... it looks like . . . carbon, platinum, and iridium." Using the em-wave device, he did a quick gamma-ray scan. "In a dense, octahedral array . . ." He hung the tools back on his belt and turned to stare at the others, feeling somewhat foolish.

  "Bubbleplastic?" Jana's whisper was incredulous, a perfect overlay.

  "That seems a little unreasonable," said Krzakwa.

  "Yep." Sealock rubbed a gloved hand uselessly over the front of his helmet. "The latticework is smaller, and there's something peculiar about it, but there's no doubt about the readings. There must be something more to this than meets the eye." He grinned to himself, humorlessly. "Not to mention the instrumentation . . ."

  Ariane turned up her suit optics and looked hard. "No seams, connectors, doors, or even bumps. No real detailabove the crystalline level, except for the slight variations in color. No way in
from this end." The Selenite grunted as he snapped together the fittings of a heavy beam-welder that he'd stripped from one of the remote work units. He took careful aim at nothing in particular, set the charge coupling regulator, and fired. The bright beam reached out and touched the surface but stopped and disappeared there like a broken rod.

  "No change in blackbody constant," said Hu.

  The beam shut down and, in the dimness, it became apparent that the intense radiation had not even marked the stuff. It hadn't even gotten warm. "Hell," said Krzakwa. "Be nice to find out how they're getting around the basic laws of thermodynamics.''

  Ariane nodded. Her speculations were getting ever more grandiose. It was best to take things as they came.

  Brendan turned to face Jana. "One thing left to do," he said. The woman nodded and began pulling components from her own belt, assembling them into a device atop a small collapsible tripod. The thing was a partial gravimetric flume gauge, a wave-system detector that could map out anomalies in the local mass-density background. Though useless to asterologists, it was a handy device for prospectors and could tell them a great deal about what lay beneath their feet. All energy fields have patterns, and those patterns contain information. Chains of causation can be unraveled by anyone with sufficient data processing capability. . . .

  "I guess we might as well give it a try, huh?"

  Hu signaled agreement by unreeling a waveguide from her suit and plugging it into the detector. Sealock joined her and they switched it on.

  The Einstein winds blow like a delicate breeze, moving shells of time restrained only by the calming influence of quantum mechanics. Sequencing events are self-ordained and all things come off a steadily unraveling skein. Lachesis. Visualize a rock in a flowing river. Now, hide the rock with an occultation disk. Inspect the turbulence that you can see downstream. Estimate the difficulty in deducing the size and shape of the rock from the wake it leaves in its lee. Q*T*D. Quantum Transformational Dynamics comes along and makes many things possible.