Iris

by William Barton

  Demo and Vana were frozen in their tableau, trying to think of words, looking like a stopframe from a pornodisk .

  Prynne stared down on them for a long moment, face motionless, then he snarled, "Bastard!" and, seizing Demogorgon by the hair, dragged him upright. Releasing his hold,he punched him in the face, knocking him down and throwing himself off balance.

  The Arab bounced to his feet in the low gravity and said, "Wait . . ." Prynne flailed his arms wildly, fighting to maintain position, and threw another punch. It missed and he went into an uncontrollable pirouette.

  Demo felt a surge of sourceless anger and tried to kick the spinning man, but he missed, lost his footing, and bounced off the ceiling. When he came down he fell on Prynne and the two melted together into a single grappling mass, clawing at each other and trying to strike. Vana threw herself on them, trying to separate them, but succeeded only in becoming part of a struggling ganglion of limbs and bodies that floated around the room, rebounding from furniture and walls. In the end their personal version of entropy ran down and they drifted to the floor in a gasping, insensate-seeming heap. Prynne and Demogorgon were unharmed. Vana Berenguer had a bloody nose from bumping into some unknown hard object. She remembered that it was not a fist or other human thing, just a hard, flat surface. Their breathing slowed, evened, and they gradually came apart, becoming individuals once again.

  Vana put her arm around Demo and said, "Harmon, how could you do something like this? Why?" The man stared at them for a second, then his face crumpled. "Vana, why are you leaving me like this?

  I'm so alone out here. I'm not like the others. . . . Without you ... I only came because of you!" He was in tears and almost unrecognizable.

  Demogorgon looked at them both and heard the kinship in his words. He thought of Brendan gone and then gone again, thought of him making love with Ariane, the two of them closing him out.

  "Join us then," he said. "Join us."

  Sealock and Krzakwa sat in the tangle that was the makeshift nerve center of the quantum conversion scanner they'dbuilt together and worked on their continuing attempts to probe the alien Artifact in the center of Iris. Though it was nearly invisible to everything they'd tried so far, there was still the surface scan to be worked on.

  "Not too much detail here," said the Selenite.

  Sealock nodded, concentrating on his task. Both men were loaded down with far more waveguides than they could legitimately handle. In addition to the twelve direct brain-taps that he usually used, Brendan had added a score of induction leads to the back of his head, focusing on the occipital lobe and his visual cortices. There was another little jungle of wires coming off the left side of his head, centering on Wernicke's Area, where a great deal of neurolinguistic processing could take place, and on the important interconnections of the arcuate fasciculus underneath. Other leads were aimed deep into his limbic system, in an effort to tap certain automatic processes that were rarely, sometimes never, used in Comnet operations. Krzakwa, similarly but less heavily arrayed, was controlling the support system that fed the other man's work.

  The outside of the Artifact had shown itself to be virtually free of meaningful surface detail. True, there was some kind of a mast reaching upward almost forty kilometers from the north pole and a big raised grid in the south, but that was about all. There were hints of surface irregularity under the thin, metallic layer that covered the thing's impervious skin, but nothing resolvable.

  "Why can't we see inside?" muttered Krzakwa. "Even if the hull were made of neutronium , which it isn't, we should be able to see ..."

  Sealock thought about that. Yes, we should be able to. Why not? There were several alternative explanations. "Maybe," he said, "we're looking too hard." Krzakwa opened his eyes and stared in the real world, seeing the other through a miasma of superimposed images. "So?"

  "We'll find out. Switch over to the W± virtuosity input."

  The Selenite complied. There was a brief instant of statickysilence on the readout channel, then both men jerked convulsively and went rigid.

  Krzakwa found himself embedded in a sea of rushing data —it came in over every waveguide, invaded every corner of his brain, and it made no sense. It was so all-pervasive, it almost took away his ability to perceive what was going on in a linear fashion. What was it? Not analogue. Numbers maybe. Numbers based on some concept he did not understand. He tried to reach out through the circuits and manipulate the net and found that he could not. Trapped? Perhaps the danger of an on-line discharge was close at hand. Am I almost dead?

  It was growing increasingly difficult to think and he felt something groping at him, tendrils caressing his circuitry with a thin, keening cry as some kind of a *shutdown* command cried for his attention directly out of Sealock and earned a *can't* reply along with a joint *we've*got*to*do*something* fear. He began reaching out with almost lost physical hands to begin ripping off leads in a frenzy. When he could see again, he saw that the other man was doing the same. He was startled to notice that Sealock's eyes were bleeding. In control again, he reached out for a mechanical switch and silenced the entire system.

  They sat in that silence, breaths at a whisper.

  Finally Brendan turned to look at him. "Temujin?"

  "It's alive."

  Sealock laughed and began trying to wipe off his face but succeeded only in smearing the thin, sticky blood. "Is it? Tell me what that word means."

  Krzakwa made mute agreement. "We'd better go to the infirmary. We may be badly hurt."

  Krzakwa and Methol had been making love. This time it had come to naught, no conclusion, and gradually their muscular activities had run down and come to a halt. The woman was lying on her back and the man was curled semifetally , his head on her stomach. He had one eye pressed into her flesh and with the other was gazing down across the vista of her groin, surveying an expanse of short, curly black hair. He shifted slightly, blank-minded, and then he was looking at herwith an eye at skin level, the other one shut. It was like staring into underbrush on a symmetrical beige hill. Why can't I think? he wondered. He moved again, a little farther, so that his cheek rested on her little pad of hair. Ariane reached down and ran her fingers through the outer layers of his beard.

  "What happens now?" she asked.

  "I don't know." He strained for an idea and finally said, "We're lucky we weren't hurt more by the overload . . . and nobody even knew you could get that kind of physical damage via Comnet."

  "Just minor capillary rupture from a rapid systolic pressure spiking."

  "We could've died."

  "What can you do?"

  "Better filtering, a much larger support infrastructure . . . we'll figure out something." He turned his face inward and nuzzled against her body, feeling its complex structure with his skin. There was a sense of newness in it for him, brought on by a passage through the filmy gauzework of death. "You know what he really wants to do?"

  She didn't answer and he went on: "He wants to modify Polaris for a direct descent into Iris, to make physical contact with the thing."

  "What?" Ariane sounded as if she simply hadn't heard him.

  "I told him that it was certain death, that even if we made it down we'd never get out again. He said he didn't care."

  Sealock and Krzakwa were making modifications to the quantum conversion scanner. The things that they had done necessitated pulling apart a lot of the circuitry needed for the full operation of their little electronic world, and much of what had been Deepstar, along with what was available to its occupants, was temporarily reduced to functioning on a shrunken level. Many of the ship's components were tracked to a binary alternate trunk.

  The banks of Torus-alpha transfinite numeric-base generators that Sealock had brought from Earth were now hookedinto the QCS, in hopes that it would be able to sort through the data mass for them and present it in some kind of coherent fashion. When the last connections were made, the stage was set for a final experiment.

  They sat for a while
staring at the massive mess they'd created.

  "Think this'll work?"

  Sealock shrugged. "Who knows? It'd better." He thought for a moment, then said, "With each discrete data system going into a fully packed multibase array variable, it ought to be susceptible to some kind of transfinite analysis. That's what Torus-alpha was supposed to be for . . . but then, we couldn't make it work right on Earth, either."

  "And what if it doesn't?"

  He smiled. "What if ... good phrase for a lot of stupid situations. Hopefully the automatic biosensor switching system will pull us out of the net before our heads explode." Krzakwa frowned. "Your grisly imagery isn't what I needed to hear." He sighed. "OK. Let's do it."

  "Right."

  They began plugging in their hordes of leads.

  "Ready?"

  "Sure."

  They switched on and went under.

  This time it was different.

  In place of the floods of raw data, they were interacting through the culturally energized formatting system of the 'net element they'd created.

  It was still incomprehensible, but it was something. . . .

  An infinite sea of clear, cold, viscous oil.

  Liquid helium, cooled to near absolute zero, perhaps. . . .

  No, it was a perceptualized vision of the plenum, the ever increasing background of almost, but not quite, massless neutrinos on which all things material rode.

  Vacuum boilers.

  Bags.

  And on down the scale.

  A multidimensional matrix of free radicals, all the kinds that could be. The things that bred reality. Quadriformiccharge, the physicists called it.

  Long vectors three, the photons, gluons, and gravitons. Their complementary short vectors. The supershort vector and its mirror identity. The hypershort vector, complete unto itself . . . And somewhere, unseen and stretching to infinity, the ultrashort vector that comes into being only at the grand flux-gate threshold, unifies the forces, sucks up the universe, and vanishes to the nowhere/when from which it came.

  -Temujin? -Yes? -What the hell is this? He gazed around, ethereally. -It seems to be a theoretical schematic for the bases of quantum transformational dynamics. -But what's it for. . .-Sealock stopped, riven by knowledge. -The arrays!-he cried. -Look at the arrays! -What do you mean? -Tem, it's an information storage device! -This is a computer? -Yes. Let's get out of here. We have work to do. . . . They surfaced and looked at each other, not knowing what to think, wondering.

  "What sort of work?" asked Krzakwa.

  "The ship! I know it can be done. . . ."

  Oh, shit, thought the Selenite. The ship.

  Six

  As the glass bead that was the sun climbed slowly up the days, Krzakwa and Sealock were incommunicado and they had taken many of the aspects of Shipnet with them. Although Bright Illimit was still operative, it had been shifted into a different subsystem to increase the RAW adjuncts to the machine they were building. The hardware they needed was totally isolated from the remainder of the 'net. Despite the exciting nature of what was happening, time began to hang heavily on the rest. New information concerning the position of the USEC ship showed that, while it was still inside the orbit of Pluto, it was accelerating again. That could only mean that they were exceeding their safety margin, redlining their drives to reach Iris as quickly as possible. It told a little of what was suspected by the government. Time was even tighter now.

  Something very deep had changed. At first it was only Beth who had seemed increasingly unwilling to participate in DR, but now even John, who was the prime mover in the affair, felt withdrawn, as if the whole process had become a waste of time. The sessions they did have seemed stilted, dominated by the ideas that Beth had formulated about him and her desire to keep him at bay. Perhaps it was at an end, but neither of them could admit it. Was DR no longer a novelty? There were so many levels, so many facades that had to be broken through, that it was never the same. And such was the state of his mind after grappling with concepts involved with the Artifacts that he came to the conclusion that, come what may, he and Beth must continue to do it. After breakfast he went to Beth's cabin, yet when the time came to reestablish rapport, John hesitated.

  She was courteous to him, interrupting a dramatization by Sukhetengri and pulling him down on the bed beside her, stroking his cheek in a mechanical way. But the distance was there, incongruous, out of synch with what should have been. "Beth," he said, "tell me what's gone wrong between us." She said nothing for a time, continuing the caress until it began to rasp. "There's so much to think about," she said. "Life is so complex sometimes. Why do we speak of it when we could DR? It's as if remoteness itself can sometimes communicate better than intimacy. . . . Oh, John, admit it—you don't love me. I know that now, I saw it so clearly. If you want to go on with this charade, I suppose I can't refuse you. But—"

  "What are you saying?"

  "Stop pretending, damn you!" She pulled away from him and looked into the corner. Suddenly she grabbed her circlet from the table and put it on. She was initiating DR routines, and it came surging into his mind like a shock wave. The deliberate thought patterns, an echo of his own, were broken and a rush of hurt and brave resignation washed through. He was there, mirrored in her mind, knowing; knowing that which he knew, that the truth was somehow a bridge between them that could not be crossed. The realization flooded them that his motivations were strange and complex ones, intermingled in his consciousness in a way that made them impossible to classify as right or wrong. It was clear, however, that she was right in that one thing: the way that he felt did not satisfy her criteria, or even his own, for love. He saw that darker, almost incomprehensible motives were driving him along the courses he had chosen. He knew that, somewhere within him, he wanted Beth to know that at some point he had stopped loving her. Perhaps the whole Deepstar adventure was a ploy to bring them close enough together so that she could know it.

  Her own motivations stood out in contrast to his as clear, forthright. The total giving of herself to DR

  had been the greatest possible expression of her love for him. But that love had been sullied by his lack of it, almost to the point where it could not be resurrected. She saw that his desire to understand, undoubtedly the strongest force within him, was a corrupting force, an emotion which had profound ramifications for them both, making all things distorted and tentative. It had flowed into her, on top of her already fully realized persona, and had made her question things that could not be questioned. No, he thought. It is not so. I am not as she thinks. She is not as she thinks. These ideas are neither real nor useful. The world is around us, it cannot be denied. The reasons for our actions are directly tied into their outcomes. There was a surge of anger. It must be so.

  But within her the small voice cried out. Break off. Break off! This is the profoundest representation of the incompatibilities within us. And it grows worse with each second. End! she cried. End! And she tore the circlet off her head, leaving him to patch the great ragged tears that fluttered into the night. He opened his eyes. "No!" he said. "You've got to listen!" And he grabbed her wrist, pulling her to face him. Her eyes were distant, cold. "It's all a lie. Even in DR, what you know about me is filtered, unknowable. Those things you think about me may be true in one sense, but not the most important one."

  "Please leave," she said, collapsing on the bed. He left.

  As he pulled on his space suit in the atrium of the CM, John felt numb, driven by the merest tickle of fear that made him keep moving. Had she been right after all? How had something that had started out so well ended in such despair? He knew little about love, that was certain, and less about people. Was it possible that this was what happened so often between men and women, happening again? Just the end of a love affair, breaking off with no rhyme or reason? He could not answer a single question, and finally he made his way out through the domes toward the beckoning night/day of Ocypete. It seemed like forever since he had been Outside. Suddenly he
stopped. Was this behavior a function of Beth's personality that had rubbed off on him? He was having difficulty even formulating the idea: in that moment he realized that he was becoming much more spontaneous, much more given to unexamined emotion. He sat down on the lip of the pool and stared out at the clouds near the dome's horizon. It was true—he was losing himself, a little. He couldn't do anything about the chill of fear that percolated into his neck muscles. Could it be that what had happened was because part of her was within him, changing, rationalizing, explaining himself to himself in a new way? The uncertainty of the situation was horrifying. Was it a manifestation of this change that he couldn't really pinpoint what was happening to him? He could only tighten his grip on himself; tell himself that he would have to get used to it. He suddenly resolved to stop sniveling this way. He remembered the night when the vision of becoming Beth had seemed so attractive. It must remain so.

  Amid the rubble of excavation, Jana Li Hu sat on the porch of the garage-sized laboratory she had carried with her and surveyed the mess she had made. Frustration and anger bubbled in her mind. Here she was, cataloging the minute changes in the composition of the slurry that had boiled out of the vent nearby—a student's project!—when that damn Sealock was making scientific history. She cursed herself fornot making more detailed observations in the shuttlecraft. Now that they were back there were no hard data to analyze, only speculation, and that was not her forte by any means. She wondered if anyone believed what she had said about anticipating the discovery of the Artifacts. She had to admit, the evidence was certainly there, and if she hadn't been so rigorous she might have seen the truth. Damn them all! She was completely shut out now.