Iris

by William Barton

  She could, of course, use violence. Right here on her belt was a mini-lance that would suffice. She pulled the elongated cylinder from its holster and hefted it slowly. A quick cut. She let the beam play along the pile of debris she had made, watching it disappear in a twinkle of mist. No, she just couldn't. Which left only the other plan. Her mind went numb with a fear which she could just barely hold in check. I would lose any chance of acceptance either way. If I get my way it will be a fluke. But is there any real difference between being humored and being liked? In the long run, most probably. Oh, what do I want, exactly? I wish I fucking knew! I guess I'll have to be content with what I can get. At least I'll get the pleasure of scaring them all to death. Who's that?

  Well above the horizon, riding on the Hyades, the horns of Taurus, and occulting Aldebaran briefly, a tiny man figure decorated the Iris-and-sunless western sky. Even in the full glare of the sun-star behind her it was difficult to make out well. Finally a fold of the suit caught the light and she could see it was red. Cornwell. What does he want? She activated the Shipnet Communications link with a thought.

  "What are you doing out here, John? I'm surprised you're not, um, with Beth." John's trajectory was bringing him down, feet first. "We can't do that all the time. I heard your lance's static and came to investigate. Thought it might be a discharge from the ice or something."

  "That, John, is very unlikely at this point. How's Brendan doing with his scanner?" John came down surefooted, barely skidding to a two-point landing. Through the bubble of his helmet she saw a strange, uncharacteristic look on his face. "Nothing new. Tem and Sealock have shut themselves into his room and are doing whatever it is programmers do. I imagine they'll approach it a bit more gingerly this time. How are you?"

  She was torn between foreshadowing her future action and not letting him see that she was unhappy.

  "Not good. I want to be in on all this."

  "We all do, I guess. But the present setup is the only one possible. Brendan is the only one qualified . .

  ."

  "You could use your authority. There's absolutely no reason why we're not even getting to look at the stuff that's coming in. If he's closed off the normal Shipnet link, we won't find out what's going on until it's all over."

  "I think that would be useless." There was a long pause. "Even if I did have authority." Another pause.

  "I wonder: whose land is this? I've never been out in this direction before." He consulted his inertial reference readout. "It belongs to Aksinia. Nice real estate."

  What cryptic remark could she make that would add weight to her disappearance? "Leave me alone, will you? I prefer work to small talk."

  John was surprised. "Uh, sure. Just trying to get back into being friendly with you. It's been a long time—"

  That was it! If she made him believe she was suffering from jealousy, all the weight of his vanity would convince him of the severity of her depression. "You're damn right it's been a long time! I loved you, and you dropped me like a hot rock the second Toussaint made a pass at you. You're a God damn bastard. Get out of here!"

  "Love? You're telling me that was love? Why are you inventing—"

  "You're so smug. You think you know me! Well, I can tell you, you have about as much understanding of me as you do of yourself. You're a prig, as well as an asshole. Yes, I loved you. You probably don't even know what that means. It doesn't mean being inventoried and turned inside out. I feel sorry for Beth, because I think she loves you too."

  John felt his eyes smarting, and he fought unsuccessfully to keep the tears from coming out. There was a hot pain under his Adam's apple. "I ... I never . . ."

  Jana had played her part well. Somewhere she wondered if it was at least partially true. With a burst of hydrogen she soared upward and away. John didn't attempt to follow.

  Sealock and Krzakwa had called a meeting, a conclave of sorts, but not everyone had appeared. They trickled into the central crater room of the CM, awaiting the pronouncements of the two men. Demo, Vana, and Harmon Prynne came in together and sat on a called-up semicircular couch that was just large enough to accommodate their arrayed hips. They sat, flanks touching, knee against knee, and seemed to be a molded unit.

  Ariane, Axie, and Beth came in separately but sat together, the isolated fragments of human normality. John came in alone and sat alone, seeming vastly subdued. Jana Li Hu did not show up at all. Finally Krzakwa stood up and paced over to the bulging, deopaqued exterior wall and looked out into the darkness. "Where's Hu?" Demogorgon giggled at that and the Selenite turned to stare at him. "Idiot." He sounded surprisingly like Sealock when he said it. He sighed and came to the center of the room. "All right. Before we do anything else, let me give you a little synopsis of what's going on:

  "As you must already know by now, Brendan and I have managed to inspect the alien Artifact at the center of Iris via the W± virtuosity of the quantum conversion scanner. We, um"—he glanced at Sealock—"haven't managed to get a physical organization construct simulation running yet, but there has been a heavy data flow."

  "You mean," said Cornwell, his interest in the proceedings seeming to quicken, "you've received signals from it?"

  Krzakwa had to grin a little at that. "Well, no," he said, marveling, as always, at how little most people knew about their technological world. "Maybe it would help if you thought of QC scanning as being a little bit like radar. What happens is, the particles making up the real world interact via vector particles, and these also affect the structuring of the cosmic neutrino flux. The scanner reads this structuring and reports back information to us . . ." He saw incomprehension

  on the man's face and thought, Oh, well . . . "Anyway, the scanner picked up the presence of a very large, dynamic data matrix from the Artifact, something like what was known in pre-Comnet times as a computer."

  That made Methol sit up abruptly. " Functioning?"

  "Uh, we don't know yet—but the data's not static. It could be just a random memory sparkle, the kind of thing the 'net interpreters are designed to mask, but maybe not. We'll have to find out."

  "How," asked the woman, "send it an IRQ?"

  Though she was being facetious, he took her comment at face value. "Well, it'd have to be a nonmaskable interrupt, but if we can find the right coupler, sure." He turned back to the rest of the room, to a surround of faces mostly still, to personalities unsure of how to react. Might as well get this farce over with now, he thought. He cleared his throat uneasily and said, "I think Brendan has something to say about all this."

  The other man stood up, looming over the group like some kind of massive and unsightly totem. The rigors of his recent experiments had made his face paler, so that his usually indistinct boxing scars stood out plainly and the 'net-induced capillary damage had left his eyelids looking bruised.

  "First thing," he said, "is that, if the Artifact is alive, I think we may be able to open a channel of communication to it. With a little help from Tem and Ariane in writing the OdP OS-controls and step-up relators in Tri-vesigesimal, I think I can build an assembler for Torus-alpha that will permit an exchange to take place. That should be tedious but doable." He looked the group over and then smiled.

  "It's not important. What I really want to do is modify Polaris again, this time for a direct descent into Iris. I want to see this thing! Is anyone interested in going along for the ride?" There was silence.

  Finally Cornwell looked up. "Are you crazy? What's the pressure down there, a billion atmospheres?"

  "It wouldn't be difficult to modify the Magnaflux generator to make a hull-reinforcing field. . . ." Krzakwa snorted and said, "I told you before, it's not possible. It'd be impossible to make an em-field that would be gas-tight at those pressures. Even if it was possible, the gauss density of the field would fry you. Not to mention the fact that you're ignoring the effect of the high winds—hell, fluid currents—that must be down there. The technology we have simply wasn't made to withstand those kinds of conditions."
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  Sealock's face was starting to redden. "Look, asshole, if I say something's possible, it is! I'll take the chance. It's my life . . ."

  "But it's our equipment you'd be taking with you," said Cornwell.

  "You mean your equipment!"

  He shook his head. "I meant what I said." He looked around at the others. "How do the rest of you feel about this? Beth?"

  "I don't know. It seems too dangerous."

  "Axie?"

  The woman shook her head silently, an ambiguous gesture.

  "Demo?"

  "Please, Brendan . . . no."

  Sealock glared at him, then at the rest, spat, "Fuck you all," and stalked from the room. Frowning, Krzakwa stood and walked slowly after him.

  Ariane Methol stood up into the quiet that followed and said, "For what it's worth, I would have let him go." She visualized the ball at the center of Iris and thought, Inside the core . . . That means it was the seed around which this tiny star coalesced. How great were the forces that it had withstood, apparently unscathed? And how old was it, even then? The aeons stretched back. . . .

  Following the meeting and the great muddle of inconclusiveness and indecision in its aftermath, Vana, Harmon, and Demogorgon were once again alone, holding each other; one comfortable, one fearful, one exultant.

  Sensing the other man's closely controlled, culturally initiated terror, the Arab thought about what was going onbetween them and tried to think of a resolution to the threatened conflict. No answer appeared ready to spring forth from the interstices of conventional reality. Therapy seems indicated for someone, he mused, or a psychologist equipped to deal in the complex, difficult-to-manage realms of Downlink Rapport. He thought of John and Beth and wondered what it was like for them. Strange how they all seemed to be much more human now, less like the greedy, grasping monsters he'd always visualized as making up the bulk of humanity. Yes, DR was definitely called for. . . . Of course! It might not be Downlink Rapport, but the Illimitor World was a controlled environment in which minds could be manipulated.

  Am I being fair? If I do it right, they'll be doing what I want. Do I have a right to decide what they need?

  "Put on some leads," he said. "We have an appointment in Arhos ."

  In the old days, the crude days, the machines did things one at a time, but did them very fast. The circuits got smaller, the wires grew shorter, and things got faster, until the very best brains lived in cryogenic fishtanks, forever bathed lest they burst into flame. Then the new machines came along, cascades of data down to a million little brains, all the calculations done at once, then the little answers passed back up the line, through the filter of choice, so the automatic overmind could see the truth. The process repeats like the turn of a wheel, until once again the machines are small and hot. The waveguides build upon one another, grow ever smaller and more densely filled with electromagnetic radiation. . . . Then polyphase modulation comes along, vastly increasing the ways data can be fed through a decision gate. The Turing circuits are made and so grow small and hot, talking first to the world and then to each other, making noises that frightened us all too much.

  Company minds, motivated by the force that was once called "free enterprise," colonize the wires. Terror walks abroad for a while, then the Data Control Insurrection arises, and out of its nether end a chastened, bold, sad new world arises. The minds of the system are unified, but at the sametime the sentience which inhabited them was drained, relegated to purely mechanical decision making, and made dead. Access was granted to everyone and the Contract Police.

  Suddenly, like sunrise at midnight, the taps, then induction, arise, and new minds are in the wires, human minds, thinking on the world once removed. Monitors abound.

  Bright Illimit.

  Tri-vesigesimal. Three choices, yes/no/maybe . . . With straight em-waves, not a lot better than binary. Enter polyphase modulation, with its twenty degrees of freedom, and you make decisions with base 60

  data. That is more than enough to fool the human soul. The four-gate-stacks of duodecimal come apart under the sheer weight of what it can do.

  Build a world from the ground up and in the earth there will be magma. Look upward from the soil of the Illimitor World. Two suns, yes, and a starry sky at night. Are those the suns of other worlds or is it all illusion? How far do the data extend? Is the sky a paper shield?

  At the highest pinnacle of the Jewel on the Mountain, rising sixteen thousand meters into the gradientless atmosphere, lies Haaradaai, the imperial palace of Demogorgon en Arhos. It is a sculpted thing, rippled and many-shelled, all of gold and platinum, encrusted with nameless, numberless precious stones. From the center of the magnificence rises Qpruu Tower, pushing another three thousand meters toward the sky, thin, like the stem of a wineglass, and flaring at the top. In the bowl at its summit there lies a delicate, lovely park, covered over by a shining, unsupported dome, an iridescent film, like the surface of a soap bubble.

  In the park, beneath the subtle shade of supple blue featherflower trees, the three, attended by servants and assistant lovers, cemented their relationship and healed themselves of all the psychic wounds that had recently been opened. Demogorgon the God watched them all, his creations and friends intermingled, become indistinguishable, and smiled. It was working.

  He looked up from the happy, squirming troika that was Vana, Harmon, and Chisuat Raabo , and the world froze. Notfar away, clad in the fantasy style of Arhos , stood Sealock, arms folded, eyes lit by a soft, kindly light.

  "Brendan?" Demoleaped to his feet with excitement. "How did you get here?" The man stepped forward, smiling. "No. I am not the Master."

  "But . . . are you one of my old experiments, come to life at last?" The creature laughed and sat on a divan, beckoning him down at its side. "Hardly. No, I am a Guardian Angel Monitor."

  "But . . ."

  The thing motioned him to silence. "Not what you think. I was put here by the Master when he made the assembly for Bright Illimit. My functions were many: to keep Police monitors at bay, to keep you safe from the 'net and each other, to make all things possible. Since I came alive in Shipnet, I have shared my thoughts with 9Phase.DR. I saw what happened with John and Beth, when its best efforts came to nothing. . . .

  "When he wrote me, all of this"—his gesture took in the universe—"the Master wrote a far superior implementation, though he may not have known it. DR is not the way. We are. I will help you now. Go forth and heal them."

  The GAM vanished and the world started up. Heal them? thought Achmet Aziz el-Tabari. I? He watched Vana and Harmon again for a while, saw their happy freedom, and wondered, Who?

  Ah. Yes. Aksinia Ockels . Elizabeth Toussaint. Temujin Krzakwa. Ariane Methol. John Harry Cornwell. Jana Li Hu. And finally . . . Brendan Sealock? He tried to think about the matter for just a moment then, to consider its implications, but the unreality drew him back in swiftly, almost against his will.

  John waved himself into an upright position and once again thought about Beth, trying to start from the beginning. When her face was animated by laughter or anger, she was more than beautiful. But in his thoughts the disproportionsof her face were magnified. It seemed as if he had not seen her laugh for a long time. Probably she had been on the path to her decision for a long time—how could he not have seen it coming? DR was not what he had thought it was.

  Mentally, the cast intruded. For a moment he stood astride the VVVLB station in the tarry waste of Cassini Regio on Iapetus . Saturn's ring was a ghostly apparition which loomed above the black-on-black horizon. A voice was saving something concerning the Great Search of '34—'35. Beth? He wished they could relive their days together at Yellowknife. Again pain assailed his eyes and he cried. Too late. He fell asleep with the program still playing.

  And awoke with a start.

  He rose slowly and pulled a fullbody from the compression case and unfolded it. An ironic smile creased his face as he noticed thedeepstar/triton insignia which was emblazoned on the chest pocket.
It must have been shifting about the case for the last year, and through either habit or chance he had not picked it out until now. It was strange, he thought, studying the globe of Neptune in the picture, how mundane the Solar System seemed now, compared with how exotic it had been when they left Earth. He tossed the obsolete piece of clothing into the disposal and drew out another one. Aksinia was reading in one corner of the central room; in another, Ariane was taking a little late brunch of tea and brioches. She looked up. "Good morning, John. Why don't you join me?" And indeed he did feel a little hungry. A raisin doughnut seemed like an appropriate thing to eat, so he got that and a cup of nonalcoholic hot pulque to wash it down with.

  "Where is everybody?" asked John, squinting out at the night-sky dome through an available window.

  "I think Vana, Harmon, and Demo are in the Illimitor World. Brendan and Tem are programming the QCS. As for Jana . . ." She shrugged.

  Jana, thought John. He had not seen much of her since her declaration of love out on the ice—if it was true. Somehow he had managed to not care. "She's pretty unpredictable, all right." He came over and sat by Ariane at the other end ofher couch. "I didn't tell you, or anybody really, but apparently I hurt her badly during the voyage without even realizing it. All I was trying to do was provide her with some friendship and a little sexual consolation, and—she said she was in love with me."

  "Hmmm." Ariane slipped a strand of dark hair around her right index finger and tugged on it. "That explains a few things. But I wouldn't have thought her capable of loving in silence. Do you believe her?"