Iris

by William Barton

"I don't really have a choice, do I?"

  "I suppose not."

  "I don't know what to think about her. I guess it's just one more tangle in my original ingenious plan. It's ironic that I was so stupid."

  "It's just a good thing these artifacts came along to shock everyone out of their senses. We'd probably be on our way back by now."

  "You're probably right. I—"

  There was a jumbled noise, and Brendan appeared at the ingress. He was still wearing space gear and, with the helmet deflated on his back, they could see the concentration on his face. He didn't even acknowledge them as he marched across the room to his compartment carrying a small cylindrical object.

  "What's that?" asked Ariane.

  Brendan stopped, looking puzzled for a moment, then said, "It's a final nail for my fucking Trojan horse. I've ransacked all the electronics I brought for this thing. It'll be as far above Torus-alpha as Torus-alpha is above binary. I'll do more than just eavesdrop on that thing." He went into his room.

  "It's nice knowing that he's working on this problem," said Ariane, smiling. "If anyone can do it, he can."

  "It is nice—having him too distracted to bother to annoy anyone. No, really, he is behaving heroically. It's just that it's hard to appreciate as nebulous a machine as he is building when the principles of QTD

  are just barely understood to begin with. I don't have the slightest idea as to what he's really doing."

  "To be honest with you, I don't think anyone except perhaps Tem does. I certainly don't."

  "You know, I'm ashamed to admit it now. But at first, for a while, I thought this whole thing, the Artifact on Aello anyway, might be a hoax—or even a delusion of Brendan's. With his programming abilities, he could certainly falsify all Shipnet sensory feeds. He could do anything he wanted with us, change anything into anything else, as long as we were all hooked up to Shipnet. If he really wanted to. This could still be a hoax." He laughed to himself. What a horrible joke if even what had happened with Beth had been somehow produced by Sealock. And yet he almost wished that it had been.

  "I can vouch for the reality of the thing on Aello. I know the difference between reality and 'cast images."

  "Do you, really? Is there a difference? For really well-crafted images? I know that experimental subjects have been able to discern the difference most of the time. But that was simple commercial-grade stuff. With more complete programming . . . who knows?"

  "I know that Brendan isn't like that. He wouldn't do that even if he could. The actions you're describing are those of a monster. Brendan is a man, even if he is different from you. Just a man." A memory came back to him, reluctantly, that he and Beth had never shared. There was something in it that held an intuition he was reaching for.

  In the mood of the moment, John Cornwell had almost forgotten the two obsessions which created his long-term motivations. The sky was a vast overspreading ice floe, broken clouds laced through with fingers of indigo. From the west a burst of haloed intensity showed the sun behind the clouds where the arch of the sky, bent by the knowledge that it must come to rest on the edge of the world, was a quick corner. He breathed warm, dry air with a flavor of mimosa and honeysuckle. Beth nuzzled more firmly against him, and her smell, like clean lavender, mixed with the others. They were sitting under a middle-aged tulip tree, at a point where the Appalachian Trail had left its more mountainous way for a hillyverge of old fields and replanted forests. Long grass dried by the rainless summer gave the wind's hushing more authority. Occasionally the whispering gargle of a passing lifter could be heard in the distance, yet it was easy, though bustling civilization was less than four miles distant, to imagine the world as primeval.

  "You know, Beth, much as I'd've liked to see the way it was, back in the last century, I can't help but think that Lonicera and the rest make a nice version of nature." This was a point that Beth couldn't let go. "I suppose you think pigeons, starlings, and English sparrows are adequate representatives of the bird population, as well."

  "Point taken. Growing up in the North, where everything has such a tenuous grip on life, tends to make all this a little intoxicating. Nature seems so, well, natural here." He laughed and rubbed a forefinger on her neck, under the dark curtain of hair. "It's difficult to imagine the way it was."

  "I think the first people who could wander alone through a forest without the slightest fear of being eaten lost a real idea of nature and substituted this. When there is nothing really left but dandelions breaking up through the pavements, it will still be enough to satisfy that urge to be with nature for most. That is, if they suppress the travelogues."

  "How can you come with me into space? There'll be no dandelions—not even natural E. coli on Triton. Just people and that which people have made."

  "You know the answer to that. It's because I want to be with you. I love you." Beth said the last as a litany, oft repeated.

  John squirmed, "And yet . . . well, we both know my answer to that." The image of Beth's refusal to DR hung between them. To John, it represented an unwillingness to give, a fearful secret interior life that the woman just wouldn't share with him. He sat up and took hold of his ankles, pulling his knees together under his chin. The rough ground pushed him from beneath.

  "You won't do it. I can accept that. I'm just not sure I can . . . love you without knowing you. You can feel us growing further apart over the last months, I know. It's just that I don't feel I can ever know you like this. Language is soclumsy; and our sex together, not that it's not tremendous, but it's a blind, nonsentient thing. It's just skin and groin with us as observers. How many times do you want to go through this? We can't understand each other's views on this—and that's why we should."

  "John. Y'know, I get these images from the entertainment 'net, in the old days, when a boy tried to go

  'all the way' with a girl; to 'get in her pants.' Why can't I preserve a part of me from you, why can't I have just a corner private to myself?"

  "You can. It is your decision to make. But until you do, don't ask me to say that I love you." He stood.

  "Am I such a bastard for that?"

  "John, I don't judge you."

  "Let's get back to the lifter, OK?" He took her hand, small and dark, and pulled her up. They made their way slowly through the wavering brownish grass and the sun broke out to throw long buckling shadows before them.

  John shook his head, incongruously, as the question he had asked was answered for him. Methol was still sitting with him, although he had been ignoring her. She was looking out the window at Iris in the sky. With each passing "day" the planet grew more closely aligned with the bright spark of the sun and they knew that an eclipse was coming, but they had already discussed that. It seemed a minor thing in the midst of everything else.

  John was saying, "I'm beginning to feel totally lost, Ari . It was bad enough on the long trip out here, trying to keep afloat in this tiny sea of locked-up people, half of them seeming like lunatics to me, but now! All this business about Iris and the Artifacts, which still seem so unreal, the things that have gone down between Beth and me . . . Brendan going crazier every day and taking Tem with him! I can't keep track of it all!" He shook his head and grimaced, a sort of wry smile. "Here Demogorgon is dragging people off to that imaginary world of his and Jana is acting weirder than ever. I thought I understood her on the trip out. . . . The only one who seems the same as at the beginning is Axie, perhaps because she does so little, just stays a simple dope fiend . . . and you, of course." Methol sat through his rambling monologue, listening sympathetically. The ramifications of what had happened to them all were enough to confuse anyone. You could understand a part of what was going on, but the whole was chaos. Perhaps, she thought, that's how normal people stay sane. They attend to whatever they can understand and ignore the rest. Certainly a sensitive, artistic mind like Cornwell's, accustomed to seeing his surroundings with a gestalt perception, would be disturbed by an overload of detail. She smiled at his last remark. "I'm
not unchanged, John. I'm just not complex enough to be rendered incomprehensible by the changes that occur within me."

  "Not like Sealock, huh?"

  She grinned. "Well, he started out incomprehensible. I think he would be no easier to understand now, no matter what happens. There have been positive changes in him, but I don't know to what effect."

  "I haven't seen any of these 'positive' changes. He seems worse than ever!" Shaking her head, Ariane said, "Just because you can't perceive a thing doesn't mean it isn't there." Cornwell felt a little upwelling of uncharacteristic anger. "Tell me how he's changed, then. Convince me."

  "I ... can't." She looked pained. "Something's going on in him. I don't know what. The violence and anger seem to be receding. I think maybe he sees himself more clearly now. I don't know what the end result will be. . . ."

  Demogorgon surfaced from the Illimitor World, called back to his body by the safeguards that Sealock had helped him build in long ago, monitors designed to prevent damage to organs by neglected bodily functions. A ruptured bladder would be a poor ending to a fine adventure. He stretched. Prynne and Berenguer were sprawled motionless on the soft floor before him, left to their own devices in a self-sustaining inner Universe. He heard a muted sound and looked up. Aksinia Ockels was leaning against the open doorway, naked, watching them all through her chemically brightened eyes. He nodded to her as he stood up.

  She approached and touched him, running her fingers down the length of his chest, toward his groin.

  "Want to make love with me?"

  He shook his head. "No. I've got to piss. Besides, you may have heard, I'm queer."

  "I thought you were changing."

  He shrugged and gestured at the other two. "I don't really want to leave them in there alone for too long. The world is too mutable for novices. They might get lost."

  She looked slightly nonplused. "It's the same thing as drugs, you know."

  "I know," he said. "Everyone has their own way out. This is mine." He looked at her speculatively, and asked, "Want to give it a try?"

  "I'm still under Beta-2." There was a hint of fear perceptible in her voice.

  "Doesn't matter." He picked up a circlet and held it out to her. "Come on."

  "I don't know . . ."

  He grinned and put it over her head, then donned his own. "It's easy. I won't let you fall." Under the wire, they sank swiftly through the cottony-dense data layers of the 'net and reappeared in the fantasy-flare skies above Arhos . Axie cried out with delight at the interaction between the effect of the machines on her mind and the drug on her brain. Demogorgon changed her into a great, metallic-green eagle-like creature, a sort of harpy, really, and let her go, with the injunction, "You can fly!"

  She fell like a bomb from the heavens, a vengeful cry tearing the quiet clouds asunder, then her wings snapped open and she flew, enthralled.

  Called back to the surface by his monitors once again, Demogorgon stepped out into the corridor, intent on his need for physical relief. He went to the refresher stall in his room and began the mechanical evacuation, thinking, with amusement, Pissing's a pleasure when you've really got to go. It's the simple things that make life worth living. A crackle came into his mind, and, somehow seeping through Shipnet's circuits, he heard a low cry of dismay. It had a flavorof Sealock about it. Strange, he thought, feeling a small jolt of anticipatory dread. Sadness and a sense of his continual isolation flooded over him, and he went to rejoin his apprentices in Arhos .

  John was again out on the ice, trying to reconcile the way he felt with the way he thought he should feel. He wasn't as devastated as he should have been and, indeed, had cried less than half an hour altogether. He found that the whole incident was already beginning to feel remote, dreamlike, and all of the DR even more so. Was he an unfeeling monster, a bastard, a mechanism driven by forces unwholesome and unhumanistic? It had taken him a brief while to readapt, to restructure his rationalizations; and here he was on the other side of it all; still functioning when by all rights he should have been destroyed. Stripped of his illusions, what was the difference? He stared up at a dim-cored Iris and the sun now so near to it, yet the squint didn't feel wet.

  He was beginning to look forward to the eclipse.

  SEVEN

  Jana turned the flat knob counterclockwise and the silent engine shut down. Through the windshield, the unbalanced triad of the Iris system hung just twenty-five degrees above the salt-white waste. The glaring pinpoint of the sun stood canted only seconds from the upper right limb of the blue infrastar, throwing little scintillae across the clear barrier. Here, at the far eastern edge of the ocellus, she could watch the eclipse without straining her neck. With rather too much care she pulled the hood of her suit over her head and adjusted it precisely. It hardened against her and she made a change in the thermal generator that would slowly drop her body temperature to a critical level, then disconnected the control element. After a moment she evacuated the driver's compartment and threw open a door. The conjunction of the two stars hurried toward first contact.

  In a neat row a hundred meters from the CM dome, Cornwell had prepared a little surprise. Ten pieces of bubbleplastic, bent to form dark chaises longues , arrayed themselves across the rubbly ice. "I didn't know if Brendan would be joining us or not," John said apologetically.

  "Yeah, well, where's Jana?" asked Ariane.

  "Good question," said Tem. "She's not within range of the Clarke, or else she's just not answering."

  "It wouldn't be the first time," said Beth, mounting one of the chairs and twisting into a supine position.

  "I'd bet she's found her own place to watch from; after all, there are observations to be made out in the highlands." Her voice was hoarse, and she looked at no one.

  "OK," said Tem, after checking Shipnet Inventory, "she's taken the 60vet and a regular suit. That means she's disconnected the homing signal in the car. No science material is missing." Axie cleared her throat, then thought out loud. "I guess I must have been the last one to see her, about three hours ago. Something—"

  "Wait a second, wait a second!" John seemed a little hysterical. "Here it is!"

  "Forget the fucking eclipse!" said Harmon. "What's she doing with my car?" But for a moment the eclipse was difficult to ignore, the sun diffusing into a spectrum-fringed splotch under the still distinct blue top of Iris' atmosphere. It was moving slowly and wouldn't make the complete transit of Iris' four degrees for almost six hours. Still, like looking at an ancient clock face, there was imperceptible motion that accumulated into discrete changes in appearance.

  "I'm very worried about Jana," said Axie. "She's changed, gotten . . . weird. I could see her, well, aura before, but it went dark. I know that sounds stupid to you, but the induction tech has side effects, sort of; anyway, I'm scared. She might do something bad."

  "Like what?" said Ariane, gently but with sarcasm creepinginto her voice. "She's got a lot invested in this exploration. I doubt if she would sacrifice that for anything."

  "All right, all right," John said slowly, inadvertently taking on the role of leader, "I guess we'd better go look for her."

  Ariane looked at the suit containing Cornwell with surprise. Perhaps the DR with Beth had had a beneficial effect on their musician-financier. "Two of us can follow the car's heat trail with no trouble. Why don't the rest of you just relax and watch the show?"

  "I'm going in and check on Brendan," said Tem. "I've given him enough time."

  The eclipse is moving along excellently, Jana thought. The sun was becoming increasingly blurred as it was swallowed by the Iridean sphere. It was also beginning to elongate a bit, forming into a fuzzy crescent with a rainbow edge. As the sun passed behind ever denser gas with a higher refractive index, its image grew more hazy.

  Jana felt good. Despite the fact that her body was dying, the enkephalin derivative that she had taken before leaving preserved her awareness and vision. She hoped that she had successfully predicted the behavior of her co-col
onists; otherwise she would indeed be very sorry.

  "Cocksuckers," muttered Brendan Sealock as he worked feverishly, alone. On the trip out, to sustain the hobbies that were expected to fill his remaining life, the man had brought a great deal of electronic gear. The bulk of it consisted of blank, mutable circuit boards, to be thought of merely as machines in potential. They were waveguide grids, waiting for some external force to impose form on their nebulous void. Sealock built them into a wall-filling maze, made the interconnections, each one to every other, and set to work. The structural writer was positioned by the first grid. He was sent through it by the highest functions that the ship's version of Comnet had to offer, translating his ideas into hardware on an instantaneous fiery line. All things related now and the writer walked alone, formulating. There are assemblers which writeassemblers. Each command says, "Do these things," and each of those actions breaks down into another set of still smaller functions. Tiny increments happen. All the little bits slowly pile up and, in the end, giant complexes emerge.

  Sealock came out of a haze of creation and the thing that he'd built over the hours seemed to sparkle before him. He was exhausted and triumphant. It was. The construct he'd sought for so long now existed. Krzakwa stood in the room by his side, looking at the tangled, involuted mass of electronics before him.

  "What is this?"

  "It doesn't have a name."

  The Selenite took in the circuitry, then began following along the waveguides with his eyes. What the hell . . . "You've got everything plugged into everything else!"

  "That's the idea."

  "But . . . which way are the data going to flow?"

  A bemused look from the tired eyes. "I don't know." A supreme act of creation in that, when the world exceeds the capacities of its maker and yet proceeds on its own.

  "How are you going to control it, then?" Krzakwa was beginning to feel little twinges of bizarre fear creeping along the back of his head.

  "I'm not. I wrote it using the physical structure of my own brain as a template." Sealock smiled wearily.