Iris

by William Barton

  "What happened?" demanded Cornwell.

  "I don't know." Krzakwa told about the machine and what had happened during its activation. As he spoke, Beth and Axie hooked into the medical scanners of Shipnet and began conducting an emergency examination. It confirmed their worst fears. What remained of Sealock was basically a mindless body in a state that was worse than trancelike.

  Axie, her face strained, said, "He'll hang on for a little while, but soon he'll require total life support. There's no way he can ever come back from this. . . ."

  The Selenite nodded and, in that moment, passed sentence: "His personality is totally discharged. He's as good as dead."

  Krzakwa stood looking at them all, feeling remote, in a state of semidetachment . They all seemed like characters on a stage, players in some old-fashioned "Grand Hotel" production. Berenguer and Prynne were together, but, incredibly, Axie stood between them, and they each held one of her hands. What could be happening there? Demogorgon and Methol were close beside them, arms about each other, sharing a mutual grief. Beth stood a little distance away, alone, and John was the most distant of all, equally alone. Jana was nowhere to be found. The Selenite continued speaking:

  "I'm not sure what we can do about Brendan, maybe nothing but execute his will. Under ordinary circumstances, a discharged personality can sometimes be recovered intact from the 'net if swift action is taken. That's what a Redux program is for. In this case, I don't know. We don't have any way of knowing where he went. The best I can do is try to punch open a QCS channel to the Artifact and see if anything is going on down there. Theoretically, he has to have gonesomewhere. If his personality had been erased in situ it would've left definite signs: a big lesion in his amygdala, for one thing. I ... I'm not hopeful." He shrugged, feeling helpless.

  It was not until the following dekahour , the loss of Brendan still not fully realized, with the eclipse long passed and the sun and Iris well apart in the sky, that they could assess the full damage wrought by the storm. They discovered Jana, frozen solid, out by the ocellus rim; she was brought back and preserved in a cold-exposure capsule, and the idea of reading out her personality programming was discussed, as if in a daze. If feasible, that would come later.

  Beyond the ocellus rim, at that point where Iris hung perpetually overhead, localized cataclysms had wrecked the neon-rich features: the liquid neon had flowed across the irregularities in the icy crust, leaving erosion features in form not unlike the valles of Mars. Great fields of neon ice, featureless but for occasional alluvium deposited by the limited load capacity of the neon flow, covered much of the sub-Iris terrain, erasing the smaller craters and filling larger ones. At one point a flow of the liquid had broken through the ocellus rim and spread across the already smooth water ice like a fresh coat of paint. Never again would Ocypete be subjected to the hot eclipse light, since the changing aspect of the Iridean ecliptic would put the sun to a near miss the next time around.

  EIGHT

  Krzakwa and Methol sat across a complex console from each other in Sealock's chamber. The other six survivors were there, but silent, for the two remaining technologists were the principal actors now. Sealock's still living body lay against one wall, enmeshed in its now necessary life-support equipment. The console was a composite of all that had gone before: Shipnet's Torus-alpha CPU, the quantum conversion scanner, and Sealock's nameless final act of creation. It would have to act in concert, under the direction of their will.

  "Well," said the Selenite. "We have two people effectively dead, and possibly a chance to save one of them. We may be able to read Jana's personality out of her dead brain . . . but we have no body to put it in. Yet." He glanced at Sealock. "In any event, Jana will keep." It was a grim, unnecessary sort of humor.

  "We have to try for Brendan first. If we fail to reclaim him, then he is dead, and Jana's image will have a place inwhich to resume its life." He frowned and stared at the machine. "We're as ready as we'll ever be. I'll go in after him and Ariane will maintain a lifeline on me . . . better, we hope, than the one I held for Bren." He sighed. "The rest of you can observe via the circlets, but keep out of our way! Let's do it." They went under and down, and the eight, trailing each other like a madly whipping human kite tail, fell through the circuits and out into the emergent wave fronts of the scanner, down into darkness, then light. A tongue of data reached out to scoop them in, but the electronic lifeline held and they unreeled into the unknown like a spider descending on its web.

  —See anything?

  The light flooding their senses was blinding but could not be shut out. It was a side effect of immersion in the QC wave front.

  —No. I'll try to turn down the gain. Maybe clean up the clutter around us a little.

  —Good idea. A little artificial image enhancement might help. If we . . . It struck. The imagery cleared and they were pinned, helpless before a flood of complex data, become mere observers.

  Brendan Sealock was afloat in the dark sea of Iris. The initial trip down, the shock of being detached from his body, left him in a fog, a state of confusion and deadly lethargy, but he was alert again now, drifting in an immense crystalline sea, suspended in the center of a great blue-green sphere in which floated other remote, indistinct shapes. His first conscious thought was the classical one, Where am I?

  then he remembered. The ship! This was what it had to be: the great mother vessel that had spawned the enormous mystery of the Aello lander and the once radiogenic material beneath the ocellus on Ocypete. The answers had to be close at hand now. Where are you? he cried out silently, but there was no answer. The masses of data that had seemed too imposing without were invisible within. A globule of some dark, oily substance floated before his eyes and he began to look around. There was a haze against an all-around sky that, when stared at long enough, resolved into a mass of filaments; one filament, perhaps, endlessly folded in upon itself. It was studded with a variety of tiny, dim shapes. Far away, at an unguessably remote distance, was an immense blue-gray sphere, a planetoid-sized mass afloat in the icy/warm sea. He reached out and touched the globule of oil. It popped, Hello, and was gone.

  Ah! Contact . . . Who are you?

  Another oily sphere boiled out of nowhere before him, writhing, then was still, waiting. He touched it. Pop.

  Centrum.

  Sealock glanced uneasily at the distant sphere and understood. Yes, there it was: the source of all data, the source of his present complex reality. Can we speak?

  Droplets machine-gunned out of nonexistence and splattered across his face. Yes. Easily. Come to me.

  It's a long way.

  More droplets. Not in the now space. Journey with me into the past.

  Sealock was incredulous. Time travel? How is that possible? Our physics denies it!

  Pop-pop-pop.

  Think! Where are you now?

  He thought, and then felt amusement at his own stupidity. Oh. Of course. I see what you mean. Roiling effervescence.

  Let us be about it then. I am eager to meet you in a more fruitful fashion. That was an excellent machine you inhabited. He felt himself begin to move and change as the imaginary years reversed themselves in an imaginary land.

  It was to be an even trade, history for history, culture for culture. With the wonders of modern technology, most extractions are painless. But not all ...

  New York Free City was one of those aberrations that still abounded in the world; a remnant, a holdover from the days before the Insurrection. Over the span of a single generation, as the datanets grew in complexity, most of the world formed into the systems of semi-independent enclaves that now stood for nations and communities. In a sense, the city was one of these, but in some very important way it was different. New York was all that remained of the bright dream that had once been America. People spoke of crime and terror when the subject of the free cities came up, but these were just unavoidable by-products of the reality that they espoused. Paris, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Calcutta and San Francis
co. They all had that indefinable Something. Freedom? The willingness of their inhabitants to do and be, whatever the cost? New York was Earth's premier city. Its population seemed to hold, of its own accord, at a constant twenty-seven million.

  Because of the strict and official limits that the enclaves placed on themselves, what passed in these days for a world government grew out of the free cities, where the laws were light. It was a powerful irony. The rigid dictatorship of the Contract Police had its headquarters in the chaotic whirl of happy Paris. All the manifold threads of the world's data system had their ultimate source in the Metro Design—Comnet, a function of New York Free City. The maddened souls who could not live within the confines of a normal society came there to be free, and so became a fruitful force in the world that they despised.

  Mankind was haunted by ghosts of its own making.

  Brendan Sealock stood alone on the flat, black, shiny, false ebony floor of Grand Central Station, surrounded by a human horde. Eighteen and alone and freshly run from the iron-thumb benevolence of Deseret. His little collection of emergency luggage was piled about his feet, valises containing mostly notebooks, and he was incredibly tired. "Oh, God . . ." Misery. "What am I going to do?" It was said aloud and nobody turned to look. His eyes were grainy andblurred from days and nights spent awake and all of his awareness seemed to be concentrated in the tight band of an almost headache about his temples and forehead. He crushed his hands into his hair and stared up at the starry sky embossed on the inside of the domed ceiling. Why not? "Fuck the world!" he screamed, his voice pitched high.

  "Hear, hear."

  It was a quiet voice with a soft rasp, and Brendan turned to stare at a short, blond, unkempt young man clad in a burlap-looking friar's cassock, complete with a hairy rope belt. "Got any spare change?" What the fuck was this now? "No."

  "Too bad." He pulled a flat bottle from his robe and uncorked it. "Drink?"

  "Thanks." He accepted the bottle, took a quick swallow, gagged at the oily taste of cheap chemistry, and handed it back. When he could speak, his voice too had a soft rasp. "Hi. I'm Brendan Sealock."

  "Ram that shit! Only homos use names." The man spun and strode off. Brendan shrugged, picked up his luggage, and began to walk in the same general direction. The path that they followed was a semitortuous one, a fly's wall-crawl through one of New York's older sections, yet away from the museum piece that was central Manhattan. Successions of steel/plastic and bricks with crumbly mortar flashed in dazzling array across hazed eyes and led to a dark alleyway in an ancient area that sported tall, ruinous buildings open to a blue-gray drizzling sky. There was a brightly lit, partially maintained building here, with a plasma sign stating YMCA, beneath which someone had erected an ornate wooden plaque renaming itthe french embassy.

  The place had fine, rosy curtains in its windows and looked warm and inviting, but Sealock didn't go in. He followed his single volitional contact across the street to a dark, dilapidated structure that had a luridly painted black and orange marquee above the door:aloysius' cream dream crotch palace. The doorway itself had been done up in spray paint as a stylized representation of a vulva. The doormat said,

  "Welcome, Zeus."

  It wasn't totally dark inside, just lit by a variety of low-wattage colored light bulbs. The hallway itself had nothing, but the doors of most of the rooms were open, in some cases missing entirely, and little washes of blue, green, red, and orange spilled out, making a dull mauve ambient light.

  "Hiya, Megalops! Who's your buddy?" There was a bearded fat man seated on stairs that rose into the darkness.

  The cassock-clad man brushed past him. "Fuck'um," he muttered, making a quick masturbatory gesture with his hand. The fat man pinched at his asscheek in response, but the other retreated wordlessly and was gone.

  The fat man grinned. "Horace," he said, holding out his hand. Brendan said, "Ah . . . Megalops there says only homos use names."

  "Megalops is an asshole. He just doesn't like being a homo."

  "Sealock." Brendan shook the proffered hand.

  The man nodded and answered with a heavily agglutinated "Pleastameecha." Brendan swayed slowly, his head describing an imitation Draysonian cycle. He realized that he was either feeling faint or on the verge of falling asleep. "How do I go about getting a room here?" Horace looked bemused. "I dunno." He took out a little black cigar and lit it with a brightly glowing sparkstick. It smelled like cabbage farts and Sealock's sway grew in amplitude. "Hey, kid, don't fall down here. You're too big for me to lug out of the way."

  "How . . ."

  "Just go up the stairs until you find an empty room. Lie down on the bed. No one'll care." The haze growing to a palpable miasma, Brendan slowly trudged upward, lost in himself, his feet feeling unaccountably massive. On one landing he came upon a young woman clad in a heavy sweat shirt and nothing else. On seeing him, she winked. He nodded politely and went on. Somehow, he found that empty room and fell heavily, face down across the bed, unable to draw in his feet. The light bulb in the lamp was fuchsia, in perfect tune with the bilious dizziness that assailed him. His last conscious thought was, What the hell is this place?

  When he awoke in the morning he hadn't moved and he mill felt tired. His eyes were sore and the muscles of his neck ached. His legs hurt. . . . Good God, my feet! He tried to hook one toe against the opposing heel and push off a boot but lacked the strength. His whole body felt swollen. There was a warm weight against one side and a lighter pressure against his back.

  He laboriously turned his head and looked. The hallway girl. She was curled up against him, one arm thrown over his back, and her crotch was hooked over his hip. His belt was wet and at first he thought she'd pissed on him, but there wasn't enough dampness for that. When he stirred, she awoke and looked up at his face through puffy eyelids. "This is my room," she said. Her voice was soft and had that same rasp that seemed to afflict everyone here.

  "Sorry."

  She smiled. " 'sOK." She helped him as he rolled laboriously over onto his back. "How you feelin'?" She sat up and swung astride him, sitting on his stomach. He couldn't help but stare down at her damp, matted brown pubic hair.

  "Don't know. Hungry, I guess."

  She grinned and, swarming up his chest, thrust her groin against his face. "Help yourself!" Brendan's stomach heaved.

  She pulled back a little and said, "What'sa matter?" Aggrieved tones. "C'mon. I don't smell that bad!" Brendan shook his head slowly. "I don't feel good." He could hardly move his arms. She got off his chest and squatted beside him, inadvertently sitting on his hand.

  "OK. I got a pizza someplace. You want some of that?"

  Brendan tried to answer, but a black thunderbolt struck at him out of nowhere and he went back to sleep.

  When he awoke again, it was night; at least, it was dark outside. The girl was sitting at a little table on the far side of the room. A plasma screen was leaning against the wall and she had an ancient Dvorak keyboard CPU opened in front of her. She had a small electron beam torch in one hand, sparkling bright blue as she made connections. She still didn't have any pants on. This time he managed to kick his boots off. They thumped on the floor.

  She looked up and, seeing that he was awake, stood up and walked over. "Feelin' better?" He nodded. "I guess so."

  "Good!" She sat astride his chest again and her hair, now dry and crisp, tickled his nose. Oh, well ... it couldn't taste any worse than the inside of his mouth. He extended his tongue, but her hip muscles did most of the work.

  When she was done, she slid down on him, lying atop his body. She kissed him, licked his face, hugged him. She undid his belt and helped him struggle out of his clothes. When he was naked, she stared. "Wow! You gotta lotta muscles, don'cha?" A sniff. "Haven't had a bath lately, either."

  "Sorry." Her speech was confusing him, with its wild oscillations between analytical and synthetic grammars. Some English-speakers did that: education stretched thinly over the outreach of original-sin poverty.


  " 'sOK. Enough dirt 'n' the bacteria die." She was playing with his penis, feeling it stiffen slowly and engorge. "Big cock, too." She slid farther down and licked him. His penis finished its progress to a full erection. She sucked him then and, big or not, she managed. The orgasm made him tired again and he lay quiescently, watching her.

  She sat on his ridged stomach and grinned. "My name's Cara Mia." She held out her hand. He shook it. "Brendan Sealock. How do you do?"

  "Pretty damn good!" She hopped to the floor, then sat on the edge of the bed. He stood up and stretched, jumped when she goosed him. He smiled. "What's all that?" He pointed to the mess of antique electronics on the table.

  "Homework. I'm a freshman CS major at NYU. I wanna work on Comnet someday." He nodded slowly. So, he thought, they're making her start at the beginning and work her way up. That way she understands it. I wonder what they'd do with me? "I'm a bum."

  "Same thing."

  In the morning they arose together and went to have breakfast at a little outdoor cafe down on the corner. The bright sun of late spring was shining down on them.

  After breakfast she took him around. At the Statue Stump, they got him registered as a landed immigrant. Brendan pointed to the fee schedule posted on the wall, but the fat, grandmotherly type behind the counter only laughed. "Don't let it throw ya, kid. We'll send a bill to Deseret." He could imagine his parents' expression when they got it, but they'd pay. The Contract Police had rules about the movement of people between enclaves.

  He followed her to NYU that day. He noticed that most of the students liked to dress up in rather idiosyncratic costumes. He went to the registrar's office and found, to his surprise, that he could take classes for free. "We'll send a bill to someone," they said.

  They gave him a battery of tests and seemed impressed. "Maybe we won't send a bill. Deseret's loss is our gain," they said. "Stay forever if you like." It went on and on. In time he made some adjustments and failed to make others. He enjoyed sleeping in Cara's bed, but then, she'd fuck anyone, anywhere. Sometimes he'd awake in the middle of the night to find her with someone else, right there beside him. Sometimes he grew angry. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he joined in. He had sex with a man for the first time in her bed. Sometimes he went out alone at night. Finally he found himself sitting on a man's chest in a dark alleyway. The man had attacked him and had been beaten. He brought his heavy fist high and drove it down with all his might. It hurt his hand. The man hadn't died, but he'd needed extensive plastic surgery after that.