Iris

by William Barton

  In a cafeteria argument with a philosophy major at NYU he was referred to as a soulless monster. He didn't know why, and felt hurt. Sometimes the feeling of directionlessness and growing insanity almost overwhelmed him.

  He kept on moving, of his own accord, dancing to an internal rhythm of increasingly feverish proportions. He began to realize that he liked beating people up, hurting them as much as possible, almost as much as he liked fucking women. He thought of combining the two but didn't. Someone said he'd fuck anything that couldn't outrun him. He laughed at that. Someone else said he'd step on bugs if they could scream loud enough. He beat that person up.

  Outside of his own pillaged memory, Sealock could feel himself being changed as the swift time reversal being wrought by Centrum progressed. He knew, intellectually, that it was all a result of software synchronization, but the imagery forced on him came with an odd emotional jolt. He changed and, changing, cried out with a commingling of wonder and fear. Head, arms, legs, torso. Gone. Like that. It was a mechanical-seeming thing, and swift. A succession of ticks, the beating of a clock, and Sealock the man was gone. Another such succession and Sealock the—what— thing was there in his place. Cephalosome and tail-sheath. Eight machinelike arms with two-fingered hands; eight matching anchorelles for pseudoautotrophic feeding. Retractile anophagomotor apparatus, for eating, eliminating, and propulsion. Here. Like this.

  He remembered. We called ourselves a small, unbroken bubble of pheromonic oil. The message it contained meant, "That which has accepted a seed."

  The being he had become had no discernible sensory apparatuses—instead, it had a hypertrophied sense of "touch," a subtle response to pressure waves and chemical changes in the surrounding methane. This, combined with a data-processing kinesthetic sense, was all it needed. The externally generated image-form which now occupied him did not come with very much in the way of memory, notyet, but he knew it would arrive, one piece at a time, as he developed the necessary complexity.

  Stop time.

  The world-lines unreversed and he was still Brendan Sea-lock, yet still changed. The Seedees were all around him now; he could sense them far away. Some flew through the sea, propelled on their jets like hard squid. Others clambered about the still ways on stalky legs. Still more were swept along by the standing waves of the great, endless transport matrix. They went about their tasks, filling the World Ship in uncounted trillions. Now, in the everlasting memory of Centrum, Mother Ocean lived. Sealock blew himself steadily along, knowing he must go to the central sphere, and looked at the pressure waves that brought him a bright window on this new reality. The matrix machine awaited him and still he saw.

  When the messenger cell met him, he was hanging in delighted awe below a self-orienting photovoltaic generator, which would turn to suck up the light of passing suns, hanging in happy contemplation of its crystalline complexity. It was Machine, in its most quintessential form. He boarded the messenger cell. His anchorelles plugged in, there was a current flow, then he soared singing above the world.

  At NYU . . .

  Brendan Sealock studied. A man, growing up, may be accused of all sorts of infelicities. The various rites of passage that most societies induce are intended to demonstrate to the adult-candidate that a great change of estate is coming over him. They say, "You may now do whatever you please. You must now be prepared to suffer the consequences of your own actions." He was generally regarded as mean, petty, and vicious, with a mind centered on the concept of self. They all thought him dangerous and deranged, a

  "thug." A few people even looked on him as a little bit stupid, but no one ever called him lazy. He worked. Though the colleges of the twenty-first century had given up the folly of a "liberal" education, recognizing itas an impediment to the technologists and a detriment to the artists, they insisted that a student learn a great deal about his own specialty. Gone were the days when a student could limp along learning "just enough." During the periodic examinations, if you couldn't handle any aspect of a task, you were sent back to study until you could.

  Though the tests he had taken revealed a phenomenal raw potential and a fair amount of preparation, the Deseret educational system being nothing if not effective, Brendan had to start at a lower level than he'd expected. It angered him, at first, but he soon came to see the sense behind it. They made him study physics in a developmental-analytical fashion and gave him a quick grounding in historical electronics, then plunged into the twinned evolutions of Quantum Transformational Dynamics and Comnet theory. They said, "These are the things that you have to learn in order to earn our certification. If you want to learn anything else while you're here, fine. It's up to you. If you don't, well, most prospective employers don't care."

  In the classroom . . .

  The professor said, "We used to start with the basics, but we don't anymore. If you're interested, it's in the library. If you've studied all the various calculi, you're all set; if you haven't, don't worry. Boab analysis rests on a somewhat different underpinning from the rest of math. In the trade, we like to call it asshole calculus." He grinned as he drew them into the Tradition. "There are no instruments to guide you through this jungle, boys and girls. It's strictly seat-of-the-pants navigation." Cara giggled and the professor's grin widened. "Whatever," he said. "Anyway, put on your circlets." The poster-cluttered wall behind him vanished, displaced by a smooth, blackboard-like image. "It goes like this: Newton and Einstein went wrong in some very curious ways. Mr. Boab finally got it figured out about thirty-five years ago. The unified force field still exists—it just has nothing to act upon, so it's a little hard to work with. . . ."He waved a hand at the wall and fiery letters began to appear. "There're eleven variables and forty-one physical constants here. I know you all know how to solve for individual unknowns. That won't do usany good, unfortunately. I will now show you how to arrive at a simultaneous solution for the Blanchard-Higgins Inequality. It's called the Desrosiers Transform and is considered the root of QTD." The letters began to dance. . . .

  In the cafeteria . . .

  Brendan Sealock was usually engaged in the process of becoming irritated. The engineering and science students liked to gobble their food and rush back to the land of ideas and experiments. Everyone else liked to argue and talk endlessly. Since they'd installed an inductab transducer, the music blared out loud. Right now, it was that popular new artist, what's-his-name . . . Cornwell, that was it. His first big release: Reflection Counterpoint. Sealock didn't much care for what seemed to him like random blatts of very loud noise.

  "Hey, Comnet-man!" He shared a table with a raucous bunch of metaphysical philosophy students. He knew some of them were already well known in their field, authors of hefty, Heidegger-like tomes full of complex and circular reality analyses.

  "Fuck off, Basket-weaver."

  "Come on, Sealock. We're trying to get up a good paragraph on the Ding an Sick controversy for Sykes. You gotta know something about that. . . ."

  He sighed. Here we go again. He wrote a simplified version of the Tornberg Inequality on the tabletop.

  "Look here: what you want is the First Product Transform. Sikt Grote got this worked out almost eighty years ago. It's pre-Boab!"

  The philosophers groaned in unison. "Shit. Even if we knew what you were talking about, we couldn't use it. Sykes won't accept that crap in a paper. Says it's unethical." Sealock was baffled. "How can you talk about something you don't understand?" They stared at him, puzzled, and the background music roared on.

  Senman-Reischar, easy to know; You can live in Scapa Flow! Scapa Flow the place to be; You can watch it on the 3V! On 3V it's easy to see;

  Skies are blue for me and thee! Thee and Comnet, how I will grow; Senman-Reischar, Scapa Flow go!

  As Sealock walked out of the cafeteria, headed for his Trivesigesimal Sequency Analysis tutorial, the opening strains from the theme of the latest 'net epic, "Scapa Flow Go," were echoing in the room behind him. Though many people sneered at the epics, calling
them "lightheaded trash," he rather liked them. Superficially escapist, the interactions of the characters were interesting to follow. I'll have to tap that when I get the time, he thought, and walked on.

  In the street . . .

  Brendan Sealock walked the dangerous places. In the foyer of NYU's QTD Lab Complex there was an enormously appealing poster, a piece of artwork more than a century old. A hairy fat man with a spiked club. Atavistic background. Distorted biblical quote. I will fear no evil because evil fears me. Sometimes he would go to stare at it and grin. He liked the thought. He wasn't the only one. Cass Mitchell, the lab's incredibly ancient founder, something like a hundred and thirty years old, also came to look at it. Once, the wizened creature looked up at him and winked. "Looks just like my dad!" he cackled. Another time the old man, who was kept alive only by the prostheses that his wealth could afford, had muttered, "Go ahead, bitch! Make my bed!" As he turned away, Sealock supposed that, if he lived long enough, brain rot would get him in the end as well.

  But I won't be his age for a hundred and ten years, he thought. What would biotech be like then?

  Most people don't live that long anyway. The average age of death from systemic failure was around ninety. Maybe I'll be run over by an RT-mod next Tuesday. . . .

  He walked the dark roads, stood beneath the glittery lights of the entertainment shells. It was in vogue for the hookers to go naked these days. Some of them wore body paint, or tattoos, and many shaved their pubic hair into artistic patterns, or off entirely. That had an appealing look to it. You could see what you were getting into.

  He stood and watched. They turned their tricks on the street and it made a show that amused him. Nearby, a hairless woman stood bent over, holding her ankles while a customer fulfilled his needs in her. The fee was already in her tote bag, representing the last days of the ancient money economy. Sealock felt himself growing horny and walked on.

  At home . . .

  Brendan Sealock lived quietly. He sat at the table and worked on his problems with the Duodecimal Work-Frame Inequalities. They had only been solved five years ago and were hard to understand. In the bed, Cara Mia entertained a matched set of burly prizefighters. They were larger men than Sealock, but in much poorer condition. He paused to watch them humping away, and speculated. . . .

  Projections. Projections. Tensors and maximalizations . Optimal courses and winding rivers of thought. As Sealock gave up his life in chunks and great bites, reliving it as it left him, Centrum replaced the pieces from its own modulus of experience. Similar machines can be exchanged one segment at a time until they are interchanged, without ever having been moved. Becoming. Becoming. Seedee life flowed into him as a steady stream of thick, rich oil.

  Seven Red Anchorelles—7red, he was called—worked at a desynthesizer unit deep in the folds of the Mother Ship sea. He was happy in his tasks, secure in the knowledge that he too contributed to the advancement of the Grand Design, as much as anyone under the everlasting light of the Starseeder Centrum. Living his life against the backdrop of the Wavy Matrix Machine, he worked and loved and his soul evolved in a double-spiral pattern, ever outward and upward. Epicycles came and went, aglow. All along the Wavy Matrix were the great tadpole-shaped units that made the ship live. Synthesizers, the storehouses and factories that made raw materials into whatever was needed. Polyphase reactors that took current from the immense photovoltaic generators and stored it chemically, making raw materials and power as needed. Desynthesizers which took unwanted goods and returned them to a storable raw state. Interphagic units, for the storage of the world's raw substance. Here and there, like great silver balloons, were enormous vacuoles that contained a variety of gas-dependent processes. They pulsed like hearts.

  Somewhere, in lands 7red had never had occasion to experience, along the great Axis, lay the flight and governing machinery. The gyroscopic control system; at the south pole, the Detection Mast and Lander Bay; at the north pole, the hot immensity of the photon drive.

  Normally, the ship coasted on its course, a dirigible planetoid wafting silently along among the stars, but when a correction needed to be made a great spear of hard, coherent radiation would lance out, stabbing deep into the bright clouds of the dawning night. The universe was a billion years old now and aging rapidly. Though quasars abounded, it was black between the galaxies. 7red thought about it, pheromonic messages circulating through his infrastructure, mixing to make new ideas. The universe was a pocket, trapped far below the bubble boundary of its single-monopole domain. The rules said that there had to be other such spaces, in other such domains, probably unreachable. And beyond the eka -event horizon of the many domains? The unimaginable hot density of what one far-future daughter sentience would come to call deSitter Space. 7red could picture it in his chemicals, but the picture was a distorted one, stepped down to match his capacities, tiny circles spread through eleven dimensions reduced to the dimensionless points of a trefoil-concept mathematics. Only Centrum, last of the Starseeder forefathers, could think of it in terms of the real space-time that surrounded them. For the time being, the Creation was less than its Creator. Work ended because the task was completed and 7red, restless component in an unresting ecosystem, flew off to the Mating Nest, still thinking his happy thoughts. 7red loved to think, as they all did. He knew his history, but that was for Centrum alone to tell the Time Traveler. In the interval of flight, he expanded his concept of space.

  It proceeded from the cosmic infinitesimal, vacuum boilersswelling out of nowhere to provide the vacuoles that held the packets of radical characters making up the pseudoparticles of reality, to the universal infinity, the ever receding wave front of the monopole domain, which pushed the unthinkable end point ahead of the uncrossable horizon. It was a frustrating concept, yet likable. Satisfying. He reached the Mating Nest and entered its latticework. Cooloil awaited him, her tasks completed also. They were not sexually differentiated, these Seedees, for their evolution had not included that complexity, yet the Time Traveler imposed his own regimen of still persisting ideas. 7red loved Cooloil; she stilled his raging mind, calmed his conceptualizations. Cooloil loved 7red; he stoked the banked fires of her soul, set her pheromones to singing. They made a handsome dyad, an island of simple beauty in a sea of more complex arrangements. Their song of ideal counterpoint was appreciated and envied by the vaster audience without.

  They coupled.

  Anophagomotor apparatuses met, anchorelles fused, arms interlocked. Their valves opened to each other in closely docked proximity and their juices flowed. The pheromonic oils, the vehicles of thought and communication, mixed and, for a while, 7red and Cooloil were one being. The Time Traveler felt their pleasure as his own and marveled at its simplicity. There was no complex machinery, no invasiveness of Downlink Rapport here. There was no remaining vestige of separateness, no identity. Nothing in his former life compared with it. It was the ideal to which all other beings of the later time must aspire in vain. He wondered at his own remaining isolation and felt despair. It was not possible for him, not in the hard-wired circuitry of a solid-state mind. Ideas came whirling. The winds of perhaps blew across his delimited consciousness. He speculated. . . .

  Brendan Sealock had come to Buckminster's Gymnasium on a whim. The sign outside had said, sparring partners, and noted that the payoff was in hooker tokens, the only hard currency that still circulated in New York Free City. You didn't have to spend them on whores. People traded themback and forth, exchanged them for favors, bought unique personal mementos with them. There was a famous artist down on the Deuce who sold his canvases for them. Rumor had it that he could get laid a million times, whenever he wanted. They were little three-centimeter silver-plastic coins, the reverse embossed with the legendone fuque, the obverse bearing a tableau of two mating pigs. The pigs were smiling. When he came in, the handlers sized him up, weighed him, and smiled grimly. The fat black man turned to the fat white man and said, "One hundred eight kilogram, Bobo!" The other snickered and his masses
of doughy flesh jiggled beneath a filthy sweatshirt. "Right, Mustafa. Killer Hunkpapa's meat she be." He turned to Sealock. "Pay is one fuque per minute you last with him." He winked. "You gonna get all fuqued up in no time, kid!"

  They stripped him, taped his hands, stuck on gloves and shorts, and put him in the ring. The spectators, mostly dirty men and overdressed slinkers, were giggling and pointing. Killer Hunkpapa was waiting. He was a large, powerfully muscled man of indeterminate race. He had black hair, black eyes, and light brown skin. There were scars on his face and he was smiling casually, calmly.

  "You ever do this before, kid?" He had what sounded like a German accent. Sealock shook his head. He was feeling nothing now, not even anticipation. The world seemed to possess that same crystalline clarity that it had when he was immersed in the dreadful complexity of Boab Analysis. He felt himself relax and his senses came to a point.

  The boxer grinned. "I'll try not to mess you up too bad. Give me a good workout, I'll let you go home with a pocket full of fuques. Maybe you'll come back."

  The bell clanked on the edge of his awareness and Sealock lifted his hands. The boxer's glove snapped in out of nowhere and tapped him on the face. There was a terrible lance of pain, proceeding from his sinuses to his occiput, and he staggered back, amazed.

  Another punch floated his way and he bent forward at thewaist, letting the arm go over his back. He stood up and threw a right at the boxer's face. It missed and landed with a squishy thud on one muscle-ridged shoulder.