Iris

by William Barton

  The boxer staggered a little and his grin broadened. "Hey! I like that! This pussy has a real punch!" He hit Sealock in the face three more times, making him bleed.

  Another long floater came and he ducked under it, learning. This time he put his fist out, then drove his weight at an exposed stomach. The boxer said, "UF!" and sat down abruptly. Sealock stood upright, flat-footed, and wobbled Wearily, feeling dizzy and sick.

  The boxer bounded to his feet, stared for a moment at Sealock, then wheezed, "Call time!"

  "But, Killer . . ."

  "Call time, asshole! Don't you see what we've got here?" The bell clanked. The boxer helped Sealock over to a corner stool and sat him down. "You OK?" Brendan nodded.

  "Good. You come back tomorrow and I'll show you what to do." He turned away. "Clean him up, Mustafa. Give him a dozen fuques for his time."

  As he staggered slowly to the door of the gym, several slinkers followed him, touching him gently.

  That evening, after a long, relaxing stay in a steam-hazy sauna had restored him to some semblance of normality, Sealock went out to walk the streets of the city, a few fuques clicking together in his pocket. The fat orange ball of a late summer sun wrote long shadows among the ancient buildings and the warm air was a feather touch, brushing across his skin. Very far away, he could see the great, featureless towers of the modern city leaning away from him into the sky. Somewhere, very vaguely, he thought about the curvature of the Earth and was startled. They were that tall. He wore only a pair of white shorts and an occasional breeze stirred the hair on his chest and legs like some faint, unheeded emotion.

  He found one of the little parks that the hookers frequented and stood relaxed, his back pressing into the roughbark of a gnarled, gray tree. Its leaves were the intense olive-green of late summer. Unable to summon any coherent thought, he stood and watched.

  It was early for the whores. Tradition made them denizens of the night, but they came out before sunset, perhaps to avoid any unfortunate mythological comparisons. They chatted with each other and ate little snacks. Some were touching up their body paint, and from time to time they would glance over at the staring, nearly motionless figure of Sealock.

  A woman lay on the grass not far from where he stood. She had long, braided hair, pale blond, with a matching pubic thatch and large, dark blue eyes. She was lean, without being too thin, and her body was adorned with perhaps a hundred tiny butterfly decals. She did stretching exercises, alternately arching her back and then bringing her legs up until her knees touched her shoulders. Finally, apparently satisfied, she took a long applicator from her tote bag and squirted a small amount of some amber-colored jelly into her vagina. Lubricant? Disinfectant? It didn't matter, and he realized that he'd enjoyed watching her insert the skinny tube into herself. As she put it away, she smiled at him.

  Brendan knew he liked watching women masturbate and he supposed that was at the root of his current pleasure. He found a certain interest in watching them at their daily ablutions as well, washing themselves, douching, even going to the bathroom. He'd never taken much time analyzing the things that he liked, perhaps fearing that would diminish his sense of the reality it brought. He hated the feeling of remoteness that persistently engulfed his life.

  As dusk fell and the streetlights came on, he found himself staring at a new addition to the group. She was tall, nearly as tall as he, and clean shaven all over. Though she bore no adornment, her tan skin had been lightly oiled, so that it shone, throwing off highlights in the dim ambient glow. Her eyes had the slight epicanthic folds of a Eurasian. She had high cheekbones, a smooth skull, and her ears were small and symmetrical. She had a long neck and was naturally thin, without being emaciated. Her stomach, beneath small, domed breasts, was flat and her hips were narrow, barelyflaring out from her waist. He could see the delicate tracery of her pelvic bones shifting slightly beneath her skin as she walked. Her legs were long and muscular. Her groin was like three soft fingers, parallel at the juncture of her thighs. She came to stand before him and he could see that her nipples were pale and pink. She smiled at him. Very slowly, she lifted one long leg until her heel was resting on his left shoulder. He stared down the length of it into the shadows of her vulva. The position held her open and he could see a little way inside. He could feel his penis slowly begin to rise.

  Reaching into his pocket, he produced the little coin and held it out to her. She took it and said,

  "Thank you." Her voice was soft and throaty.

  Taking down her leg, she turned away as he removed his scant clothing. She bent over before him and he stepped forward into the lethe of her body.

  7red had another task. The message had been transmitted to him from Centrum, a globe of oil that swept up along the Wavy Matrix and leaped across to him while he was still engrossed in his conjunction with Cooloil. It burst upon his shell and soaked into the receptor tissues of his integument. With a pang of regret, their circulations closed off from each other and they separated, become two beings once again. There was still a commingling of inner substance, but the differences would accumulate now, as their natural selves were reasserted, a part of the pheromonic oil generating organs in their bodies. 7red touched Cooloil's tail-sheath once, a parting gesture, and flew away.

  The content of the globule had been a complex one. Outside, it had said, and all the appropriate technicians were being called to action. The lander was being prepared for a voyage of its own. A Messenger came for him as he flew and whisked him away toward the south pole. 7red felt a small surge of growing excitement disturb the mating-tranquilized flow of his idea circulation. He had never been called upon to do this particular task before, but he was the right sort of being for the job. Centrum was a caring sort of overlord and shared theassignments around as fairly as it could. Now, his turn to go Outside had come at last!

  The Messenger let him off at the Lander Bay nexus, where perhaps a hundred thousand Seedees of various types were milling about in a random-seeming horde, preparing for the job ahead. A semisentient exterior work vacuole approached him and halted. 7reAn? it queried with a primitive, highly simplified jet of oil. He assented and commanded it to proceed.

  The leathery-skinned golden sphere drew closer and then carefully engulfed him. He sank into a pouch of its outer membrane, which then detached itself with an interiorward thrust. The inner skin dissolved, freeing him to his task within the CH4-filled confines of his device. Here, within the limits of a space hardly larger than himself, 7red could practice the most difficult and rewarding task that a technician might face: the direct control of a construct with his own freed mind. The interior of the vacuole was lined with a sheath of receptor material. 7red took a figurative grasp on himself and, opening his valves, released the entire contents of his pheromonic circulation.

  His mind pulsed outward and he became the vacuole. Its senses were his. Its capabilities were his. He became immensely tougher and stronger, able to withstand the rigors of total vacuum and near-absolute zero, able to resist the hard radiation of a nearby star that was doubtless just recently emerged from a wild T-Tauri youth.

  He swept over to an "airlock" and passed through its membranes to the interior of the Lander Bay. The huge compartment had already been evacuated and the outer door was ajar. 7red went to the edge and looked out with his new amplifications. Without the vacuole he would have been insensitive to the grandeur, dead, in fact, but now he could see the horrid wash of electromagnetic radiation. There was a terrible bright star only a few light-minutes away, a high K or low G, he thought, and Mother Ship hung in the skies above a dense silicate world. The place was disturbingly hot and glowed on its own in the far infrared. He understood it well. It was a death place. A whole system bornfrom the ashes of a recent supernova. This sort of a place meant the handling of dangerous hydroxyl-cloud materials, and Seedees would soon die, perhaps already had. He was glad he didn't have to do that job. His own task was far simpler. With a flotilla of other vacuoles, he would get o
ne of the radioactive aluminum fuel cells from its external storage bin and charge up the electrical power pods of the lander. A relatively simple thing, but important and dangerous nonetheless. He and his comrades went about it steadfastly and steadily as they whirled round and round above the tiny, almost atmosphereless world below. They were careful, none of them got killed, and at last they were finished. All was ready. They stayed to watch.

  The triangular, finned shape of the lander banged out of its hold and drifted a short distance out. Its LiH -fueled engines flared luridly and it began to shrink away, descending. It would skim into the thin, hot gases of this newborn planet and return, having discharged its cargo of microminiaturized Composites, surrogates of the Mother Ship and Centrum itself. It would return, and the Grand Design would be advanced another tiny notch.

  7red's oil writhed in ecstasy.

  The drain and fill of emotion-laden interiors came quickly now, a liquid kaleidoscope of scenes and impressions first from one life and then the other. Though feeling himself ever more the nameless Time Traveler, he was alternately burdened by flaring ego identities, swirling through the experiences of Sealock and 7red like a molecule of water in a red-raging sea. The concatenation of personalities struck him like a song sung in rounds, a horde of bells being rung through their changes. He saw Sealock in swift progression, the man growing quickly older as he expanded into his electronic world, coming to the fateful time when he had mastered all that was Comnet and joined the Design Board, intent on expanding the horizons in the wires beyond what it had been. The man grew quickly wiser as he fought in the ring, aiming arrowlike at that series of matches in Montevideo . . . the defeat by the Cuban, the silver medal, the meeting with Ariane Methol. Love. Another concatenation, something grafted onto his soul like an agonized parasite, destroying the equilibriums so carefully built up, showing him the falsehoods that padded his feelings, tearing them down to oozing red flesh, leaving him exposed. It was pain, once again. Islands have beaches where they are rubbed raw by the sea. In a similar fashion, 7red moved upward, propelled by capacities unsought into the arena of his destruction. His too was a society of individuals. Though they mixed and meshed as they would, still the very reality of their separate physical bodies kept them apart. He rose to ever greater mastery of the devices and thought modes that made up his world, growing ever closer to the greatness of Centrum and ever farther from the simple things and persons that he loved. Alone in his hard shell 7red worked, and he coupled with Cooloil, then with other beings, greater beings who were more on a level with his increased station in life. His inner essences boiled at a fever pitch with the wonder of it all, and gradually he began to mourn his loss.

  Two scenes played in swift counterpoint:

  At Ariane's behest, Sealock had moved to Montevideo, living with his woman in Tupamaro Arcology, linked to the now beloved, lost New York only by the wires that otherwise dominated his life. I didn't really need their physical presence, he told himself often, why do I miss it so much? They lay in bed together and made love often.

  Brendan lay on the cool, slightly damp sheets of a bed and rubbed his hand slowly across the velvet textures of Ariane's sleeping back, staring hard into the mute darkness. Why has it come to this? he wondered. He put his face against her skin. Why am I here? He stuck out his tongue and tasted her flesh. She sighed and stirred slightly but did not awaken. Why do I lack the strength to run away, go back where I had at least the illusion of happiness? He ran his hand down across her buttocks, then into the crevice between them, down past her anus until he came to her vagina. He felt of its wetness, an albumin-like stickiness that was largely a product of his ownsecretions. She awoke and rolled over, and they made love again. murmuring softly to each other in the darkness.

  In that time he forgot to think and wonder, but illusions, once shattered, can never be reformed. And Seven Red Anchorelles rose to the scene of his own final nightmare. Having mastered all else within the inflated boundaries of the great Mother Ocean, he now floated deep within a special inner sea, a pocket far down in the thought folds of Centrum itself. The being, the Overmind, spoke to him in the voice of his people one last time, and he understood. He had achieved Unity. The chemicals struck and he felt a moment of terrible despair, then his shell dissolved, his oils escaped, and he was into oneness with the Overmind. He was gone.

  The Time Traveler awoke to himself in a blaze of ecstasy and horror. Centrum penetrated the flowing nebula of this soul with tendrils of awareness and said, I greet you, Brendan Sealock. Be welcome.

  It began . . .

  Before the dawn of time, the infinite universe was a hard, ringing void. There was nothing, but that nothing had limitless potential energy. It might have remained, this empty potential that stood for God, but nothingness is an unnatural state. It persisted, timeless in the absence of a referent, waiting for the random number that would act as a trigger. The false vacuum stood poised, hard, hot, infinitely denser than the nuclei it would spawn, and the clock of quantum fluctuations ticked away. The slow rollover came. . . . Everything flashed into being. The monopole domains exploded outward, sucking the cosmic-event horizon away into the infinite reaches of now extant space. The vacuum boiled and particles were born. Physical processes toppled down the quick stairway of the flux-gate thresholds and the forces separated, one, then four. Temperature fell, hesitated, and fell again, carrying along density and radius in its wake. The world came into being and evolved.

  Swirling clouds of bright matter, white light, cooling, became only an afterecho of cold radiation in mere seconds. Matter and energy now separate, the clouds spun and condensed, becoming ragged and lumpy as they aged, a pudding improperly stirred, a universe made by a lazy chef. Quasars were everywhere then, bright, hot globules of pulsating light, galaxies in birth and exploding. Cooling goes on, hot huge stars quick and brief in their young life, and exploding, seeding the surround as they died. It was too early yet. . . .

  And yet the odds had to be broken, as the symmetry was broken. A cluster supernovae went critical in a chain reaction and scattered dense matter through their neighborhood, yet it was in a region far from the hot cores all about. New stars formed, smaller, longer-lived stars that had planets of a small, dense sort. The universe was less than a billion years old.

  We evolved then, said Centrum, and fast. As always, the precursors of life came into being among the great, rich hydroxyl clouds. Amino acids rained down out of interstellar space upon those hot silicate worlds and, because of it, life evolved. So far as is known we were the first. Because of the odds, we were, at that time, the only.

  The radiation density was higher then, and evolution went at an accelerated pace, making life in seas that nearly boiled. It crawled up onto the land and saw and fought and grew. The eras were short then, and intelligence looked out at the stars for the first time in newborn amazement. The lights in the sky attracted them, bright baubles, lures before a fish, and they flew outward into space. We searched, but they were not there.

  We? They? Sealock's persisting sense of self forced a question into the flood. We.The ones who made me in their own image. Star-seeders. We searched, but there was no other life. We were alone. Worse still, we could find no other worlds like our own. We were a fluke. Theywere not there. The others whom we expected. There were other worlds, yes, great balls of warm gas, mostly hydrogen, stars too little to shine. Useless.

  We cried out, enraged at our solitude, and the Grand Design was begun. Too long. Too long.

  Images formed, imperfect and broken, for Centrum was ancient and damaged. They were images of beings not so terribly unlike men. Beings of flesh and bone walking beneath a starry sky, looking upward resentfully at the universe that had so disappointed them.

  We knew it would take too long, longer than we could expect our species, even our own sun, to last. Generations of stars would have to live and die, worlds would have to form and evolve the way ours had, only slower, much slower. We would be gone, vanished fo
r billions of years before the comrades that we sought could come into being. We became the Starseeders and set to work. We searched among the stars for ages and we found them. . . .

  What?

  Littleballs of gas. Spheres so small that much of their hydrogen leaked away, until only the trace elements remained. They were cold, these planets, and rare. Each one had to have a thick sea of the proper density upon it ... complex lipids dissolved in methane may be a form of life, you see. And we had special models at home to work from. . . .

  It began ...

  Tupamaro Arcology, like Montevideo, was quiet and raucous at all times. As the postindustrial world of the late twentieth century evolved, waves of technology cascaded out and down from the Euroamerican Transpacific matrix that gave it birth. The benefits and deadly dangers flowed outward in equal measure, changing the world's four quadrants on four levels across four generations. They quickly destroyed the basic nature of the matrix, first the Turing circuits, then the Insurrection fragmenting the lives of the people. What emerged demolished the economy and ideology of the Socialist Bloc. By the time the wave front got to the third world, it had leveled off, become a mere bootstrapping effect. The fourth world, the lands of absolute poverty and degradation,felt it only as a sudden famine, then they were all swept up into the New Order, made whole again.

  It filtered downward. Suramerica Limited Federation was the Earth's largest old-style political entity, a weak corporate state in which the ex post facto enclaves were bound together by the rules and regulations meant for the various communication and data networks. Montevideo was still a city, but not a free city, not a New York. On its outskirts, Arcologia de Tupac Amaral was almost a city in its own right, something like an enclave writ small, a million people in a giant building, striving to be free and failing.