Iris

by William Barton

  Ariane and Brendan sat together in their living room, working at separate tasks. He had a single tap plugged into his forebrain, reviewing some correspondence from MCD, cursing their inability to understand the latest batch of inequations he'd sent. They were stupid, he thought. Only the response from the Moon's Lewislab made any sense at all. At least they asked interesting questions. Someday, he knew, there would be a branch of mathematics called Sealock Decision Gate Masking, but it was a struggle.

  Ariane had a circlet on. She was perusing the latest edition of her favorite electronic newsmagazine, looking over the various articles and wildly extravagant advertisements with quiet amusement. Suddenly she called out, "Hey! Look at this!"

  Brendan sighed and shunted his awareness over, Neptune hung in the starry sky, huge and blotched turquoise above a field of dark, rubble-strewn ice. A pale haze hung on the horizon and there were domes below, twinkling with light and life. A tall, slender man clad in colorful robes smiled out at them.

  "Come with me," he said. "Be free. Triton." Induction music filled the background, latest addition to a panoply of famous works. The name was John Cornwell; a TY-com outlet address followed.

  "What the fuck was that all about?"

  Ariane snuggled up against him, warm and soft. "It seems this guy has almost a billion ceus saved up from his royalties. He wants to take a colony out to Triton. I never thought of it before, but that sounds neat. Maybe we're all dying downhere on Old Earth. . . . Want to go?" She was grinning mischievously. Brendan felt a sudden freezing terror.

  Continuities . . .

  On the old world, the first world, perhaps the only world, a council met. The Starseeders called it the Grand Design Planning Forum. There were almost a hundred billion beings jamming this Solar System, among them millions of savants and philosophers. The thousand greatest of them were gathered here and the one called Over Three Hills spoke to the multitude.

  OTH was a giant, tailed biped, massing well over a ton, with thick, leathery gray skin and a broad, muzzled face. Beneath a heavy brow ridge and crested skull his eyes were deep-sunk, glowing red orbs. He waved his tentacled hands for silence. "The first survey is now complete," he said. "We have now examined every star in the fourteen galaxies of our own little cluster. Among all those billions of systems we have found a few score of silicate worlds, all lifeless, all circling stars too hot for our purposes." A low rustle of dismay came from the assembled multitude. His head dipped slowly to one side. "Disappointing, I know, but all is not lost. Among the hydrogen masses we have found more than four thousand of the little methane worlds. That is enough. I propose that we proceed with the Alternate Plan. We'll never see it come. Even our descendants will not last so long, but in the end the Grand Design may succeed. We have aeons to deal with. . . ."

  The scientists arose silently, with grim determination. There was work to be done. Work enough for many lifetimes and a purpose to fill the race.

  A flashing change. OTH was an old being now, his long, productive life coming to an end. He stood before his finest creation, proud at the legacy he would leave his world. The Starseeders technology had followed many different tracks, but this had proven to be the most fruitful one. Passing alongall the lifeless mineral paths, they finally settled upon large,complex organic molecules as the basis for their data processing capabilities. They built brains capable of independent, original thought and, in so doing, created their first truly great life form, what was to be the most enduring product of their society.

  "You understand," said OTH, "what it is that you are to do?" A rustling voice speaking in the Starseeder tongue came from an encoder box nearby. "I do," it said.

  "It seems to me that you took a wrong turn in my design. A million minds of my capacity might well be combined fruitfully, but there is another way. . . ."

  OTH was satisfied. The brains would grow in depth and complexity of their own accord. He died happy.

  A thousand generations went by and Waving Ancestral Nodes worked in a great experimental ecologarium, orbiting the outskirts of the Starseeder system. WAN's laboratory was attached to a planetoid-sized mass of liquid methane, confined by an impervious membrane. Within, the tiny life forms swam and bred. Evolution was proceeding on its own. Through a viewer, he watched as the diatom-like creatures propelled themselves about, consuming other life forms that lived off nutrients in the methane.

  "They are ready," he said.

  From a speaker nearby, the Mind agreed. "Yes, it would seem so. We are at a stage where vessels like this may be released upon the methane worlds. They will breed and prosper." WAN nodded to himself. "It is a pity," he said, "that they cannot be our own kind."

  "They can be," said the Mind, and it began to speak. WAN felt a dawning wonder as he listened. The great ships went out, the worlds were colonized with life, and the Starseeders watched patiently and waited, communing with the artificial brains they had created. Slowly, the race became extinct. Finally their sun exploded and all that they had originally been was gone. The artificial brains went on without them, proliferatingthe Grand Design, but not quite alone. The things in the methane continued to evolve.

  Continuities . . .

  Now Sealock was seized by the scene that he hated most, the moment of his life that he hated to review the most and so most often did.

  The musician, John Cornwell, had come to Montevideo intent on meeting with Ariane Methol and her little pool of special applicants. They talked and, at some point, the two retreated to the privacy of her bedchamber. Pinned, a fly in amber, Brendan pressed his face to the cool, soundproofed wall that separated them.

  Vivid imaginings.

  He saw them locked together in a foul, treacherous embrace. He saw them kiss and touch. He saw the man tonguing her, saw her sucking his penis, a long, thick thing, shining moistly as it emerged from her lips. He saw the man's buttocks rise and fall slowly as he drove deep within her body, heard her sighs of pleasure, her murmurs of devotion. And no room in their hearts to feel his pain. . . . They emerged, smiling and dry, and the decision was made. "What the hell," he said, "I'll go." He helped build the ship and it was better, safer for his presence. They went.

  They were on Earth again, taking their last views of a never loved, never thought-about homeland. Heimaey Cosmodrome . . . The transporter lurched and stopped. Silently the exterior door-stair assembly unfolded and extended to the ground. The cool air of an Iceland August pushed in and rummaged around. The midnight sun would have set less than an hour before. It was still quite bright, though overcast, as they filed outside.

  There was yet forty feet of hard-packed ash between them and the ship. All horizons were dark and sterile against the shimmering gray-yellow sky. Brendan knew that he was seeing the last of Earth but, to his amazement, it didn't bother him. He was impatient to be away and could almost feel adesire to skip coming up his legs as he made his way toward the towering black and white spaceship. It looked to him like a silent, motionless stargazing penguin.

  He lagged far enough behind that he could see the other eight of the group, their varying treads somehow chaotic and unyielding. They were all strangers, even Ariane. Memory struck within memory. The pictures of Triton, against the odd, broken clouds of Neptune, filled the screen, and he heard Cornwell's voice saying, "Come with me." It seemed a long time ago. Time became a stranger commodity as he grew older. His memories remained intense, solid, yet he wondered if this would still be true after the years on board Deepstar filled him.

  They crowded into the plane's elevator and the intimacy made him feel good, momentarily. They began the ascent.

  As they rose Brendan found himself looking at Jana Li Hu. She was short and solid, a classic central Chinese, and she affected a ponytail that fell to mid-back. An astronomer trained at the totally regimented Reflexive Institute in Ulaanbaatar, she could have been a cold automaton, but beneath that controlled facade was something very disturbing. . . . What? In a sudden, icy flash of insight, he realized that t
here was something in her reminiscent of himself. The elevator hissed to a stop.

  Keeping pace with their charges, the artificial brains that the Starseeders had left behind continued to evolve. One to a world, they talked to each other across the interstellar wastes, slow conversations by electromagnetic beam, and sometimes they traveled, using the great colony ships that had distributed them throughout a sphere several million light-years in radius. Three billion years went by as they grew and changed. They too were methane beings now, too large to leave the interiors of their vast ships. From their orbits they oversaw what was going on below. They sent down probes to sample and, presently, to direct the course of a slow, cold evolution.

  The seeded beings developed as swiftly as their environments would permit. They lived in the depths of the great frigid Mother Ocean and used the resources that they found,most often resources dropped among them from the immense, immortal beings in the sky.

  Seeded with methane monera, the planet soon filled with life. There were methane plants and animals, methane fungi. The animals grew complex, then large, as their ecosystem provided niches for them to fill. Aeons passed again, and the universe had brought forth its third generation, the next in the line of intelligences.

  Bitter Shell was stalking a food-pod creature. He had wounded it with his lance and could smell it leaking oil as he cruised along its trail. It had fled high into the upper reaches of the sea in its pain, where the methane was thin. Pressures and temperatures were nearing the triple point and he knew that neither he nor the food-pod could go much farther.

  There it was! The immense mass of the animal hung overhead motionless against the murky sky. Bitter Shell cast his lance and it struck. The food-pod writhed, jetting oil, and then fell. He followed it into the depths with his sense and knew that he had won. He tried to dance upward, triumphantly, but failed. The methane was too thin to support his mass.

  He wondered. Many Seedees had tried to fly upward, to find the source of life in the heavens, in a place where they could not go. Doubtless there was a reason for it all, but still, he wondered. Back in their camp, amid the floating fronds of a homeland bush, Bitter Shell lived with his tribe and feasted for many days on the bounty of the food-pod he had slain. He spoke with the shaman, Withered Senses, but there were no answers. He swore that he would find some, and spent his life in the quest, but there were none. The blind Seedees continued to live on as the God provided for them, unable to see the stars that shone down from above.

  External voices came to him, generated who knew where. . . . He had seen the event many times before and so, now that he was within it, his mind supplied the external reality of what he was experiencing.

  The GM155 stood alone on its barren field of hard gray ash, nose still pointing at a dim yellow sky. Its interior machinery, powered by a compact fusion reactor, was coming to life. The air intakes on the leading edges of the sharply swept wings had opened and powerful turbines were forming a flow of air through the constricted throats of coannular multiphase engines. Winds began to blow out from the tail of the ship, making it the center of a dusty maelstrom. When the jet pressure was high enough, a thin mist of liquid hydrogen sprayed into the engine's throat and ignited. A fleurette of yellow fire blossomed amid the triangle of tail fins, followed by a deep, hollow roar. GM155 lurched and came off the ground, seemed to teeter motionless for an instant, and then climbed into the sky atop the short, bright, smokeless spike of its exhaust flare.

  The sky without began to turn bright blue, then darkened as the shallow arctic troposphere was left behind. As the rocket approached Mach 1 the turbines shut down, the engines becoming ramjets, force-fed on high-velocity air. They sped southeastward now, high across Europe in a sharp cross-ranging maneuver, curving toward the equatorial plane that they would meet below Indonesia and, as they climbed above thirty kilometers altitude, the pilots began to feed oxygen to the engines. Soon the intake nacelles would squeeze shut and rocket flight would begin in earnest. The sky darkened faster now, indigo, violet, then black, and the sounds of the outside were gone. Inside, inside . . .

  Brendan Sealock was talking to an old man in the seat next to him. ". . . Look, I know hydrogen burned in oxygen seems like it will only make water, but that's not what comes out of the exhaust at first. During the troposphere ascent, the engine is burning on air. All sorts of crap comes out; oxides of nitrogen, a lot of really deadly stuff . . ."

  "Why, that's terrible! The GM ads say it's nothing but steam!" Sealock gave him a disgusted look. "Sure, they say that. Just so assholes like you won't complain." The old man seemed taken aback. "But . . ." "Look, it's just the price that we have to pay for having a technological society on Earth. Forget about it."

  They were distracted then by a thumping sound as the main engines shut down. Brennschluss. There was a moment of zero-g disorientation and then a muted hissing filled the cabin as the "cruise motor" came on. Though essentially unnecessary, it would make the phasing maneuver up to Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd a continuum, boosting the cabin gravity to a steady 0.1g and preventing the chance of motion sickness until they reached the spinning wheel at Alpha in its two-hour orbit, some 1,076 miles high.

  Endless generations passed.

  Eight Guiding Cries came to float before God's Voice in the temple. It was now his turn to be invested in the priesthood and he was afraid. He knew that priests were privileged to speak with God, but he never thought that it would come to him. He also knew that the priests emerged from their first interview with the deity shaken and withdrawn. Most of them would never again consent to couple with another Seedee. It made them something of a breed apart. His time came.

  He jetted up to the hard metal ovoid in the center of the empty chamber and waited. Presently a valve opened on its surface and he was sprayed with the oil of an unimaginably powerful soul. You are the initiate?

  8cries shuddered. He could feel its great age and wisdom, its awesome power. He assented timorously.

  It is well. Go to the coordinates that I will tell you and retrieve the mass that you find there. It is a God substance, the project on which you shall spend the rest of your life. Go!

  8cries went out from the temple shaken and withdrawn, like those who had gone before. He went out to find his lump of metal, to work on it, and study, and learn as the God directed. And he never coupled with his own kind again.

  Sealock had moved to a different seat, intent on escaping from the blathering old man. He pinched the bridge of hisnose and tried to think. He turned his head, pillowing it against the soft seat back, and stared out the window. They were soaring two hundred and fifty kilometers above the equator, clearing Australia in the sunshine glare, having left night and the Indian Ocean far behind, and the island-speckled expanses of the Pacific lay ahead. It was strange how the turquoise sea glittered with thousands of lemony diamonds, as if each tiny wave were visible to the discerning eye, and he could swear a small space appeared between the white striations of cloud matter and the surface of the ocean. Was that a shadow on the water? It was hard to tell truth from illusion.

  He sat meditating for a long time, almost without thought, watching the Earth turn beneath him, a source of never ending fascination. A man came bounding lightly down the aisle and drifted into the seat next to him. Brendan turned to look at him. He was a red-faced northern European type, with heavy eyebrows and a wrinkleless, soft complexion. The man smiled brightly and said, "Hello! My name is Steven Niccoli."

  "Sealock." He smiled faintly, remembering the first denizens of New York that he'd met. Only homos use names? He thought of Demogorgon and suddenly realized that he now knew what had been meant. Names! He chuckled softly.

  Unaccountably, the man laughed right along with him. "Say! You must know a lot more about this experience than I do, Mr. Sealock. What's that bright star coming up over the Earth, there?" Now why would he think a thing like that? Sealock frowned and glanced out the viewport. He was momentarily confused by the weird vantage point,
but, oh, yes . . . "It's Jupiter. You headed out that way?"

  The man peered at the bright planet for a long moment. "Oh, no," he said. "We won't get that far. We're bound for an asteroid colony."

  We. There was something decidedly odd about this creature. "Are you with the others in this section?" He shook his head and smiled. "No, not really. We're all going to the same place, Hygeia, but there are three groups. I was bumped up here because the after cabin is full." Hepaused. "I'm a member of the Intuition Club." It seemed to be a prideful statement.

  The what? "That's . . . interesting. What does it mean?" The urge to continue speaking had become a conversation.

  The man's smile slowly blossomed into a grin. "Mr. Sealock, I don't mind telling you that we are the first group of retarded people to leave Earth."

  Brendan felt a flicker of interest. It was to be expected: as the risks of space travel decreased asymptotically to zero, more and more of the partially disabled were going out. "Retarded? What do you mean?" He thought he knew, but . . .

  Niccoli laughed pleasantly. "Well . . . Nowadays, of course, there aren't any official classifications of mental ability, at least not in Europe. But the textbooks talk about psychotropic dysfunction. . . . We know who we are. My score on the Senman-Reischar Test was only 1260—that's something like 80 on the Kammerchoff Acultural Metamorphosis Battery—"

  And mine is over 190! Brendan thought.

  "—and that was with full prosthesis! They try not to set us apart from normal people, but we can't plug into the Comnets at all. That separates us forever, doesn't it?" The agitation showed through for a moment and he realized with horror the degree of the man's disability. Through Comnet, a blind man could see, the mute speak with ease—this man was totally cut off from the world in which Brendan lived. Niccoli smiled again. "Anyway, we have an intercontinental society restricted to people with SRT ratings of 1300 or below. We call it the Intuition Club because that's pretty much all we have to go by." Sealock looked at him with a powerful sense of alienation. How could they live? How could they learn—and what would they do for entertainment? For normal people, everything came through Comnet!