Iris

by William Barton

  Aksinia Ockels, wearing a rumpled orange space suit with the hood thrown back, was in a compartment of the containerized cargo hold where Brendan had stored the hefty mass of personal belongings that had come along with him on the Deepstar's flight. She'd been rummaging through his collection of antique books and had at last come upon the thing she sought. Now she stared fixedly at a color plate, a picture of a six-sided being, its parts neatly labeled, cephalosome, tail-sheath . . .

  "I knew it," she muttered. She packed the book into a silver-lined environment bag and drew the top together intoits seal. Then, with some fumbling, she hardened her suit and hood and stepped into the airlock.

  Krzakwa, who had just awakened from an unsatisfying nap upon the heather, was kneeling on the rim of the pool and splashing cool water on his face. The entrance at the far end of the dome made its

  "cycling" warning and he wondered who had been outside. Finally the door came open and Aksinia came through, eagerness quickening her steps.

  "What're you doing?" Tem asked.

  "Reading." She came up and opened the bag that she carried, pulling out a book, and smiled. "Look at this." After a moment of turning slick pages, she had it.

  "How the hell did you find a picture of a Seedee"—the oddness of it suddenly took hold of him—"in a book?"

  She held it up so that he could see the cover. It was the 2007 edition of Raymond's Elements of Virological Anatomy.

  "I don't understand. What're they doing with it?"

  She smiled crookedly at him. "It isn't a Seedee, Tem. It's a T—4r+bacteriophage virus."

  "I see." He picked up the book and read through the stereophotomicrograph's accompanying text. Gobbledegook, material far outside of his own specialty. "How did you come to find it here?"

  "When we were in with Brendan, I knew I'd seen the Seedees before, somewhere. I think I even remembered the name.... I got an equivalency in bioengineering, back before residencies were required. I've forgotten a lot, but not everything. All it takes is something to jar it out. I wish I'd brought my tech info along! But I didn't. I suppose it was Beta-2 that saw to that. Shit! It never lets me care about things like that." She laughed softly. "When you people filled up Shipnet, you neglected the basic biology stuff. I ran a quick check on the cargo manifest. I was hoping . . . Anyway, this book turned up on Brendan's list." She looked at the man in front of her and was amazed to see how pale and watery his eyes looked.

  "Is something wrong?" she asked.

  Temujin looked hard at the woman. He had never heard someone use those words with such a lack of solicitousness. "I'm all right."

  "That bastard was interested in too many things."

  Was.Krzakwa felt a cold prickle of realization creep along his neck. He thought of Sealock back on the alien lander, swearing that the empty shell they'd found had a familiar shape. "So what does it mean?"

  "Nothing, I suppose, but it's an interesting coincidence. If I'm not mistaken, evolution at the viral level is very quick, and what we see is almost totally optimized. Maybe these things are optimized for a similar type of existence."

  "What, invading asteroid-sized cells? We didn't see anything like that in the Centrum memories. That is what viruses do, isn't it, parasitize DNA?"

  "Something like that."

  "OK. You're the closest thing we have to an expert on this. If you can integrate some sort of theory on the shape of the Seedees with what you know about these viruses, do so."

  "They do parasitize planets...."

  "So do we all ... we need something better than that. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it right now. I've got to get some more sleep."

  Elizabeth Toussaint lay alone on the bed in her room. Periodically, for no reason, tears would start to flow down her cheeks, oozing in the low gravity, then stop, and she would be still, staring at the ceiling. When her face had time to dry, the crying would start again.

  What's wrong with me now? she wondered. I'm not feeling anything. Brendan's dead; Jana's dead. Am I? Why am I thinking about these things? This numbness was a new, withering factor. It was something she had inherited from John, and though it was, in a measure, comforting, it felt so wrong. Perhaps if she had to come up with a word for it, it would be perspective. She had lost her gauge for the importance of things. And experiencing the primitive emotions that dominated Sealock's memories had given this emotionlessness even a greater hold on her. I need to be with someone, she thought. John? No. She rejected the idea summarily. How could he help? Right now she couldn't even call up an image of his face.

  The door opened quietly and Vana Berenguer came in. People were not respecting the idea of privacy anymore. There were connections now, strange ones.

  "Beth?" She saw the drying tears and came over, concerned. "Beth? What's wrong?

  The woman looked up at her, wooden-faced. "I don't know." She started to cry again, shaking silently. "I really don't know!"

  Vana put her hand on Beth's brow, brushed back her hair a little, and shook her head slowly. "You shouldn't be in here alone. . . ."

  "I want to be. No one can help.''

  "Someone can." She reached out and, taking Beth by the arms, pulled her to her feet. "You helped Demo a little, back when we first got here, remember? Let him help you now. . . ."

  "How?"

  Vana smiled. "You haven't been under yet. It's more than you think. Come on." They walked out of the room, slowly, and John was waiting for them. "Beth? I wanted to see you." Vana shook her head. "Not now, John. In a little while."

  The man ignored her. "Beth, do you want to link with me now? DR, I mean. . . ." Beth looked at him in astonishment. "Now?" she asked. "Oh, John. Go away. . . ." He seemed stunned. "But I ..." He turned from them abruptly and stalked off. Vana said, "Come on, Beth. Demogorgon's in Ariane's room. They've lost him together, you know, in the same measure. They need us as much as we need them."

  Ariane and Demogorgon were alone together in the former's room. They had been talking, trying to talk, but were quiet now, curled up on the bed. Words were useless. Their hearts throbbed to a measured stillness, an inner silence that held a matrix of conflicting ideas. The woman thought, He loved him as much as I did, perhaps more. Our culture still breeds a strange sort of contempt, fills us with a curious lack of understanding. We think of bizarre biochemical mix-ups, of volitional neuroses for which a refused cure exists . . . but the emotions continue to seem real. It's more than just a friction between sticky bodies—the great I-don't-know-what that binds humanity. And there remain no explanations but the ridiculous romanticisms of dead poets.

  The man thought, There must have been more between them than just the sweat and gruel of heterosex. People bind without reason. I don't know. I think I always looked on other people as warped extensions of myself. They're not. There are differences I cannot understand, shades of meaning that do not come through. We can see each other's experiences, live through a tide of alien feelings, but still we are not each other. We strain everything through the one-way filter of our own ideas and meanings. We view everyone through a lens that distorts them into ourselves. We never see them as they are. We think, If I did that, I would be bad, therefore he must be bad. Brendan is gone, but really, to me, did he ever exist? Can empathy be real without understanding?

  Oddly, it was as if Brendan had died before the episodic projections they'd gotten from the Starseeder computer. The personality of the man as relayed from inside Iris simply connected with their other memories at no point, and it was disappearing from their consciousnesses like nothing so much as a bad dream.

  The door crackled open and Harmon Prynne looked in, his face uncertain, his manner tentative. "Can I be with you?"

  Demogorgon almost smiled. "Come in. Please."

  He entered and came to sit on the edge of the bed. "Is there anything I can do?" Ariane patted him on the thigh. "Just be here. That's enough." They sat in silence for another little while, then the door sizzled again. This time it was Vana and Beth. They c
ame over to the bed. Beth sat down and Vana remained standing, smiling down at them a little. "Well," she said. "We needed to be with someone. I guess we weren't the only ones." She sat. Beth lay down, tangling herself with the others, and sighed. After a while she seemed to fall asleep.

  Prynne stirred, snuggling closer into the mass. "We're becoming like little children. Pillows and blankets to curl up in. Teddy bears to hug. Warm laps to lie in. This is comforting." Demo looked at him, surprised, then thought, Oh, why not? We are none of us as stupid and insensitive as we always seem. Magicians. We can be closer. . . . But the idea fled, unripe. A short while passed, and Tem's head stuck in through the unclosed door. "What's going on in here?" He came in, followed by Aksinia. They came over to the bed and Krzakwa grinned, looking down. "Is this something sexual?"

  Ariane smiled up at him. "We're having a special conclave. Climb aboard." Aksinia pushed herself off the deck and drifted down onto the bed, clutching her book.

  Krzakwa sat on the edge of the growing human tangle. "Axie's made something of an important discovery. We . . ."

  "Can it wait?" Ariane asked.

  "Well . . . sure. I think I see." He wedged his bulk in among them. Demogorgon was frowning. They're all here, he thought, we're all here, but something's still missing. This is an artificial sort of closeness, an electric-blanket sort of thing. Just because our bodies are warm .

  . . The idea came back. He said, "Listen, I think we should go to the Illimitor World together."

  "Aw, Demo. Come on!" That was from Harmon.

  "I mean it. I think we're all sick right now. Hurting. We could make things better. Some of you have been there. You know what I mean."

  Vana nodded. "I do. He's right."

  Krzakwa sat up slightly, looking out meditatively across the room. "Maybe. Could be, uh . . . OK." He thought about it a while longer, then said, "Um, where's John?" Opening her eyes, Beth said, "Fuck John."

  That sealed it for them. They seized the ubiquitous waveguide cables, plugged in, and went under, then down.

  And, going downward, continued to reach out. . . .

  John Cornwell stood in front of the dome of the CM, arms folded, staring out across the bleak Ocypetan landscape, staring at the sky. A huge, early-phase incarnation of Iris loomed far above and the tiny, matching crescents of Podarge and Aello hovered nearby. The sky was star-sequined without pattern, a clumped maze of untwinkling pinpoints. Strange, he thought, that the atmosphere of the planet is still clear. You'd think the eclipse would have done something to it. But he knew there'd been no real effect. The pristinely clear upper air of Iris had merely acted as a lens . . . muddying things down here all right. And the thing they'd found in the planet had done the same.

  Jana dead. Brendan dead. Beth ....

  An image of their latest encounter came back to him and the muzzy hurt renewed itself. How has it come to this? he wondered. I only thought that we could be of some use to each other after the terrible strains of the last days. She needed contact. . . . But why did I walk away, give up so easily? A stab of pain, an abrupt turn, and the chain was snapped. The DR link between them had seemingly died in a moment, fading into an apartness even greater than before DR. He tried once again to analyze their last painful moments together. Yes. It was there. Everything that they had shared, all the superficial communion, had come down to that one moment when their two personalities had really commingled and they saw each other as themselves.

  How could you know?

  It was difficult for John to not judge himself harshly. But, with Jana, how could he have known what was transpiring in her confused head? Was there something about him, something so close to his perception of himself that he could not even imagine what it was, that was bad? He thought about it long and hard, and could only conclude that there wasn't.

  And people ... at least some people . . . loved Sea-lock. How odd it was. How odd he was. How could anyone really have lived like that? John had done time in New York and never run across that sort of thing. But then, he hadn't gone everywhere, seen everything. What if it was real? Andwhy the hell did Brendan leave? It seemed to fit his outer persona so well. But the inner man . . . that was even harder to understand. Unbidden, an image of the shaven prostitute floated up from nowhere, bending over before him, holding her ankles. A stirring of lust twisted in his abdomen. God! The unbelievable coarseness of the man's imagery! How can anyone be like that? He drove it away, but other scenes came to take its place, visions of unknown naked women open before him, begging to be despoiled. He closed his eyes to an angry feeling of resentment. Is his ghost going to haunt me now? Perhaps Sealock dead was worse than Sealock alive. . . . How could he have been like that? The answer constructed itself: he couldn't have been. He wasn't. The flashes of feeling had been there. There was an emotive, sensitive Sealock, yes, but that reality was buried beneath the coarse, hard visions. Smashing people's faces, thrusting into sodden vulvae . . . those things hid all the rest. They gave expectations, made stereotypes. If you split an infinitive and put an expletive in between, it distorted the meaning of the verb. People heard that instead of what you said.

  I've got to talk to Beth, he thought. I've got to be given another chance. She took my offer the wrong way.... I did mean to help. And how had she taken it? Like a raped woman being offered the comforts of sex. The playback of Sealock's life must have been brutal for her, the scented floweriness of love turned to some kind of horrid, animal carnage. He turned to walk below and the images floated before him again. Endless visions of dripping crotches, seas of spurting semen, totally repulsive. How could anyone not think it madness?

  He came to Ariane Methol's chamber and opened the door. They were there. The seven were sprawled together on the bed, a tangle of limbs and bodies, with wires sprouting from their heads. He stared at them, silent.

  Beth looked like a sleeping child, her hair flattened out into a fan. Tem looked like a huge, dead opossum. The others . . . Ariane's skirt had come awry, exposing her vulva. A pad of curly black hair, a slit, an animal-hole, a little wetness.

  That's what Brendan would have seen. . . . But no, that's just my perception of the view from his eyes. He loved her.He would have felt something. The imagery was a perfect mask. He went back up into the dome and looked at the sky. Aello had moved and its phase had swollen, but Podarge was no longer in synch.

  They'll be back, he thought. He wondered if they really would.

  The stars were still untwinkling, still unmoving, emotionless pinpoints. They sat there in the matte-black sky and did nothing for him.

  I miss that part of it, he realized. When the stars glittered and twinkled above the night, made pretty by their color and movement and seeming isolation, it made me feel better. In Mackenzie, I used to go out onto the tundra just to look at the night sky. That's how I came to know which stars were which. It was something, it was an image of a world where things really existed, really meant something. Is it that this ambience is my whore?

  He shook his head and grinned ruefully. There is that, after all. When you stretch these ideas to their limits, the gulf that separates me from a soulless monster is not so great. We all make mistakes and I've made at least my share. Who am I to judge anyone else the worse. . . . Who am I to make any judgments at all? A familiar turn of phrase. He knew he'd said it before, but now, somehow, it was different. I mean it, he realized.

  His laughter echoed eerily in the dome, perhaps magnified by his awareness that he was essentially alone at this moment in the whole Iridean system. Everyone else was away on some other ethereal electronic plane, one most ethereal. Listen to me, he thought with a touch of self-directed bitterness. What should I do, apologize for my own being? Sorry, Jana; sorry, Brendan; sorry, Beth? It's a foolishness of its own sort.

  Should I grovel and promise to do better? Another laugh. This is just me, wallowing in the dung heap of self-generated guilt. No one else has even noticed what's happening to me,despite what Tem said. They're too busy writhin
g in their own night soil to notice my fetid breath. . . . My, how poetic we are in our bereavement! It's a damned good thing I'm laughing at myself. What an asshole! A total fucking moronic little head-up-the-ass shit-in-the-ears bloody little sniveling Lunatic. . . . He sobered then and thought about it, images without words. There is that, he subvocalized, watching all the scenes of Brendan and Beth mingle together in his head. He did talk that way, didn't he? I wonder what he meant by it all? The same thing as I? I doubt it. All I can do is turn him into another subset of my own image. We are what we project.

  He stretched, yawning against a sudden weariness, and to no one in particular said, "The only time I'm myself is when there's nobody with me."

  He went back down to the kitchen module then for a snack, hoping to keep his mind blank, in preparation for the moment of their return and the scene that he imagined would come then. I wonder what they'll have to say for themselves?

  Who cares?

  Who the fuck cares?

  He saw himself in a paroxysm of nonchalance and smiled, his lips twisting in self-derision. Go ahead, Big Asshole Artist! Keep thinking like that. You'll talk yourself into a ticket home alone yet!

  He went below.

  They sailed down through the golden skies of the Illimitor World in a long, singing arc, holding hands as they fell. The heavens were a burnished shell of the brightest brass around them and they had no idea where they were going, what was happening to them. They had entered as a unit, headed, it seemed, for the Jeweled City on the Mountain, the portentous lands of Arhos in the midst of many seas and rivers, and this had happened. They fell and fell, and the sky beneath their feet gave no intimation of a landing. Demogorgon was stunned and, he supposed, a thrill of fear should have come. But they had designed it together, he andBrendan, and he thought he knew all its byways. He remembered the Sealock-mimicking GAM subunit and wondered . . . and programs could mutate of their own accord, even in the efficiencies of Shipnet. Perhaps especially there. Systems grew more complex, as in Comnet and Centrum, and the chances for diversion and change multiplied. What was happening?