Iris

by William Barton

  From this perspective the landscape was much changed. But Aksinia was used to this aspect of the world, the places where no one went. To the horizon there stretched almost featureless boxes of concrete and senplast: a desert save where a tiny plot of ground sent forth the green and brown weeds/grasses. Aksinia hitched up the shopping-bag handles on her shoulder and silently began to walk. Thumbing rides was very different than it had been during its early days. It was simply a matter of being visible on the ground, being where a person never was. Someone would look down from the seat of a lifter and catch sight of you. It took anywhere from an hour to days. Occasionally you ran into another thumb-rider, but only very rarely. When that happened, you talked; said things you could never say to someone from above.

  She started to walk, the nausea that she had felt a thing of the past. She popped a lozenge beneath her tongue and enjoyed the sensation of her strong legs moving her across desolation. Later, when she was skirting the edge of a cultivated field, passing row after row of diminutive, rigid plants separated by magnetic strips, her eyes were drawn from the nearest farm-float to a metallic glint far up in the patchy, cloud-striped sky. Not a lifter, no. Suddenly a contrail plumed out from it, tiny and at an oblique angle to the prevailing cloud-march. It was a shuttle, coming back. Returning from the endless blackness out there. Aksinia shuddered slightly and thought, That's where I'd like to go. The thought resonated within her.

  Temujin Krzakwa held open a jagged fissure in the ground, into which Ariane Methol deeply probed. It was the best they could do. Thrusting in among the gossamer clockwork of the world, she put her delicate fingers into the elastomeric machinery and grappled with its underpinnings. It was all madness, of course, nothing so real as it seemed, but they were locked into a path of imagery now and had to live with it. The battle with Centrum's defenders, the eating of the imaginary thers, had done damage to the inner workings of Bright Illimit—not much, but enough. A single command had mutated, becoming inexecutable, and a whole section of action routines had gone out of reach. She deftly parted the substance, touching here and there, going where Tem's logic told her to search. It took time. Item after item seemed OK until she uncovered a waveguide-like tube with a dark, carboned knot blocking it. "I think I found it," she said. She read a tiny silver inscription on the wire. "Terminus Junction 26:aleph-aleph subA033?"

  Tem sent her a nod. "That's probably it. We'd know better if we had a system architecture diagram, but, uh, what's it read now?"

  She passed across it, like blind fingertips feeling out the subtle meanings of electronic braille. "I can't quite . . . ah! 0Q30:0Q31,XFB1,028F:028E."

  Krzakwa almost snarled to himself and then felt amused. One fucking bit-pair swapped around on a near-three-hundred-trillion-byte address complex! No wonder we lost it! Load Link; Command Listen; and Decode Logic. He wanted to chuckle and finally did. "That's it, all right. 028F:028E is nonsense. Supposed to be 028F:029R, I think."

  "You're not sure?"

  He sent her a shrug. "How can I be sure? That's the way a

  HORMAD sequencing device usually writes it, but who knows what Brendan really did? There're a lot of oddities in this program."

  Including us, Ariane thought. "I'll have to take your word for it," she said. "I was never this far into the substrata of execution control before." Really. Who ever heard of servicing high-level software from underneath? She sighed. "Ax, let me have your diadem, please." When she had it, she activated the gem, pushing the numbers around, a shift left to add twice, and it was done. The Dramatic Creation subroutines reconnected themselves with a metaphysical thump.

  Harmon lifted her out and Tem let the earth snap shut. She turned over onto her back and gasped. All of them turned and looked where she pointed. Centrum's castle towered above them, a looming slate-gray mass, obscured by deep shadow, perspective giving it a bizarre aspect ratio that made it almost triangular in shape. A heavy battlement wall of irregular stone, topped with massive tooth-shaped merlons, protected the inner castle, which was positively medieval. Above the citadel massed towers, themselves crenellated, loomed. To give it a thoroughly alien feel, a ring of black machines, blunt and intricate, hung like broken boulders in a wide orbit about the towers. The castle, as before, did not sit on the ground but floated above a terribly truncated horizon that could not have been more than a mile distant. The sky had became twilit, clouds turning taupe and gray, drifting in striated bands across a sky hued into dark orange and vermilion, a band of sunset all around that merged into a circle of indigo and black directly overhead. The program let them assume the invisible sun had already set, but it could not quite provide them with stars. The ground humped up into mounds, carrying them upward in a single-surge earthquake, and silhouetted purple hills rose up to hide the unnatural horizon, making a believable edge to creation. A blanket of short green grass sprang up at their feet and roared outward to clothe the world's bones, shivering in waves before a soft breeze. Let us die in beauty, it said, and thunder rumbled, lightless, in the distance.

  They watched the castle, silent, waiting, spread out in afighting formation, preferring to brood somberly and let Centrum make the first move. A long time passed, and it did not. Nothing moved except for the halo of orbiting machines, and the castle came no closer. Finally, exhausted, they sat in a half circle on the ground, wanting to plan but having no will. John Cornwell sat with forearms around upfolded knees and gazed at the bleak castlescape, his mind a cool tunnel of emptiness. By chance, Axie sat cross-legged by his side, reading from a small book she had produced. Almost like the old days, he thought, in the real world. Have I yet really examined my motives for doing all this? Probably not. We think we know ourselves, then life takes in its belt another notch and we feel the pinch. Time to go on another involuntary diet. He sighed and looked at the woman.

  She sat still, reading, and her eyes looked tired. He wondered why the program allowed such an appearance and decided that it probably fitted right into the composite. The sentence, "Appearances can be deceiving," came to him, and he sighed. Her head drifted slowly around, tracking to return his stare. She smiled faintly at him, a drawn, wry look, and said, "It's all too much, isn't it, John?" He surprised himself by feeling startled and felt a certain layering returning to his thoughts. "Oh, I don't know," he said offhandedly. "I'm handling it, I think. I like to be grounded in what we call reality. Here that's meaningless."

  Her smile widened to a skeptical grin.

  "Really." He felt a pulse of self-annoyance. "It's too unreal to not handle." Her grin faded and she turned her gaze to the castle again. "OK. . . . But it was real when the monsters tried to eat us, and I think what's coming is going to be a lot worse." He shook his head. Try not to consider anything as real, he told himself. He remembered a time when he had briefly tried dream control, finally concluding that, even if he felt he was in control of the dream, it was simply part of the dream structure and in no way indicated actual ability to influence the outcome of the dream. Was this like that? Was the illusion of free will here simply part of the program? He couldn't tell, of course. Is that what madness is? He wanted to think aboutthe real world, real life, as if this were no part of it. "Tell me something," he said, "about the binding that you have been feeling since we've been here."

  Axie glanced at him, then went back to her contemplation of the immense, structured pile of stone. "It's hard to quantify, and I'm not sure I even want to try. The feelings that dominated our lives before were a form of blindness. Now we see."

  John wanted to laugh but managed to control himself. Febrile nonsense once again! Always couched in the same occult ways. Did they have nothing inside them but theories of life? Everyone seemed to engage in modeling behavior at some point! He threw himself on his back, preferring to watch the unreal-seeming sky, staring into the strange disk of night directly above. A simulacrum is better than nothing, I suppose. But he wondered if it really was. And just how far does that idea extend? Are my self-images real? I don't hav
e any way to challenge them. He stopped it there and drifted back into that long cool tunnel where his thoughts liked to live.

  Time passed and their energies cycled up. Time struck hard, though the vista of day's end remained unchanged before them. The moments waxed into being and arrived one by one. The eight made camp on their hill, weapons sheathed, and waited to act. There was nothing else they could do. Armies? They had none. It was obvious that Bright Illimit lacked a will to populate this wilderness with creatures of its own. Larger weapons, though perhaps of greater symbolic importance, could not be more powerful than Tem's missile weapon. For whatever reason, Demogorgon did not extend his ideas further.

  The blackness at zenith was growing, and all of the world was dimming. Some tried to sleep but could not. Finally, muttering a great oath, Krzakwa stood and shouldered his blunt launcher. "This is getting ridiculous," he said, set the controls for maximum range and effect, and hit the firing trigger. The projectile flared away, leaving a thin, curving trail ofsmoke in its wake. It struck the wall with a shower of sparks, molten metal dripping down the stones to spatter on the ground. The motion of things seemed to slow and the breeze gradually died down. The point of impact slowly brightened, throwing shadows behind them on the hillside. The spark grew, its color shifting upward, the wavelengths of the light shortening. It hit violet, searing holes upon their motionless retinae, and it came. The blob of light suddenly expanded into a great globe, outlined in brilliant shock waves. The sky turned a garish blood red and, for a moment, everything was still. They waited, then it exploded. White light shut off the world with a glare and the wave front rolled over them soundlessly, throwing them all to the ground. It ended with equal suddenness, as they knew it would, and the castle in the twilight land was back, a hole blown in its walls beneath a small, billowing mushroom cloud. Things came roaring out of the cloud, attacking them.

  They came at them fast, swept-wing creatures with tails of bright blue fire and staring malevolent eyes, pinpoints of dark, glowing crimson. The eight stood again together as the assault force went into a wingover and dive, a strafing run. There seemed to be no time to do anything but gape. The first winged being swept over them, guns stuttering a staccato roll. Streaks of tracer white stained the air and it was gone by. Little explosions marked the hillside, turf and earth thrown from little craters, and Demogorgon suddenly staggered, pierced by a dozen flaming rounds. He fell to the ground, gasping, and lost all touch with the battle. Another being made its run over the little group, rattling off a story of mayhem and blood.

  Demogorgon lay on the grass face down, isolated from the inner world and drifting away into gray nonexistence. He wanted to run slides of all times past, to have his little death experiences and be done with it all, but the electronic lifelines held on and would not let him go. He was compelled to go on thinking, to call out in his pain.

  What should it be? Yes: Brendan, if you are anywhere now, if you can hear me, please help. We are here for you.

  A roar of rage tore the sky back into daylight and green eyes flamed, a frosty thunder that stopped the world. A hand swelled above their heads, immense, swatting the flying things from the air, crushing them back into an electronic nether place, ignoring their little cries of strident dismay. It struck at the walls of the castle, folding them back in upon themselves, tearing away at Centrum's outermost circuits, blinding Mother Ocean's God in the process.

  Night fell suddenly and then more; the world went black and they moved on, transported and healed.

  They ran down the dark corridors of Centrum's mind, surrounded by a glowing pool of liquid light that kept pace with their every step. They fled, and blackness enveloped fore and aft, surrounding them on all sides. They ran in a compact group, eight together, afraid to separate to any distance for fear of getting lost, and as a result they kept bumping into each other, caroming off walls, constantly in danger of falling down. They were afraid to stop.

  Demogorgon was in the lead, slim, muscular legs pumping effortlessly, clenched fists swinging on the ends of balancing arms. His breath rasped in his throat, an aftershock of some deathlike experience, but he felt no pain. The cool air surged in and out, feeding him, urging him to go on. To what end? he thought. We're in here now, without plan or preparation. It mirrors our lives, like the lives of all men. We go on and on, running blindly toward the unknown until we stumble and fall. Where can he be? Can anything help me find him? I'll know what to do then. The notion was comforting.

  Krzakwa came last, lumbering, trying to keep up, wobbling with fatigue. Thin worms of pain crawled through his sides, demanding rest, but he couldn't stop. The others would go on without him. I laid careful plans for what we were to do and none of it has happened, he thought. Only the interactive processes of Bright Illimit keep us rolling. "Throw in the kitchen sink!" I said. A good thing, too. So much unpredictability would have overwhelmed us in an instant! He ran on, moaning softly as his feet thudded heavily upon the unforgiving stone.

  Ariane ran in the middle, thankful for the superb physical conditioning that she'd unintentionally kept all her life. How is it so? Bright Illimit, she realized, must have some reason for making us suffer like this. It could give us unlimited endurance, or at least take away the pain!

  How many factors impinged upon them? In the old days, when the wires were simple and processes were clean, programs had warred upon each other for the edification of men, for their delight and amusement. In that time, as now, the programs were still at the mercy of their hardware. They could do no more than the machine would allow. And they were in a machine, its capacities unknown. They came to a sudden stop, jumbling together comic-opera fashion, limbs entangled, bodies sprawled across the hard, dusty floor. They were still, hearts pounding, breaths wheezing into slow silence. There was a light ahead, and theirs had gone out.

  Linked into the past through a series of memories connected by a single thread of emotion, Beth sat, seeing herself as a small dark eleven-year-old, on the ledge of the transparent solar panel of the family farmhold, watching the dust devils of this last day of November sweep across the fallow, stripy field which extended to the dim blue humps that defined the horizon. She kicked her feet and let the plastic flip-flops loosely flap against her soles. It was cold, though not cold enough to mist her breath, but the sun, a light so intense it blanched the most intense sky she could recall, seemed to sear her skin. Kentucky had already grown too small for her. She wanted to see the world, not just be in it through Comnet.

  She wished her fathers would dream the same dreams she did. Theder was totally lost to the 'net, especially when there were fullsense programs, and Anselm was off most of the time, studying the lightning-quick evolution of the toxin-dominated ecosystems that sprouted among the fields. Neither had any time for her, though Theder did make love to her once or twice a week. She had heard that was the reason her mother had left, a month after the first time. It was fun,though, and the physical contact that it provided was a comfort. She didn't like the mess, though. When she had brought forth blood, the day before yesterday, that really had been messy. Of course, she had expected it for a month or two, and it really wasn't a surprise, but she knew that it was time for her to get herself together and get out of this situation. The school up in Canada had sent her a prospectus, indicating a scholarship would be no problem, and she supposed that was where she would go.

  It was Anselm who made most of the decisions for the family. Her mother had chosen his last name, Toussaint, for her. Anselm was the person to speak to.

  A whirlwind appeared almost at her feet, scouring up dust and dead leaves like an invisible sweeper. Beth hopped down and ran into it, giggling as the hot wind turned about her and pelted her with weightless debris. Suddenly it swung to the left and headed off toward the hills, leaving her to watch. She turned wistfully and skipped toward the entrance portico of the Station, maneuvering the lithe smallness of her body up the dirty concrete stairway, halfway up onto a massive balustrade. The warmt
h of the air seeping from the energy curtain ushered her in.

  It wasn't difficult to find Theder Sabin. As usual, he was curled up on the watercouch in the darkened viewing room, head encased in the complex helmet which transmitted 'net sensory input. A look of amusement had somehow oozed out onto his face. Beth cleared the control tablet and wrote "Break" on the metallic surface. Though no physical change was obvious, Theder's body began to straighten, and his smile hardened into a grin. His eyes, after a minute, opened.

  "Hello, dear Libbie. You should see what they've done. Another breakthrough in preparing films from the early days for a four-sense presentation. It's fantastic what they can do. I've just been watching something called Wings, from 1927. What color! And to imagine that they could get stuntmen to do those things. You know, there's a difference between real action and matte-pastiches. Care to join me?"

  "No, Dad. I have something I want to talk to you and Dad

  Anselm about. Something important. I am going away to school."

  "Uh-hah. Well, it's really about time. I'll miss you, though. We both will. Let's get Ans on the phone." It was only an hour before the family's car came crunching up out of the dust to the west, casting a hazy shadow before it. The smell of oxidized metal preceded it. The big soft wheels conformed to the shallow troughs of the field and deflated into withered blue prunes as the vehicle came to a stop in front of the Station. Beth and Anselm both came out and hugged their third silently, and began to walk back up the stairs, hand in hand in hand. Anselm dropped their hands and sat on the top step, wiping his forehead with a dusty hand. Beth sat between her two fathers, resting her dark hands on the two knees, one pale and pudgy, the other sallow, scarred, and knobby. If the world could have stayed the way it was at that moment, she wouldn't have wanted to leave. Together with the two of them, the center of attention, she could see no winds in the field.