Iris

by William Barton

  "You know I love the two of you," she began, feeling awkward, almost unable to tell them what they already knew. "But I've decided to leave. I'm eleven now, and I'm going to the Macallister School in Yellowknife. That's in the CFE, nowhere near the Sosh Old Zone, and they have offered me a scholarship."

  Anselm looked pleased. "What kind of school is it. Old Style? Freeform?"

  "It's a Summertree school, sort of free-form, but more rigorous. I think I'll like it there." Theder took her hand and intertwined her small fingers into his large clasp. "You can always come back. And we'll visit you too." Anselm nodded. He enveloped them both in his naked arms, and they held each other like that for a long time. "Remember," he said, "always remember—we're a family. Your mother is still with us. We're a family."

  The Seedees, at least temporarily defeated, lay deep within the folds of Centrum, coupled together in a staggered line. They were wed primarily to each other, to their old mates andfriends, but the oils leaked back and forth along the line, making the many one. They whispered softly to each other in the silent darkness, reggae tunes of the battle's excitement, the flying mist and the sound-flare of an imaginary sun. But we lost, they sighed, wind currents in the sea, and so come closer to the death from which we cannot arise. The battle was lost and the war was in peril. Other voices whispered softly, pointing up the other factors among them: And if we win? What then? Centrum swallows us back into itself. We become dream matter once again, our awareness gone. That, too, is death. Shivers of terror, powered by the knowledge that it had already happened, that they had all been dead for countless ages. So why should we fight for the thing that will kill us? Why not let Centrum go down to doom with us? Let the great world spin on into darkness and come to a stop. A still, somber voice sparkled in their midst, one of many, interconnected: If Centrum dies, we are dead forever. If it lives, we may someday live again, for it needs us. We must fight!

  The voices sighed on, talking to each other, making love grow like bubbles in the sea, a froth of mixing minds. They dreamed to each other, minimizing their differences, contravening the old evolutionary drives, yet powering them nonetheless.

  Cooloil was caught in a bright dream of times past. Her gentle rhythms were settled into their old, quiescent ways. She wanted only to live again, as she had always lived, and so bespoke it to 7red and to all the others who had been called back from the void.

  Before her, Seedees played in the freshness of Mother Ocean's methane sky, chasing about in great, complex patterns, the old culture-dances that made their senses reel with happiness and wonder, and she danced among them. Here, it was not the enclosed sea of Centrum's ship, instead people played their games in the natural surround of the old world, the world none of them had ever seen. She dashed about the sky on an anophagomotor jet, dodging playfully among the bright toxin-clouds, dashing through schools of brothermind fliers, bursting their unity asunder, feeling their raspy bodies bumping along her sides, hearingthe muted cries of their synchronized oils dimmish into startled cacophony. She tumbled, and kinesthesia made the world tumble.

  There was another Seedee ahead. She projected her remote senses, reading the methane pressure waves, and identified him. Seven Red Anchorelles awaited her. She rushed forward joyfully and coupled with him. . . .

  The deep oils of 7red pulsed with energy. He told a story to her, then to them all, of a time that had never been. In a complex song of what-if, he imagined that the Starseeders had never been born. What then?

  The Starseeders had been the beginning of it all, yes, the founders of the Grand Design, but they had come from nature itself, just like the worlds and all the stars. The little methane worlds had come into being on their own, without interference from any intelligent agency, and it was known that intelligence could evolve by itself, in a haphazard fashion. Maybe . . . Maybe, without Starseeder and without Centrum, there would still have been Seedees. . . . No, that was the wrong word. There must be something else. . . .

  He projected a vision: high in the skies of a cold, blue-green world the hard squid jetted, proud, knowing themselves the masters of creation. Though the nature of the sea dictated their form, they were no longer subsumed to the modeling powers of a silicate world virus. Unlike the dreamer, they had eyes and, from old, had known about the remote, twinkling points of light that had always dominated the sky. They had eyes, these proud creatures, and called themselves the People.

  They worked together, on a Grand Design of their own. The People studied the worlds about them and, slowly, over the aeons, accumulated the materials for their quest. They plunged deep, to the core of their world; they mined the random metal masses that occasionally fell from the sky. They flew higher and higher until they had penetrated the spaces about them. They built ships that coursed the heavens. In time they had starships and found the other worlds. Mostly they were empty worlds, it was true, frequently theywere useless save as a source of more raw material, but that was not always the case. As the People colonized among the methane worlds they found other People in various stages of development. They coupled with them, subsumed them to the universal whole. They spread throughout creation.

  The universe aged and, as it mellowed, brought forth other forms of life, other intelligences. The silicate worlds filled with life of their own sort, quick minds that climbed the steady ladder upward into the black, star-sequined night. As they arrived, one by one, they found the People waiting with open generosity, the elder statesmen of creation.

  Cooloil flew through his vision, enthralled by the nobility of it, saddened by the tragedy that she knew had been real. Why had the fates not seen to it that her people had been the masters of their own destiny?

  Because the fates were Centrum and the Starseeder plan.

  And why was it still so? Why had they never rebelled?

  Because we could not, whispered another Seedee. Because we lived within Centrum and it ruled our lives down to the tiniest detail, down to the ultimate moment. How could we fight against such a thing without some outside agency to intervene in our behalf?

  There was nothing beyond Centrum and the sea of Mother Ship. We are, as we always were, trapped. The Seedees moaned in unison, a soft wail of whispered death. . . . 7red's oil burst upon them like an incandescent cataract. There is now, he said, his meaning penetrating to them all. The disease is here. The thing that infects Centrum watches us and waits. You know what it is.

  Some chance by-product of the Grand Design?

  It is the Grand Design! The Starseeders made Centrum, which made us, solely to make more of their own kind. We are merely intermediary stages in a long process that has succeeded at last. They are here. Can they help us? Will they?

  It doesn't matter. Let us help them to kill Centrum.

  But then we will all die! Die forever!

  Perhaps. But at least God will go down into the darknesswith us. We will not die alone. To me, that is a satisfactory end to it all.

  So be it, whispered all the Seedees together, relishing their potential revenge.

  John stood wearily. The others were seated on an inner rampart of one of the higher parapets, huddled in couples as if to hold off the next attack by ignoring the world around them and concentrating on what was happening behind their closed eyes. For the first time he noticed that a strong bond seemed to have been formed between Temujin and Aksinia, the latter cuddled in the bearded man's bulky grip. Strange, he thought. He scanned, once again, the flat, broken wall before him, the huge tower reaching upward into the night-circle, which now sported six stars, bloated and red like Betelgeuse, in a random constellation. He shook his head. What is this? How the fuck are we supposed to deal with a world in which their are no bases for understanding, in which the rules of the game are unreadable? OK . . . OK .

  . . even if logic is not totally applicable here, this that seems is strongly tied to the premises of the Bright Illimit program. Something is not quite what it appears . . . no, that's wrong, nothing is quite what it appears.r />
  "Well," he said, looking at the others, "should we proceed?" There was no dissent. They moved. Through barren halls that were nothing at all, John walked automatically, barely feeling the scraping of his feet on the hard rock. He had begun to feel that he would not be involved in the process of reliving memories, but, unexpectedly, it was not so.

  There were endless hours of building data montages, pasting consonant intervals through the purely mathematical central motif. The music leading to the break before the rush into the coda was coming along, coming along. It would be finished, perhaps, today.

  He looked through the complex notation, rather like a color abstraction of a city skyline viewed through a screen and window splattered with raindrops, to the real window that his desk faced. The computer feed dimmed anddisappeared, and the mountains of Backbone Range, snowy bleak and rimmed with halos of blowing ice, looked back at him. January was lord of Canada and he was warm and cozy in the sconce of his mother's cabin. Removed from the interface with his machine, the raw ache of his restored leg returned like a claw bite. He looked down at the cloth within which his cold, pale leg was regenerating its nerve tissue, and remembered the fall.

  And yet, despite it all, it had been good. Here he was, idea tumbling on to idea, building the complexity of Reflection Counterpoint from the well of experiences that had brought him to this place. Sometimes he would marvel at how the pain had helped fuse the earlier idea of complex structures analogous to music in direct data throughput into something real and within his grasp to produce. It was a wonder—one of those things that are unbelievable until they occur. And, for the first time in his life, he was about to know the feeling of absolute triumph.

  He brought the program overlay back into his field of vision and began to manipulate the loopy half scales of numbers that provided the background, interposing passing tones flanking the pivot chords a hundred deep. This, when played back, amazingly, had just the effect he had desired, and no more tinkering was necessary. The penultimate passage was finished. He linked in the preliminary coda file and looked at it again in the context of the finished climax. Ho! he thought. That's closer to the final version than I suspected.

  A sequence of commands fleshed out the coda with the color-chords he had already made, holding the additions in his mind for a moment to twist them this way and that, catching overly legato numbers and popping them slightly. A little inversion put just the hint of a reference to Bach's " Heut ' triumphieret Gottes Sohn ," followed by the barest chuckle, and, yes! it was finished. He had done it!

  John shut the interface off with a mental click and sat back. He was laughing, knowing for once that what he had done was right. Perfect. He had captured the essence that brimmed within him, and, perhaps, created a new art form in theprocess. He slapped his leg and smiled at the pain, and returned to the present.

  The eight crept forward out of the darkness, slowly feeling their way into the unknown circuitry. The dim world about them stayed artificialized, moldering stone walls glowing with a dim, greenish phosphorescence, redolent of damp, ancient life. They stopped, hiding behind a low wall that had somehow come into existence, and peered into an enormous chamber. Lit by flickering red torchlight, its walls were of pale, translucent marble in which varihued whorls of color were faintly visible. The ceiling was a vaulted arch, the inside of a blank, high dome. Windows suddenly appeared, as if an afterthought, tall, thin slits that admitted dim vermilion twilight and faint breezes, drafts of cool, dry air that stirred the flames and made shadows dance upon the walls. The strong, incongruous smell of jasmine tea began to fill their nostrils.

  Things floated above the floor. For a brief moment they saw the familiar hard-squid shapes of the Seedees hanging there. They were linked together in pairs, connected at their anchorelles, and the couplets were joined together in a double row, like a string of firecrackers waiting to be touched off. The forms began to change. They writhed and their outlines began to blur, shifting away into a melting softness, like oil-based clay thrown into a kiln.

  "What's going on?" asked Vana, turning to look at the others. Tem shook his head, pale face beaded with droplets of cold sweat. "I think Bright Illimit's routines are looking for some image we can deal with."

  "Yes," said Ariane. "It's trying to find an average for all of us. . . ." They fell silent and watched. The shapes before them coalesced, forming into a huddled, glowing mass, an insensate pool of light gathered in the middle of the soft, padded floor. Things began to appear in the light, vaguely humanoid images that spilled onto one another, mixing together as a mass of indistinct limbs and bodies. They shifted and changed rapidly as the program picked up imagery, first from one controlling mind, then another. Abruptly, the picture sharpened into focus, jumping out at them like a dense holograph. There were a hundred human beings jumbled together motionless on the floor. They were huddled in endless arrays of sexual poses, every conceivable posture and position, like some alien Karnak wrought in three-dimensional, fleshlike stone. They remained still, for the moment showing no sign of life; then the first one moved.

  A being from the center of the group stirred and, with his motion, the others breathed, a sudden sighing from a hundred manlike throats. The man, for he was clearly male, arose and stretched. Separated from the generalized mass of the group, posing before them, they could see him clearly now. The shape was generally humanoid, all of the parts were more or less present, but there seemed to be a lack of fine detail. The skins were pallid, the dull bone white of institutional walls, and everywhere there was a lack of flexion lines. The fingers were smooth; likewise the elbows and knees. His brow was empty of feature and his face was without the character lines that help distinguish human beings. Their hair, also white, was undifferentiated, a shapeless mass meant to indicate where hair would go. They were cartoons brought to life. A female Seedee arose to stand beside the man and they could see that she too was crude, as if adapted from a paleolithic statuette.

  Their eyes opened, reddish orange, dully glowing coals.

  "A touch of humanity," murmured Demogorgon, "and a strong flavor of alienness. Good work." The two Seedees walked slowly forward to stand before them while the others hung back and watched, motionless and silent. The two groups examined one another for a drawn-out moment; then the male being spoke. "I am called Seven Red Anchorelles," he said. "You are the aliens?" Krzakwa smiled softly. "I guess we are," he said.

  7red nodded slowly and exchanged glances with the woman. In their featurelessness, they seemed to communicate. He turned back to the humans. "We know you're here to destroy the ancient Mind, what you call Centrum . . ."

  "Wait a minute!" said Cornwell. "We don't want to . . ." 7red held up a pale hand, silencing him. "It doesn't matter what you intend. That is what you have come to do. We want to join you."

  "Why?" asked Krzakwa flatly, his voice echoing from the hardening stone of the chamber. "That'll mean the end of you all."

  Cooloil spoke for the first time, her voice portrayed as a rich, deep flow of liquid syllables. "We know that. We don't care. This has gone on long enough. Our people have never been free, and if we cannot be free, we would as soon cease to exist."

  The humans could find no reply to this, each buried in his own secret responses. Cornwell found himself recalling his feelings as he'd emerged from his first submergence into the world of Centrum, when they'd followed Sealock's fleeing soul down into the depths. "Poor bastards, indeed," he murmured, and,

  "Join us, then. We'll do what we can."

  The Seedee reached forward and grasped his hand, touching him only fleetingly, while the others pressed forward, animated by an eagerness to begin.

  Achmet Aziz el-Tabari was in Montevideo, in Tupamaro Arcology so far from Paris, to meet with his technical adviser for the first time. He walked through the cool, dark, quiet hallways, thinking of what it could mean. Brendan Sealock. He rolled the name around, considering its feel. It was an ordinary-seeming sort of name, a Sean Smith-like Anglo-Irish
pastiche, but the syllables had a rolling dignity to them that was unusual. It sounded like the name of an impressive man and he wondered what sort of figure would be attached to it. He smiled. Probably a typical sort of brain-worker: short, skinny, stuttering. A hundred years ago he would have had rotten teeth and thick glasses. This character would probably smell bad. The vital statistics had been sparse. Born in the Deseret Enclave Complex thirty-two years ago, moved to New York Free City when eighteen, and spent the rest of his life at NYU. Typical. Some kind of theoretical design engineer working for MCD. A high-caliber type. Unlimited Comnet access.

  That puzzled him a little. When he'd applied to Comnet for professional assistance in designing the Illimitor World, he'd been expecting to get a list of good programmers, preferably people working right in Paris, where he could easily visit them in person. He liked to work closely with the craftsmen he hired. You never knew when some sexy flesh might wander by. After his request, Comnet had asked for a set of specifications, so he'd sent in a précis of what he wanted the program to do. Astonishingly, there had been a wait of several minutes, then the unit had sent him one name, Brendan Sealock, and a single-digit TY-com address. Weird.

  Whoever heard of a one-number address? Not only that, but why had Comnet referred him to a design engineer? The world held millions of top-quality programmers, many of them—hell, most of them—working in artistic fields. Surely the program wasn't so difficult that it would require new hardware! The idea was beginning to disturb him.

  He arrived at the correct door and announced himself. He stood in front of it, staring at his own eye level, waiting for a person to appear. The door slid open and he was gazing at a chest. Demogorgon gasped and took a sudden step backward. The man was huge! At least a hundred kilos, close to a hundred and ninety centimeters tall. He looked upward from a broad, heavily muscled body into a face marked by unreconstructed scars. Details began to force themselves on him. At some point the man's nose had obviously been broken, and his eyes were dark green, sunk into shadows beneath heavy brows. His hair was a reddish-blond tangle, cut short in what looked like a homemade butchery of a coiffure. Sealock was grinning at him, showing big, square white teeth. He let his eyes drift downward, drinking in the minutiae of his physique. The man was dressed in white tennis shorts and a sleeveless shirt. His arms were thick, laden with big, slabby muscles and roped with thick veins; his legs were sleek, hairy pillars ending in short, broad, blunt-toed feet. His hands had knobby, white-scarred knuckles, as if he'd spent a lot of time fighting with stone walls. "Ah . . ." He swallowed, convulsively, fighting confusion. "Mr. Sealock?"