Iris

by William Barton

  She looked at him with a narrow, sidelong glance, smiling crookedly. "I got a date tonight." Sealock shrugged haphazardly. "Oh. OK, maybe some other time."

  "Sure." They were walking down the street together, long strides matched, arms swinging in unison.

  "Who is it, anybody I know?"

  "Mike Torr ."

  "The snuff-dipper? You got to be kidding!"

  "No, really!" She was giggling at him, almost blushing at his laughter. "He's a lot of fun." Sealock shook his head in mock dismay. "Boy, oh, boy," hesaid, "I will never understand why women make the choices that they do!"

  "Now, now. Just because I didn't choose you is no reason to get bitter." They were still smiling, still in a teasing social mode.

  "Yeah. I've heard all that before. How can you take that cud-chewer in preference to a Celtic god like me?" He posed before her in the street, flexing his muscles into a buckling chaos of flesh.

  "My, my!" she exclaimed, running a hand over one stiffened bicep. "I just don't know. I must be mentally ill!"

  "You must be." The charade fell apart as laughter overcame them.

  "Look, I gotta run now. See ya later." She punched him in the arm and was gone. Sealock walked slowly back to his apartment, still grinning. She was fun to work with.

  Later that night Brendan was standing in one of the little street parks so common in modern New York, watching the passing scene with a mild disinterest. There seemed to be a lot of bums out tonight. Probably most of them were just posing as bums, for it was a fun role that many people enjoyed playing. Some of them might be real bums, he supposed, people far gone in volitional alcoholism.

  "Hi!" He turned about and saw one of the young girls from the Intro to QTD course that he was teaching. Cathy, um . . . no, Lori something-or-other. The rest of her name escaped him.

  "Hello. Having a nice night?" She was slim and had lots of bushy red hair framing a cute, bland little face, with a light dusting of freckles. She was, he knew, something like eighteen years old. She shrugged. "OK, I guess. I'm getting a little bored."

  "Tired of studying?"

  She nodded. "Your class is a little hard for me."

  A glinting supposition appeared in his mind. "Tell you what," he said, "come on up to my apartment and I'll give you a nice body rub. Fix you right up."

  She seemed startled and stared at him, hands on her hips. "What is this, some kind of come-on?" He held his hands up before him, palms outward, grinning broadly. "Perish the thought! Look, I'm trying to do something nice for one of my students for a change. This'll be the ultimate in refreshing experiences. I promise not to fuck you."

  She still seemed doubtful but went with him. Once there, she stood quietly while he spread a soft blanket on the floor of his living room, watching him closely. He turned to face her, and she said, "What do I do now?"

  "Stand still." He began to undress her, unbuttoning her blouse, pulling off her tattered, cut-down shorts. He slid her out of a pair of green silk underpants and she stood naked before him, obviously uneasy. He looked her over and shook his head, smiling. Youth held its own special beauty, something he had not noticed when he had been that age. She blushed before his gaze, redness suffusing down onto her chest.

  "OK, now lie face down on the blanket." She did his bidding.

  He got out a small bottle of almond-scented oil and poured it onto her back. She shivered as he touched her with his hands, beginning to knead the slippery stuff into her skin. She was tense at first, frightened by the way it had gotten out of her control so quickly, but later relaxed, surrendering to the experience as his hands squeezed her buttocks and worked their way down her legs. He turned her over and worked on the front of her soft body. Her breathing quickened when he massaged her breasts and sweat began to bead across her brow and upper lip as his hands moved down her abdomen. She had at least one orgasm when he rubbed the oil slowly into her groin, but he kept his word to the end.

  Morning found him sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring out across the steel-gray sea, watching the mists disperse before the oncoming day, waiting for the sun to rise out of the sea, a dull, fat orange ball. This was the day. He breathed in deeply, smelling the tang of ionized air, the scent of the land, sailors called it, and feeling it invigorate him, fill him with renewed life. I love it here, he realized, just like I loved my childhood.

  This time, I'll not let it get away. New York, Comnet, the life in the streets, all of it. I don't think I've ever been happier. How could I ever go away?

  Scenes passed before him, women clustered thickly round, friends and experiences everywhere. His work was fulfilling, sex could be had just by stretching out his hand. He treasured the nights spent alone in his apartment, the times of close and somber thought. What else could anyone want?

  The Games awaited. He got up and stretched carefully, feeling the solid muscles rippling across his back. Montevideo, he thought, and glory before my peers, then I come home again. He strode off into a gathering cloud of darkness.

  Demogorgon felt himself going down the drain, like a childhood nightmare come to life at last. He swirled down and around and down, the darkness growing all around him. His memory and life were coming apart, and he felt himself fragmenting, subsystems flying off in all directions, preceding him into the night of nonbeing. He was silent and felt nothing as his emotional drivers were stripped from him. In the end, he was no longer a person, just a disembodied consciousness dropping in a tight spiral. As he fell, other subsystems were being sucked up the center of the spiral, pieces of Brendan Sealock being reassembled by the process of his fall. He was succeeding. He recognized the bits as they swept past him, scenes from Brendan's life in which he had had a part. I will not completely die, then, he realized, for bits of me rise again, embodied in all the past that was his. Had he been able to feel, it might have been comforting.

  He fell and the black clouds gathered him in. He fell and, in just a little while, he was gone.

  Brendan Sealock felt himself rising through cottony layers of unconsciousness. It was like the journey that imagination sent him on in the old films. The doctor was peeling away the endless layers of gauze bandage that covered his eyes and he waited, frightened. Will I be able to see again when he's done? I don't want to know. The light grew as the layers ofcloth between him and the world diminished. He fancied he could see the grainy texture of the gauze. What will I see when the last layer is gone? Will I emerge into a life of light and color or will the world always be a blur to me? Is a life of light and shadow without any detail better than black, blinding death? He was in agony, but he waited. Suddenly, the last layer was gone.

  Brendan Sealock awoke and opened his eyes.

  TEN

  The world-lines were beginning to darken. In the sea of light that had delineated their existence, lines of dull ebony were beginning to penetrate, threads of blackness that advanced on their rigorous courses, heralding the extinction of individual subsystems. They felt themselves go with little keening cries of dismay.

  Night overcame them in the midst of their lives, throwing them down as their tales strove to resume. Stories of an infinite past buckled in upon a common center, coalescing into a single bright dot, a spark which swiftly winked out. The walls of castles, then entire cities crushed together, imploding into nothingness. The horizons of the world were a swiftly closing circle, a fiery limit that wound itself tight, drawing the cosmos together like a death noose closing in on its vanishing point. The towers fell and were no more, shards of dull glass tumbling from the sky.

  The universe became a plane which flattened itself with an effervescent hiss and was still, a black, tideless sea lying beneath a dark, featureless sky. The entities lay dead in its depths, become a mass of quiescent data. It ended.

  They rose, like bubbles drifting buoyant through an endless sea, seeking the surface and light. Beneath them the detritus of their deeds was left behind, the wreckage of lives become as nothing. In the delimited world that fell awa
y below them, they had but little consciousness, a sense of self that grew ever stronger as the blue light grew about them and the spectrum slowly broadened, taking on ever longer wavelengths as their separation lessened. They rose together at first, then one of the eight leaped ahead, taking on a teardrop shape as it flew, leaving behind a contrail of lesser bubbles. The false security of an artificial sun blossomed above; a burnished, wavering disk that beckoned them to come forth. Far below, the shambles rested, waiting. All the pieces were there, whole but quiet, from stilled program to dead souls.

  Brendan Sealock awoke into his body. He lay still for what seemed a long time, savoring the resurrection of physical sensations that had so long eluded him. It all seemed clear to him now, but he knew that it was a false reprieve from his own special reality. The lives of men are often immutable, no matter what they go through. In the distance he could hear the soft sighing of life-support machinery and, all about him, the whispering breaths of his still sleeping comrades. A smile tugged briefly at his lips and then vanished. I am mad, he thought.

  He opened his eyes slowly and stared at the ceiling. It was a blank expanse of padded whiteness that told him nothing. He sat up and looked around. The others were still there, lying motionless, a profusion of induction leads sprouting from their heads. He reached up and began to unplug the taps from the sockets in his skull. Is it over now? he wondered.

  He stood and began to move around the room, feeling faint, as if he were mildly ill. The world seemed removed a considerable distance from him, too far away for him to reach out with a caress. He stood looking down at Ariane. Onceagain, her loose clothing was disarrayed, exposing her to his gaze. He felt like laughing. Had she always been like this, a careless person with all her secrets let out for all to examine? He didn't know. All the memories were there, clearer than they had ever been, but their content seemed somehow changed. He looked at the others, one by one, assessing them bleakly, until he came upon the still form of Demogorgon.

  He felt a sense of remote loss. The dark face was filled with life, as if it might awaken in only moments to beg him once again. The Arab was almost pretty in his stillness. Brendan brushed the dark hair away from the man's dry brow and shook his head slowly. His emotions were curiously diminished, as if put away from him for good. Perhaps I am better off this way, a madman in whom none can detect the insanity. Another thought: I am dead. They failed to bring me back. He found it impossible to care. The others began to stir and awaken, their eyes popping open like mechanical things. They rose gently, disengaging themselves from the machine with little regret. Sealock watched them from heavy-lidded eyes, looking for some response that exceeded his own, but found none. They were all equally drained. Perhaps it was a natural thing, and all concerns were needless.

  He looked down at the still form and said, "So I live again, and this one dies." Cornwell came across the room to stand before him, looking into his face. "Yes," he said, "and Jana too is dead— frozen."

  Jana? Dead? Brendan felt a long moment of confusion, then the light and meaning of it all struck at him and he burst out laughing.

  The others were staring at him as if he had truly gone mad. Still giggling fitfully, Brendan sank down on the couch beside what was left of Demorgorgon, muttering to himself, trying to catch his breath. "'He died that others might live . . . 'Unrequited love burns fierce in the hearts of men . . .'" His laughter roared forth again, echoing in the closed room, and tears of mirth squeezed out of his eyes, oozing like oil in the low-g drag across his cheeks. "Oh, I can't stand it!" hecried, pointing a finger at the motionless form. " 'This was the noblest Roman of them all!' "

  He stopped laughing then, gasping for breath. He sniffled, wiping his nose on the back of a sleeve, rubbing his hands across a dampened face. "Oh, Christ . . ." He picked up the still body and clutched it across his chest like a huge rag doll, grinning at the others. "What a prize bunch of assholes we are!" Cornwell felt rage welling up from within him, a conflagration fueled by all that he'd been through, the things that he thought had happened to them all. "Nothing's changed then," he snarled. He stalked over to Sealock and stood before him, fists balled up and planted heavily on his hipbones. "You haven't changed, have you? Nothing affects a bastard like you! You're self-contained, aren't you? What happens is meaningless if it hasn't happened to you!"

  Brendan let the man drift slowly back onto the couch and stared at him for a moment, a smile still twisting his lips. He turned to look at John, then slowly rose to his feet, seeming to tower over him, some kind of wrathful, demonic hulk. He glared for a moment, then grinned again. "Oh, I've changed, all right, kiddo," he said softly, "and so have you. Think about it." He waved a hand to take in the other six. "We've changed because we had to, whether we're capable of realizing it or not. It's these strangers who haven't changed. While we were being burned in our own special crucibles, our little private hells, they were being cemented into their present form, forever."

  "What're you talking about?" whispered Cornwell, but he had a horrible inkling of what was meant and, so, what was coming a short distance down the line.

  "How can you be like this, Brendan?" cried Ariane. "For God's sake, he died for you!"

  "Did he?" Brendan sat again and slowly drew the fingers of one hand across the man's smooth face.

  "Bullshit. He just wrote himself the best closing scene he thought he'd ever have. He knew I wouldn't let him down . . ."

  "You . . ." Ariane stopped, choking, and her face slowlydarkened. She tried to speak again, failed, and then burst into tears and fled from the room. Vana glared at him, spat, "You bastard!" and went after her. Prynne followed them, wordless.

  Axie stood in the silence, seeming almost to smile. "It's all meaningless, isn't it? Why would they expect you to change? You weren't there with us. You missed it all!"

  Brendan's grin broadened. "I did, didn't I? But you're wrong. You all are. Demogorgon didn't die for me; he just went out the way he wanted to, and in so doing got his own way at last. 'Do a little something for me, just this once!' "

  The woman shook her head, keenly feeling the loss of Beta-2 understanding. But underneath her shrunken awareness there was a new note of order—harmony—that kept her on course. Enfolded in this new structure, Brendan's face was somehow there, like a pistil in a flower, but the man standing before her was not this Brendan. Before her was a horrible distortion. "That may be your illness," she said softly, looking at the floor. "It seems you have always been incapable of understanding anyone except in the limited vocabulary by which you define yourself."

  Brendan smiled faintly at her. "That may," he said, "be what you want to believe." Axie stared at him through eyes that seemed for a moment to have become empty holes through her face into some darkness beyond, then she turned and left.

  Beth followed the other woman through the door, her face streaked by unnecessary tears. John watched her go and felt benumbed, longing but unwilling to follow. Foreknowledge kept him in his place. Temujin, catapulting himself from the cramped floor into a nearby chair, said, "OK, the histrionics are over. Materially, we're all still the same despite everything. We know something of the history of these things, but most of it is damnably sketchy and virtually all of it is unverifiable. What's to be done? Jana's still dead and now Demo is too. We haven't gained a thing."

  Brendan deopaqued one relatively machineless wall of his chamber and stared out across the moonscape, smiling ruefully. "Haven't we? Thanks." He chuckled and said, "The oldturn of phrase still suffices to cover up all traces of evil. No matter how close we come to another person, we are still blind. The filter of self still makes the world seem opaque. . . ."

  John felt a moment of blank astonishment. The filter of self? The path his own thoughts had been taking was moving inexorably toward similar conclusions. There simply wasn't any other explanation for the horrible breakdowns that were all around. He could no longer chalk everything up to a failure of communication. We perceive what we need to perceive.
The thought of it coming out of Sealock's lips made him feel slightly sick. The implications weren't good.

  Brendan turned to face them, his face growing more serious than it had been since the awakening.

  "What's to be done?" he murmured. "Jana, dead? How . . . No, don't tell me. I know she killed herself somehow. I picked it up from Demo during my resurrection." He shook his head slowly, rubbing a broad hand across the back of his neck. "I saw him then, while the rest of you were being blind. . . . No, forget that. I haven't got a good reason for picking on you anymore."

  "Well?" asked Krzakwa, "What do you suggest? Is there any way we can get Demo back? You know more about these things that the rest of us put together."

  Brendan shrugged. "Nope. He's in there for good, I'm afraid. What can we do? Just pump him full of whatever Jana left behind is all." He laughed. "Hell, maybe she'll be more at home in there!"

  "So," said John, dismayed at last. "He's dead forever, and it doesn't bother you?" The man turned to face him, his features looking carefully controlled. "Two points," he said. "One: I didn't say that, you did. Two: why should it bother me?" He turned to look at the body and said, "Don't worry, pal. I'll see you didn't do it in vain. Can't leave you looking like an asshole, now, can we?" John felt some of his rage and confusion recede. Something was going on that he felt capable of understanding. I've seen this all before, he thought.

  Some time later Sealock and Krzakwa were in the chamber alone with the electronically supported body of Demogorgon and the cryogenic capsule containing the ice-encrusted remains of Jana Hu. The Arab's head was festooned with leads and Brendan had finished drilling into the dead woman's skull, installing deeply embedded brain-taps and scanners into the ruined tissue. It had been a bloodless operation, free of gore. What was left of her, brittle and harder than iron, looked less than human, more or less inorganic. Having been frozen very slowly, Jana did not even look like a statue. Her face looked like the broken ice on an expanded and refrozen stream.