Iris

by William Barton

  "Think it'll work?"

  Brendan shrugged his answer. "We'll get something. If she's lucky, it'll be enough to give her an intact sense of self and enough to combine successfully with the lower functions that Demo left behind when he went into Centrum."

  The Selenite nodded. He had begun to learn. The supposed lower functions were actually the majority of what made up a human mind: the autonomic systems that took care of life and the emotional generators and consciousness mediators of the brain stem. Even above that the human soul was hard-wired in. All the neurolinguistic patterns were built in, add-ons though they might be. Of all the little habit patterns that so many people mistook for "personality," only the highest cortical functions, the parts of the mind that mistook themselves for the total "I," could be stripped off and sent elsewhere. That was, it seemed, the heart of what made Comnet work the way it did. That was the part of Demogorgon that had become embedded in whatever still functioned within Centrum and it was the part of Jana that they were trying to save. Is he still alive in there? Krzakwa wondered, feeling detached. And what will it be like for her? To be invaded by alien emotions . . . and then to find out that you were the invader. People from all centuries past had thought about the horror of being invaded and dispossessed by a dybbuk. Why did no one wonder about how the monster felt?

  He caught a fleeting glimpse of what he'd seen in Sealock,then, a recollection from the memories that Centrum had made public property. That was how it felt, perhaps. He felt a small surge of pity for the man. He'd been exposed before them all. Yet they all had, seemingly, seen each other's selves during the final battle. He had been operating on a kind of automatic pilot since coming back, not acknowledging the changes in him, but he had changed.

  Sealock was grinning at him. "I don't have to be hooked up to you to read your thoughts," he said, "I can see it written on your face. If I thought you all understood what you'd seen, I might be a little worried, embarrassed or something. None of you did. Having your faces rubbed in an endless sea of vaginas made a pretty good shield for me. I came out of there with a rich haul." He turned to face the machinery. "Let's get this done."

  "All right. One thing . . ."

  Sealock looked at him questioningly, eyebrows slightly raised.

  "What you said about not letting Demogorgon down. Is this what you meant?" That brought a merciless grin. "Nope."

  "What then?"

  "I'll tell you later. Maybe I'll just let it stand at a firm 'You'll see.' " They turned to the machinery a final time, switched things on, and it began.

  The scanners did their work well. They began searching among the rubble that was all that remained of the personality of Jana Li Hu, Hu Li-jiang. All the neurons of her brain had been ruptured by the growing ice crystals, all her interconnections broken asunder. There was much to be found among the destroyed circuitry of her soul. Still, the machines probed. The data were there, waiting to be interpreted. Most of what had called itself "me" in her had been concentrated into a thin cortical layer in the frontal lobes of her brain, a small amount more in the associative areas to either side. Like most other human beings, Jana was just a small packet of intense cognitive drivers and a bundle of language skills. It was easy to pluck out.

  Because most of the brain was given over to switchingcenters and data processing and retrieval devices, extreme miniaturization processes had been invoked by nature. Like a primitive computer from the dawn of electronics, most of what made up a person was just keyboard and plastic, and macroplugs . The part that did all the work was far less than one percent of the whole. There weren't enough nerves packed into those few cubic inches to make up a thinking, self-aware being, so it had all been done on a molecular level. Endless trails, endless arrays . . . the electrical patterns were still there, preserved, after a fashion, in the sea of frozen slush.

  At the moment of death, or so it seemed now, she had heard her father's voice growling out of a dim Tibetan night: "I don't care what's in her mind, Pi Ling! The parts of a woman I'm interested in could be covered by a few square centimeters of silk! And that's what they ought to be, when I'm not embedded in 'em, by Mao!"

  His cronies roared with appreciative laughter, their breath foul with a mixture of kumiss and rice wine, and the sound of it echoed down the corridors of time, waking her from a deep, dark, endless sleep which had been blessedly without dreams.

  Li-jiangwas seven years old. She squatted in the dark corners of the apartment building's community toilet, crouching inside a stall. She had her pants down and was holding a little oval mirror she'd found, looking at herself. She was pushing it down between her legs, trying to see all the places she went to the bathroom from. She remembered standing on her father's bed, trying to see her backside in the dresser mirror, and remembered his laughter. It was all funny-looking down there. Unlike everywhere else on her body, things were mushy and unsymmetrical. Her anus she understood, a simple sphincter to open and close tightly. But what was all this other nonsense for? She fingered the thick lips aside and squinted, bending down, trying to get a better look in the dim light. Why was the little hole she peed through mounted on that weird floppy structure? And what was that other hole for? It was unclosed, and nothing ever came out. . . . Shepushed a finger inside a little way and felt its moistness, but the action scared her, so she stopped.

  Suddenly the door of the toilet banged open. Li-jianggasped, horrified at the prospect of being discovered at these evil deeds, and tried to escape. She leaped to her feet, panicky, and tried to run, but she tripped over her trousers, which were down around her ankles, and fell on her face to the floor. The newcomer was laughing as he helped her up.

  It was the teenage boy, Chang-chen, who lived a few doors down the hall from her family. He was about fourteen and quite handsome, tall, with unusually shiny dark hair and large eyes. He grinned at her with doglike white teeth as he sat her on the toilet seat, seeming to ignore her state of disarray. "What's all this now, little one?" He picked up the little mirror and fingered it delightedly. "Trying to have a little look-see, find out what all the uproar is about?"

  She nodded dumbly, unable to think in her shame and terror. He laughed again, seeming hugely pleased. He picked her up and sat down, holding her on his lap. She squirmed, but he held her fast.

  "Now, now," he said. "You just hold still and I'll tell you all about it." She gasped as he placed his hand over her mons veneris, squeezing it lightly. "This," he said, "is what makes every woman worth a thousand men. And this"—he stuck his index finger into her vagina, making her whimper at a thin, strange stab of pain—"is the place where all men long to be." He ran his finger slowly in and out. "You like that?" She shook her head frantically, but he didn't seem to notice. "Well, remember what I say and you'll rule the world!" It went on and on, his fingerings and pinchings and touchings. Time disappeared into a haze of pain and confusion. Later on he held her up in the air and began licking between her legs. That felt very funny, strange, and it almost tickled, but the vileness of what was happening made her sick and she threw up down his back. That made him very angry and she carried the bruises with her for days.

  Jana considered the ancient memory. As she recalled, the boy had grown up to be a powerful canton official in Tibet,then had killed himself over some scandal or another. Something to do with the star of a visiting South American soccer team.

  Damn! A painful pins-and-needles sensation dug at her, racking the centers of her brain as if with a return of circulation. What was happening? She remembered being in the car, far out on the ocellus , and then being trapped outside with a damaged thermocouple. Oh, God! she cried silently. I thought freezing to death was supposed to be painless! She remembered all the old myths about how a dying man's life was supposed to flash before his eyes as he drifted beneath the surface of the sea for the last time, or fell past the walls of a building, counting the stories as he dropped toward certain doom. How strange that it should all turn out to be true, but not as one died, as one wa
s reborn . . . Somewhere, far away, a little voice told her that it was not true. I'm still dead, she realized. I've been dead for a very long time, centuries, in fact. I am a mausoleum, a tourist attraction in the remote future. See the funny ancient statue these humans from the dawn age left here on Ocypete's ice!

  What can be happening to me? Is one of the old religions really true? Nonsense! She pushed the absurd idea away.

  Something else was coming now, something tainted with alienness, but it seemed to be her memory nonetheless. She waited for it patiently, and it came upon her with a roar.

  Li-Jiang was eleven and Obey Cadre was in full swing. She still remembered it as having been among the worst and most repulsive things she had ever done in her life, but it all seemed changed now. Why?

  She had some of the littler boys and girls trapped in a closet with her, and she was doing things to them. It hadn't originally been her idea; other generations of older bullies had started Obey Cadre long before she came on the scene, but she was the best at it. She controlled them all, bent them to her forming will with exquisite precision. Sometimes she liked to whip them with her belt, listen to them squeal, but that wasn't all.

  She made them disrobe and lie on the floor. She grinned asshe took down her warm, quilted trousers and laid them carefully to one side. Had she been a Caucasian, she would have had the silken beginnings of pubic hair by now, but she was Chinese and it had yet to begin. Her covering would always remain sparse.

  She squatted over little An-qing, chuckling as evilly as she could manage, trying to make the play-acting part of it as real as possible. He stared, horrified, for a moment, and then squeezed his eyes shut, as if able to anticipate what was about to happen to him. She began to urinate in his face and he spluttered, trying to turn away from the thin, hot stream.

  She giggled at him. Yes, this was more like it! Maybe I can pee up his nose, she thought. She took her penis in hand, trying to direct it a little higher and . . .

  The world froze suddenly, becoming crystalline and still, the very atoms pausing in the courses. She and the boy became a tableau, two inanimate beings connected by a bright stream of urine that had glittered in the dim light, still shone of its own accord.

  Her penis?

  Had she been able to, Li-jiangwould have screamed and, screaming, have carried the terror to the Jana who lay in her vast, roving future.

  What was going on here? Something alien had entered into her dying dreams. The visions of what had been were somehow altered, as if some strange change were being thrust upon her. She felt resentment at the fact that these last fleeting moments of consciousness were being spoiled, then remorse at this perception of the way she had been. How did I suddenly turn into a boy? she wondered and . . .

  Li-jiang was thirteen. This memory was the one that she cherished the most, the thing she recalled when she wanted to feel warm and wonderful, to feel the things that had put her life on so special a course.

  She stood above the high plateau, sequestered among the jagged peaks that had once known only the wanderings of barbaric tribes and mad, mountaineering Englishmen, the mountains that were now filled with bold, sad Chinese. Shewas out on a school expedition, left alone in the summery hills above Lhasa and its temples. It was a test, to see if she were made of the stern stuff that the Enclave required. She would be coming of age soon, she knew with a shudder of disgust, and the Eugenics Council would want to know if she had anything worth passing on to the generations of unborn. The stars lay above her in glorious polar array, millions of them, it seemed, all nameless and wonderful, sparkling like diamonds in a field of black felt. She watched them and they made her feel good. They seemed untouchable, remote, far from the defiling things of mankind that made the world such a hard thing to bear.

  Her eyes followed the patterns that they made as her mind carried her toward gentle sleep. The patterns made pictures in the sky, she knew, but she hadn't learned them yet, in fact, didn't really want to. It was enough that the stars were there for her on nights like these.

  She followed the lines, tracing out constellations of her own devising against the night, growing muzzy and vague as tiredness overcame her. Her vision focused on a big, bright V shape in the sky. It seemed like a restful shape, but hard and angular. They drifted away to another place nearby. Li-jiang gasped and came fully awake with a start. Why . . . What was that one? It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen! It was a little grouping of bright jewels off to one side of the V, a cluster of tiny stars that seemed to be embedded in a dim, fiery haze. I wonder what it's really called? she wondered. When I get home I'll have to find out. It held her enraptured for half the night. She wanted to stay up longer and watch the little asterism fade, but sleepiness overwhelmed her at last, carrying her off into a dreamless land where nothing could ever intrude. Her last waking thought was, I'll really have to find out what they call it ...

  Li-jiang was fifteen and going to be with a man, truly, for the first time in her life. She was terrified and disgusted with herself for doing it, yet pathetically anxious to please him. He was Deng-yuan, a boy from the Astronomy Club, tall and very handsome, with pale skin, the blackest of hair, and the nicest,deepest eyes she had ever seen. He was always kind and spoke to her as if to an equal, though he was two years older and a world of experience wiser. She knew he was trying to be gentle with her, but it still hurt. He stroked at her for the longest time, breathing quietly on the side of her face, waiting for her to be ready, but somehow she never was. He kissed her from time to time and whispered sweet delicatenesses into her ear. He licked into it and let his hot breath flow after the moisture, thinking to excite her in a traditional manner.

  This is supposed to be nice, she thought. What's wrong with me?

  Suddenly he was on top of her, pulling aside clothing, inside of her, heaving massively away, his breath rasping thickly over her face, his huge maleness tearing away at her delicate insides. She caught her breath and started the scream that she remembered would send him leaping off her in horror, would send him fleeing into the night, never to see her again, but it never happened. Suddenly, the young man was enveloped in an angelic halo of supernatural beauty. He was a gorgeous man, something she had always appreciated. She felt her insides melt with unknown passion, become fluid for him, and she felt him relax into her, spending his effort with a small, delightful cry of pleasure. His orgasm swept her away and she began too, a pulse of delight reaching out to tingle in her fingertips and bring a flush of heat to her cheeks.

  It was a wonderful experience, the first of many that she longed to enjoy. . . .

  In her impenetrable darkness, Jana was horrified. It didn't happen that way! she cried, trying to break through the barrier of her motionless silence. I did scream! I was in agony! I never learned to enjoy it ... I never did . . .

  Had she been able to sob, her feelings of intense despair would have driven it out into the darkness. They're changing me! she wanted to wail, but it went on and on ...

  Hu Li-jiang was seventeen. She sat alone in her dorm room at Ulaanbaatar's Reflexive Institute at night, conducting her studies. This place, remote in the relatively backward wastelands of Central Asia, was positively archaic, but she enjoyed the work, enjoyed learning nonetheless. Perhaps she would stay forever. The big observatory at Uliassutai was not the most modern in the world, and was ridiculous in comparison to the off-world-scopes that dominated modern science, but half the time they went unused, having cataloged the entire universe to the limits of man's desire to fund. For all she knew, she might discover something new, something not yet noticed by the pattern-recognizers in the few continuously operating projects.

  The Comnet lines had only been run in here a few years ago, had still not gotten to her home in Tibet, but she had learned how to use them quickly and well. Her professors, in considerable difficulty themselves over the new mode of learning, looked upon her as a star pupil. If only the others would leave her alone. Their slimy attentions were unwelcom
e. They debased her as a person. She thought about her roommate, a tall blonde girl of Russian stock who had grown up in Tannu Tuva

  . She was a beautiful young lady, Darya Anni , and the object of every male eye on the campus. In the late evenings Jana sometimes watched her undress, prepare herself for a date or for sleep, and it felt very strange. She admired the woman's large breasts, with their delicate pink nipples, and found herself staring at her bright starburst thatch of pubic hair with some strange, formless sense of regret. What am I becoming? she sometimes wondered. She wanted nothing to do with any of it, most of the time, but the sleek wilderness of the woman's body reached out to her nonetheless. She thought of Klaus, the Volga-German boy who lived two floors up. She had gotten to know him fairly well, and sometimes liked him. He was a good student in the newly named Department of Asterology , land of the star-studiers,second, perhaps, only to her. She felt good when he gave her work his seemingly awestruck compliments.

  She sighed. He was known far and wide across the campus as something of a pervert. So far as anyone could tell, he was still a technical virgin, and he seemed to be more or less impotent. No one had even seen him masturbate, or ever seen the telltale tenting evidence of a nocturnal erection, but there were things he liked to do. . . . And he did them well! She had spent a few nights groaning beneath the tireless lash of his tongue, wishing that her desires would just go away. She envied him his apparent inability and wondered why he bothered to perform.

  The door suddenly popped open, swinging inward as she looked up. A broad, heavy Mongol face peered in, eyes slitted beneath a particularly massive epicanthic fold. Bayan Joghu from next door. " Anni in?" he asked in Gwo-yu , the dorm's official language.

  She shook her head. "Too bad," he said, and retreated. Before the door could swing shut another figure burst through it, a short, slim Japanese boy whose name she could not remember. His fly was down, his long penis dangling out, swaying ludicrously, one of his pockets turned inside out. "Hey, Hu!" he cried, breathing out the dense fumes of some smoky drug. "Look! It's a ..."