Iris

by William Barton

  ". . . one-eared elephant!" she snarled, reaching for the square glass paperweight that she knew she would throw at him, knocking him unconscious and bloodying his brow.

  The action went uncompleted. Her hand swung past the object and clutched at his groin. She heard his squawk of surprise and delight as she seized the organ and stuffed it into her eager mouth. A ring of stunned faces appeared in the door, watching what she did with dazed astonishment, with total disbelief.

  "Will you look at that!" came an awed whisper.

  "The ice queen's blowin' him," said someone else.

  They cheered as she swallowed and her popularity began to ride on the crest of a dramatic upswing. Far in the future, Jana tried to still her rampant horror. I knocked him out, she sighed to herself. I fractured his skulland almost got kicked out of school! I did! I remember it! Is that merely what I should have done, or is it what someone else, in my place, would have done? Who am I becoming? And still it went on....

  A melange of memory ... a mosaic of moments. All the times she had known, the cascading changes, flooded through the minutes, the hours, that had known no meaning. Only when it reached a kind of watershed did it pause and enact a painful reliving. Hu Li-jiang was twenty. She had recently been granted an assistantship at the Reflexive Institute and now she had power over some of the students. She had told the girl to meet her on the quad after sunset, it being one of the few good nights of high summer on the Gobi Plateau. She savored the meeting with quick anticipation and felt the flesh loosening between her thighs. Obey Cadre held nothing to the things she could do now. She waited patiently, smiling to herself. The girl wanted a perfect grade, and she was willing to pay for it in an excellent coin. . . . The man appeared. He was tall and thin, a dark-haired Caucasian of Armenian stock, something of a rarity in these parts. He was hawk-handsome and his slickly oiled hair shone in the waning light. She found her gaze riveted upon him by an unaccountable, unfamiliar magnetism. He held out his hand to her and she went to him, molding her body against his alien sleekness. He ran his hand between her legs and she thrilled to his touch.

  They strolled away together, arm in arm, leaving the student girl to stare after them, perplexed. She had come prepared to debase herself and felt cheated that this gigolo had stolen away the chance. Li-jiang gave her the grade nonetheless.

  Jana cried out in the darkness. I made her have sex with me! I remember it! I made her pay for what I could give out! Didn't I? She suddenly realized she could no longer remember it as well as she'd thought. Why is it all fading away? How can this be happening to me? She moaned. . . . And that same year Li-jiang remembered receiving the com message, watching as the self-decoding cipher she haddesigned did its work. The Free University at Vancouver was proud to offer such a fine young savant its riches. She whooped with joy, danced with unaccustomed merriment. They were offering her a full professorship, with unlimited access to remote observations, the chance to direct her own research program!

  I'll need a new name, she mused, something to separate me from the old life I'm leaving behind. No more am I a creature of the Institute. Who shall I be? I want to blend in. Jiang . . . Jana! That's it! Dr. Jana Li Hu, Chinese-Canadian asterologist . . .

  No, a faint voice whispered. You have a name. Your real name is a good enough label . . . Hua

  -hung.

  She changed her mind.

  No! I am Jana! I've been Jana for half of my life! She sobbed in her eternal darkness and, for just a moment, swore that she could feel the slow crawl of tears worming their way across the ruined landscape of her frozen face. What was it?

  Impossible.

  Li-jiang was a hundred years old. She lay on a silken divan surrounded by a diffuse gauze of sea-green mosquito netting somewhere in the tropics. She was immortal and the endless life served her well. She was gifted by eternal youth and had become completely given over to the pleasures of the flesh that had tried to claim her since childhood.

  The advances of surgery had changed her, augmenting her beauty until it was an unearthly thing. Between her legs there was a great iridescent flower of flesh. She had become a perfect androgyne , able to take enjoyment wherever she would. The flower would open to accept men or compress for the swift penetration of compliant women. She used them by the dozen, reeling her ancient way through a thousand and more orgasms in a single day.

  They fed her, bathed her, and she never had to stir from the airy, gently swaying bed that was her home. The great people, the famous ones, came to enjoy her uniqueness from all over the inhabited universe. In the distances a great hard squid lurked, waiting its turn. She sought the discharge of its anchorelleswith breathless anticipation. She used her experiences at a prodigious rate, secure in the knowledge that the universe was truly infinite, that all the newnesses could never be exhausted. In the hot confines of her darkness Jana cried, pleading for death to end the torture, for the world to turn her loose and let her fall end over end down into the vast night of nonbeing.

  She awoke.

  Through the thin skin of her closed eyelids the world was a sea of light. She felt her lips curve in an unfamiliar smile. She sighed, and the resonances of her breath sounded strange. Her chest felt light, somehow tighter, as if the negligible weight of her small breasts was gone, amputated. Maybe they have been. The extremities would have taken the most damage, she thought.

  She stirred, and felt that her limbs were still there, all her fingers and toes accounted for, still willing to wiggle. They felt strange and angular, longer and thinner than they had been. Prostheses? Am I back on Earth? No. She felt the lightness of Ocypete's hold.

  Her hips felt wrong. Narrow. The legs seemed connected at the wrong angle, far too acute. She seemed bony. She sighed again, listening to the hoarse rasp. Might as well face it now, she thought. I wonder what this lump between my legs could be? Probably a catheter. I must be pretty sick. . . . She opened her eyes and Brendan Sealock's dead face swam into view, smiling at her. Oh! She lurched upward, off balance, and clutched him to her nonexistent bosom in a fierce hug. Strong emotion, unfamiliar emotion, washed over her. To see him once again! She felt a powerful desire to pull him down on her, to feel the swift penetration of his burgeoning manhood, to submit herself to his will. She buried her face in his chest and said, "I knew you'd come in time, beloved!" in a voice far too deep.

  Jana's screams seemed to echo for hours in the cold spaces of the CM. Her horror on awakening to find herself bothdead and changed was uncontrollable, a raving madness of whirling motion that brought them down on her in moments. Her wild, glaring rage out of Demogorgon's lost eyes took them away from her, transformed her to a thing, and seemed to make them all impersonal and remote. It transferred them all into the past for a brief time.

  Lightly sedated, she went to sleep for a time, dreamless, and awoke, as always, alone within herself. She lay there in her bed, hunkered down in the warm, drowsing comfort that fills in the chasms of a slow awakening. I had the strangest dream, she whispered to herself, a slight smile marking the lines of her face. How bizarre I can be at times, how artistic! One of her hands drifted across the expanse of soft sheets warmed by body heat and touched a soft flank, her own. She rubbed her fingers across the gentle flesh and her smile broadened. Now, she thought. . . . The hand lifted upward of its own accord and descended on her abdomen. It drifted across a delicate expanse, headed for her groin, intent on the soft pleasures of sleepy masturbation. The fingers glided through a dense tangle of crisp, curling hair, feeling for the sensitive skin of swelling labia, for the moistness of engorging tissues and . . . Her eyes snapped open to stare hard at the ceiling rimmed with stark whiteness, and her breathing quickened, expressing itself in short gasps of renewed terror. No dream. She felt herself again and shuddered. The unexpected organ was there, a stiff temple of flesh growing like some alien symbiote from her body, pulsating with a ready eagerness that defied logic. Her fingers jerked away, her hand clawed in upon itself, then slowly, inexorably, went b
ack to its exploration. Long, thick, knob-ended, a heartbeat exposed to public view. Ridged on the upper surface, pulpy and softer below, vanishing into folded flesh as she progressed. It hardened still more under her touch, as men always did, souls out of control, and she felt a strong sense of pleasure that made her feel sick. Her breath rasped! in her throat and grew deeper.

  The madness wanted to close in again, but something, some indefinable factor from deep within, was holding it at bay. The fingers of her right hand continued in their course,following the well-marked route of an old, familiar trail. She stroked slowly, gently, feeling the little ridge that marked the beginning of the bulbous end, touched the little hole gently, and backed away from an unexpected tenderness. She squeezed hard and moved more quickly, felt the skin of her face tighten, then grow slack. The forces from within made her gasp against her will, uncontrollable. How odd, how odd... Muscles deep within her body suddenly clenched, nausea closing in. Oh, she gasped, wondering if she'd somehow injured herself. The thing tightened and tightened ... it pulsed and she felt a strong surge of warmth rush away from the center of her body, reaching out to her extremities in a fraction of a second. Another pulse followed on the heels of the first and she felt a sensation a little like urination. The warmth increased, making her flush. The pulses went in rapid waves, tearing her mind apart, and she felt puddles of hot wetness forming on her stomach.

  Her mind came back with a sickening rush, bringing with it a feeling of tiredness, of collapse. She felt like a suddenly punctured balloon. It was over, almost as if it had never happened. She felt strange, horrid. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, her thoughts fragmented and unreal. Who am I, where am I, and why? It was all too terrible for rational contemplation. Do I deserve to think?

  She sat up and looked around. Oh, God . . . for some reason they had put her in Demogorgon's room. His effects surrounded her on every side. She looked at all his things and felt warm, comfortable. Somehow, they made her feel calm. She got up and began to walk around aimlessly, and after a while her wet stomach began to feel cold.

  She stood in front of his full-length antique mirror and looked at herself, at the alien reflection in the mirror.

  At him . . .

  She stared at the slim, dark man in front of her, his face mimicking her most usual expression, his brow taking on the lines that had always creased hers. Her thought furrows were reborn. How did this happen? She thought she knew. Theexplanations had been made. She was intelligent and could piece the story together on her own. She shook her head and Demogorgon's head made the same moves in return, an instant response. She touched the mirror and he reached out to her. . . . She burst into tears and watched him cry unashamedly before her gaze.

  What is my name? she wondered. Li-jiang. No Jana. No Achmet Aziz el-Tabari. No Demogorgon. Those people are all dead. She stared at the curdled semen still sticking like cold glue to her skin, shining at her eyes, mocking her. Something far within felt like laughing.

  Slowly, she turned and walked out the door of her chamber, still naked, to walk the halls of the CM, seeking an unneeded, unheralded absolution. And to give it forth in lieu of honor. . . .

  Reluctantly, with a numb dread that actually felt like friction against his shoulders and neck holding him back, John moved to the chair that he used for composing and sat. He rolled back the headrest and lay his head back, looking blankly at the ceiling. Every part of him recoiled from the idea that he could actually go back to music after all that had happened—deep inside he felt the total inadequacy of the medium—and, further, he felt somehow that using the pain that filled him for the task would somehow be trivializing it, and himself in the process.

  A quick, almost abstract vision appeared in his head, accompanied by a riveting, stirring sensation of deja vu. It was blue above, green below, with an almost sourceless yellow light everywhere in between. He was tumbling, moving across the soft, perfect lawn, enchanted with the new concepts of himself and the world and the joyous intermingling of the two. It was his earliest memory. He couldn't have said when, or where it was, or who had been there, for he seemed to be alone, out of time. And then the second memory, in a room at night, the impossibly bright face of the three-quarter moon staring in at him, scaring him beyond his little ability to reason, hanging there, a specter or icon so far removed from what heunderstood as to reduce the world and himself to symbols in the dark misunderstanding.

  The memories passed. He thought he understood something of what it all meant. Calling up his overlays, he began with a first note.

  Vana, Harmon, and Ariane sat in the latter's room, talking far into an ersatz night of their own making. Their flesh needed a comforting touch, a renewal of contact, but still they held off, filled with questions without answers and a formless dread that had no name.

  Prynne sprawled bonelessly on the bed, his arms and legs lying in the positions to which they had fallen, listening, without speech, without ideas. The time within Centrum had made him whole, but it had also left him empty. He knew himself for what he was now, and knew that he would never go beyond those limits. It was enough. It had to be.

  Berenguer sat cross-legged at his feet, looking at the other woman. "What does it all mean, Ariane?" She laughed at the age-old question, a soft sound, giving them some sense of the destruction that had been wrought upon her. "Mean? It means nothing, Vana. The changes that have been made in us are all illusory. We're still the same, we just see each other more clearly now. Brendan's still what he always was ... I just never knew it before." She laughed again, a harsher, bitterer sound. "I called him a god once! I was in love with what I thought was the depth of his soul. It's not there and never was. I loved what I thought I saw, and that was just a construct, a blank space filled with images from the depths of my own longing. . . . I'm glad it's over. Seeing the truth has made me freer than I ever dreamed possible." The others nodded wisely at that, imagining that they understood. Finally Prynne sighed and said, "I wish Demo was still here. I'd like to go into the Illimitor World once again . . ." Ariane smiled, then reached out and touched them both softly. "We don't need it anymore," she said,

  "for we have each other." She stretched slowly before them, watching theradiance of her beauty grow in their eyes. "And Demogorgon will always live on in our hearts." Because she said it, for the moment it was so.

  Axie and Tem were having dinner together, enjoying one of his lesser creations. They tasted it and praised the food, smiling often at each other. Somehow they were thrown together, the man made whole by his experiences, the woman restored to what she perceived as her original "self." It made them similar, after a fashion, and they converged. Some repressions are, in the end, beneficial.

  "Do you suppose she'll ever be the same?"

  The Selenite shrugged. "You probably know as much about it as I do, Ax. We won't know how much we rescued until she calms down a little."

  The woman nodded meditatively, thinking back about what she knew, drawing on the resources of a more complicated past. "Yes. And until we know how much of Demo's true self resided in the cells of his brain. It's a pity things had to turn out this way. We should never have come out here like this."

  "I know what you mean. I'm sorry I had to leave the Moon, but there wasn't any other way. While I stayed there I could never be free. I could never find out about who I was."

  "So it all had to take place then, for us all to grow. If I'd stayed on Earth, my life would've killed me. I took the drugs, ate all the experiences I could grasp, and ran and ran. I had to flee from a heritage that was strangling me, and at last it brought me here." She rested her chin on small, delicate hands and smiled across at his bearded bulk, her eyes seeming to glisten in the subdued light of the room they were in.

  "We've become adults, Tem, after a too long adolescence. I wonder: is it too late?" He shook his head, his smile slowly fading as he gazed into the depths of her vision. "Never. Only I have to ask myself— what happened to us in there? Was this feeling of ..
. happiness . . . somehow imposed from without?"

  "Does it really matter? Or, to put it another way, is therereally a difference? From the moment we were born everything has been, as you say, imposed from without."

  "If it were a hundred years ago, I'd ask you to marry me, Aksinia." Her cheeks dimpled at the compliment. "If it were a hundred years ago, I'd accept, Temujin Krzakwa."

  They laughed, together, and moved on.

  Jana stood before a clear, cold window, looking at the crystal pulp that remained from her body, seeing the death that she'd bought for herself. It was an unreal sight, steaks frozen, thawed, and frozen again. Her hair had turned to a stiffened spikiness, limned with frost and ice crystals. The beloved physical processes which shaped the world beneath her feet were responsible for this transformation. Ice queen —how appropriate that she had come to study and love the geology of the outer Solar System. But it wasn't that simple, not by a long shot. And, indisputably, the woman that she had been was dead. Did I feel it? she wondered. Did it hurt? It was more than just that, of course. Am I still in there? You can record a song over again, then burn the original tape, and the song still lives . . . but is it still the same song? Is a recording ever real? Does a song vanish forever when the singer's breath runs out, when the last echoes die down? What's left of me? She sighed. Probably nothing. I'm Demogorgon, with a rebuilt personality. . . .

  Then something in her rebelled, a heat rising out of nowhere, a flame rising to devour her doubts. It cannot be! But she deflated again. No. Jana is gone. Demo is gone. Just little Li-jiang remains to carry on in their stead, making a little pretense of life.

  Li-jiang strode from Jana's mausoleum, not wondering what had become of the one whose body she now owned. Process instructions cascaded down the sequences of a mind in turmoil, unwinding, and the self-image, rising out of the depths, recognized itself as male, if nothing else. The various impulses coalesced, melting together to form a coherentwhole, because the alternative was a permanent and incurable madness.