Iris

by William Barton

  Why there?

  Pieces of the Centrum records indicate that's where the last functioning Seedee colony was emplaced. I want to see if there's anything left, maybe learn from what has developed over the course of a couple of billion years. From little acorns

  . . . Maybe I could pick up another crew. I could use a few physical hands. Sounds like a good idea to me. Listen, what's going to happen to the moons? Things're getting pretty hot up here.

  That brought a ghostly chuckle.

  I wondered if you'd ask. You'll like this one: this ship has some pretty sophisticated technology; things like the old SF tractor beams are available, working from a limited sort of gravity control that the Starseeders worked out when they discovered QTD, way back when. It's useless for spacecraft propulsion, but it can be used to do a lot of work when you've got a really big planet to use for a fulcrum. As soon as you get out of the way I'm going to bounce the moons. You'd better move quickly, though; there's not much time left.

  I know. Where are you sending them?

  There was a girlish giggle.

  I've worked it all out: I'm going to send those cocksuckers billiarding through the Solar System! Once around Jupiter and through the belt, splitting them apart. I'm going to interact Aello with Phobos and drop her into a loose elliptical orbit around Mars. Instant economy. Then I'm going to let Podarge smash right into Venus. Instant Earth. Like it?

  Yeah. There's only a small contingent of scientists on Venus, so it shouldn't be a big problem. How fast'll it hit?

  18 kps . No big explosion. Podarge'll break up before impact and come down as an asteroid shower. Lots of steam. Earth will have a lot of work to do, still, but if they act quickly, get the preliminaries done in under a generation, people could be living on the exposed surface in less than two centuries. Maybe less, if they hurry.

  What about Ocypete ?

  That's yours, pal, I'm going to drop it into a "Toro" orbit, right where it'll do the most good. I think you and John could find some use for a trillion ceus ' worth of inner-system water. . . . John and I?

  Think about it. The others don't need you. I saw what was going to happen, back when I took the survivors through Bright Illimit that last time. You did a good job with that GAM. They won't need either of you, but you may need each other. Promise me you'll at least consider the idea.

  I already have. You could be right.

  I know I am. You'll be feeling like your old self again in a few days, I think. The shock must be wearing off pretty quickly.

  Yes. I wish I had you back, though.

  Hey, that's nice to hear. If I were still alive, you'd have me blubbering all over you. Listen, I've got one last little present to give you. Latch this data . . .

  It squealed suddenly into his head at nearly a million-kbaudrate. Brendan Sealock convulsed and fell to the floor, hemorrhaging from his nose and ears, body beginning to twitch into the opening phases of a grand mal seizure.

  Formis Fusionhad been dropping along a swift hyperbola toward Iris when the photon drive lit off. The new planet had been only a few days away and now . . . this. The crew and the scientists they had brought watched, thunderstruck, as the planet began to move. How could such a thing possibly happen?

  They called back to USEC headquarters on Ganymede, looking for directives, fearfully awaiting new orders. The command came back swiftly: Proceed with the mission. Go in there and take over. Now. They accelerated into Iris' path, entering into an interaction that they did not understand. The planet swelled before them, a boiling, flaming demon, no longer the gentle water carrier. They looked for her harpies and were horrified to discover that their positions were so far from the predicted place. What was happening? They looked at the glowing exhaust plume, at the dirigible infrastar , and consulted the capabilities of their spacecraft. A converted high-energy freighter, the ship had five-g legs. They fired up the engines, hoping that it was not too late. . . .

  An hour and more passed and Brendan was sitting up in his bed, recovering, sipping a cup of camomile tea heavily laced with sugar. John sat in a chair beside him, watching him drink. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

  "Better, I think. I've got a real skull-pounder of a fucking awful headache, though."

  "Do you want anything else?"

  "No, thanks."

  "What happened?"

  "One of Demo's brighter little ideas. He popped me with a massive data flow and sent it in at a machine-style flow rate. I'm surprised that the GAM let it happen. He must be running some kind of override to make it cooperate with the inflight procedures that are outside its danger parameters."

  "Was he trying to kill you?"

  Brendan smiled wanly. "No. He just doesn't understand, yet, the full meaning of what's happened to him. A data flow rate like that one wouldn't faze him a bit. . . ." John nodded slowly. "When are we leaving?"

  "In a little bit. Listen, I've got some things I wanted to talk to you about. . . ." Krzakwa popped into the room, gliding across the floor with a puzzled, concerned expression on his face. " Bren? We're picking up some kind of modulated radio signal from the space near Iris' outer atmosphere. . . ."

  "Something from Demo?" Sealock was rising to his feet, staring wistfully at the planet, squinting into the glare of its bright exhaust.

  "No. I don't know what it is. It's on the standard distress frequency, but the static from the drive is overwhelming it almost completely."

  "Standard distress frequency?" He thought about that and then was horrified. "Holy Fuck!" He located a tap and inserted it. "You don't suppose . . ." The flash overloaded his visual cortex. Outside, the others cried out and, when he opened his mind again to dancing shadows, he could see the billowing ball of a thermonuclear explosion blossoming out from Iris. At least in the fifty-megaton range, it left a great crimson pockmark in the planet's gaseous outer integument as it faded.

  "Sweet Jesus," murmured Temujin Krzakwa.

  "Yeah," said Sealock, his mouth dry. "Say good-bye to our friends from USEC."

  "Stupid bastards," said Cornwell, and was surprised at himself. Sealock turned to grin in his direction. "Yeah? There's a lot of that going around lately. . . . Come on, we've got to get this shit can on the road."

  They went below, calling the others to action.

  Deepstarsquatted for a while in the ground-hugging mists of Ocypete , and it began. Opaque wisps of mist were drifting about, slowly rising toward the level of the CM. A view of the bottom part of the craft showed that the struts and nozzle mounting were hidden by the stuff. And the sky was slowly brightening, a twilight that masked the dimmest stars. Ocypete was breathing, outgassing the atmosphere that had once been hers, and more. She would soon have a substantial atmosphere instead of this thin muck. Dissolution would happen rapidly as methane, ammonia, and finally carbon dioxide evaporated. The pressure would rise over two, then three, bar, and the features on its face would be wiped out by clouds and haze. As it was, and would be, the little world could never again be the same. Already the stars were going out.

  Tendrils of methane fog crept up the sides of the ship like some immense living force, striving to hold it down, engulf it, and hold it to its bosom forever. Moments were passing. The people inside the mechanism activated it.

  New gases swirled out from the base of the ship, driving the mist before them, creating an island of stark clarity. Venting hydrogen, Deepstar teetered slowly, gently, then began to climb. As it rose, entering new regions of obscurity, Bernoullian eddies of vapor swept across and around the thousand complex surfaces of the ship, finally to be captured in the fountain of descending gas pressure to stretch and disappear. Safely aloft, the Hyloxso engines were lit off—a bulbous spike of bright flame appeared, red, then yellow, then a translucent white clarity that was defined only by its flickering outlines. Below, the mistscape had turned to jealous, hateful chaos.

  The mists waited things out, then flowed back in to claim the spot that humans had vacated. All was quiet for a moment, t
he worlds swirling beneath the violet light of Mother Ship's flame. A bright spark appeared in the sky, throwing new shadows. Deepstar fled from Iris on the flare of its heavy-ion engine, a dim, tiny light drifting slowly away into a deepening night. We'll meet again, the world beneath them sighed on newborn winds, in another year. When they were gone, five million safe kilometers away, a tall, periscope-like mast slowly rose from the dark sea of Iris. It looked around carefully, then began sighting in, first Aello , then Podarge , then Ocypete . An invisible beam of power flashed, carrying the deepest insight of Quantum Transformational Dynamics. Three jolts and the three moons, soared away, punted from the toe of a cosmic boot. Iris drove inward, still accelerating. At the precise moment when the proper velocity had been reached, the drive shut down and darkness closed in. The ship, enclosed in a still substantial world, fell on. Shorn of its moonlets and ring, the world seemed infinitely forlorn and blank. For a long time, a year, Iris simply fell along the mathematically complex but nearly straight path that Demogorgon had chosen. Finally she came within ten million kilometers of Jupiter, into the sway of the much larger world, and her course altered, narrowing its incoming tangent to the sun to within finely tuned parameters. It was going well.

  By this time the swirling bands that mottled Iris' cloud banks were a strangely entangled mess compared to the familiar bands and zones of Jove. The temperature rose, and the solar wind began to rip handfuls of world away. Newly ionized particles began to stream outward at a slightly different angle from the barely visible haze that trailed directly behind. Iris was becoming a comet, the greatest comet that ever could be.

  Eventually it was visible from Earth, from the few dark regions where light pollution didn't blind the night sky. A second-magnitude star, not yet large enough to present adisk, and growing to make a belt buckle for Ophiuchus . When it was lost again in the twilight glow, it was first magnitude, and slightly elongated. Then, from the vantage point of Earth, it was lost behind the mask of day. The lengthening teardrop of Iris proper continued to fall. More than three times her original size now, sixty thousand kilometers in diameter, the world was larger than Uranus, though as solids vaporized and her atmosphere bubbled out to nothingness her density had become an insubstantial 0.3 gm/cm2. Indeed, were it not for the high-albedo clouds which hid the depths of her atmosphere from the searching heat of Sol, she would already have been ninety percent gone. As it was, much of the hydrogen was still present, though ineffectively held by gravity. It would only be a matter of time before the small atoms found the trajectory that, in their wild oscillations, would allow them to leak into the void. Iris was slowly developing into the traditional shape of a comet, lengthening at the point of her teardrop into a broad tail of streaming gas. At the height of her acceleration she had come to have a more or less regular flow pattern, flowering out from her leading hemisphere and spreading, to disappear in the dark halo of her nightside. Now, all pattern vanished and she was a featureless raindrop of milk, falling crazily toward the light.

  The orbit of Mars passed unheeded. The sun waxed slowly brighter, with its promise of freedom and the Grand Design, the mission of ages, reborn. Iris fell . . .

  As spring came once again to the northern hemisphere of Earth, billions waited in curiosity as the diffuse spot of light that was the approaching Iris climbed out of the morning twilight. Even before it could be seen in near darkness, the bright stain had spread over most of Scorpio's chelae, covering perhaps five times Luna's half degree. From this perspective, it was still only a slightly elongated circle of haze with a bright center. From night to night its progress through the stars could be seen, and, briefly, the demon eye of Antares was swallowed and disgorged. Soon the central spot alonewas brighter by far than Venus, also visible in the early morning sky.

  From the heart of the CFE, Ennis Cornwell watched as Iris reached out and, like her goddess namesake, stretched a bright white rainbow across the night sky. Radiating from a central sphere brighter than the full moon, hazy only at its outer edge, the comet sent out a huge tail, itself hugely bright and spreading to cover almost a fifth of the sky.

  When he was a young man, this was the way he'd expected Halley's comet to look, waiting for its apparition in 2062. When it actually came, he could barely make it out against the haze-ridden sky, and really saw it only on the entertainment nets.

  Now this was a comet.

  And his son was riding it home!

  A year and more had gone by, and now Deepstar orbited above Ocypete once again. Iris had gone past the sun, shedding all her mighty airs, and the drive had gone on again. Trailed by a bright, violet flame, the Mother Ship had driven off into the night sky, riding outward toward the stars and a world far away.

  John and Brendan were in the common room of the CM, looking through a deopaqued wall at the fog-shrouded, half-molten world below them. The sun had taken over when the photon beam's nimbus no longer remained to heat the little moon. They were alone in the ship. During the long flight, contacts had been made and negotiations had proceeded. Expensive lawyers and diplomats were hired, judges bribed, and governments bought. A threat had been made by certain members of the Comnet Design Board; Maggie Lewis and Cass Mitchell had broadcast a joint statement, harsh and unforgiving in its tone. Do it, or else. . . .

  Finally they had made rendezvous with a cruiser of the Contract Police, a ship that bore the guarantees for a Writ of Pardonment . The others had gone aboard, a unified group, never looking back. Cornwell understood that they lived in a giant palace somewhere, wealthy beyond imagination; he didn't know where and found that he didn't care.

  "Well," he said, "there's our money. What shall we do with it all?" Sealock leaned forward toward him and grinned. "I know, and I think you do too." Cornwell nodded. "Maybe you and I can do business after all." Brendan stirred suddenly and said, "There's a lot of money bubbling away down there. Money enough to build something really great...."

  "And so?"

  "I never did tell anybody what was in that big data squeal, Demogorgon's last gift. . . ."

  "I noticed that. I figured you had your reasons, as always." Brendan nodded. "Well, it was the Starseeder technology."

  John's eyebrows rose a trifle, a study in controlledinexpressiveness. "So. All of it?"

  "Propulsion. Long-term life support. Genetic engineering. Suspended-animation techniques. The whole works."

  "How much do you suppose it'd cost to build a good-sized starship?" They were sublime now, talking through the shadows of a too long past.

  Brendan nodded toward Ocypete . "Not more than that."

  John grinned appreciatively, wondering where all the old, horrid emotions had gone. He felt bland but wonderful. It had all been worth while, then. "Maybe it could be a lot less. This starship doesn't have to be too big. . . ."

  "True."

  "Who should we take along?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "No, I guess not." John was thinking, It certainly doesn't. We all loved each other and, in the end, it was as useless as anything could ever be.

  Brendan's face turned serious again. "Why take anyone? Why not just us?" John smiled and shook his head. "That doesn't sound like a very good idea."

  "No, I guess not," Brendan said. "We'll think of something."

  "Right." John started to turn away, then stopped. Well, he thought, if I put this off again, it's not going to get done. I have to. ... " Bren?"

  The other man looked up from a developing reverie.

  Cornwell hesitated again, then said, "I know you've always mistrusted my, well, what I like to think of as my sincerity, but . . . Hell. Will you engage in Downlink Rapport with me?" Sealock looked vaguely uncertain for a moment, not quite taken aback. "After all we've been through?

  You don't let go of things easily, do you?" He smiled then. "All right." Feeling a small jolt of surprise, Cornwell thought, All right? But . . . Shit. Am I ready for this? I'd better be. ... He thought about Beth and said, "At least you seem to know who you
are." Brendan turned away to look out at the bright clouds of Ocypete again. "We never quite learn, do we?

  You know, I feel that I've changed some—maybe I haven't. I could say a great deal about the changes that I think should have taken place in you, but I won't. Maybe that's the only evidence I have that those changes have taken place at all."

  John nodded slowly. "Perhaps. And you can give me the only evidence that I know is true enough to accept...." They were silent for a moment, then he added: "In any case —the world goes on." Brendan turned and fixed him with an emotionless stare. "If you never lie again, you'll never speak truer words than those."

  Five years later Temujin Krzakwa lay on his back on a padded seat in a shuttlecraft, awaiting lift-off from Baikonur Cosmodrome . A sickly sweat bathed his face and desperation twisted with cold fingers inside him. He watched the countdown clock on the bulkhead move inexorably toward zero, and he thought about what had happened.

  It was an unpleasant thing to run away like this, but it seemed the only way. They had him imprisoned Sometimes he thought back to his youth on the Moon and remembered how he'd longed to get away from that congenital entrapment, escape to the lovely freedom that was Earth. Freedom! It hada bitter taste to him now, and he could remember the excitement with which he'd fled Lewislab eight years ago, on his way to a rendezvous with the Triton colonists.

  Why has it come to this again? he wondered. No answer? Then why had he slowly oozed out of the solidarity that the others had found in the great chateau by the Dzungarian Gates? They lived lives of contentment and only wanted him to be happy. . . .

  His lips twisted with an almost uncontrollable rage. He damped the feelings down and exhaled heavily. Contentment? Jesus, what's keeping this thing on the ground? He looked up at the clock again and felt a sudden, scalding nausea. The progression of numbers had been replaced by a flashing red bar. Emergency hold.

  He sat forward and looked out the porthole of this venerable Russian spacecraft. There was a handsomely designed sportsGEM racing across the parched concrete toward him in a cloud of dust, pursued by the flashing blue lights of spaceport security. The police caught up with the intruder, quite nearby now, and forced it to a stop. The hovercar's door popped open and a little figure jumped out. It began running toward the ship. The police pursued the runner on foot and soon had the tiny figure pinned to the ground. When they were gone, the shuttle lifted off only a little behind schedule. Comforted by the roaring engines and the inertial pressure on his back, Temujin began to relax. But he thought, I'm sorry, Axie; I just couldn't take it. You were just another childhood to me: you put me back on the Moon.