Iris

by William Barton

  They were both nervous. John was thinking he had been presumptuous, inviting her up here so soon. He was not confident about his ability to provide a woman like Beth with what she wanted or needed. The house was in pretty bad shape and the Comnet link was still by old-fashioned optical fiber. Perhaps a little adversity was what they needed to bring them together, though. It would be "romantic"—or at least that was what he hoped.

  Beth was also apprehensive. John was quiet and polite, and he reminded her of Angelo Reh . She had no desire to repeat that relationship. But he was also like her father Theder in some unknown way. Desperately, she wanted to make contact with somebody . . . almost anybody . . . "Oh, look!" she said.

  "Fireweed!"

  "Where?" said John, vaguely realizing she meant some kind of plant.

  "There, around the porch. They're related to evening primroses, but I think they're much more attractive. If you look, they have cruciform stigmas." She pointed, and he found she meant the tall stalks of pink blooms growing in the area recently cleared to make the side yard. He wasn't sure whether the woman's penchant for identifying birds and flowers was a good thing or not. At times it could certainly be annoying.

  Machine processes probed, manipulated, and the DR program retreated, allowing an overview. John and Beth smiled wistfully. They could see, in embryonic form, what the relationship might become. Here, before anything had really begun, their connection had predictive nuances that were easily discerned. . . . Still, they hadn't seen ... A matrix-input subunit of the program sensed they were ready and began reimmersion.

  As they sat on the porch and talked, the long twilight of September had stretched on and on. The big satellites appeared before the stars. When night fell, it was darker than he was used to. A sweet, complex fragrance came from somewhere, and Beth was edging closer to him. Finally she reached out and took his hand.

  Why had he brought her here? In the most obvious way, he was trying to set up a sexual encounter, and he'd not even decided if that was what he really wanted. He'd had only intermittent success at having sex with women whose motivations and wants were obscure to him. Even with his courtesan, bought and paid for, sex was awkward and uncomfortable, like participating in some game of skill for which he was ill prepared. In some senses, Pammy was even harder to tuck than most other women—when he looked deep into her eyes, seeking ... he didn't know what . . . he'd found only a sort of subtle coldness. It was hard to fully accept her behavior as an expression of the power of money. Beth admired the sensitive intelligence in this strange musician. She could tell he was more subtle than anyone she'd been with for a long time. He seemed . . . well . . . deep. His eyes, so dark in the golden evening, looked mysterious. She wanted to touch him, to pull him out of that enveloping shroud of "self" he wore like a mantle . . . but he recoiled when she took his hand. Is he gay? No. This setup must be as obvious to him as it is to me.

  If only I could tell what she wants from me, John thought. A night of friction? The solution to the world? She'd sounded very independent, with her desires seemingly focused on saving humanity from, first, sickness and death, and then, itself. He laughed to himself. I don't know what she wants, and I don't know what I want either. How can I believe that the situation is more complex than it seems, when I don't have the slightest idea what's going on? Her skin feels so warm ... so pliable ... I could do worse than to be in her arms. . . . Deliberately, he took hold of her hand and drew her to a place beside him. Almost immediately his penis began to rise, an independent entity invading his space, and he looked at the glossy surface of her eyes, glitters in the darkening oval of her face. He wanted to relax, but his nerves were standing on end. He shivered slightly.

  She kissed him. Already there were the familiar tingles and warmths in her lower torso, and she was disappointed not tofeel him molding his body to hers. She reached into his pants, past the modest constriction of a belt, and found him ready. Am I misreading his body language? Have I been? She said:

  "Shall we go test that old mattress?"

  Strike now! The DR program moved, grappling with the elusive surfaces of thought, and from the shifting memories drew forth his reactions.

  Something in the taste of her mouth, in the fluid reaching of her tongue, touched a chord in him. They kissed more, deeper, and he could feel an urgency of passion pass between them, a quality he'd not known before. It clarified things. He could tell, or thought he could, that her motivations were simple and profound. She wanted to love him, whatever that meant. Suddenly things were overwhelmingly clear. Nothing in the world was more significant than satisfying her desires and, if the truth were known, his own. "Sure," he said.

  After three days in space, watching Iris grow imperceptibly bigger, Brendan and Tem were firmly in the grip of boredom. They were beginning to feel much as they had during major portions of the 60vet expedition, and, here, there was no ice to go twirling on. Time seemed to flow like slowly crystallizing honey.

  Krzakwa was wedged into the lower equipment bay, humming softly to himself as he unwrapped a low-eel snack. He closed the sandwich bin with a click and took a big, irregular bite out of the corner of his little meal. He wondered how long he could go without shitting. He stretched in a space that was barely larger than his own body and found himself wishing that he could move some of the equipment around. It was possible, of course, the stuff was only bolted down, but why bother? It was in a fairly efficient configuration, deliberately emulating an early Soviet spacecraft, and any changes they made would achieve nothing. He floated, bumping into things repeatedly. Zero g was still an appealing phenomenon, and he suddenly wished that he could access a significant volume of it. He could put on a spacesuit and go outside, of course, but that would be a major hindrance when it came to stuffing his face with food.

  "Will you quit making so much fucking noise? I'm trying to sleep!" Tem grinned at him with greasy lips. He was tempted to start chewing with his mouth open, to start making a symphony of wonderful slobberings, but then bits of the sandwich would have escaped, making the effort hardly worth while. He marveled at his thoughts: Maybe being a deliberately annoying asshole is contagious! Sliding another bite between his teeth, he gazed around and wondered, for the thousandth time, why they'd made an opaque CM. Bubbleplastic could as easily be made transparent. . . . There was something to be said against verisimilitude, and old science fiction was probably as valid a model as antique technology. He remembered the stories about see-through spacecraft and started sinking into a pleasant reverie.

  Sealock squirmed into a more comfortable position on his couch, tugging at the restraining straps and trying to get them back into their proper positions. Boredom could be less than terrible to a man with a memory. Though he'd kept relatively busy, there had been periods in his life when he'd had nothing to do and, worse, hadn't wanted to do anything. Those times had had to be dealt with, and habits had emerged from the telltale fog. Even without Comnet-reinforced cross-referencing, he was still able to link with the major scenes from his past. Long practice made it easy: he simply picked a distinctive memory, however trivial, and rolled forward from there, into more misted times, events leaping out of the past as if they'd never been forgotten. . . .

  He'd talked to other people about it. They marveled, they agreed, they called him mad. . . . The ones who liked to remember just smiled and nodded, holding him off that private space that was all their own; the rest, the fanatical forgetters, stared at him coldly, or with derision, and sometimes told him that he was obsessed. The MCD people were sometimes accessible to him, or had been. It seemed as if only personalities that were nearly on his own level were willing to risk ... He stopped thinking, retreated from the onset of past-life, and squirmed to looked down on Krzakwa. Two years and I never thought to ...

  "Hey, Tem," he said. "You want to try trading a few memories with me? Like telling stories?"

  "What do you mean?" It puzzled him. Despite their growing friendship, Sealock was still rather remote. For h
im to suggest . . . "Come on. This 'net element is barely adequate for—"

  "Nah. You're looking at it wrong. This is a duodecimal element, kind of small, but it's got a lot of good conveyance properties so that we can run the ship's instrumentation. We're experienced controllers, so we ought to be able to manipulate the i/o systems to transmit what we want, instead of what's real." Tem nodded slowly. "I see what you mean. Sort of visual images . . . sensory data and the like, maybe a conceptual narrative like an entertainment 'net production. . . ." It seemed possible, and less than dangerous. He wasn't really letting the man into his head, just trading deliberately released and carefully edited data. It would be entertaining . . . and interesting to see just how much Sealock would be willing to reveal of himself. Tem's lips twisted under the hair that hung from his mustache even in zero g. —And it'll be interesting to see how much I'm willing to reveal, too. . . . "You know," he said, "this could be fun." The programming was a simple matter of setting up the right feed mechanisms. Self-confident and experienced, they left out all the various GAM levels and complex subsystem controller channels that would have made up a commercial presentation. They would be relying on their conscious minds to perform whatever editing functions they felt they needed. When they were done, they hooked up, Tem using induction leads and Sealock plugging direct-connect waveguides into his head. "You go first. . . ."

  Tem was strapped into a seat in the ballistic transport Scotland, feeling the gentle forces of Lunar gravity and inertia. He was seeing a passenger hold, arrays of head-tops in varying colors, and the venerable 3V that occupied the front wall was displaying a shallow representation of the familiar circle-pocked landscape of the Lunar highlands, vast Oceanus falling behind them, drifting out of view. The antique, windowless ship had been designed to transport people in some comfort, but over the years it had been adapted to hold as many occupants as possible. Fortunately Tem had managed to grab one of the older, more luxurious seats, and the cushions under his back and buttocks were adequate for a 0.8-g takeoff. The bitter complaints from some of the others, feeling their normal weight multiplied on hard plastic chairs, made him feel lucky. . . .

  He felt lucky for other reasons, too. Just a mesomoon before, he'd thought his life fully defined, rigidly set until old age put him in the pits, a Met-stat apprenticeship dragging toward its close. Perhaps not such a bad life; but, already, he was chafing, waiting for those rare opportunities when he'd be assigned to do an exoroutine and could see the outside world. Even his nonwork life was becoming more and more of a drudge, conforming to Sandy's notions of "terran" living, cluttering their apartment with origami crap and his life with stupid ideas. Their sex was great, however, and he knew he'd miss those brief, spontaneous couplings.

  On the screen, the terminator was coming up at them, and the huge ripples that marked Orientale's rims were keeping pace with it. Just before they passed into night, Tem made out a tiny bit of order among the ruins. The crater Einstein was that curious anomaly, an astrobleme that had received an impact at its very center. The result was a concentric pair of circles that, this close to the line of dark/light interface, looked amazingly like an eye.

  Tem had felt old, like an adult, in the world he was leaving, yet he was only sixteen. He had spent his entire life in the vicinity of Picard Crater, in Crisium , only once ranging the two-hundred-odd kilometers to Dorsa Harker and the Fahrenheit Rail Terminus. That seemed far . . . but this! He was headed into the deepest, darkest heart of the Lunar wilderness to study at Heaviside Academy. A wild feeling of freedom wanted to surge up in him, defying the seat restraints. Beyond the stricter controls of the maria subcities , Heaviside had a hint of the subversive about it. Now, thanks to his test scores, he'd been granted an unlimited travel pass and expense-free enrollment into the physics curriculum. It was worth never seeing Earth in the sky again.

  Now the craft fell over night. It was not the muted darkness of Earthlit night, but the utter blackness of farside. Stars came out on the half of the screen that showed the sky. He wished he knew their names; they were an uncommon sight on the contrast-washed maria.

  He was glad he'd never spend another night trying to sleep locked in Sandy's sweaty arms. Though he sweated too, sometimes like the proverbial pig, his skin crawled when he remembered the heat of those nights, when the sun baked Picard and the Meteorology Works strained to get rid of the caloric flow. When the guilt was gone, he knew he wouldn't think of her once in a month. On arrival, Tem was among the first to unstrap himself. Some here would require a medic's services before they could do so, but he didn't care. He climbed down the rung-floor of the now upended chamber and, with several other people, began to shuffle through the rear port. He pulled his rucksack from the balloon grasp in the baggage bin and slung it over his shoulder, glad to be pressed into the queue.

  His mind focused on one abrupt idea: I never want to go home again. . . . And he never had.

  Sealock opened his eyes and stared at Krzakwa, smiling faintly. "So," he said, "that was your coming of age." His thoughts were wandering a little bit, and important parts of him seemed to be in retreat. He struggled to control that, and his smile broadened, becoming a conscious thing. "Mine came just a little earlier in my life ... or, at least, part of it did." He'd been surprised at the complex and subtle revelations that the Selenite let him have—there had been a lot of detail slipped in there that could have been left out, a lot of really personal stuff. "How much do you know about Transition Era Earth? Not much, huh? Well

  . . ." We'll see about this. . . .

  Tem was pleased with himself. The question is, how surprised am I going to be?

  "My turn?" asked Sealock. "Or do you want to wait awhile?"

  "I'm . . . listening."

  At first it seemed like a horribly disorganized thing. . . .

  They fell, through tunnels of light, into a deep and sunless past, a bloody place, full of horror and mist. Emotions coalesced around them until they drowned in a sea of feeling. Krzakwa felt himself curiously detached, his mind clear, free of it all, and he felt a faint, ironic smile tugging at the corners of his lips. It disturbed him, and foreshadowed much that was to come. Where are we now? Am I going to hear ghostly voices wailing? That upset him too. How much of this is my thinking? How much is imposed?

  Impressions began to come at last, unfolding out of the past like two-dimensional sheets, deprived of reality, indexed. He had one last coherent thought, This seems improbable, and then it took him. . . . There was one indistinct idea: something about being eight years old. . . . A black sky formed from a microdot, swelling, filling his field of vision too fast for him to recall the original backdrop. It filled with stars. A blue disk appeared, folded into dimensionality, then rushed toward him, bulging, then real. He fell, alone, through bright sky and clouds, toward integrating overlay scenery.

  A garish, angular landscape broke out, sunrise, dark red stone and sand, overtopped by a peach-colored sky, a few dots of stars visible down near the horizon. He knew this scene! Where?

  There were ruddy hills near the edge of the world, and the winds blew delicately about. . . . Mars? It matched his memories of the historical tapes, though he'd never been there. . . . They drew closer, now only a hundred meters up, and he could see life, thin, scraggly vegetation, a dead bush rolling across the sand, in a place where the air was too thin for any wind to push such a mass. Was this the future then, after the planetary engineering projects had finished their task? No. It was too bleak. They moved into the east, and the sun rose, fat, orange, then bright. The color of the desert floor lightened and the sky turned to blue, andboth colors were of a searing intensity, as if the saturation level had been turned up. The mountains came up on them, low here, higher in the distance, the sun rising over them, and the colors changed. They were following a road, rutted deep into yellow soil. They crossed a steel bridge over a turbulent brown river and went into the mountains. They went into the canyon lands, where desert lay on the surface, still, but the
deep gouges were filled with streams, and the streams brought life. Where? A soft voice, deep and sensual, started whispering in his ear, carried on the wings of a damp wind.

  Do you remember? It's a long time ago, deep in your life, before the greater world called to you, before you stepped into the dark void. It is the time before you fell. . . . When? Go back. Stride gently into the forest. You were eight; and now you are thirty-eight. It must be 2067, then. Is that right?

  Let it be. Dates do not matter. Only times. How did it happen? What were the beginnings? The past is remote, but it becomes less so when you remember, . . . The voice became drier, less personal, almost pedantic, telling a story of sorts, as the landscape slowly rolled past, waiting for the rim of that certain valley, following the ancient road.

  . . . in the aftermath of the Data Control Insurrection that had nearly destroyed the world, when much of North America had to be rebuilt, the desert lands between the two great mountain ranges began to collect all the host of disconnected, self-directed people from the surrounding areas: kibbutzniks came, with a bright dream of society reborn; there were survivalists and nomadic communards, people intent on resurrecting something of the way this land had been used in the long centuries past. There were refugees from poverty-stricken California and the riot-torn Midwest. With a small horde of starving Canadian farmers, with the streams of Mexican peasants who were fleeing yet another mad dictatorship, they came to rebuild the deserts of dying America. In history books, it was the Second Reconstruction . . .

  . . . they were unlike the previous pioneers. They came with the full support of a near-magical technology, a machine culture that had become increasingly portable, and the hardships were few—a flurry of brief years, then haciendas blossomed in the wasteland and communes were born, tenable, sensible, and secure. Communication made a mockery of their physical isolation. The communes joined to form enclaves, and when those were linked Deseret Enclave Complex came into existence. By then the world was, perhaps, sane again. . . .