Iris

by William Barton

  When it was over there were no frustrations, no aches, just perfect satiation and contentment—and if you wanted it to begin again, it did.

  In the contented languorous moments here, time was seemingly suspended, and the simple comfort of her relationship with Demo put no pressure on her to act or speak in any particular way. They'd come here again and again to escape the social pressures building in the colony. Somehow, the Thing they had found on Aello meant little to her, here, now ... all her links to the outer world were dissolving. Perhaps not so strangely, she missed Harmon most of all here. But she knew he couldn't accept all this. The perfect pleasures of the Illimitor World were building something between her and Demogorgon. Things were changing. What they were building seemed good, but she didn't know quite what it was. Not yet.

  Vana took a sip of her fizzy gin and tonic and watched a broken cloud pass in front of the lower sun. Whatever was going on here, she thought, it was right, for a change.

  Sealock fell to his knees beside the hole in the floor that had eaten Jana, fighting the force field, which, in the vicinity of the opening, seemed to want to pull him in. It was a cushiony black below, the chamber-light that spilled through the opening seeming to be swallowed by nothingness. He called up an image of her, based on telemetry signals. There she was, falling slowly away—no, not falling. She was on a ballistic trajectory created by a momentary acceleration as she'd gone through the hole. She was a hundred meters away and receding. "Jana!"

  "Yes." The woman's voice was calm. "Brendan, I can't see anything down here. I've turned the scale enhancers all the way up, but it doesn't help. This must be an awfully big room. I'm going to activate my microwave emitter."

  "OK." Sealock switched over a portion of his suit optics to short-wave sensing, thoughtfully chose an array of false-color generators, and waited. Hu's suit suddenly went bright, then dimmed again as his rectifiers normalized the image. Lightflickered on in the chamber below. Looking over his shoulder, Krzakwa gasped.

  Jana was a flyspeck drifting through space toward a tilted platform more than a half kilometer away. What they could see of the room below made no sense beyond the sheer enormity of it. Sealock turned the holding em of his gloves all the way up and splayed his hands on the deck, then stuck his head over the edge, lurching as the force field tried to draw him downward, and looked around. Jana's radiation was quite sufficient to illuminate the entire chamber, which, by rough estimate, seemed to extend the length of the ship. Though the room was of constant width, the outward-bending walls dwindled into the distance, following the converging lines of perspective, and seemed to almost meet many kilometers away. The floor was cluttered with angularities, incomprehensible objects that changed from a monumental array directly below to a foreshortened jumble in the distance. Sealock turned off his right glove and reached down through the hole. He touched the underside of the floor and, feeling his hand stick, guessed that it too possessed a gravity-like field. He hung his torso down through the opening and quickly got a grip on the surface opposite. Inching his body forward, he suddenly reached a point where the field in the hole and beyond overcame that of the airlock, and he was propelled in a head-over-heels arc that left him sprawling on the other side. Above him the world inverted, and he looked up at the underside of the sky.

  Dizziness assailed him, and he shut his suit optics down for a moment, then took a deep breath and brought them up again. The surface to which he was bound was like an immense game board, slightly convex, and populated by a regular array of man-sized white obelisks, for all the world like the bishops of his first chess set. At the level of his eyes they sprouted in great enough profusion to cut off vision about fifteen hundred meters away. So much for form and function, he thought.

  "Come on through," Brendan said, extending a hand toward what seemed to be once again "down" through the opening. "Grab my hand and I'll swing you through." Carefully, the others flipped up and through, roughly deposited on the flypaper inner surface. When they were ready, they stood, which by now evoked hardly any vertigo, and looked up in awe. Sealock felt a sudden deterministic frustration at this rapid alteration of his directional sense. He needed to think of this as a zero-g space, but the presence of the gravity-like field prevented him from doing so.

  "OK," he said, "up/down is dangerous here, and totally inapplicable, folks. As discomforting as it may be, forget it."

  "Jana?" That was from Krzakwa. "Your Doppler telemetry indicates you're going about five m/s, so you're in for a pretty hard landing. If the field doesn't exist on the other side, you'll bounce. . . . Please remember the electromagnetic features of your worksuit. Your wrists . . ."

  "I'm not stupid!" she said, sounding angry.

  "I know, but I ..."

  "More experience in low g, right? But you don't have any experience with this. No one does, so shut up. I'm here." She relayed an image to them. The "floor" grew patiently, broken platforms pulling apart to reveal a bit of smooth floor decorated with another of the mysterious circles. Just before she struck, a force pushed at her and decelerated her into a soft landing. "Wow," she said. "There's a field down here too."

  "You're OK, then?" asked Ariane, receiving a noncommittal "Unh" in return. Brendan and Tem had meanwhile been exploring in the vicinity of the nearest of the "bishops." It was set in a dark circle and looked as if it had been turned on a lathe, widening and shrinking in an unpredictable way until it swelled and then tapered to a minaret crown. Sealock reached out and stroked it. "I've heard of queen games, but this is a new one on me."

  "No squares, either, Bren . No markings at all, in fact."

  "If there are any answers here they're down where Jana is. Sorry, over where Jana is. . . ." Ariane joined them. "Well, what is it? A dildo?"

  Brendan laughed, and it sounded unreal.

  "Hey," said Jana, from afar, "you need to see this."

  "Stay there," said Ariane. "I'm coming over." She leaped up, expecting to fly away, but the floor held on resolutely, and she just managed a little hop. She looked at Sealock. " Bren, we're stuck here . . . how do we get to the other side if this field won't let go?"

  "Think about it, Ari," he said. "That's what the hole is for —it's evidently a transport device disguised as a portal. Which probably indicates that there aren't many reasons to hang around here." Krzakwanodded, walked over to the opening, and stepped into it. Instead of being launched outward, however, he disappeared back into the airlock. "Whoops!" they heard him say. "Obviously it's a two-way device." A moment later he appeared, feet first, launched along the same trajectory as Hu had followed. Ariane was next and in a minute was arcing, spread-eagled, toward the other side. Sealock stood on the ceiling, watching them sail off, and felt a slow dawning of his sense of wonder, a returning of some of the lost sensations of his distant childhood. He suddenly remembered a week spent camping in the Roan Mountains, living a blood-crimson life under a burning blue sky, and remembered feeling this way before: a gnawing happiness reacting against "what will happen next" imagery. What, he wondered, am I going to see? Anything. He walked to the edge of the opening, squatted slightly, and fell down, being deposited softly on the former ceiling of the other room. Then, grinning, he bunched the heavy muscles of his thighs and leaped into space.

  The fall took a very long time, during which he had ample opportunity to try to make sense of the mountings and cablings that crisscrossed the surface. What had he expected? he wondered. A big cabin with endless kilometers of plush seats arranged in orderly rows, like a commercial space-liner? This was certainly not that. The real question, interrelated with the size of the thing, was, why build a craft this big and then leave it empty? Could this just be a cargo hold of some sort? It made a certain amount of sense. In the end, the four of them were standing on a two-hectare raised platform, nine hundred meters below the nowalmost invisible tiny hole that had been their entrance. Krzakwa and Methol stood examining a large dais covered with thousands of dark spots, what they assumed to be a control
panel of sorts, while Sealock and Hu wandered off together, reconnoitering in the area, trying to get an overview of the machinery around the "landing circle" to determine if there were any logical inferences to be made about function.

  "What do you think of this thing so far?" Brendan had enacted a face-to-face image mode between them, and Hu looked at him through darkly slitted eyes, her small head protruding from the collar of the worksuit and the image of her ponytail hanging down her back.

  "Leave me alone," she said, and the optics image of her cylindrical helmet reappeared. "Why are you such a fucking bastard?"

  He laughed. "I like being a fucking bastard. You ought to try it sometime." They walked on, silent for a while, then he said, "I wasn't trying to ride you. I'm asking for some kind of professional opinion from you

  ... as a scientist."

  She stared at him for a moment, then said, "You want to know what I think? I think that what we're seeing is not the whole story. There was something in this cavity at one time. And the purpose of it all may be impossible to figure out without a clue as to what it was. The thing that's got me is, what kind of cargo does this carry?"

  "That's just what I was thinking. It may not be so mysterious, though. Those nodes on the far side—could it be that some kind of field held the cargo in a matrix within the space?"

  "The strange thing is this—if it's for bringing a cargo up from the surface of a gas giant, say, then where's the offloading equipment? It can't all be done with fields."

  "Maybe the cargo was liquid. . . ."

  "We don't have any data yet. The time for 'impressions' is later, when we know more." He nodded. "Yes, but guesswork can sometimes help." They came to the edge of the platform and stopped. This interior world stood mostly at a level about one hundredmeters below them. There were other platforms in the distance, and they could see a large number of such structures below them. It looked almost like a cityscape, a scale model on a tabletop, and everything was linked together by a maze of curving cables. The microwave emitter, which had been set on the tallest nearby structure, sharply delineated the staggered blockiness of the scene by throwing long, dense shadows. Here and there cables reached toward the "sky."

  There was a sudden change in the texture of the objects they were seeing and Sealock looked back toward Methol and Krzakwa . They were gazing about. He shifted his suit optics from microwave to visible light and the vast chamber was bathed in blue-green radiance. "Looks like you got the lights turned on. . . ." They turned and walked back toward the dais.

  "That was an easy one," said Ariane. "At least I think I did it. It happened about twenty seconds after I touched this node. Do you think I should touch it again to see if they go off?"

  "Sure," said Jana. Nothing happened.

  "We seem to have established that they don't believe in toggle buttons," said Tem. "Try this one next to it," he said, reaching out to touch one of the dark spots. As he did so, something huge began to move in the distance. A sea of cables shimmered, where before there had been nothing, and beneath them the unknown machine glided a small distance and stopped. Sealock smiled grimly. "Be a hell of a note if we accidentally turned on the rocket engines, wouldn't it?"

  Watching without expression, Hu said, "It would be interesting to discover that they still worked, that they still had fuel. And that a fuel would indeed still be potent. Most that I know work by the release of stored entropy . . . and time will have its effect."

  They touched other buttons, which made other objects move, and Sealock was struck by a sudden analogy: they were like small children, playing with the controls to an older child's complex toy system. It did things that they were too young to understand. They couldn't see the real relationshipbetween cause and effect. And any theories that they may have formed were neither enforced nor disproved.

  Harmon Prynne sat in his cubicle in Deepstar's CM, alone, as he had been, now, seemingly for so long. And Vana . . . she was under the wire again with that God damned fagwog ! The black anger built in him and he wanted to rage, to smash things, destroy them. . . . He wanted to throw things, hurl them against the walls of his room, but in this low-g environment they would only ricochet around inanely, making him want to laugh when he needed to cry. He chewed his knuckles in frustration and stared hard at nothing. Why did it have to happen this way?

  I'm alone again, he thought, and remembered endless nights he had spent alone as a younger man, when he lived in his ancestral Key West Monad. He'd never fitted in there, or in any of the other places he'd tried to live—he'd always been an outsider, cut off in the midst of his own culture . . . unable to join in the simple, joyous games of the other adolescents. If it is difficult to be strange, how much more difficult can it be to be strange and stupid?

  He couldn't fit in with their impersonal ideas about human relationships, the ideas about absolute freedom within the restrictive framework of the Monad. He needed someone, and needed that person to need him. . . .

  When he went to Montevideo in the pursuit of his career, when he met Vana Berenguer and loved her

  . . . he'd tried so hard to make it work, and now she was slowly being taken from him. He wanted to kill them, or himself. . . . He wanted all life to come to an end. . . . Oh, hell. He couldn't think which way to turn. He didn't know what to do. Maybe when the USEC ship came, he could get away.

  Having exhausted their patience in playing with the alien control panel, the four explorers had walked back to the edge of the platform and, in keeping with the topsy-turvy nature of the place, continued to walk down the side to the thing's base. Before the omnipresent lighting came on, this place had been buried in the shadows, but now that they could seeit well they discovered that there was nothing to see. Around them were virtually featureless blue-green rhomboids of various sizes lacking even the circles which allowed one the luxury of imagining that the thing was at least marginally understandable. Alleyways strung with occasional cables led in all directions. Finally they came to an attach point for one of the cables, and Ariane climbed up to it and said, "I wonder what it was for? It seems to go just about everywhere. . . ." The surface of the thing had a strange oily sheen, a faint coruscation of colors that gave the illusion of movement. She reached out to touch it. "You know, it has the same force field that we've found on all the flat interior surfaces." She encircled the ten-centimeter-thick cable with her fingers and let them slowly clamp down. "I wonder if they're all really continuous with each othAAAAaaaa . . ." The scream was a trailing diminuendo, for as soon as her fingers made contact with it she was jerked off her feet and sucked away on the cable, manifestly under rapid acceleration.

  Sealock cursed and, throwing himself on the thing, was sucked away in his turn. The other two, unwilling to be left behind, followed suit. Obligingly, the device brought those behind up at a faster pace until they were traveling in a little cluster, like dried raisins on a bare stem.

  "Well," said Brendan, "I guess we know what it does now." Ariane laughed weakly. "This is a novel sort of transportation device. I wonder how we get off?" Krzakwawas looking around, trying to make something of the things about them as they soared through alleyways with increasing numbers of cables hung almost within reach. It was as if they had been on a spur of the system that was being fed into the terminal nexus for a large network. Below them, instead of solid bulkhead, was an undulating river of larger-diameter cables. "At this speed," said Tem, "if we did manage to let go, we'd get hurt. Maybe we'd better just ride it to wherever it's going."

  "Like a Westerner, you pretend to be in control of a force when in fact you are totally helpless," said Hu. "Let us hope that it remembers how to stop when it does get somewhere." Brendan laughed. "How droll. Be funny if we all got killed in here."

  "What an encouraging thought," said Tem. "You're a real optimist, aren't you?" In the end the machine worked as they supposed it should. When they neared the port-side wall their speed of travel dropped. It brought them to a terminus near the floor and let the
m go. They dropped lightly and were grabbed only at the end of their descent by the now familiar field. The wall in front of which they had been deposited looked like a gigantic honeycomb, an endless array of identical hexagons about one and a half meters across by three deep. Sea-lock crawled into the nearest one and said, "Looks like there's a set of electrical connectors coming in the back end. These are sort of like little garages. . . ."

  "Or maybe circuit plug-ins," said Methol. "That'd fit in with the scale of the ship." Jana Li Hu sighed. "The worst of it is, this isn't even a real spaceship. It's an atmospheric shuttle, like the GM155 at Reykjavik."

  "But for what kind of a planet?" demanded Sealock, climbing down from his perch. "Can you imagine flying this monster in an Earth-type troposphere? The trailing-edge vortices alone would constitute major weather disturbances!"

  "Not to mention what the engines'd do . . ." That was from Krzakwa . "Could it have come from Iris itself?"