Iris

by William Barton

  Ariane was planted before him, glaring, her fists doubled up on her hips. "God damn it, Brendan, what the hell is wrong with you?" He was silent, and she continued. "You can't rule my every waking moment. I have to be with other people sometimes. I'll go crazy if I'm around you all the time!" He was helpless before her anger. "It's just ... I love you, Ari . I can't stand it when . . ."

  "Shit," she said. "You said you wanted to be here. You didn't have to come." The implications of it enraged him. Didn't have to? And yet you wouldn't come to me. . . . He wished the words would emerge, but fear kept his feelings imprisoned. The parasite chewed on his soul, teeth searing him deeply. He raised his hand, as if to strike her, then let it fall. "No," he said, "I didn't have to come. But . . . here I am."

  She took his hand then and led him away, his senses seeming dulled, the fires banked for another little while. They went home and made love with renewed heat.

  That other Brendan, riding on the Now wave front of the future, surfing into the unknown, marveled at the things he'd felt. No one, ever before, no one now, no one ever again. Is that how it will be? Is that what I want? The tortures were hard, but the intervals between were so sweet and glorious as to make it seem all worth while. Will I have the will to go on?

  One last memory came to plague and inform him, restoring the missing parts to his psyche. He was on a white sand beach somewhere on the shores of the enclosed fresh-water lake that Rio de la Plata had become, perhaps to the east of Buenos Aires. He was lying on top of Vana Berenguer, the epitome of mindless, animal thrusting, and her breath was a stentorian engine beside his ear. Her orgasm came as a squirming, high-pitched outcry, then his own injected semen deep into her body and they were still. His breathing slowed, stirring the tangle of her hair less and less.

  He rolled off, flopping onto his back, and gazed at the pale blue sky, blinded by sunlight. He groped about, found his sunglasses, and put them on. The world was reduced to a fine sunset level, and he looked around. Vana was sprawled at his side, eyes shut, legs apart, gelatinous liquids marking the place of his entry and exit. She was breathing slowly, deeply, lips pressed tightly together, smiling slightly, perhaps concentrating on the fading sensations of satiation, prolonging the sense of contact and pleasure. A human shadow fell across the blanket and he looked up quickly. It was Ariane, naked and beautiful. She was grinningslyly, her teeth showing white against a dark tan. She raised one hand and waved, a little wiggling of fingers.

  Brendan felt dismay. " Ari, I ..."

  "Oh, shut up!" She jumped into his lap and kissed him, grinding herself against the wetness of his groin. He wanted to speak, to say something, anything, but she wouldn't let him. She forced him back on the blanket, worrying at his body, bringing him up into a new round of responses, almost unwilling. She squatted over his face, making him service her will, lay on her back and pulled him onto her, guiding him into her, moving under him in cadences all her own.

  Vana watched them and, presently, began to stroke his back gently, rubbing the sweat around, smoothing it into a thin layer that evaporated with swift coolness.

  The future crashed down on him and began the present again. Well, he told himself, I wish I'd had that kind of cavalier attitude to play with. I certainly would have been happier. Is that what I am now?

  Perhaps I am reduced to their level. In a way I hope so.

  He walked on, seeking the things that he knew would come, going to watch scenes that would prove certain things to him once and for all.

  Tem and Axie were sitting together on a couch in the CM's common room, enjoying afterglow, watching the yet uncompleted actions of the little group before them, and talking quietly of the future. The time to come was a little hard to contemplate right now, but surely something would come of it all. Perhaps the adventure of Iris and Centrum was over, perhaps not, but Formis Fusion would come, bringing its horde of USEC scientists, and perhaps they would be allowed to join that group, contributing the knowledge that had already been gleaned. Brendan had promised a few surprises.

  "What do you think they'll do?" asked the woman.

  The Selenite shrugged. "I can't imagine. We've considered that they might punish us for all the destruction that's been wrought, but I don't think so. There's no jurisdiction outhere, not yet, and there are enough competing power groups in the Solar System that I imagine that we'll be safe." Aksinia paused and reflected for a moment. "Here we all are, all except Beth. It would never have occurred to me before how John and Brendan and Jana are freaks, outside the accepted norms, and how their presence is so divisive among us. I thought I was the freak. They keep pushing the limits, shredding and reassembling themselves according to the moment. And everything—everyone—is grist for their mill."

  Tem watched the cavorting bodies at his feet. "I don't think I know what you mean. I am a physicist after all. I am guilty too."

  "We are all guilty," she said. "Only some of us are guiltier than others. Perhaps I am being unfair. It's so difficult to think without falling into these endless paradoxes. I will not cast the first stone."

  "Is that all? Should we try? Would it hurt anyone to try and draw him in, make him a part of the group at last? We know that's what he wants."

  "Do we? The only way we can tell is to not help him. Until he makes some effort at a rapprochement on his own."

  "But he is my friend. Maybe ..."

  The door crackled open and they fell silent. Brendan came in and drifted down on the couch beside them, bouncing lightly. Tem looked at him apprehensively and then glanced across the room. Vana, Harmon, and Ariane were there, locked into a slowly moving, three-cornered embrace. How would the man react? There was no way to predict his response, but he was frowning already, staring at the three naked bodies. Krzakwa tensed himself against possible violence.

  Brendan stared at them, absorbing the scene. It was, he thought, typically foolish-looking. It was unaesthetic, but he could imagine how the participants felt quite easily. Vana had her head buried between Ariane's legs and she was, herself, sucking on the man. Harmon had positioned himself poorly and so was forced to work on Berenguer with the fingers of one hand. Brendan's frown deepened. So it doesn't botherme anymore. So what? All it means is that I don't care anymore. Why not? I guess I don't care about that either. I don't care about any of these people; I probably never have. Funny how I could mistake selfishness for love. . . . Was it that? Yes, on both our parts. The only person on this ship who was ever capable of real love was Demogorgon, and he was really crazy! It's probably just as well ... or am I fooling myself there too? If so, I should accept it as being a necessary thing to me. A little voice from deep inside argued against that tack, but he ignored it. There were more important things to worry about now. He could fret and whine about the absurdities of his immortal soul some other time, when he was bored and had nothing better to do.

  He turned to Tem and smiled. "I finally managed to get in touch with Demogorgon," he said. Krzakwa breathed a sigh of relief. "Yes? How is he?"

  "Hard to tell. I didn't get to talk to him directly, but he delegated a section of Bright Illimit to communicate with us. He seems to be doing fairly well."

  "So what will be happening next?"

  Brendan grinned broadly and a bit of the old satanity lit up his features. "A lot. He's planning to fire up the Mother Ship's photon drive."

  Tem felt an electric tension growing in him, a stern jolt of horror that made him sit slowly upright, releasing Axie's hand. "What?" he cried, aghast. "Oh, Jesus!" Sealock stood up, laughing at him. The old self returns, he thought, and welcome back to reality!

  Things proceeded swiftly then.

  The technicians among them swept into a nightmare matrix of action, pushing the others aside as they went about the tasks that would have to be accomplished so quickly. Tem and Brendan worked side by side once again, a team for just another little while, joined by the computer skills of Ariane and the limited technical competence that was Harmon's. Li-jiang worked wit
h them, contributing Jana's knowledge that had been carried over into Demogorgon's body.

  Polariswas torn asunder, never to rise again, quicklyreduced to a pile of reusable components. The colony was gutted. Domes were collapsed, cut apart, the CM was brought forth to stand once again beneath the everlasting darkness that Iris so easily dominated. The beambuilder machines went to work, resurrecting the matrix of girders that had once been the core of a ship. The Hyloxso matrices were recharged from the waters of their pool, the reactor was gingerly transferred back to its spot, and the ion drill, an engine once again, was slid back into its nacelle.

  Deepstarwas reborn, sitting on its four spindly legs upon the smudged and scraped ice, all its components restored as if they had never been touched. The colony site would never look as it had when they first arrived. It was a ruined space, littered with broken and useless throw-offs, dirty and, in its way, depressing. Where the domes had been there were porous-looking, circular discolorations of the ice. They finished, exhausted, but it was done in plenty of time. In the end, there was more time to think.

  Beth waited with the others, sitting in reclining chairs in the common room, finally content to let the imagery come in through Shipnet. John sat near her, seeming to seek her attention from time to time, but she ignored him. Some things were best left unsaid, some concepts left alone, by all of them now. She glanced furtively at him and he caught her eye. "It's all right," he said. She turned away with evident difficulty.

  The magnified image of Iris against a sky washed clean of stars splashed over her, and her attention was blissfully stolen by this familiar sight. She wondered if they shouldn't have left the little moon world by now, fled as far as they could from the Iridean system in the time that remained, but Brendan had insisted on staying. "This is going to be the greatest thing you ever saw," he told her, seeming childlike and excited, very much like a father she'd lost so long ago. "Even if we get killed, which I doubt, it'd be well worth seeing." So they stayed.

  Li-jiang had sided with him in the decision. The Jana part of her, ever dominant, waited with keenly expressedanticipation. Perhaps the Demogorgon part held her horror at a world's destruction at bay. In any event, her mind was quiet.

  Suddenly, it happened.

  Iris hung silent in the sky for one moment more, and then it changed. The atmosphere around the north pole began to well upward slowly, bringing muddy clouds from the depths to brighten the once blue mantle. Eddies formed about the area, giant hurricanes that whirled ever outward, carrying clouds in their wake. A spiral pattern formed about the north pole, a blossoming flower that grew until it covered the northern hemisphere. It paused then, hanging fire for a few minutes, and swept on until the entire world was a boiling nightmare. The clouds twisted and roiled like smoke, coiling patterns within patterns that formed and disappeared within a minute.

  The air over the pole seemed to bulge, and a great plume of gas sprang up, pushing outward into the dark sky, highlighted by the rays of the distant sun. A dim glow formed at its base, a glow that brightened steadily, swiftly. "It's working!" whispered Sealock in a voice that was yet loud enough to fill the entire room. No one else felt they would be allowed to speak. The sound of breathing was loud and irregular. The glow suddenly became an incandescent flare, blinding to eyes that had become adapted to the dimmer light, and Beth cried out, trying to turn her eyes away, unable to do so. The light blotted out everything else, and a dense beam of energy leaped up from the planet, hurling itself away into interstellar space. Someone seemed to cheer, a deep voice. Krzakwa? It didn't matter, now. A world was on the move, pushing itself into the depths once again.

  Deep within the immense confines of the Mother Ship, far within Iris, things were beginning to happen. With the torchfire of the photon drive lit off, pushing with a still small acceleration, the multiple throats of the intake mast began to open wider. A whirlpool formed in the southern hemisphere as the reaction chambers drank down vaster amounts of hydrogen, converting them to unimaginable energies along the axial core. Just forward of Centrum's blue sphere, the control moment gyros, long still, began to spin again, counter to the direction of the planetary rotation. The world slowed fractionally and the rigid body of the lithosphere cracked like eggshell, shards buoyed aloft by the ringing tsunamis that crisscrossed the lowest stratum of the already boiling atmosphere. The gyros spun up, keening a wild, silent song, spinning ever faster, and then they tipped away from the equatorial plane . . .

  Slowly, and at first imperceptibly, Iris was imbued with a will to go. Holding its fiery beacon aloft, the blue-white world seemed to shrug. The great clouds arrayed in waves swung across the globe faster now, and in close rank, as she began her turn. The emission beam of the drive described a slow arc against the background of the fixed stars. The gyros tumbled back to their neutral position and the turn stopped. Iris' axis of thrust was now pointed in its direction of travel. The intake throats opened still wider, swallowing gigatons of atmosphere, and the deceleration began to increase. The planet slowed in its course, things unimaginable transpiring within, while the humans on Ocypete watched its developing splendor. The heavens were ablaze, bathing their minds in an eldritch, violet glow.

  Common sense was violated at once. The moons did not fly off wildly into space, but their orbits began to stretch into more and more eccentric ellipses. They corkscrewed away from Iris' equatorial plane, their apirideons pointing toward the apex of the world's diminishing motion. The world in their minds shrank imperceptibly. As its velocity was slowly canceled, Iris' relationship with the sun changed as well, dying down from its original hyperbola through parabola and ellipse to the precise, curved line that drove a chord through the tiny circle that was Mercury's orbit. And so, no different than a rubber ball dropped from a ten-story window, Iris began to fall.

  The gyros tipped again, reorienting the thrust axis, and then it began to accelerate down, full-throat into the gravity well of Sol. Precisely controlled, as unnoticeable as the hour hand of a clock, the stars began to shift. Whipped about theirlord, Ocypete , Podarge , and Aello assumed even stranger orbits, following a high-order rosette as they began to precess. And, with the passage of time, they settled into ever lengthening ellipses, their apirideons tipping farther and farther into the northern hemisphere. The exhaust plume of Mother Ship grew ever brighter and the temperature began to rise. Somewhat more slowly, the badly disturbed ring particles held close to Iris' bosom followed suit, and the dazzling elastic band, no longer a thin line, began to stretch out and disperse.

  Brendan and Li-jiang sat in the kitchen module of Deeps tar, whipping up one of an endless series of the small snacks and quick meals that had sustained them during the day and a half since it had begun. The long hours of observation were taxing them, leaving them increasingly tired. Gathering in this experience, the two of them tended not to sleep, whereas once the initial excitement had died down the others had returned to more or less normal sleep patterns. They munched on thick, creamy yogurt loaded with fruit and unnameable crunchy particles. Suddenly the ship lurched, and a deep, groaning rumble filled the room, a palpable presence from the world outside. A gyro started up above their heads. Li-jiang shook her head and wiped at the yogurt that had dribbled unto her chest. "Another one," she said. Brendan nodded abstractedly, gazing out the window at Ocypete's massively altered landscape. The hard radiation scattered from the photon beam had raised the ambient temperature to such a point that the highlands that composed much of the surface were subliming away and the inrushing pressure of air, for such the combination of noble gases, nitrogen, and CO could be called, was filling with white mist, undoubtedly methane vapor. "We should expect quakes," he said. "This place is undergoing a lot of stress."

  "Too right. How much longer can we delay a lift-off?"

  "Not much longer. I'd like to stay, but . . . we've got to get out of here in a few more hours. The peripheral particle cone of the exhaust is going to strike us by tomorrow noon atthe latest." He laughed.


  "The fireworks'd be pretty to watch but painful to endure." The ship rocked slowly again and the plain outside crackled, electrostatic discharges released as the still supercold water ice was stressed. Temujin came up into the room looking worried and shaky. Moonquakes were serious business in the underground cities of Luna. " Bren? We're getting some kind of an attention-getting signal over the QCS."

  Brendan's face brightened. "Good. This is what we've been waiting for." He leaped down into the common room, reached out, grabbed a handful of leads, and, walking over to the nearby gang-tap, plugged into Shipnet, whole once again.

  The voices started. . . .

  Brendan?

  It was a soft, gentle whisper, the old voice made real once more, calling to him out of a gray and misty sea.

  Demogorgon? Are you all right?

  Yes, my friend. I've never been better. I wanted to thank you for all that you've given me, at last. . . . I'm glad you like it. What're you up to?

  A lot of things. You'd be surprised.

  I'm sure I would. What are you planning? That's what I meant.

  I called to tell you about it. I've got to do a number of things to get the ship back on its original mission. There's a great deal to be done. . . . I'm going to dive Iris to within about five million kilometers of the chromosphere, burn off as much of this garbage as I can, and see if I can explode off all the rest. I'll use a phase boost and head for a globular cluster about six thousand parsecs from here. XGC5152, it's called.