Iris

IRIS

WILLIAM BARTON and MICHAEL CAPOBIANCO

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

AVON BOOKS, INC.

1350 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10019

Copyright © 1990 by William Barton and Michael Capobianco

Cover art by Chris Moore

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-32501

ISBN: 0-380-73038-3

www.avonbooks.com/eos

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Avon Books, Inc.

First Avon Eos Printing: September 1999

AVON EOS TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES. MARCA REOISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

Printed in the U.S.A.

WCD 10 98765432

Dedicated to

The Voyager 2 Computer Command Subsystem

Ave atque vale

The Falsehood that exalts we cherish more

Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

—pushkin

IRIS

ONE

Load. Uplink. Begin.

Achmet Aziz el-Tabari, who called himself Demogorgon the Illimitor Artist, was on his knees before Brendan Sealock, scientist, engineer, gladiator. . . . Cultural labels made a miasma between them that was too thick to be thrust aside. It made them things, defying understanding. He looked up at the man. He looked at the curly, dirty, reddish-blond hair, the acrid green eyes almost hidden in deep, dark wells beneath shaggy brows, at the broad face, with its high, heavy cheekbones, at the flattened nose, the wide, frowning mouth framed with shadowy lines, and the massive jaw. He looked at the thick neck above powerful, rounded shoulders, the heavily muscled chest, and the broad waist with its solid stomach, lightly padded with fat. He looked at the long arms, roped with vein-netted muscles that stood out like an anatomical chart. He ran his hands over the corded tree-trunk legs through a thin layer of light cloth.

So ... His own voice whispered to him from far away, rhyming rhymes, naming names. Culture, it said, and tradition . . . "Brendan. Tell me again why you won't do anything with me?" The man smiled faintly. "You're the faggot here, not me. Besides, I'm your . . . what is it you call me?"

"You're my 'Great Dark Man,' Brendan. It's from a book that was written more than a hundred and fifty years ago."

"Yeah." He laced his fingers through Demogorgon's coarse black hair and jammed his crotch forward into the man's face. "So get to work."

As the man's sharp nose began to jab rhythmically against his abdomen, Sealock settled back to look out through the deopaqued section of wall opposite him. Iris was a bright light in the star-sequined perpetual night and it attracted a deep longing in him, the way so many other things had in the past. Perhaps this too would be a disappointment—but he had to go on trying until success or death made an end to things. Why do they want me to feel their pain? he wondered. Isn't it enough that I feel my own?

Against a rising tide of orgasmic inevitability, he saw images of himself in the prize ring, bloodying opponents, and this was supplanted by the dark, carved-ivory face of Ariane Methol. Almost alone, he thought. Almost, but not quite.

Sealock wiped the sweat from his brow, running blunt fingers through the dense snarls of his own hair, and once again felt the twelve sockets embedded in his skull.

Dreams without number laid themselves down in concentric tracks throughout John Cornwell's mind. Music . . . Not music, just the idea of music. The effect alone, hot the thing itself. It was 2097 and now humankind was irrevocably changed. Those manifestations of the physical world that had entertained and ravaged people were ebbing away, becoming less important. Reality had become an eerie technological ocean, and mankind a frenzied swimmer in its electronic deeps. Only a little more than a generation before, an easy and acceptable means of plugging human minds into the already vast information processing and retrieval networks had been invented. Its ramifications were universal and its tendrils extended into virtually every phase of human endeavor. Comnet had been born in 2063. It was the ultimate networking system, finishing off a task begun over a century before, and it grew effortlessly until it had engulfed the world. Parents had lived their lives mediated by computers, voice actuators, and 3V screens, long accustomed to the devices that surrounded them, but the children . . . increasingly, humanity lived with its minds in the wires, and the momentum of change followed a quickening tempo.

For now, men and women might live lives recognizable to their ancestors. Similar things would make them unhappy, similar things would seem unpleasant; but life was changing. A tender trap was engulfing them, drawing the subjective world in step by step, with neither will nor collective acknowledgment. The mental echoes of the last barrage went away, and John relaxed, disengaging from RedShipnet, his composition program. He energized his suit and the em-field stuck him to his chair with a creaky plop. His new piece, the induction-music suite Rose of Ash, was finished. Tallish and wiry, Cornwell's tonus was a testament to the procedures they had used to cope with almost two years of weightlessness. His face was slightly oriental, with dark brown eyes and a strong chin that showed his mixed heritage. His great-grandmother had been an Innuit from the Baffin region of the Canadian Archipelago. His hair was black, cut short enough for the pate to show through and lighten it. He was wearing red fullbodies, with a Deepstar/Iris logo on the chest. Around his head was a metal diadem holding an array of focus nodes for induction transfer and his Shipnet interface. Induction music, a subset of the induced entertainment industry that had brought him fame and a vast fortune, was something more than audio music and, for many, something less. A more appropriate term might have been "data music."

Although most 'net access was via a feed to the various sensory nexi, it was sometimes useful to choose an adaptable area in the subdominant parietal lobe and feed it data. He had been one of the first to realize that this data feed was accompanied by certain emotions, analogous to those of music input. The bandwidth for induction music was much greater and there was some spatial perception within the sequential flow. To his astonishment, he'd found that most people responded strongly to his "music." An industry and an art had been born. The playback of the music had brought up strange emotions in him. Right there, in the middle of it, was his breakup with Beth. They had been acting the part of strangers now for months, yet in the limited confines of the Command Module they saw each other constantly. It was all too much for him. Everything was mutating into the opposite of what he wanted.

There was a tiny crackle of static and the hatch of his personal compartment opened into four spreading segments which retracted into the bulkhead. Jana Li Hu, Chinese and naked, appeared in the entrance. "Finished?"

He phased back into Shipnet and gave the command to transmit. "It should get there in six hours or so. I've got the best scramble money can buy, but circpirates'll probably get it anyway. What's up?" Hu pushed her way into the room, a baby crawling in three dimensions. She was short and built compactly. Her face was central Chinese: round, with high cheekbones and a small, flat nose. A dull black, 50 cm. ponytail floated behind her head. Cornwell looked into her eyes and noticed, for the thousandth time, a hard, unchanging quality that unnerved him. This woman was his new girlfriend?

"Why do you care about piracy?" she said. "You've said yourself that money will have no real use where we're going. Residuals on Triton alone will buy all the data we'll ever need." She assumed a stable float about two meters over his head, with her body at a forty-five-degree angle to his own. Normally self-conscious, she was playing a little game. "Turnaround's coming." He called up the present high-mag view of Iris and accessed pertinent data concerning the voyage. The information flowed via electromagnetic induction to the optical centers of his brain and was presented to him in a complex visual array, superimposed over his view of the room like a fantastic, detailed afterimage.