Iris

Krzakwa sat up slightly, looking out meditatively across the room. 'Maybe. Could be, uh . . . OK.' He thought about it a while longer, then said, 'Um, where's John?' Opening her eyes, Beth said, 'Fuck John.'

That sealed it for them. They seized the ubiquitous waveguide cables, plugged in, and went under, then down.

And, going downward, continued to reach out. . . .

John Cornwell stood in front of the dome of the CM, arms folded, staring out across the bleak Ocypetan landscape, staring at the sky. A huge, early-phase incarnation of Iris loomed far above and the tiny, matching crescents of Podarge and Aello hovered nearby. The sky was star-sequined without pattern, a clumped maze of untwinkling pinpoints. Strange, he thought, that the atmosphere of the planet is still clear. You'd think the eclipse would have done something to it. But he knew there'd been no real effect. The pristinely clear upper air of Iris had merely acted as a lens . . . muddying things down here all right. And the thing they'd found in the planet had done the same.

Jana dead. Brendan dead. Beth ....

An image of their latest encounter came back to him and the muzzy hurt renewed itself. How has it come to this? he wondered. I only thought that we could be of some use to each other after the terrible strains of the last days. She needed contact. . . . But why did I walk away, give up so easily? A stab of pain, an abrupt turn, and the chain was snapped. The DR link between them had seemingly died in a moment, fading into an apartness even greater than before DR. He tried once again to analyze their last painful moments together. Yes. It was there. Everything that they had shared, all the superficial communion, had come down to that one moment when their two personalities had really commingled and they saw each other as themselves.

How could you know?

It was difficult for John to not judge himself harshly. But, with Jana, how could he have known what was transpiring in her confused head? Was there something about him, something so close to his perception of himself that he could not even imagine what it was, that was bad? He thought about it long and hard, and could only conclude that there wasn't.

And people ... at least some people . . . loved Sea-lock. How odd it was. How odd he was. How could anyone really have lived like that? John had done time in New York and never run across that sort of thing. But then, he hadn't gone everywhere, seen everything. What if it was real? Andwhy the hell did Brendan leave? It seemed to fit his outer persona so well. But the inner man . . . that was even harder to understand. Unbidden, an image of the shaven prostitute floated up from nowhere, bending over before him, holding her ankles. A stirring of lust twisted in his abdomen. God! The unbelievable coarseness of the man's imagery! How can anyone be like that? He drove it away, but other scenes came to take its place, visions of unknown naked women open before him, begging to be despoiled. He closed his eyes to an angry feeling of resentment. Is his ghost going to haunt me now? Perhaps Sealock dead was worse than Sealock alive. . . . How could he have been like that? The answer constructed itself: he couldn't have been. He wasn't. The flashes of feeling had been there. There was an emotive, sensitive Sealock, yes, but that reality was buried beneath the coarse, hard visions. Smashing people's faces, thrusting into sodden vulvae . . . those things hid all the rest. They gave expectations, made stereotypes. If you split an infinitive and put an expletive in between, it distorted the meaning of the verb. People heard that instead of what you said.

I've got to talk to Beth, he thought. I've got to be given another chance. She took my offer the wrong way.... I did mean to help. And how had she taken it? Like a raped woman being offered the comforts of sex. The playback of Sealock's life must have been brutal for her, the scented floweriness of love turned to some kind of horrid, animal carnage. He turned to walk below and the images floated before him again. Endless visions of dripping crotches, seas of spurting semen, totally repulsive. How could anyone not think it madness?

He came to Ariane Methol's chamber and opened the door. They were there. The seven were sprawled together on the bed, a tangle of limbs and bodies, with wires sprouting from their heads. He stared at them, silent.

Beth looked like a sleeping child, her hair flattened out into a fan. Tem looked like a huge, dead opossum. The others . . . Ariane's skirt had come awry, exposing her vulva. A pad of curly black hair, a slit, an animal-hole, a little wetness.

That's what Brendan would have seen. . . . But no, that's just my perception of the view from his eyes. He loved her.He would have felt something. The imagery was a perfect mask. He went back up into the dome and looked at the sky. Aello had moved and its phase had swollen, but Podarge was no longer in synch.

They'll be back, he thought. He wondered if they really would.

The stars were still untwinkling, still unmoving, emotionless pinpoints. They sat there in the matte-black sky and did nothing for him.

I miss that part of it, he realized. When the stars glittered and twinkled above the night, made pretty by their color and movement and seeming isolation, it made me feel better. In Mackenzie, I used to go out onto the tundra just to look at the night sky. That's how I came to know which stars were which. It was something, it was an image of a world where things really existed, really meant something. Is it that this ambience is my whore?

He shook his head and grinned ruefully. There is that, after all. When you stretch these ideas to their limits, the gulf that separates me from a soulless monster is not so great. We all make mistakes and I've made at least my share. Who am I to judge anyone else the worse. . . . Who am I to make any judgments at all? A familiar turn of phrase. He knew he'd said it before, but now, somehow, it was different. I mean it, he realized.