Iris

Droplets machine-gunned out of nonexistence and splattered across his face. Yes. Easily. Come to me.

It's a long way.

More droplets. Not in the now space. Journey with me into the past.

Sealock was incredulous. Time travel? How is that possible? Our physics denies it!

Pop-pop-pop.

Think! Where are you now?

He thought, and then felt amusement at his own stupidity. Oh. Of course. I see what you mean. Roiling effervescence.

Let us be about it then. I am eager to meet you in a more fruitful fashion. That was an excellent machine you inhabited. He felt himself begin to move and change as the imaginary years reversed themselves in an imaginary land.

It was to be an even trade, history for history, culture for culture. With the wonders of modern technology, most extractions are painless. But not all ...

New York Free City was one of those aberrations that still abounded in the world; a remnant, a holdover from the days before the Insurrection. Over the span of a single generation, as the datanets grew in complexity, most of the world formed into the systems of semi-independent enclaves that now stood for nations and communities. In a sense, the city was one of these, but in some very important way it was different. New York was all that remained of the bright dream that had once been America. People spoke of crime and terror when the subject of the free cities came up, but these were just unavoidable by-products of the reality that they espoused. Paris, Hong Kong, and Rio de Janeiro. Calcutta and San Francisco. They all had that indefinable Something. Freedom? The willingness of their inhabitants to do and be, whatever the cost? New York was Earth's premier city. Its population seemed to hold, of its own accord, at a constant twenty-seven million.

Because of the strict and official limits that the enclaves placed on themselves, what passed in these days for a world government grew out of the free cities, where the laws were light. It was a powerful irony. The rigid dictatorship of the Contract Police had its headquarters in the chaotic whirl of happy Paris. All the manifold threads of the world's data system had their ultimate source in the Metro Design—Comnet, a function of New York Free City. The maddened souls who could not live within the confines of a normal society came there to be free, and so became a fruitful force in the world that they despised.

Mankind was haunted by ghosts of its own making.

Brendan Sealock stood alone on the flat, black, shiny, false ebony floor of Grand Central Station, surrounded by a human horde. Eighteen and alone and freshly run from the iron-thumb benevolence of Deseret. His little collection of emergency luggage was piled about his feet, valises containing mostly notebooks, and he was incredibly tired. 'Oh, God . . .' Misery. 'What am I going to do?' It was said aloud and nobody turned to look. His eyes were grainy andblurred from days and nights spent awake and all of his awareness seemed to be concentrated in the tight band of an almost headache about his temples and forehead. He crushed his hands into his hair and stared up at the starry sky embossed on the inside of the domed ceiling. Why not? 'Fuck the world!' he screamed, his voice pitched high.

'Hear, hear.'

It was a quiet voice with a soft rasp, and Brendan turned to stare at a short, blond, unkempt young man clad in a burlap-looking friar's cassock, complete with a hairy rope belt. 'Got any spare change?' What the fuck was this now? 'No.'

'Too bad.' He pulled a flat bottle from his robe and uncorked it. 'Drink?'

'Thanks.' He accepted the bottle, took a quick swallow, gagged at the oily taste of cheap chemistry, and handed it back. When he could speak, his voice too had a soft rasp. 'Hi. I'm Brendan Sealock.'

'Ram that shit! Only homos use names.' The man spun and strode off. Brendan shrugged, picked up his luggage, and began to walk in the same general direction. The path that they followed was a semitortuous one, a fly's wall- crawl through one of New York's older sections, yet away from the museum piece that was central Manhattan. Successions of steel/plastic and bricks with crumbly mortar flashed in dazzling array across hazed eyes and led to a dark alleyway in an ancient area that sported tall, ruinous buildings open to a blue-gray drizzling sky. There was a brightly lit, partially maintained building here, with a plasma sign stating YMCA, beneath which someone had erected an ornate wooden plaque renaming itthe french embassy.

The place had fine, rosy curtains in its windows and looked warm and inviting, but Sealock didn't go in. He followed his single volitional contact across the street to a dark, dilapidated structure that had a luridly painted black and orange marquee above the door:aloysius' cream dream crotch palace. The doorway itself had been done up in spray paint as a stylized representation of a vulva. The doormat said,

'Welcome, Zeus.'

It wasn't totally dark inside, just lit by a variety of low-wattage colored light bulbs. The hallway itself had nothing, but the doors of most of the rooms were open, in some cases missing entirely, and little washes of blue,