Iris

'Sorry.' Her speech was confusing him, with its wild oscillations between analytical and synthetic grammars. Some English-speakers did that: education stretched thinly over the outreach of original-sin poverty.

' 'sOK. Enough dirt 'n' the bacteria die.' She was playing with his penis, feeling it stiffen slowly and engorge. 'Big cock, too.' She slid farther down and licked him. His penis finished its progress to a full erection. She sucked him then and, big or not, she managed. The orgasm made him tired again and he lay quiescently, watching her.

She sat on his ridged stomach and grinned. 'My name's Cara Mia.' She held out her hand. He shook it. 'Brendan Sealock. How do you do?'

'Pretty damn good!' She hopped to the floor, then sat on the edge of the bed. He stood up and stretched, jumped when she goosed him. He smiled. 'What's all that?' He pointed to the mess of antique electronics on the table.

'Homework. I'm a freshman CS major at NYU. I wanna work on Comnet someday.' He nodded slowly. So, he thought, they're making her start at the beginning and work her way up. That way she understands it. I wonder what they'd do with me? 'I'm a bum.'

'Same thing.'

In the morning they arose together and went to have breakfast at a little outdoor cafe down on the corner. The bright sun of late spring was shining down on them.

After breakfast she took him around. At the Statue Stump, they got him registered as a landed immigrant. Brendan pointed to the fee schedule posted on the wall, but the fat, grandmotherly type behind the counter only laughed. 'Don't let it throw ya, kid. We'll send a bill to Deseret.' He could imagine his parents' expression when they got it, but they'd pay. The Contract Police had rules about the movement of people between enclaves.

He followed her to NYU that day. He noticed that most of the students liked to dress up in rather idiosyncratic costumes. He went to the registrar's office and found, to his surprise, that he could take classes for free. 'We'll send a bill to someone,' they said.

They gave him a battery of tests and seemed impressed. 'Maybe we won't send a bill. Deseret's loss is our gain,' they said. 'Stay forever if you like.' It went on and on. In time he made some adjustments and failed to make others. He enjoyed sleeping in Cara's bed, but then, she'd fuck anyone, anywhere. Sometimes he'd awake in the middle of the night to find her with someone else, right there beside him. Sometimes he grew angry. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he joined in. He had sex with a man for the first time in her bed. Sometimes he went out alone at night. Finally he found himself sitting on a man's chest in a dark alleyway. The man had attacked him and had been beaten. He brought his heavy fist high and drove it down with all his might. It hurt his hand. The man hadn't died, but he'd needed extensive plastic surgery after that.

In a cafeteria argument with a philosophy major at NYU he was referred to as a soulless monster. He didn't know why, and felt hurt. Sometimes the feeling of directionlessness and growing insanity almost overwhelmed him.

He kept on moving, of his own accord, dancing to an internal rhythm of increasingly feverish proportions. He began to realize that he liked beating people up, hurting them as much as possible, almost as much as he liked fucking women. He thought of combining the two but didn't. Someone said he'd fuck anything that couldn't outrun him. He laughed at that. Someone else said he'd step on bugs if they could scream loud enough. He beat that person up.

Outside of his own pillaged memory, Sealock could feel himself being changed as the swift time reversal being wrought by Centrum progressed. He knew, intellectually, that it was all a result of software synchronization, but the imagery forced on him came with an odd emotional jolt. He changed and, changing, cried out with a commingling of wonder and fear. Head, arms, legs, torso. Gone. Like that. It was a mechanical-seeming thing, and swift. A succession of ticks, the beating of a clock, and Sealock the man was gone. Another such succession and Sealock the—what— thing was there in his place. Cephalosome and tail- sheath. Eight machinelike arms with two-fingered hands; eight matching anchorelles for pseudoautotrophic feeding. Retractile anophagomotor apparatus, for eating, eliminating, and propulsion. Here. Like this.

He remembered. We called ourselves a small, unbroken bubble of pheromonic oil. The message it contained meant, 'That which has accepted a seed.'

The being he had become had no discernible sensory apparatuses—instead, it had a hypertrophied sense of 'touch,' a subtle response to pressure waves and chemical changes in the surrounding methane. This, combined with a data-processing kinesthetic sense, was all it needed. The externally generated image-form which now occupied him did not come with very much in the way of memory, notyet, but he knew it would arrive, one piece at a time, as he developed the necessary complexity.

Stop time.

The world-lines unreversed and he was still Brendan Sea-lock, yet still changed. The Seedees were all around him now; he could sense them far away. Some flew through the sea, propelled on their jets like hard squid. Others clambered about the still ways on stalky legs. Still more were swept along by the standing waves of the great, endless transport matrix. They went about their tasks, filling the World Ship in uncounted trillions. Now, in the everlasting memory of Centrum, Mother Ocean lived. Sealock blew himself steadily along, knowing he must go to the central sphere, and looked at the pressure waves that brought him a bright window on this new reality. The matrix machine awaited him and still he saw.

When the messenger cell met him, he was hanging in delighted awe below a self-orienting photovoltaic generator, which would turn to suck up the light of passing suns, hanging in happy contemplation of its crystalline complexity. It was Machine, in its most quintessential form. He boarded the messenger cell. His anchorelles plugged in, there was a current flow, then he soared singing above the world.