Iris

At NYU . . .

Brendan Sealock studied. A man, growing up, may be accused of all sorts of infelicities. The various rites of passage that most societies induce are intended to demonstrate to the adult-candidate that a great change of estate is coming over him. They say, 'You may now do whatever you please. You must now be prepared to suffer the consequences of your own actions.' He was generally regarded as mean, petty, and vicious, with a mind centered on the concept of self. They all thought him dangerous and deranged, a

'thug.' A few people even looked on him as a little bit stupid, but no one ever called him lazy. He worked. Though the colleges of the twenty-first century had given up the folly of a 'liberal' education, recognizing itas an impediment to the technologists and a detriment to the artists, they insisted that a student learn a great deal about his own specialty. Gone were the days when a student could limp along learning 'just enough.' During the periodic examinations, if you couldn't handle any aspect of a task, you were sent back to study until you could.

Though the tests he had taken revealed a phenomenal raw potential and a fair amount of preparation, the Deseret educational system being nothing if not effective, Brendan had to start at a lower level than he'd expected. It angered him, at first, but he soon came to see the sense behind it. They made him study physics in a developmental-analytical fashion and gave him a quick grounding in historical electronics, then plunged into the twinned evolutions of Quantum Transformational Dynamics and Comnet theory. They said, 'These are the things that you have to learn in order to earn our certification. If you want to learn anything else while you're here, fine. It's up to you. If you don't, well, most prospective employers don't care.'

In the classroom . . .

The professor said, 'We used to start with the basics, but we don't anymore. If you're interested, it's in the library. If you've studied all the various calculi, you're all set; if you haven't, don't worry. Boab analysis rests on a somewhat different underpinning from the rest of math. In the trade, we like to call it asshole calculus.' He grinned as he drew them into the Tradition. 'There are no instruments to guide you through this jungle, boys and girls. It's strictly seat-of-the-pants navigation.' Cara giggled and the professor's grin widened. 'Whatever,' he said. 'Anyway, put on your circlets.' The poster-cluttered wall behind him vanished, displaced by a smooth, blackboard-like image. 'It goes like this: Newton and Einstein went wrong in some very curious ways. Mr. Boab finally got it figured out about thirty-five years ago. The unified force field still exists—it just has nothing to act upon, so it's a little hard to work with. . . .'He waved a hand at the wall and fiery letters began to appear. 'There're eleven variables and forty-one physical constants here. I know you all know how to solve for individual unknowns. That won't do usany good, unfortunately. I will now show you how to arrive at a simultaneous solution for the Blanchard-Higgins Inequality. It's called the Desrosiers Transform and is considered the root of QTD.' The letters began to dance. . . .

In the cafeteria . . .

Brendan Sealock was usually engaged in the process of becoming irritated. The engineering and science students liked to gobble their food and rush back to the land of ideas and experiments. Everyone else liked to argue and talk endlessly. Since they'd installed an inductab transducer, the music blared out loud. Right now, it was that popular new artist, what's-his-name . . . Cornwell, that was it. His first big release: Reflection Counterpoint. Sealock didn't much care for what seemed to him like random blatts of very loud noise.

'Hey, Comnet-man!' He shared a table with a raucous bunch of metaphysical philosophy students. He knew some of them were already well known in their field, authors of hefty, Heidegger-like tomes full of complex and circular reality analyses.

'Fuck off, Basket-weaver.'

'Come on, Sealock. We're trying to get up a good paragraph on the Ding an Sick controversy for Sykes. You gotta know something about that. . . .'

He sighed. Here we go again. He wrote a simplified version of the Tornberg Inequality on the tabletop.

'Look here: what you want is the First Product Transform. Sikt Grote got this worked out almost eighty years ago. It's pre-Boab!'

The philosophers groaned in unison. 'Shit. Even if we knew what you were talking about, we couldn't use it. Sykes won't accept that crap in a paper. Says it's unethical.' Sealock was baffled. 'How can you talk about something you don't understand?' They stared at him, puzzled, and the background music roared on.

Senman-Reischar, easy to know; You can live in Scapa Flow! Scapa Flow the place to be; You can watch it on the 3V! On 3V it's easy to see;

Skies are blue for me and thee! Thee and Comnet, how I will grow; Senman-Reischar, Scapa Flow go!

As Sealock walked out of the cafeteria, headed for his Trivesigesimal Sequency Analysis tutorial, the opening strains from the theme of the latest 'net epic, 'Scapa Flow Go,' were echoing in the room behind him. Though many people sneered at the epics, calling them 'lightheaded trash,' he rather liked them. Superficially escapist, the interactions of the characters were interesting to follow. I'll have to tap that when I get the time, he thought, and walked on.

In the street . . .

Brendan Sealock walked the dangerous places. In the foyer of NYU's QTD Lab Complex there was an enormously appealing poster, a piece of artwork more than a century old. A hairy fat man with a spiked club. Atavistic