Iris

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.

The sight of the planet was riveting. Every time he looked at it, Cornwell was amazed by the continually more resolved image. As with Luna, there was something that fought against seeing it as a sphere. It was simply a white circle, three-banded, surrounded by a dim, blue disk maybe a diameter bigger, and cut by the ever more obvious ring, which, since they were coming in close to its plane, was just a thin line. The ring shadow was obliterated somewhere in the immense blue atmosphere and never made it to the 'surface.'

He scanned the data coming out in the lower right-hand segment of his vision field, not feeling the muscles of his eyes move, yet not aware of the projection's unreality. They were 41.947 AU from Sol and 0.229 AU from Iris. Here, far from the sun, it was dark, lonely, and cold. They might just as well be in the depths of interstellar space.

The numbers told the story. It was 701.891 days since they'd detached their little ship from the Jovian transport Camelopardalis and 696.668 days since they'd shut down Deep- star's engine. The ship would soon be turned around to fire the heavy-ion reaction drive for Iridean orbital injection. 'It's just about ten hours and forty-one minutes away.' Computers bred precision; language didn't.

'I can't believe the trip's finally ending,' said Hu, clinging to a no-g handhold on the back edge of a console/desk. 'I feel like the world is coming to an end.'