Iris

Krzakwa's paunch made it difficult for the woman to reach him. Prynne shut his eyes and tried to make the image go away, but it wouldn't. He thought the words

'channel down,' and, one by one, images of amazing vividness but little or no portent filled his brain. He stopped at an image that reminded him of his home in Florida. A quiet, sun-washed shore presented itself, and a turquoise- blue sea rolled into foam upon it. The vantage point was maybe five meters in the air and slightly inshore, and here there was another couple making love. They were different . . . somehow cleaner. And yet, as they held each other and looked out at a sunrise that he could see in their eyes, he couldn't stand to watch anymore. He shut his eyes again, hard, and said, 'Off,' this time vocally. As the image died, he felt globules of water hanging without weight on his eyelashes, making them clump together.

Aksinia Ockels put down her 'book,' a loosely bound sheaf of pages she'd had printed up, and took a gulp of the smoky creosote called Lapsang Souchong . She was a tall woman, light-complexioned, and had a rather strange face, flat, square-jawed, with a ski-jump nose. Her hair was a mousy brown, loosely curled, and she had cheeks that were often naturally flushed. The taste of the tea never failed to call up visions of her days living at the Hotel Lisboa , reading book after book on the beach, burning despite generous applications of paba , and waiting endlessly for her mother to decide to leave. At twelve, she was not yet pubescent, and the world seemed clean and fantastic. The years she had spent in schoolplant were far in the past and life had been without unpleasant intimations.

For the thousandth time she wondered, How did I get here?

She remembered the quick and cumulative wilting of her world-view during the following years. When she met Daniel, and he'd deflowered her in Paris Commune, at thirteen, she had substituted love for happiness. When it didn't last, she had nothing. Her wandering had started only after many hideous, interminable shouting matches with her parents, and in the many years since then she'd lived amicably, alone. Only Beta-2, a complex brain- chemical derivative, supplied her with the inner vision she'd had as a child. And the time had come for her shot.

The apothecary mounted in her mag case made a tinychirring noise and burped forth a blistersac containing her standard dose of Beta-2. For the briefest moment she beheld the capsule, regretting the social side effects that had come with her addiction. Anticipation coursed along her nerves, a velvet static electricity.

She held the blister under the line of her jaw and popped it: the osmotic solution in which the drug was held spurted through her skin, saturating the blood in her carotid artery, filling her mind with a feeling of rightness that she treasured.

She pulled out an induction circlet and placed it on her head, rearranging the fall of her hair to regularize the fit. The circuitry would find her brain centers, but it needed to be near the right place. As she turned to the doorway, the world, burnished with a chemical sense of wonder, ballooned before her.

A cold infrastar fell from the darkness of interstellar space. It seemed to hang poised, as if waiting, inside Pluto's aphelion, deep within Sol's gravitational sway. It was, though, going fast enough, and its path along a conic section would never close. The little star was only a visitor. Had Pluto been on the same side of the Solar System, the thing would have given itself away long before. Even so, its 0.58 of Earth's mass should have been easily detectable, would have been, had anyone been looking. The search for a trans-Plutonic planet had, however, been abandoned seventy years before. Astronomy itself had changed from the early days of randomly scattered observation into a rigid and systematic cataloging of the heavens conducted almost entirely from a single great multi-observatory on Luna's farside. It had changed so much that it had a different name: asterology. In one of the little coincidences that add flavor to reality, Cometary Halo probe Oort IX, launched from Callisto in 2085, had gone off course—far off course—and there seemed to be only one possible explanation: a gravitational perturbation produced by a very large object some 42 AU out. The men with telescopes and photorecorders , mostly hobbyists, looked. And there, glowing in the long infrared, was a planetary object, intensely cold and sending back solar radiation in the striking deep blue of Rayleigh scattering. Those with sufficient resolving power saw that it also bore a ring rivaling Saturn's and three tiny satellites.

That such an object could form on its own out of the vast clouds of galactic dust and gas was a matter for long and bitter debate, but there could be no doubt: an independent body so small and cold that it could hardly be called a star was passing. In the quiet offices of the IAAU Working Group on Astrological Nomenclature, a WGS-07 mythology coordinator decided to call this new object Iris, and the satellites Aello, Podarge, and Ocypete, after the rainbow goddess and her sisters, the harpies. As he emerged from an airlock mounted on the rear of the CM, Temujin Krzakwa felt the fear and paranoia that had characterized his Lunar personality coming back to him like a scream in the night. It was easy, inside, to forget. The ship was it —everything that was human, a fragile house in the dead, bodiless, perpetual winter darkness. He closed his eyes and flexed the springy em-pads that were his primary adhesion to the CM's hull. He wouldn't come off. Sealock popped up before him through a shimmering circle at his feet and gave him a facetiously tender pat on the helmet. Krzakwa made a rude gesture in return and heard a laugh through the audio link.

Deepstar'sstructural tower, a matrix of metal-plastic girders stretching into the fifty-meter distance, was greatly foreshortened from this perspective. The elongated cylinders of differing lengths around the outside were all that made the ship look substantial. Without the appended containers, it was just four skeletal isosceles prisms, connected by their long bases, surrounding the ultrarigid bulk of a heavy-ion engine. At the aft end of the ship was a toroid with quatrefoil outriggers on which the Hyloxso engines were mounted.

They made their way along an inner vertex between a Hyloxso cylinder and one containing fusion water, inspecting, looking. It wasn't until they mounted the ion-drive emission unit that Iris cleared the stern and stared hard at them.

Tem stopped for a moment to look. It seemed he could just make out the Rayleigh -scattering atmosphere around abarely discernible disk. He gazed at the thing, trying to imagine just what he was doing here and, after a while, became aware that Sealock had stopped beside him, motionless, silent. He turned to look at the other man, a dim human-shape with a cylinder for a head, silhouetted before the still blinding pinprick of the sun. 'What do you think?' He gestured toward the planet.

'I don't know.' It was his most commonplace answer. People took it for many things, but Krzakwa always understood it as: 'I don't want to tell you. . . .'A perplexing man. Sealock stood for a while longer, wrapped in himself, then said, 'Let's go. We've got to make sure everything is perfect now. Don't want to wind up a smoking