Iris Read online

  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 hole in the ice, do we?" Krzakwa looked at the mazy interconnection of metallic lines, whistling softly to himself, almost a whisper, human static that the 'net would filter out. The last course correction had not produced any major structural damage. Despite its fragile appearance, the craft's em-reinforced infrastructure could withstand very large linear forces. Hoping that the landing on Ocypete would be easy, he imagined a nominal performance.

  They floated free a meter or so from the main load-bearing girder of Deepstar's dorsal external vertex, moving toward the nose. Sealock stopped short, and Tem could see what had provoked the reaction: the smooth metallic sheen of the member was discolored by a faint ripple of iridescence, a spectral glistening, as of oil on water.

  "Shit," said Sealock.

  The Selenite looked at the featureless cylinder that housed his companion's head. "Shear stress?"

  "Just a minute." Through a lead plugged into his head, the man sent a command via Shipnet to his suit. It obediently altered its optical system and relayed the result back to him through the same conduit. He examined the area microscopically, across both the gamma and X-ray bands, then cursed again. "The whole cross section has gone monoclinic on us. Even worse, it's buckled at least five milliarcsec out of true. I can't get any closer with this suit's reticle."

  Krzakwa looked out over the long expanse of the ship for a moment, letting machines calculate quickly, then said, "That's not enough to cause a structural failure."

  "No." Sealock grinned, an unseen baring of teeth. "Not by a long shot. . . . But what the hell. We might as well fix it."

  It made him think of all the times he'd heard the Lunar government's tired old slogan, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." Here, he could but try. "All right." Another pause, unfilled. "How do you want to do this?"

  " Mmh." He blinked into the darkness that surrounded him, thinking. "I've only got two leads in this helmet and Shipnet's not as flexible as it could be ... not yet, anyway. Why don't we split up the job? You take the rebrace fixture and I'll handle the electron-beam welder, OK?" A year or so before, that would have been an impatient command. Krzakwa wished briefly that he could get a handle on what his odd friend was thinking. There was a way, of course, but ... He had to laugh at himself, silently. Even if it could be done involuntarily, secretly, like the work of some telepathic spy . . . well, he too had only two leads to work with, and they were the far less efficient induction leads at that. With such a setup, he would be hard enough pressed to handle communications, suit control, optic response, and a work-pack. Something so complex as Downlink Rapport would be out of the question, even if Shipnet were already in the proper configuration. He smiled, invisibly, to himself. "OK."

  "I'll call the equipment."

  In response to a series of commands, two work-packs in a service module external-access bay came to life. In a minute they were dancing along on their spindly legs, picking a path through Deepstar's openwork array of girders like a pair of armored, weapons-toting spiders. "Ready?" Krzakwa responded with a nonverbal assent, a fragment of knowledge transmitted to the other. For a moment he felt helpless—understanding to the nth degree the physics of a situation such as this one wasn't much help.... It was, of course, foolish to feel this way, but how could one avoid these sorts of feelings?

  " Inphase, please." In a work situation, Sealock was completely focused on the business at hand, his normally harsh tone and rancorous manner banished behind a fairly leak-proof screen. The Selenite activated the final reserves of his suit-born resources and tensed as he felt the command/control impulses flood
his conscious mind. The rebrace fixture machine was routed through a duodecimal program aspect of Shipnet and, while his handling of the device was suborned to a built-in self-awareness subplot, it took over quite a few reflex responses as well. He walked the machine behind the damaged girder, set its adjustment verniers, and then used a resistance heater to de-blackbody the metal-plastic matrix of the warped region.

  When all was ready, he transmitted a squirt of data to Sealock, who began his task. The welder scuttled into place and lit off. An angstrom-thin collimated particle beam sliced away the affected area, which adhered to the fixture device and melted, going into a polyclastic state. Stresses were set up and, as the mixture cooled, the proper orthorhombic array reappeared. Simultaneously, calipers pulled the now isolated beam-ends back to zero azimuth. The welder reattached the cut-out segment and, when it had settled back into its blackbody state, they were done.

  Sealock resurfaced out of the 'net depths laughing. "That was kind of fun. Good job. Come on, let's go in and torture everybody about how smart we are."

  Even after two years, Krzakwa found himself marveling at the man's abrupt changes of manner. He could be crazy, I suppose, but . . . hell. Who knows? His musings faded out, and they went in.

  To the crew of a terrifyingly expensive but essentially homemade spaceship somewhere off Neptune, the news of Iris' coming had struck with electrifying madness. They had been bound for Triton, the last frontier of human civilization, fleeing an angst that was not easy to identify. . . . Their reasons for leaving Earth were manifold and well thought out. Their destination had been picked simply because there was no place farther away to which they could go. The stars were too far. The comet cloud . . . maybe, maybe not. They had to have water ice for their fusion plant, and remote exploration had been inadequate. It would have been too long a voyage, in any case. Now this thing fell across their space, in reach, adventurous. . . .

  A quick vote was taken, a seemingly unanimous decision made, and a vessel built by the fortune of one of the world's most popular artists made a gravity-boost phasing maneuver around Neptune into a Solar-retrograde orbit, headfirst toward an on-rushing mystery.

  The Command Module of Deepstar, shaped roughly like a cylinder, was divided into three floors, perpendicular to its long axis. The middle and by far largest floor was designed with ten personnel compartments around its periphery, surrounding a gear-shaped room that comprised fully half the habitable volume of the CM. This central chamber had been outfitted with a ramfloor , from which a myriad of couches, tables, and other memomolecular shapes could be extruded on demand. In its center was a p-curtained door leading aft, and forward access was through the ceiling to the next deck, where the kitchen module was housed. Directions were defined by the pull of em-fields on clothing. As they gathered for a final preinsertion briefing, the central room had been reconfigured into a sunken amphitheater and everyone was em-stuck to its surface except for Aksinia Ockels, who was late. She hung above them for an instant like some huge, gauzy-winged insect/bird hybrid, then assumed a sitting position. She touched the static-node of her clothing, creating a faint breath of em-force, and settled like a dust mote on the edge of the upholstered crater.

  Jana Li Hu looked up from an attitude of concentration, licking her upper lip slowly. Annoyed at the woman's interruption, she glanced at the rest of the group. Placed at odd angles, they wore induction circlets around their heads, except for Sealock and Krzakwa, who had waveguides plugged into an unobtrusive gang-tap. Ariane Methol made a triad with them. She was a slim, mid-sized woman with a dark, lustrous mestizo complexion, fathomlessly expressive eyes,and shiny black hair worn just over shoulder length. Unrestrained by gravity, it floated in a shifting nimbus around her head. Her face was pretty and regular, though not really remarkable. It was the sort of face people had come to expect on a fashion model simulacrum: narrow, smooth, and cool.

  She was a poly-tech engineer, specializing in Comnet subprogram debugging, and, in some ways, was the best in the world at what she did. There were others who knew more, others more skilled, but they were research scientists, useless in a tight commercial universe.

  "OK." Hu was flat-voiced, angry. "To continue with the summary of planetography . . ." As she spoke, images illustrating the subject matter entered the minds of her listeners and textual data were superimposed on their vision fields. She wanted to present it fully, to force all the information on them, despite their disinterest. She had no illusion that some of them would retain what she said, or even understand it. But she would make the effort anyway.

  "As you can see, the extreme smoothness of the ocellus on III is plain evidence, at least to me, of the enormously slow process of resolidification. This implies that either there was a forced eccentricity in this presently very regular system or else an object impacted on III that was itself a source of heat energy. To account for the paucity of craters we see here, we must posit, in addition to the extreme enhancement of cratering rates on the leading hemisphere relative to the trailing, a very long-lived glacial annealing process.

  "Though superficially it looks like the basins on Tethys and Titania, it seems to be a different phenomenon. The data suggest that a small body, fifty kilometers or less in diameter, wrought profound changes in the entire object, melting a fifth of its total volume. You can see how the craters covering the remainder of the moon are lacking in relief. What you see are the remains of old craters at some depth, covered by the neon, argon, and other gases that constituted Ill's atmosphere during this period. . . ." Suddenly, Ariane spoke up. "What does that mean, a body that tiny as source of heat?" Tem said, "Any concentration of radionuclide would do,though it would have to have a relatively short half-life. I wonder what cosmological process would concentrate it?"

  "I have already given this matter a great deal of thought," said Jana. "The total disruption of any second-generation macrobody that had completely fractionated would account for it. My report to the IAAU-PD will suggest as much."

  "Do you think that this 'body' was part of the Iridean system?" asked John.

  "Unlikely since we're dealing with a planetary system that formed out of almost pristine type-2 galactic material. Iris and her satellites show a general depletion ofall radionuclides , as well as a scarcity of transironic elements. It was probably an intruder."

  "What about mascons?" asked Krzakwa. "Is there one under the ocellus?"

  "There's a slight gravitational anomaly associated with it, but this object sank almost to the center of Ocypete, so it's difficult to resolve it from the silicate core in general.

  "Iris itself is very different from the gas giants we're used to. Aside from its small size, hardly half again the diameter of the Earth and only about 0.58e-mass, and slow rotation rate, it's meteorologically bland. Except at the very lowest levels, where there is a slow convective overturning, the atmosphere is quiescent. Iris, or at least the eighty percent of its total mass that is gaseous, has differentiated, giving rise to the Rayleigh -scattering mantle, which is a thick layer of hydrogen and, underneath it, a thinner stratum of helium. The surface of the white ball within is made up of nitrogen cirrus not unlike the obscuring haze of Saturn. I should point out that Iris is losing considerable mass due to solar irradiation. It has only been able to maintain its current mass/diameter ratio because of the extreme cold." Aksinia laughed. "You mean it's evaporating?"

  Jana nodded. "If it stayed this distance from Sol, it would dwindle to about a fifth of its present size, at which point its gravitation would be sufficient to permit retention of theremaining gases.....I can see by some of your faces that seems counterintuitive. You think that the smaller it gets the less able it should be to retain anything. Well, that's true—but it's a simple matter of the point at which the velocities in the excited gases attain escape velocity for that particular depth in the gravitational field. There are plenty of elementary texts in the library ..."

  Another look about. Too many faces were blank. Some of them didn'
t know enough for anything to be counterintuitive. Once again, she wondered what the hell they were doing out here. . . . She sighed, and went on. "Anyway, Iris' magnetosphere is very low grade, almost nonexistent, so we won't have to waste energy on a charged-particle shield.

  "The Iridean ring is very much like Saturn's, without, of course, the gaps that give Saturn's its unique appearance. Iris' ring is nearly opaque, and it has a greater proportion of millimeter and smaller particles, there not being much in the way of magnetic sweeping here. Aello is an interesting small body which shows no immediately identifiable endogenic asterologic features. It's probably the best chance we'll ever get to examine a nearly pristine, totally undifferentiated body composed of cryogenic volatiles. Podarge is much like the many similar-sized moons in the Solar System, showing resurfaced terrains and an albedo asymmetry due to preferential gardening of the 'front' hemisphere. Considering that the materials making up these satellites are extremely volatile, we've seen few surprises. The colder temperatures have been a powerful force influencing these exotic ices to behave in a familiar fashion.

  "As you might guess, my report is much more detailed." Jana concluded by showing them a skilled 3V

  collage of Iris and its satellites projected against the tapestry of a deep-space sky. The thing was prettier than any out-the-window view they'd seen since rounding Jupiter. There was a long moment of silence.

  "Next business, then." She looked at Cornwell.

  The musician nodded, pulling off his circlet, but he waited for a while before he spoke. "Maybe this isn't the correct time to bring this up. I don't know. We've got some big adaptations to make in the near future. The ten of us are going to be building a colony, perhaps not very isolated in the sense that we will still have access to many of the benefits of Comnet ona delayed basis, but isolated in the sense that we're going to have to provide each other with human society." He stopped, sighed heavily, wondering where his prepared words had gone. "The 'quest' is over. Now we have to get into the period of living happily ever after. It's hard not to see how stupidly we've been treating each other. We're all familiar with the emotional difficulties that come from being in the midst of too many people. . . . Some of us are here to escape just that. Well. I'm not sure we've come to grips with the problems of being in a permanent small group. When this adventure first occurred to me, I envisioned us becoming more closely knit, perhaps even experimenting with induction rapport. . . . The opposite is what seems to be happening." He stopped, looking at them all, seeking some kind of response. What he saw was that they were waiting for him to continue, to draw some kind of conclusion. Obviously, when you stated a problem, most people expected you to propose some kind of solution. He sought for something to say, some plea for reasonableness, but it was too late.