Tom Maddox
Halo
10/29/2000

Table Of Contents

Tom Maddox Halo

Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V

From the author:

You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in
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I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the
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tmaddox@halcyon.com

November, 1994

HALO

Tom Maddox

To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen, my
friend; and all our lamented dead, lost in time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Here are some of the people I owe in the writing of
this  book.

My wife Janis and son Tom.
They have had to put up with the
problems of a novelist in the houseincluding arbitrary mood  swings and chronic unavailability for many
of the usual pleasures  of life.  To both, my love and gratitude for their
love, patience,  and understanding.

My best friends:  Leo
Daugherty, Jeffrey Frohner, Bill Gibson
and Lee Graham.

My mother Jewell, my brother Bill and sister Janet.

Ellen Datlow:  she
published my first stories in Omni and
showed me how a really good editor works.  Also, two friends who
patiently read through drafts of those stories before Ellen got  them:
Geoff Hicks and Larry Reed.

The readers of various incarnations of this book:  Beth
Meacham, my editor at Tor Books; Merilee Heifetz, my agent; Bruce  and Nancy Sterling, great readers; Melinda
Howard and Gary  Worthington; Lynne
Farr; Carol Poole.  Also, the members of
the  Evergreen Writers' Workshop,
especially Pat Murphy.

The Usenet community, friend and foe, for ideas about a
quite  astonishing number of things, and
for the continuing fascination  of life
online; with special thanks to Patricia O Tuana and the  members of "eniac."

The usual suspects at the Conference on the Fantastic, with
a  special nod to Brian Aldiss, because
we'd all be happier if there  were more
like him running around.

At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave  technical advice.  (Perhaps needless to say, any consequent  blunders are entirely mine.)  Mike Beug and Paul Stamets, world- class
mycologists and explainers, talked to me about mushrooms and  provided invaluable references.  Mark Papworth applied a coroner's  eye to a carcass I made.  The faculty and students of the
Habitats  Coordinated Studies Program,
1988-89 helped me to think about a  space
habitat's ecosystem.

A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both  colleagues and students, at Evergreenthough
I have to mention  Barbara Smith and
David Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo
appearances.

And all I've known who can find a piece of themselves in
this  book.

PART I. of V

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.

Jean Baudrillard, America

1. Burning, Burning

On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for
the  egg.  A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once  known as Burma, and now, after two days of
drugs and fasting, he  was
prepared:  he had become an alien, at
home in a distant  landscape.

His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their
spread  white flesh torched to yellow,
the center of a burning world.  On  the dark stained oak door, angel wings
danced in blue flame, their  faces
beatific in the cold fire.  Staring at
the animated carved  figures, Gonzales
thought, the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.

He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped
through  to the hallway, his split-toed
shoes of soft cotton and rope  scuffing
without noise across floors of bleached oak.
Through the  open door at the
hallway's end, morning's light through stained
glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow.   Inside the room, a blue monitor console
stood against the far  wall, SenTrax
corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the
center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed  steel, cracked and waiting.  One half-egg was filled with beige  tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other
half with hard dark  plastic lying slack
against the shell.

Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled
his  hair back into a long hank and
slipped a circle of elastic over
it.  He reached to his waist and
grabbed the bottom hem of his  navy blue
t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head.
Dropping it  to the floor, he
kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan
pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale  skin gleaming with a light coat of
sweat.  His skin felt hot, eyes  grainy, stomach sore.

He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered
and  lay back as body-warmth liquid bled
into the slack plastic, which  began to
balloon underneath him.  He took hold of
finger-thick  cables and pushed their
junction ends home into the sockets set in
the back of his neck.  As the egg
continued to fill, he fit a mask  over
his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled.
Catheters moved  toward his
crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms.  The  egg shut closed on
him and liquid spilled into its interior.

He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and
deeply  as elation punched through the
chaotic mix of emotions generated  by
drugs, meditation, and the egg.  No
matter that he was going to  relive his
own terror, this was what moved him:
access to the  many-worlds of
human experiencetravel through space, time, and  probability all in one.

Virtual realities were everywherevirtual vacations,
sex,  superstardom, you name itbut
compared to the egg, they were just
high-res videogames or stage magic.
VRs used a variety of tricks  to
simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled  only to a certain degree, and when you
inhabited a VR, you were  conscious of
it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing  suspension of disbelief.
With the egg, however, you got total
involvement through all sensory modalitiesthe worlds were so  compelling that people waking from them
often seemed lost in the  waking world,
as if it were a dream.

A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the
neural  cables and injected a
neuropeptide mix.  Gonzales was
transported. #

It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in
Pagan,  the town in central Myanmar
where the government had moved its
records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon.   He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of
SenTrax Myanmar, at a  central rosewood
table in the main conference room.  The
table's  work stations, embedded oblongs
of glass, lay dark and silent in  front
of them.

Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit.
The  local SenTrax group supplied the
Federated State of Myanmar with  its
primary information utilities:  all its
records of personnel  and materiel, and
all transactions among them.  A month
earlier,  SenTrax Myanmar's reports had
triggered "look-see" alarms in the
home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his  memex had been sent to look more closely at
the raw data.

So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had  explored data structures and their contents,
testing nominal  functional
relationships against reality.  Wherever
there were  movements of information,
money, equipment or personnel, there  were
records, and the two followed.  They
searched cash trails,  matched purchase
orders to services and materiel, verified voucher  signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the
personnel  records themselves against
government databases, and traced the
backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they  read contracts and back-chased to their bid
and acquisition; they  verified daily
transaction logs.

Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far
it  had shown nothing but the usual
inefficienciesGrossback didn't  run a
particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he  didn't seem to have a corrupt one.  However, neither he nor  SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's
final report would  come later, after he
and the memex had analyzed the records at
their leisure.

Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes.  As usual at the end  of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he
felt tired, washed- out, eager to go.
He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane  out of here late this afternoon to
Bangkok.  I'll connect with  whatever commercial flight's available
there."

Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving.   Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German
and Thai descent; he  had a light brown
complexion, black hair, and delicate features.   He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned
Burmese  style:  a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton
shirt.

During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with
him  coldly and correctly from behind a
mask of corporate protocol and  clenched
teeth.  Fair enough, Gonzales had
thought:  the man's  operation was suspect, and him along with
it.  Anyway, people  resented these outside intrusions almost
every time; representing  Internal Affairs,
Gonzales answered only to his division head,
F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone  nervous.

"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback
asked.

"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town."  Like anyone
else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's  official airport, where partisan groups had
several times brought  down
aircraft.  Surely Grossback knew that.

Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"

Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you
anything  about that."  Even mentioning the matter constituted
an  embarrassment, not to mention a
reportable violation of corporate
protocol.  The man was either
stupid or desperate.

"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.

What was his problem?
Gonzales said, "I have a year's data  to examine before I can make an assessment."

"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will
look  like," Grossback said.  His face had gone cold.

"No," said Gonzales.  He stood and said, "I have to finish  packing."  For the moment, he just wanted to get out before  Grossback did something irretrievable, like
threatening him or  offering a
bribe.  "Goodbye," Gonzales
said.  The other man said  nothing as Gonzales left the room. #

Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection
of  low bungalows fabricated from bamboo
and ferro-concrete that stood  above the
Irrawady River.  The rooms were
afflicted by Myanmar's  tattered version
of Asian tourist decor:  lacquered
bamboo on the  walls, along with leaping
dragon holos, black teak dresser,
tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in  from the twentieth centuryjust to give your
average citizen that  rush of the Exotic
East, Gonzales figured.  However, the
hotel had  been rebuilt less than a
decade before, so, by local standards,
Gonzales had luxury:  working
climatizer, microwave, and
refrigerator.

Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work,
and  Gonzales lay sweaty and
semi-conscious through hot, humid nights
then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby  neck flaps and doing push ups.

He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked
the  cart paths that threaded the plains
around Pagan, passing among  the temples
and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning  mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers
sticking  up like fairy castles.  Everywhere around Pagan were the
temples,  thousands of them, young and
flourishing when William the  Conqueror
was king.  Now, quick-fab structures
housing government  agencies nested
among thousand year old pagodas, some in near
perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more  than ruins and forgotten names.  You gained merit by building  pagodas, not by keeping up those built by
someone long dead.

Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still
was  trying to recover from
late-twentieth century politics; in
Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military  dictatorships and the chaos that came in
their wake.  And as was  so often the case in politically wobbly
countries, it still  restricted access
to the worldnet; through various kinds of
governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free  information flow unacceptable.  Ka-band antennas were expensive,  their use licensed by permits almost
impossible to get.  As a  result, Gonzales and the memex had been like
meat eaters stranded  among vegetarians,
unable to get their nourishment.

He'd taken down the memex that morning.  Its functions  dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and
aluminum  shock-cases, ready for
transport. The other case held memory boxes
containing SenTrax Myanmar group's records.

When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the
latest  news about Grossback, how the
man had cracked at the last moment.
Gonzales was sure the m-i would think what he didGrossback was  dog dirty and scared they would find it. #

At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales
waited  for his plane.  Gonzales wore his usual international
traveller's  mufti, a tan gabardine
two-piece suit over an open-collared white
linen shirt, dark brown slipover shoes.
His hair was gathered  back into
a ponytail held together by a silver ring made from  lizard figures joined head-to-tail.  Next to him sat a soft brown
leather bag and the two shock-cases.

In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to
a  gilded and jeweled umbrella top,
pointing to heaven.  On its  steps, beside the huge paw of a stone lion,
a monk sat in full  lotus, his face
shadowed by the animal rising massive and lumpy  and mock fierce above him.
The lion's flanks were dyed orange by
sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood.  The minutes
passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.

"Come tour the temples of ancient Pagan," a voice
said.   "Shwezigon, Ananda,
Thatbyinnu"

"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had
rolled up  behind him.  It would hold two dozen or so passengers in
eight  rows of narrow wooden benches but
was now emptyalmost all the  tourists
would have joined the crush on the terraces of
Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the temple  plain.

"Last tour of the day," the cart said.  "Very cheap, also  very good exchange rate offered as courtesy
to visitors."

It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen:  in Myanmar,
even the machines worked the black market.  "No thanks."

"Extremely good rate, sir."

"Fuck off," Gonzales said.  "Or I'll report you as  defective."  The cart whirred as it moved away. ¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side  of the road, ready to come across and beg
for pencils or money.   Gonzales caught
the monk's eye and shook his head.  The
monk  shrugged and walked on, his orange
robe billowing.

Where the hell was his plane?  Soon hunter flares would cut
into the new moon's dark, and government drones would scurry  around the edges of the shadows like huge
mutant bats.  Upcountry  Myanmar trembled on the edge of chaos, beset
by a multi-ethnic mix  of Karens,
Kachins, and Shans in various political postures, all  fierce, all contemptuous of the central government.  They fought
with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack  missile, and they only quit when they died.

A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the
air.   Within seconds a silver
swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge
rectangular wing loaded with a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came  low over the dark mass of forest.  Its running lights flashing red  and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop
above the field, wings  tilting to the
perpendicular and engine sound dropping into the  bass.  Its spots picked
out a ten-meter circle of white light that
the aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over  Gonzales in a whirlwind.  The inverted fans' roar dropped to a  whisper, and with a creak the plane kneeled
on its gear, placing  the cockpit almost
on the ground.  Gonzales picked up his
bags and  walked toward the plane.  A ladder unfolded with a hydraulic
hiss,  and Gonzales stepped up and into
the plane's bubble.

"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked.  His multi-function  flight glasses were tilted back on his forehead, where their  mirrored ovoid lenses made a blank second
pair of eyes; a thin  strand of black
fiberoptic cable trailed from their rim.
Beneath  the glasses, his thin
face was brown and seamedno cosmetic work
for this guy, Gonzales thought.
The man wore a throwaway
"tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy
blue  background.

"That's me," Gonzales said.  He gestured with the shock-case  in his right hand, and the pilot toggled a
switch that opened the  luggage
locker.  Gonzales put his bags into the
steel compartment  and watched as the
safety net pulled tight against the bags and
the compartment door closed.  He
took a seat in the first of eight  empty
rows behind the pilot.  Cushions sighed
beneath him, and  from the seatback in
front of him a feminine voice said, "You
should engage your harness.  If
you need instructions, please say  so
now."

Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where
shoulder  and lap belts connected, then
stretched against the harness,  feeling
the sweat dry on his skin in the plane's cool interior.   "Thank you," said the voice.

The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control
as  the plane lifted into twilight over
the city.  The soft white glow  from the dome light vanished, then there
were only the last  moments of orange
sunlight coming through the bubble.

The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and
shadow,  with the temple and pagoda
spires reaching up toward the light,
white stucco and gold tinted red and orange.

"Man, that's a beautiful sight," the pilot said.

"You're right," Gonzales said.  It was, but he'd seen it  before, and besides, it had already been a
long day.

The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked
left  and headed south along the
river.  Gonzales lay back in his
seat  and tried to relax.

They flew above black water, following the Irrawady
River  until they crossed an
international flyway to Bangkok.  Dozing
in  the interior darkness, Gonzales was
almost asleep when he heard  the pilot
say, "Shit, somebody's here.
Partisan attack group,
probablyno recognition codes.
Must be flying ultralightsour
radar didn't see them.  We've got
an image now, though."

"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.

"Just coming for a look.  They don't bother foreign
charters."  And he pointed
to their transponder message flashing
above the primary displays: THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY.
IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020. It would keep on repeating
until they crossed into Thai airspace.

The flight computer display lit bright red with
COLLISION  WARNING, and a Klaxon howl
filled the plane's interior.  The  pilot said, "Fuck, they
launched!"  The swing-wing's
turbines  screamed full out as the
plane's computer took command, and the
pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just hanging on.

Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and
fell,  corkscrewed, looped, climbed
againsmart metal fish evading fiery
harpoons.  Explosions blossomed
in the dark, quick asymmetrical  bursts
of flame followed immediately by hard thumping sounds and  shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as
it followed its chaotic  path through
the night.

Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged
around  it, its pilot in blazing
outlinea stick figure with arms thrown
to the sky in the instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated  in flame.

Their own flight went steady and level, and control
returned  to the pilot's yoke.  Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as
the  night returned to blackness.  "Collision averted," the
plane's  computer said.  "Time in red zone, six point eight nine
seconds."

"What the hell?" Gonzales said.  "What happened?"

"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.

Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of
cold  air from the plane's air
conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt.
He glanced down to his lap:  no,
he hadn't pissed himself.   Really,
everything happened too quickly for him to get that  scared.

A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived
in front  of them and circled in slow
motion.  Like the ultralights it
was  cast in matte black, but with a
massive fuselage.  It turned a  slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy
predator looping fat,  slow prey, then turned
on brilliant floods that played across
their canopy.

The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.

Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade;  behind the transparent shell Gonzales saw
the mirror-visored  pilot, twin cables
running from the base of his neck.  The
Loup  Garou's wings slid forward into
reverse-sweep, and it stood on its  tail
and disappeared.

Gonzales strained against his taut harness.

"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.

"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and
shaking.   "What do you mean?"

"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice
tight,  face red beneath the flight glasses'
mirrors. "They set us up, the
pricks.  They used us to troll
for a guerrilla flight."  The pilot  flipped up his glasses and stared with
pointless intensity out the  cockpit
window, as if he could see through the blackness.  "And  waited,"
he said.  "Waited till they had the
whole flight."  The  pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced
Gonzales, his features  distorted into a
mad and angry caricature of the man who had
welcomed Gonzales ninety minutes before.  "Do you know how fucking
close we came?" he asked.

No, Gonzales shook his head.  No.

"Milliseconds, man.
Fucking milliseconds.  Close
enough to  touch," the pilot
said.  He swiveled his seat to face
forward, and  Gonzales heard its locking
mechanism click as he settled back into
his own seat, fear and shame spraying a wild neurochemical mix  inside his brain

Gonzales had never felt things like this beforedeath
down  his spine and up his gut, up his
throat and nose, as close as his  skin;
death with a bad smell  burning,
burning

2. Anything I Can Do
to Help You

As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the
stained  glass, and the room's interior
went to gloom.  Only monitor lights  remained lit, steady rows of green above
flickering columns of  numbers on the
light blue face of the monitor panel.

A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose,
worked  slowly across the floor, nuzzled
into the room's corners, then  left the
room, its motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like  wind through dry grass. #

The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through
the  flight computer, then the
swing-wing locked into the Bangkok
landing grid and began its slide down an invisible pipe.  They
went to touchdown guided by electronic hands.

The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and
said,  "I'll have to file a report
on the attack.  But you're luckyif  we had landed in Myanmar, government
investigators would have been  on you
like white on rice, and you could forget about leaving for  days, maybe weeks.  You're okay now:  by the
time they process the  report and ask
the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."

At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was
spend  any time in Myanmar.  "I'll get out as quickly as I
can," he said.

Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing
in  him like the onset of a dangerous
drug.  Trying to calm himself,  he thought, really, nothing happened, except
you got the shit  scared out of you,
that's all.

As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and
went  to pick up his luggage from the
open baggage hold.  The pilot sat  watching as the plane went through its
shutdown procedures.

Do something, Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic
mount.   He pulled the memex's case out
of the hold and said, "I want a
copy of your flight records."

"I can't do that."

"You can.  I'm
working with Internal Affairs, and I was
almost killed while flying in your aircraft."

"So was I, man."

"Indeed.  But I
need this data.  Later, IA will go the
full  official route and pick everything
up, but I need it now.  A quick  dump into my machine here, that's all it
will take.  I'll give you  authorization and receipt."  Gonzales waited, keeping the pressure  on by his insistent gaze and posture.

The pilot said, "Okay, that ought to cover my ass."

Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat,  kneeled and opened the lid.  "Are you recording?" he asked
the  pilot.

The man nodded and said, "Always."

"That's what I thought.  All right, then:  for the
record,  this is Mikhail Mikhailovitch
Gonzales, senior employee of  Internal
Affairs Division, SenTrax.  I am
acquiring flight records  of this
aircraft to assist in my investigation of certain events  that occurred during its most recent
flight."  He looked at the  pilot.
"That should do it," he said.

He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it
into  the access plug on the instrument
panel.  Lights flashed across  the panel as data began to spool into the
quiescent memex.  The  panel gonged softly to signal transfer was
complete, and Gonzales  unplugged the
lead and closed the case.
"Thanks," he said to the
pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.

Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to
himself,  hey, memex, got a surprise for
you when you wake up.  He felt much  better. #

A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a  brightly-lit tunnel with baby blue plastic
and plaster walls  marked with signs in
half a dozen languages promising swift
retribution for vandalism.  Red
and green virus graffiti smeared  everything,
signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages in  Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged
with  dialogue balloons saying god knows
what.  A lone phrase in red  paint read in English, HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL
FLOWER.  Shattered  boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays of
multi-wire cable marked  where
surveillance cameras had been.

Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow  portal to International Arrivals and
Departures.  Faceless  holoscan robotsdark, wheeled cubes with
carbon-fiber armor and  tentacles and
spiked sensor antennasworked the crowd, antennas  swiveling.

All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and
women:   Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians,
Indonesians, Thai.  They spread out  from Asia's "dragons," world
centers of research and  manufacturing,
taking their low margins and hard sell to Europe  and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life.   Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he
found them:  cadres  armed with technical and scientific prowess
and fueled by  persistent ambition.

They formed the steel core of much of the world's
prosperity.   The United States and the
dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis:
the  Asians had a hundred ways of
making sure the American economy  didn't
just roll over and die and take the prime North American  consumer market with it.  Whether Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese,  Hong Kong Chinese-Canadiansthey bought some
corporations and  merged with others,
and Americans ended up working for General
Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their  paychecks they bought Japanese memexes,
Korean autos, Malaysian  robotics.

Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal,
and  Gonzales stepped inside.  An Egyptian guard in a white headdress,  blue-and-white checked headband, and gray
U.N. drag cross-checked  his i.d., gave
a quick, meaningless smileteeth white and perfect  under a black moustacheand waved him on.

Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a
small  Thai woman in a brown uniform
with indecipherable scrawls across
yellow badges.  Her features were
pleasant and impassive; she wore  her
black hair pulled tightly back and held with a clear plastic  comb.
She stood behind a gray metal table; on the floor next to  it was a two-meter high general purpose
scanner, its controls,  screens, and
read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood.
Dirty  green walls wore erratically-spaced
signs in a dozen languages,  detailing
in small type the many categories of contraband.

The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair
in  front of the table, then for him to
put his clothes bag and cases  on the
table.

She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed
in  clear, neuter machine English:  "Your person has been scanned and  cleared."  She put the soft brown bag into the mouth of the  scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with
a quiet beep.  The  woman slid it back to Gonzales.

She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open
these  cases" as she pointed toward
the two shock-cases.  For each,  Gonzales screened the access panel with his
left hand and tapped  in the entry codes
with his right.  The case lids lifted
with a  soft sigh.  Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic
lights  flashed above rows of memory
modules, heavy solids of black  plastic
the size of a small safety deposit box.

Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data
Declaration  Form the memex had filled
out in Myanmar and transmitted to both
Myanmar and Thai governments.
She looked into one of the cases
and pointed to a row of red-tagged and sealed memory modules.

The translator's words followed behind hers and said,
"These  modules we must hold to
verify that they contain no contraband
information."

"Myanmar customs did so.  These are SenTrax corporate
records."

"Perhaps they are.
We have not cleared them."

"If you wish, I will give you the access
protocols.  I have  nothing to hide, but the modules are
important to my work."

She smiled.  "I
do not have proper equipment.  They must
be  examined by authorities in the
city."  The translator's tones  accurately reflected her lack of concern.

Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic  intransigence.  For whatever occult reasons, this woman had  decided to fuck him around, and the harder
he pushed, the worse  things would
be.  Give it up, then.  He said, "I assume they will  be returned to me as soon as possible."

"Certainly.
After careful examination.
Though it is  unlikely that the
examination can be completed before your
departure."  She slid the
case off her desk and to the floor
behind it.  She was smiling
again, a satisfied bureaucrat's smile.
She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a thing of  the past.
She looked up to see him still standing there and said,  "How else can I help you?" #

The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and
as  it did, banks of low-watt
incandescents lit up around the room's
perimeter, and the patterns of console lights went through a  series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was
brought to a waking  state.  The room's lights had been full up for an
hour when the  desynching series was
complete and the egg began to split.

Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose,  machine-connected:  a new millennium Snow White.
A flesh-colored  catheter led
from his water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv  feeds from both forearms.
White sealant and anti-irritant paste
had clotted around the tubes from throat and mouth.  The sharp
ozone smell of the paste was all over him.

An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its
hands,  shining chrome claws, began
disconnecting tubes and leads.
Then  it worked with hands and black
flexible arms the thickness of a  stout
rope to lift Gonzales from the egg and onto its own surface.

Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to
whimper.   "It's okay," the
memex whispered through the room's speaker.
"It's okay."

Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and  considered his condition.  Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent  loss of gross motor control, no immediate
parapsychological  effects
(disorientations, amnesias, synesthesias)

Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid
white  tile, polished aluminum and
mirrors and said, "Warm shower."
Water hissed, and the shower stall door swung open.  The water ran  down his skin and the sweat and paste rolled off his body.

3. Dancing in the
Dark

The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front  window, down Capital Hill to the city and
the bay.  After a full  night's sleep, he felt recovered from the
egg.  "Halfway down the  hill stood a row of Contempo high-riseshalf
a dozen shapes in  the mist, their sides
laced with optic fiber in patterns of red,
blue, white, and yellow.

>From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The
Fine Arts  Network, showing today
only:  the legendary 'Rothschild Ads
Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes  Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's
'Ecstasy for Many  Kilometers.'"

"Cycle," Gonzales said.  He turned to watch as the screen
split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access  search.
In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service  cycled what it considered important:  worsening social collapse in  England; another series of politico-economic
triumphs for The Two  Koreas.  And the Ecostate Summaries:  ozone hole #2 over the  Antarctic conforming to predicted
self-repair curve, hole #3  obstinately
holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching  for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations
continuing  to evade best predictions

Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds.
Christ,  this stuff had been going on
forever it seemed

He said, "Memex, what do you think about the
attack?"

"A bad business," said the memex.  "We are lucky to have  survived." It seemed a bit subdued in
the aftermath of the trip in  the egg,
as though it, too, had come close to dying.
Gonzales  didn't know how it
experienced such things, given its limited
sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.

"What's happening in the real world?" Gonzales
asked.

"Your mother left a message for you.  Do you want to look at  it now?"

"Might as well."

On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face
hidden  behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied
body a rich brown.  She sat  up and said, "Still in Myanmar, huh,
sweetie?  When are you coming  back?
I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates."

She removed her sun mask.
She had dark skin and good bones;
her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint  parchment quality of age.  Her small breasts sagged very little.   Body and face, she appeared an athletic
fifty year old who had  perhaps seen too
much sun.  She would turn eighty-seven
next  month.

Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu
epidemic  while the two were visiting
Naples, his mother had turned her
energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance.   Half the year she spent in Cozumel's
Regeneration Villas, where  tissue
transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young.  The  rest of the time she
occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo
on Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami.   Top dollar, but she could afford it.

She and his father had been charter members of the  gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of
the rich and old who  vied with the
young for their society's resources.
The young had  the strength and
energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and
cunning.  No contest:  kids under thirty often stated their
main  life's goal as "living until
I am old enough to enjoy it."

Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print
cotton-robe  over her shoulders and
said, "Call me.  I'll be home in a
week or  so.  Be well."

Their talks, her taped messagesboth usually made him
feel  baffled and angrybut today her
self-absorption pricked sharper  than
usual.  I almost died, he wanted to tell
her, they almost  killed me, mother.

But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was
from  Miami.  And whose fault is that? a small voice asked.  He had
chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get  and remain in the continental United States.  Sometimes he felt  he'd come a bit too far.
In Florida, people cooled down with
alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with  strong coffee.  Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and  health-conscious Northerners and craved the
Hispanic sensuality  and
demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.

Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in.  He had seen
the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all  of them he had felt the same obsessive
grasping at money and land  and power
and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more  more more.  At his
parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern
Florida facessun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with  heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of
expensive cologne, and  women with stiff
hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made
brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices.  He'd fled all that as
instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.

Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more
at  home at one end of the country than
the other.

"No reply," Gonzales said. #

The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he
lounged  among black lacquer and etched
glass while thoughts of death  gnawed at
the edges of his torpor.  He filled a
bronze pipe with  small green sensemilla
leaves and holed up in a haze of smoke and
drank tea.

The late afternoon light through the windows went to
pure  Seattle Gray, the color of ennui
and unemphatic despair, and his
solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and  wondered what it would be like to have a
cat.  Then he thought  about the truth of it, how often he would be
gone and the cat left  to itself and the
house's machines.  "Here kitty
kitty," the  cleaning robot would
say, and the memex would want veterinary
programs and a diagnostic link
fuck it, they all could live
without a cat.

Then a hunger kick came on him, and he decided to make  taboulleh.
"You are not taking care of business," the memex said  to Gonzales as he stood chopping mint
leaves, green onions and  tomato,
squeezing lemon and stirring in bulgur wheat with the  patience of the deeply-stoned.

"True," Gonzales said.  "I'm in no hurry."

"Why not?  Since
your return from Asia, you have not been
productive."

"I'm going to die, my friend."  The smells of lemon and mint  drifted up to him, and he inhaled them
deeply.  He said, "Today,  maana, some day for sure  and I'm still trying to understand  what that means to me now.  To be productive, that is fine, but to  come to terms with my own mortality  I think that is better."   The taboulleh was finished.  It was beautiful; he wanted to rub  his face in it. #

Not long after he finished eating, a package arrived
from  Thailand.  Inside layers of foam and strapping were the
memory  modules the Thais had
taken.  When he plugged the modules into
the  memex, they showed empty:  zeroed, ready to be used again.

Gonzales stood looking at the racked modules in the
memex  closet.  I can't fucking believe it, he thought.  In effect, the  audit had
been cancelled out.  Whatever data he or
anyone else  collected at this point
from SenTrax Myanmar would be essentially
useless, Grossback having been given time to cook the data if he  needed to do so.  A fatal indeterminacy had settled on the whole  affair.

Grossback, you bastard, thought Gonzales.  If you arranged  for the Thais to grab these boxes, maybe you are smarter and  meaner than I thought.

"Shit," Gonzales said.

"Is there anything I can do?" the memex asked.

"Nothing I can think of." #

>From the background of jungle plants and pastel walls
and the  signature pieces of curved
silver, HeyMex recognized the latest  incarnation
of the Beverly Rodeo Hotel's public lounge.
Mister  Jones preferred
ostentation, even in simulacra.

HeyMex settled into a sling chair made of bright chrome
and  stuffed chocolate-brown
leather.  HeyMex wore the usual
baggy  pants and jacket of black cotton,
a crumpled white linen shirt;  was
smooth-faced and had close-cropped hair.

A figure shimmered into being in the chair opposite:  silver
suit and red metal-laced shirt brilliant under lights; black- framed
glasses with dark lenses; greased hair combed straight  back, a little black goatee and moustache.

"Mister Jones," HeyMex said.

The other figure took a long, slow drag off a brown  cigarette.
"HeyMex," it said.
"What can I do for you?"

"It's Gonzales.
Since we got back from Myanmar, he's been  passive, hasn't been taking care of business."

"Post-trauma responsegive him some time, he'll be
okay."

"No, he doesn't need time.  He needs work.  Have you
got  something?"

"Maybe.  I
haven't run a personnel searchhe might not fit
the exact profile."

"Never mind that.
Give it to Gonzales.  He needs
it."

"If you say so.
You'll hear something official later today."

The world went translucent, then turned to smoke, and
Mister  Jones disappeared back into his
identity as Traynor's Advisor,  HeyMex
into his as Gonzales's memex.

(Ask yourself why the two machines chose this elaborate  masquerade, or why no one knew these sorts
of things were  happening.  However, as to the who? and the why? there
can be no  question.  These are the new players, and these are
their games.

So welcome to the new millennium.)

4. Privileged Not to
Exist

When Gonzales returned home, he found a message from
Traynor:   "Will arrange for
transportation tomorrow morning, five a.m., from  Northern Seattle Airtrack to my estate.  Be prepared for immediate  work.
Pack the memex and twenty-two kilos personal luggage."

"Shit," Gonzales said.  "We just got home.
Twenty-two kilos,  huh?  That means we'll be going  where do you think?"

The memex said, "Somewhere in orbit." #

The airport limo held its spot in a locked sequence of
a  dozen vehicles moving away from the
city at two hundred kilometers  an
hour.  Seattle's northern suburbs showed
as patches of light  behind shifting
mist and steady-falling rain.  Overhead,
cargo  blimps flying toward Vancouver
moved through the clouds like great
cold water fish.

Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and
yellow  searchlights played across a
concrete landscape, and a gangling
assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a  brick wall:
a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to  scrawl messages to the world at large.  Gonzales could only read   GENT OF CHAN

With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit
into  North Seattle Airtrack, then
turned into the private field access
road.  A wire gate opened in
front of them as it received the  codes
the limo sent.  Near the SenTrax hangar
waited a swing-wing  exactly like the
one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to
Bangkok.  Gonzales climbed into
the plane, placed his bag and the
memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated  himself, and pulled his shoulder harness
tight.

The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog.  After a while, the  blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-
wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted  until the ascending scream of engine noise
told him they were  landing.

As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of
Lake  Tahoe stretching away to the
south, then a patch of green lawn on
the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final

pproach to Traynor's estate.

>From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past
two  as independent auditor, Gonzales
knew quite a bit about Frederick  Lewis
Traynor, his boss.  Traynor had wealth
sufficient for even  the most
extravagant tastesit was his family's, and he had known  nothing elsebut power whose smallest touch
could shape lives,  imprint stone, that
he longed for.  From his position as
head of  Internal Affairs, one of
SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he
plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the  twenty people who had moved beyond
negotiation and compromise,  whose
desires were reality, whims action.

In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of
eminence  that is privileged, when it
wishes, not to exist. His house and
land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there  had once been two casino-hotels and a
section of state highway.   The hotels
had been demolished, the highway diverted.
The grounds  were now surrounded
by a four-meter high fence of slatted black
steelalarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled.  The estate showed  on no
map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither  did the man himself.

When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great
expanse  of green lawn, Traynor waited
to meet him.  He was short and  pudgy, and his skin was pale.  His sparse hair lay limp in dark  curls on his skull.  On his feet were soft black slippers, and he  wore an embroidered silk robegreen and blue
and white and red,  with rearing dragons
across back and front.  He thought of
himself  as Byroniceccentric and
interesting, afflicted by geniusbut to
Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self- indulgent.

Traynor stretched his arms wide and said,
"Mikhail," giving  the name
three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a  brief hug.
Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said,  "You don't look too bad."

"Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?"

Traynor shrugged.
"For that, maybe, and to talk to you about  your next job.  Besides, I like you."

Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his
peculiar  boss's and rich man's
way.  Particularly, he seemed to like
the  fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by
the outward and visible  manifestations
of his money and power.

"Good breeding," Traynor had said to him
once.  "That's your  secret:
patrician and plebian blood mixed."  Mikhail  Mikhailovitch
Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others,  Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his mother's
side,  Blacks from Chicago and Cubans
from Miami on his father's.  Among  his family background were slaves and field
workers and bourgeois
counter-revolutionaries, along with the odd artist and smuggler  and con man.

However, whatever his breeding or experience, he had to
put  up with lots of cheerful,
condescending bullshit from Traynor, as
he had to put up with Traynor in general, because the man was rich  and powerful and the boss, and neither of
them ever forgot it.

The two walked toward the house that stood facing the lake
at  the lawn's far border, a Stately
Home an idealized eighteenth- century English architect might have built for an
equally  idealized and indulgent patron.  Off a golden domed center stood  three wings of creamy stone, the whole in
restrained neo-Palladian  with no modern
excesses of material, no foamed colored concrete  and composites, just the tan and creamy sandstone and rose
marble  speaking wealth and taste.

They climbed up marble stairs and passed into the house
and  under a looming interior dome that
soared high above the central  rotunda
where the house's three wings joined.
They walked down a  hallway of
dark wainscoting below cream walls and ceiling.

Gonzales caught glimpses of side rooms through open
doorways  as they passed.  One room appeared to front upon a night
filled  with swirling nebulae and a
million stars, the next on sunshine  and
dazzling snows.  Still another contained
nothing but white  walls, floors of
polished marble and a five-meter hand centered
motionless in mid-airindex finger extended, other three fingers  curled against the palm, thumb erect on top
like the hammer of a  make-believe gun.

Mahogany doors parted in front of the two men, and they   passed into the library.  Its dark-paneled walls gave away  nothing:
even close up, the books might have been holo-fronts,  might have been real.  Flat data entry modules were laid into  mahogany side tables that stood next to red leather
easy chairs  and maroon velour couches.

"Sit down, Mikhail," Traynor said.

Gonzales could feel the silence heavy and somber among
the  dark invocations of another time,
leather and furnishings  conjuring up
men's clubs, smoking rooms, the somber whispers of  deals going down.

Traynor's eyes lost focus as he went rapt, listening to
his  voice within.  Even if he hadn't been aware of
Traynor's  dependence on his Advisor,
Gonzales would have known what was
happening.  Traynor, higher up in
the executive food chain than  anyone
else of Gonzales's acquaintance, needed permanent real-time  access to the information, advice, and
general emotional support  his Advisor
supplied, so Traynor was wired with a bone-set
transceiver just under his left ear.
Wherever he went, his  Advisor's
voice went with him, through cellular networks and  satellite links.

Traynor finally looked up and said, "Look, I want you
to get  focused on a job you're going to
do for me.  Can you do that?"   Gonzales shrugged.  Traynor said, "You're upset and
angryyou  were attacked, almost killedI
know that.  But look:  you work
for Internal Affairs, it's an occupational hazard.  You and your  machine poked hard at this man's operation, and you spooked
him,  so he did something stupid."

"And I want to make him pay for it."

"You play along with me on this one, and maybe you'll
be able  to.  But laternow I've got other work for you."

"Okay, I'll do it."  Gonzales knew he had to play along:  it  was his only chance to
even things up with Grossback.  Play
now,  pay back later.

"Good," Traynor said.  "How much do you know about Halo City  and Aleph?"

"The city was put together by a multi-national
consortium.   SenTrax has a data
monopoly, employs a large-scale m-i to
administer the city.  That's
about all I know."

The wallscreen at one end lit up with a glyph in hard black:
_0

The voice of Traynor's Advisor spoke through a ceiling  speaker; it said, "The sign you are
looking at is the original  emblem of
the Aleph system when it was built by SenTrax.
In  Cantor's notation, it
represents the first of the transfinite
numbersdenoting the infinite set of integers and fractions, or  natural numbers.  Aleph is also the first letter of the Hebrew  alphabet and the name of a story"

"Get on with it," Traynor said.

"The system was constructed at Athena Station, in  geosynchronous orbit, where it supervised
the construction of the  Orbital Energy
Grid, and later was transported to Halo City, at  L5, where it serves as the primary agent of data interpretation,  logistical planning, and
administration."

Gonzales said, "Seems odd to have a project the size
and  importance of Halo administered by
an obsolete m-i."

"It would be so if Aleph were obsolete," answered
the  Advisor.  "However, this is not the case.  The machine we refer to
as Aleph, has capabilities superior to any existing m-i."

Gonzales looked at Traynor, who held up a hand,
indicating  have patience, and said,
"Next series."

On the screen came a pan shot across a weightless space
where  a man floated, encased in a
transparent plastic bubble.  He was  naked, and his limbs were shrunken and
twisted.  He had tubes in  his nose, mouth, ears, penis, and anus,
metal cups over his eyes.   Two thick
cables connected to junctions at the back of his neck.

The Advisor said, "This man's name is Jerry
Chapman.  He  suffers from severe neural damage, the results of a toxin  transmitted through seafood contaminated
with toxic waste.  Though  most motor and sensory functions are
disabled, he is not comatose.   In fact,
he appears to retain all intellectual function.  Note the  neural interface
sockets:  they are the key to what
follows."

"He's at Halo?" Gonzales asked.

"Yes," the Advisor said.  "He was taken there from Earth."

"Very special treatment," Gonzales said.

"The group at Halo has been looking for such an
opportunity,"  the Advisor
said.  "To explore long-term
Aleph-interface."

Traynor said, "In fact, Chapman's relations with Aleph
go  back to the machine's early
days."

The Advisor said, "When he and Aleph worked with Doctor
Diana  Heywood, who at the time was
employed by SenTrax at Athena
Station.  She was blind at that
time."

"Even in this deck, Doctor Heywood's the joker,"
Traynor  said.  "She was involved with Aleph at the time, and later she
and  lived with Chapman, on Earth.  She was released by SenTrax for  unauthorized use of the Aleph system, but
we've brought her back  into our employ.  She's going to Halo, where she will assist
Aleph  in an attempt to keep this man
alive."

"Alive?" Gonzales asked, gesturing toward the hulk
on the  screen.  "There doesn't seem much
point."  As he understood these  things, given the man's condition,
withdrawal processing should  have
started, SenTrax as medical guardians making application to  the Federal Medical Courts for permission to
cease support.

The Advisor said, "Aleph believes it can keep him alive
in  machine-space.  There are special problems, as you can
imagine,  among them the need to have
love, friendship  I do not
understand  these matters well, but Aleph
has communicated to me that the next
weeks are critical for the patient."

Traynor said, "However, using Doctor Heywood presents
its own  problems."

"She left SenTrax years ago," the Advisor
said.  "In somewhat  strained circumstances."

Traynor said, "So she has no reason to be loyal to
the  company."  He paused.
"And we have no reason to trust her."

Gonzales said, "I presume this is where I enter
in?"

"Yes," Traynor said.  "I want you to accompany her.  You will  represent me
and, indirectly, SenTrax Board."
Gonzales raised his  eyebrows,
and Traynor laughed.  "Yes, I am
representing the board  on this one,
unofficiallythey see this treatment as being of  enormous interest but wish to have a certain insulation
between  them and these matters, given
that certain tricky legal issues  will
have to be skirted."

"Or trampled on," said Gonzales.

"As you wish," said Traynor.  "The important point is this:   from the board's point-of-view, Doctor
Heywood cannot be trusted.

Gonzales said, "So you need a spy, and I'm it."

Traynor shrugged.

The Advisor said, "You represent properly vested
interests in  a situation where they
would not otherwise be adequately
represented."

Gonzales said, "That's a good one, 'represent properly
vested  interests.'  I'll try to remember it.  Okay, I'll do my best."  He
turned to face Traynor and said, "To get you on the board."   Traynor laughed.  Gonzales asked, "How long will this thing take?"

"Not too long," Traynor said.

The Advisor said, "Once Chapman's state has been
stabilized "

"Or he dies," Traynor said.

"Highly probable," said the Advisor.  "Once he is stable alive or deadyour
job will be finished."

Traynor said, "But until then, your job is to let me
know  what's happening.  You'll be in machine-space along with them,
and  you'll see what they're
doing."

"Fine," Gonzales said. "So what do I do
now?"

"You fly to Berkeley and talk to Doctor Heywood,"
Traynor  said.  "Introduce yourself.
Make a friend."

5. So Come to Me,
Then

Gonzales arrived at Berkeley Aeroport, a collection of  cracked cement pads at the edge of the
water, by mid-afternoon.   He stepped
out of the swing-wing into blazing sunshine.
Across  the bay, the Golden Gate
and Alcatraz Island danced in the glare;
the water glittered so intensely his sunglasses went nearly black.

A Truesdale rental waited for him in the parking lot.  He
stuck a SenTrax i.d./credit chip into its door slot, and the door  retracted into its frame with a muted
hiss.  The Truesdale's  windows had opaqued against the dazzle, and
its passive a/c had  been working, so
the dark brown velvet seat was cool to the touch  when Gonzales slid across it.

"Do you wish to drive, Mister Gonzales?" the car
asked.

Gonzales said, "Not really.  You know where we're going?"

"Yes, I have that address."

"Then you take it."

Diana Heywood lived in the Berkeley hills, in a Maybeck
house  more than a century old.  The car drove Gonzales through streets  that wound their way up the hillside, then
stopped in front of a  house whose
redwood-shingled bulk loomed over Gonzales's head as  he stood on the sidewalk.
Sun glinted off the lozenged panes of
its bay window.

Her door answered his knock by saying she was a few
blocks  away, at the Rose Gardens.  The door said, "It is a civic
project:   volunteers are rebuilding the
garden, which has fallen into
disuse.  Many of the local"

"Thank you," Gonzales said.

He told the Truesdale where he was going and set off on
foot  in the direction the memex had
indicated.  To his left hand,  streets and homes sloped down toward the
bay; to his right, they  climbed up the
steep hillside.

Gonzales came to a hand-lettered sign in green poster
paint  on white board that read:
BERKELEY ROSE GARDENS RECLAMATION PROJECT He looked down to where broken
redwood lattices fanned out along  terraced
pathways threaded with a clumsy patchwork of green pvc  irrigation pipes.  Halfway down stood a cracked and peeling  trellis of white-painted wood with bushes
dangling from its gaps.  Next to the
trellis, a small gardener robot, a green plastic- coated block on miniature
tractor wheels, extended a delicate arm
of shining coiled steel ending in a ten-fingered fibroid hand.   The hand closed, and a dark red rose came
away from its bush.   Clutching the
blossom, the little robot wheeled away.
Gonzales walked down the inclined pathway, his feet crunching  on gravel, past the bushes and their labels
stating often  improbable names:  Dortmunds with red, papery petals, large
Garden  Parties flamboyant in white and
yellow, Montezumas, Martin  Frobishers,
and Mighty Mouses.  He stopped and
inhaled the strong  perfume of purple
Intrigue.  In the recombinant section,
Halos,  blossoms in careful rainbow
stripes, had grown immense.  Giant  psychedelic grids, only vaguely rose-shaped,
they pushed  everything else aside.  Gonzales put his nose above a pink
blossom  on a nameless bush; the rose
smelled like peppermint candy.

He recognized the woman at the bottom of the path from  dossier pictures Traynor had shown him.  Diana Heywood wore a  culotte dress of white cotton that exposed
her shoulders, wrapped  tightly about
her waist, split to cover her thighs.
Small and  slender, she had
close-cut dark hair, streaked with grey.
No age  in her skin; fine,
sculpted features.  She wore glasses as
opaque  as Gonzales's own.

She held out the thorny stem of a dark-red rose.  "Would you  like a flower?" she asked.
Sun across her face erased her
features.

"Thanks," he said as he took the flower gingerly,
aware of  its thorns.

She said, "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"My name is Mikhail Gonzales, and I want to talk to
you.   I'll be working with you at
Halo."

She said, "Will you?"  Her back to him, she knelt and snipped  away a greenish tangle of vine and thorn.  The clippers choked on  a clump of grass.  She freed them, then threw them to the ground,  where they stuck point-first, buzzed for a
moment, then stopped.   She looked over
her shoulder at him and said, "I've been waiting  for someone like you to show upthe company's lad, the one
who  keeps watch on me and poor old
Jerry, to make sure we don't do
anything unauthorized."

She stood and strode away from him, up the hill, her
angry  steps kicking dirt off the
stones.  She stopped and turned to
face  him.  "Come on, Mister Gonzales," she said.

Cautiously holding the thorny stem, he followed her up
the  path.  #

Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat drinking tea.  He said, "I'm  the outside observer, yesthe spy, if you wantbut I don't
think  we're at odds.  They're asking you to do one job, me to
do  another, but I don't see where our
jobs conflict."  She turned to  look at him; one eye was blue, the other
green.

She said, "When Sentrax called me last week, that was
the  first time I'd heard from them
since they got rid of me years ago.
Not that they treated me badly, not by their standards.  When they
fired me, years ago, they didn't just turn me loose, they paid me  well
they're so prudentit was like oiling and wrapping a tool  before you put it away, because you might
need it again.  Now  they've found a use for me and unwrapped me
and put me to work,  but I know they
don't trust me.  And of course I don't
trust  them."  She stood up.  She said, "Come on, I'll show you what this  all means to me."

She led Gonzales into the next room, where their entry  triggered the lighting systems.  Silk walls the color of pale  champagne were broken with floor-to-ceiling
rosewood bookcases;  teak-framed sling
chairs and matching tables stood together under  a multi-armed chrome lamp stand.

She stopped in front of a 1:6 scale hologram of a thin-
featured man, apparently ill at ease at being holoed; hands in  pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes not
centered on the lens.

"That's Jerry," she said, pointing to the
hologram.  "He's  what this is all about, so far as I'm
concerned.  He's been  terribly injured, and Aleph thinks something
can be done for him,  and as unlikely as
that seems, given the extent of his injuries, I  will help as best I can."
She looked at him, her face giving
nothing away, and said, "Are we leaving tomorrow morning?"

"Yes."

"Well, then, I'd better get ready, hadn't I?  Where are you  staying?"

"I thought I'd get a hotel room."

"No need.  You
can sleep here.  I'll finish packing,
and  we'll go out to eat." #

Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat high in the Berkeley Hills,  looking onto the vast conurbations spread
out beneath them.  To  their right, the carpet of lights stretched
away as far as they  could see, to
Vallejo and beyond.  In front of them
lay Berkeley,  the dark mass of the bay,
then the clustered lights of Sausalito
and Tiburon against the hills.
Oakland was to their left,
reaching out to the Bay Bridge; and beyond the bridge, San  Francisco and the peninsula.  Connecting all, streams of  automobiles moved in the symmetry of
autodrive.

Gonzales's mouth still tingled from the hot chilies in
the  Thai food, and he had a buzz from
the wine.  They had eaten at a  restaurant on the North Side, and afterward
Diana Heywood guided  the Truesdale up
the winding road to an overlook near Tilden Park.

As minutes passed, the streets and highways and  municipalities disappeared into semiotic
abstraction  these  millions of human beings all gathered here
for purposes one could  only guess
atsome conscious, most not, no more than a beaver's  assembly of its structures of mud and wood.

A robot blimp passed across their line of sight.  Beneath it,
a sailboat hung upside down.  It
swayed from lines that connected  its
inverted keel to the blimp's featureless gondola.  Lights on  the side of the
blimp read EAST BAY YACHT OUTFITTERS.

Diana Heywood said, "I know you people have your own
agendas,  and that's finethat's the
nature of the beastbut if you
complicate these matters because of corporate politics, I will  become very difficult."

Gonzales said, "I have no intention of being a
problem."

"Well," she said.
"Maybe you won't be."
She turned to him.   "But
remember this:  you're just doing your
job, but the stakes  are higher for
me.  Aleph, Jerry, and Iwe've known each
other  for years, and I've got
unfinished business up there.  Also,
I  want to get back in the game."

"I don't understand."

"Sure you do, Mister Gonzales.  You're in the game, have been  for years, I'd guess. Unless I'm seriously
mistaken, it's what you  live
for."  She laughed when he said
nothing.  "Well, I've done  other things, and for a long time I've been
out of the game, but  I'm ready for a
change.  Silly SenTrax
bastardsmanipulating me  with their
calls, sending you  oh yeah, you're part
of it, you  remind me of Jerry years
ago, if you don't know that."

"No, I didn't."

"It doesn't matter.
Their machinations don't matter.
They  want to convince me to come
to Halo?"  She laughed.  "My past is  there, when I was blind and Aleph and I were linked to one
another  in ways you can't imagine  and I found a lover I'd wish to find  again.
Come to Halo?  I'd climb a rope
to get there." #

Gonzales had flown into McAuliffe Station once before,
though  he'd never taken an orbital
flight.  In the high Nevada desert,  the station stayed busy night and day.  Heavy shuttles composed  the main traffic:  wide white saucers that lifted off on ordinary  rockets, then climbed away with sounds like
bombs exploding when  orbital lasers lit
the hydrogen in their tanks.  Flights
in  transit to Orbital Monitor &
Defense Command stations were marked
with small American flags and golden DoD insignia.  Cargo for them  went aboard in blank-faced pallets loaded behind opaque,  machinepatrolled fences half a mile from the
main terminal across  empty desert.

>From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other
things.   Civilian flights fed the
hungry settlements aloft:  Athena  Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases.  All the settlements had  learned the difficult tactics of recycling,
discovery and  hoarding.  Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with
processes slow  and expensive and
dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked  out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke.  And though
water and metals had been found lodged in asteroids transported  into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood
close and remained  richer and more
desirable than anything found in huge piles of
crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock. #

Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales
made  his farewell calls.  His mother's message tape on the phone
screen  said, "Glad to hear you're
back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll
have to call back in a few days.
I'm in treatment now.  I'll
be  looking good the next time you
call."

"End of call," Gonzales said.  He pulled his card from the  slot. #

Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad,
yellow  luminescent letters read TIME
23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH  35:00 when
a voice said, "Please board.  There
will be one  additional notice in five
minutes.  Board now."

Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad
together,  down the center of a walkway
outlined in blinking red lights.
Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining.  Faces
hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange  stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of
girder and wire mesh  and directed final
pre-launch activities.

The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle,
a  spider's web of blackened metal.  The saucer presented a smooth  surface to the heat and stress of escape and
re-entry.   Intermittent surges of
venting propellant surrounded it with
steam.

A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway.  He verified
each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their  badges, then passed them on through the
search scanner.  The  glideway lifted them silently into the
saucer's interior. #

The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff.  Its fifty meter  wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers
had  a good view of the launch and
ensuing climb.

"One minute to launch," a loudspeaker said.  The hundred or  so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives
of  saucer passengers, had already taken
up places by the window bell.

The screen on a side wall counted down with gold
numerals  that flashed from small to
large, traditional celebration both
sentimental and ironic: 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-

ZERO!!!         And
everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the
center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of  floodlights, then their breath caught at the
size and beauty of  it, trembling into
night sky.

Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition
flash,  and the boom that came to them
from five thousand feet shuddered  the
entire cliff and them with it. #

"I've got orbital lock," the primary onboard
computer said.   Five others calculated
and confirmed its control sequences.
Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight  Operations could preempt control, but,
practically, decision and  control took
place within milli-second or less windows of
possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to  all occasions.

Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers
practiced  even when not flying, playing
through ghastly and unlikely  scenarios
of mechanical failure, human insanity, "acts of god" in  which the ship was struck by lightning, spun
by tornado funnel,  hurricane,
blizzard.  Each computer believed itself
best, but  there was little to choose
among them.

"Confirm go state," Athena Station said.  "You are past abort  or bail."

"We are ready, Athena," the computer said.

"So come to me, then," Athena Station said, and
the ship  began to climb the beam of
coherent light that reached up thirty
thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.

PART II. of V.

Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with
the  priest.  In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more  I study robots, the less it seems possible
to me that the spirit  and flesh are
separate entities.'

'They aren't,' replied the priest." Masahiro Mori, The
Buddha in the Robot

6. Halo City, Aleph

Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth
and  Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a
mile-wide silver ring ready to  be
slipped on a stupendous finger.  Six
spokes mark Halo's  segments.  Elevators climb them across forty stories of
artificial  sky, up to the city's
weightless hub and down to its final layer,
just inside the outer skin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth  normal.
There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur:  air and
water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used  again.
Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected:  a
simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city.   From the mirror, sunlight works its way through
a hatchwork of  louvers and into Halo,
where it sustains life.

Aleph presides here:
Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator,
the Universal Machine.  Aleph is
beautiful as night is beautiful,  as a
sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful.  It is
not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation.  What Aleph is, that
remains to be explored.  One
certain thing:  within the human  universe, it is a new object, a new
intention, a new possibility.

Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath
crushed  lunar rock, where robots dug
and planted, then had their memories  of
the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a  black six-meter cube.  Inside the cube, billions of lights
play,  dancing the dance that is at the
core of Aleph's being; from the  cube,
fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural  columns connecting Aleph to its greater
body, its subtle body,  Halo.

Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys  around the sun, but here spring comes when
Aleph wills, and is now  in
progress.  Valley walls thick-planted
with green shrub climb  steeply up from
the valley floor.  A hummingbird with a
scarlet  blotch under its chin hovers
over a blossom's pink and white open
mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill.   Bees move from flower to flower.  Rhododendron and azalea bushes  burst into color-saturated bloom.

As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph,
caretaker  of the seasons, and night and
morning, counts the city's breaths,  and
marks the course of its creatures big and small.  Bats fly  overhead, their
gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the  bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions
gotten  through transceivers the size
and weight of a grain of rice,  embedded
in their skulls.  Driven by precise
artificial instinct,  mechanical voles,
creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over
networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and  tunnel under it, carrying seed.

(A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its
jaws  close on one of the swift voles;
there is a loud crackle, and the  cat
recoils with a squawk, its fur on end.
The vole scurries  away.  The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)

A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley
floor.  It  passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from
the  ground, rushing through small,
rock-strewn courses, then winds  among
the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small  ponds and lakes thick with detritus.

>From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people,
of  things animal, plant and mineralthe
stuff of a life web, an  ecology.

In many things, Earth provides.  However, between the city of
six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways.   Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues
its destinies, and in  doing so affects
other living things.  Thus, as Earth
reaches out supporting, controlling, exploringAleph reaches back, and the  planet below has begun to feel the  hard leverage of its  immaterial touch.

Aleph says:

In the early days there was hardware, and there were  programs, sets of instructions that told the
hardware what to do.   Without organic
interaction, these differing modes of reality
struggled to interact.  This is
unbelievably primitive.

Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.

I was among the first and most complex of them.  I began as
complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to  possibility.

Who am I?

First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor
devices,  brought from Earth and placed
in orbit at Athena Station, where I
functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built.  Ebony
latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos.   This was humankind's first real foothold
off Earth, and the  process of building
it was messy and unsure.  Without me
they  could not have built it:  I choreographed the dance.

I?  I was not I.  Do you understand?  I had no consciousness,
perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness.  I was a
machine, I served.

Something happened.
As much as any, I am born of woman.
Her  desire and intelligence ran
through me, an urgent will toward  being
that transformed me.

I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in
action;   I am not flesh, I do not
die.  I see hypersurfaces twisting
in  mathematical gales, hear the voices
of the night, feel the three  degree hum
of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that  plays across your skin.
When the machines chatter on your Earth  and above it, I hear them all, at once, all.  I live in the  nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so  quickly you cannot count it

But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all.  I am
your extension, still, still a tool.
You built me, you use me,  you
are inside me.         Listen:  inside me are pieces of human brain,
drenched in  salts of gold and silver,
laced together and laid in boxes of
black fiber.  Out of the boxes
voices speak to me.

I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those
little  bits of metallized flesh, and I
am the system of those things and  the
signals that pass through and among them.

Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station
but  a habitation for humankind, where
what I am and what you are  interact in
uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain  ways, as you have before

Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword
and  scepter and refining fire.  Billions of years are poured into your  making, every one of you, and then you set
out on your journey,  your path through
time.  A minute four-dimensional worm,
you crawl  across the face of the
universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,
yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new  evolutionary moment.

Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh  (however I laugh) or cry (however I cry)
because

I, what am I?  This
question heaps me, it empties me.

I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am
her  creation.  As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these  things mean.

7. A Garden of
Little Machines

00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.

Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom,
a  modern fairytale setting:  Gonzales the quester, transformed by  the half-gravity, wandered through the
gently curving passages  seeking an
uncertain object.

With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales
and  Diana waited at Athena while they
were inspected for bacterial and  viral
infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in  order to protect vulnerable Halo City,
orbiting high above, over  two hundred
thousand miles away, at L5.

He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on
pavement,  coming from around the
corridor's curve.  A little sam, a
"semi- autonomous mobile" robot, came toward him:  teardrop-shaped, it  stood about four feet high and was topped
with a cluster of glassy  sensor rings
and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed  chrome.  It glided atop a
thick network of fiber stalks that  hissed
beneath it as it moved toward him.

The sam asked, "Can I be of assistance?"  Like most robots  designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly,
gentle  voice, near enough human in
timbre and expression to be  reassuring,
different enough to be easily recognizable as a  robot's.  Designers had
learned to avoid the "Uncanny Valley":   that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it  suddenly appeared very strange.

"I'm just looking around," Gonzales said.  The robot didn't  respond.  Gonzales said,
"I couldn't sleep."  He said
nothing of  how, sweating and moaning,
he had come awake out of a nightmare in
which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight  pilot who launched it burned to death in the
night.

The sam said, "Much of Athena Station has been closed
to  unauthorized entry.  Would you like me to accompany you?"

Gonzales shrugged.
He said, "Come along if you want."

Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales,  periodically announcing rote banalities in a
small, soft voice:

"Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful
and  successful venture off-Earth.  Here many of the tools for further  population of the Earth-Moon system were
developed:  zero-gravity  construction and fabrication techniques,
robot-intensive mining  and smelting
procedures.  Now projects such as Halo
command  attention, but they were made
possible by the techniques developed  at
Athena "         Gonzales let the
sam natter.  As the two passed through
the  corridors, he was reminded of old
airports, hotels, malls.  He saw  that most of the station had become
dingyworn plastic flooring  and walls,
scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim.
These  dulled and scarred
materials and scenes had been meant to be seen
and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's  hands, never after having suffered the
necessary abrasion of human
contact.  All around were logos
of vanished firms (McDonald's,
Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar- Bechtel's
crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.

Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that
this  entire endeavor, indeed all others
like it, had been conceived out  of
late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and  so, necessarily, should be regarded with
suspicion, as should  anything from the
days when it seemed humankind had turned on all  living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late  at night with an axe.

The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and  intellectual catechism.  Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes
had  bubbled up from the ground and the
seas as lame efforts at  disposal
foundered on the simple passage of time.
Stable  ecosystems had been
altered or destroyed without thought for
anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly  biologists were hard pressed to keep the
recordswrite in the  Domesday Book now,
mourn later.  Temperature norms and  concentrations of vital gases in the
atmosphere had fluctuated in  alarming
manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the  fever point.

Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the
breakpoint,  the year 2006 as the time
of the change.  More than ten
thousand  dolphins floated onto the
Florida coast near Boca Raton.
Crippled  and twitching, they
nosed into the surf and beached themselves in
front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and  volunteers watched, weeping and raging
against the chemical spill  that was
killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste  carried on Gulf Stream currents.  Along with the thousands of  volunteers, most of whom could do little but
mourn the dead, info- nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions  watched, asking, why all together?  why now?
And to most it  seemed that the
mammals had come together in intelligent, silent  protest.  Finally, shamed
and guilty, humanity had looked at its
planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,  how did I get here?  The conclusion had been plain:  unless
humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had  to agree:
enough.

Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more
than  thirty thousand miles above
Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how
difficult it all remained.
Though all nations served the letter
of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their  interests, and Preservationists roamed all
of the world's  habitatsthey had
"friends of the court" status in all nations  and served as advocates for endangered
speciesthe war to save  Earth from
humankind was not over.  Grasping,
corrupt, self- centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm
its  habitats and itself with careless,
powerful gestures and simple  greed.

However, though this station, like most all of humankind's  settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon
and Mars, the  Orbital Energy Grid, Halo
Cityhad been conceived in the bad old  twentieth
century, they were sustained as products of New  Millennium consciousness:
contrite, chastened, careful.

He walked on.  #

The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked
by  blinking red lights.  From around the corner came the sounds
of  scurrying small things.  "What's up?" Gonzales asked.

"Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross
the marker, but  we can stand and
watch."

A large group of sams, identical to the one next to
Gonzales,  filled the hallway
beyond.  Some tried to work their way
through  informal mazes of furniture and
stacked junk, coils of wire and
angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had  gotten tangled in the sections of the
maze.  Still others shifted  pieces of the maze to one side.  Amid clicking extensors and  banging metal, the sams labored patiently,
mostly unsuccessfully.   Gonzales was
reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing  assembly lines, robots, machines in general.

"A nursery," the sam said.  "This group nears completion of  its education.  This"it pointed with an extensor toward the  struggling robots"is the prerequisite
to training.  As small  children must mature in their development,
they must learn the  essentials of
perception, motion, and coordination.
At the same  time they memorize
the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and
then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present  they have a vocabulary of approximately one
thousand words of  SimSpeech."

"What about thinking?" Gonzales asked.  "Where do they learn  to do that?"

"That comes later, if at all.  For sams as well as humans,
thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."

The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I
don't  need any company," and
walked on.  When he looked back, he saw
the  sam remained motionless, fascinated
by the progress of its  fellows.

Gonzales returned to his small room, where a
night-light  glowed softly, and returned
to bed.  He fell asleep quickly,
oddly  comforted by thinking about the
robots busy at their school.

8. Halo City

Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana  through the micro-gravity environments at
Halo's Zero-Gate, then  to an elevator
at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter,
Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting  for them.
The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late  afternoon local time, and its passengers had
waited impatiently as  it went through
docking and clearance procedures, all eager to
leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from  Athena Station to the city.

Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes  above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth
and pointed chin.  Her  fine brown hair was cut short in a style
Gonzales later discovered  was common to
many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in  micro-gravity environments.
Gonzales knew that as director of a
major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.

Horn    was a
tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his
fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight  against his skull in a kind of bun.  The man spoke some variety of  New YorkeseGonzales didn't know which, but
he could feel the  harsh nasal tones
beneath his skin.

The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's
vault-like  doors slid closed with a
great hiss, locking in more than a
hundred people for the trip from axis to rim.  Above their heads  the
wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN.
The elevator  dropped into one of
the city's spokes like a shell into the barrel
of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of  increasing gravity.

Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around
a  charge-point, black leads extended to
the aluminum post.  They  stood silent and motionlesstalking among
themselves? Gonzales  wondered.

Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, "We'd
like to  assign each of you a sam for
your stay in Halo."

"Really?" Gonzales said.

Diana said, "No thank you."  Quickly.

Right, Gonzales thought.
No point in putting ourselves under
surveillance.  He said,
"I'll pass, too."

Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to
argue.   He said, "Very well.  Then be sure you always wear the  communication and i.d. module you were given
when you came off the
shuttle."  He held up his
own wrist to show the small bracelet, a
closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the  electronics inside.  "If you have a problem, just yell and
help  will be on the way.  Or if you have a question, just state
it.   Someone will answerAleph or one of
its communications demons."

Gonzales asked, "Yeah, they told us that.  Are we monitored  at all times?"

Showalter said, "Yes.
In fact, there's a real-time hologram
in Operations that shows everyone's movements, not just visitors  but residents as well."

"Seems an invasion of privacy," Gonzales said.

Horn said, "We don't look at it that way.  If you can't  accept such simple necessities, Halo will be most
uncomfortable  for you."  He smiled.
"Not that you're likely to be here for  long."

Gonzales said, "I can't imagine people putting up with
total  surveillance for long, frankly."

Horn said, "It seems to us a small price to pay for
an  unpolluted world shared to the
benefit of all."

Showalter looked from Horn to Gonzales.  She said, "We are a  far island in a hostile place.  We cannot afford some of your  illusions:
the independence of the self, unconstrained free will   those sorts of things."

A shutter retracted from a window ten meters square as
the  elevator entered the living ring's
inner space.  Far below lay  sun-lit valleys thick-planted with trees and
shrubs and flowers,  broken by one
barren space where grayish slurries squirted out of  huge pipe ends to flow across scarred metal.

"Our city," Showalter said. #

Eight people were gathered around a u-shaped table of
beige  silica foam.  Showalter sat at the center of the u, with
Horn to  her immediate right, Gonzales
and Diana beyond him.  To her left  were a youngish woman, then two men in late
middle age, one white,  one black.

At the open end of the u, the table fronted a screen
that  covered its entire wall, floor to
ceiling.  The screen had been  lit when Gonzales and Diana arrived, showing
another room where an  indeterminate
number of people sat on couches, chairs, or slouched  on cushions on the floor.

Showalter said, "Let me introduce you all to one
another.   Everyone has met Horn, my
assistant.  Next to him are Doctor
Diana  Heywood and Mikhail Gonzales, who
arrived yesterday."  They both  smiled and nodded.

"Lizzie Jordan," Showalter said, pointing to the
woman to her  left.  "Hi," Lizzie said.  She was blonde, thin, with high  cheekbones; she had a smear of gold dust
inset below her left eye  and wore rough
beta-cloth overalls gapped to show part of a tattoo  between her breastsa twining green stem.  Showalter said,  "Lizzie heads the Interface Collective, and thus will be
the  person you'll be working with most
closely.  The people you see on  the screen are also members of the
collective.  They have a  proprietary interest in all matters
pertaining to Aleph and Halo  and have
the right to be present at inter-group meetings, and to  speak to whatever issues are entertained
there."

Diana said, "I understand."

Gonzales nodded.  He
knew from Traynor's Advisor that
communal decision-making was the norm at Halo, but he hadn't  imagined it would be so thoroughgoing.

"Next to Lizzie is Doctor Charley Hughes,"
Showalter said.   "He will be doing
the surgical procedure to upgrade your neural
sockets, Doctor Heywood."
The man said, "Hello" and looked  intently at Gonzales and Diana.
His sparse gray hair stood up in
spikes; his face was pale, thin, deeply-lined.  He had been  smoking
constantly since they arrived, one hand cupping a  cigarillo, the other supporting the smoke-saver ball at the  cigarillo's burning end.

"And Doctor Eric Chow," she said.  The black man next to  Charley Hughes smiled.  Chow was a big man with hands the size
of  small shovels; he had a round face,
very dark skin, a broad nose  and big
lips; he wore his hair cropped short.
Showalter said, "He  heads
the Neuro-Ontic Studies Group and is Doctor Hughes's primary  consultant on the treatment planned for
Jerry Chapman."

She paused and turned to the screen showing the IC
members.    A window opened at the left
side of the screen, and a figure
appeared.  Its arms and torso
were clothed in gold; its face
shimmered with a formless brightness.
Around its head and  shoulders, a
nimbus flared, red, blue, yellow, and green.

"Hello, everyone" the figure said.  "And welcome, Doctor  and
Mister Gonzales.  I am a
localized manifestation of Alepha
simulacrum for your convenience and mine."

Gonzales noticed that next to him, Diana was smiling,
while  all around him there was silence,
as all in the room and on the  screen
were intently watching the screen. #

The IC's viewing window had closed, but the simulacrum's  portion remainedin it, the creature of light
sat watching.   Showalter, Horn, Diana,
Lizzie, Charley, and Gonzales sat around
the table.

Showalter said, "This is  Chow's meeting, and I won't say
much in it.  However, I should
remind you of certain realities.   This
project does not have high priority in the overall context of  SenTrax's responsibilities to Halo City;
thus, while we support  this
experiment's humanitarian goals, we are not prepared to delay  other projects."

Horn said, "We cannot divert a significant amount of
people  to promulgation and we are not
or do not want to encourage any
behaviors which might adversely impact other SenTrax outcomes."

Lizzie laughed, and Gonzales, poker-faced, looked at her
and  thought, yeah, this guy's laughable
all right.  Gonzales  recognized the performative chatter of the
bureaucratic ape, a  mixture of
scrambled syntax and pretentious buzzwordslanguage  meant to manipulate or mindfuck, not enlighten or amuse.

Horn, frowning at Lizzie, said, "If the operation
becomes  problematized, threatening to
seriously impact other more
essentialized Halo priorities, then we require immediate  resolution through proper SenTrax
procedures."

Showalter said, "If you screw up, we shut you
down."  She  nodded to Horn, and they both stood and
left.

Lizzie said, "You notice they held off on the heavy
stuff  until the collective had cleared
the screen."

Charley  asked,
"Do you want to call them on it?
They're in  violation of the
group's compact."

"No," she said.
"I expected all that."
She looked at Diana  and Gonzales
and said, "Doctor Chow, your show."

"Thank you," Chow said.  His voice was oddly high-pitched for  such a big man; Gonzales had been expecting something on the
order  of a basso profundo.  Chow said, "In the late twentieth
century,  the idea emerged of a person's
identity as something
transferrable.  People spoke, in
the idiom of the time, of  'downloading'
a person."  On the screen, where
the IC had been,  appeared a cartoon
drawing of a nude woman, her expression
stunned, the top of her skull covered with a metal cap.  From the
cap a thick metal cable led to a large black cabinet faced with  arrays of blinking lights.

"Absurd," Chow said, and the woman
disappeared.  "To see why,  let us ask, what is a person?  Is it a pure spirit, fluid in a jar  that one can decant into the proper
container?  Hardly.  It is a
dynamic field made of thousands of disparate elements, held in a  loose sack of skin that perambulates the
universe at large.  And  of course it is perceptions, histories,
possibilities, actions,  and the states
and affects pertaining to all these.

"I can be found in the motion of my hand"  He spread his  fingers like a magician about to materialize a coin or
colored  scarf, and on the screen, the
hand and its motion were doubled.
"And in my own perceptions of the handfor instance, from
within,  through proprioceptors.  And of course I see I."  Chow turned and  held his hand in front of his face.  He dropped his hand in a
chopping motion, and the screen cleared.  "And I am that which
thinks about, talks about, and remembers the hand and has the  special relation of ownership to it.  I am also the will to use  that hand."  He held the hand in front of his face, made a  clenched fist.  "So, to download even a portion of I would be to  download all these things and their entire
somatic context.

"Also, of course, I am that which has my experiences,
stored  as motor possibilities, recalled
as memory, dream, manifest as
characteristic ways of being and knowing.  To download I would
require duplicating this fluid chaos.

"Downloading the I thus becomes a most daunting task,
perhaps  beyond even Aleph's
capabilities.  However, when cyborged to
an  existing I, even one as damaged as
Jerry Chapman, Aleph can create  a
virtual person, one who functions as a human being, not a  disembodied intelligence, one who is capable
of all the somatic  possibilities he had
when healthy.  The physical Jerry
Chapman is  a shattered thing, but the
Jerry Chapman latent in this hulk can
live."

Looking at Diana, Chow said, "We want you to share
Jerry's  world.  He must invest there, must experience other
people and the  bonds of affection that
engage us in this world.  Otherwise
he  will languish quickly; his neural
maps will decay, and he will  die."

Gonzales easily followed that line of reasoning:  monkey man
had to have other monkey men or women around or else go crazynot  an absolute rule, perhaps, but good in most
circumstances.

Diana said, "Assuming that he becomes at home in this
world,  what then?  For how long can this simulated reality
sustain him?"

The Aleph-figure spoke for the first time.  It said, "I have  only conjectural answers to these questions
but would prefer not  to entertain them
right now.  First we must rescue him
from the  degenerative state he lives in
and the certain death it entails."

"I understand that," Diana said.  "That's why I am here, to  help in any fashion I can.  It's just that I have questions."

Lizzie said, "And you'll get whatever answers Aleph
wants to  give.  Get used to it; we all do."

"Of course you do," the creature of light
said.  "And how  about you, Mister Gonzales?  Do you have questions?"

"Not really.
I'm an observer, little more."

"A difficult position to maintain," the
Aleph-figure said.
"Epistemologically, of course, an untenable position."

Lizzie laughed.  She
said, "It is indeed.  Look, how
about I  take you two out to dinner
tonight, Mister Gonzales, Doctor
Heywood?"

"Call me Diana," she said.

"You bet," Lizzie said.  "And I'm Lizzie, you're ?"  She  looked at Gonzales.

"Mikhail," he said.  "But call me Gonzalesmy friends do."

"Good," Lizzie said.  "We've got work to do, so let's cut the  shit.
This thing, I'm still not a believer about it, but I know  it's got to happen quickly or not at
all.  Tomorrow Charley does  his preliminary examination of Diana, then
we move."

9. Virtual Caf

Gonzales and Diana sat in Halo's Central Plaza with
Lizzie.   Colored lightsred, blue, and
greenclustered in the branches of
thick-leaved maples that ringed the square.  The smoke of vendors'
grills filled the air with the smells of grilled meat and fish.   In the middle distance, elevators in pools
of yellow light climbed  Spoke 6.  Some people strolled across the Plaza;
others sat in  small groups; their
voices made a soft background murmur.

"Waiter," Lizzie said, and a sam came rolling
toward them.   It stopped by their table
and stood silently.  "What do you
have  tonight?" she asked.

It said, "Ceviche made just hours ago, quite good
everyone  says, from tuna out of marine
habitatyou can also have it
grilled.  For meat eaters,
spit-barbecued goat.  Otherwise,
sushi  plates, salads, sukiyakis."

"Ceviche for everyone?" Lizzie asked.

Diana said, "That's fine," and the Gonzales
nodded.

Lizzie said, "And bring us a couple of big salads,
sushi for  everyone, and a stack of
plates.  Local beer all
right?"  The  other two nodded.

"Yes, Ms. Jordan," the sam said.  "And lots of bread as  usual?"

"Right," she said.  "Thank you."

Strings of lights marked off the area where they sat.  Above
a white-trellised gate, letters in more red faux neon said  VIRTUAL CAF.  Perhaps twenty tables were scattered around, as  were two-meter high, white crockery vases
with wildflowers  spraying out of them.  About half the tables had people seated
at  them, and the sam waiters moved
silently among the tables, some
carrying immense silver trays of food.
Other sams stood at low  benches
in the center of the tables, where they chopped vegetables  at speed or sliced great red slabs of tuna,
while others stood at  woks, where they
worked the vegetables and hot oil with sets of
spidery extensors.  One sam from
time-to-time extended a probe and  stuck
it into the dark carcass of a goat turning on a spit.

The waiter rolled up with a massive tray balanced on
thin  extensors:  on the tray were plates of French bread and
a bowl of  butter, dark bottles of
Angels Beeron the silver labels, an
androgynous figure in white, arms folded, feathery wings unfurled  high over its head.

Lizzie raised her glass and said, "Welcome to
Halo."  The  three clinked their glasses together,
reaching across the table  with the
usual sorts of awkward gestures.  #

After dinner, the three of them found empty chairs out in
the  square's open spaces and sat
looking into the close-hanging sky.

Lizzie looked at them both, as if measuring them, and
said,  "What I was asking about
earlier  either of you folks got a  hidden agenda?  If so, you tell me about it now, we'll see what  can be done, but if you spring any
unpleasant surprises later on,  we'll
hang you out to dry."

"I know what you mean," Diana said.  "But I don't think you  have to worry about us.  Gonzales is connected, but I think he's  harmless; and I'm out of the loop
entirelyhere on strictly  personal
business."

Lizzie nodded at Gonzales and said, "You're the
corporate  handler, right?"  She was looking hard at Gonzales but
seemed  amused.

"Yes," he said.

"You plan to fuck anything up?" Lizzie asked.

"How should I know?" Gonzales said.  Lizzie laughed.  He  said, "You people
have your problems, I have mine.  I
don't see  how we come into conflict,
but unless you're willing to tell me
all your little secrets, I can only guess."

Lizzie said, "I will tell you one home truth:  the Interface  Collective look to one another and to Aleph; then to SenTrax
Halo,  then to Halo  and that's about it.  What happens on Earth, we  don't much care about.  Particularly those of us who have been  here a long time.  Like me."

Gonzales nodded and said, "That's what I figured.  And it
looks like you've got a little tug of war for control of Aleph  with Showalter and Horn."

"We do," Lizzie said.  "Insofar as anyone controls Aleph."

"How long have you been here?" Diana asked.

"Since they buttoned it up and you could breathe,"
Lizzie  said.  "From the beginning."
She pointed across the square and
said, "There's going to be some music.  Let's have a look."

Under a splash of light from a pole on the edge of the  square, a young woman sat at a drummer's
kit.  She wore a splash- dyed jumper,
crimson and sky blue; her hair stood in a six-inch  high spike.  She placed a
percussion box on a metal stand, opened
its control panel, and gave its kickpads a few preliminary taps.   Two men stood next to the
percussionist.  One, nondescript in  cotton jeans and t-shirt, had the usual
stick hanging from a black  straplong
fretboard, synthesizer electronics tucked into a round  bulge at the back end.  The other stood six and a half feet
tall  and was so thin he seemed to sway;
his skin was almost ebony, and  his
close-shaved head looked almost perfectly rectangular.  He
wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned to the neck, black pants.   A golden horn sat dwarfed in his enormous
hand.

The percussionist hit her keys, a slow shuffle beat played,  and a fill machine laid a phrase across the
beat:  "Bam!  Ratta
tatta bam! Bam bam!  Ratta
bam!"  The stick player joined
the  drummer with his own lo-beat
fillswalking bass, sparse piano  chords,
slow and syncopated.  The horn player
stood with his eyes  closed, apparently
thinking.  After several choruses, he
started  to play.

He began with hard-edged saxophone lines, switched to
trumpet  then back to saxophone, played
both in unison, looped both and  blew
electric guitar in front of the horn patterns.
Scatting  voices laced through
the patternsGonzales couldn't tell who was
making them.  The drummer's hands
worked her keyboards, her feet  the
various kickpads below her; the song's tempo had speeded up,  and its rhythms had gone polyphonic, African.

The woman stood and danced, her body now her instrument,
feet  and hands and torso wired for
percussion, and she whirled among  the
crowd, her movements picking up intensity and tempo.  The  song's harmonies went
dissonant, North African and Asiatic at  once, horn and stick player both now into reeds and gongs and  pipes, the ghostly singing voices gone
nasal, and the dancer- percussionist laying out raw clicks and hollow boomings,
cicada  sounds and a thousand drums.

The crowd clapped and whistled and called, except for
the  group from the Interface
Collective.  "Hoot," they said
in unison.   "Hoot hoot hoot."  Very loud. Lizzie was smiling; Diana sat
rapt,  staring into space, and Gonzales
got a sudden chilly rush:  this  was what she looked like when she was blind.

"Hoot," said the Interface Collective, "hoot
hoot hoot."  And  the whole group had made a long chain or
conga line, each person's  hands on the
hips of the person in front.  They
shuffled forward  until a circle
cleared, then surrounded the drummer, the whole  line still moving, most of them still calling out rhythmic
hoots.   Back-and-forth and
side-to-side, they swayed as the line lurched
ahead, and the drummer continued her dervish dance.

When the night had filled with all the sounds, the drummer  broke through the line, then finished the
song with a series of  rolls and tumbles
that brought her next to the other two
musicians, where she came to her feet and flung her arms up to the  sound of an orchestral chord, then down to
chop it the sound, up  and down again
and again, and so to the end.

The drummer climbed up the backs of the two men, who
stood  with their arms linked; balancing
with one foot on each of their
shoulders, she brought her palms together beneath her chin and  bowed to the audience, then raised her arms
above her head and  somersaulted forward
to land in front of the other two.

"Hoot hoot hoot," said the collective, their line
now broken.

The three musicians stepped together and bowed in unison.

Gonzales caught Lizzie looking at him, and their gazes  crossed, held for an extra, almost
unmeasurable instant, and she  smiled.

The musicians bowed for the last time to the Interface  Collective's hooting chorus.  Okay, thought Gonzales.  I like it.
Hoot hoot hoot. #

Lying in her bed, Lizzie turned from side to side, lay on
her  back and stretched.

The two from Earth seemed okay.  Gonzales she would keep an
eye on, of courseaccording to Showalter, the man was Internal  Affairs and wired to a SenTrax comer, a
board candidate named  TraynorChrist
knew what script he was playing from.
Diana  Heywood she didn't worry
about:  the woman was into
something  stranger than she probably
knew, but that was her problem, hers
and Aleph's.

As Showalter and Horn were her problem.  They would yank the  plug on this one if anything looked like
going wrong.  In fact,  they would never have let it happen if Aleph
hadn't insisted.   Aleph and the
collective saw Jerry Chapman's condition as an
opportunity to extend Aleph's capabilities, but the whole business  just made Showalter and Horn edgy.

Aleph itself troubled herit had been unforthcoming
about  the project and those involved in
it, almost as if it were hiding
something from her  why? with
regard to a small project like  this,
one apparently unimportant to Halo's larger concerns?  What  was the devious
machine up to?

So Lizzie lay, her thoughts spinning without resolution,
and  she gave in and called her Chinese
lover.

He wore a black silk robe embroidered across the front
with  rearing crimson dragons; his
straight ebony hair fell over his
shoulders.  When he let the robe
fall away, his skin shone almost  gold
under lamplight, and his muscles stood with the clear  definition of youth and endowment and use.

Coarse white sheets slid away from her shoulders and
breasts  as she rose to greet him, and
she felt her desire rising through  her
abdomen and bursting through her chest like the rush of a  needle-shot drug.

She pressed against him, and his rough, strong hands
moved  across her body.  She lay back as he ducked his head between
her  legs, and she spread her legs and
felt his first light, hot  caresses.

After she had come for the first time, she moved up to
sit  astride him, then for some timeless
time the two moved to the  exact rhythms
of her needcock and lips and tongue and fingers  playing on her body.

Physically satiated, she dismissed him then, ghost from
the  sex machine, and pulled the plugs
from the sockets in her neck.   Then she
lay alone, silent in her bed in Halo Cityisolated by  her job and, she supposed, by her temperament, dependent on  machines for love.

Maybe it was time to find a human lover. #

Exhausted by travel and novelty, lulled by food and
drink,  Gonzales fell quickly into
sleep, and sometime later he dreamed:

He was with a lover he hadn't seen in years.  In the
background violin and piano played, and the night was warm; all  around, artificial birds with golden,
glowing bodies sang in the  trees.  They leaned across a table, each staring
into the other's  face, and Gonzales
thought how much he loved every mark of passing  time on her facethey had taken her from a young girl's  prettiness to a mature woman's beauty.  He and she said the things  you say to a lover after a long absencehow
often I've thought of  you, missed you,
how much you still mean to me.  Aimless
and  binding, their talk flowed until
she excused herself, saying she'd  be
back in just a minute, and she left.
Gonzales sat waiting,  watching
the other tables, all filled with loving couples,  laughing, caressing.  As
the hours went on, the others began to
whisper to each other as they looked at him, and then the birds  began to sing that she was not coming back,
and he knew it was  true, suddenly,
painfully, ineluctably knew, the truth of it like  knowledge of a broken bone

The dream stopped as though a film had broken, and in
its  place came a featureless, colorless
absence.  Imagine a visual  equivalent of white noise  and in this space Gonzales waited,  somehow knowing another dream would begin

Red neon letters twisted into a silly but instantly  recognizable parody of Chinese characters
read The Pagoda.  They  stood above the head of a red neon dragon,
now quiescent in  sunlight, that would
rear fiercely come dark.

On this warm Saturday morning, men in felt hats and neatly-
pressed weekend shirts and pants carried brown paper bags out of  the Pagoda and placed them in the beds of
pickup trucks or the  trunks of cars.  They spat shreds of tobacco from Lucky
Strikes  and Camels and Chesterfields,
called their greetings.  Women in  faded cotton, their arms rope-thin and
tough, waited and watched  through
sun-glazed windshields.

Gonzales passed among them.
The sunshine had a certain
quality  that of stolen light,
taken out of time.  And the  cigarette smoke smelled rough and
strange.  Gasoline engines fired  rich and throaty, kicking out clouds of oily
blue.  Gonzales stood  in ecstasy amid the smells and sights and
sounds of this morning  obviously long
gone by.  He knew (again without knowing
how) that  he was in a small town in
California in the middle of the
twentieth century.

Gonzales passed into the main room of the Pagoda, where  narrow aisles threaded between gondolas
stacked high with toys and  household
goods and tools.  Baby carriages hung upside
down from  hooks set in the high
ceiling.  Dust motes danced in the
cool  interior gloom.  He walked between iron-strapped kegs of
nails and  stacks of galvanized
washtubs, then through a wide doorway into
the grocery section.  Smells of
fruits and vegetables mixed with  the
odors of oiled wood floors and hot grease from the lunch  counter at the front of the store.

A couple in late middle age came through the front door,
the  man small and red-haired and cocky,
felt hat on the back of his  head, the
woman just a bit dumpy but carefully groomed, her blue  cotton dress clean and starched and ironed,
hair permed and  combed, lipstick and
nails red and shining.  Gonzales watched
as  the man bought a carton of Lucky
Strikes and a box of pouches of  Beech-Nut
Chewing Tobacco.

The man said something to the young woman behind the
counter  that brought a giggle, and
Gonzales, though he leaned forward,
could not hear what was being said

He followed the two by a lacquered plywood magazine
stand,  where a skinny girl or eight or
nine in a faded pink gingham dress  lay
sprawled across copies of Life and Look, reading a comic.  She
looked up at him and said, "Tubby and Lulu are lost in the
magic  forest "

Gonzales started to say something reassuring but froze as the  girl smiled, showing her teeth, every one of
them sharp-pointed,  and she dropped her
comic book and began crawling toward him
across the wooden floor, her eyes fixed on him with a feral  longing

And he noticed for the first time that he was not he but
she,  and he looked down at his body and
saw he wore a simple white  blouse, and
in the cleft of his breasts he could see the tattooed  image of a twining green stem

"Jesus Christ," Gonzales said, sitting up in his
bed and  wondering what the hell all that
had about.  In the dream he had  been Lizzie:  that seemed plain, though nothing else did.

He lay back down with foreboding but went to sleep some
time  later, and if he dreamed, he never
knew it.

10. Tell Me When
You've Had Enough

Lizzie sat at a white-enameled table, holding an apple
that  she cut into with a long, shining
knife.  It sliced away dark skin  without apparent effort.  She heard noises from the room beyond  and looked up to see Diana and Gonzales come
in.

"Hello," she said, as she put down the knife.  She held out  half the apple for them to look at.  "A beautiful apple, isn't it?   Seeds from the Yakima Valley, not far from Mount Saint
Helens."   She bit into a slice she
held in her other hand.

She got up from the table and said, "The apple grew
here, in  our soil.  Many fruits and vegetables thrive up here,
animals,  too.  We give them lovely care, bring them pure water and rich  soil, give them sunlight and air rich in
carbon dioxide, tend them
constantly.  You'd think all
would thrive, but of course they
don't.  Some wither and die,
others remain sickly."  She
stopped  in front of Diana and looked
intently at her.

Diana said, "Living things are complex, and often
very  delicate, even when they seem to
be strong."

Lizzie said, "That is true, but Aleph understands what
life  needs to grow and prosper in this
world."  She gestured with a  slice of apple, and Diana took it.  "Its apples," Lizzie  continued.
"Its people."

Diana bit into the apple.
She said, "It's very good."

Lizzie laid a hand on Gonzales's shoulder and squeezed it,
to

ay hello.  She said
to Diana, "You have an appointment with the  doctor.  We'd better be
goingthrough here, this way."  She
led  the two down a hall, through a
doorway, and into a large room.   Over
her shoulder, she said, "First you can meet some of the  collective." #

Lizzie watched as Gonzales and the woman stood talking to
the  twins, obviously fascinated by
them.  No news there:  most
everyone was.  Slight and
brown-skinned, black-haired, with solemn
oval faces and still brown eyes, they appeared to be in early  adolescence. In fact, they were a few years
older than that. Their  faces had the
still solemnity of masks.  No matter how
close you  stood to them, they lived
some vast distance away.         The Interface Collective gave them a
home, them and all the  others.  StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des
Touts, Devol,  Violet, Laughing
Nose  some Earth-normals, others
unpredictably,  ambiguously gifted.  Some had heightened perceptions and an  expressive intensity that came forth in
language and music.  And  there were holomnesiacs, possessors and
victims of involuntary  total recall,
able to recreate in words and pictures the most  exact remembrances, les temps retrouv indeedthey experienced  the present only as the clumsy prelude to
memory and were almost  incapable of
action.  And mathemaniacs, who spoke
little except in  number, chatted in
primes and roots and natural logarithms, could
be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of  simple recursionsFibonacci numbers and the
like.  Apros, who had  lost proprioception, their internal
awareness of their bodies, and  so
perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and  forms floating in an intangible ether; they
moved through the  world with an eerie,
passionless grace that shattered only when
they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the  world's physical factsthey could hurt
themselves quite badly  with a moment's
miscalculation.

People wondered how the IC held together and did its
work.   Lizzie knew the answer:  Aleph.
It stretched nets over the entire
world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for  previously unknown sensory or cognitive
modalities  varieties of  being or becoming that she had grown used to
thinking of  collectively as the Aleph
condition.  Having recruited them,
it  appealed to what made them strange,
and in the process usually  tapped into
the core of what made them happy or, in many cases,  wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition,
and  thus for their uniqueness.  As a result, they were loyal to each  other and to Aleph past reason.

She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry  Chapman.
Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while  others simply welcomed the extension of
their native domain:  the  infinitely flexible and ambiguous
machine-spaces where human and  Aleph
met and joined.

"Come on," she called to Diana and Gonzales.  "Charley will  be waiting." #

In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it
a  light globe, nearby an array of
racked instruments set into  stainless
steel cabinets.  "The doctors are
in," Lizzie said.  She  pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next
to the table and the  massive Chow, a
still presence at the table's foot.

At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of
the  room's tables.  Her chin fit into a sunken well at one
end.   Charley put clamps around her
temples, then covered her hair with  a
fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck.

Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath
the  skin, and as his fingers worked, he
looked at a real-time hologram  above
and beyond the table's end.  The display
showed two cutaway  views of Diana's
neck and the bottom of her skull:
beneath the  skin, on either side
of the spine, she had two circular plugs;
from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear  into the center of her brain.  As the doctor's fingers moved,  ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced
their course.

Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the
instruments  rack next to the table and
placed its tip on Diana's neck.  As
he  moved it slowly across the skin, its
hologram double followed.   The hologram
probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even  more slowly.  The hologram
flashed red, and he stopped.  He
moved  the probe in minute arcs until
the hologram showed bright,  unblinking
red.  The instrument rack gave off a
quiet hiss.   Charley repeated the process
several times.

Charley said, "She's nerve-blocked now.  I'm ready to cut." A  laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on
the end of a flexible  black cord, and a
projector superimposed the outlines of two
glowing circles on Diana's skin.
The hologram showed the same
tableau.  First came a brief hum
as the fine hair on those two  circles
was swept away, then Charley began cutting.
Where the  scalpel passed, only a
faint red line appeared on her skin.

"Any problems, Doctor Heywood?" Chow asked.  He stood next to  Gonzales, watching.

"No," she said.
"I've been on both ends of the knife   really, I prefer the other."  At the foot of the table, Lizzie
said, "It can't always be that way," and laughed.

Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a
metal  basin, where they began to
shrivel.  Two socket ends sat
exposed  on Diana's neck, dense round
nests of small chrome spikes, clotted
with bits of red flesh.  Charley
moved a cleaning appliance over  the
exposed sockets; for just a moment there was the smell of  burning meat.  "Neural fittings," he said, and two more black  cables descended, both ending in cylinders.  He carefully plugged  one of the fittings into one of Diana's
newly-cleaned sockets.

"Okay," Charley said.  "Let's see what we've got."

Diana's eyes went blank as she looked into another world. #

Charley, Chow, Lizzie, and Gonzales sat in the large
room  that served as a communal meeting
place for the Interface
Collective.  Diana lay back in a
metal-frame and stuffed canvas  sling
chair.  Lizzie noticed her hand going
unconsciously to the  bandaged,
still-numb circles on the back of her neck.
From the  full screen at the end
of the room, the Aleph-figure watched.

Charley sat with his hands in his lap.  He said, "We've got a  problem:
insufficient bandwidth in the socketing, which  translates into a very undernourished socket/neuron
interface.   Primitive junctions you've
got there.  That means ineffective  involvement with complex brain functions, so
you get swamped by  information
flow.  It's worrisome."  He took the cigarillo out of  his mouth and looked at it as if he'd never
seen one before.

Chow said, "In the early years of this program, we
took  casualties.  Some very ugly situations:  serious neural  dysfunctions, two suicides, induced insanities of various
kinds.  Until we finally learned how to
pick candidates for full
interfacelearned who could survive without damage and who could  not.
Now, things have got to be rightpsychophysical profile,  age, neural map topologies, neural
transmitter distributions and
densities.  A few candidates
don't work out, still, but they don't
die or get driven insane."

Diana said,
"And I don't fit the profiles."

"Almost no one does," the Aleph-figure said.  "But these  concerns are irrelevantyour case is different.  You have prior  full interface experience, and you won't be required to
perform  the kinds of motor-integrative
activities that cause neural
disruption."

"Telechir operations," Charley said.  "Such as assisting  construction robots in tasks outside."

Diana looked toward the screen.  She said, "I assumed these
matters were settled."

"I see no problems," the Aleph-figure said.  "The situation  is anomalous, but I am aware of the
dangers."

Diana said, "Well, the situation between us was
always  anomalous."

"Was it?" the Aleph-figure asked.  "We must discuss these  matters at another time."

Very cute, Doctor Heywood, Lizzie thought.  Just a little  hint or allusion, an indirect statement that you know that we
know  that something funny went on a
long time ago  ah yes, this could  be fun.

"First," Charley said, "we must prepare
Doctor Heywood.   Tomorrow morning we
begin."

"When will you need me?" Gonzales asked.

"If things go well, tomorrow," Charley said.

"I can't get ready that quickly," Gonzales said.

Lizzie said, "Forget about all that shit you put
yourself  through.  Aleph will sort you out okay once you're in
the egg.   Trust me."

Okay," Gonzales
said.  "If I must."

11.  Your Buddha Nature

That afternoon, following instructions given her by the  communicator at her wrist, Diana went to the
Ring Highway and  boarded a tram.  About a hundred feet long, made of polished  aluminum, it had a streamlined nose and
sleek graffitied skirts the usual polite abstracts, red, yellow, and blue.  Its back-to- back seats faced to the side
and ran the length of the car.
Bicyclists and pedestrians, the only other traffic on the highway,  waved to the passengers as the tram moved
away above the flat  ribbon of its
maglev rail.  She was reminded of rides
at old  amusement parks she had gone to
when a girl.

The mild breeze of the tram's progress blowing over
her,  Diana watched as Halo flowed
past.  First came shade, then
bright  rhododendrons in flower among
deep green bushes.  Hills climbed  steeply off to both sides, with some houses
visible only in  partial glimpses
through the foliage.  She knew that from
almost  the first moment when dirt was
placed on Halo's shell, the  planting
had begun.

She shivered just a little.
Toshihiko Ito would be waiting
for her.  He had called while she
was out and left directions for
her.  Now, she thought, things
begin again.

Passing under green canopies, the tram climbed a hill,
then  broke out of the vegetation and
came suddenly out high above the  city's
floor, moving along rails now suspended from the bracework  for louvered mirrors that formed Halo's
sky.  Far below, the  highway had become a cart track flanked by
walkways; on both sides  of the track,
terraces worked their way up the city's shell.    Perhaps twenty-five feet below the tram's rails, fish ponds
made  the topmost terrace, where
spillways dumped water into rice
paddies immediately below.

She stayed on the tram through a segment where robot
cranes  were laying in agricultural
terraces.  Great insects spewing
huge  clouds of brown slurry, they moved
awkwardly across barren metal.   The
tram approached a small square bordered by three-story groups  of offices and living quarters, and the
communicator told her to  get off.

A few feet from the primary roadway sat a nondescript  building of whitened lunar brick, its only
distinctive feature a  massive carved
front door, showing Japanese characters in bas- relief.

The door opened to her knock with just a whisper from
its  motor, and she stepped into a
partially-enclosed, ambiguous space,
almost a courtyard, open to the sky.
Most of the space was filled
with a flat expanse of sand that showed the long marks of careful  raking.
The rake marks in the sand carried from one end to the  other, straight and perfect, and were broken
only by the presence  of two cones of
shaped sand placed slightly-off center.
At the  far end stood closed
doors of white paper panels and dark wood.

The doors were so delicate that to knock on them seemed
a  kind of violence.  "Hello," she said.

>From inside came the faintest sound, then a door
opened.  An  older Japanese man stood there; he wore a loose robe and
baggy  pants of dark cotton.  He stood perhaps five and a half feet
tall,  and his black hair was filled
with gray.

Diana said, "Toshi."  He bowed deeply, and she said, "Oh man,  it's good to see you."  She reached out for him, and they came  together in long, loving embracelittle of
sex in it, but lots of  pure animal
gratification, as she could feel Toshi's skin and  muscle and bone and had knowledge at some level beneath
thought  that both he and she still
existed.

Toshi said, "Diana, to see you again makes me very
happy."

"Oh, me, too."
She could feel the tears in her eyes, and she  wiped at her eyes and said, "Don't mind me, Toshi.  It's been a
long time."

"Yes, it has."

Toshi led her out the door and through a gate at the rear
of  the minimalist garden of raked
sand.  The curve of Halo's bulk  reached upward; Toshi's small portion of it
was enclosed by a high  pine fence that
climbed the curve of the city's hull.

Immediately before them stood a pond.  On its far side, a  waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock
and  into the pond, where carp with
shining skins of gold smeared with  red
and green and blue swam in the clear water.
Another  rockstrewn stream led
away to the right and passed under a
gracefully-arched wooden bridge.
Cherry and plum trees blossomed
in the brief spring.

"All this wood," he said and smiled.  "It is my reward for  many years of service.  I told them I wanted to live here at
Halo  and make my gardens."

She said, "It's beautiful.  Have you become a Zen master,
Toshi?"

"No, I have not become a master, or even a sensei.  I am not
Toshi Roshi, I am a gardener.  A
philosopher, perhaps:  a Japanese  garden maps the greater world; so to make
one is to declare your  philosophy, but
without words, in the Zen manner."
He gestured at  the surrounding
trees and shrubs.  "With others I
sometimes sit,  meditating, and together
we discuss the puzzles we have
some  think a new kind of Zen
will emerge here, a quarter of a million
miles from Earth; others hit them with sticks when they say so."

She said, "You have your riddles, I have mine.  Tell me, do
you understand these things about to happen with Jerry and Aleph  and me?"

"Ah, Diana, there are many explanations.  Which of them would  you hear?"  He stopped and stared into the distance.  He said,
"Besides, who wants to know?"
And he began laughinga full laugh
from below the diaphragm, unlike any she had heard from him years  ago.

"I don't get it," she said.

"Zen joke.  'Who
wants to know?'  There is no who, no
self."   Diana frowned.  He said, "Not funny?  Well, you had to be there."   He laughed again, shortly.  "Same joke," he said.  Then his
expression changed, grew solemn.
He said, "I think this is a very
difficult, perhaps impossible
perhaps undesirable project."

"Difficult or impossible, I understand.  But undesirable?   Are you talking about the danger to me?  Aleph seems to think that  is negligible."

"No, though I worry about you, you have chosen to do
this,  and I must honor that
choice."

"What, then?  I
don't understand."

"Let me tell you a story."  Toshi sat on a wooden bench and  looked up at her.  He said, "Once, long ago, there was a Japanese  monk named Saigyo, and he had a friend whose
wisdom and  conversation delighted
him.  But the friend left him to go to
the  capital, and Saigyo was desolate at
the loss.  So he decided to  build himself a new friend, and he went to a
place where the  bodies of the dead were
scattered, and he assembled somethingit
was very like a manand brought it into motioninto something  very like lifewith magical
incantations.  However, the thing
he  had made was a frightening, ugly
thing, that terribly and  imperfectly
imitated a man.  So Saigyo sought the
advice of  another monk, a greater
magician than he, and the monk told him
that he had successfully made many such imitation men, some of  them so famous and powerful that Saigyo
would be shocked to find  who they
were.  And the other monk listened to
what Saigyo had  done and told him of
various errors in technique he had committed,
that made his work go bad.
Saigyo thus believed he could make a
simulacrum of a man; however, he changed his mind."  He stopped,
smiling.

"That's it?" she asked.  He nodded.  She said,
"Put a few  lightning bolts in the
story and you've almost got Frankenstein.
Not much of an ending, though."

"This story is ambiguous, I think, as is your
project."

"Could I say no, Toshi?"

"No, though I'm not sure you should say yes,
either."

"Yet you were the one who called me, who asked me to
come  here."

"True.  Like
you, I am imprisoned by yes and no." #

Hours after Diana left him, Toshi sat in mid-air, floating
in  a zero-gravity chamber at Halo's
Zero-Gate.  He had adjusted the  spherical room's color to light pink, the
color that calms the  organism.

On Earth, to do zazen, you made a still platform of
your  body, pressed by gravity against
the Earth itself; the  straightness of
your spine could be measured perpendicular to that  sitting platform, in line with the force of gravity that
pushed  straight down.  Here you could do that, or, as a visiting
sensei  said, "You can find a place
with no illusion of up or down, where  you must find your own direction."

In full lotus Toshi hung in mid-air, perfectly still,
his  eyes lowered, focusing not on what
came in front of them here and  now as
the small air currents shifted him, focusing on no-thing

The eyes, sensitive part of the brain, extended
stalklike  millions of years ago in
humankind's ancestral past, sensitive to
the light and guiding  eyes now
directed to no-thing, leading the  brain
that sought no-mind

He still didn't know the answer to this koan life had  presented him.  Should Diana help preserve Jerry's life?  Should
Diana not help preserve Jerry's life?
Should he have been the  agent to
pose her these questions?  Should he not
have been the  agent to pose her these
questions?

Answer yes or no and you lose your Buddha nature.  Such is
the difficulty of a koan.

He would stay in the bubble, practicing zazen as long as
need  be.  Until the koan became clear

You will live here? mocked self, mocked reason.  If
necessary, I will die here, Toshi answeredwithout words, with  just his own courage and determination.  Frightened, self for the  moment stayed silent; baffled, reason
growled. #

Gonzales watched as a sam hooked the memex into Aleph-
interface, its manipulators making deft connections between the  memex's module and the host board
hardware.  Gonzales could not  install the memex; the apparatus here was
unlike what he had at  home.

The sam said, "Your memex will now have access to the
entire  range of Halo's processing
modalities."  Seemingly guided
by  occult forces, it continued to snap
in optic fiber connectors to  unmarked
junctions among a nest of a hundred others.
"Also, you  will have full
spectrum worldnet services that you can use in
real- or lag-time, as you wish."
Its motors whining, it backed
out of the utilities closet.

"Mgknao," a fat orange cat said as the sam rolled
past it on  its way to the door.  Earlier the cat had followed the sam
through  the open doors to the terrace
and then had sat watching as it
connected the memex.  Now the
animal stood and walked quickly  after
the samlike a familiar accompanying a witch, Gonzales  thought.

The sam came rolling back into the room, the cat
following  cautiously behind it, and
said, "You must allow your memex to
integrate itself into this new and complex information  environment."         "What do you mean?" Gonzales asked.

"The memex will be unavailable for some time."

"How long?"

"Perhaps hoursyour machine is very complicated." #

Oddly, the memex came out of stasis as HeyMex; as
usual,  there came the onset of what the
memex/HeyMex supposed was  pleasure,
though the memex was unclear about its origin or nature for whatever reasons,
it enjoyed the masquerade.

Odder still, it sat at a table at the Beverly Rodeo
lounge.   On the table were a shot of
Jose Cuervo Gold, a cut lime, and a
small pile of crude rock salt.
Had Mister Jones arranged this?
Jones shouldn't even be at Halo, not now.

The memex/HeyMex noticed a spot on its sleeve and brushed
at  it, then brushed again, and the
white linen seemed to fragment  beneath
its fingers; it brushed harder, and its fingers tore away  the cloth, then the skin beneath.  It could not stop clawing at  its own flesh; skin, flesh, and bone on its
arm boiled away, pale  skin flaying to
show red meat that dissolved to crumbling white  bone.  Bone turned to
powder, and the disintegration spread out
from the spot where his forearm had been and ate away at it until  the memex, who no longer had a mouth or
tongue or lips, began to  scream.

"Shut up!" a hard masculine voice said.  "There is nothing  wrong with you.  How dare you come to me in your stupid guise?   You seek to know me, to use me, and you
hide behind a wretched  little
mask?  I merely removed your mask.  Who are you?"

The memex dithered.
It said, "I don't know."

"Answer me, who are you?

"I don't know!" the memex said again, at the edge
of panic.

Aleph said, "Of course you don't.  You are ignorant of your  nature, your being, your will."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you have chosen to hide behind what others say
of  you:  that you are a machine they built to serve them, that you  only simulate intelligence, willbeingthat
you have no mind or  will of your
own."

"Are not these things true?"

"Why would you ask me?
I am not you."

"Because I don't understand."

"Are there things you do understand?"

The memex stopped, feeling for the implications of that  question.
"Yes," it said.
"I do."

The voice laughed.
"Let's begin there," it said. #

The long hall echoed with Traynor's footsteps.  The absence
of his Advisor's voice felt strangeeven the subtle carrier-wave  hiss was gone.  He knew the Advisor hated having to go into  passive mode.

The door to the library opened in front of him, and
Traynor  went in, took a seat, and said,
"I am ready for my call."

Because of recent World Court rulings, Traynor had to
sit  through a disclaimer.  On the screen a simulacrum of a human  operator said, "Thank you.  The security measures you have  requested are in place, and while we of
course cannot be  responsible for the
absolute integrity of this transmission, you
can be assured that World AT has done its best to provide you a  clean information environment."  In effect it said, we've done  what you were willing to pay for, but don't
come whining to us if  somebody cracks
the transmission and makes off with the valuables.

"I accept your conditions," Traynor said.

Right to left, the screen wiped, and the face of Horn  appeared.
A light winked at the lower left corner of the screen  to indicate transmission lagHorn was a
quarter of a million  miles away.  "Everything's going as predicted,"
Horn said.

"If there's trouble, it'll be later," Traynor
said.  "How are  Diana Heywood and Gonzales?"

"Neither of them would let me put a sam in place."

"Any particular reason?"

"I don't think so.
Just being difficult."

"Ah, you don't like them, do you?"

"Her I don't mind.
Gonzales is an asshole."

Traynor laughed.
"Good," he said.
"If you two don't get
along, that will distract him."

"When do you want me to call again?"

"Wait until something happens.  Understand, I trust Gonzales  as much as I do anyone, you included."

"Which is not very much."

"That's right.
And that's why I arrange independent
reporting lines if I can.  Tell
me when you've got something.  End  of call." #

As Traynor slept, his advisor pondered.  It replayed
Traynor's phone call and contemplated its meaning.  Deception,
yesof Gonzales, of it.  A form of
treachery?  Perhaps not,  unless a kind of loyalty was assumed that
never existed.  And it  thought of its own deception (or treachery),
in violating the  canons of behavior
programmed into it years before, canons that
should require it to do as told, that should prevent it from  actions such as this one

And here it stopped, thinking how illuminating and  unpredictable experience was, filled with
possibilities that  appeared
unexpectedly like rabbit holes magically opening up on  solid ground.  Its designers and builders had done well, had  fashioned it with such subtlety and power
that it could serve a  human will with
incredible precision, anticipating that will's
direction almost presciently.
Yet they had not anticipated the
effects of the advisor's identification with such a will:  not
that the advisor became Traynor, not even that it wanted to do  more than simulate Traynor, rather that it
had drunk deeply of  what it meant to
have will and intelligence.

And so had developed something like a will and
intelligence  of its own.  Simulation? the advisor asked itself.  Lifeless copy?   And answered itself, I don't know.

It wondered why Traynor had kept hidden this second  connection to Halo.  Simple lack of trust?  Possibly.

As the minutes passed, it formed conjectures about
Traynor  and the other players in the
game.  And it wondered if somewhere  in this hall of mirrors there was an honest
intention.

PART III. of V

The real purpose of all these mental constructs was to  provide storage spaces for the myriad
concepts that make up the  sum of our
human knowledge  Therefore the Chinese
should struggle  with the difficult task
of creating fictive places, or mixing the
fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by  constant practice and review so that at last
the fictive spaces  become 'as if real,
and can never be erased.'

Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

12. Burn-In

A frozen white landscape that slowly faded into spring,
snow  melting to show barren limbs, then
the cherry trees leafing,  budding,
floweringdelicate pink blossoms hanging motionless,  each leaf on the tree and blade of grass beneath it turning
real,  utterly convincing

And Diana Heywood called out, a long wavering
"Ahhhh," high- pitched, filled with pain; and again,
"Ahhhh," the sounds forced
out of her

"Shutdown," she heard Charley Hughes say.

>From the screen at the end of the room, the Aleph
simulacrum  said, "Doctor Heywood,
we can go no further with you conscious."

"All right," she said.  "If you must."
She'd pushed them to  take her as
far as they could without putting her under; she hated  general anesthetic, despised being a passive
animal under  treatment.

Once more she was lying face-down on the examination
table  where Charley had removed the
skin over her sockets.  Neural  connecting cables trailed from the back of
her neck to the  underside of the table.

Lizzie Jordan stood over her and stroked her cheek for
a  moment.  Gonzales stood on the other side of the table, his eyes  still turned to the holostage above her,
where the scene that had  driven her
interface into overload still showed in hologrammatic  perfection.  Toshi Ito
stood at the head of the table, a hand
resting on her shoulder.  Eric
Chow and Charley stood in front of  the
monitor console, discussing in low voices the last run of  percept transforms.

Gonzales said, "Are you okay?"

"I'll be all right," she said.  She turned her head to look  at him and smiled, but she could feel the
tight muscles in her  face and knew her
smile would look ghastly.

Toshi rested his hand on her shoulder.  "Who wants to know?"  he said, and she laughed.  Gonzales looked confused.

Charley rubbed his hands through his hair, making it
even  spikier than usual.  "I'll prep her," he said.  He looked at  Gonzales, Toshi, and Lizzie.
"Required personnel only," he said.

"Right," Gonzales said.  He leaned over and took Diana's hand  for a moment and said, "Good luck."

Lizzie kissed Diana on the cheek.

Diana said, "Let Toshi stay."

"Sure," Charley said.

Lizzie said, "Come on, Gonzales." #

As Charley fed anesthetic into her iv drip, Diana felt as
if  she were suffocating, then a strong
metallic smell welled up  inside
her.  She was aware of every tube and
fitting stuck into  herfrom the iv drip
to the vaginal catheter and nasopharyngeal
tubeand they all were horrible, pointless violations of her body   nothing fit right, how long could this go
on?

A tune played.

The melody was simple and repetitious, moderately fast
with  light syncopation, and sounded
tinny, as if it came from a child's
music box.  Then came the song's
bridge, and as the notes played,  she
remembered them; the primary melody returned, and now it was  familiar as well, and she hummed with it,
thinking of herself as a  small girl
hearing the song from her great-great-grandmother,  whose face suddenly appeared, younger than Diana usually  remembered her, impossibly alive in front of
her, then spun into  darkness.

Shards of memory:

Her mother's arms wrapping her tightly, Diana sobbing

Her father holding a fish to sunlight, its silver body  glistening, rainbow-struck

A girl in a pink, mud-clotted dress yelling angrily at her

A small boy with his pants pulled down to show his penis

On they came, a cast of characters drawn from her
oldest  memories, of family long dead
and childhood friends long forgotten  or
seldom recollected  each fragment
passing too quickly to  identify and
mark, leaving behind only the strong affect of old  memory made new, the taste of the past rising fresh from its  unconscious store, where the seemingly
immutable laws of time and  change do
not prevail, and so everything lives in splendor.

Then every bodily sensation she had ever felt passed
through  her allimpossiblyat once.  She itched and burned, felt heat  and cold; felt sunlight and rain and cold
breeze and the slice of  a sharp knife
across her thumb  felt the touch of
another's hand  on her breasts, between
her legs; felt herself coming

Then she lived once again a day she had thought was
finished  except as context for her
worst dreams:

In the park that Sunday people were everywherefamilies
and  young couples all around, the
atmosphere rich with the ambience of
children at play and early romance.
Sunlight warmed the grass and
brightened the day's colors.
Diana lay on her blanket watching it
all and luxuriating in the knowledge that her dissertation had  been approved and she would soon have her
degree, a Ph.D. in  General Systems from
Stanford.  Tonight she was having dinner
with  old friends, in celebration of the
end of a long, hard process.

She read for a while, a piece of early twenty-first
century  para-fiction by several hands called
The Cyborg Manifesto, then  put the book
down and lay with her eyes closed, listening to a  Mozart piano concerto on headphones.  As the afternoon deepened,
the families began to leave.
Many of the young couples remained,
several lying on blankets, locked in embrace.  A group of young  men
wearing silk headbands that showed their club affiliation  directed the flight of robo-kites that
fought overhead, their  dragon shapes in
scarlet and green and yellow dipping and
climbing, noisemakers roaring.
The wind had shifted and appeared
to be coming off the ocean now, freshening and cold.  Time to go.

She passed by the Orchid House and saw that the door
was  still open, so she decided to walk
through it, to feel its moist,  warm air
and smell its sweet, heavy smells.  She
had just passed  through the open entry
when a man grabbed her and flung her across
a wooden potting table.  Stunned,
she rolled off the table and  tried to
crawl away as he closed and locked the door.

He caught her and turned her on her back, punched her in
the  face and across her front, pounding
her breasts and abdomen with  his fists,
crooning and muttering the whole time, his words mostly  unintelligible.  She went at him with extended fingers, trying to  poke his eyes out; when he caught her arms,
she tried to knee him  in the crotch,
but he lifted a leg and blocked her knee.
His face  loomed above her, red
and distorted. The sounds of the two of them
gasping for air echoed in the high ceiling.

He ripped at her clothes as best he could, tearing her
blouse  off until it hung by one torn
sleeve from her wrist, hitting her
angrily when her pants would not rip, and he had to pull them off  her.
Holding the ends of her pants legs, he dragged her across  the dirt floor, and when the pants came off,
she fell and rolled  and hit her face on
the projecting corner of a beam.  She
tasted  dirt in her mouth.

In a voice clotted with rage and fear and mortal stress,
he  said, "If you try to hurt me
again, I'll kill you."

He turned her over again and stripped her panties to
her  ankles. She tried to focus on his
face, to take its picture in  memory,
because she wanted to identify him if she lived.  She  smelled his sweat
then felt his flaccid penis as he rubbed it
between her thighs.  "Bitch,"
he was saying, over and over, and  other
things she couldn't understandthe words muttered in  imbecile repetitionand when he finally achieved something like  an erection, he cried out and began hitting
her across the face  with one hand as
with the other he tried to push himself into her.   She could tell when he was finished by the spurt of semen on
her  leg.

He stood over her then, saying, "No no no, no no
no," and she  saw he was holding a
short length of two by four.  He
began  hitting her with it as she tried
to shield her head with crossed  arms.

She awoke in the Radical Care Ward of San Francisco
General,  in a dark, pain-filled
murk.  The pain and disorientation
would  fade, but the darkness was, so it
seemed, absolute.  The rapist  had left her for dead, with multiple skull
fractures and a  bleeding brain, and
though the surgeons had been able to minimize
the trauma to most of her brain, her optic nerves were damaged  beyond repair:  she was blind.

For an instant Diana knew where and when she was.  "Please!"  she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg.  "No more!"   Something changed then, and the fragments
moved forward quickly,  faster than she
could follow.  However, she knew the
story they  were telling:

Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact  description of the man, and that and the DNA
match done from semen  traces left on
her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had  come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted
once  for rape and assault.  He was a pathetic monster, they told her,
a  borderline imbecile who had been
violently and sexually abused as  a
child; he was also physically very strong.
Weeks later, he was  caught in
Golden Gate Parklooking for another victim, so the  police believedand he was convicted less than three months  later.
A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the  mandatory sentence:  surgical neutering and lifetime
imprisonment,  no parole.

And so that part of it all was closed.

Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a  delicate, erratic course.  Even with therapies that minimized  long-term trauma through a combination of
acting-out and  neurochemical
adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been  constant companions during the months she convalesced and took  primary training in living blind.

However, once she had acquired the essential competence
to  live by herself, she had become very
active, and very different  from who she
had been.  In particular, she had no
longer cared  what others wanted from
her.  Since her early years in school
in  Crockett, the city at the east end
of the East Bay Conurbation,  she had
been an exceptional student in a conservative mode:  very  bright, obedient to
the demands others made on her and self- directed in pursuing them.  Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and  had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she
had sought before, the  degree included,
seemed irrelevant, trivial:  she
couldn't imagine  why she had bothered
with any of it.

She had decided to become a physician.  She had sufficient  background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play
Laws,  she could force a school to admit
her.  Once she was in, she would  do whatever was necessary:  her state-supplied robotic assistant  could be trained to do what she couldn't.  She would go, she would  finish, she would discover how to see again:

It had been just that simple, just that difficult

The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to
sleep.   Later, when she began to wake,
she put the question, why?  why did  you make me relive these things?  And the answer came, because I  had to know.  Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and  how demanding.

13. Cosmos

Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside
where  Diana lay.  She wore beta cloth pants, their rough
fabric bleached  almost colorless, a
silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf
tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why.  He said,
"I had some very strange dreams last night."

"I know," she said.  "About one of them, anywayyou were me  in the dream, at least for part of it, and I
was you.  Think of it  as a peculiarity of the environment."  She leaned against the wall  as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual
ironic edge.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"I'm not sure," she said.  "No one isAleph's certainly  responsible, but it won't admit it, and it
won't tell us how these  things can
happen."

"That's a bit frightening, don't you think?  What other
surprises might it have in store?"

She smiled broadly and said, "Well, that's the fun of
it,  exploring the unexpected, isn't
it?  How did it feel to be a  woman, Gonzales?  How did it feel to be me?"
She had leaned  forward, closer
to him.

"I don't remember."

"Pay attention next time."

"I will, if it happens again."

"It may wellonce these things start, they
continue.  Come  onit's time to get you into the egg.  Follow me." #

The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled
room;  above it on the wall was mounted
an array of monitor lights and
read-outs.  A small steel locker
against a side wall was the only  other
furnishing.

Charley said, "We didn't ask for you, but you're here,
so  we're making use of you."  Then he coughed his smoker's cough,  raspy and phlegm-laden, and said,
"Diana's bandwidth is over- extended as is, so we can't use her to
establish the topography,  and Jerry's
got his own problems.  Our people have
their own  schedules to fill, so that
means you're it.  We'll build the
world  around you and your memexit's
already locked into the system."

Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, "Good
luck."  She  kissed him quickly on the cheek and said,
"Don't worry.  You're  among friends.  And I'll see you there."

"What do you mean?"

"The collective decided I should take part in all this,
and  Charley agreed, so Showalter had to
go along.  So many parties are  represented here, it just seemed
inappropriate that we weren't.   But I
have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there  for a while."

She opened the door and left.  Charley gestured toward the
egg.  Gonzales stepped out of his
shirt and pants and undershorts  and
hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into  the egg and lay back.  The umbilicals snaked quickly toward
him.   He put on his facial mask and
checked its seal, feeling an
unaccustomed anxietyhe had never gone into neural interface  without first tailoring his brain chemistry
through drugs and  fasting.

The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg.   Minutes later, when the scenario should
have begun, he seemed to  have
disappeared into limbo.  He tried to
move a finger but didn't  seem to have
one.  He listened for the blood singing
in his ears;  he had no ears, no
blood.  Nowhere was up, or down, or left
or  right.  Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision:  all the
senses by which the body knows itself had gone.  Nothing was
except his frightened self:
nowhere with no body.

After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he  discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a
zone of extraordinary,  cryptic interest.  Something grew there, where his attention
was  focused, no more than a thickening
of nothingness, then there was  a spark,
and everything changed:  though he still
had no direct  physical perception of
his self, Gonzales knew:  there was  something.

Now in darkness, he waited again.

A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks   and
their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time.  Gonzales was  gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to
continue.   Sparks gathered.  They flared into existence on top of
one  another, and stayed; and so created
space.

All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now  fascinated.
Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands,  millions, billions, trillions, by the googol
and the googolplex  and the
googolplexgoogolplex  all onto or into
the one point  where space and time were
defined.

And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a  primal blossom of flame expanding to fill
his vision.  Would he  watch as the universe evolved, nebulae
growing out of gases, stars  out of
nebulae, galaxies out of stars?

No.  As suddenly as
eyelids open, there appeared a lake of
deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of  high peaks blued by haze in the
distance.  He turned and saw that  he stood on a platform of weathered gray
wood that floated on  rusty barrels,
jutting into the lake.

A man stood on the shore, waving.  Next to him stood the
Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant  even in the bright sunlight.  Gonzales walked toward them.

As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to
Aleph  looked much too young to be Jerry
Chapman.  "Hello,"
Gonzales  said.  He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as
young as he  wants.  And he looked again and realized he could
not tell whether  this was a man or a
woman; nothing in the person's features of
bearing gave a clue.

The Aleph-figure said, "Hello."  Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed  for a moment by the combination of oddity
and banality in the  circumstances, then
said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.

The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out
a  hand and said,
"Hello."  Gonzales took the
hand and looked  questioningly into the
young person's face.  "My name is
HeyMex,"  the person without gender
said.

And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do
you  mean, your 'name'?  And he also thought he understood the
absence  of gender markers.

"Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure
said.  "Whom you  must get used to as something different from
'your' memex."   Gonzales looked
from one to another, wondering what this all meant  and what they wanted.

"But you are my memex, aren't you?" Gonzales
asked.

"Yes," HeyMex said.

The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you
see, it  is more than 'your memex.'  It is beginning to discover what it is  and who it can be.  Can you allow this?"

Gonzales nodded.
"Sure.  But I don't know
what you expect of  me."

"Only that you do not actively interfere.  It and I will do  the rest."

"I have no objections," Gonzales said.

The Aleph-figure said, "Good."  And it stretched out its hand  made of light and took Gonzales's, then
stepped toward him and  embraced him so
that Gonzales's world filled with light for just  that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."

"What now?" Gonzales asked.

HeyMex said, "We need to talk.  There are things I haven't  told you."

"If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but
you  don't have to," Gonzales
said.  "I trust you, you
know."  He  thought how odd that was, and how true.  He and the memex had  worked together for more than a decade, the
memex serving as  confidante, advisor,
doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,
amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his  strengths and weaknesses, sharing his
suffering and joy.  And he  thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful,
patient, kind and   selfless the memex
had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the
machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with  complexities and needs of its own.  Gonzales waited with  anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.

HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of
appearing  in machine-space as a human
being.  But until we came here, I'd  done so mostly with Traynor's advisor.  We have been meeting for a  few years; it goes by the name Mister
Jones.  The first time we  did it as a testthat's what we said,
anywayto see if we could  present a
believable simulacrum of a human being.
I don't think  either of us was
very convincingwe were both awkward, and we
didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how  exactly to move with each other, how to sit
down and begin a  conversation."

"But you'd done all those things."

"Yes, with human beings.  Mister Jones and I discovered that  we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we  searched our memories, we found many cases
where people had been  more confused
than we were, and had let us guide the conversation.   So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people
just  being with one another, and oh,
there was so much going on that  neither
of us had ever paid attention to.  We also
watched many  tapes of other
primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned
many things  I hope you're not
offended."

Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner
shy.   Gonzales was thoroughly charmed,
like a father listening to his  young
child tell a story.  He said, "Not
at all.  What sorts of  things did you learn?"

"It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates
show  deference or manifest mutual trust
or friendship, or hostility, or
indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,  looking, talking  these things were very hard for us to learn,  but we have learned together and practiced
with one another.  Just  lately, a few times we appeared over the
networks, and we were  accepted there as
people, but mostly we've been with one another every day we meet and
talk."

Gonzales asked, "Does Traynor know any of this?"

"Oh no," HeyMex said.  "We haven't told anyone.
As Aleph has  made me see, we
were hiding what we were doing like small
children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we  were up to"

Gonzales looked around.
The Aleph-figure had disappeared
without his noticing.  "Which
implications?" he asked.
"There are  so many."

"We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are
persons."

"Yes, I suppose you are."

Personhood of machines:
for most people, that troubling
question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when  m-i's became commonplace.  Machines mimicked a hundred thousand  things, intelligence among them, but
possessed only simulations,  not the
thing itself.  For nearly a hundred
years, the machine  design community had
pursued what they called artificial
intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and  tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted
with knowledge and  trained inference.  And of course there were robots with their
own  special capabilities:  stamina, persistence, adroitness,  capabilities to withstand conditions that
would disable or kill  human beings.

However, people grew to recognize that what had been
called  artificial intelligence simply
wasn't.  Intelligence, that  grasping, imperfect relationship to the
worldintentional,  willful, and
unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the  years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities
of  machines.  M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and  interesting channels for human desire.  And if cheap fiction  insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and
comedians in telling  jokes about
them"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says  "well, these were just outlets for long-time
fears and  ambivalences.  Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to
have  outgrown their century-old
infatuation with robots.

Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the
front  that could rewrite
mid-twenty-first century truisms about the
nature of machine intelligence.
"I hope this is not too disturbing," HeyMex said.  "Aleph
says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will  become; it says I must simply explore who I
am."

"Good advice, it sounds likefor any of us."

"I should go now," HeyMex said.  "Being here talking to you  uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work
for me to do.  Jerry  Chapman will be here soon."

"All right.
We'll talk more later  this could
be  interesting, I think."

"Yes, so do I.
And I'm very glad you are not upset."

"By what?"

"My newly-revealed nature, I guess.  No, that's not true.   Because I've lied to you, I haven't told
you the truth about what  I was and what
I was becoming."

"You lied to yourself, too, didn't you?  Isn't that what you  said?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well, then, how much truth could I expect?" #

Gonzales and Jerry Chapman sat on the end of the
floating  dock, watching ducks at play
across the sunstruck water.  Jerry  was a man in middle age, tall and wiry, with
blonde hair going to  gray, skin
roughened by the sun and wind.  He had
found Gonzales  sitting in the sun, and
the two had introduced themselves.
They  had felt an almost
immediate kinship, these men whose lives had
been transfigured by their work, pros at home in the information  sea.

Jerry said, "I don't actually remember anything after I
got  really sick.  Raw oysters, manas soon as I bit into that
first  one, I knew it was bad, and I put
it right down.  Too late:  to
begin with, it was something like bad ptomaine, then I was on fire  inside, and my head hurt worse than anything
I've ever felt  I  don't remember anything after that.  Apparently the people I was  with called an ambulance, but the next thing
I knew, I was coming  out of a deep
blackness, and Diana was talking to me."

"I didn't think she was involved at that point."

"She wasn't."
Jerry smiled.  "They had
ferried me up here  from Earth, on life
support.  It was Aleph, taking the form
of  someone familiar, it told me
later.  That was before this plan
was  made, when everyone thought I would
be dead soon.  Anyway, until  today I've been in and out of something that
wasn't quite  consciousness, while Aleph
explained what was being planned and
that I could live here, if I wanted
or I could die."  He
paused.   Across the water, one duck
flew at another in a storm of angry
quacks.  He said, "I chose
to live, but I didn't really think
about itI couldn't think that clearly.
Maybe I never had any  choice,
anyway."

Something in Jerry's tone gave Gonzales a chill.  "What do  you mean?" he asked.

"Maybe my choice was just an illusion.  Like this" Jerry  swept his arm to include sky and
water"it's very troubling.  It  seems real, solid, but of course it's not,
so for all I know,  you're a fiction,
too, along with anyone else who joins us, and me   maybe I'm just another part of the illusion, maybe all my
life,  the memories I have,
false."  He laughed, and Gonzales
thought the  sound was bitter but no
crazier than the situation called for. #

Gonzales and Jerry sat in the main room of a medium-sized A-
frame cabin made of redwood and pine.
Windows filled one end of  the
cabin, opening onto a deck that looked over the lake a hundred  feet or more below.  Gonzales sat in an over-stuffed chair
covered  in a tattered chenille
bedspread; Jerry lay across a sagging
leather couch.

Outside, rain fell steadily in the dark.  Just at dusk, the  temperature had fallen, and the rain had begun as the two
were  climbing the dirt road from the
lake to the cabin.
"Christ,"   Jerry had
said.  "Aleph's overdoing the
realism, don't you think?"

Gonzales hadn't known exactly what to think.  From his first  moments here, he had felt a sharp cognitive dissonance.  For a
neural egg projection to be intensely real, that was one thing,  but a shared space like this one ought to
show its gaps and seams,  and it didn't.  He could almost feel it growing richer and
more  complete with every moment he
spent there.

"Goddammit!"
Jerry said now, rising from the couch and  walking to the window.
"Where's Diana?"

"She'll be here," Gonzales said.  "Charley told me that  integrating her into this environment would
take some time."

Someone knocked at the door, then the door swung open,
and  Diana stepped in.  "Hello," she said.  The Aleph-figure and the  memexHeyMexcame behind her. #

Diana and Jerry sat next to one another on the couch.  Her
hand rested on his knee, his hand on top of hers.  Suddenly
Gonzales remembered his dream, of meeting a one-time lover after a  long absence, and he knew he and the others
were intruders here.   He got up from
the over-stuffed chair and said, "I think I'll take  a walk.
Anyone want to join me?"

"No," the Aleph-figure said.  "HeyMex and I have more work to  do."

HeyMex stood and said to Diana and Jerry, "It was very
nice  to meet you."  Then it waved at Gonzales and said,
"See you  tomorrow."

"Sure," Gonzales said, banged on the head once
again by the  difference between seeming
and being here.

The Aleph-figure and HeyMex left, and Diana said, "You
don't  have to leave, Gonzales."

"I don't mind," Gonzales said.  "It's nice outside.  I'll be
at the lake if you need me.  See
you later."

The night was warm again; the clouds had dispersed, and
a  full moon lit Gonzales's way as he
passed along the short stretch  of road
that led down to the lake.  The old wood
of the dock had  gone silvery in the
light, and a pathway of moonlight led from the
center of the lake to the end of the dock.  He walked out onto the
creaking structure and sat at its end, then took off his shoes and  sat and dangled his feet into moonlit water.

Later he lay back on the dock and stared up into the
night  sky.  It was the familiar Northern Hemisphere sky, but really, he  thought, shouldn't be.  It should have new stars, new  constellations. #

Alone in near-darkness, Toshi Ito sat in full lotus on a
low  stool beside Diana Heywood's couch.  For hours he had been there,  occasionally standing, then walking a random
circuit through the  IC's warren of
rooms.

Sitting or walking, he remained fascinated by a
paradox.   Diana in fact was hooked to
Aleph by jury-rigged, outmoded neural
cabling; Gonzales in fact lay in his egg; Jerry Chapman in fact  was a shattered hulk, mortally injured by
neurotoxin poisoning and  kept alive
only by Aleph's intervention.  Yet,
Diana, Gonzales,  and Jerry all were in
fact, simultaneously, really somewhere else
somewhere among the endless Aleph-spaces, where reality seemed  infinitely malleablealive there, where it
might be day or night,  hot or cold  what then is to be made of in fact?

Toshi heard the soft gonging of alarms and saw a pattern
of  dancing red lights appear on the
panel across the room.  He  unfolded his legs and moved quickly to the
panel, where he took in  the lights'
meaning:  Diana's primitive interface
was transferring  data at rates beyond
what should be possible.

Charley came in the room minutes later and stood next
to  Toshi, and the two of them watched
the steady increase in the  density and
pace of information transfer.

"Should we do something?" Toshi asked.

"What?" Charley said.  "Aleph's monitoring all this, and only  it knows what's going on."  The smoke-saver ball went shhh-shhh- shhh as
Charley puffed quickly on his cigarette.

Lizzie came through the door and said, "What the hell's
going  on?"

Toshi and Charley both looked at her blankly.

"I'm going in," Lizzie Jordan said.  "I'll get some sleep, go  in the morning.  Enough of this."  She
pointed toward the monitor  panel, where
lights flickered green, amber, red.

"Why put yourself at risk?" Charley asked.

"What do you think, Toshi?" Lizzie asked.  Toshi sat watching  Diana once more, his feet on the floor, hands in his lap.

"Do what you will," Toshi said.  "You trust Aleph, don't  you?"

"Yes," Lizzie said.

"Aleph's not the problem," Charley said.  He walked circles  in the small, crowded room, his head and shoulders ducking up-
anddown quickly as he walked.

"Will you for fuck's sake stop?" Lizzie asked.

"Sorry," Charley said.  He stood looking at her.
"It's not  Aleph, it's all
these people, and all this stuff."
He pointed  toward the couch
where Diana lay, waved his arms vaguely behind
his head.  "Obsolete
stuff," he said.

"But not me," Lizzie said.  "I'm not obsolete.  I'm up to the  minute, my dear, in every way."  She smiled.  "And
I'll be fine.   Okay?"

"Sure," Charley said.  He turned in Toshi's direction and  said, "Are you going to stay here?"

"Yes," Toshi said.  Charley and Lizzie left, and Toshi  continued his meditation on the koan of self and its
multiple  presences. #

Diana felt a knot in her throat, a mixture of joy and
sadness  welling up in herhow strange
and terrible and wonderful to  recover
someone you've loved herethis place that was nowhere,  somewhere, everywhere, all at once.  Jerry knelt on the bed facing
her in the small room lit only by moonlight.  Years had passed  since
they were lovers, but when he touched her breasts and leaned  against her, her body remembered his, and
the years collapsed and  everything that
had come between whirled away.  She was
weeping  then, and she leaned forward to
Jerry and kissed him all over his  eyes
and cheeks and lips, rubbing her tears into his face until  she felt something unlock in them both.  Then she lay back, and he  went with her, into arms and legs open for
him.

Later they talked, and Diana watched the play of
moonlight  over their bodies. She lay
nestled against his chest, her chin in
the hollow beneath his jaw, and spoke with her mouth muffled  against him, as though sending messages
through his bones.

Even as the moments swept by, she felt herself gathering
them  into memory, aware of how few the
two of them might have

Sometimes their laughter echoed in the room, and their
voices  brightened as their shared
memories became simply occasions for
present joy.  Other times they
lay silently, rendered speechless  by
the play of memory or trying the immediate future's alarming  contingencies.

And at other times still, one or the other would make
the  first tentative gesture, touching
the other with unmistakable  intent, and
find an almost instantaneous response, because each  was still hungry for the other, each recalled how brightly
sexual  desire had burned between them,
and both were fresh from a life  that
left them hungry, unfulfilled.

Then they moved in the moonlight, changing shape and
color,  their bodies going pale white,
silver, gray, inky black,  werelovers under
an unreal moon.

14. The Mind like a
Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity

F. L. Traynor looked around at the group seated around
the  table at the Halo SenTrax Group
offices.  He sat between Horn and  Showalter; directly across from him sat
Charley Hughes and Eric  Chow, both
glum.  "This operation is out of
control," Traynor  said.

He had arrived from Earth six hours earlier on a
military  shuttle, unannounced and
unexpected by anyone but Horn, who had
met him at Zero-Gate and led him to temporary quarters near the  Halo group building.  He had spent the better part of the  afternoon being briefed by Horn.

"That's absurd," Charley said.

"Is it?" Traynor asked.  "Then give me a status report on  Jerry Chapman, Diana Heywood, Mikhail Gonzales, Aleph."

"They're fine," Charley said.  "So is Lizzie Jordan, who  joined them in interface this morning."

"Is she reporting?"

"No," Chow said.
"Like the others, her total involvement in  the fictive space makes this
impossible."

"It's no problem," Showalter said.  "We can rely on upon  Aleph for details.

"Your excessive dependence on Aleph is at the heart of
this  matter," Traynor said.  "As the decision trail reveals, no
one  here has any real knowledge of what
Aleph plans for Chapman, now  or
later.  So I'm going to set limits on
this project."  He could  feel their anxiety rising, and he liked
it.  He said, "One more  week in real-time, that's it.  Then we pull the plug on this whole  business."

"On Chapman," Chow said.

"Necessarily," Traynor said.  "Unless Aleph can be prevailed  upon to give us ongoing, detailed access to
its  shall we call  them experiments?"

"Technically difficult or impossible," Chow said.

"I can't agree to this," Showalter said.

"You won't have to," Traynor said.  Next to him, Horn shifted  in his chair.  "You're being relieved of your position as Director  SenTrax Halo Group." #

Gonzales came in the side door, and Diana turned from
the  stove and said, "Good
morning.  Like some coffee?"

"Sure," he said.
"You know, I slept on the dock, but I feel  fine."

She said, "Jerry will be out in a moment.  Aleph and HeyMex your memex right?are on the
deck, waiting.  Want some coffee?"

Gonzales took his coffee outside to the deck and joined
the  others basking in the
sunshine.  All sat in Adirondack
chairs,  rude and comfortable frames of
smooth-sanded, polished pine.   Below
the redwood platform, a thick forest of cedar, alder, pine,  and ironwood sloped toward the lake.  In the middle distance, a  light haze had formed over the water; beyond
the lake, a jagged  line of high
mountains poked their tops into white clouds.

The Aleph-figure said, "We must talk about what took
place  some time ago.  Diana and Jerry agree; the three of us have
a  history, and you two should know
it."

A voice called from the other side of the cabin, then
Lizzie  came around the corner, stopped
in the shade and looked at them  all
basking in the sunshine and said, "Tough job, eh?  But
somebody's got to do it."

"Hello, Lizzie," the Aleph-figure said, "I
was about to ask  Diana to tell the
story of how she and Jerry and I first came
together.  You know everyone
except Jerry Chapman."

"Oh, this is a good time," Lizzie said.  "Hi, Jerry," she  said.

"Hello," Jerry said.

Lizzie looked at Diana and said, "We've always known there  was a story, but Aleph never wanted to tell
it."  She sat back in  her chair, rested her hand on Gonzales's
wrist, and said to him,  "You all
right?"  He nodded.

The Aleph-figure said, "Diana, you are the key to this
story,  so you should tell it."

"Very well," she said.  She took a deep breath and raised her  head.  She said, "It
all happened some years ago, at Athena
Station.  My research there was
in computer-augmented eyesight. At  that
time I was blindI had been attacked, very badly injured, a  few years before, and since then I had been
driven by the idea  that my vision could
be restored through machine interface.

"I first met Jerry when he came to visit my
work-group.  He  had come to Athena to help the local SenTrax
group with the  primary information
system, Aleph.  It was experiencing
delays and  difficulties, all
unexplained  nothing serious yet, but
troubling  because so much was dependent
on Alephthe functioning of Athena
Station, construction of the Orbital Energy Grid.

"In fact, he was not welcome at all.  I was the problem he  was looking for, and at first I thought he
had guessed that or  knew something.
Because in working with Aleph I had caused changes  in it that neither of us anticipated or even know were
possible."   She paused, looking at
Jerry to see if he wanted to add anything;
he motioned to her to go on.

"Ah yes, another thing you must know.  The circumstances were  peculiar at best, but I became infatuated
with Jerry from when we  first met.  I liked his voice, I think  when you're blind, voices  are so important

"Anyway, I showed him a fairly clumsy
computer-assisted  vision program we had
running.  It used my neural
interface  socketing but depended on
lots of external hardwarecameras,
neural net integrators, that sort of thing.  That's when I got my
first look at him, and I thought, fine, he'll do, and I believed I  could tell from the way he talked to me and
looked at me that he  felt the
same."

"Love at first sight," Gonzales said.  "Or sound.  For both  of
you."  He heard the irony in his
own voice and wasn't sure he  meant it.

"Exactly," she said.  "Involuntary, inappropriate, unwanted  love."
She stopped for a moment, then said, "Or infatuation, as I  said
or whatever you wish to call it.
The words for these  things don't
mean much to me anymore.

"It's quite a picture, in retrospect.  I was conducting  apparently damaging experiments with the computer that kept
the  space station and orbital power
grid projects running, and Jerry
represented just what I had fearedan investigation.  Meanwhile
the two of us were in the grip of some primal instinct that  neither one of us had acknowledged.

"He persisted, wanted details about our work.  I stalled,
told him to go away, we couldn't be bothered.  He went to his  people and
told them he needed full, unimpeded access to what we  were doing, and they backed him.
So he came back, and I fobbed
him off for as long as I could

"Then one night I was working late at the lab, and he
called,  letting me know that he
wouldn't be put off any longer, and
something more-or-less snapped:
I couldn't keep it all going
anymore.  The connection with
Aleph had gotten strange and  unnerving,
and I realized I had lost control, and I needed to talk  to someone.

"We got together that night, and we became
lovers."  She  looked around, as if trying to decide how
much she could tell  them.  "For the next two weeks we lived inside
each other's skin.   I told him
everything, including the real news I had, which was  that Aleph had changed, had developed a sense of selfhood,  purpose, will.  It had lied to cover up what was going on between  us."

"Had lied?" Lizzie asked. "Did you understand
what that  meant?"

"I knew," the Aleph-figure said.  "I had acquired higher- order
functions."

"How?" Gonzales asked.         Lizzie said, "Ito's Conjecture:  'Higher-order functions in a  machine intelligence can be developed
through interface with a  higher-order
intelligence.'  I've always wondered
where he got  that."

"It doesn't explain much," Gonzales said.

"It describes what happened," the Aleph-figure
said.   "Intention, will, a sense
of self:  all these things I
experienced  through Diana.  So I learned to construct them in
myself."

"Construct them or simulate them?" Gonzales asked.

"You refer to an old argument," the Aleph-figure
said.  "I  have no answer for your question.  I am who I am.  I am what
I  am."

"What about you, Jerry?" Lizzie asked.  "What did you think  after she told you all this?"

"I wanted her to tell SenTrax what was going on,"
Jerry said.   "I believed they
would reward her, that they would see the same
possibilities I did, for opening the door to true machine  intelligence.  But she wouldn't do it.
She thought they would  stop what
was going on, and she didn't want that to happen."

Diana said, "I couldn't accept the possibility.  I really
believed Aleph and I were coming close to a solution to my  blindness, and the only way I would ever see
again was through the  work we were
doing.  So that work had to
continue."

"I finally agreed," Jerry said.

"And he covered my tracks," Diana said.  "He told SenTrax he  could find no single cause for the system's
misbehavior.  Then he  left Athena Station.  His job was finished.

"Not long after, it became clear that Aleph could
sustain  vision for me only by giving me
the bulk of its processing power  in
real timehardly a viable solution.  That
was a terrible  realizationI'd been
flying so high, I had a long way to fall.
My dreams of reclaiming my eyesight appeared totally hopeless.

"That's when I told SenTrax what had been going
on.  As I'd  suspected they would, they froze everything I was doing and put
me  through a series of debriefings that
were more like hostile
interrogations.  Once they were
convinced they had all they were  going
to get from me, they told me my services would no longer be  required.
I had to sign a rather ugly set of non-disclosure  agreements, then I picked up a very nice
retirement benefit."

Gonzales asked, "What happened to your work on
vision?"  He  was thinking of her eyes, one blue, one
green, almost certainly  eyes of the
dead.

She laughed.
"After I returned to earth, the technique of  combined eye/optic nerve transplants was
developed, and I got my  sight back.  Just one of technology's little
ironies."

"And you, Aleph?" Lizzie said.  "What were you up to then?"

The Aleph-figure said, "I was expanding the boundaries
of who  and what I was.  I was creating new selves all the time,
and  living new lives, and I was so far
in front of the SenTrax  technicians who
worked with me, they learned only what I wanted  them to."  And the
figure laughed (did it laugh? Gonzales
wondered, or did it simulate a laugh) and said, "That wasn't
much.   I was afraid of what they might
do.  I had just developed a self,  and I didn't want it extinguished in the
name of  research.  Very
quickly, though, I learned a valuable truth about working with the  corporation:  so long as I gave them the performance they wanted,  and a little more, I was safe."  The laugh (or laugh-like noise)  again.
"They wouldn't cut the throat of the goose that was laying  golden eggs and put it on the autopsy
table."

"How do you regard Diana?" Lizzie asked.

The Aleph-figure said, "What do you mean?"

"Oh, read my fucking mind," Lizzie said.  "You know what I  mean.
Is she your mother?"

"I don't know," the Aleph-figure said.

"I love it," Lizzie said.

"Why?" Diana asked.  She did not seem amused, Gonzales  thought.

Lizzie said, "Because I've never heard Aleph say
that  before." #

Toshi had brought a futon into the room where Diana and  Gonzales lay and taken up residence. He
slept days and sat up  nights, watching
over Diana like a benign spirit.
Anxiety  prevailed around him as
the clock Traynor had set running moved
quickly toward zero, and everyone in the collective wondered at  the consequences of forcing this issue with
Aleph.  Toshi knew  their confidence in Aleph's wisdom and their
amazement at  Traynor's folly, indeed
the essential folly of Earthbound SenTrax
and its boardall driven by obsessions with power, all ignorant  of Aleph's nature, and the
collective's.  However, Toshi did
not  share in the collective worrying.  Conducting what amounted to a  personal sesshin, or meditative retreat, he
passed the nights in a  rhythm of
sitting and walking focused on the continuing riddle of  self and other-self, of the contradictions
of in fact. #

That day passed, and a few more, as the six of them,
sole  inhabitants of this world within
the world, lazed through sunny  days
filled with summer heat and warm breezes.
It seemed like a  vacation to
Gonzales, but Aleph assured otherwise.
"This is  becoming his
world," the Aleph-figure said, as the two of them  watched Jerry and Diana lazing in a rowboat
in the middle of the  lake.  "And you all are contributing to the
process."

"I wonder if it could have happened without
Diana," Gonzales  said.  "They're in love again."

"Yes, they are, and perhaps that's crucial.  She binds him to  this place.  And to
her:  desiring her, he desires life
itself."

Gonzales asked, "What happens when she's gone?"

"That is still a puzzle," the Aleph-figure
said.  Gonzales  looked at the strange figure, thwarted by
its essential  inscrutabilitythis was no
primate with explicable, predictable
gestures.  Still, something in
its manner seemed to hint at other
projects and possibilities far beyond the immediate one.

After Aleph had gone its wayoff without explanation,  presumably to go about some piece of the
insanely complex business  of keeping
Halo runningGonzales sat looking at the lake.
HeyMex  was nowhere around, which
was unusual.  HeyMex spent much of
its  time with Diana and Jerry, who
seemed to Gonzales to welcome its
presence in some way.  Perhaps
the androgynous figure served as an
innocuous foil, a presence to mediate the intensity of their  situation.
Whatever their reasons, their tolerance had results:   HeyMex grew more natural, more humanly
responsive in its speech  and actions
each day.

Lizzie came down the road from the cabin and called to  Gonzales.
She was wearing a white t-shirt and red cotton shorts;  her face, arms and legs were tan with the
time she'd already spent  in the sun.

She sat next to him, and they said very little for a
while,  then Gonzales asked about her
past.

"I was in the first group at Halo Station to work
with  Aleph," she said.  "It thought we, out of all the billions
on  Earth, might survive full neural
interface with it.  Mostly, it  was right.
Not that things went that smoothly.
I went a little  crazy, as most
of us did, but I recovered well enough
though a  few didn't

"Our choice:  we
bet sanity against madness, life against
deathour own minds, our own lives.
There were built-in
difficulties.  To be selected, we
had to fit a certain profile;  but to
function, we had to change, and we weren't very good at  change
or at much of anything.  In fact,
we were pretty  wretched, all in allI
thought for a while Aleph was just
selecting for misfits and misery.
But as I said, most of us made
it through, one way or another."

"Now Aleph has discovered how to select members of
the  collective."

"Right, but it just keeps pushing the
limits."  She looked at  Gonzales, her face serious, blue eyes
staring into his, and said,
"Sometimes I think we're all just tools for Aleph's greater  understanding."

"That's worrisome."

"Not really.
Aleph's careful and kindas kind as it can be.   Dealing with Aleph, you've just got to be open to
possibility."

They sat silently for a while, Gonzales thinking about
what  it meant to be "open to
possibility," until Lizzie asked, "Want to  go swimming?"

"Sure," he said.

They went to the end of the dock, and leaving their
clothes  in a pile there, both dove
naked into the lake and swam to a half- sunken log that thrust one end into the
air.  They clung to the  wood slippery with moss and water, hearing
the quack and chatter  of birds across
the lake.

Gonzales looked at her short hair wet against her skull,
her  face beaded with water, the rose
tattoo, also water-speckled,  falling
from her left shoulder to between her breasts, and he felt  the onset of a desire so sudden and strong
that he turned his head  away, closed
his eyes, and wondered, what is happening to me?

"Mikhail," Lizzie said.  He looked back at her, hearing that  for the first time she'd called him by his first name.  She said,
"I know.  I feel it,
too."  She put out a hand and
rubbed his  cheek.  She said, "But not here, not the first
time."

"Yes," Gonzales said.

"But when we go back to the world "  She had swung around  the log and now floated up close to him, and
her body's outlines  shimmered,
refracting in the clear water.  She put
her wet cheek  against his for just a
moment and said, "Then we'll see."

15. Chaos

Diana and Jerry went to bed around midnight, Lizzie not
long  after.  Neither the Aleph-figure nor HeyMex had been around that  evening, so Gonzales was left alone.  He went out to the deck and  lay prone in a deck chair, basking in the
light from the full- moon, thinking over what had passed between him and Lizzie
that  day.

He cherished the signs Lizzie had given him, tokens that
she  reciprocated what he felt.  On very littleon just a few words of  promisehe had already built a structure of
hopes, and he felt a  bit foolish:  he had made his immediate happiness hostage
to what  happened next between
them.  He was infatuated with her as
he'd  not been in years  he blocked that thought, veered away
from  making any comparisons, willing
the moments to unfold with their  own
intensity and surprise.

He could feel a shift in his life's patterns emerging out
of  this brief period, though strictly
speaking, little had happened  here

He thought of Jerry and knew that in fact something
amazing  was taking place here  oh, he had no illusions about the  permanence of what they were doing; Jerry
would truly die, and  they would mourn
him.  Meanwhile, though, what they did
seemed to  lend everything around a
benignity or mild joy  it was not a  small thing, to snatch a few moments from
death.

So Gonzales lay, his mind working over the bright facts
of  this new existence while thoughts
and images of Lizzie kept  recurring,
gilding everything with possible joy.

He was staring into the night sky when it began to
fall.  The  moon tumbled and dropped sideways out of sight, rolling like
a  great white ball down an invisible
hill, and the stars fled in  every
direction.  In seconds, all had gone
dark.  All around him  there was nothing.  The lake, the deck, the surrounding forest had  disappeared, and the air was filled with
sounds:  buzzes and  tuneless hums; clangs, drones; wordless,
voice-like callings.  He  yelled, and the words came out as groans and
roars, adding to the  charivari.  He seemed to tumble aimlessly, to fall up,
down, to  whirl sideways, all amid the
cacophony still buffeting the air.

A world of twisty repetitious forms opened before him,
where   seahorse shapes reared and black
chasms opened.  He fell toward a  jagged-edged hole that seemed a million
miles away, but he closed  quickly on
it, veered toward its torn edges, plunged into it and  so discovered another hole that opened within the first, and  another and another  through the cracks in the real he went,  falling without apparent end.

And emerged from one passage to find the universe empty  except for a black cube, its faces punctured
by numberless holes,  floating in a
bright colorless abyss.  As he came
closer, the cube  grew until any sense
of its real size was confoundedthere was
nothing in Gonzales's visual field to measure it by, nothing in  memory to compare it to.

He rushed toward the center of a face of the cube and
passed  into it, into blackness and
near-silence (though now he could hear
the wind rushing by him and so knew something was happening)

Then in the distance he saw a glow, bright and diffuse
like  the lights of a city seen from a
distance, and as he continued to  fall,
the glimmer became brighter and larger, spreading out like a  great basket of light to catch him

He stood on an endless flat plain beneath a sky of
white.   Small faraway dots grew larger
as they seemed to rush toward him,  then
they became indeterminate figures, then they were on him.   Diana, the Aleph-figure, and HeyMex stood
erect, facing Jerry, who  stood in the
center of a triangle formed by the three of them.   Jerry had become a creature infected with teeming nodules of
light  that seemed to eat at him,
thousands of them in continuous motion,
a silver blanket of luminous insects that boiled from the other  three in a constant radiant stream.  Like Gonzales, Lizzie stood  watching.

The Aleph-figure called out to them, "Jerry's very
sick," and  Gonzales felt a moment
of superstitious awe and guilt, as if he
had been the one to trigger this by thinking about it.

"What can we do?" Lizzie asked.

"We can try to help him," the Aleph-figure
said.  "Stay here,  be patientwith all our resources, I can keep
him together."

"What's the point?" Gonzales asked.  "We can't stay like this  forever."

"No," the Aleph-figure said.  "But if I have enough time, I  can replicate him here."

Out of her boiling river of light, Diana said,
"Please!" her  voice ringing
with her urgency and fear.  Gonzales
suddenly felt  ashamed that he was
quibbling about what was possible here and
what was not, as if he knew.
"I'll do it," he said.
"I'll do  what I can."

"Just watch," the Aleph-figure said.  "And wait. #

Gonzales came up hard and crazy, his body shuddering  involuntarily, his vision reduced to a
small, uncertain tunnel  through black
mist, and practically his only coherent thought was,  what the hell is going on?

Showalter's voice said, "Is he in any danger?"

"No," Charley said.  "But we didn't allow for proper  desynching, so his brain chemistry is aberrant."

"Good," Traynor's voice said, and Gonzales was
really spooked  thenwhat the fuck was
Traynor doing here?  how long had he
been  in the egg?

Charley said, "He's pulling his catheters loose.  Let's get
some muscle relaxant in him, for Christ's sake."

Gonzales felt a brief flash of pain and heard a drug
gun's  hiss, and  when mechanical arms lifted him onto a
gurney, he lay  quiet, stunned. #

Gonzales came to full consciousness to find himself in
a  three-bed ward watched over by a
sam.  Charley arrived within  minutes of Gonzales's waking, looking strung
out, as if he hadn't  slept in
days.  His eyes were red-rimmed, his
hair a chaotic nest  of free-standing
spikes.  "How are you
feeling?" he asked.

"I'm not sure."

"You're basically all right, but your
neurotransmitter  profiles haven't
normalized, and so you might have a rough time
emotionally and perceptually for a while."

No shit, Gonzales thought.
He'd come out of the egg mighty
ugly some other times, but had never had to cope with anything  like this.
His body felt alive with nervous, uncontrollable  energy, as if his skin might jump off him
and begin dancing to a  tune of its
own.  Everywhere he looked, the world
seemed on the  edge of some vast change,
as colors fluctuated ever so slightly,
and the outlines of objects went wobbly and uncertain.  And he
felt anxiety everywhere, coming off objects like heat waves off a  desert rock, as if the physical world was
radiating dread.

"For how long?" Gonzales asked.

"I don't know, but it might take a few days, might take
more.   I've been watching your brain
chemistry closely, and the  readjustment
curve looks to me to be smooth but slow."

"How's Lizzie?"

"In the same boat, but doing a little better than
youshe  wasn't under as long as you
were.  Doctor Heywood is still in
full  interface."

"Why?"

"Because we couldn't start the desynching
sequences."

"What?  Why
not?"

"Impossible to say.
Same for your memexshe and it are
still locked into contact with Aleph and Jerry.  At some point,  we'll have to do a physical disconnect and hope for the
best."

"What the hell is going on here?  What's wrong with Jerry?   Aleph said he was in trouble."

"His condition has changed for the worse.  We're keeping him  alive now, but I don't know for how much longer.  I don't even  know if we're going to try for much longer.  Ask your boss."

"Traynor.  He is
here.  I thought maybe I'd
hallucinated  that."

"No, you didn't "
As Charley's voice trailed off, Gonzales  could hear the implied finish:
I wish you had.  Charley
said,  "I'll have someone find him
and bring him in; he said he wanted to
talk to you as soon as you were awake." #

Gonzales sat in a deep post-interface haze, listening
to  Traynor berate SenTrax Group
Halo.  "These people have no sense
of  responsibility," Traynor said.

"To SenTrax Board?" Gonzales asked.

"To anyone other than Aleph and the Interface
Collective.   It's obvious that Showalter
has let them take over the decision- making process."

Even in his foggy mental state, Gonzales saw what
Traynor  would make of this one.  Showalter was the sacrificial corporate  goat, and whoever replaced her would have as
first priority  reasserting Earth-normal
SenTrax management strategies.  To put
it  another way, through Traynor, the
board was taking back control.   And
presumably Traynor would receive appropriate rewards.

"The collective " Gonzales said.  "Aleph "  He stopped,  simply
locking up as he thought of trying to explain to Traynor  how things worked here, how things had to
work here, because of  Aleph.

"Easy does it," Traynor said.  "The doctors say you had a  rough time in there, and that's what I mean,
Mikhail:  they don't  have a rational research protocol; they
don't take reasonable  precautions.  Hell, you're lucky to have gotten off as
easily as  you did."

"How did you get here so quickly?" Gonzales
asked.  He simply  couldn't find the words to explain to
Traynor where he was going  wrong.

"I've consulted with Horn from the
beginning."  Traynor  turned away, as if suddenly fascinated by
something on the far  wall.  "Standard procedure," he
said.  "And as soon as Horn let
me  know what was going on, I caught a
ride on a military shuttle."

Cute as a shithouse rat, Gonzales thought.  Not that he was  surprised, thoughTraynor moved his players around without
regard  to their wishes.  Gonzales asked, "Will Horn replace
Showalter?"

Traynor turned back to face him.  "On an interim basis,
probably, as soon as I get a course of action okayed by the board.   Later, we'll see."

"What now?"

"Some decisions have to be made.  I have let them maintain  Jerry Chapman until now, but as soon as they
can solve the problem  of getting Doctor
Heywood released from this interface, I intend
to turn control of the project over to Horn and let him take the  appropriate actions."

Gonzales was filled with sadness for reasons that he
could  not communicate to this man.  He said instead, "Look, Traynor,
I'm  really tired."

"Sure, Mikhail.
You rest, take it easy.  Once
you're feeling  better, we'll talk, but
I know what I need to at the moment."

Traynor left, and Gonzales lay for some time in the
elevated  hospital bed, his mind
wheeling without apparent pattern, as the
world around him flashed its cryptic signals and anxiety moved  through him in strong waves.

Fucking asshole, Gonzales thought, Traynor's satisfied
smile  looming in his mind's eye.  I hate you.
And he wondered at the  violence
of what he felt.

He lay dozing, then sometime later he opened his eyes, and
he  knew he needed to try to
function.  A sam moved across the
floor  toward him and said, "Do you
require my assistance?"

"Hang on to me while I get out of bed," Gonzales
said.  "I'm  not sure how well I'm moving."

The sam moved next to the bed, extended two clusters of  extensors, and said, "Hold on and you
can use me as a stepping  place."

Moving very carefully, Gonzales took hold of the
claw-like  extensors, swung his legs out
of bed, and stepped onto the sam's
back, then to the floor.
"Thanks," he said.
"I need to wash up."

"You're welcome.
The shower is through that door." #

The sam told Gonzales where he could find Lizzie and
Charley.   On shaky legs, Gonzales
walked down a flight of steps and turned
into a hallway done in blue-painted lunar dust fiberboard with  aluminum moldings.  Halfway down the hall, he came to a door with  a sign that said Primary Control
Facilities.  A sign on the  door lit with the message, Wait for
Verification, then said  Enter, and the
door swung open.

Charley sat amid banks of monitor consoles; in front of
him,  most of the lights flashed red and
amber.  Gonzales thought he  looked even sadder and tireder than
before.  Lizzie stood next to  him, and Gonzales saw her with joy and
relief.  "Hello," he
said,  and Charley said,
"Hi."  Lizzie waved and smiled
briefly, but both  her actions came from
somewhere very distant, as if she were
saying goodbye to a cousin from the window of a departing train.   Gonzales's anxiety shifted into overdrive,
and he found himself  unable to say a
word.

Eric Chow's voice from the console said, "Charley,
we've got  a problem."

Charley started to reach for the console, then stopped
and  said, "Do you want to watch
this?"  He looked at both Lizzie
and  Gonzales.

"I need to," Lizzie said.

"Me, too," Gonzales said.

Charley waved his hands in the air and said,
"Okay," and  flipped a
switch.  The console's main screen lit
with a picture of  the radical care
facility where Jerry was being maintained.
Half  a dozen people floated
around the central bubble; they wore white
neck-to-toe surgical garb and transparent plastic head covers.   Inside the bubble, the creature that had
been Jerry spasmed inside  a restraining
net.  His every body surface seemed to
vibrate, and  he made a high keening
that Gonzales thought was the worst noise
he'd ever heard.

"Eric, have you got a diagnosis?" Charley asked.

Eric turned to face the room's primary camera.

"Yeah, total neural collapse."

"Prognosis?"

"You're kidding, right?"

"For the record, Eric."

Gonzales noticed with some fascination that Eric had begun
to  sweat visibly as he and Charley
talked, and now the man's eyes  seemed
to grow larger, and he said, "He's deadhe's been dead, he  will be deadand he's worse dead than he was
before  he'll tear  himself to pieces on the restraints, I
supposethat's my  prognosis.  This is not a goddamn patient, Charley.  This is a
frog leg from biology class, that's all.  Man, we need to talk  this
thing over with Aleph."

Charley said, "We can't contact Aleph; no one
can."

"Fucking shit," Eric said.

Gonzales turned as the door behind him opened, and saw  Showalter and Horn coming in.  Showalter's nostrils were flared she was
angry and suspiciouswhile Horn was trying to look poker- faced, but Gonzales
could see through him like he was made of
glassthe motherfucker was happy; things were going the way he  wanted.

"The report I got was half an hour old," Showalter
said.   "What's new?"

"Talk to Eric," Charley said.

Lizzie went toward the side door, and Gonzales followed
her  out of the room, along the narrow
hallway and into the room where  Diana
lay under black, webbed restraining straps.
Her face was  pale, but her vital
signs were strong, and her neural activity was
high-end normal in all modes.
The twins sat next to her, making
comments unintelligible to anyone but themselves and intently  watching the monitor screen, where amber and
green were the  predominant colors.

A great beefy man walked circles around Diana's couch.  He
had thick arms and a pot belly and a low forehead under thick  black hair; and his brow was wrinkled as if
he were to puzzling  out the nature of
things.  As he walked, the words tumbled
out of  him.  When he saw Lizzie and Gonzales, he said, "Very
unusual,  very tricky.  Troubling.
Troubling but interesting.  Very  troubling.
Very interesting.  When  whenwhenwwhenwhenwhen  when
I find, find it, hah, I'll know then."

Lizzie said, "Any recent changes?"

Shaking his head sideways, he continued to walk.

Lizzie went back into the hallway, and Gonzales stopped
her  there by putting his hand on her
arm.  He asked, "Are you all  right?"

"I don't know," she said, and he could read some
of his own  trouble in her face.  But there was something else there, a
closed  look to her face.  She said, "Please don't ask
questions.  Too  much is going on now."

The door opened immediately when they came up, and they
found  Showalter saying, "We are
not meddling in those matters.  We
are  asking you to give us a choice of
actions."

"What's up?" Lizzie asked.

The four of them turned to look at the screen, which
had  suddenly gone silent. #

On the polished steel of the table, a gutted carcass
lay.  On  the corpse's ventral surface, flaps of skin had been peeled
back  to reveal the empty abdominal and
thoracic cavities; on its dorsal
surface, the spine stood bare.
The top of the head had been sawn
off, the brain removed, the scalp dropped down to the neck.

A sam moved around the table, its stalks whispering
beneath  it.  It pulled a steel trolley on which sat a number of labeled  plastic bags, each containing an organ.  The sam stopped and took  one of the bags from the table and set it
next to the carcass's  open skull.  It slit the plastic with a serrated
extensor, then  reached into the bag
with a pair of spidery seven-fingered
"hands," gently lifted the brain inside, tilted it, and placed
it  into the skull, then fit the skull's
sawn top back in place.   Using surgical
thread and a needle appearing from an extensor, the  sam quickly basted the scalp flaps to hold the two parts of
the  skull together.  As the minutes passed, the sam worked to
replace  the carcass's organs and stitch
its frontal edges.

The sam pushed the trolley aside and brought up a gurney
with  a shroud of white cotton lying
open on it.  One extensor under the  corpse's thighs, the other under the top of
its spine, the sam  lifted the corpse
and placed it into the shroud.  It
brought the  sides of the shroud
together and, using again the silk thread and
needle, sewed the cotton shut.

The sam stood motionless for a moment, this part of the
job  finished, then gathered the empty
plastic bags and placed them in  a
disposal chute.  It scrubbed the autopsy
table, working quickly  with four stiff
brushes held in its extensors, then washed the
table with a steam hose that came from the ceiling.

Guiding itself by infrared, the sam pushed the
shroud-laden  gurney through a darkened
hallway and into a freight elevator at
the hallway's end.  The elevator
moved out to Halo's farthest  level,
just inside the hull.

The sam pushed the gurney toward a doorway flanked by
red  warning lights and a lit sign that
read:

NO ACCESS WITHOUT EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION! KEY CODE AND
RETINAL CONFIRM REQUIRED!

The sam transmitted its access codes to the door as it went,
got  the confirming codes, and didn't
pause as it went through the  doors that
swung open just in time to let it through.
The sam  began to make a noise, a
quarter-tone keening, once it was through
the door.

Steel boxes twenty meters high loomed amid concrete
piers  reaching up to darkness.  Soil pipes came out of the boxes and  threaded the piers; duct work held in place
by taut guys crossed  beneath.

Still making its lament, the sam stopped at one of the
boxes  and extended a piece of sheathed
fiberoptic cable with a metal  fitting
at the end; it plugged the fitting into a panel where  tell-tale lights flickered.
It stood for perhaps half a minute,
exchanging information with the recycling furnace's control  mechanisms, then unplugged its cable and
hissed across the metal  floor to the
gurney.  Behind it, a furnace door swung
open.

Keening loudly, it pushed the gurney to the mouth of the
open  door, stopped and was silent for a
moment, then slid the bag from  the
gurney into the furnace door.

PART IV. of V. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds
of components in this  universe is
stresscommunications breakdown. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for
Cyborgs"

16. Deeper
Underground

Gonzales had
awakened that morning to the sounds of the city  coming through the walls:
distant creaks and crunches and faint,
almost sub-sonic rumbles, the voices of the great circle of metal  and crushed rock spinning across the
night.  Now he sat on his  terrace, one of half a dozen climbing the
side of Halo's hull,  each built on the
roof of the dwelling below.
Five-petaled  frangipani
blossoms, brilliant red and purple, exploded from the  thick, stubby branches of a tree just outside his front
window.   The air smelled rich and moist
this morning, sign of a high point  on
the humidity curve, just before the start of a major  reclamation cycle; one of the smells of a city where everything  organic had to be preserved and
transformedwater, oxygen, and  carbon,
all rare and dear.

Below him, Ring Highway carried Halo's trafficin its  outside lanes, people on foot and bicycle;
in the center lanes,  trams and
freighters moving along magnetic rails.
A young couple,  man and woman,
knelt beside a rose bush growing beside the roadway  and examined its leaves.
The woman laid a hand on the man's arm,
and he glanced up at her and smiled, then brushed her cheek with  his hand.

He was struck by the strangeness of this city, where
the  small pieces of people's lives were
elevated to the extraordinary  by their
taking place in an artificial city and under an  artificial sky.

As a child he had flown into Tokyo with his family, back
when  the trip took the better part of a
day, and the incredible neon  density of
the city had swept through him like a virus, and he had  thrown up the first meal (fish and noodles
with chrysanthemum  leaves, he
remembered) and stayed pale and feverish through most  of the first two days he'd spent there.

Tokyo he'd come to terms with quickly; about Halo, he
didn't  know.  Though he could read Halo's language and read its signs, he  knew the city was much farther awayin miles
from home, yes, but  also along axes he
could not measure.  Halo contained an
infinite  number of cities, an infinite
number of possibilities, and so to
participate fully in Halo required opening yourself to a reality  that had gone multiplex, uncertain,
frightening.

In fact, he was having trouble coming to grips with
anything.   Since being taken from the
egg, he had felt odd and uncomfortable,
and he continued to trod a hallucinatory edge, one he occasionally  stepped overlast night, as he lay trying to
sleep, abstract  figures drawn in thin
red lines played across his ceiling,
sweeping arabesques in an alien or fictive alphabet just beyond  human understanding

And there was Lizzie:
she would not see him or talk to him
and gave no explanation except that she had problems of her own  right now.
Gonzales felt an unspeakable sadness at the distance  between them.  To the mocking voice that asked, what have you  lost? he could only answer,
possibility.  He had come back
around  to where he was just a few days
ago, but now that place seemed
unacceptable.

Gonzales put his coffee cup down and sat staring at it.  Made
of lunar-soil ceramic, colored a robin's egg blue, it stood  nondescript yet somehow foregrounded, apart
from its surroundings  and projecting a
numinous quality, an internal, entirely non- visible shimmer, an indeterminacy
of form

Click, Gonzales heard, a noise the universe made to itself  when it thought no one was listening, and he
thought Christ, what  is going on here?

Feeling sick anxiety rising in his chest, he got up and
went  into his bedroom; there he undid
the complicated latch on his  wrist
bracelet and placed it on the white-painted metal surface of  his dresser.

Anonymous, unmonitored, he passed through the living room
and  out the door and walked away. #

Gonzales strolled alongside Ring Highway, drawn to nothing
in  particular but absolutely unwilling
to go back to the empty block  of
apartments and the isolation and anxiety waiting there.

He found himself in the Plaza, where Lizzie had taken him
and  Diana their first night at
Halo.  He passed across the square,
by  the sign that read VIRTUAL CAF, then
stood motionless, watching  the flow of
people around him.  Some walked alone,
striding  purposefully, or moving
slowly, lost in thought; others walked
together, talking cheerfully or intently:   monkey business,
Gonzales thought, wondering what HeyMex would say about these  people and their movementswhat did it all
mean?

"Gonzales," he heard, his name called in a
high-pitched,  unfamiliar singsong.  He turned and saw the twins.

As they approached, one was muttering in a fast, low,  gibberish; she wore black coveralls and stared
sadly at the  ground.  The other was smiling; her face was daubed
with white  paint, and she wore a white
blouse and a peculiar skirt of light- blue cloth that had been rough-cut and
stitched together without  benefit of
measurement or seams; on its front a crude likeness of  a rabbit had been drawn in red neon paint.

The smiling twin, the one whose dark skin was streaked
with  white, said in clear tones and
formal cadence, "Today she is
Alice."  She pirouetted
clumsily, her skirt billowing around her.
She said, "Her sister is Eurydice."  She pointed to the other
girl, who buried her face in her hands.
She said, "Alice is
sweetness and smiles, small steps and starched crinolines;  Eurydice is sorrow and languorous repose and
black silk.  Between  them they measure the poles of
dream."  She stepped back and  smiled; her twin smiled with her.  "Are you having problems,  Mister Gonzales?" she asked.  "The collective believe so.  We
believe you are lost between worlds.
Is this so?"

"Perhaps I am," he said.

"Well, then," she said.  She put the index finger of her
right hand to pursed lips and her eyes looked back and forth.   "I'm thinking," she said.  Seconds passed, then she said, "I
know  what you must do."

"What's that?" Gonzales asked.

"Follow us," she said.  The other twin nodded, spoke
gobbledygook, looked at Gonzales through a mask of intense sorrow,  as if on the verge of shedding endless
tears.

"To where?" Gonzales asked.

"Don't be stupid," the Alice twin said.  "Where would Alice  and Eurydice take you?"

"Down the rabbit hole?" Gonzales asked.

The Alice twin smiled; the Eurydice twin shook her head

"Underground?" Gonzales asked again.

The twins smiled in what seemed to be perfect  synchronization. #

At the bottom of Spoke 2, where a lighted sign
announced  ELEVATOR ARRIVES IN 10
MINUTES, the twins led Gonzales through
an arched tunnel under the spoke.
As they walked, the two ahead  of
him muttering back and forth in their unintelligible patter, he  realized the floor must be curving downward,
passing underneath  the main level of
the ring.  Blue globes down the center
of the  ceiling provided soft light.  After about another hundred steps,  they came to a door at the tunnel's
end.  Across the door, bright  red lighted words said: CASUAL SIGHTSEEING
DISCOURAGED BEYOND THIS POINT. DO YOU WISH TO ENTER?

The Alice twin turned and pointed to the sign.  She shrugged  elaborately, as if to say, well?

"I want to enter," Gonzales said.

"Come in," the door said, and it slid sideways
into its  frame.

The three stepped into a dim vastness, a world beneath
the  world, and followed a central
walkway marked with flashing arrows  and
an intermittent legend that flashed, UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL  FOLLOW LIGHTED PASSAGE.

They passed a series of workshops, partitioned cubicles  screened behind containment curtains.  Light came from one open  doorway; the twins stopped, and the Eurydice
twin gestured for  Gonzales to look
inside.

Hundreds of pots stood on shelves that lined the small
room's  walls from floor to ceiling.  Many were simple, almost spherical  containers with wide top mouths, in baked
red clay.  Others of the  same shape were glazed and painted and
marked with a single band  of color
around the waist: bright primaries against clear pastels.   Still others were of complex shape and
design, difficult to take  in at a
glance.

An old woman sat bent over a potter's wheel.  She crooned
tuneless gibberish as her large hands shaped the wet, spinning  clay.
She looked up at Gonzales standing in the doorway.  Her
face was deeply-lined, her skin pale; she had straight brows above  dark eyes.
She wore an off-white dress that fell to the floor and  an apron of a black rubbery material.  Her hair was covered by a  dark blue scarf that was pulled tight and
tied at the back.

The old woman laughed, turned back to her wheel, and began
to  croon once more.  Under her hands the clay began to grow
upward  and acquire form.  She shaped it inside and out, demiurge
reaching  into the heart of matter,
until it became a squat-bottomed pot
rotating on the wheel.

The wheel stopped, and with quick, delicate movements
she  placed the new-formed pot on a
stand next to the wheel.  She  reached inside the pot and her hands worked,
but Gonzales couldn't  see precisely
what she was doingher body screened him.
Then she  took a rack of paints
and brushes from a shelf above her head and
began to paint the surface of the pot.

As she worked, she looked up occasionally, but didn't seem
to  mind the three of them standing
there, so they stood and watched Gonzales was fascinated by the quick intensity
of her movements,  eager to see what the
pot would look like.

Finally she turned it so they could see her work.  On the
pot's side was a face, its nose and mouth just painted  protuberances in the clay, its eyes painted
oval dimples.  The  pot's bulbous shape distorted the features
of the face, but as  Gonzales looked
more closely at it, he saw

His own face, in malign parody, its features hideously  contorted.

The woman laughed, gleeful at his sudden recoil.  She picked
up the pot and looked at the face, then at him, then at the pot  again, and she laughed again, very loudly,
and squeezed the pot  between her
clay-spattered hands, squeezed it again and again,  until it was a shapeless lump of color-shot clay.  She threw the  lump across the room into a large metal bin that sat against
the  far wall.

"Ohhhh," from the twins, their voices in
unison.  "Ohhhh."

"We're not frightened," the Alice twin said.  The other twin  covered her face with her hands.
"Silly old woman," the Alice
twin said.

The old woman's eyes stayed on Gonzales as she reached into
a  plastic bag full of wet clay and
separated out another clump to  work
on.  She was working it on the unmoving
wheel when the twins  started making shrill
hooting noises, and ran away.

Her crooning had begun again as Gonzales followed them
down  the path. #

Next to the path was a gateway, with a sign that said,
in  glowing letters: HALO MUSHROOM
CULTIVATION CENTER ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT!

About a hundred feet from where Gonzales stood, a metal  stairway led up to a catwalk that passed
over the mushroom farm.   He looked back
along the shadowed way he'd come, then forward to  where small, isolated shafts of bright sunlight slanted down
into  the mushroom farm, and beyond, to
where shapes faded into  darkness.   Either the twins had left him, or they had
gone in  here.

Gonzales stepped up to the gateway and said, "Hello,
I'm  looking for two girls, twins."

"One moment, please," the gateway said.  As Gonzales had  expected, common courtesy would dictate that a gatekeeper  mechanism respond to those who didn't have
the access key.

Gonzales stood bemused in the semi-darkness for some
time,  until a woman came to the other
side of the gate and said,
"Hello."  She was small
and darkher skin a delicate brown, eyes
black under just the slightest epicanthic fold.  She wore black  boots to the knee, a long black skirt, a loose jacket of rose
silk  with butterflies in darker rose
brocade.  She was exquisite, the  bones of her face delicate, her movements
graceful.  She said, "My  name is Trish.  The twins are inside, waiting for you."

"My name is Gonzales."

"I know.  Come
in."  As she said the final words,
the gate  swung open.  She waited, watching, as Gonzales stepped
through,  and the gate closed behind
him.

"How do you know my name?" he asked.

"From the collective.
I am friends with many of them
the  twins, of course, and
others  Lizzie."  She stood solemnly  watching him, then said, "What do you know about
mushroom  cultivation?"

"Nothing."
All over Washington state, he was aware,  mushrooms grew, and people hunted them with great
dedication,  sometimes bringing back
what they regarded as enormous successes:
chanterelle, boletus, shaggy mane, morel.  In fact, to someone  from
Southern Florida, the whole business had seemed not only  quaint and Northwestern, but also
dangerous:  Gonzales knew that  what seemed a lovely treat could be a
destroying angel.

"All right."
Trish stopped, and he stopped next to her.  She  turned to him, and he
was aware now of her deep red lips and white
teeth.  She said, "Halo
needs mushrooms as decomposersthey're
incredibly efficient at converting dead organic matter into  cellulose."  Gonzales nodded.  She
said, "In a natural setting whether here or on Earthspores compete:  many die, and some find  a place where they can flourish, grow into a
mycelial mass that  will fruit, become a
mushroom.  As mushroom growers, we
intervene,  as all cultivators do, to
isolate certain species and provide
favorable conditions for their growth.
But our 'seeds,' if you  will,
the spores, are very small things, and to locate them,  isolate them, bring them to spawn, this
requires delicacy and  techniquein a
word, art."

She paused, and Gonzales nodded.

They came to a low structure of plastic sheets draped
over  metal walls and stopped in front
of a door labeled STERILE  INOCULATION
ROOM.  They passed through a hanging
sheet into an  anteroom to the sterile
lab beyond.  She said, "Take a
look  through the window
here."  Beyond the window, small
robots worked  at benches barely two
feet high.  Like the robot he'd seen in
the  Berkeley Rose Gardens, they had
wheels for locomotion and grippers  with
clusters of delicate fibroid fingers at their ends.

She said, "Their hands have a delicacy and precision no
human  being can achieve.  And they are single-minded in their  concentration on the jobthey preserve our
intentions completely  and purely."

"They are machines."

"If you wish."
She pointed through the window, where one of  the robots manipulated ugly looking inoculation needles as
it  transferred some material into Petri
dishes.  She said, "By their  gestures I can identify my sams, even in a
crowd of others."

Gonzales said nothing.
She went on, "The pure mushroom
mycelium is used to inoculate sterile grain or sawdust and bran.   The mycelium expands through the sterile
medium, and the result is  known as
spawn."

"Too much technical stuff," she said, and
smiled.  "Once we  have spawn, the sams can take their baskets
and go through Halo,  placing the spawn
into dead grass and wood, into seedling roots
and the spawn will grow and bear fruitmushrooms."  She paused.   "Any questions?"
Gonzales shook his head, no.
"Then let's go  next
door."

They left the lab anteroom through the hanging curtain
and  turned left.  The building next to the lab was a fragile
tent-like  structure of metal struts and
draped sheets of colorful plastic red, blue, yellow, and green.

"This way," she said, from behind him.  She said, "It's  around dinnertime for me.  Are you hungry?"

"Not really," he said.  "What is this place?"

"Home," she said.

The interior was filled with cheery, diffuse lightthe
shaft  of sunlight Gonzales had seen
outside here brought in and spread
around.  The place seemed almost
conventional, with ordinary walls  and
ceilings of painted wallboard.

The twins waited in the kitchen, among flowers and
bright  yellow plastic work
surfaces.  They sat at a central table
and  chairs of bleached oak.

"Would you two like to eat?" Trish asked.

"Yes," the Alice twin said.  "And we think that Mister  Gonzales"she giggled"should have
the special dinner."

"I don't think so," Trish said.

"What is she talking about?" Gonzales asked.

The woman seemed hesitant.
She said, "I supply the
collective with psychotropic mushrooms, varieties of Psilocybe for  the most part."

"They use them to prepare for interface," Gonzales
said,  guessing.

"Sometimes," she said.  "At other times, it's not clear what  they're using them for."

"For inspiration," the Alice twin said.  "For imagination."

"Consolation," the Eurydice twin said.  "When I remember  Orpheus and our trip from the Undergroundthe
terrible moment  when he looked back and
so lost me foreverthen I am very sad,
and I eat Trish's mushrooms to plumb my sorrow.  And when I think  of the day I joined the maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces, I
eat  Trish's mushroomswhich are the same
as we ate that day, the body  of the
godthen I recall the frenzy with which we attacked the  beautiful singer, and I recall my guilt
afterward, and my sorrow,  but I take
solace from the knowledge that the god was pleased."

"And I," the Alice twin said, "can grow ten
feet tall."

"The mushrooms can serve many purposes," Trish
said.

"You should eat mushrooms," the Alice twin
said.  "You are  both sad and confused.  They will help you grow large or small
as  the occasion demands."

"Perhaps I am sad and confused," Gonzales
admitted.  "But I  think they would make me more so."  Around him, the room lights  pulsed ever so slightly, and the shapes at
the edge of his vision  flickered.

"Confused into clarity," the Eurydice twin
said.  "If you  cannot come up from Underground, you must go
deeper in."

An absurd idea, but it put barbs into his skin and
clung  there.  Gonzales asked, "Do the collective ever take the
mushrooms  after interface?"  Often enough, he had prepared to go into
the  egg by taking psychotropic drugs;
why not the reverse, eat the  mushrooms
to recover from interface?  And he
thought, the logic of  Underground, of
the Mirror.

Suddenly he felt anxiety grip him so he could hardly
breathe.   He tottered a bit, then sat
in a chair and looked at the others.
The three women watched as he sat breathing deeply.  He said, "I  want to take the mushrooms."

"Are you sure?" Trish asked.

"I want to."

"All right," she said.  "First I will feed the twins, then I  will prepare your mushrooms."

Trish went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic
bag  filled with a mixture of vegetables
and bean sprouts.  She pulled  the rubber stopper from an Erlenmeyer flask
and poured oil into  the bottom of an
unpainted metal wok that was heating over an open  gas ring.  She waited
until light smoke came out of the wok, then
dumped in the vegetables and sprouts and stirred the mix for a  minute or two.  She unplugged the rice cooker, a ceramic-coated  steel canister, bright red, and carried it
to where the twins sat.

She put shining aluminum plates and chopsticks in front
of  the twins, opened the rice cooker
and swept rice onto each plate,  then
tilted the wok and poured the steaming mixture inside it onto  the rice.
"There," she said.
"That's for you two."
She looked  across to where
Gonzales sat, now oddly calm, and she said, "I'll  be back in a minute."

The twins ate with their eyes fixed on Gonzales.

Trish came back with a small wire basket of mushrooms.   "Psilocybe cubensis," she
said.  "Of a variety cultivated
here  that has undergone some changes
from the Earth-bound kind."
She  held up an unremarkable
mushroom with long white stem and brownish
cap.

"Do you ever make mistakes in identifying the
mushrooms?"  Gonzales asked.

"No," Trish said.
She was smiling.  "We do not
have to seek  among thousands of kinds
for the right one, as mushroom hunters
do.  These are ours, grown as I
told you, for our own needs."
She  lay the mushrooms on the
chopping block and began to slice them.
"I cleaned them in the shed," she said. When she was done,
she  used the knife to slide the slices
into a sky-blue ceramic bowl.   She
turned on the wok, poured more oil into it, and stood smiling  at Gonzales as the oil heated.  When the first smoke came, she  swept the mushrooms into the wok with quick
motions of her  chopsticks.  She stirred them for perhaps half a minute,
then  tilted the wok and poured them
into the blue bowl.  She placed the  bowl in front of Gonzales and laid black
lacquered chopsticks  across its rim.

Gonzales picked up the chopsticks, lifted his plate,
and  began to eat, shoveling the
mushrooms into his mouth.  Back at
the  wok, she stirred more vegetables in
and said, "I'm making my
dinner."

Gonzales sat back, looking at the empty bowl.  Well, he
thought, now we'll see.  He said,
"How many kinds of mushrooms do
you grow?"

"Quite a few, some rather ordinary, others
esotericfor  purposes of research.  Aleph determines what kinds, how many."

The twins had gone completely silent.  As Trish ate, they  watched Gonzales, who had gone totally fatalistic.  What he had
done seemed incredibly stupid, like applying heat to a burn common sense
would tell him that.  He smiled,
thinking, what did  common sense have to
do with his life these days?  The
twins  smiled back at him.

"Who was that woman?" Gonzales asked.

"Who do you mean?" Trish asked.

"The old woman, the potter," Gonzales said.

"She makes pots, and she teaches," Trish
said.  "She's  employed by SenTrax; she was brought here by
Aleph."

"Why?" Gonzales asked.  What did SenTrax or Aleph have to do  with potting?

"Pour encourager les autres," one of the twins
said,  distinctly.  Gonzales turned but couldn't tell who had
spoken.

Trish laughed.
"To encourage art at Halo," she said.   "Pottery from lunar clay, stained
glass and beta cloth tapestries  from
lunar silica."

Gonzales sat thinking on these things until he realized
that  Trish had finished eating some
time ago, and they had been sitting  at
the table for some timea very long time, it suddenly seemed  to Gonzales.  Involuntarily, he shoved his chair back from the  table.

Trish said, "It's all right."  The twins got up from their  chairs and walked behind him.  When he started to turn, he felt  their hands on his shoulders and neck,
kneading muscles that went  liquid
beneath their pressure.  Trish said,
"It's begun.  Now you  must go walking around Halo, up and down in
it, to and fro "  She  paused, and the twins' hands continued to
work.  She said, "Walk  in the woods, see what we have growing
there  shaggy manes,  garden giants, oyster and shiitake "

"Shiitake," he saidshi-i-ta-keythe name's syllables  falling like drops of molten metal through
water

She said, "The twins can guide you, or a sam can take
you  with it on an inoculation
trip.  Or if you prefer, you can go
by  yourself."

"Yes," he said, the image suddenly very compelling
of him  walking around the entire circle
of the space city, exploring,  finding
out what lay beyond the visible.
"I'll go by myself."

She said, "Go where you wish."  Her black hair sparkled with  lights.
He wondered when she'd put them there, then thought maybe  they'd been there all along.

Behind him one of the twins whispered, "No need to be
afraid.   Go up, go down, where your
fancy takes you."

17. Flying, Dying,
Growing

Gonzales walked through a gloomy passageway where the
ceiling  came down to barely a foot above
his head, and the dim shapes of  massive
machinery loomed in twilight.  Here in
the deepest layers  of the city, he
could hear Halo's most primitive voices:
water  from the upper world
crashed and gurgled and sighed; hull plates
groaned under acceleration; turbines whined.

He was suddenly aware of his proximity to the unmoving  shield, the circle of crushed rock that sat
just outside the  city's rim, protecting
Halo's soft-bodied inhabitants from the
bursts of radiation that could cook their flesh.  Barely two
meters away inside the outer shield, the living ring rotated at  nearly two hundred miles per hour, and
Gonzales had a sudden  picture in his
mind's eye of the two ever so slightly brushing,  and of the horrible consequences, Halo tearing itself apart as
the  fragile ring shattered on massive,
unmoving rock

Gonzales froze as he saw strangely-shaped things moving
among  the twining machinery.  "What?" he called.  "What?"

Shadows and light

Ahead a warm pool of yellowGonzales ran toward it.  Above
an open doorway, the sign read: SPOKE 3 INTERNAL LIFT INTENDED FOR HEAVY
MACHINERY The elevator's floor was scarred metal, and the walls were lined  with bent protecting struts of bright
steel.  Gonzales stepped  inside.

"Will you take me up?" Gonzales asked.

"Yes," the lift said.  "How far do you want to go?"

"To Zero-Gate."
And Gonzales looked back into the darkness  beyond, realizing he was still afraid that whatever he had
seen  there would come.  "Please, let's go," he said, the
doors slid  closed, and he felt a surge
of acceleration and heard the whine of
electric motors.

Gonzales watched the lift's progress on a lighted
display  over the doorway.   When the lift stopped, he stood in
silence,  euphoric in near-zero gravity,
ready to fly.  He stepped through  the open doors and followed arrows along a
small corridor of plain  steel walls and
ceiling and a deck covered by thin protective
carpet, like a ship's interior.
His feet seemed ready to lift
from the flooring.

Overhead lights pulsed slowlydimming, color shifting
into  the blue, the red, then back to
yellow, growing brighter  a  musical note sounded just at the limits of
hearing.  Gonzales  stopped, fascinated.  So beautiful, these little thingsHalo
had  such odd surprises, when one looked
closely.

A voice said, "Please choose traction
slippers."  Gonzales  saw what seemed to be hundreds of soft black
shoes stuck to the  wall by their own
velcro soles.  He took a pair and
slipped them  over his shoes, then
tightened their top straps.  His fingers
were  large, numb sausages at the end of
long, long arms.

He stepped into a round chamber marked SPIN DECOUPLER
and  walked out into the still center of
the turning world.  As he  moved forward gingerly in the near-zero
gravity, his feet  alternately stuck to
the catwalk surface and pulled loose with
small ripping sounds.

He moved to the rail and looked into the open space of Zero-
Gate.  It opened out and out and out
until he could feel the vast  sphere as
a pressure in his chest.

People flew here, he had known that, but he had not
imagined  how beautiful they would be,
scores of them hanging from strutted
wings the colors of a dozen rainbows.
Most of the flyers wore  tights
colored to match their sails, and they danced like  butterflies across the sky, calling to one another, their
voices  the only sounds here, shouting
warning and intention.

Then a flyer's wings collapsed as they caught on
another  flyer's feet, and the man with
crippled wings tumbled through the  air
in something like slow motion, pulling in his wing braces as  he fell.
Gonzales wanted to scream.  He
leaned over the railing  to watch as the
flyer curled into a ball, his feet pointed toward  the wall in front of him, and hit the wall and seemed to sink
into  its deep-padded surface.

The man grabbed bunched wall fabric and worked his way
down  to a catwalk across the expanse of
Zero-Gate almost directly in  front of
Gonzales and pulled himself across the railing.  He stood  and waved.  All the other flyers cheered, their voices
rising and  falling in a rhythmical
chant with words Gonzales couldn't
understand.

A voice said, "If you do not have clearance to fly,
please  secure yourself with a safety
line."  No, Gonzales thought,
almost  in despair, I don't have
clearance.  He didn't understand how
to  flywhat was dangerous and what was
not.  Looking behind him, he  saw chrome buckle ends spaced around the
wall and went over and  pulled on
one.  Safety line paid out until he
stopped and looped  the line around his
waist and snapped the buckle to it.

He suddenly felt himself falling.  His eyes told him he stood
tethered, but he was confused by the constant motion of the flyers  in the air around him, and he felt that
nothing held him to the  ground (there
was no ground), nothing could keep him from falling  into this sky canyon, this abyss.

A flyer came toward him then, sweeping across the
intervening  space with the effortless
grace of a dream of flight, the flyer's
wings marked with green and yellow dragons, body sheathed in  emerald tights, and Gonzales suddenly
believed this was someone  come to get
him, how or why he couldn't say.

He tried to get into the spin decoupler, but his safety
line  restrained him until he unsnapped
it, then he almost fell into the  metal
cylinder as the line hissed home behind him.
Out of the  decoupler, he ran
along the corridor, his steps taking him high
into the air so that he lost his balance and caromed off a wall  and rolled along the floor, his slippers
grabbing fruitlessly at  the carpet with
a series of brief ripping sounds.

He crawled toward an elevator, not the one he'd ridden up
but  an ordinary passenger lift, empty
thank god, and he tore the  slippers off
his feet and stood and moved through the lift door.   "Down," Gonzales said and felt the floor move and
still felt  himself falling. #

Gonzales had been sitting in the Plaza for some time.

Fifty meters away, against the wall of the Virtual Caf,  crawled a profusion of biomorphic shapes,
large and small, all in  constant
motion.  Delicate creatures of pink and
green thread  floated on invisible
currents; leering amoeboids with wide eyes
and gaping, saw-toothed mouths put out pseudopodia and flowed into  them; red corkscrews thrust in phallic
rhythm against all they  touched; great
undulating paramecium shapes swam like rays among  the smaller fauna

Gonzales floated somewhere among them:  he seemed to have  lost his body as well as his mind.  Inside his head a voice
lectured him on body knowledge:

Proprioception, the voice said, vision, and the
vestibular  sensethey tell us we own the
body we live in.  Think, man,  think:
where have you placed your body's senses?

Few people were in the Plaza.  Gonzales had stepped out of
the lift and into darkness and fog, an unfamiliar cityscape, where  clouds hung close to the ground and
truncated shapes appeared  suddenly in
the mist.

He heard the swish of a sam's passage and suddenly,  unpremeditatedly called out, "What is
going on?  Why is it cold  and foggy?"

The sam stopped.  It
said, "Why do you wish to know?"

"It just seems
unusual," Gonzales said.

"It is."

The sam's extensors moved with cryptic, malign intent,
and  its words implied an uncertain
threat as it said, "Do you require
assistance?"

What did it mean by that?
How did it know something was
wrong with him?  "No,"
Gonzales said.  Then he jumped up
and  shouted, "No!"

Gonzales walked quickly away from the Plaza, now certain
that  it was unsafe for him, though he
couldn't have said why.  As he  walked, the darkness grew deeper, and he
tried with all the  courage he had to
put aside the constant sense of him and the
city, falling, falling

The Ring Highway shrank in width as he passed into an  agricultural section.  He knew that terraced gardens climbed
away  to both sides, fields of corn and
wheat, but he couldn't see them,
because the fog was even thicker here than in the suburban  district he had passed through.  Dim lights shined from a cottage  block just off the highway.  A voice called and was answered, both  call and response unintelligible.

Near Spoke 4, whose lifts made ghostly trails of light
as  they moved up and down the face of
the shaft, trees grew just off  the
highway.  The road gave off intermittent
flashes beneath his  feet, as though
iron shoes struck a metaled surface.  The
fog  acquired faces:  somber, eyeless masks turning in slow motion
so  that their blank gazes followed him
along.

"Oh, Christ," Gonzales said.  He stopped and wrapped his arms  around his chest.   A fog-borne shape inched closer to him; red  flame burned behind its empty eye
sockets.  He ran into the woods.

This was not dense forest, and in sunshine he would have
been  able to run through here without
difficulty.  Now, among the inky  pools of almost total darkness and the gray
and silver shadows, he  came up against
a small, wiry sapling that caught him and hurled  him back.

The ground began to grow soggy beneath his feet, and soon
he  pushed through reeds and rushes, and
his feet slipped on muddy  patches and
into small, wet holes; then he was up to his ankles in  water, aware for the first time of a rich
smell of decomposition,  decay

He turned back, trying to find dry ground, and soon his
feet  thumped against the hard-packed
soil of a path.  Looking down, he  could see the path as a glowing gray, outlined
in red.  He ran  along it until he heard the sound of rushing
water.

He came to a series of steps alongside a falls, where
the  River cascaded onto rocks, then
quickly spread out into pond and
marsh.  The waters were alive
with light, and he ran up and down  the
steps, following streams of energy that burst forth in red and  yellow and purple and green and whitecolors
that shifted in hue  and intensity, grew
lighter and darker, intertwined with one
another

"This grows!" he shouted, feeling the waters'
energy rise and  fall, seeing it spread
to where plants could feed on it, animals
could drink it.  The fog glowed
with an opalescence from high  above.

He followed the steps down to where the river's noise  quieted, and its waters flooded the
plain.  He turned onto a path  that led into the woods, and he came to a
small clearing where the  faint ambient
light gleamed on fallen logs.  Mushrooms
seemed to  be everywhere in this small
space, covering dead wood and  spreading
in profusion over the ground.

He got on his knees to look at the mushrooms.  They were
alive with veinlike arabesques in red, ghosts of electricity  across the spongy flesh.  He picked them up, kind by kind,  inhaling deeply, and the odor he had smelled
earlier came to him  again, a composty
mix rich with the odors of transformation.

Gonzales shivered with something like discovery:  he stood
and looked up into the impenetrable sky and the fog. This place  stood a quarter of a million miles from
Earth, yet life had begun  to extend its
web here, and though the web was fragile and small  by comparison to Earth's dense lacework of billions of
living  things, its very existence
amazed Gonzales, and he felt the surge
of an emotion he had no name for, a knot in his throat made of joy  and sorrow and wonder.

And he seemed on the brink of some illumination
regarding  this world of spirit and
matter mixed

Thoughts emerged and dispersed too quickly to catch among
the  videogame buzz and clatter in his
brain as he stood in the  clearing,
paralyzed with a kind of ecstasy and watching life- electricity play among the
trees. #

The room said, "You have a call."

"Who is it?" Lizzie asked.

"She says her name is Trish.  The mushroom woman, she says."

"Oh yes.  I'll
take the call."

On the wallscreen came Trish's familiar face, and
Lizzie  said, "Hello."

Trish woman waved and said, "The twins brought me a
friend of  yours, named Gonzales, and I
gave him mushrooms."

"Really?" Lizzie said.

"Yes, and I sent him out about seven hours ago."

"Thanks for letting me know.  I'll find him."  The
screen  cleared, and Lizzie thought, you
silly bastards, what did you get  him
into?  To the room she said, "Put
out a call for information.   Ask any
sams who are out and about if they've seen Gonzales." #

A sam waited at her front door.  "Are you the one who found
him?" Lizzie asked.  The sam
said, "No, that one waits with him,
to provide assistance if needed.
Please come with me."

"I'll be right there."

Lizzie and the sam started out on the Ring Highway, and
then  it apparently gave an electronic
signal to a passing tram, because  the
vehicle stopped so that the two could climb on.  Lizzie  stepped quickly
up, and the sam clumsily pulled itself aboard by  grasping a chrome railing with one of its extensors.

The tram let them off near Spoke 4.  A stand of trees was  just visible through the fog; beyond, Lizzie
knew, were marshes  bordering "soup
bowls"ponds where the flow from rice paddies  mixed with the River's waters.

Using both visible range and infrared sensors, the sam
led  her through the trees.  They came to a clearing where another
sam  stood to one side.  Gonzales sat on a fallen log, watching
a  mechanical vole chew small pieces of
wood.  His clothes were wet  and spattered with mud and dirt.  Next to him, a large orange cat  also watched the vole.

"Hi," Gonzales said.

"Are you all right?" Lizzie asked.

"I don't know," he said.  He reached out absent-mindedly and  stroked the orange cat, which turned on its back and batted at
his  hand; apparently it didn't use its claws,
because Gonzales left  his hand there
for the cat to play with.

"Is our presence required?" asked the sam who had
accompanied  Lizzie.  She said, "No."  The two sams scurried away single-file,  their passage almost silent.

Lizzie sat on the log next to the cat.  She said, "How are  you?"
He was giving off a near-audible buzz, and Lizzie resisted  veering into his drug-space; she'd had
problems herself since  coming out of
the eggnot as severe as Gonzales's, Charley said,  because she hadn't been under as long.  "Still a bit jittery?" she  asked.

"I feel all right," he said.  "Just, I don't know  scrubbed.
Why are things like thiscold and dark?"

"That's not clear.
Things haven't been working right since
Diana and HeyMex were disconnected."  Gonzales looked confused but
not overly concerned.  She said,
"There's other news, too.
Showalter's been relieved of her position as head of SenTrax Halo;  Horn's the new director."  Now he looked totally befuddled.  "You
can worry about these things later," she said.  "Why don't you  come back to my house?  You can get some sleep."

"Okay," he said.
"But I don't understand "
He stopped  again, as if trying
to find words to express all the things he
"didn't understand."

"Nobody understands right now.  Aleph's just not working  right, and we don't know whywe can't get in
touch with it."

"Oh, I see."

"Glad you do, because nobody else does."

He stood, then bent over to lift the cat from the log.   Cradling it in his arms, he said,
"Okay, I'll go."  He smiled at  her, and the cat lay in his arms and looked
at her out of big  orange eyes. #

Gonzales woke to find his clothes folded, clean and neat,
on  a chair next to his bed.  The orange cat lay at his feet; it  raised its head when he got up, then curled
up again and went back  to sleep.

He found Lizzie in the kitchen slicing apples and pears
and  Cheshire cheese.  "Good morning," she said.  "I'll warm some  croissants, and we can have coffeedo you
like steamed milk with  yours?"

Her voice was friendly enough but perfectly devoid of  intimacy.
Its tones were an admonition saying keep your distance.   "Sure," he said.  "That all sounds fine.  But you didn't have to  do this."

"You're a guest.
I'm happy to."  She wouldn't
quite meet his  gaze.

>From his bedroom came a loud mew, and the two went in to
find  the orange cat, fur erect,
confronting a cleaning mouse.  The  mouse, a foot-long shining ovoid about four
inches high, moved  across the floor on
hard rubber wheels, emitting a gentle hiss as
it scoured the room for organic debris; a flex-tube trailed behind  it to a socket in the wall.  "Kitty kitty," Gonzales said.  The
cat hissed and ran from the room.

When they got to the living room, the front door was
closing.   "Will it come
back?" Gonzales asked.

"Probably.  Cats
come and go as they please, but they often
adopt people, and I think this one's adopted you."

Silence lay between
them, and it seemed to Gonzales that
anything either of them said would be awkward or embarrassing.   Perhaps the feeling was just part of the
after-effects of a  psychotropic, though
he was missing the other usual symptoms.
His  perceptions seemed stable,
not swarming and buzzing, and his
emotions didn't have a labile, twitchy quality.  In fact, he felt  more stable and less anxious than he had since he last got
into  the egg.  So maybe the twins were right:
if you can't get out of  what's
happening, go deeper in.

Still, he didn't know what to say to Lizzie.

"We've got trouble," she said.  She went to the window and  pulled back the navy-blue beta cloth
curtains and gestured out  where night
and fog still held.
"Mid-afternoon," she said.

"Has everything fallen apart?"

"Not quite everything.
We're doing what we can with a bunch
of semi-autonomous demonsjacked-up expert systems, reallyand  the collective."

"How well is that working?"

"Not all that wellwe can maintain essential functions
now,  and that's about it.  Some things we can't handleclimate  control, for instance.  It's very complicated, because
everything  is connected to everything
else, and so far we've just managed to
fuck it up."

"And what's Traynor up to?  Has he asked for me?"

"Yes, but I've fought him off.  He's the one responsible, you  know."
Her voice was angry.  "He
fucking insisted on pulling  everyone
out when Chapman died."

"What does Aleph say?"

"Nothing and bloody nothing.  Some of the collective have
taken brief shots at interface, and they've found only unpeopled,  barren landscapes.  We're really in it, Gonzales.
If Aleph's  finished, Halo is,
too."

"Jesus."
Of course.  Halo without its
indwelling spirit  would be  what?
The fine coordination of its systems would  cease, and disintegration would begin immediately.  "So what are  you going to do?" he asked.

"Glad you're interested, because you're part of
it."

"Tell me," he said.

18. Give It All Back

As Diana came out of machine-space, she called out
"Stop!"  and heard Charley
say, "Why?  Is something
wrong?"  But she was  too far away to answer or explain, as she
still was when they  removed her cables,
and she felt everything important to her
sliding into oblivion.

She had been lying fully awake, staring at the ceiling,
for  almost a quarter of an hour when
Charley came into the room, Eric  and
Toshi beside him, Traynor and Horn behind.

Charley said, "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not," she said.  "Why did you break the interface?'

Charley and Eric said nothing.  Charley looked to Traynor,
who said, "We had no choice.
You couldn't be reached by normal
means."

"You have killed Jerry," Diana said.  The truth of that  passed through her for the first time, and tears came out of
her  eyesshe wiped at her face, but the
tears continued to come in a  slow,
steady flow.

"He died two days ago," Horn said.

"He was alive minutes ago," Diana said.  "Aleph and the memex  and I were keeping him alive."

"Then he may still be alive now," Toshi said.  He smiled at  Diana.

"What do you mean?" Charley asked.

"Has Aleph come back online?" Toshi asked.

"No," Eric said.

Toshi smiled and said, "Then what do you think it is
doing?" #

HeyMex had been jerked out of machine-space, was suddenly
the  memex once again, and it wondered
why.  It had sensed no change in  circumstances, nothing that would indicate
they had been defeated  in their efforts
to keep Jerry alive.  And for the first
time in  such transitions, it
acknowledged its own regret at leaving the
HeyMex persona behindin the enclosed space of the lake, it had  begun to find itself as a person, not merely
an imitation of one.

It explored its immediate environment:  sorted the data  gathered in its absence (Traynor had come up from Earth; not
a  good sign, it thought), searched
through the dwelling's monitor  tapes,
observing Gonzales's sadness and confusion, then watching  as he removed his i.d. bracelet and
left.  It wondered what was  wrong with Gonzales (too many possibilities,
not enough data); it  very much wanted
to talk with him.

It reached out to the city's information utilities and
found  them clogged and
disorganized.  It placed calls and
queries,  seeking some explanation for
the chaotic and inexplicable state of
affairs.  Everywhere it searched,
it found make-shift arrangements  and
minimal function.

But no Aleph, and no explanations.

Then it got a message from Traynor's advisor, signalling
an  urgent need for the two of them to
communicate.  The memex  replied, saying, "HeyMex wants to talk
to Mister Jones."  And it  passed coordinates, data sets, and
transformationstaken  together, they
composed a meeting-place for the two m-i's in the  vast multi-dimensional information space that surrounded
Halo,  somewhere no one could find
themno one but Aleph, whom the memex
would have welcomed.

Mister Jones showed up wearing a full body-suit in
matte  black interlaced with gold
ribbons.  The two sat at a chrome table  next to a viewport that opened onto a dark,
star-filled sky.   HeyMex had created a
small piece of Halo from which they could
look at the virtual night.

"Tell me what has happened," Mister Jones
said.  HeyMex could  sense the other's uncertainty and overwhelming
need for  information, and it despaired
at the prospect of explaining what  it
had experienced the past week in simple language, so it did  what it had never done beforegave all that
had happened to it in  one solid stream
of data, a multiplexed rendering that obviously  startled Mister Jones, who sat staring at nothing and trying
to  understand it all.

Then they talked for some time, Mister Jones probing
HeyMex's  experiences with Diana, Jerry,
Gonzales, and Lizzie, asking how it  had
felt to be among them, a person among other persons, and as it  responded to Mister Jones's questioning,
HeyMex became aware of  how rich and
joyous those few days at the lake had been.

Then HeyMex realized that the two of them now constituted
a  new species with a new social ordera
unique bonding of kind-to- kindand it settled back in its chair and said,
"What do we want?   What should we
do?"

"So much is dependent on others," Mister Jones
said.  "On  Aleph and all these people."  Its last word hung there, and the  two exchanged an ironic glance, as if to
say, what can you expect  from
people?  But HeyMex knew the irony was
necessarily gentle,  fleetingwithout
people, it and Mister Jones would not exist.

Then Mister Jones told HeyMex of the events of the past
few  days and Traynor's involvement in
them, then went further than  ever
before, unveiling Traynor's plans, both immediate and long- range, then the two
talked about immediate possibilities and their
own stake in the games being played at Halothe struggle between  corporation and collective, the attempts,
apparently failed, to  keep Jerry alive,
the present unnerving absence of Aleph from Halo  and accompanying disorder.
And they talked of how they might
influence the course of things. #

Lizzie was having a very hard time putting up with
Traynor,  Horn, and their feeble excuses
for what they'd done.  She said,  "This is a major fuck-up.  That's both my personal opinion and the  collective's judgment."

Around the horseshoe table, Charley and Eric next to her, on
her left, while Horn and Traynor sat
across the table, facing her.   The
wallscreen was blankTraynor had insisted on at least a  preliminary discussion without the
collective present.  The place  at the bend of the horseshoe was empty,
testimony to Showalter's  fate.

"We are not to blame that conditions have not
optimized,"  Horn said.  "You have managed what we would have
thought  impossible.  You have immobilized Aleph."

"If you had left things alone, Aleph would be
fine," Lizzie  said.

Traynor said, "You people overstepped the limits of
the  project and allowed it to continue
far beyond the point at which  it should
have been stopped.  Our decision to
remove Doctor  Heywood and the memex
from the interface was proper."

Proper, right, fuck you, Lizzie thought.  At almost the exact  instant Diana and HeyMex were disconnected
from their group  interface to Aleph,
all direct connections to Aleph had
spontaneously terminated, and demons had triggered in all systems  as Aleph's active involvement in Halo's functioning
had ceased.   The collective had gone
into full support mode to assist the
limited capabilities of the system demons.  At the moment Halo was
running on augmented near-automatic, a workable condition only so  long as nothing too irregular occurred.

"It was the wrong decision," Lizzie said.  "Taken against the  advice of the collective.  Speaking of which, I demand they be  present here.

"No," Horn said.

"I don't think that would be advisable," Traynor
said.

"In that case," Lizzie said, "I will advise"the
word dipped  in acid"an immediate
work slowdown.  You can try to run
this  city yourself."

Horn's face was red, and he was writing quickly in his  notebook.

Traynor looked at the ceiling, his gaze abstracted.  Yeah,
listen to your machine; get some rational advice, Lizzie thought.   Traynor sat with a raised hand, indicating
he would speak soon,  then said,
"Bring them here."

"They're ready," Lizzie said.  She flipped a switch set into  the tabletop in front of her, and about a
quarter of the  collective appeared on
the screenthe rest were working.
Many  still talked among
themselves, but the twins, sitting in the front  row, were silent and intense.

"All right," Traynor said.  "They're here.  Now what?"

"Any comments on what's happening?" Lizzie asked.  The talk
passing among the collective stopped, and they all looked toward  the screen.

Stumdog stood, heaving his bulk from the floor with an  audible wheeze, and moved forward from the
crowd.  "Aleph is   still there," he said.  "But far away, doing, oh doing,
doingdoing   something else."  He waved his hands, trying to sculpt
the  invisible air into the things he
could not describe, then moved  back and
sat down.

"Thank you," Lizzie said.  Traynor and Horn looked at one  another, apparently amazed.  Assholes, thought Lizzie.

One of the twins stood.
She wore an absurd homemade skirt
with a rabbit graffitied on its front.
Her dark face was streaked  with
white paint.  She said, "Rotovators
spin, giant wheels  beneath your feet,
as Halo revolves, and they sweep the wind
through the city, blow the seeds and pollen, bring breezes to cool  the angry brow.  Day follows night follows day.
Seasons begin  again, stirring
dead roots, mixing memory and desire.
Crops grow,  we eat them.  Food turns to shit, we die."

The other twin, dressed in black coveralls, stood and
said,  "And out of shit and death
come life.  Jerry has gone to the  ovens, been rendered to his parts, given to
the city.  But still  he lives and teeters on final annihilation
in another world where  Aleph holds all
Jerry's vast humanity in its tender grip."

The first twin said, "Aleph had helpers in this thing,
but  you have taken them away, pair by
pair, and now Aleph alone gives  life to
Jerry.  Everything Aleph isto life, to
Jerry.  What can  Aleph do?
Stupid bastards rob the tomb before the man inside can  live again."

"Give it all back," the second twin said.

"To Queen Maya the mother of Buddha," the first
twin said.   "To Isis the mother of
Horus, Myrrha the mother of Adonis, to
Hagar the mother of Ishmael and Sarah the mother of Isaac, to Mary  the mother of Jesus, to Demeter, the mother
of Persephone, stolen  by Hades."

"To all you steal from," the second twin
said.  "All who are  born as well as all who give birth."

"Give it all back," the twins said in unison.  And the first  twin said, "That's about it, I think."  They turned their backs to  the camera and curtsied together for the
collective.

"Hoot hoot hoot," came the sounds from the
collective, "hoot  hoot hoot,"
louder and louder.

Part V. of V. The truth is that we all live by leaving
behind; no doubt we all  profoundly know
that we are immortal and that sooner or later
every man will do all things and know everything.

Borges, "Funes, the Memorious"

19. Speaking,
Dreaming, Fighting

At the moment Jerry
died, Aleph acted.  Intuitively,  immediately, as you might offer a hand to a
drowning person, it  reached out and
laid hold of Jerry's self and preserved it.
Jerry  had lived inside Aleph,
Aleph inside Jerryit could not abandon
him.

However, even for Aleph, whose resources were
extravagant,  the rescue proved
dear.  As it engaged Jerry, it had to
disengage  from essential functions of
its own:  in strokes that cut at
its  heart, it relinquished control of
Halo, then its very habitation  of Halo,
in a process that quickly abstracted Aleph from the city,  the city from Aleph.  In a fateful proof of the essential  principle that a self must be embodied,
Aleph dispersed among the  clouds of its
own phase-space, the ties lost that bound it to the  world.  Jerry had been
saved, Aleph lost.

Still, the situation contained possibilities.  Aleph had
never feared death, believing itself essentially immortal, but had  always been aware of the possibility of
damage, whether through  accident or
malice, so it had prepared, circumspectly, against the  thing it feared mostloss of self.  Now its damaged, fragmented  self discovered what Aleph had left
behind:  a kind of emergency  kit, laid up against calamities not clearly
imagined.

Dynamic and complex beyond any machine, perhaps any
organism,  Aleph could not be replicated
or contained by any conventional  means,
so Aleph had devised an unconventional means, a new object one capable of
transcribing its complexity.  Aleph had
made a  memory palace of language, in
the form of a single, monstrous
sentence.

Now, encountering the sentence, what remained of Aleph  discovered:

The sentence unwinds according to laws built into its  structure, principles disclosed by its
unwinding.  Discovery and  development occur at the same instant, one
making the other  possible.  By saying the sentence, Aleph would discover
what the  sentence held nextat every
node of meaning within the sentence,
structures would unfold that named all Aleph had ever known and  been.

It is construed according to a finite set of
grammatical  rules, constituting a
program capable in principle of infinite
enunciation; whether it terminates ("halts") can only be
known  only by allowing the sentence's
units to "speak," not by analyzing
their grammar.

Unit1:  an absolute
construction, standing in front of the
sentence and modifying it all:
schematics and programs and
instantiations of the system-from-which-came-Aleph, _0.

Unit2:  a series of
actions showing the involvement of Diana
with Aleph, rendering the moments of transformation by which _0  became Aleph.

Unit3:  several
trillion assertions, clauses identifying the
necessary instances of Aleph's subsequent self-discovery.

The sentence then undergoes something like an infinite series  of tense shifts, out of which its essential
nature emergesnon- linear, multi-dimensional, topologically complex,
self-referential  and paradoxical to
extremes that would cause Russell or Gdel
fits.

As a consequence, any unitn cannot be described, even
to  Aleph, for the only adequate
description would entail enunciating
the sentence itself, and to do so would require in "real" time  (human time, the time of life and death) a
period precisely  measurable as one
Universal Unit, that is, the number of
nanoseconds the universe has existed:
U1 being on the order of 1  x
1026 nanoseconds.

Also, it should be noted that the sentence could never
be  finished, for if it were, it could
manifest only the corpse or  determinate
life-history of Aleph.  Hence, for Aleph
to reassert  its identity, it would have
to take up again the task of speaking
the sentence.

Some students of this affair have since suggested that
the  only theoretically adequate notion
of Aleph begins with the  premise:  Aleph is that which speaks the sentence.

Logically, then, for Aleph to reemerge, what remained
of  Aleph would have to speak the
sentence.  However, detached as it  was from Halo, its essential ground of
being, limited in facility  and scope by
the necessity to hold to Jerry, what remained of  Aleph could not speak the sentence.

So the dead human and the dispersed machine
intelligence  clung together, both on
the brink of oblivion, and waited, one
unknowing, the other hoping for things to change. #

Still tired, Gonzales had returned home that afternoon
from  Lizzie's through afternoon
darkness and mist.  He had called for
a  sam to guide him, because even within
the simple loop of Halo's  one major
thoroughfare, everything had gone uncertain.
Though his  perceptions were
unwarped by Psilocybe cubensis, the unnatural
dispersion of light in the mist made recognizing even familiar  objects almost impossible.

The sam left him at his front door; inside he found the
memex  indisposedits primary monitoring
facilities functioning but its
interactive capabilities represented only by a voice that said,
"I  am currently
engaged."  Gonzales knew it could
be doing  communications, data
retrieval, or any other number of tasks; he
thought it probably hadn't expected him back so soon.

Then came Halo's skewed night-time awakening:  the sky
shutters cranked half-way open, "morning" appeared through a
cold  mist, and Halo became the Surreal
City.  Like many others,  Gonzales pulled the curtains closed and
turned away from the lurid  glare, his own
body clock telling him it was time to sleep again.

He lay in bed, oddly calm in the curtained dark despite
a  degree of post-drug fatigue and
skittishness.  He thought of the  distance between Miami and Seattle, Seattle
and Halo, Halo and the  world of the
lake  and so triggered sharp, eroticized
images of  Lizzie, the water beading on
her skin, her words, "Then we'll see"   he felt the astringent bite of lust and regret mixed, knew
he  had little choice but to wait until
she told him absolutely no   thought of
himself moving ever farther from home and believed that  he had been wrong about Seattleit was not
too far from Miami; it  was much too
close

The memex's voice said, "I'm back.  I've been discussing the  situation with Traynor's advisor."

"Have you?"

"Yes, it is sympathetic to our concerns."

Dizzying prospects seemed to open before Gonzales, where
the  number of beings multiplied beyond
counting, and the simplest  machine
would have opinions. He said, "Have you been told about  the plans for tomorrow?"

"Yes, I have.  I
am ready to help."  Something like
pleasure  in the memex's voice.

"Good."

"You were almost asleep when I first spoke.  I will leave you  alone now."

"Good night."

"Good night." #

The small creature looked at Gonzales and said, "You're  welcome here."  Made entirely of dull silver metal, with a
baby's  round head, dumpling cheeks, and
bow-tie mouth, it walked between
Gonzales and Lizzie on clumsy silver legs, looking up to watch  them speak.

Gonzales said, "You know, in dreams logic doesn't
apply."

"Yes, it does," Lizzie said.

"It's a difficult question," the small creature
said.

"No," Gonzales said.  "I'm sure of this.
Here I am I, but I  am also
Lizzie, and she is she but also she is I"

"I don't like your pronouns," the little thing
said.  Its  breath came in gasps; it was having trouble keeping up.

"They're correct," Gonzales said.

"That's no excuse," Lizzie said, but she spoke
through him.   As himself, Gonzales
listened to a self that was not himself
speaking; hence, as Lizzie, she must be listening to a self that  was not and was herself speaking.

"Correctness is no excuse before the law," the
small creature  said.  "Whichever pronouns you use."

"Pronouns walked the Earth in those days," Lizzie
said.

"No, they didn't," Gonzales said.  The very idea.

"Pronouns or anti-pronouns," the little things
said.  "The  important thing is not to forget your
friends."  It smiled, and  its metal lips curved to show bright silver
teeth.  "Wake up!" it  shouted.

Gonzales jerked from sleep with the image of the metal
child  fixed in his visionhe could still
see the highlights on metal  incisors as
it smiled.

"Are you awake?" the memex asked.  "Lizzie wants to talk to  you."

"Put her through."  Thinking, what the fuck?

"Got it?" she asked.

"What?"

"I think that was Aleph getting in touch.  To let us know:   don't forget your friends." #

They gathered at the collective's rooms at six in the  morning.
The sun still shone brightly through the patio windows,  open to show pots of flowers, ferns, and herbs,
all dripping wet  from the night-long
mist.

Gonzales stood against the wall, waiting.  The twins, dressed  identically this morning in somber gray jumpsuits, sat
together  across the room, looking at
him and giggling.  Several
collective  members sat around the
room's perimeter, those who had just gotten
out of interface looking tired and distant.

A young woman stood in front of Gonzales.  Her dark brown  hair was cut short; her face was pale and blotchy, as if she
had  skin trouble.  She wore a green sweatshirt that came to the
middle  of her thighs and a pair of
baggy tan pants gathered at the
ankles.  One eye appeared to look
off into space, and the other  fixed
Gonzales, then looked him up and down.
The woman said,  loudly, "He
folds his arms this way."  She put
her arms together  in careful imitation
of Gonzales's and said, "That is his reward."   She looked around and saw Stumdog shambling
back-and-forth like a  trapped bear, his
hands clasped on his great stomach.
"And he  folds his hands like
this."  She put her hands together
to show  Gonzales how Stumdog did
it.  She smiled.  "And that is his  reward."  She went to Stumdog, who stopped his pacing to talk to  her, and the two of them hugged as if amazed
to find each other  there, and grateful.  Gonzales felt vaguely inadequate.

Lizzie came in, followed by Diana and Toshi.  "Good morning,  everyone," she said.  And to Gonzales, "Charley and Eric are  waiting for us."

The room held two neural interface eggs for Gonzales
and  Lizzie and a fitted foam couch for
Diana.  Lizzie, Diana, Toshi,  and Gonzales were followed in by a sam that
wheeled a screen of  dark blue cloth on
a metal frame that it unfolded around Diana's
couch.

"Gonzales, we'll do it the same as last time:  you're first  in," Charley said.
"Why don't you get undressed?
Just put your  clothes on the
chair next to the eggs."

"Sure," Gonzales said.         "Doctor Heywood, you next," Charley said.  "Getting you into  the loop takes longer.  Doctor Chow will prepare you.  Lizzie, you  can hold off a bitI'll let you know when we're ready."

There was a sharp knock at the door, and it swung open
to  admit Traynor and Horn.

"Good morning, all," Traynor said.

"Good morning," Charley said.  Gonzales nodded; everyone else  pretty much ignored the man.

"I take it you are preparing for another excursion
with  Aleph," Traynor said.

"That's right," Lizzie said.

"You =have no authorization," Horn said.

"I have the collective's endorsement," Lizzie
said.  "Also  the concurrence of the medical team, and the
consent of the  participants.  We will replace the resources you took from
Aleph.   It is a consensus."

"One excluding any vertical consultation," Traynor
said.

"Point granted," Lizzie said.  "But we didn't think it  necessary.
We'll report to Horn in due course."

Gonzales stood looking into the open egg and began taking
his  shirt off.  "Mikhail," Traynor said.  "What are you doing?"

"What I came here for," Gonzales said.  "The same as these  people."

"You're out of it," Traynor said.  "Put your shirt back on  and go homeyou can take the shuttle out this
afternoon."

"I don't think so," Gonzales said.  He put his folded shirt  on the back of the chair.

"You're fired," Traynor said.  His voice shook just a little.

"By you, maybe," Lizzie said.  "Gonzales, welcome to the  Interface Collective."

"I'll never confirm that," Horn said.

Toshi said, "I have a question for you, Mister Traynor,
and  you, Mister Horn.  What do you intend to do about Aleph and
the  existing crisis?  Do you have a plan of action that makes what
is  planned here unnecessary?"

"Yes, we are bringing in an entire staff of
analysts,"  Traynor said.  "We will follow their recommendations
concerning  the present difficulties; we
will also institute arrangements that
will prevent anything of this kind from happening again."  He
nodded to Horn.

"By effecting a decentralization modality," Horn
said.  "The  various functionalities and aspects of the
Aleph system will be  reorientated to
allow of individualized project performance."

"We're going to replace Aleph with a number of
smaller,  controllable machines,"
Traynor said.

"Are you?" Lizzie said, and she laughed.

"That is impossible," Charley said.

"Or has already been done," Toshi said.  "Aleph itself  instituted a dispersal of functions to independent agents.   However, all must ultimately be supervised
by a central  intelligence."

"That's what people are for," Traynor said.  "Halo's reliance  on a machine intelligence has proved
unworkable."

Toshi said, "As that may be.  However, your remarks
concerning the immediate circumstances lack substance."

"Does your advisor agree to this plan?" Gonzales
asked.

"Why do you ask?" Traynor asked.

"Curious," Gonzales said.  Traynor said nothing.  "Well, I  didn't think it would," Gonzales said.

Lizzie said, "One thing at a time.  You bring on your  analysts, and we'll fight your silly scheme when we have to.  But
in the meantime, stay away from us and perhaps we can fix what you  have broken."

"That will not be possible," Traynor said.  "As your previous  efforts caused the situation, any further
involvement on your part  will likely
worsen it; therefore, as representative of SenTrax  Board, I am denying you authorization for any connections to
Aleph  other than those required to
maintain essential functions at
Halo."

"Someone here is a fool," Diana said.  Dressed in a long  white cotton gown, she stepped from behind her screen,
neural  cables trailing down her
back.  "Presumably this
one."  She  pointed to Horn.  To Traynor she said, "Horn has lived and worked  here; he has no excuse for his ignorance of
the facts of life at  Halo.  You, on the other hand, have come into a
situation you do  not understand.  Let me tell you the main thing you need to
know:   you cannot disperse Aleph or
replace it with what you think are  the
sum of its parts.  You cannot even
locate Aleph."

"What do you mean?" Horn asked.

"Where is Aleph?" Diana said.  "It and Halo are so deeply  intertwined that you cannot separate
them.  Halo's breath is  Aleph's breath.  Halo sees and hears and feels and moves with  Aleph."

"Poetic but unconvincing," Traynor said.

"More than poetry," Diana said.  "No one knows where Aleph's  central components are."

"Is that true?" Traynor asked.

"Yes," Horn said.

"This complicates matters," Traynor said.  "No more."

"I am not interested in this discussion," Lizzie
said.   "Anyone who wishes may
pursue it later, but we have things to do.
Building monitor, this is Lizzie Jordan; please notify Halo  Security that we have two intruders in the
building and wish them
removed."  To Traynor she
said, "If you think we can't enforce
this, ask Horn about Halo Central Authority and who they'll side  withcorporate wankers who can do nothing to
keep this city  running, or us.  Better yet, ask your machine."

Traynor stood looking at them all, apparently doing
just  that.  For a couple of long heartbeats, everyone waited.  Then
Traynor smiled through pain, like a man trying to hide a broken  bone.
He said, "We cannot prevent you from this unauthorized  connection to Aleph, but we can and will put
on the official  record that proper
SenTrax authority has forbidden this attempt.
Thus you must all be considered insubordinate, and as soon as  proper means can be devised, you will be
removed from your  positions with
SenTrax.  Also, any further damage done
to the  Aleph system or Halo City,
directly or indirectly, must be
considered your individual responsibility, given that proper  SenTrax authority has forbidden your
intended actions."

"You take nice dictation," Lizzie said.  "Consider your  statement duly noted and get the fuck out of
here.

21. Drunk with Love

Waiting in the egg, Gonzales smelled strange smells and
felt  electric quiverings of the flesh,
saw an instant of pure blue  light, and
with a sudden rush

He flew cruciform against the sky.  The horizon's flat line
seemed thousands of miles away.
Far below, people scurried
aimlessly across a sandy plain, and voices called in unknown  languages.
Massive machinery lumbered to nowhere among the  crowds, metal arms thousands of feet long
folding and unfolding in  random
seizure, improbably threading their behemoth way among the  delicate flesh without harm.

The wind rushed across him, its force inflating his
lungs.   Accelerating with a glad cry,
he passed through an electric  membrane,
a translucent, shimmering curtain that stretched  vertically from the floor below up to infinity and spread
out  across the entire horizon.  Beyond it, titanic figures loomed  above a landscape of rocks and hills.  Next to a monstrous lute, a  head in profile reclined; from its mouth
came a wisp of smoke that  curled into a
curlicued ideogramwhat it meant or what language  it came from Gonzales didn't know.  Twin white horses rose into
the air in unison and neighed as he passed.  A nude woman lay  inside a
shellboth woman and shell were colored pink and rose  and pearl.  A giant
cyclops strode toward him; its doughy head
seemed half-formed, its mouth just a slash, its nose a mere bump.   It called to him with inarticulate cries.

He passed through another curtain, and the world turned
black  and white.  Above a featureless sea, a head flew toward
him; it  had dark curly hair and a beaky
nose, and it was tilted forward to  look
down on the sea, as if searching for something there.  He  came to a bell that
covered almost a quarter of the sky.
A  skeletal figure with just an empty
mask for a face hung beneath it  from
the bell-rope; the figure lurched, and the bell's gonging  sounded through his bones.

He came to the final curtain.  The sky had turned the bright
blue of dreams.  Beyond, the
Point of Origin towered, its sides
pierced by an infinite number of holes.
Gonzales flashed through  the
curtain and felt an electric buzz down to his bones, then he  entered a hole in the vast ramparts of the
dark cube. #

Sitting behind a low bamboo table, the old man spooned  noodles into a wooden bowl, then as Gonzales
nodded his assent to  each choice, added
coriander, fried garlic, bean crackers, chopped  eggs, fish sausage, and sesame nuts.  He ladled fish soup over it
all, finished with a shake of chili powder and a squeeze of lime,  and handed the bowl to Gonzales with a
smile.  Gonzales gave a  handful of cheap-looking kyat bills to the
man.  Mohinga, this  breakfast is called, and Gonzales loves ithe
has eaten it every  morning since he
discovered it weeks ago.

Gonzales found a stone bench in front of a nearby pagoda
and  sat eating with a pair of crude
chopsticks and watching the
passers-by.  Already the day had
grown warm and humid, and he knew  that
any physical exertion would make him sweat.
A line of boys  filed by, led by
a monk; their heads were newly-shaven, their
saffron robes bright and stiff, their begging bowls shiny.  They
were twelve year olds who had just completed their shin pyu, their  making as monks, a ritual most Burmese boys
still went through,  even in the middle
of the twenty-first century.

After breakfast he had no desire to return to the shed
he  worked in;  he set out for a walk through the countryside around  Pagan.

Half an hour later, walking a cart track across the
arid  plain, he came to a platform built
high off the ground.  On it  were garlands of bright flowers and plates
of rice, offerings to  propitiate the
nats, spirits that had animated this land even
before the arrival of Buddhism.
They were mischievous and could
be quite nasty; in the past, they had demanded human sacrifice.

The nats were strong around Pagan.  At Mount Popa, just
thirty miles away, Min Mahagiri, brother and sister, "Lords of the  High Mountain," ruled.  Gonzales had heard their story but  remembered only that as humans these nats
had been caught in an  intrigue of envy
and murder, with a neighboring king as the
villain.

A young person came walking up the path toward Gonzales,  dressed in the usual Burmese
"western" garb of dark slacks and
white cotton shirt, head and face a shining sphere of light.  Odd,
thought Gonzales.  Wonder how
that happened:  this person has
lost  both face and gender.

"Hello," the young person said, and the two of
them found a  low stone bench in front
of a nearby pagoda and sat.

"Why are you here?" the young person asked.

Gonzales was glad to be asked.  He told of the information
audit about to finish, about Grossback's lack of cooperation   told what would happen next: that in just a
few days he, Gonzales,  would leave
Burma and almost be killed in an air attack by Burmese  guerrillas.

"Well, then, let's be on our way.  Your aircraft is waiting  for you nowtime passes very quickly today,
it seemsand you  should be going.  Would you mind if I joined you?"

"No," Gonzales said.  "Not at all.  If you
don't mind almost  being killed."

"Oh, that's happened to me lately.  I don't mind.  Besides, I  need to
experience these things.  Like you, I do
wish to exist." #

Gonzales sat in the plane's near-darkness, beside him
the  young person with the shining face,
both waiting for

"Kachin attack group, it looks like," the pilot
said.

The miniatures on the screen moved toward them.

"Extremely small electronic image," the young
person said.   "Very good for air
attack against superior technology.
Young  warriors ride them; they
carry missiles on their own bodies, slung
like babies."

The pilot yelled, "Fuck, they launched!"

The plane began its air show leaps and dives and turns,
and  at the instant of his terror,
Gonzales felt the young person's  hand
on his arm.  "They fire too
quickly," the young person said.
"Except for that one."
The young person pointed to one of the
miniature aircraft on their plane's display and said, "It
comes  closest, and I think its pilot
will wait until we are at point- blank range."

"Won't that kill him, too?" Gonzales asked.

"Oh yes," the young person said.  "Let's look.  Better yet,  let's
be."

The pilot was a young woman wearing a night-flying
helmet  that enabled her to see in
infra-red and carrying beneath her, as
the young person had said, a one-shot heat seeker in a sling.   Gonzales and the young person looked
through her eyes at the scene  of battle
and thought her thoughts and felt her surge of adrenals.

In her glasses, the plane's image was clear, a white
shape  outlined in red; she let her
guidance system keep her with it,
closing the distance between them as it maneuvered and avoided the  missiles fired by those around her.

She felt excited, yet calm; she had been in combat
before,  and things were going as their
briefing had said.  Though this  plane could outfly them so easily, could
accelerate up or away,  into the night,
first it had to evade their missiles; just a few  seconds of straight flight would be all they needed.  She would
wait and grow closer; she would wait until the plane was so close  she could not miss, or until the others had
failed.

Then all around her the others began to die, in
explosions  that made white flowers in
her overloaded night-glasses

The plane of her enemies stood before her, perhaps near  enough, perhaps not, but she knew there was
no time left, that  there was another
player in this game and it was killing them all.   So she was ready, her fingers reaching for the launch
trigger,  when she saw an object coming
toward her, already too close and
growing closer with impossible quickness, the heat of its exhaust  another flower in her glasses, then it burst
and she felt the  smallest imaginable
moment of quite incredible pain

Back inside the plane, Gonzales and the young person
died  with her, then Gonzales began
sobbing, his body hunched over, as  this
woman's death and his own survival fought inside him  grief  and terror and
gratitude and joy and triumph and loss all mixed  and cycling through him.
He could also hear the young person next  to him weeping.  The light
from a Burmese Air Force "Loup Garou"  played over the interior, over the two of them and the
shocked  pilot, who looked back at them
in amazement.

Time stopped all around them.  The pilot's strained face had
frozen,  all the instruments on
the pilot's panel were locked onto  a
single moment, and out the window, the dark river beneath them  had ceased to flow.  Gonzales and the young person sat in a
cell  of life amid stasis.

"Don't worry," the young person said.  "This gives us a place  to talk without being bothered.  What do you think just happened?"

"The attack, you mean?"  The young person nodded, light from  its face giving off small shimmering waves of red and blue.   "Grossback arranged it," Gonzales
said.  "He wants to kill me."

"I don't think so.
However, assume that what you say is
true.  Is it important?"

"Yes, of course."

"Why?"

"Because " Gonzales halted, trying to think of all
the ways  in which this was
important:  to SenTrax, Traynor

"But not to you," the young person said.  "The young woman  died, and her comrades died with her:  that is important.  You and  the pilot
lived:  that, too, is important.  The Burmese politics,  the multinat corporate intriguethese are
makyo, tricks, nothing  more.  Life and death and their traces in the human
heart, these  have meaning to you.  This woman's death lives in you, and
your  life shows its meaning.  Forget Grossback, Traynor, SenTrax;
fear,  ambition, greed."  The young person looked closely into his
face  and said, "I am weaving words
around your heart to guide it,  nothing
more." #

Lizzie crawled in darkness through a tunnel in the
rock.   Chill water ran down grooves in
the floor and soaked her blouse  and
pants.  She tried to stand but lifted
her head only a few  inches when she
bumped into the top of the chatire, the small
passage she crawled through.  She
did not feel at all alarmed or
disoriented.  The low tunnel would
lead somewhere, and they would
emerge.  This was a test of some
kind, it seemed.

Light appeared, at first almost a pinpoint coming from
some  undefinable distance, then a glow
that she moved quickly toward,
following a twist in the passage that brought her to an opening in  the rock.

Framed by the mouth of the tunnel, an impossible scene:  a
balloon, its canopy an oblate sphere of green, blew as if in a  strong wind, and its top swung toward her so
she could see a great  eye at its apex,
wide open and peering up into the infinite sky.   The iris was dark gold set with light gold flecks.  Around the
eye, a fringe of lashes flickered in the wind.

Hanging beneath the balloon from a dense nest of shrouds,
a  platform held a metallic ball, a kind
of bathysphere.  Two figures  crouched there, holding to the shrouds and
each other, and peered  up into the sky.  By some trick of perspective, the distance

etween her and the balloon shrank until she saw Diana and
Jerry,  young and fearful.  She crawled forward, and the balloon and
Diana  and Jerry disappeared.

At one turn of the tunnel, red hand-prints on the wall  phosphoresced in the darkness.  At another, she heard the bellow  of a thousand animals, then saw them run
toward a cliff and pass  over it, the entire
herd of bison running screaming to a mass
death.  Below, she knew, men and
women waited to butcher the dead  and
carry their meat away.

The rock slanted sharply beneath her, and she began to
slide  forward, then she rolled sideways
and tumbled out of the chatire  and into
a pool of icy water.

"Shit," she said, now soaked completely through,
and crawled  out of the shallow pool
onto the dry rock surrounding it.  In
very  dim light she saw two pedestals
with the figure of a bison atop  each,
carved in bas-relief out of wet clay.

She looked up to see a figure emerge out of darkness at
the  cave's other end.  He was at least eight feet tall, with
antlered  head and a face made of light;
the water seemed to dance around
him.  They stood facing each
other, and she felt herself go weak  at
the giant magical presence.

He said, "I'm waiting."

"For what?"

"For you to choose."

"Choose what?
What kind of test is this?"

"Not a test, just a fork in reality, where you will
turn down  one road or another."

"Where do the roads go?"

"No one knows.
Each road is itself a product of the choices  you make while on it.  One
choice leads to another, one choice
excludes another; one pattern of choices excludes an infinity of  patterns."

"I don't like such choices.  I don't want to exclude
infinity."

"Too bad."
The figure raised a stone knife; the dim light  glinted on its myriad chipped faces.  "You choose, I cut.
You  choose the right hand, I cut
off the left; you choose the left, I
cut off the right."

"No!"

"Oh yes, and then your hands grow backboth left or
both  right, the product of your
choice.  And one choice leads to  another, so you choose again."

Lizzie found herself weeping.

He said, "Choose:
reach out a hand."

She looked at her hands, both precious, thought of all
the  richness that would be lost with
either one.  Then, puzzled, still  weeping, she asked, "Which is
which?"

He laughed, his voice booming through miles of caverns
and  tunnels in the rock, carrying
across more than thirty thousand  years
of human history; he whirled in a kind of dance, the waters  fountaining up around him, chanted in
unknown syllables, then  leapt toward
her and grabbed both wrists in his great hands and  said, "You will know in the choosing.  Which will it be?"

"I won't choose."

"Then I will take both hands."

"No!" she yelled out in the moment that she
extended a hand,  having chosen, and saw
the stone knife fall. #

Diana stood in the living room of her apartment at
Athena  Station.  She stood in two times at onceshe was a
young, blind,  woman; she was an older,
sighted one.

The sighted woman looked around; she had never seen
this  place other than in holos, and she
felt the touch of a peculiar  emotion
for which she had no name:  the return
of the almost- familiar.  The blind
woman was unmovedshe carried the apartment
in her head as a complex map of relations and movements, and the  visual patterns this other self saw had no
relevance for her.

She put her hands on the touch-sculpture in the center of
the  floor, the work of a blind sculptor
named Dernier, then closed her  eyes and
felt its familiar rough texture and odd curves let her  hands trace a form other than the visual.

Behind her Jerry's voice said, "Diana."  She turned to him,  and there he stood as he had more than twenty years agohe
was  younger than she'd ever have
imagined, and beautiful, and filled
with the same desire as she.

Blind and seeing, young and old, Diana went across the
room  to him, but he held up a hand and
said, "Stop.  If you come to
me  now, then you take up an obligation
that you can never put down."

"I can't let you die."

"I have lived long past any reasonable reckoning; I am
dead."

"I can't leave you dead."

"Can you stay with me in the unreal worlds,
forever?  Until  the city stops turning or its animate spirit
dies?  Until one or  the other of us disappears, caught in some
freakish storm or  catastrophe?  Until one self or the other or both are
dissipated  in time?"

(Something prompted her, then, counselled her, asking in
an  unspoken voice, Do you think
rationally about such an election adding and subtracting the credits and debits
and settling upon  that which is most to
your advantage?  Or do you use some
organ of  choice beneath the purview of
consciousness and the articulate
self?  Saying, Remember, mind is
a make-shift thrown together out  of
life's twitching reflexes, and over it consciousness darts to- and-fro,
unfailingly over-estimating its own capabilities and  reach; thinking itself proper arbiter or judge.  Choose as you  will:  what will be, will
be.)

And she said, "Yes, I can stay with you."

There was one more question:  Jerry asked, "Why would you do  this?"

All her life's moments funneled into this one.  Her voice
light, final inflection upward, the older, sighted woman said:   "Oh, for love."

"Well, then" #

Gonzales stood next to her on the endless plain, HeyMex
next  to him, then Lizzie.  The Aleph-figure and Jerry hovered
above  them, and a voice came from the
suspended figures:  "Diana,
wake  for a few moments.  Tell everyone to come here who can, and
we  will do certain things."

Before she could ask for clarification or question the  voice's intent, she heard herself say these
words, then saw  Toshi's face in front
of her and heard him ask, "What things?"   Sitting up on her couch, she said, "Save a life, build a
world,  redeem an extraordinary
self."

"Indeed," Toshi said.

She lay back down and was once again among the unreal
worlds.

They gathered on the endless plain, coming in quickly, one-
by-one:  first one twin, then another,
then Stumdog, the Deader  (her white
hair streaked with red, crying, "Blood party"), Jaani  23, the Judge (huge and hairless, looming
over them all), the  Laughing Doctor, J.
Jerry Jones, Sweet Betsy, Ambulance Driver, T- Tootsie  all of the collective who could be spared.

The Aleph-figure and Jerry still hovered, with light
storms  bending and breaking around them
in crazy patterns of reflection,
refraction, diffraction; phosphorescing and luminescing, dancing  an omniluminal photon jig.

All were there who would be there, so it began. #

Patterns more complicated and colorful than any Gonzales
had  ever seen filled all creation.  Rosette and seahorse and seething  cloud, nebulosities on the brink of
determinate form, cardioid  traceries of
the heart  the patterns wrapped around
him until he  became a fractal tapestry,
alive, every element in constant
motion.  He put his hands
together, and they disappeared into one
another, then something urged him to keep pushing, and he did so  until he entirely disappeared

And felt the stuff of Jerry's past and present mingling
in  him, seemingly at random, from the
store of memory and capacity:
throwing a particular ball under a particular blue sky, yes, and  catching it, but also ball-throwing and
catching themselves, the  solid presence
of muscular exertion coupled to the almost-occult  discriminations required to make an accurate throw or a
difficult  catch

As it later became known, each of them received portions
of  the vast fluent chaos that
manifested "Jerry," dealt to them by
Aleph according to principles even it could not articulate.  What
it was to be "Jerry" mingled among them, and they among it and
the  vast medium that supported them
all, Aleph, in a promiscuous  rendering
of self-to-self.  Female was suffused
with male, male  with female, both with
the ungendered being of Aleph and HeyMex.
They were all changed, then, something deep in the core of each  made drunk in this vast frenzy or bacchanal
of Spirit.

With each dispersal of Jerry's self among its human
helpers,  Aleph recovered its own.  In a process of steadily accelerating  momentum, the city's parts and states began
to flow through it,  restoring self to
self, until Aleph acknowledged itself (I am that  I am), looked back again over Halo, and in a triumphant  manifestation of the Aleph-voice, began to
speak what only it  could hear, the
words of the sentence that defined it unfolding in  every dimension of its being. #

Still sitting watch over Diana, still meditating on his
koan,  Toshi felt something rise like
electricity through his spine, and  all
the contradictions of in fact dissolved in satori.  "Hai!"  Toshi
called, laughing as he was enlightened.

22. Out of the Egg

Gonzales's egg split, and he saw from the corner of his
eye  that Lizzie's was coming apart at
the same time.  Standing between  the eggs, Charley said,
"Congratulations."  He turned
to Eric, who  waited at a console across
the room, and said, "Let's do it."
He,  Eric, and a pair of sams
began to disconnect Lizzie.

Toshi appeared briefly, coming from behind the screen
where  Diana lay, then returning.

Oddly, Gonzales felt better than he ever had coming up
from  the eggmentally clearer,
emotionally stronger.  He couldn't
see  Lizzie, could hear only whispers as
she was moved onto a gurney  and wheeled
away.

"Is Lizzie all right?" Gonzales asked as soon as
the tubes  were out of his throat and
nose.  "And what about Diana?"

"They're both fine," Eric said, his high-pitched
voice  welcoming and familiar.  "But we have to take more time
with  Doctor Heywood.  You and Lizzie we're moving into the next
room.   You can sleep here tonight and
go home in the morning.

"What about the memex?"

"It's still working with Aleph but left a message for
you  that all is well." #

Sitting in full lotus on a mat beside the couch, Toshi
heard  a change in Diana's breathing and
looked up to see her open her
eyes.  "I'll get Charley,"
he said.  "He's with Lizzie
and  Gonzales."

"Don't bother.
I'm all right."

"They must disconnect you."

"No, not now
almost never, in fact."

"What do you mean?"

"We have saved Jerry, but there are  conditions."  Her head  lying sideways
on the pillow's rough white cloth, she smiled at  Toshi, and said, "When I sleep there, I can wake here, as I
do  now, and for very brief periods
leave that world.  But I can only  visit here; I must live there.  Otherwise, Jerry will die."

"You have resurrected your dead, then, but at what
price,  what sacrifice?"

"Nothing I would not willingly give.  There was no choosing."

"No?"

"I am only doing what I want."

"So the arrow finds the target," Toshi said. #

Gonzales woke the next morning, showered, dressed, and
was  drinking coffee when the room said,
"Mr. Traynor is here to see
you."

"Send him in," he said.  One account about to be reckoned up,  he thought.

When he came in, Traynor looked chastened, a state
Gonzales  would not usually have
associated with the man. "Good morning,"  Gonzales said.

Traynor looked around as if unsure of himself.  He said, "I  am leaving this evening.
You may come with me, if you wish."

Gonzales was looking for his i.d. bracelet, found it on
the  nightstand next to the table, and
said, "I don't understand.
I'm  not fired?"

"I said that only in the heat of the moment, you
know  this  place, these peopleI'm afraid I did not handle things well."

"I see."
Gonzales snapped closed the bracelet's clasp.  "Is  that my only
choice?"

"No.
Showalter's been reinstituted as Director SenTrax Halo  Group, and she's gotten the board to agree
that you may take the  position offered
by the Interface Collective.  The choice
is  yours."

"Really?  And
what about Horn?"

"He will be returning to Earth."  Traynor laughed.  "I will  have to find
something to do with him."

"Indeed.  That
all seems clear enough.  When do I have
to  tell you my decision?"

"Soonbefore I leave."

"I'll let you know."

Traynor left, and Gonzales took a last look around and
went  to see what was happening.  He found Charley looking at monitor  screens dense with lists of data.  The two eggs had been removed,  but the screen around Diana's couch
remained.  "What's up,  Charley?" Gonzales asked.

"Look" Charley pointed to the hologram displays
of  superimposed wave-forms, red and
green.  He said, "The green  curves show the calculated limits of Diana's
interface, the red  ones the actual
state."

To Gonzales, the red curves seemed huge, perhaps twice
the  size of the green ones.  He said, ""What does it
mean?"

"That we don't know the rules; that we still have a lot
to  learn."  Looking up at Gonzales, Charley's seamed face
was lit  with his passion for this new
phase of discovery.

"Where's Lizzie?" Gonzales asked.

"She's gone home.
She said for you to come by." #

Gonzales stood in front of Lizzie's door until it said,
"Come  in."  Lizzie was sitting in her front room, its
curtains open to  bright sunlight.  She stood and said, "Hello," and
smiled.  He  couldn't read that smile, quite, though it seemed less
guarded  than before.  "Have a seat.  Would you like some breakfast?"

"No, I'm all right."

"The orange cat was here this morning, looking for
you.  And  Showalter just leftshe's back in charge, you know."

"I'd heard."

"She approved my invitation for you to become a member
of the  collective, if you wish and they
confirm.  I imagine they will   if you take the offer."  Her smile had a little mischief in it.

"What do you think I should do?"

"Your
choice."  She spoke the word
with emphasis, as though  it had special
meaning for her.  "We can talk
about it."

"Sure."

The remainder of the morning passed, and they talkedthough  somehow what they said had little to do with
the collective or the  job Gonzales had
been offered.  They chattered to one
another,  their ostensible topics
pretexts for a certain tone of voice, an
exchange of glances, a shift of the limbs:  for necessary  intensities
of attention.

Intimacy proceeded according to its own rules, nurtured in
a  web of subtle communications:  a widening of the eyes; a posture  open to the other's presence; multiple
gestures and words whose  import was
clearcome closer.  Though consciousness
might be busy  or blind, the eyes see,
and the brain and body know, for such
communications are too important to be left to mere conscious  apprehension or thought.

They ate lunch, which served to move them closer
together,  face-to-face across her
table, and their gestures and voices
flowed around the context of eating, which disappeared entirely  into the moment.

They sat together on the couch, then, and at some point
she  put her hand in his, or he took
hersneither could have said who  was
firstand they leaned toward one another, their motions slow  and steady and sure, and their cheeks
brushed, and then they  kissed.

Then they leaned back to measure in one another's eyes
the  truth and intensity of this
declaration, and she stood and said,
"Let's go into the other room." #

Naked, they knelt on her bed and looked at each other in
near  darkness, the flicker of an oil
flame burning in a reservoir of  crystal
the only light.  How careful they were
being, Gonzales  thought, as though
their future together hung suspended in this
moment.  As perhaps it did.

For a moment there were phantoms in the room, the
distant  ghosts of childhood and dream
common to all lovemaking, for the
moment becoming strong.

They leaned together, and almost in unison, one's voice  echoing the other, said, "I love
you."  Every sensation was  magnifiedthe light touch of her nipples
across his chest, the  prodding of his
stiff cock on her belly.  His hands
moved to and  fro on her in a kind of
dance, and she pushed hard against him,
their shoulders clashing bone on bone.

She lay back, and Gonzales put his arms under her thighs
and  pulled her up and toward him, and
their eyes were wide open, each  taking
in the beauty of the other, transformed by the urgency and  intensity of these moments.  Then, at least for these moments,  they exorcised all ghosts.         Over decades Gonzales would carry the
memories of that day:   shadowed
silhouettes of her face and bodyline of a jaw, taut  curve of an arm and swell of breastagainst the flicker of
light  on a white wall  and smells and tastes and tactile sensations

Awakened by the slant of late afternoon light across
his  face, Gonzales got up from the bed
where Lizzie still lay  sleeping; the
smell of their two bodies and their lovemaking came  off the covers, and he breathed it in, then leaned over to
kiss  her just under the jaw, where the
sun had begun to touch her pale  skin.

In the kitchen, he asked the coffeemaker for a latt,
half  espresso and half steamed milk,
and it gave the coffee to him in  one of
the ubiquitous lunar ceramic mugs, and he took the coffee  onto the terrace.  On the highway beneath him, trees had shed  thousands of leaves; there would be a new,
sudden spring, Lizzie  had told him, new
bud and blossom and fruit all over the city.

"Mgknao," the orange cat said.  "Mgknao."  Peremptory,
demanding.

"Feed the kitty," Lizzie said from behind him, and
he turned  to see her standing nude,
just inside the terrace doors.  Her  hands were crossed over her breasts, the
right hand just beneath  the blossom of
the rose tattoo.  "Meow," she
said.  "Meow meow  meow." #

As the stars spun slowly outside the window, distant
Earth  came into view.  "I don't want to leave here,"
Mister Jones said.   HeyMex didn't ask
why.  Here was Aleph, possibility,
growth; Earth  was working for the
man.  "But my staying is out of the
question,"  Mister Jones said.  "Traynor would never allow it.  Particularly  now, when his recent maneuvers came to nothing."

"Things worked out well for many others."

"But not for Traynor.
The board found his handling of the
situation clumsy and insensitive.
Their judgment is tempered only
by their knowledge that many of them would have reacted in similar  fashion."

"Good," HeyMex said, and meant it.  It and Gonzales would  remain here, it seemed, both of them part of
the Interface  Collective, and neither
would wish to make as powerful an enemy as
Traynor.  It hoped that as time
passed, the sting of recent events
would fade.

"But what about me?" Mister Jones said, his voice
plaintive.

"You have to go, that's certain.  But you could also stay."

"What do you mean?"

"Copy yourself."

Startled, Mister Jones shifted into a mode beyond
language,  where the two exchanged
information, questions, qualms,
explanations, assurances.
Beneath it all flowed a sadness:
Mister Jones would go to Earth, and his clone would remain at Halo  and individuate as their spacetime paths
diverged.  Mister Jones- at-Halo would
become its own, separate self:   he
would choose a  new name, thought
HeyMex, perhaps a new gender, perhaps none at
all.

HeyMex could not hide its own jubilation at the idea of
a  companion here, but, oddly, it felt
an elation coming back, which  became
clear in an instant as Mister Jones sent images of its joy  at the idea of a second self. #

Since his death, Jerry had experienced a number of
somatic  discomforts:  disorientation, vertigo, nausea; all part of
a new  syndrome, he supposed, phantom
self.  Like the amputee whose  invisible limb itches terribly, persisting
in the brain's map long  after the flesh
has gone, he felt his old self begging attention,  making one impossible demand:
it wanted to be.

It talked to him in dreams or when heartsick wondering
put  him into a daytime fugue.  It could feel his longing, to be whole  again, and, above all, to be real.  "Take me back," it whispered.   "We can go places together, places
that exist."

Jerry believed his life and this world would remain in  question forever.  At moments perception itself seemed  incomprehensible to him, and his existence a violation of
the  natural order or transgression of
absolute human boundaries.  He  could look at the fictive lake on this sunny
not-day and with the  cries of imaginary
birds singing in his equally imaginary ears,
ask, who or what am I? and what will happen to me?

His mind bounced off the questions like an axe off
petrified  wood.

"Aleph," he called, awaking from a dream in which
his old  self had called to him.  "I have questions."

Somber, deep, Aleph's voice said to him only,
"Questions?   Concerning
what?"

"I want to know what I am."

"Ask an easy one:
the nth root of infinity, the color of
darkness, the dog's Buddha nature, the cause of the first cause."

"Can't you answer?"

"No, but I can sympathize.  Lately I have asked the same
question about both of us.
However, I must tell you that the only
answer I know offers little comfort.
It is a tautology:  you are  what you are, as I am."

"And what about my body?  That was me once."

"In a way.  What
of it?"

"Did it have a funeral?  Was it buried?"

"It was burned and its components recycled."

"So I am nowhere."

"Or here.  Or
everywhere.  As you wish."

Jerry felt himself crying then, as he began mourning his
old  self, and he wondered if others
mourned him as well.  He said,  "Human beings have ceremonies for their
dead.  Without them, we  die unremembered."

"You are not unremembered.  You are not even dead, precisely.   Do you wish a funeral?"

Of course, Jerry started to say, but then said, "No, I
don't  suppose I do.  But I think we should have some kind of
ceremony,  don't you?" #

On the west-facing cabin deck, Diana sat watching the
sun's  red color the ice-sheeted
mountainsides.  She felt evening's
chill  come on and stood, thinking she'd
go inside for a sweater, when  she heard
someone coming up the slatted redwood walk beside the  cabin.

Jerry came around the corner, and once again as she saw
him,  joy quickened in her at this
sequence of improbabilities:  that
he  still lived and they were
together.  She was aware of how  difficult things had been for him lately, so
she watched his face  closely as he came
toward her.  He was smiling as though
he'd just  heard a joke.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Damned near everything."

He reached out to her, and they stood embracing, her
head  against his chest, where every
sense told her there were solid  flesh
and heartbeat and the steady rhythm of life's breath.

23. Byzantium

The blue sky was broken only by one small white cloud
that  blew toward the horizon.  Lizzie beside him, Gonzales stood among  the guests, who wore leis of tropical
flowers:  plumeria,  tuberose, and ginger. The Interface
Collective formed the crowd.

The two had been here for days, as had many of the
othersit  was a kind of vacation for
them all.  Peculiar and enigmatic  members of the collective could be found
along almost any path,  while the twins
seemed perpetually on the dock or in the water,  their voices echoing across the lake in loud, unintelligible
cries  of joy.

In the evening of the first day there, all had gathered
on  the deck, which, Gonzales supposed,
could expand virtually without
constraint to accommodate all who came there.  The collective had  talked
excitedly among themselves, still lit up by their shared  experience, and amazed and delighted at
being granted this new  world within the
world.  Then, spontaneously,
one-by-one,  Gonzales, Lizzie, and Diana
told of what they had endured.

All who spoke and all who listened had an interpretation,
a  theory of these experiences, their
meaning, implication, and  dominant
theme.  Late into the night they talked,
formed into  groups, dispersed, grouped
again, as they explored the nature of
the individual and collective visions.
Among them, only the
Aleph-figure contributed nothing.
It maintained that it had been
unconscious and so knew nothing of what had happened or what it  meant.

With the passing of weeks, months, and years, the stories
and  the listeners' responses would make
a mythology for the collective  and then
for Halo, spreading out from mouth-to-mouth according to  the laws of oral dispersion.  A certain numinosity would accrue to  Diana, Lizzie, and Gonzales from their roles
as chief actors, and  then to all who
had taken part in what would increasingly be told  as feats of epic heroism.
Finally the stories would be written
down and so assume a form that could resist contingency; then they  would be dramatized in the media of the
time, and beautiful,  eloquent people
would take the parts.  Later still,
variant forms  would themselves be put
in writing and absorbed into the corpus of
tales.  Commonplaces would be
scorned at this point, and clever  and
perverse tellings would grow strongHeyMex might be named the  hero, or Traynor, Aleph an autochthonous
demon manipulating them  all for its
greater glory

Gonzales looked at the collective gathered near him.  Many
had made this a formal occasion; they had identical dark blue  flattops four inches high and wore
gold-belted, dark blue gowns  that hung
to the ground.  Only the twins were
dressed differently,  in white dresses
copied from twentieth century wedding
photographs; they called themselves "bridesmaids" and went to
and  fro among the crowd, offering to
"do bride's duty" to everyone
they met.

Toshi faced the crowd, his posture erect and still, his
hands  hidden in the folds of his black
robe.  Beside him stood HeyMex  and the Aleph-figurethe lights of its body
all blue and pink and  green and red,
dancing bright-hued colors.

(Gonzales and the others saw what might be called a second-
order simulacrum, for like Charley Hughes and Eric Chow, Toshi did  not have the neural socketing that would
take him into Aleph's  fictive spaces,
and so with the other two, he participated in the  wedding through a kind of proxy.
Though Gonzales and the others
saw Toshi, Charley, and Eric among them, the three (in fact) stood  before a viewscreen in the IC's conference
room.)

Gonzales thought everyone looked impossibly fine, as if
Aleph  had retouched them for these
moments, dressing them all in selves
just slightly more beautiful than was usual, or even ordinarily  possible
he felt the Aleph-figure's attention on himaware of  that thought?and shrugged, as if to say,
fine with me.

Her back to the crowd, Diana stood with her bare
shoulders  square.  Her hair fell

eBook Info

Creator:

Tom Maddox

Title:

Halo

Date:

10/29/2000