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 any  way you wish so long as you do not change them in any way or  receive money for them.

I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the Net, but  I retain the copyright to the novel.

If you paid for these files, you were cheated; if you sold them,  you have cheated.

Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around.

If you have any comments on the book or this distribution, you can send me e-mail at:

            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