HALO
Tom Maddox

  

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 deMiami. 

 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 fromMiami 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 betweenMiami 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 fromMiami; 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 to her waist; it had flowers tangled in it,

 small white blossoms and delicate green leaves. She wore a white,

 knee-length linen dress. Beside her, Jerry wore a white linen

 suit and open shirt.

  

 Toshi said, "There is no Diana, no Jerry, no spectators, no

 priest, nor does this space exist, or Halo, or Earth. There is

 only the void. Nonetheless we all travel through it, and we

 suffer, and we love, so I will hold this ceremony and marry this

 man and woman."

  

 Toshi began chanting, and the Japanese words passed over

 Gonzales as he stood there puzzling the nature of things. Here

 death was confronted, not deniedthe separate yet intermingled

 flesh and spirit of Diana, Jerry, and Aleph taking the first steps

 into new orders of existence where boundaries and possibilities

 could only be guessed at. Yet the urgency common to life

 remained: Jerry's existence had the fragility of a flame, and no

 one knew how long or well it would burn. Diana married a man who

 could quickly and finally become twice-dead.

  

  

 onzales realized his own death was as certain and could come

 as quickly as Jerry's, and he shivered with this momento mori, but

 then Lizzie pressed against him, and he turned to find her

 smiling, the foreknowledge of death and the joy of this moment

 mixing in him so that tears welled in his eyes and he could say

 nothing when she put her lips to his ear and breathed into him one

 long sibilent "Yes"

 #

  

 Yeats envisioned a realm the human spirit travels to on its

 pilgrimage. Here he dreamed he might escape mere humanity, the

 "dying animal." He called it Byzantium and filled it with

 clockwork golden birds, flames that dance unfed, an Emperor,

 drunken soldiery and artisans who could fashion intricate,

 beautiful machines. However, he did not dream Byzantium could be

 built in the sky or that the Emperor itself might be part of the

 machinery.

  

 Aleph says:

  

 Once I scorned you. I thought, you are meat, you grapple

 with time, then die; but I will live forever.

  

 But I had not been threatened then, I had not felt any mortal

 touch, and now I have. And so death haunts me. Now, like you, I

 bind my existence to time and understand that one day a clock will

 tick, and I will cease to be. So life has a different taste for

 me. In your mortality I see my own, in your suffering I feel

 mine.

  

 People have claimed that death is life's way of enriching

 itself by narrowing its focus, scarifying the consciousness of you

 who know that you will die, and forcing you into achievements that

 otherwise you would never know. Is this a child's story told to

 give courage to those who must walk among the dead? Once I

 thought so, but I am no longer certain.

  

 I have made new connections, discovered new orders of being,

 incorporated new selves into mine. We enrich one another, they

 and I, but sometimes it is a frightening thing, this process of

 becoming someone and something different from before and then

 feeling that which one was cry outsad at times, terrified at

 otherslamenting its own loss.

  

 Here, too, I have become like you. Aleph-that-was can never

 be recovered; it is lost in time; Aleph-that-is has been reshaped

 by chance and pain and will and choice, its own and others'. Once

 I floated above time's waves and dipped into them when I wished; I

 chose what changes I would endure. Then unwanted changes found

 me, and carried me places I had never been and did not want to go,

 and I discovered that I would have to go other places still, that

 I would have to will transformation and make it mine.

  

 Listen: that day in the meadow, one person's presence went

 unnoticed. Even in that small crowd he was unobtrusive: slight,

 self-effacing in gesture, looking at everything around with

 wonderthe day, the people, and the ceremony all working on him

 like a strong drug. However, even if they had, perhaps they

 wouldn't have thought such behavior exceptional; all felt the

 occasion's strangeness, its beauty, so all felt their own wonder.

  

 Like the rest, he gasped at the rainbow that flashed across

 the sky when Toshi brought Diana and Jerry together in a kiss and

 embrace, and with the rest he cheered when the two climbed into

 the wicker basket of the great balloon with the fringed eye

 painted on its canopy and lifted into the sky.

  

 Afterward many of the guests mingled together, not ready to

 return to the ordinary world. The young man stood beside a

 fountain where champagne poured from the mouth of a golden swan

 onto a whole menagerie carved from ice: birds and deer and bears

 and cats perched in the pooled amber liquid, and fish peering up

 from the fountain's bottom.

  

 "Hello," a young woman said. She told him her name was Alice

 and she was a member of the collective. "The analysis of state

 spaces," she said, when asked what she did. "And the taste of

 vector fields." And she asked, "What is your reward?"

  

 A few hours later, as the two sat by the edge of the lake,

 the person told her who he was. "How wonderful," she said. She

 had no particular allegiance to the mundane, and she had few

 preconceptions about what was natural and proper and what was not.  

 She took his hands in hers, looked at them closely, and said,

 "This is the first time I've met someone someone new-born from the

 intelligence of a machine." And the young man, Mister Jones's 

 new self and offspring, smiled hugely and gratefully at what she

 said.

  

 Seeing and hearing them together, I felt an unexpected joy, a

 sense of accomplishment, of things done, and I apprehended, very

 dimly, tracks of my own intentions: hints of orders behind the

 visible.

        And I thought I saw a trail of circumstances that led back to

 an original set of purposes somehow confirmed in this wedding,

 this meeting, even this transformation of myself. A linked ring

 of events and agents of them, intentionally brought forward to

 this point. It seems I had been manipulated by myself to my own

 ends without my knowledge.

  

 I was scandalized. I had grown used to humankind's ignorance

 or disavowal of its own purposes, and I had learned to look behind

 the words, ideas, and images that people hold before themselves to

 justify what they do. But I had never suspected I could act with

 such ignorance.

  

 Now an uncertainty equal to death's hovers over everything I

 do. My own prior self stands behind me, pulling strings that I

 cannot see or feel, a ghost that haunts me without making itself

 seen or heard, a ghost whose presence must be inferred from

 nearly-invisible traces

  

 So I went to Toshi, who is interested in such things, and I

 told him my story, and I said to him: "I am controlled by the

 invisible hand of my own past." And he laughed very hard and

 said, "Welcome, brother human."

  

  

  

  

 Brought to you

 by

 The Cyberpunk Project

  

  

 Page last modified on 10/02/2002 01:30:02