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, man--as 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 it--I 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 memex--HeyMex--came 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 malleable--alive 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 her--how strange and terrible and wonderful to recover someone you've loved here--this 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.
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 blind--I 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 Aleph--the 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 hardware--cameras, 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 feared--an 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 time--hardly a viable solution. That was a terrible realization--I'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 board--all 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 inscrutability--this 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 way--off without explanation, presumably to go about some piece of the insanely complex business of keeping Halo running--Gonzales 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 death--our 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 all--I 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 kind--as 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."
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 little--on just a few words of promise--he 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 confounded--there 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 patient--with 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 then--what 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 you--she 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 memex--she 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, though--Traynor 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 dead--he's been dead, he will be dead--and he's worse dead than he was before ... he'll tear himself to pieces on the restraints, I suppose--that'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 suspicious--while Horn was trying to look poker-faced, but Gonzales could see through him like he was made of glass--the 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 stress--communications breakdown.
Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"
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 transformed--water, oxygen, and carbon, all rare and dear.
Below him, Ring Highway carried Halo's traffic--in 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 away--in 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 over--last 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 movements--what 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 doing--her 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 dark--her 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 decomposers--they're incredibly efficient at converting dead organic matter into cellulose." Gonzales nodded. She said, "In a natural setting--whether here or on Earth--spores 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 technique--in 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 job--they 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 fruit--mushrooms." 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 light--the 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 Underground--the terrible moment when he looked back and so lost me forever--then 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 mushrooms--which are the same as we ate that day, the body of the god--then 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 esoteric--for 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 time--a 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 said--shi-i-ta-key--the 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."
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 yellow--Gonzales 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 slowly--dimming, 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 things--Halo 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 fly--what 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 sense--they 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 white--colors 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 egg--not 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 this--cold 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 why--we 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 coffee--do 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 demons--jacked-up expert systems, really--and the collective."
"How well is that working?"
"Not all that well--we can maintain essential functions now, and that's about it. Some things we can't handle--climate 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.
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 eyes--she 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 behind--in 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 transformations--taken 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 them--no 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 before--gave 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 order--a unique bonding of kind-to-kind--and 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, fleeting--without 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 Halo--the 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 blank--Traynor 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 screen--the 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 is--to 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"
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 Jerry--it 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 most--loss 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 next--at 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, Aleph-sub-null.
Unit2: a series of actions showing the involvement of Diana with Aleph, rendering the moments of transformation by which Aleph-sub-null 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 emerges--non-linear, multi-dimensional, topologically complex, self-referential and paradoxical to extremes that would cause Russell or G�del 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 indisposed--its primary monitoring facilities functioning but its interactive capabilities represented only by a voice that said, "I am currently engaged." Gonzales knew it could be doing communications, data retrieval, or any other number of tasks; he thought it probably hadn't expected him back so soon.
Then came Halo's skewed night-time awakening: the sky shutters cranked half-way open, "morning" appeared through a cold mist, and Halo became the Surreal City. Like many others, Gonzales pulled the curtains closed and turned away from the lurid glare, his own body clock telling him it was time to sleep again.
He lay in bed, oddly calm in the curtained dark despite a degree of post-drug fatigue and skittishness. He thought of the distance between Miami and Seattle, Seattle and Halo, Halo and the world of the lake ... and so triggered sharp, eroticized images of Lizzie, the water beading on her skin, her words, "Then we'll see" ... he felt the astringent bite of lust and regret mixed, knew he had little choice but to wait until she told him absolutely no ... thought of himself moving ever farther from home and believed that he had been wrong about Seattle--it was not too far from Miami; it was much too close ...
The memex's voice said, "I'm back. I've been discussing the situation with Traynor's advisor."
"Have you?"
"Yes, it is sympathetic to our concerns."
Dizzying prospects seemed to open before Gonzales, where the number of beings multiplied beyond counting, and the simplest machine would have opinions. He said, "Have you been told about the plans for tomorrow?"
"Yes, I have. I am ready to help." Something like pleasure in the memex's voice.
"Good."
"You were almost asleep when I first spoke. I will leave you alone now."
"Good night."
"Good night."
The small creature looked at Gonzales and said, "You're welcome here." Made entirely of dull silver metal, with a baby's round head, dumpling cheeks, and bow-tie mouth, it walked between Gonzales and Lizzie on clumsy silver legs, looking up to watch them speak.
Gonzales said, "You know, in dreams logic doesn't apply."
"Yes, it does," Lizzie said.
"It's a difficult question," the small creature said.
"No," Gonzales said. "I'm sure of this. Here I am I, but I am also Lizzie, and she is she but also she is I--"
"I don't like your pronouns," the little thing said. Its breath came in gasps; it was having trouble keeping up.
"They're correct," Gonzales said.
"That's no excuse," Lizzie said, but she spoke through him. As himself, Gonzales listened to a self that was not himself speaking; hence, as Lizzie, she must be listening to a self that was not and was herself speaking.
"Correctness is no excuse before the law," the small creature said. "Whichever pronouns you use."
"Pronouns walked the Earth in those days," Lizzie said.
"No, they didn't," Gonzales said. The very idea.
"Pronouns or anti-pronouns," the little things said. "The important thing is not to forget your friends." It smiled, and its metal lips curved to show bright silver teeth. "Wake up!" it shouted.
Gonzales jerked from sleep with the image of the metal child fixed in his vision--he 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 bit--I'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 home--you 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 with--corporate 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 give nice dictation," Lizzie said. "Consider your statement duly noted and get the fuck out of here.
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 ideogram--what 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 shell--both 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 it--he 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 now--time passes very quickly today, it seems--and 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 intrigue--these 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 chati�re, 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 between 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 _chati�re _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 back--both 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 once--she 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 unmoved--she 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 ago--he 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.
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 egg--mentally 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 people--I'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?"
"Soon--before 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 left--she'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 talked--though 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 clear--come 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 hers--neither could have said who was first--and 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 magnified--the 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 body--line of a jaw, taut curve of an arm and swell of breast--against 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.
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 others--it 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 strong--HeyMex 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-figure--the 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 him--aware 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 denied--the 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.
Gonzales 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 out--sad at times, terrified at others--lamenting 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 wonder--the 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."
The End
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