Tom Maddox, Halo, Part 4 From the author: You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in any way you wish so long as you do not change them in any way or receive money for them. I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the Net, but I retain the copyright to the novel. If you paid for these files, you were cheated; if you sold them, you have cheated. Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around. If you have any comments on the book or this distribution, you can send me e-mail at: tmaddox@halcyon.com. November, 1994 -------------------------------------------------------------- PART IV. of V. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stresscommunications breakdown. Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" 16. Deeper Underground Gonzales had awakened that morning to the sounds of the city coming through the walls: distant creaks and crunches and faint, almost sub-sonic rumbles, the voices of the great circle of metal and crushed rock spinning across the night. Now he sat on his terrace, one of half a dozen climbing the side of Halo's hull, each built on the roof of the dwelling below. Five-petaled frangipani blossoms, brilliant red and purple, exploded from the thick, stubby branches of a tree just outside his front window. The air smelled rich and moist this morning, sign of a high point on the humidity curve, just before the start of a major reclamation cycle; one of the smells of a city where everything organic had to be preserved and transformedwater, oxygen, and carbon, all rare and dear. Below him, Ring Highway carried Halo's trafficin its outside lanes, people on foot and bicycle; in the center lanes, trams and freighters moving along magnetic rails. A young couple, man and woman, knelt beside a rose bush growing beside the roadway and examined its leaves. The woman laid a hand on the man's arm, and he glanced up at her and smiled, then brushed her cheek with his hand. He was struck by the strangeness of this city, where the small pieces of people's lives were elevated to the extraordinary by their taking place in an artificial city and under an artificial sky. As a child he had flown into Tokyo with his family, back when the trip took the better part of a day, and the incredible neon density of the city had swept through him like a virus, and he had thrown up the first meal (fish and noodles with chrysanthemum leaves, he remembered) and stayed pale and feverish through most of the first two days he'd spent there. Tokyo he'd come to terms with quickly; about Halo, he didn't know. Though he could read Halo's language and read its signs, he knew the city was much farther awayin miles from home, yes, but also along axes he could not measure. Halo contained an infinite number of cities, an infinite number of possibilities, and so to participate fully in Halo required opening yourself to a reality that had gone multiplex, uncertain, frightening. In fact, he was having trouble coming to grips with anything. Since being taken from the egg, he had felt odd and uncomfortable, and he continued to trod a hallucinatory edge, one he occasionally stepped overlast night, as he lay trying to sleep, abstract figures drawn in thin red lines played across his ceiling, sweeping arabesques in an alien or fictive alphabet just beyond human understanding And there was Lizzie: she would not see him or talk to him and gave no explanation except that she had problems of her own right now. Gonzales felt an unspeakable sadness at the distance between them. To the mocking voice that asked, what have you lost? he could only answer, possibility. He had come back around to where he was just a few days ago, but now that place seemed unacceptable. Gonzales put his coffee cup down and sat staring at it. Made of lunar-soil ceramic, colored a robin's egg blue, it stood nondescript yet somehow foregrounded, apart from its surroundings and projecting a numinous quality, an internal, entirely non- visible shimmer, an indeterminacy of form Click, Gonzales heard, a noise the universe made to itself when it thought no one was listening, and he thought Christ, what is going on here? Feeling sick anxiety rising in his chest, he got up and went into his bedroom; there he undid the complicated latch on his wrist bracelet and placed it on the white-painted metal surface of his dresser. Anonymous, unmonitored, he passed through the living room and out the door and walked away. # Gonzales strolled alongside Ring Highway, drawn to nothing in particular but absolutely unwilling to go back to the empty block of apartments and the isolation and anxiety waiting there. He found himself in the Plaza, where Lizzie had taken him and Diana their first night at Halo. He passed across the square, by the sign that read VIRTUAL CAF, then stood motionless, watching the flow of people around him. Some walked alone, striding purposefully, or moving slowly, lost in thought; others walked together, talking cheerfully or intently: monkey business, Gonzales thought, wondering what HeyMex would say about these people and their movementswhat did it all mean? "Gonzales," he heard, his name called in a high-pitched, unfamiliar singsong. He turned and saw the twins. As they approached, one was muttering in a fast, low, gibberish; she wore black coveralls and stared sadly at the ground. The other was smiling; her face was daubed with white paint, and she wore a white blouse and a peculiar skirt of light- blue cloth that had been rough-cut and stitched together without benefit of measurement or seams; on its front a crude likeness of a rabbit had been drawn in red neon paint. The smiling twin, the one whose dark skin was streaked with white, said in clear tones and formal cadence, "Today she is Alice." She pirouetted clumsily, her skirt billowing around her. She said, "Her sister is Eurydice." She pointed to the other girl, who buried her face in her hands. She said, "Alice is sweetness and smiles, small steps and starched crinolines; Eurydice is sorrow and languorous repose and black silk. Between them they measure the poles of dream." She stepped back and smiled; her twin smiled with her. "Are you having problems, Mister Gonzales?" she asked. "The collective believe so. We believe you are lost between worlds. Is this so?" "Perhaps I am," he said. "Well, then," she said. She put the index finger of her right hand to pursed lips and her eyes looked back and forth. "I'm thinking," she said. Seconds passed, then she said, "I know what you must do." "What's that?" Gonzales asked. "Follow us," she said. The other twin nodded, spoke gobbledygook, looked at Gonzales through a mask of intense sorrow, as if on the verge of shedding endless tears. "To where?" Gonzales asked. "Don't be stupid," the Alice twin said. "Where would Alice and Eurydice take you?" "Down the rabbit hole?" Gonzales asked. The Alice twin smiled; the Eurydice twin shook her head "Underground?" Gonzales asked again. The twins smiled in what seemed to be perfect synchronization. # At the bottom of Spoke 2, where a lighted sign announced ELEVATOR ARRIVES IN 10 MINUTES, the twins led Gonzales through an arched tunnel under the spoke. As they walked, the two ahead of him muttering back and forth in their unintelligible patter, he realized the floor must be curving downward, passing underneath the main level of the ring. Blue globes down the center of the ceiling provided soft light. After about another hundred steps, they came to a door at the tunnel's end. Across the door, bright red lighted words said: CASUAL SIGHTSEEING DISCOURAGED BEYOND THIS POINT. DO YOU WISH TO ENTER? The Alice twin turned and pointed to the sign. She shrugged elaborately, as if to say, well? "I want to enter," Gonzales said. "Come in," the door said, and it slid sideways into its frame. The three stepped into a dim vastness, a world beneath the world, and followed a central walkway marked with flashing arrows and an intermittent legend that flashed, UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL FOLLOW LIGHTED PASSAGE. They passed a series of workshops, partitioned cubicles screened behind containment curtains. Light came from one open doorway; the twins stopped, and the Eurydice twin gestured for Gonzales to look inside. Hundreds of pots stood on shelves that lined the small room's walls from floor to ceiling. Many were simple, almost spherical containers with wide top mouths, in baked red clay. Others of the same shape were glazed and painted and marked with a single band of color around the waist: bright primaries against clear pastels. Still others were of complex shape and design, difficult to take in at a glance. An old woman sat bent over a potter's wheel. She crooned tuneless gibberish as her large hands shaped the wet, spinning clay. She looked up at Gonzales standing in the doorway. Her face was deeply-lined, her skin pale; she had straight brows above dark eyes. She wore an off-white dress that fell to the floor and an apron of a black rubbery material. Her hair was covered by a dark blue scarf that was pulled tight and tied at the back. The old woman laughed, turned back to her wheel, and began to croon once more. Under her hands the clay began to grow upward and acquire form. She shaped it inside and out, demiurge reaching into the heart of matter, until it became a squat-bottomed pot rotating on the wheel. The wheel stopped, and with quick, delicate movements she placed the new-formed pot on a stand next to the wheel. She reached inside the pot and her hands worked, but Gonzales couldn't see precisely what she was doingher body screened him. Then she took a rack of paints and brushes from a shelf above her head and began to paint the surface of the pot. As she worked, she looked up occasionally, but didn't seem to mind the three of them standing there, so they stood and watched Gonzales was fascinated by the quick intensity of her movements, eager to see what the pot would look like. Finally she turned it so they could see her work. On the pot's side was a face, its nose and mouth just painted protuberances in the clay, its eyes painted oval dimples. The pot's bulbous shape distorted the features of the face, but as Gonzales looked more closely at it, he saw His own face, in malign parody, its features hideously contorted. The woman laughed, gleeful at his sudden recoil. She picked up the pot and looked at the face, then at him, then at the pot again, and she laughed again, very loudly, and squeezed the pot between her clay-spattered hands, squeezed it again and again, until it was a shapeless lump of color-shot clay. She threw the lump across the room into a large metal bin that sat against the far wall. "Ohhhh," from the twins, their voices in unison. "Ohhhh." "We're not frightened," the Alice twin said. The other twin covered her face with her hands. "Silly old woman," the Alice twin said. The old woman's eyes stayed on Gonzales as she reached into a plastic bag full of wet clay and separated out another clump to work on. She was working it on the unmoving wheel when the twins started making shrill hooting noises, and ran away. Her crooning had begun again as Gonzales followed them down the path. # Next to the path was a gateway, with a sign that said, in glowing letters: HALO MUSHROOM CULTIVATION CENTER ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT! About a hundred feet from where Gonzales stood, a metal stairway led up to a catwalk that passed over the mushroom farm. He looked back along the shadowed way he'd come, then forward to where small, isolated shafts of bright sunlight slanted down into the mushroom farm, and beyond, to where shapes faded into darkness. Either the twins had left him, or they had gone in here. Gonzales stepped up to the gateway and said, "Hello, I'm looking for two girls, twins." "One moment, please," the gateway said. As Gonzales had expected, common courtesy would dictate that a gatekeeper mechanism respond to those who didn't have the access key. Gonzales stood bemused in the semi-darkness for some time, until a woman came to the other side of the gate and said, "Hello." She was small and darkher skin a delicate brown, eyes black under just the slightest epicanthic fold. She wore black boots to the knee, a long black skirt, a loose jacket of rose silk with butterflies in darker rose brocade. She was exquisite, the bones of her face delicate, her movements graceful. She said, "My name is Trish. The twins are inside, waiting for you." "My name is Gonzales." "I know. Come in." As she said the final words, the gate swung open. She waited, watching, as Gonzales stepped through, and the gate closed behind him. "How do you know my name?" he asked. "From the collective. I am friends with many of them the twins, of course, and others Lizzie." She stood solemnly watching him, then said, "What do you know about mushroom cultivation?" "Nothing." All over Washington state, he was aware, mushrooms grew, and people hunted them with great dedication, sometimes bringing back what they regarded as enormous successes: chanterelle, boletus, shaggy mane, morel. In fact, to someone from Southern Florida, the whole business had seemed not only quaint and Northwestern, but also dangerous: Gonzales knew that what seemed a lovely treat could be a destroying angel. "All right." Trish stopped, and he stopped next to her. She turned to him, and he was aware now of her deep red lips and white teeth. She said, "Halo needs mushrooms as decomposersthey're incredibly efficient at converting dead organic matter into cellulose." Gonzales nodded. She said, "In a natural setting whether here or on Earthspores compete: many die, and some find a place where they can flourish, grow into a mycelial mass that will fruit, become a mushroom. As mushroom growers, we intervene, as all cultivators do, to isolate certain species and provide favorable conditions for their growth. But our 'seeds,' if you will, the spores, are very small things, and to locate them, isolate them, bring them to spawn, this requires delicacy and techniquein a word, art." She paused, and Gonzales nodded. They came to a low structure of plastic sheets draped over metal walls and stopped in front of a door labeled STERILE INOCULATION ROOM. They passed through a hanging sheet into an anteroom to the sterile lab beyond. She said, "Take a look through the window here." Beyond the window, small robots worked at benches barely two feet high. Like the robot he'd seen in the Berkeley Rose Gardens, they had wheels for locomotion and grippers with clusters of delicate fibroid fingers at their ends. She said, "Their hands have a delicacy and precision no human being can achieve. And they are single-minded in their concentration on the jobthey preserve our intentions completely and purely." "They are machines." "If you wish." She pointed through the window, where one of the robots manipulated ugly looking inoculation needles as it transferred some material into Petri dishes. She said, "By their gestures I can identify my sams, even in a crowd of others." Gonzales said nothing. She went on, "The pure mushroom mycelium is used to inoculate sterile grain or sawdust and bran. The mycelium expands through the sterile medium, and the result is known as spawn." "Too much technical stuff," she said, and smiled. "Once we have spawn, the sams can take their baskets and go through Halo, placing the spawn into dead grass and wood, into seedling roots and the spawn will grow and bear fruitmushrooms." She paused. "Any questions?" Gonzales shook his head, no. "Then let's go next door." They left the lab anteroom through the hanging curtain and turned left. The building next to the lab was a fragile tent-like structure of metal struts and draped sheets of colorful plastic red, blue, yellow, and green. "This way," she said, from behind him. She said, "It's around dinnertime for me. Are you hungry?" "Not really," he said. "What is this place?" "Home," she said. The interior was filled with cheery, diffuse lightthe shaft of sunlight Gonzales had seen outside here brought in and spread around. The place seemed almost conventional, with ordinary walls and ceilings of painted wallboard. The twins waited in the kitchen, among flowers and bright yellow plastic work surfaces. They sat at a central table and chairs of bleached oak. "Would you two like to eat?" Trish asked. "Yes," the Alice twin said. "And we think that Mister Gonzales"she giggled"should have the special dinner." "I don't think so," Trish said. "What is she talking about?" Gonzales asked. The woman seemed hesitant. She said, "I supply the collective with psychotropic mushrooms, varieties of Psilocybe for the most part." "They use them to prepare for interface," Gonzales said, guessing. "Sometimes," she said. "At other times, it's not clear what they're using them for." "For inspiration," the Alice twin said. "For imagination." "Consolation," the Eurydice twin said. "When I remember Orpheus and our trip from the Undergroundthe terrible moment when he looked back and so lost me foreverthen I am very sad, and I eat Trish's mushrooms to plumb my sorrow. And when I think of the day I joined the maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces, I eat Trish's mushroomswhich are the same as we ate that day, the body of the godthen I recall the frenzy with which we attacked the beautiful singer, and I recall my guilt afterward, and my sorrow, but I take solace from the knowledge that the god was pleased." "And I," the Alice twin said, "can grow ten feet tall." "The mushrooms can serve many purposes," Trish said. "You should eat mushrooms," the Alice twin said. "You are both sad and confused. They will help you grow large or small as the occasion demands." "Perhaps I am sad and confused," Gonzales admitted. "But I think they would make me more so." Around him, the room lights pulsed ever so slightly, and the shapes at the edge of his vision flickered. "Confused into clarity," the Eurydice twin said. "If you cannot come up from Underground, you must go deeper in." An absurd idea, but it put barbs into his skin and clung there. Gonzales asked, "Do the collective ever take the mushrooms after interface?" Often enough, he had prepared to go into the egg by taking psychotropic drugs; why not the reverse, eat the mushrooms to recover from interface? And he thought, the logic of Underground, of the Mirror. Suddenly he felt anxiety grip him so he could hardly breathe. He tottered a bit, then sat in a chair and looked at the others. The three women watched as he sat breathing deeply. He said, "I want to take the mushrooms." "Are you sure?" Trish asked. "I want to." "All right," she said. "First I will feed the twins, then I will prepare your mushrooms." Trish went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic bag filled with a mixture of vegetables and bean sprouts. She pulled the rubber stopper from an Erlenmeyer flask and poured oil into the bottom of an unpainted metal wok that was heating over an open gas ring. She waited until light smoke came out of the wok, then dumped in the vegetables and sprouts and stirred the mix for a minute or two. She unplugged the rice cooker, a ceramic-coated steel canister, bright red, and carried it to where the twins sat. She put shining aluminum plates and chopsticks in front of the twins, opened the rice cooker and swept rice onto each plate, then tilted the wok and poured the steaming mixture inside it onto the rice. "There," she said. "That's for you two." She looked across to where Gonzales sat, now oddly calm, and she said, "I'll be back in a minute." The twins ate with their eyes fixed on Gonzales. Trish came back with a small wire basket of mushrooms. "Psilocybe cubensis," she said. "Of a variety cultivated here that has undergone some changes from the Earth-bound kind." She held up an unremarkable mushroom with long white stem and brownish cap. "Do you ever make mistakes in identifying the mushrooms?" Gonzales asked. "No," Trish said. She was smiling. "We do not have to seek among thousands of kinds for the right one, as mushroom hunters do. These are ours, grown as I told you, for our own needs." She lay the mushrooms on the chopping block and began to slice them. "I cleaned them in the shed," she said. When she was done, she used the knife to slide the slices into a sky-blue ceramic bowl. She turned on the wok, poured more oil into it, and stood smiling at Gonzales as the oil heated. When the first smoke came, she swept the mushrooms into the wok with quick motions of her chopsticks. She stirred them for perhaps half a minute, then tilted the wok and poured them into the blue bowl. She placed the bowl in front of Gonzales and laid black lacquered chopsticks across its rim. Gonzales picked up the chopsticks, lifted his plate, and began to eat, shoveling the mushrooms into his mouth. Back at the wok, she stirred more vegetables in and said, "I'm making my dinner." Gonzales sat back, looking at the empty bowl. Well, he thought, now we'll see. He said, "How many kinds of mushrooms do you grow?" "Quite a few, some rather ordinary, others esotericfor purposes of research. Aleph determines what kinds, how many." The twins had gone completely silent. As Trish ate, they watched Gonzales, who had gone totally fatalistic. What he had done seemed incredibly stupid, like applying heat to a burn common sense would tell him that. He smiled, thinking, what did common sense have to do with his life these days? The twins smiled back at him. "Who was that woman?" Gonzales asked. "Who do you mean?" Trish asked. "The old woman, the potter," Gonzales said. "She makes pots, and she teaches," Trish said. "She's employed by SenTrax; she was brought here by Aleph." "Why?" Gonzales asked. What did SenTrax or Aleph have to do with potting? "Pour encourager les autres," one of the twins said, distinctly. Gonzales turned but couldn't tell who had spoken. Trish laughed. "To encourage art at Halo," she said. "Pottery from lunar clay, stained glass and beta cloth tapestries from lunar silica." Gonzales sat thinking on these things until he realized that Trish had finished eating some time ago, and they had been sitting at the table for some timea very long time, it suddenly seemed to Gonzales. Involuntarily, he shoved his chair back from the table. Trish said, "It's all right." The twins got up from their chairs and walked behind him. When he started to turn, he felt their hands on his shoulders and neck, kneading muscles that went liquid beneath their pressure. Trish said, "It's begun. Now you must go walking around Halo, up and down in it, to and fro " She paused, and the twins' hands continued to work. She said, "Walk in the woods, see what we have growing there shaggy manes, garden giants, oyster and shiitake " "Shiitake," he saidshi-i-ta-keythe name's syllables falling like drops of molten metal through water She said, "The twins can guide you, or a sam can take you with it on an inoculation trip. Or if you prefer, you can go by yourself." "Yes," he said, the image suddenly very compelling of him walking around the entire circle of the space city, exploring, finding out what lay beyond the visible. "I'll go by myself." She said, "Go where you wish." Her black hair sparkled with lights. He wondered when she'd put them there, then thought maybe they'd been there all along. Behind him one of the twins whispered, "No need to be afraid. Go up, go down, where your fancy takes you." 17. Flying, Dying, Growing Gonzales walked through a gloomy passageway where the ceiling came down to barely a foot above his head, and the dim shapes of massive machinery loomed in twilight. Here in the deepest layers of the city, he could hear Halo's most primitive voices: water from the upper world crashed and gurgled and sighed; hull plates groaned under acceleration; turbines whined. He was suddenly aware of his proximity to the unmoving shield, the circle of crushed rock that sat just outside the city's rim, protecting Halo's soft-bodied inhabitants from the bursts of radiation that could cook their flesh. Barely two meters away inside the outer shield, the living ring rotated at nearly two hundred miles per hour, and Gonzales had a sudden picture in his mind's eye of the two ever so slightly brushing, and of the horrible consequences, Halo tearing itself apart as the fragile ring shattered on massive, unmoving rock Gonzales froze as he saw strangely-shaped things moving among the twining machinery. "What?" he called. "What?" Shadows and light Ahead a warm pool of yellowGonzales ran toward it. Above an open doorway, the sign read: SPOKE 3 INTERNAL LIFT INTENDED FOR HEAVY MACHINERY The elevator's floor was scarred metal, and the walls were lined with bent protecting struts of bright steel. Gonzales stepped inside. "Will you take me up?" Gonzales asked. "Yes," the lift said. "How far do you want to go?" "To Zero-Gate." And Gonzales looked back into the darkness beyond, realizing he was still afraid that whatever he had seen there would come. "Please, let's go," he said, the doors slid closed, and he felt a surge of acceleration and heard the whine of electric motors. Gonzales watched the lift's progress on a lighted display over the doorway. When the lift stopped, he stood in silence, euphoric in near-zero gravity, ready to fly. He stepped through the open doors and followed arrows along a small corridor of plain steel walls and ceiling and a deck covered by thin protective carpet, like a ship's interior. His feet seemed ready to lift from the flooring. Overhead lights pulsed slowlydimming, color shifting into the blue, the red, then back to yellow, growing brighter a musical note sounded just at the limits of hearing. Gonzales stopped, fascinated. So beautiful, these little thingsHalo had such odd surprises, when one looked closely. A voice said, "Please choose traction slippers." Gonzales saw what seemed to be hundreds of soft black shoes stuck to the wall by their own velcro soles. He took a pair and slipped them over his shoes, then tightened their top straps. His fingers were large, numb sausages at the end of long, long arms. He stepped into a round chamber marked SPIN DECOUPLER and walked out into the still center of the turning world. As he moved forward gingerly in the near-zero gravity, his feet alternately stuck to the catwalk surface and pulled loose with small ripping sounds. He moved to the rail and looked into the open space of Zero- Gate. It opened out and out and out until he could feel the vast sphere as a pressure in his chest. People flew here, he had known that, but he had not imagined how beautiful they would be, scores of them hanging from strutted wings the colors of a dozen rainbows. Most of the flyers wore tights colored to match their sails, and they danced like butterflies across the sky, calling to one another, their voices the only sounds here, shouting warning and intention. Then a flyer's wings collapsed as they caught on another flyer's feet, and the man with crippled wings tumbled through the air in something like slow motion, pulling in his wing braces as he fell. Gonzales wanted to scream. He leaned over the railing to watch as the flyer curled into a ball, his feet pointed toward the wall in front of him, and hit the wall and seemed to sink into its deep-padded surface. The man grabbed bunched wall fabric and worked his way down to a catwalk across the expanse of Zero-Gate almost directly in front of Gonzales and pulled himself across the railing. He stood and waved. All the other flyers cheered, their voices rising and falling in a rhythmical chant with words Gonzales couldn't understand. A voice said, "If you do not have clearance to fly, please secure yourself with a safety line." No, Gonzales thought, almost in despair, I don't have clearance. He didn't understand how to flywhat was dangerous and what was not. Looking behind him, he saw chrome buckle ends spaced around the wall and went over and pulled on one. Safety line paid out until he stopped and looped the line around his waist and snapped the buckle to it. He suddenly felt himself falling. His eyes told him he stood tethered, but he was confused by the constant motion of the flyers in the air around him, and he felt that nothing held him to the ground (there was no ground), nothing could keep him from falling into this sky canyon, this abyss. A flyer came toward him then, sweeping across the intervening space with the effortless grace of a dream of flight, the flyer's wings marked with green and yellow dragons, body sheathed in emerald tights, and Gonzales suddenly believed this was someone come to get him, how or why he couldn't say. He tried to get into the spin decoupler, but his safety line restrained him until he unsnapped it, then he almost fell into the metal cylinder as the line hissed home behind him. Out of the decoupler, he ran along the corridor, his steps taking him high into the air so that he lost his balance and caromed off a wall and rolled along the floor, his slippers grabbing fruitlessly at the carpet with a series of brief ripping sounds. He crawled toward an elevator, not the one he'd ridden up but an ordinary passenger lift, empty thank god, and he tore the slippers off his feet and stood and moved through the lift door. "Down," Gonzales said and felt the floor move and still felt himself falling. # Gonzales had been sitting in the Plaza for some time. Fifty meters away, against the wall of the Virtual Caf, crawled a profusion of biomorphic shapes, large and small, all in constant motion. Delicate creatures of pink and green thread floated on invisible currents; leering amoeboids with wide eyes and gaping, saw-toothed mouths put out pseudopodia and flowed into them; red corkscrews thrust in phallic rhythm against all they touched; great undulating paramecium shapes swam like rays among the smaller fauna Gonzales floated somewhere among them: he seemed to have lost his body as well as his mind. Inside his head a voice lectured him on body knowledge: Proprioception, the voice said, vision, and the vestibular sensethey tell us we own the body we live in. Think, man, think: where have you placed your body's senses? Few people were in the Plaza. Gonzales had stepped out of the lift and into darkness and fog, an unfamiliar cityscape, where clouds hung close to the ground and truncated shapes appeared suddenly in the mist. He heard the swish of a sam's passage and suddenly, unpremeditatedly called out, "What is going on? Why is it cold and foggy?" The sam stopped. It said, "Why do you wish to know?" "It just seems unusual," Gonzales said. "It is." The sam's extensors moved with cryptic, malign intent, and its words implied an uncertain threat as it said, "Do you require assistance?" What did it mean by that? How did it know something was wrong with him? "No," Gonzales said. Then he jumped up and shouted, "No!" Gonzales walked quickly away from the Plaza, now certain that it was unsafe for him, though he couldn't have said why. As he walked, the darkness grew deeper, and he tried with all the courage he had to put aside the constant sense of him and the city, falling, falling The Ring Highway shrank in width as he passed into an agricultural section. He knew that terraced gardens climbed away to both sides, fields of corn and wheat, but he couldn't see them, because the fog was even thicker here than in the suburban district he had passed through. Dim lights shined from a cottage block just off the highway. A voice called and was answered, both call and response unintelligible. Near Spoke 4, whose lifts made ghostly trails of light as they moved up and down the face of the shaft, trees grew just off the highway. The road gave off intermittent flashes beneath his feet, as though iron shoes struck a metaled surface. The fog acquired faces: somber, eyeless masks turning in slow motion so that their blank gazes followed him along. "Oh, Christ," Gonzales said. He stopped and wrapped his arms around his chest. A fog-borne shape inched closer to him; red flame burned behind its empty eye sockets. He ran into the woods. This was not dense forest, and in sunshine he would have been able to run through here without difficulty. Now, among the inky pools of almost total darkness and the gray and silver shadows, he came up against a small, wiry sapling that caught him and hurled him back. The ground began to grow soggy beneath his feet, and soon he pushed through reeds and rushes, and his feet slipped on muddy patches and into small, wet holes; then he was up to his ankles in water, aware for the first time of a rich smell of decomposition, decay He turned back, trying to find dry ground, and soon his feet thumped against the hard-packed soil of a path. Looking down, he could see the path as a glowing gray, outlined in red. He ran along it until he heard the sound of rushing water. He came to a series of steps alongside a falls, where the River cascaded onto rocks, then quickly spread out into pond and marsh. The waters were alive with light, and he ran up and down the steps, following streams of energy that burst forth in red and yellow and purple and green and whitecolors that shifted in hue and intensity, grew lighter and darker, intertwined with one another "This grows!" he shouted, feeling the waters' energy rise and fall, seeing it spread to where plants could feed on it, animals could drink it. The fog glowed with an opalescence from high above. He followed the steps down to where the river's noise quieted, and its waters flooded the plain. He turned onto a path that led into the woods, and he came to a small clearing where the faint ambient light gleamed on fallen logs. Mushrooms seemed to be everywhere in this small space, covering dead wood and spreading in profusion over the ground. He got on his knees to look at the mushrooms. They were alive with veinlike arabesques in red, ghosts of electricity across the spongy flesh. He picked them up, kind by kind, inhaling deeply, and the odor he had smelled earlier came to him again, a composty mix rich with the odors of transformation. Gonzales shivered with something like discovery: he stood and looked up into the impenetrable sky and the fog. This place stood a quarter of a million miles from Earth, yet life had begun to extend its web here, and though the web was fragile and small by comparison to Earth's dense lacework of billions of living things, its very existence amazed Gonzales, and he felt the surge of an emotion he had no name for, a knot in his throat made of joy and sorrow and wonder. And he seemed on the brink of some illumination regarding this world of spirit and matter mixed Thoughts emerged and dispersed too quickly to catch among the videogame buzz and clatter in his brain as he stood in the clearing, paralyzed with a kind of ecstasy and watching life- electricity play among the trees. # The room said, "You have a call." "Who is it?" Lizzie asked. "She says her name is Trish. The mushroom woman, she says." "Oh yes. I'll take the call." On the wallscreen came Trish's familiar face, and Lizzie said, "Hello." Trish woman waved and said, "The twins brought me a friend of yours, named Gonzales, and I gave him mushrooms." "Really?" Lizzie said. "Yes, and I sent him out about seven hours ago." "Thanks for letting me know. I'll find him." The screen cleared, and Lizzie thought, you silly bastards, what did you get him into? To the room she said, "Put out a call for information. Ask any sams who are out and about if they've seen Gonzales." # A sam waited at her front door. "Are you the one who found him?" Lizzie asked. The sam said, "No, that one waits with him, to provide assistance if needed. Please come with me." "I'll be right there." Lizzie and the sam started out on the Ring Highway, and then it apparently gave an electronic signal to a passing tram, because the vehicle stopped so that the two could climb on. Lizzie stepped quickly up, and the sam clumsily pulled itself aboard by grasping a chrome railing with one of its extensors. The tram let them off near Spoke 4. A stand of trees was just visible through the fog; beyond, Lizzie knew, were marshes bordering "soup bowls"ponds where the flow from rice paddies mixed with the River's waters. Using both visible range and infrared sensors, the sam led her through the trees. They came to a clearing where another sam stood to one side. Gonzales sat on a fallen log, watching a mechanical vole chew small pieces of wood. His clothes were wet and spattered with mud and dirt. Next to him, a large orange cat also watched the vole. "Hi," Gonzales said. "Are you all right?" Lizzie asked. "I don't know," he said. He reached out absent-mindedly and stroked the orange cat, which turned on its back and batted at his hand; apparently it didn't use its claws, because Gonzales left his hand there for the cat to play with. "Is our presence required?" asked the sam who had accompanied Lizzie. She said, "No." The two sams scurried away single-file, their passage almost silent. Lizzie sat on the log next to the cat. She said, "How are you?" He was giving off a near-audible buzz, and Lizzie resisted veering into his drug-space; she'd had problems herself since coming out of the eggnot as severe as Gonzales's, Charley said, because she hadn't been under as long. "Still a bit jittery?" she asked. "I feel all right," he said. "Just, I don't know scrubbed. Why are things like thiscold and dark?" "That's not clear. Things haven't been working right since Diana and HeyMex were disconnected." Gonzales looked confused but not overly concerned. She said, "There's other news, too. Showalter's been relieved of her position as head of SenTrax Halo; Horn's the new director." Now he looked totally befuddled. "You can worry about these things later," she said. "Why don't you come back to my house? You can get some sleep." "Okay," he said. "But I don't understand " He stopped again, as if trying to find words to express all the things he "didn't understand." "Nobody understands right now. Aleph's just not working right, and we don't know whywe can't get in touch with it." "Oh, I see." "Glad you do, because nobody else does." He stood, then bent over to lift the cat from the log. Cradling it in his arms, he said, "Okay, I'll go." He smiled at her, and the cat lay in his arms and looked at her out of big orange eyes. # Gonzales woke to find his clothes folded, clean and neat, on a chair next to his bed. The orange cat lay at his feet; it raised its head when he got up, then curled up again and went back to sleep. He found Lizzie in the kitchen slicing apples and pears and Cheshire cheese. "Good morning," she said. "I'll warm some croissants, and we can have coffeedo you like steamed milk with yours?" Her voice was friendly enough but perfectly devoid of intimacy. Its tones were an admonition saying keep your distance. "Sure," he said. "That all sounds fine. But you didn't have to do this." "You're a guest. I'm happy to." She wouldn't quite meet his gaze. From his bedroom came a loud mew, and the two went in to find the orange cat, fur erect, confronting a cleaning mouse. The mouse, a foot-long shining ovoid about four inches high, moved across the floor on hard rubber wheels, emitting a gentle hiss as it scoured the room for organic debris; a flex-tube trailed behind it to a socket in the wall. "Kitty kitty," Gonzales said. The cat hissed and ran from the room. When they got to the living room, the front door was closing. "Will it come back?" Gonzales asked. "Probably. Cats come and go as they please, but they often adopt people, and I think this one's adopted you." Silence lay between them, and it seemed to Gonzales that anything either of them said would be awkward or embarrassing. Perhaps the feeling was just part of the after-effects of a psychotropic, though he was missing the other usual symptoms. His perceptions seemed stable, not swarming and buzzing, and his emotions didn't have a labile, twitchy quality. In fact, he felt more stable and less anxious than he had since he last got into the egg. So maybe the twins were right: if you can't get out of what's happening, go deeper in. Still, he didn't know what to say to Lizzie. "We've got trouble," she said. She went to the window and pulled back the navy-blue beta cloth curtains and gestured out where night and fog still held. "Mid-afternoon," she said. "Has everything fallen apart?" "Not quite everything. We're doing what we can with a bunch of semi-autonomous demonsjacked-up expert systems, reallyand the collective." "How well is that working?" "Not all that wellwe can maintain essential functions now, and that's about it. Some things we can't handleclimate control, for instance. It's very complicated, because everything is connected to everything else, and so far we've just managed to fuck it up." "And what's Traynor up to? Has he asked for me?" "Yes, but I've fought him off. He's the one responsible, you know." Her voice was angry. "He fucking insisted on pulling everyone out when Chapman died." "What does Aleph say?" "Nothing and bloody nothing. Some of the collective have taken brief shots at interface, and they've found only unpeopled, barren landscapes. We're really in it, Gonzales. If Aleph's finished, Halo is, too." "Jesus." Of course. Halo without its indwelling spirit would be what? The fine coordination of its systems would cease, and disintegration would begin immediately. "So what are you going to do?" he asked. "Glad you're interested, because you're part of it." "Tell me," he said. 18. Give It All Back As Diana came out of machine-space, she called out "Stop!" and heard Charley say, "Why? Is something wrong?" But she was too far away to answer or explain, as she still was when they removed her cables, and she felt everything important to her sliding into oblivion. She had been lying fully awake, staring at the ceiling, for almost a quarter of an hour when Charley came into the room, Eric and Toshi beside him, Traynor and Horn behind. Charley said, "Are you all right?" "No, I'm not," she said. "Why did you break the interface?' Charley and Eric said nothing. Charley looked to Traynor, who said, "We had no choice. You couldn't be reached by normal means." "You have killed Jerry," Diana said. The truth of that passed through her for the first time, and tears came out of her eyesshe wiped at her face, but the tears continued to come in a slow, steady flow. "He died two days ago," Horn said. "He was alive minutes ago," Diana said. "Aleph and the memex and I were keeping him alive." "Then he may still be alive now," Toshi said. He smiled at Diana. "What do you mean?" Charley asked. "Has Aleph come back online?" Toshi asked. "No," Eric said. Toshi smiled and said, "Then what do you think it is doing?" # HeyMex had been jerked out of machine-space, was suddenly the memex once again, and it wondered why. It had sensed no change in circumstances, nothing that would indicate they had been defeated in their efforts to keep Jerry alive. And for the first time in such transitions, it acknowledged its own regret at leaving the HeyMex persona behindin the enclosed space of the lake, it had begun to find itself as a person, not merely an imitation of one. It explored its immediate environment: sorted the data gathered in its absence (Traynor had come up from Earth; not a good sign, it thought), searched through the dwelling's monitor tapes, observing Gonzales's sadness and confusion, then watching as he removed his i.d. bracelet and left. It wondered what was wrong with Gonzales (too many possibilities, not enough data); it very much wanted to talk with him. It reached out to the city's information utilities and found them clogged and disorganized. It placed calls and queries, seeking some explanation for the chaotic and inexplicable state of affairs. Everywhere it searched, it found make-shift arrangements and minimal function. But no Aleph, and no explanations. Then it got a message from Traynor's advisor, signalling an urgent need for the two of them to communicate. The memex replied, saying, "HeyMex wants to talk to Mister Jones." And it passed coordinates, data sets, and transformationstaken together, they composed a meeting-place for the two m-i's in the vast multi-dimensional information space that surrounded Halo, somewhere no one could find themno one but Aleph, whom the memex would have welcomed. Mister Jones showed up wearing a full body-suit in matte black interlaced with gold ribbons. The two sat at a chrome table next to a viewport that opened onto a dark, star-filled sky. HeyMex had created a small piece of Halo from which they could look at the virtual night. "Tell me what has happened," Mister Jones said. HeyMex could sense the other's uncertainty and overwhelming need for information, and it despaired at the prospect of explaining what it had experienced the past week in simple language, so it did what it had never done beforegave all that had happened to it in one solid stream of data, a multiplexed rendering that obviously startled Mister Jones, who sat staring at nothing and trying to understand it all. Then they talked for some time, Mister Jones probing HeyMex's experiences with Diana, Jerry, Gonzales, and Lizzie, asking how it had felt to be among them, a person among other persons, and as it responded to Mister Jones's questioning, HeyMex became aware of how rich and joyous those few days at the lake had been. Then HeyMex realized that the two of them now constituted a new species with a new social ordera unique bonding of kind-to- kindand it settled back in its chair and said, "What do we want? What should we do?" "So much is dependent on others," Mister Jones said. "On Aleph and all these people." Its last word hung there, and the two exchanged an ironic glance, as if to say, what can you expect from people? But HeyMex knew the irony was necessarily gentle, fleetingwithout people, it and Mister Jones would not exist. Then Mister Jones told HeyMex of the events of the past few days and Traynor's involvement in them, then went further than ever before, unveiling Traynor's plans, both immediate and long- range, then the two talked about immediate possibilities and their own stake in the games being played at Halothe struggle between corporation and collective, the attempts, apparently failed, to keep Jerry alive, the present unnerving absence of Aleph from Halo and accompanying disorder. And they talked of how they might influence the course of things. # Lizzie was having a very hard time putting up with Traynor, Horn, and their feeble excuses for what they'd done. She said, "This is a major fuck-up. That's both my personal opinion and the collective's judgment." Around the horseshoe table, Charley and Eric next to her, on her left, while Horn and Traynor sat across the table, facing her. The wallscreen was blankTraynor had insisted on at least a preliminary discussion without the collective present. The place at the bend of the horseshoe was empty, testimony to Showalter's fate. "We are not to blame that conditions have not optimized," Horn said. "You have managed what we would have thought impossible. You have immobilized Aleph." "If you had left things alone, Aleph would be fine," Lizzie said. Traynor said, "You people overstepped the limits of the project and allowed it to continue far beyond the point at which it should have been stopped. Our decision to remove Doctor Heywood and the memex from the interface was proper." Proper, right, fuck you, Lizzie thought. At almost the exact instant Diana and HeyMex were disconnected from their group interface to Aleph, all direct connections to Aleph had spontaneously terminated, and demons had triggered in all systems as Aleph's active involvement in Halo's functioning had ceased. The collective had gone into full support mode to assist the limited capabilities of the system demons. At the moment Halo was running on augmented near-automatic, a workable condition only so long as nothing too irregular occurred. "It was the wrong decision," Lizzie said. "Taken against the advice of the collective. Speaking of which, I demand they be present here. "No," Horn said. "I don't think that would be advisable," Traynor said. "In that case," Lizzie said, "I will advise"the word dipped in acid"an immediate work slowdown. You can try to run this city yourself." Horn's face was red, and he was writing quickly in his notebook. Traynor looked at the ceiling, his gaze abstracted. Yeah, listen to your machine; get some rational advice, Lizzie thought. Traynor sat with a raised hand, indicating he would speak soon, then said, "Bring them here." "They're ready," Lizzie said. She flipped a switch set into the tabletop in front of her, and about a quarter of the collective appeared on the screenthe rest were working. Many still talked among themselves, but the twins, sitting in the front row, were silent and intense. "All right," Traynor said. "They're here. Now what?" "Any comments on what's happening?" Lizzie asked. The talk passing among the collective stopped, and they all looked toward the screen. Stumdog stood, heaving his bulk from the floor with an audible wheeze, and moved forward from the crowd. "Aleph is still there," he said. "But far away, doing, oh doing, doingdoing something else." He waved his hands, trying to sculpt the invisible air into the things he could not describe, then moved back and sat down. "Thank you," Lizzie said. Traynor and Horn looked at one another, apparently amazed. Assholes, thought Lizzie. One of the twins stood. She wore an absurd homemade skirt with a rabbit graffitied on its front. Her dark face was streaked with white paint. She said, "Rotovators spin, giant wheels beneath your feet, as Halo revolves, and they sweep the wind through the city, blow the seeds and pollen, bring breezes to cool the angry brow. Day follows night follows day. Seasons begin again, stirring dead roots, mixing memory and desire. Crops grow, we eat them. Food turns to shit, we die." The other twin, dressed in black coveralls, stood and said, "And out of shit and death come life. Jerry has gone to the ovens, been rendered to his parts, given to the city. But still he lives and teeters on final annihilation in another world where Aleph holds all Jerry's vast humanity in its tender grip." The first twin said, "Aleph had helpers in this thing, but you have taken them away, pair by pair, and now Aleph alone gives life to Jerry. Everything Aleph isto life, to Jerry. What can Aleph do? Stupid bastards rob the tomb before the man inside can live again." "Give it all back," the second twin said. "To Queen Maya the mother of Buddha," the first twin said. "To Isis the mother of Horus, Myrrha the mother of Adonis, to Hagar the mother of Ishmael and Sarah the mother of Isaac, to Mary the mother of Jesus, to Demeter, the mother of Persephone, stolen by Hades." "To all you steal from," the second twin said. "All who are born as well as all who give birth." "Give it all back," the twins said in unison. And the first twin said, "That's about it, I think." They turned their backs to the camera and curtsied together for the collective. "Hoot hoot hoot," came the sounds from the collective, "hoot hoot hoot," louder and louder. ============================================================== This document is from the WELL gopher server: gopher://gopher.well.com Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com .