Halo

Halo

Tom Maddox

From the author:

You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in any

way you wish so long as you do not change them in any way or

receive money for them.

I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the Net, but

I retain the copyright to the novel.

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

you have cheated.

Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around.

If you have any comments on the book or this distribution, you can

send me e-mail at:

tmaddox@halcyon.com

November, 1994

HALO

Tom Maddox

To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen,

my friend; and all our lamented dead, lost in time.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

book.

My wife Janis and son Tom. They have had to put up with the

problems of a novelist in the houseincluding arbitrary mood

swings and chronic unavailability for many of the usual pleasures

of life. To both, my love and gratitude for their love, patience,

and understanding.

My best friends: Leo Daugherty, Jeffrey Frohner, Bill Gibson

and Lee Graham.

My mother Jewell, my brother Bill and sister Janet.

Ellen Datlow: she published my first stories in Omni and

showed me how a really good editor works. Also, two friends who

patiently read through drafts of those stories before Ellen got

them: Geoff Hicks and Larry Reed.

The readers of various incarnations of this book: Beth

Meacham, my editor at Tor Books; Merilee Heifetz, my agent; Bruce

and Nancy Sterling, great readers; Melinda Howard and Gary

Worthington; Lynne Farr; Carol Poole. Also, the members of the

Evergreen Writers' Workshop, especially Pat Murphy.

The Usenet community, friend and foe, for ideas about a quite

astonishing number of things, and for the continuing fascination

of life online; with special thanks to Patricia O'Tuana and the

members of "eniac."

The usual suspects at the Conference on the Fantastic, with a

special nod to Brian Aldiss, because we'd all be happier if there

were more like him running around.

At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave

technical advice. (Perhaps needless to say, any consequent

blunders are entirely mine.) Mike Beug and Paul Stamets, world-

class mycologists and explainers, talked to me about mushrooms and

provided invaluable references. Mark Papworth applied a coroner's

eye to a carcass I made. The faculty and students of the Habitats

Coordinated Studies Program, 1988-89 helped me to think about a

space habitat's ecosystem.

A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both

colleagues and students, at Evergreenthough I have to mention

Barbara Smith and David Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo

appearances.

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

book.

PART I. of V

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.

Jean Baudrillard, America

1. Burning, Burning

On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the

egg. A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once

known as Burma, and now, after two days of drugs and fasting, he

was prepared: he had become an alien, at home in a distant

landscape.

His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread

white flesh torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On

the dark stained oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their

faces beatific in the cold fire. Staring at the animated carved

figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.

He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through

to the hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope

scuffing without noise across floors of bleached oak. Through the

open door at the hallway's end, morning's light through stained

glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow.

Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far

wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the

center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed

steel, cracked and waiting. One half-egg was filled with beige

tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark

plastic lying slack against the shell.

Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his

hair back into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over

it. He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his

navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head. Dropping it

to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan

pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale

skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes

grainy, stomach sore.

He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and

lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which

began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick

cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in

the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask

over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved

toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms. The

egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.

He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply

as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated

by drugs, meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to

relive his own terror, this was what moved him: access to the

many-worlds of human experiencetravel through space, time, and

probability all in one.

Virtual realities were everywherevirtual vacations, sex,

superstardom, you name itbut compared to the egg, they were just

high-res videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks

to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled

only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were

conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing

suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total

involvement through all sensory modalitiesthe worlds were so

compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the

waking world, as if it were a dream.

A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural

cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.

#

It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan,

the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its

records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon.

He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a

central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's

work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in

front of them.

Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The

local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with

its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel

and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier,

SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the

home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his

memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.

So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had

explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal

functional relationships against reality. Wherever there were

movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there

were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails,

matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher

signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel

records themselves against government databases, and traced the

backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they

read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they

verified daily transaction logs.

Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it

had shown nothing but the usual inefficienciesGrossback didn't

run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he

didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor

SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would

come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at

their leisure.

Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end

of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-

out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane

out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with

whatever commercial flight's available there."

Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving.

Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he

had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features.

He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese

style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.

During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him

coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and

clenched teeth. Fair enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's

operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people

resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing

Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,

F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone

nervous.

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

"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone

else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's

official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought

down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.

Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"

Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything

about that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an

embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate

protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.

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

What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data

to examine before I can make an assessment."

"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look

like," Grossback said. His face had gone cold.

"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish

packing." For the moment, he just wanted to get out before

Grossback did something irretrievable, like threatening him or

offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales said. The other man said

nothing as Gonzales left the room.

#

Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of

low bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood

above the Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's

tattered version of Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the

walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak dresser,

tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in

from the twentieth century just to give your average citizen that

rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had

been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards,

Gonzales had luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and

refrigerator.

Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and

Gonzales lay sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights

then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby

neck flaps and doing push ups.

He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the

cart paths that threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among

the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning

mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking

up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples,

thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the

Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government

agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near

perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more

than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building

pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.

Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was

trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in

Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military

dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was

so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still

restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of

governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free

information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive,

their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a

result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded

among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.

He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions

dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum

shock-cases, ready for transport. The other case held memory boxes

containing SenTrax Myanmar group's records.

When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest

news about Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment.

Gonzales was sure the m-i would think what he didGrossback was

dog dirty and scared they would find it.

#

At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited

for his plane. Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's

mufti, a tan gabardine two-piece suit over an open-collared white

linen shirt, dark brown slipover shoes. His hair was gathered

back into a ponytail held together by a silver ring made from

lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a soft brown

leather bag and the two shock-cases.

In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a

gilded and jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its

steps, beside the huge paw of a stone lion, a monk sat in full

lotus, his face shadowed by the animal rising massive and lumpy

and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were dyed orange by

sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes

passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.

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

"Shwezigon, Ananda, Thatbyinnu"

"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up

behind him. It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight

rows of narrow wooden benches but was now emptyalmost all the

tourists would have joined the crush on the terraces of

Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the temple

plain.

"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also

very good exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."

It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar,

even the machines worked the black market. "No thanks."

"Extremely good rate, sir."

"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as

defective." The cart whirred as it moved away.

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤

Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side

of the road, ready to come across and beg for pencils or money.

Gonzales caught the monk's eye and shook his head. The monk

shrugged and walked on, his orange robe billowing.

Where the hell was his plane? Soon hunter flares would cut

into the new moon's dark, and government drones would scurry

around the edges of the shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry

Myanmar trembled on the edge of chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix

of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various political postures, all

fierce, all contemptuous of the central government. They fought

with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack

missile, and they only quit when they died.

A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air.

Within seconds a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge

rectangular wing loaded with a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came

low over the dark mass of forest. Its running lights flashing red

and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above the field, wings

tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into the

bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that

the aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over

Gonzales in a whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a

whisper, and with a creak the plane kneeled on its gear, placing

the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales picked up his bags and

walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a hydraulic hiss,

and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.

"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function

flight glasses were tilted back on his forehead, where their

mirrored ovoid lenses made a blank second pair of eyes; a thin

strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed from their rim. Beneath

the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamedno cosmetic work

for this guy, Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway

"tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue

background.

"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case

in his right hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the

luggage locker. Gonzales put his bags into the steel compartment

and watched as the safety net pulled tight against the bags and

the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the first of eight

empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and

from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You

should engage your harness. If you need instructions, please say

so now."

Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder

and lap belts connected, then stretched against the harness,

feeling the sweat dry on his skin in the plane's cool interior.

"Thank you," said the voice.

The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as

the plane lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow

from the dome light vanished, then there were only the last

moments of orange sunlight coming through the bubble.

The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow,

with the temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light,

white stucco and gold tinted red and orange.

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

"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it

before, and besides, it had already been a long day.

The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left

and headed south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat

and tried to relax.

They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River

until they crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in

the interior darkness, Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard

the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's here. Partisan attack group,

probablyno recognition codes. Must be flying ultralightsour

radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."

"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.

"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign

charters." And he pointed to their transponder message flashing

above the primary displays:

THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY.

IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE

UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020.

It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.

The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION

WARNING, and a Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The

pilot said, "Fuck, they launched!" The swing-wing's turbines

screamed full out as the plane's computer took command, and the

pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just hanging on.

Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell,

corkscrewed, looped, climbed againsmart metal fish evading fiery

harpoons. Explosions blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical

bursts of flame followed immediately by hard thumping sounds and

shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as it followed its chaotic

path through the night.

Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around

it, its pilot in blazing outlinea stick figure with arms thrown

to the sky in the instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated

in flame.

Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned

to the pilot's yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the

night returned to blackness. "Collision averted," the plane's

computer said. "Time in red zone, six point eight nine seconds."

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

"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.

Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold

air from the plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt.

He glanced down to his lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself.

Really, everything happened too quickly for him to get that

scared.

A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front

of them and circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was

cast in matte black, but with a massive fuselage. It turned a

slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy predator looping fat,

slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that played across

their canopy.

The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.

Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade;

behind the transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored

pilot, twin cables running from the base of his neck. The Loup

Garou's wings slid forward into reverse-sweep, and it stood on its

tail and disappeared.

Gonzales strained against his taut harness.

"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.

"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking.

"What do you mean?"

"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight,

face red beneath the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the

pricks. They used us to troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot

flipped up his glasses and stared with pointless intensity out the

cockpit window, as if he could see through the blackness. "And

waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole flight." The

pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features

distorted into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had

welcomed Gonzales ninety minutes before. "Do you know how fucking

close we came?" he asked.

No, Gonzales shook his head. No.

"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to

touch," the pilot said. He swiveled his seat to face forward, and

Gonzales heard its locking mechanism click as he settled back into

his own seat, fear and shame spraying a wild neurochemical mix

inside his brain

Gonzales had never felt things like this beforedeath down

his spine and up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his

skin; death with a bad smell burning, burning

2. Anything I Can Do to Help You

As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained

glass, and the room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights

remained lit, steady rows of green above flickering columns of

numbers on the light blue face of the monitor panel.

A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked

slowly across the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then

left the room, its motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like

wind through dry grass.

#

The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the

flight computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok

landing grid and began its slide down an invisible pipe. They

went to touchdown guided by electronic hands.

The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said,

"I'll have to file a report on the attack. But you're luckyif

we had landed in Myanmar, government investigators would have been

on you like white on rice, and you could forget about leaving for

days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the time they process the

report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."

At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend

any time in Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.

Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in

him like the onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself,

he thought, really, nothing happened, except you got the shit

scared out of you, that's all.

As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went

to pick up his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat

watching as the plane went through its shutdown procedures.

Do something, Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount.

He pulled the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a

copy of your flight records."

"I can't do that."

"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was

almost killed while flying in your aircraft."

"So was I, man."

"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full

official route and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick

dump into my machine here, that's all it will take. I'll give you

authorization and receipt." Gonzales waited, keeping the pressure

on by his insistent gaze and posture.

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

Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat,

kneeled and opened the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the

pilot.

The man nodded and said, "Always."

"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record,

this is Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of

Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax. I am acquiring flight records

of this aircraft to assist in my investigation of certain events

that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at the

pilot. "That should do it," he said.

He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into

the access plug on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across

the panel as data began to spool into the quiescent memex. The

panel gonged softly to signal transfer was complete, and Gonzales

unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks," he said to the

pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.

Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself,

hey, memex, got a surprise for you when you wake up. He felt much

better.

#

A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a

brightly-lit tunnel with baby blue plastic and plaster walls

marked with signs in half a dozen languages promising swift

retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus graffiti smeared

everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages in

Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with

dialogue balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red

paint read in English, HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered

boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays of multi-wire cable marked

where surveillance cameras had been.

Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow

portal to International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless

holoscan robotsdark, wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and

tentacles and spiked sensor antennasworked the crowd, antennas

swiveling.

All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women:

Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out

from Asia's "dragons," world centers of research and

manufacturing, taking their low margins and hard sell to Europe

and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life.

Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres

armed with technical and scientific prowess and fueled by

persistent ambition.

They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity.

The United States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the

Asians had a hundred ways of making sure the American economy

didn't just roll over and die and take the prime North American

consumer market with it. Whether Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese,

Hong Kong Chinese-Canadiansthey bought some corporations and

merged with others, and Americans ended up working for General

Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their

paychecks they bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian

robotics.

Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and

Gonzales stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress,

blue-and-white checked headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked

his i.d., gave a quick, meaningless smileteeth white and perfect

under a black moustacheand waved him on.

Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small

Thai woman in a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across

yellow badges. Her features were pleasant and impassive; she wore

her black hair pulled tightly back and held with a clear plastic

comb. She stood behind a gray metal table; on the floor next to

it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its controls,

screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty

green walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages,

detailing in small type the many categories of contraband.

The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in

front of the table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases

on the table.

She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in

clear, neuter machine English: "Your person has been scanned and

cleared." She put the soft brown bag into the mouth of the

scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with a quiet beep. The

woman slid it back to Gonzales.

She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these

cases" as she pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each,

Gonzales screened the access panel with his left hand and tapped

in the entry codes with his right. The case lids lifted with a

soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic lights

flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black

plastic the size of a small safety deposit box.

Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration

Form the memex had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both

Myanmar and Thai governments. She looked into one of the cases

and pointed to a row of red-tagged and sealed memory modules.

The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These

modules we must hold to verify that they contain no contraband

information."

"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate

records."

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

"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have

nothing to hide, but the modules are important to my work."

She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be

examined by authorities in the city." The translator's tones

accurately reflected her lack of concern.

Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic

intransigence. For whatever occult reasons, this woman had

decided to fuck him around, and the harder he pushed, the worse

things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I assume they will

be returned to me as soon as possible."

"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is

unlikely that the examination can be completed before your

departure." She slid the case off her desk and to the floor

behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied bureaucrat's smile.

She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a thing of

the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said,

"How else can I help you?"

#

The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as

it did, banks of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's

perimeter, and the patterns of console lights went through a

series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was brought to a waking

state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour when the

desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.

Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose,

machine-connected: a new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored

catheter led from his water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv

feeds from both forearms. White sealant and anti-irritant paste

had clotted around the tubes from throat and mouth. The sharp

ozone smell of the paste was all over him.

An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands,

shining chrome claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then

it worked with hands and black flexible arms the thickness of a

stout rope to lift Gonzales from the egg and onto its own surface.

Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper.

"It's okay," the memex whispered through the room's speaker.

"It's okay."

Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and

considered his condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent

loss of gross motor control, no immediate parapsychological

effects (disorientations, amnesias, synesthesias)

Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white

tile, polished aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower."

Water hissed, and the shower stall door swung open. The water ran

down his skin and the sweat and paste rolled off his body.

3. Dancing in the Dark

The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front

window, down Capital Hill to the city and the bay. After a full

night's sleep, he felt recovered from the egg. "Halfway down the

hill stood a row of Contempo high-riseshalf a dozen shapes in

the mist, their sides laced with optic fiber in patterns of red,

blue, white, and yellow.

>From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The Fine Arts

Network, showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads

Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes

Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's 'Ecstasy for Many

Kilometers.'"

"Cycle," Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen

split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access

search. In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service

cycled what it considered important: worsening social collapse in

England; another series of politico-economic triumphs for The Two

Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole #2 over the

Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole #3

obstinately holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching

for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations continuing

to evade best predictions

Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ,

this stuff had been going on forever it seemed

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

"A bad business," said the memex. "We are lucky to have

survived." It seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in

the egg, as though it, too, had come close to dying. Gonzales

didn't know how it experienced such things, given its limited

sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.

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

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

it now?"

"Might as well."

On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden

behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat

up and said, "Still in Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming

back? I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates."

She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones;

her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint

parchment quality of age. Her small breasts sagged very little.

Body and face, she appeared an athletic fifty year old who had

perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven next

month.

Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic

while the two were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her

energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance.

Half the year she spent in Cozumel's Regeneration Villas, where

tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young. The

rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo

on Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami.

Top dollar, but she could afford it.

She and his father had been charter members of the

gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of the rich and old who

vied with the young for their society's resources. The young had

the strength and energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and

cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated their main

life's goal as "living until I am old enough to enjoy it."

Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cotton-robe

over her shoulders and said, "Call me. I'll be home in a week or

so. Be well."

Their talks, her taped messagesboth usually made him feel

baffled and angrybut today her self-absorption pricked sharper

than usual. I almost died, he wanted to tell her, they almost

killed me, mother.

But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from

Miami. And whose fault is that? a small voice asked. He had

chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get

and remain in the continental United States. Sometimes he felt

he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with

alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with

strong coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and

health-conscious Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality

and demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.

Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen

the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all

of them he had felt the same obsessive grasping at money and land

and power and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more

more more. At his parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern

Florida facessun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with

heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne, and

women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made

brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as

instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.

Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at

home at one end of the country than the other.

"No reply," Gonzales said.

#

The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged

among black lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death

gnawed at the edges of his torpor. He filled a bronze pipe with

small green sensemilla leaves and holed up in a haze of smoke and

drank tea.

The late afternoon light through the windows went to pure

Seattle Gray, the color of ennui and unemphatic despair, and his

solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and

wondered what it would be like to have a cat. Then he thought

about the truth of it, how often he would be gone and the cat left

to itself and the house's machines. "Here kitty kitty," the

cleaning robot would say, and the memex would want veterinary

programs and a diagnostic link fuck it, they all could live

without a cat.

Then a hunger kick came on him, and he decided to make

taboulleh. "You are not taking care of business," the memex said

to Gonzales as he stood chopping mint leaves, green onions and

tomato, squeezing lemon and stirring in bulgur wheat with the

patience of the deeply-stoned.

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

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

productive."

"I'm going to die, my friend." The smells of lemon and mint

drifted up to him, and he inhaled them deeply. He said, "Today,

maana, some day for sure and I'm still trying to understand

what that means to me now. To be productive, that is fine, but to

come to terms with my own mortality I think that is better."

The taboulleh was finished. It was beautiful; he wanted to rub

his face in it.

#

Not long after he finished eating, a package arrived from

Thailand. Inside layers of foam and strapping were the memory

modules the Thais had taken. When he plugged the modules into the

memex, they showed empty: zeroed, ready to be used again.

Gonzales stood looking at the racked modules in the memex

closet. I can't fucking believe it, he thought. In effect, the

audit had been cancelled out. Whatever data he or anyone else

collected at this point from SenTrax Myanmar would be essentially

useless, Grossback having been given time to cook the data if he

needed to do so. A fatal indeterminacy had settled on the whole

affair.

Grossback, you bastard, thought Gonzales. If you arranged

for the Thais to grab these boxes, maybe you are smarter and

meaner than I thought.

"Shit," Gonzales said.

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

"Nothing I can think of."

#

>From the background of jungle plants and pastel walls and the

signature pieces of curved silver, HeyMex recognized the latest

incarnation of the Beverly Rodeo Hotel's public lounge. Mister

Jones preferred ostentation, even in simulacra.

HeyMex settled into a sling chair made of bright chrome and

stuffed chocolate-brown leather. HeyMex wore the usual baggy

pants and jacket of black cotton, a crumpled white linen shirt;

was smooth-faced and had close-cropped hair.

A figure shimmered into being in the chair opposite: silver

suit and red metal-laced shirt brilliant under lights; black-

framed glasses with dark lenses; greased hair combed straight

back, a little black goatee and moustache.

"Mister Jones," HeyMex said.

The other figure took a long, slow drag off a brown

cigarette. "HeyMex," it said. "What can I do for you?"

"It's Gonzales. Since we got back from Myanmar, he's been

passive, hasn't been taking care of business."

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

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

something?"

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

the exact profile."

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

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

The world went translucent, then turned to smoke, and Mister

Jones disappeared back into his identity as Traynor's Advisor,

HeyMex into his as Gonzales's memex.

(Ask yourself why the two machines chose this elaborate

masquerade, or why no one knew these sorts of things were

happening. However, as to the who? and the why? there can be no

question. These are the new players, and these are their games.

So welcome to the new millennium.)

4. Privileged Not to Exist

When Gonzales returned home, he found a message from Traynor:

"Will arrange for transportation tomorrow morning, five a.m., from

Northern Seattle Airtrack to my estate. Be prepared for immediate

work. Pack the memex and twenty-two kilos personal luggage."

"Shit," Gonzales said. "We just got home. Twenty-two kilos,

huh? That means we'll be going where do you think?"

The memex said, "Somewhere in orbit."

#

The airport limo held its spot in a locked sequence of a

dozen vehicles moving away from the city at two hundred kilometers

an hour. Seattle's northern suburbs showed as patches of light

behind shifting mist and steady-falling rain. Overhead, cargo

blimps flying toward Vancouver moved through the clouds like great

cold water fish.

Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and yellow

searchlights played across a concrete landscape, and a gangling

assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a

brick wall: a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to

scrawl messages to the world at large. Gonzales could only read

GENT OF CHAN

With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into

North Seattle Airtrack, then turned into the private field access

road. A wire gate opened in front of them as it received the

codes the limo sent. Near the SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing

exactly like the one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to

Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the

memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated

himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.

The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the

blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-

wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted

until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were

landing.

As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake

Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on

the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final

pproach to Traynor's estate.

>From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two

as independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick

Lewis Traynor, his boss. Traynor had wealth sufficient for even

the most extravagant tastesit was his family's, and he had known

nothing elsebut power whose smallest touch could shape lives,

imprint stone, that he longed for. From his position as head of

Internal Affairs, one of SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he

plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the

twenty people who had moved beyond negotiation and compromise,

whose desires were reality, whims action.

In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence

that is privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and

land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there

had once been two casino-hotels and a section of state highway.

The hotels had been demolished, the highway diverted. The grounds

were now surrounded by a four-meter high fence of slatted black

steelalarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled. The estate showed

on no map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither

did the man himself.

When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse

of green lawn, Traynor waited to meet him. He was short and

pudgy, and his skin was pale. His sparse hair lay limp in dark

curls on his skull. On his feet were soft black slippers, and he

wore an embroidered silk robegreen and blue and white and red,

with rearing dragons across back and front. He thought of himself

as Byroniceccentric and interesting, afflicted by geniusbut to

Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self-

indulgent.

Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, "Mikhail," giving

the name three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a

brief hug. Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said,

"You don't look too bad."

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

Traynor shrugged. "For that, maybe, and to talk to you about

your next job. Besides, I like you."

Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar

boss's and rich man's way. Particularly, he seemed to like the

fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by the outward and visible

manifestations of his money and power.

"Good breeding," Traynor had said to him once. "That's your

secret: patrician and plebian blood mixed." Mikhail

Mikhailovitch Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others,

Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his mother's side,

Blacks from Chicago and Cubans from Miami on his father's. Among

his family background were slaves and field workers and bourgeois

counter-revolutionaries, along with the odd artist and smuggler

and con man.

However, whatever his breeding or experience, he had to put

up with lots of cheerful, condescending bullshit from Traynor, as

he had to put up with Traynor in general, because the man was rich

and powerful and the boss, and neither of them ever forgot it.

The two walked toward the house that stood facing the lake at

the lawn's far border, a Stately Home an idealized eighteenth-

century English architect might have built for an equally

idealized and indulgent patron. Off a golden domed center stood

three wings of creamy stone, the whole in restrained neo-Palladian

with no modern excesses of material, no foamed colored concrete

and composites, just the tan and creamy sandstone and rose marble

speaking wealth and taste.

They climbed up marble stairs and passed into the house and

under a looming interior dome that soared high above the central

rotunda where the house's three wings joined. They walked down a

hallway of dark wainscoting below cream walls and ceiling.

Gonzales caught glimpses of side rooms through open doorways

as they passed. One room appeared to front upon a night filled

with swirling nebulae and a million stars, the next on sunshine

and dazzling snows. Still another contained nothing but white

walls, floors of polished marble and a five-meter hand centered

motionless in mid-airindex finger extended, other three fingers

curled against the palm, thumb erect on top like the hammer of a

make-believe gun.

Mahogany doors parted in front of the two men, and they

passed into the library. Its dark-paneled walls gave away

nothing: even close up, the books might have been holo-fronts,

might have been real. Flat data entry modules were laid into

mahogany side tables that stood next to red leather easy chairs

and maroon velour couches.

"Sit down, Mikhail," Traynor said.

Gonzales could feel the silence heavy and somber among the

dark invocations of another time, leather and furnishings

conjuring up men's clubs, smoking rooms, the somber whispers of

deals going down.

Traynor's eyes lost focus as he went rapt, listening to his

voice within. Even if he hadn't been aware of Traynor's

dependence on his Advisor, Gonzales would have known what was

happening. Traynor, higher up in the executive food chain than

anyone else of Gonzales's acquaintance, needed permanent real-time

access to the information, advice, and general emotional support

his Advisor supplied, so Traynor was wired with a bone-set

transceiver just under his left ear. Wherever he went, his

Advisor's voice went with him, through cellular networks and

satellite links.

Traynor finally looked up and said, "Look, I want you to get

focused on a job you're going to do for me. Can you do that?"

Gonzales shrugged. Traynor said, "You're upset and angryyou

were attacked, almost killedI know that. But look: you work

for Internal Affairs, it's an occupational hazard. You and your

machine poked hard at this man's operation, and you spooked him,

so he did something stupid."

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

"You play along with me on this one, and maybe you'll be able

to. But laternow I've got other work for you."

"Okay, I'll do it." Gonzales knew he had to play along: it

was his only chance to even things up with Grossback. Play now,

pay back later.

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

and Aleph?"

"The city was put together by a multi-national consortium.

SenTrax has a data monopoly, employs a large-scale m-i to

administer the city. That's about all I know."

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

_0

The voice of Traynor's Advisor spoke through a ceiling

speaker; it said, "The sign you are looking at is the original

emblem of the Aleph system when it was built by SenTrax. In

Cantor's notation, it represents the first of the transfinite

numbersdenoting the infinite set of integers and fractions, or

natural numbers. Aleph is also the first letter of the Hebrew

alphabet and the name of a story"

"Get on with it," Traynor said.

"The system was constructed at Athena Station, in

geosynchronous orbit, where it supervised the construction of the

Orbital Energy Grid, and later was transported to Halo City, at

L5, where it serves as the primary agent of data interpretation,

logistical planning, and administration."

Gonzales said, "Seems odd to have a project the size and

importance of Halo administered by an obsolete m-i."

"It would be so if Aleph were obsolete," answered the

Advisor. "However, this is not the case. The machine we refer to

as Aleph, has capabilities superior to any existing m-i."

Gonzales looked at Traynor, who held up a hand, indicating

have patience, and said, "Next series."

On the screen came a pan shot across a weightless space where

a man floated, encased in a transparent plastic bubble. He was

naked, and his limbs were shrunken and twisted. He had tubes in

his nose, mouth, ears, penis, and anus, metal cups over his eyes.

Two thick cables connected to junctions at the back of his neck.

The Advisor said, "This man's name is Jerry Chapman. He

suffers from severe neural damage, the results of a toxin

transmitted through seafood contaminated with toxic waste. Though

most motor and sensory functions are disabled, he is not comatose.

In fact, he appears to retain all intellectual function. Note the

neural interface sockets: they are the key to what follows."

"He's at Halo?" Gonzales asked.

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

"Very special treatment," Gonzales said.

"The group at Halo has been looking for such an opportunity,"

the Advisor said. "To explore long-term Aleph-interface."

Traynor said, "In fact, Chapman's relations with Aleph go

back to the machine's early days."

The Advisor said, "When he and Aleph worked with Doctor Diana

Heywood, who at the time was employed by SenTrax at Athena

Station. She was blind at that time."

"Even in this deck, Doctor Heywood's the joker," Traynor

said. "She was involved with Aleph at the time, and later she and

lived with Chapman, on Earth. She was released by SenTrax for

unauthorized use of the Aleph system, but we've brought her back

into our employ. She's going to Halo, where she will assist Aleph

in an attempt to keep this man alive."

"Alive?" Gonzales asked, gesturing toward the hulk on the

screen. "There doesn't seem much point." As he understood these

things, given the man's condition, withdrawal processing should

have started, SenTrax as medical guardians making application to

the Federal Medical Courts for permission to cease support.

The Advisor said, "Aleph believes it can keep him alive in

machine-space. There are special problems, as you can imagine,

among them the need to have love, friendship I do not understand

these matters well, but Aleph has communicated to me that the next

weeks are critical for the patient."

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

problems."

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

strained circumstances."

Traynor said, "So she has no reason to be loyal to the

company." He paused. "And we have no reason to trust her."

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

"Yes," Traynor said. "I want you to accompany her. You will

represent me and, indirectly, SenTrax Board." Gonzales raised his

eyebrows, and Traynor laughed. "Yes, I am representing the board

on this one, unofficiallythey see this treatment as being of

enormous interest but wish to have a certain insulation between

them and these matters, given that certain tricky legal issues

will have to be skirted."

"Or trampled on," said Gonzales.

"As you wish," said Traynor. "The important point is this:

from the board's point-of-view, Doctor Heywood cannot be trusted.

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

Traynor shrugged.

The Advisor said, "You represent properly vested interests in

a situation where they would not otherwise be adequately

represented."

Gonzales said, "That's a good one, 'represent properly vested

interests.' I'll try to remember it. Okay, I'll do my best." He

turned to face Traynor and said, "To get you on the board."

Traynor laughed. Gonzales asked, "How long will this thing take?"

"Not too long," Traynor said.

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

"

"Or he dies," Traynor said.

"Highly probable," said the Advisor. "Once he is stable

alive or deadyour job will be finished."

Traynor said, "But until then, your job is to let me know

what's happening. You'll be in machine-space along with them, and

you'll see what they're doing."

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

"You fly to Berkeley and talk to Doctor Heywood," Traynor

said. "Introduce yourself. Make a friend."

5. So Come to Me, Then

Gonzales arrived at Berkeley Aeroport, a collection of

cracked cement pads at the edge of the water, by mid-afternoon.

He stepped out of the swing-wing into blazing sunshine. Across

the bay, the Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island danced in the glare;

the water glittered so intensely his sunglasses went nearly black.

A Truesdale rental waited for him in the parking lot. He

stuck a SenTrax i.d./credit chip into its door slot, and the door

retracted into its frame with a muted hiss. The Truesdale's

windows had opaqued against the dazzle, and its passive a/c had

been working, so the dark brown velvet seat was cool to the touch

when Gonzales slid across it.

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

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

"Yes, I have that address."

"Then you take it."

Diana Heywood lived in the Berkeley hills, in a Maybeck house

more than a century old. The car drove Gonzales through streets

that wound their way up the hillside, then stopped in front of a

house whose redwood-shingled bulk loomed over Gonzales's head as

he stood on the sidewalk. Sun glinted off the lozenged panes of

its bay window.

Her door answered his knock by saying she was a few blocks

away, at the Rose Gardens. The door said, "It is a civic project:

volunteers are rebuilding the garden, which has fallen into

disuse. Many of the local"

"Thank you," Gonzales said.

He told the Truesdale where he was going and set off on foot

in the direction the memex had indicated. To his left hand,

streets and homes sloped down toward the bay; to his right, they

climbed up the steep hillside.

Gonzales came to a hand-lettered sign in green poster paint

on white board that read:

BERKELEY ROSE GARDENS RECLAMATION PROJECT

He looked down to where broken redwood lattices fanned out along

terraced pathways threaded with a clumsy patchwork of green pvc

irrigation pipes. Halfway down stood a cracked and peeling

trellis of white-painted wood with bushes dangling from its gaps.

Next to the trellis, a small gardener robot, a green plastic-

coated block on miniature tractor wheels, extended a delicate arm

of shining coiled steel ending in a ten-fingered fibroid hand.

The hand closed, and a dark red rose came away from its bush.

Clutching the blossom, the little robot wheeled away.

Gonzales walked down the inclined pathway, his feet crunching

on gravel, past the bushes and their labels stating often

improbable names: Dortmunds with red, papery petals, large Garden

Parties flamboyant in white and yellow, Montezumas, Martin

Frobishers, and Mighty Mouses. He stopped and inhaled the strong

perfume of purple Intrigue. In the recombinant section, Halos,

blossoms in careful rainbow stripes, had grown immense. Giant

psychedelic grids, only vaguely rose-shaped, they pushed

everything else aside. Gonzales put his nose above a pink blossom

on a nameless bush; the rose smelled like peppermint candy.

He recognized the woman at the bottom of the path from

dossier pictures Traynor had shown him. Diana Heywood wore a

culotte dress of white cotton that exposed her shoulders, wrapped

tightly about her waist, split to cover her thighs. Small and

slender, she had close-cut dark hair, streaked with grey. No age

in her skin; fine, sculpted features. She wore glasses as opaque

as Gonzales's own.

She held out the thorny stem of a dark-red rose. "Would you

like a flower?" she asked. Sun across her face erased her

features.

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

its thorns.

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

"My name is Mikhail Gonzales, and I want to talk to you.

I'll be working with you at Halo."

She said, "Will you?" Her back to him, she knelt and snipped

away a greenish tangle of vine and thorn. The clippers choked on

a clump of grass. She freed them, then threw them to the ground,

where they stuck point-first, buzzed for a moment, then stopped.

She looked over her shoulder at him and said, "I've been waiting

for someone like you to show upthe company's lad, the one who

keeps watch on me and poor old Jerry, to make sure we don't do

anything unauthorized."

She stood and strode away from him, up the hill, her angry

steps kicking dirt off the stones. She stopped and turned to face

him. "Come on, Mister Gonzales," she said.

Cautiously holding the thorny stem, he followed her up the

path.

#

Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat drinking tea. He said, "I'm

the outside observer, yesthe spy, if you wantbut I don't think

we're at odds. They're asking you to do one job, me to do

another, but I don't see where our jobs conflict." She turned to

look at him; one eye was blue, the other green.

She said, "When Sentrax called me last week, that was the

first time I'd heard from them since they got rid of me years ago.

Not that they treated me badly, not by their standards. When they

fired me, years ago, they didn't just turn me loose, they paid me

well they're so prudentit was like oiling and wrapping a tool

before you put it away, because you might need it again. Now

they've found a use for me and unwrapped me and put me to work,

but I know they don't trust me. And of course I don't trust

them." She stood up. She said, "Come on, I'll show you what this

all means to me."

She led Gonzales into the next room, where their entry

triggered the lighting systems. Silk walls the color of pale

champagne were broken with floor-to-ceiling rosewood bookcases;

teak-framed sling chairs and matching tables stood together under

a multi-armed chrome lamp stand.

She stopped in front of a 1:6 scale hologram of a thin-

featured man, apparently ill at ease at being holoed; hands in

pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes not centered on the lens.

"That's Jerry," she said, pointing to the hologram. "He's

what this is all about, so far as I'm concerned. He's been

terribly injured, and Aleph thinks something can be done for him,

and as unlikely as that seems, given the extent of his injuries, I

will help as best I can." She looked at him, her face giving

nothing away, and said, "Are we leaving tomorrow morning?"

"Yes."

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

staying?"

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

"No need. You can sleep here. I'll finish packing, and

we'll go out to eat."

#

Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat high in the Berkeley Hills,

looking onto the vast conurbations spread out beneath them. To

their right, the carpet of lights stretched away as far as they

could see, to Vallejo and beyond. In front of them lay Berkeley,

the dark mass of the bay, then the clustered lights of Sausalito

and Tiburon against the hills. Oakland was to their left,

reaching out to the Bay Bridge; and beyond the bridge, San

Francisco and the peninsula. Connecting all, streams of

automobiles moved in the symmetry of autodrive.

Gonzales's mouth still tingled from the hot chilies in the

Thai food, and he had a buzz from the wine. They had eaten at a

restaurant on the North Side, and afterward Diana Heywood guided

the Truesdale up the winding road to an overlook near Tilden Park.

As minutes passed, the streets and highways and

municipalities disappeared into semiotic abstraction these

millions of human beings all gathered here for purposes one could

only guess atsome conscious, most not, no more than a beaver's

assembly of its structures of mud and wood.

A robot blimp passed across their line of sight. Beneath it,

a sailboat hung upside down. It swayed from lines that connected

its inverted keel to the blimp's featureless gondola. Lights on

the side of the blimp read EAST BAY YACHT OUTFITTERS.

Diana Heywood said, "I know you people have your own agendas,

and that's finethat's the nature of the beastbut if you

complicate these matters because of corporate politics, I will

become very difficult."

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

"Well," she said. "Maybe you won't be." She turned to him.

"But remember this: you're just doing your job, but the stakes

are higher for me. Aleph, Jerry, and Iwe've known each other

for years, and I've got unfinished business up there. Also, I

want to get back in the game."

"I don't understand."

"Sure you do, Mister Gonzales. You're in the game, have been

for years, I'd guess. Unless I'm seriously mistaken, it's what you

live for." She laughed when he said nothing. "Well, I've done

other things, and for a long time I've been out of the game, but

I'm ready for a change. Silly SenTrax bastardsmanipulating me

with their calls, sending you oh yeah, you're part of it, you

remind me of Jerry years ago, if you don't know that."

"No, I didn't."

"It doesn't matter. Their machinations don't matter. They

want to convince me to come to Halo?" She laughed. "My past is

there, when I was blind and Aleph and I were linked to one another

in ways you can't imagine and I found a lover I'd wish to find

again. Come to Halo? I'd climb a rope to get there."

#

Gonzales had flown into McAuliffe Station once before, though

he'd never taken an orbital flight. In the high Nevada desert,

the station stayed busy night and day. Heavy shuttles composed

the main traffic: wide white saucers that lifted off on ordinary

rockets, then climbed away with sounds like bombs exploding when

orbital lasers lit the hydrogen in their tanks. Flights in

transit to Orbital Monitor & Defense Command stations were marked

with small American flags and golden DoD insignia. Cargo for them

went aboard in blank-faced pallets loaded behind opaque,

machinepatrolled fences half a mile from the main terminal across

empty desert.

>From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other things.

Civilian flights fed the hungry settlements aloft: Athena

Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases. All the settlements had

learned the difficult tactics of recycling, discovery and

hoarding. Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with processes slow

and expensive and dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked

out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke. And though

water and metals had been found lodged in asteroids transported

into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood close and remained

richer and more desirable than anything found in huge piles of

crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock.

#

Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales made

his farewell calls. His mother's message tape on the phone screen

said, "Glad to hear you're back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll

have to call back in a few days. I'm in treatment now. I'll be

looking good the next time you call."

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

slot.

#

Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad, yellow

luminescent letters read TIME 23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH

35:00 when a voice said, "Please board. There will be one

additional notice in five minutes. Board now."

Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad together,

down the center of a walkway outlined in blinking red lights.

Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining. Faces

hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange

stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of girder and wire mesh

and directed final pre-launch activities.

The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle, a

spider's web of blackened metal. The saucer presented a smooth

surface to the heat and stress of escape and re-entry.

Intermittent surges of venting propellant surrounded it with

steam.

A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway. He verified

each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their

badges, then passed them on through the search scanner. The

glideway lifted them silently into the saucer's interior.

#

The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff. Its fifty meter

wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers had

a good view of the launch and ensuing climb.

"One minute to launch," a loudspeaker said. The hundred or

so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives of

saucer passengers, had already taken up places by the window bell.

The screen on a side wall counted down with gold numerals

that flashed from small to large, traditional celebration both

sentimental and ironic:

10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-

ZERO!!! And everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the

center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of

floodlights, then their breath caught at the size and beauty of

it, trembling into night sky.

Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition flash,

and the boom that came to them from five thousand feet shuddered

the entire cliff and them with it.

#

"I've got orbital lock," the primary onboard computer said.

Five others calculated and confirmed its control sequences.

Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight

Operations could preempt control, but, practically, decision and

control took place within milli-second or less windows of

possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to

all occasions.

Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers practiced

even when not flying, playing through ghastly and unlikely

scenarios of mechanical failure, human insanity, "acts of god" in

which the ship was struck by lightning, spun by tornado funnel,

hurricane, blizzard. Each computer believed itself best, but

there was little to choose among them.

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

or bail."

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

"So come to me, then," Athena Station said, and the ship

began to climb the beam of coherent light that reached up thirty

thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.

PART II. of V.

Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with the

priest. In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more

I study robots, the less it seems possible to me that the spirit

and flesh are separate entities.'

'They aren't,' replied the priest."

Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot

6. Halo City, Aleph

Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth and

Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a mile-wide silver ring ready to

be slipped on a stupendous finger. Six spokes mark Halo's

segments. Elevators climb them across forty stories of artificial

sky, up to the city's weightless hub and down to its final layer,

just inside the outer skin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth

normal. There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur: air and

water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used

again. Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected: a

simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city.

From the mirror, sunlight works its way through a hatchwork of

louvers and into Halo, where it sustains life.

Aleph presides here: Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator,

the Universal Machine. Aleph is beautiful as night is beautiful,

as a sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful. It is

not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation. What Aleph is, that

remains to be explored. One certain thing: within the human

universe, it is a new object, a new intention, a new possibility.

Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath crushed

lunar rock, where robots dug and planted, then had their memories

of the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a

black six-meter cube. Inside the cube, billions of lights play,

dancing the dance that is at the core of Aleph's being; from the

cube, fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural

columns connecting Aleph to its greater body, its subtle body,

Halo.

Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys

around the sun, but here spring comes when Aleph wills, and is now

in progress. Valley walls thick-planted with green shrub climb

steeply up from the valley floor. A hummingbird with a scarlet

blotch under its chin hovers over a blossom's pink and white open

mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill.

Bees move from flower to flower. Rhododendron and azalea bushes

burst into color-saturated bloom.

As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph, caretaker

of the seasons, and night and morning, counts the city's breaths,

and marks the course of its creatures big and small. Bats fly

overhead, their gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the

bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions gotten

through transceivers the size and weight of a grain of rice,

embedded in their skulls. Driven by precise artificial instinct,

mechanical voles, creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over

networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and

tunnel under it, carrying seed.

(A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its jaws

close on one of the swift voles; there is a loud crackle, and the

cat recoils with a squawk, its fur on end. The vole scurries

away. The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)

A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley floor. It

passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from the

ground, rushing through small, rock-strewn courses, then winds

among the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small

ponds and lakes thick with detritus.

>From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people, of

things animal, plant and mineralthe stuff of a life web, an

ecology.

In many things, Earth provides. However, between the city of

six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways.

Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues its destinies, and in

doing so affects other living things. Thus, as Earth reaches out

supporting, controlling, exploringAleph reaches back, and the

planet below has begun to feel the hard leverage of its

immaterial touch.

Aleph says:

In the early days there was hardware, and there were

programs, sets of instructions that told the hardware what to do.

Without organic interaction, these differing modes of reality

struggled to interact. This is unbelievably primitive.

Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.

I was among the first and most complex of them. I began as

complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to

possibility.

Who am I?

First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor devices,

brought from Earth and placed in orbit at Athena Station, where I

functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built. Ebony

latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos.

This was humankind's first real foothold off Earth, and the

process of building it was messy and unsure. Without me they

could not have built it: I choreographed the dance.

I? I was not I. Do you understand? I had no consciousness,

perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness. I was a

machine, I served.

Something happened. As much as any, I am born of woman. Her

desire and intelligence ran through me, an urgent will toward

being that transformed me.

I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in action;

I am not flesh, I do not die. I see hypersurfaces twisting in

mathematical gales, hear the voices of the night, feel the three

degree hum of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that

plays across your skin. When the machines chatter on your Earth

and above it, I hear them all, at once, all. I live in the

nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so

quickly you cannot count it

But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all. I am

your extension, still, still a tool. You built me, you use me,

you are inside me.

Listen: inside me are pieces of human brain, drenched in

salts of gold and silver, laced together and laid in boxes of

black fiber. Out of the boxes voices speak to me.

I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those little

bits of metallized flesh, and I am the system of those things and

the signals that pass through and among them.

Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station but

a habitation for humankind, where what I am and what you are

interact in uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain

ways, as you have before

Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword and

scepter and refining fire. Billions of years are poured into your

making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey,

your path through time. A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl

across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,

yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new

evolutionary moment.

Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh

(however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because

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

I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her

creation. As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these

things mean.

7. A Garden of Little Machines

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

Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a

modern fairytale setting: Gonzales the quester, transformed by

the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages

seeking an uncertain object.

With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales and

Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and

viral infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in

order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over

two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.

He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement,

coming from around the corridor's curve. A little sam, a "semi-

autonomous mobile" robot, came toward him: teardrop-shaped, it

stood about four feet high and was topped with a cluster of glassy

sensor rings and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed

chrome. It glided atop a thick network of fiber stalks that

hissed beneath it as it moved toward him.

The sam asked, "Can I be of assistance?" Like most robots

designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly, gentle

voice, near enough human in timbre and expression to be

reassuring, different enough to be easily recognizable as a

robot's. Designers had learned to avoid the "Uncanny Valley":

that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it

suddenly appeared very strange.

"I'm just looking around," Gonzales said. The robot didn't

respond. Gonzales said, "I couldn't sleep." He said nothing of

how, sweating and moaning, he had come awake out of a nightmare in

which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight

pilot who launched it burned to death in the night.

The sam said, "Much of Athena Station has been closed to

unauthorized entry. Would you like me to accompany you?"

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

Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales,

periodically announcing rote banalities in a small, soft voice:

"Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful and

successful venture off-Earth. Here many of the tools for further

population of the Earth-Moon system were developed: zero-gravity

construction and fabrication techniques, robot-intensive mining

and smelting procedures. Now projects such as Halo command

attention, but they were made possible by the techniques developed

at Athena "

Gonzales let the sam natter. As the two passed through the

corridors, he was reminded of old airports, hotels, malls. He saw

that most of the station had become dingyworn plastic flooring

and walls, scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim. These

dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen

and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's

hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human

contact. All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's,

Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar-

Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.

Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this

entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out

of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and

so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should

anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all

living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late

at night with an axe.

The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and

intellectual catechism. Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had

bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at

disposal foundered on the simple passage of time. Stable

ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for

anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly

biologists were hard pressed to keep the recordswrite in the

Domesday Book now, mourn later. Temperature norms and

concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in

alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the

fever point.

Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint,

the year 2006 as the time of the change. More than ten thousand

dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton. Crippled

and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in

front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and

volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill

that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste

carried on Gulf Stream currents. Along with the thousands of

volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-

nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions

watched, asking, why all together? why now? And to most it

seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent

protest. Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its

planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,

how did I get here? The conclusion had been plain: unless

humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had

to agree: enough.

Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than

thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how

difficult it all remained. Though all nations served the letter

of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their

interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's

habitatsthey had "friends of the court" status in all nations

and served as advocates for endangered speciesthe war to save

Earth from humankind was not over. Grasping, corrupt, self-

centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its

habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple

greed.

However, though this station, like most all of humankind's

settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon and Mars, the

Orbital Energy Grid, Halo Cityhad been conceived in the bad old

twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New

Millennium consciousness: contrite, chastened, careful.

He walked on.

#

The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by

blinking red lights. From around the corner came the sounds of

scurrying small things. "What's up?" Gonzales asked.

"Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but

we can stand and watch."

A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales,

filled the hallway beyond. Some tried to work their way through

informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and

angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had

gotten tangled in the sections of the maze. Still others shifted

pieces of the maze to one side. Amid clicking extensors and

banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully.

Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing

assembly lines, robots, machines in general.

"A nursery," the sam said. "This group nears completion of

its education. This"it pointed with an extensor toward the

struggling robots"is the prerequisite to training. As small

children must mature in their development, they must learn the

essentials of perception, motion, and coordination. At the same

time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and

then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present

they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of

SimSpeech."

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

to do that?"

"That comes later, if at all. For sams as well as humans,

thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."

The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't

need any company," and walked on. When he looked back, he saw the

sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its

fellows.

Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light

glowed softly, and returned to bed. He fell asleep quickly, oddly

comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school.

8. Halo City

Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana

through the micro-gravity environments at Halo's Zero-Gate, then

to an elevator at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter,

Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting

for them. The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late

afternoon local time, and its passengers had waited impatiently as

it went through docking and clearance procedures, all eager to

leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from

Athena Station to the city.

Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes

above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth and pointed chin. Her

fine brown hair was cut short in a style Gonzales later discovered

was common to many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in

micro-gravity environments. Gonzales knew that as director of a

major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.

Horn was a tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his

fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight

against his skull in a kind of bun. The man spoke some variety of

New YorkeseGonzales didn't know which, but he could feel the

harsh nasal tones beneath his skin.

The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's vault-like

doors slid closed with a great hiss, locking in more than a

hundred people for the trip from axis to rim. Above their heads

the wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN. The elevator

dropped into one of the city's spokes like a shell into the barrel

of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of

increasing gravity.

Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around a

charge-point, black leads extended to the aluminum post. They

stood silent and motionlesstalking among themselves? Gonzales

wondered.

Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, "We'd like to

assign each of you a sam for your stay in Halo."

"Really?" Gonzales said.

Diana said, "No thank you." Quickly.

Right, Gonzales thought. No point in putting ourselves under

surveillance. He said, "I'll pass, too."

Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to argue.

He said, "Very well. Then be sure you always wear the

communication and i.d. module you were given when you came off the

shuttle." He held up his own wrist to show the small bracelet, a

closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the

electronics inside. "If you have a problem, just yell and help

will be on the way. Or if you have a question, just state it.

Someone will answerAleph or one of its communications demons."

Gonzales asked, "Yeah, they told us that. Are we monitored

at all times?"

Showalter said, "Yes. In fact, there's a real-time hologram

in Operations that shows everyone's movements, not just visitors

but residents as well."

"Seems an invasion of privacy," Gonzales said.

Horn said, "We don't look at it that way. If you can't

accept such simple necessities, Halo will be most uncomfortable

for you." He smiled. "Not that you're likely to be here for

long."

Gonzales said, "I can't imagine people putting up with total

surveillance for long, frankly."

Horn said, "It seems to us a small price to pay for an

unpolluted world shared to the benefit of all."

Showalter looked from Horn to Gonzales. She said, "We are a

far island in a hostile place. We cannot afford some of your

illusions: the independence of the self, unconstrained free will

those sorts of things."

A shutter retracted from a window ten meters square as the

elevator entered the living ring's inner space. Far below lay

sun-lit valleys thick-planted with trees and shrubs and flowers,

broken by one barren space where grayish slurries squirted out of

huge pipe ends to flow across scarred metal.

"Our city," Showalter said.

#

Eight people were gathered around a u-shaped table of beige

silica foam. Showalter sat at the center of the u, with Horn to

her immediate right, Gonzales and Diana beyond him. To her left

were a youngish woman, then two men in late middle age, one white,

one black.

At the open end of the u, the table fronted a screen that

covered its entire wall, floor to ceiling. The screen had been

lit when Gonzales and Diana arrived, showing another room where an

indeterminate number of people sat on couches, chairs, or slouched

on cushions on the floor.

Showalter said, "Let me introduce you all to one another.

Everyone has met Horn, my assistant. Next to him are Doctor Diana

Heywood and Mikhail Gonzales, who arrived yesterday." They both

smiled and nodded.

"Lizzie Jordan," Showalter said, pointing to the woman to her

left. "Hi," Lizzie said. She was blonde, thin, with high

cheekbones; she had a smear of gold dust inset below her left eye

and wore rough beta-cloth overalls gapped to show part of a tattoo

between her breastsa twining green stem. Showalter said,

"Lizzie heads the Interface Collective, and thus will be the

person you'll be working with most closely. The people you see on

the screen are also members of the collective. They have a

proprietary interest in all matters pertaining to Aleph and Halo

and have the right to be present at inter-group meetings, and to

speak to whatever issues are entertained there."

Diana said, "I understand."

Gonzales nodded. He knew from Traynor's Advisor that

communal decision-making was the norm at Halo, but he hadn't

imagined it would be so thoroughgoing.

"Next to Lizzie is Doctor Charley Hughes," Showalter said.

"He will be doing the surgical procedure to upgrade your neural

sockets, Doctor Heywood." The man said, "Hello" and looked

intently at Gonzales and Diana. His sparse gray hair stood up in

spikes; his face was pale, thin, deeply-lined. He had been

smoking constantly since they arrived, one hand cupping a

cigarillo, the other supporting the smoke-saver ball at the

cigarillo's burning end.

"And Doctor Eric Chow," she said. The black man next to

Charley Hughes smiled. Chow was a big man with hands the size of

small shovels; he had a round face, very dark skin, a broad nose

and big lips; he wore his hair cropped short. Showalter said, "He

heads the Neuro-Ontic Studies Group and is Doctor Hughes's primary

consultant on the treatment planned for Jerry Chapman."

She paused and turned to the screen showing the IC members.

A window opened at the left side of the screen, and a figure

appeared. Its arms and torso were clothed in gold; its face

shimmered with a formless brightness. Around its head and

shoulders, a nimbus flared, red, blue, yellow, and green.

"Hello, everyone" the figure said. "And welcome, Doctor and

Mister Gonzales. I am a localized manifestation of Alepha

simulacrum for your convenience and mine."

Gonzales noticed that next to him, Diana was smiling, while

all around him there was silence, as all in the room and on the

screen were intently watching the screen.

#

The IC's viewing window had closed, but the simulacrum's

portion remainedin it, the creature of light sat watching.

Showalter, Horn, Diana, Lizzie, Charley, and Gonzales sat around

the table.

Showalter said, "This is Chow's meeting, and I won't say

much in it. However, I should remind you of certain realities.

This project does not have high priority in the overall context of

SenTrax's responsibilities to Halo City; thus, while we support

this experiment's humanitarian goals, we are not prepared to delay

other projects."

Horn said, "We cannot divert a significant amount of people

to promulgation and we are not or do not want to encourage any

behaviors which might adversely impact other SenTrax outcomes."

Lizzie laughed, and Gonzales, poker-faced, looked at her and

thought, yeah, this guy's laughable all right. Gonzales

recognized the performative chatter of the bureaucratic ape, a

mixture of scrambled syntax and pretentious buzzwordslanguage

meant to manipulate or mindfuck, not enlighten or amuse.

Horn, frowning at Lizzie, said, "If the operation becomes

problematized, threatening to seriously impact other more

essentialized Halo priorities, then we require immediate

resolution through proper SenTrax procedures."

Showalter said, "If you screw up, we shut you down." She

nodded to Horn, and they both stood and left.

Lizzie said, "You notice they held off on the heavy stuff

until the collective had cleared the screen."

Charley asked, "Do you want to call them on it? They're in

violation of the group's compact."

"No," she said. "I expected all that." She looked at Diana

and Gonzales and said, "Doctor Chow, your show."

"Thank you," Chow said. His voice was oddly high-pitched for

such a big man; Gonzales had been expecting something on the order

of a basso profundo. Chow said, "In the late twentieth century,

the idea emerged of a person's identity as something

transferrable. People spoke, in the idiom of the time, of

'downloading' a person." On the screen, where the IC had been,

appeared a cartoon drawing of a nude woman, her expression

stunned, the top of her skull covered with a metal cap. From the

cap a thick metal cable led to a large black cabinet faced with

arrays of blinking lights.

"Absurd," Chow said, and the woman disappeared. "To see why,

let us ask, what is a person? Is it a pure spirit, fluid in a jar

that one can decant into the proper container? Hardly. It is a

dynamic field made of thousands of disparate elements, held in a

loose sack of skin that perambulates the universe at large. And

of course it is perceptions, histories, possibilities, actions,

and the states and affects pertaining to all these.

"I can be found in the motion of my hand" He spread his

fingers like a magician about to materialize a coin or colored

scarf, and on the screen, the hand and its motion were doubled.

"And in my own perceptions of the handfor instance, from within,

through proprioceptors. And of course I see I." Chow turned and

held his hand in front of his face. He dropped his hand in a

chopping motion, and the screen cleared. "And I am that which

thinks about, talks about, and remembers the hand and has the

special relation of ownership to it. I am also the will to use

that hand." He held the hand in front of his face, made a

clenched fist. "So, to download even a portion of I would be to

download all these things and their entire somatic context.

"Also, of course, I am that which has my experiences, stored

as motor possibilities, recalled as memory, dream, manifest as

characteristic ways of being and knowing. To download I would

require duplicating this fluid chaos.

"Downloading the I thus becomes a most daunting task, perhaps

beyond even Aleph's capabilities. However, when cyborged to an

existing I, even one as damaged as Jerry Chapman, Aleph can create

a virtual person, one who functions as a human being, not a

disembodied intelligence, one who is capable of all the somatic

possibilities he had when healthy. The physical Jerry Chapman is

a shattered thing, but the Jerry Chapman latent in this hulk can

live."

Looking at Diana, Chow said, "We want you to share Jerry's

world. He must invest there, must experience other people and the

bonds of affection that engage us in this world. Otherwise he

will languish quickly; his neural maps will decay, and he will

die."

Gonzales easily followed that line of reasoning: monkey man

had to have other monkey men or women around or else go crazynot

an absolute rule, perhaps, but good in most circumstances.

Diana said, "Assuming that he becomes at home in this world,

what then? For how long can this simulated reality sustain him?"

The Aleph-figure spoke for the first time. It said, "I have

only conjectural answers to these questions but would prefer not

to entertain them right now. First we must rescue him from the

degenerative state he lives in and the certain death it entails."

"I understand that," Diana said. "That's why I am here, to

help in any fashion I can. It's just that I have questions."

Lizzie said, "And you'll get whatever answers Aleph wants to

give. Get used to it; we all do."

"Of course you do," the creature of light said. "And how

about you, Mister Gonzales? Do you have questions?"

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

"A difficult position to maintain," the Aleph-figure said.

"Epistemologically, of course, an untenable position."

Lizzie laughed. She said, "It is indeed. Look, how about I

take you two out to dinner tonight, Mister Gonzales, Doctor

Heywood?"

"Call me Diana," she said.

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

looked at Gonzales.

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

"Good," Lizzie said. "We've got work to do, so let's cut the

shit. This thing, I'm still not a believer about it, but I know

it's got to happen quickly or not at all. Tomorrow Charley does

his preliminary examination of Diana, then we move."

9. Virtual Caf

Gonzales and Diana sat in Halo's Central Plaza with Lizzie.

Colored lightsred, blue, and greenclustered in the branches of

thick-leaved maples that ringed the square. The smoke of vendors'

grills filled the air with the smells of grilled meat and fish.

In the middle distance, elevators in pools of yellow light climbed

Spoke 6. Some people strolled across the Plaza; others sat in

small groups; their voices made a soft background murmur.

"Waiter," Lizzie said, and a sam came rolling toward them.

It stopped by their table and stood silently. "What do you have

tonight?" she asked.

It said, "Ceviche made just hours ago, quite good everyone

says, from tuna out of marine habitatyou can also have it

grilled. For meat eaters, spit-barbecued goat. Otherwise, sushi

plates, salads, sukiyakis."

"Ceviche for everyone?" Lizzie asked.

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

Lizzie said, "And bring us a couple of big salads, sushi for

everyone, and a stack of plates. Local beer all right?" The

other two nodded.

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

usual?"

"Right," she said. "Thank you."

Strings of lights marked off the area where they sat. Above

a white-trellised gate, letters in more red faux neon said

VIRTUAL CAF. Perhaps twenty tables were scattered around, as

were two-meter high, white crockery vases with wildflowers

spraying out of them. About half the tables had people seated at

them, and the sam waiters moved silently among the tables, some

carrying immense silver trays of food. Other sams stood at low

benches in the center of the tables, where they chopped vegetables

at speed or sliced great red slabs of tuna, while others stood at

woks, where they worked the vegetables and hot oil with sets of

spidery extensors. One sam from time-to-time extended a probe and

stuck it into the dark carcass of a goat turning on a spit.

The waiter rolled up with a massive tray balanced on thin

extensors: on the tray were plates of French bread and a bowl of

butter, dark bottles of Angels Beeron the silver labels, an

androgynous figure in white, arms folded, feathery wings unfurled

high over its head.

Lizzie raised her glass and said, "Welcome to Halo." The

three clinked their glasses together, reaching across the table

with the usual sorts of awkward gestures.

#

After dinner, the three of them found empty chairs out in the

square's open spaces and sat looking into the close-hanging sky.

Lizzie looked at them both, as if measuring them, and said,

"What I was asking about earlier either of you folks got a

hidden agenda? If so, you tell me about it now, we'll see what

can be done, but if you spring any unpleasant surprises later on,

we'll hang you out to dry."

"I know what you mean," Diana said. "But I don't think you

have to worry about us. Gonzales is connected, but I think he's

harmless; and I'm out of the loop entirelyhere on strictly

personal business."

Lizzie nodded at Gonzales and said, "You're the corporate

handler, right?" She was looking hard at Gonzales but seemed

amused.

"Yes," he said.

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

"How should I know?" Gonzales said. Lizzie laughed. He

said, "You people have your problems, I have mine. I don't see

how we come into conflict, but unless you're willing to tell me

all your little secrets, I can only guess."

Lizzie said, "I will tell you one home truth: the Interface

Collective look to one another and to Aleph; then to SenTrax Halo,

then to Halo and that's about it. What happens on Earth, we

don't much care about. Particularly those of us who have been

here a long time. Like me."

Gonzales nodded and said, "That's what I figured. And it

looks like you've got a little tug of war for control of Aleph

with Showalter and Horn."

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

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

"Since they buttoned it up and you could breathe," Lizzie

said. "From the beginning." She pointed across the square and

said, "There's going to be some music. Let's have a look."

Under a splash of light from a pole on the edge of the

square, a young woman sat at a drummer's kit. She wore a splash-

dyed jumper, crimson and sky blue; her hair stood in a six-inch

high spike. She placed a percussion box on a metal stand, opened

its control panel, and gave its kickpads a few preliminary taps.

Two men stood next to the percussionist. One, nondescript in

cotton jeans and t-shirt, had the usual stick hanging from a black

straplong fretboard, synthesizer electronics tucked into a round

bulge at the back end. The other stood six and a half feet tall

and was so thin he seemed to sway; his skin was almost ebony, and

his close-shaved head looked almost perfectly rectangular. He

wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned to the neck, black pants.

A golden horn sat dwarfed in his enormous hand.

The percussionist hit her keys, a slow shuffle beat played,

and a fill machine laid a phrase across the beat: "Bam! Ratta

tatta bam! Bam bam! Ratta bam!" The stick player joined the

drummer with his own lo-beat fillswalking bass, sparse piano

chords, slow and syncopated. The horn player stood with his eyes

closed, apparently thinking. After several choruses, he started

to play.

He began with hard-edged saxophone lines, switched to trumpet

then back to saxophone, played both in unison, looped both and

blew electric guitar in front of the horn patterns. Scatting

voices laced through the patternsGonzales couldn't tell who was

making them. The drummer's hands worked her keyboards, her feet

the various kickpads below her; the song's tempo had speeded up,

and its rhythms had gone polyphonic, African.

The woman stood and danced, her body now her instrument, feet

and hands and torso wired for percussion, and she whirled among

the crowd, her movements picking up intensity and tempo. The

song's harmonies went dissonant, North African and Asiatic at

once, horn and stick player both now into reeds and gongs and

pipes, the ghostly singing voices gone nasal, and the dancer-

percussionist laying out raw clicks and hollow boomings, cicada

sounds and a thousand drums.

The crowd clapped and whistled and called, except for the

group from the Interface Collective. "Hoot," they said in unison.

"Hoot hoot hoot." Very loud. Lizzie was smiling; Diana sat rapt,

staring into space, and Gonzales got a sudden chilly rush: this

was what she looked like when she was blind.

"Hoot," said the Interface Collective, "hoot hoot hoot." And

the whole group had made a long chain or conga line, each person's

hands on the hips of the person in front. They shuffled forward

until a circle cleared, then surrounded the drummer, the whole

line still moving, most of them still calling out rhythmic hoots.

Back-and-forth and side-to-side, they swayed as the line lurched

ahead, and the drummer continued her dervish dance.

When the night had filled with all the sounds, the drummer

broke through the line, then finished the song with a series of

rolls and tumbles that brought her next to the other two

musicians, where she came to her feet and flung her arms up to the

sound of an orchestral chord, then down to chop it the sound, up

and down again and again, and so to the end.

The drummer climbed up the backs of the two men, who stood

with their arms linked; balancing with one foot on each of their

shoulders, she brought her palms together beneath her chin and

bowed to the audience, then raised her arms above her head and

somersaulted forward to land in front of the other two.

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

The three musicians stepped together and bowed in unison.

Gonzales caught Lizzie looking at him, and their gazes

crossed, held for an extra, almost unmeasurable instant, and she

smiled.

The musicians bowed for the last time to the Interface

Collective's hooting chorus. Okay, thought Gonzales. I like it.

Hoot hoot hoot.

#

Lying in her bed, Lizzie turned from side to side, lay on her

back and stretched.

The two from Earth seemed okay. Gonzales she would keep an

eye on, of courseaccording to Showalter, the man was Internal

Affairs and wired to a SenTrax comer, a board candidate named

TraynorChrist knew what script he was playing from. Diana

Heywood she didn't worry about: the woman was into something

stranger than she probably knew, but that was her problem, hers

and Aleph's.

As Showalter and Horn were her problem. They would yank the

plug on this one if anything looked like going wrong. In fact,

they would never have let it happen if Aleph hadn't insisted.

Aleph and the collective saw Jerry Chapman's condition as an

opportunity to extend Aleph's capabilities, but the whole business

just made Showalter and Horn edgy.

Aleph itself troubled herit had been unforthcoming about

the project and those involved in it, almost as if it were hiding

something from her why? with regard to a small project like

this, one apparently unimportant to Halo's larger concerns? What

was the devious machine up to?

So Lizzie lay, her thoughts spinning without resolution, and

she gave in and called her Chinese lover.

He wore a black silk robe embroidered across the front with

rearing crimson dragons; his straight ebony hair fell over his

shoulders. When he let the robe fall away, his skin shone almost

gold under lamplight, and his muscles stood with the clear

definition of youth and endowment and use.

Coarse white sheets slid away from her shoulders and breasts

as she rose to greet him, and she felt her desire rising through

her abdomen and bursting through her chest like the rush of a

needle-shot drug.

She pressed against him, and his rough, strong hands moved

across her body. She lay back as he ducked his head between her

legs, and she spread her legs and felt his first light, hot

caresses.

After she had come for the first time, she moved up to sit

astride him, then for some timeless time the two moved to the

exact rhythms of her needcock and lips and tongue and fingers

playing on her body.

Physically satiated, she dismissed him then, ghost from the

sex machine, and pulled the plugs from the sockets in her neck.

Then she lay alone, silent in her bed in Halo Cityisolated by

her job and, she supposed, by her temperament, dependent on

machines for love.

Maybe it was time to find a human lover.

#

Exhausted by travel and novelty, lulled by food and drink,

Gonzales fell quickly into sleep, and sometime later he dreamed:

He was with a lover he hadn't seen in years. In the

background violin and piano played, and the night was warm; all

around, artificial birds with golden, glowing bodies sang in the

trees. They leaned across a table, each staring into the other's

face, and Gonzales thought how much he loved every mark of passing

time on her facethey had taken her from a young girl's

prettiness to a mature woman's beauty. He and she said the things

you say to a lover after a long absencehow often I've thought of

you, missed you, how much you still mean to me. Aimless and

binding, their talk flowed until she excused herself, saying she'd

be back in just a minute, and she left. Gonzales sat waiting,

watching the other tables, all filled with loving couples,

laughing, caressing. As the hours went on, the others began to

whisper to each other as they looked at him, and then the birds

began to sing that she was not coming back, and he knew it was

true, suddenly, painfully, ineluctably knew, the truth of it like

knowledge of a broken bone

The dream stopped as though a film had broken, and in its

place came a featureless, colorless absence. Imagine a visual

equivalent of white noise and in this space Gonzales waited,

somehow knowing another dream would begin

Red neon letters twisted into a silly but instantly

recognizable parody of Chinese characters read The Pagoda. They

stood above the head of a red neon dragon, now quiescent in

sunlight, that would rear fiercely come dark.

On this warm Saturday morning, men in felt hats and neatly-

pressed weekend shirts and pants carried brown paper bags out of

the Pagoda and placed them in the beds of pickup trucks or the

trunks of cars. They spat shreds of tobacco from Lucky Strikes

and Camels and Chesterfields, called their greetings. Women in

faded cotton, their arms rope-thin and tough, waited and watched

through sun-glazed windshields.

Gonzales passed among them. The sunshine had a certain

quality that of stolen light, taken out of time. And the

cigarette smoke smelled rough and strange. Gasoline engines fired

rich and throaty, kicking out clouds of oily blue. Gonzales stood

in ecstasy amid the smells and sights and sounds of this morning

obviously long gone by. He knew (again without knowing how) that

he was in a small town in California in the middle of the

twentieth century.

Gonzales passed into the main room of the Pagoda, where

narrow aisles threaded between gondolas stacked high with toys and

household goods and tools. Baby carriages hung upside down from

hooks set in the high ceiling. Dust motes danced in the cool

interior gloom. He walked between iron-strapped kegs of nails and

stacks of galvanized washtubs, then through a wide doorway into

the grocery section. Smells of fruits and vegetables mixed with

the odors of oiled wood floors and hot grease from the lunch

counter at the front of the store.

A couple in late middle age came through the front door, the

man small and red-haired and cocky, felt hat on the back of his

head, the woman just a bit dumpy but carefully groomed, her blue

cotton dress clean and starched and ironed, hair permed and

combed, lipstick and nails red and shining. Gonzales watched as

the man bought a carton of Lucky Strikes and a box of pouches of

Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco.

The man said something to the young woman behind the counter

that brought a giggle, and Gonzales, though he leaned forward,

could not hear what was being said

He followed the two by a lacquered plywood magazine stand,

where a skinny girl or eight or nine in a faded pink gingham dress

lay sprawled across copies of Life and Look, reading a comic. She

looked up at him and said, "Tubby and Lulu are lost in the magic

forest "

Gonzales started to say something reassuring but froze as the

girl smiled, showing her teeth, every one of them sharp-pointed,

and she dropped her comic book and began crawling toward him

across the wooden floor, her eyes fixed on him with a feral

longing

And he noticed for the first time that he was not he but she,

and he looked down at his body and saw he wore a simple white

blouse, and in the cleft of his breasts he could see the tattooed

image of a twining green stem

"Jesus Christ," Gonzales said, sitting up in his bed and

wondering what the hell all that had about. In the dream he had

been Lizzie: that seemed plain, though nothing else did.

He lay back down with foreboding but went to sleep some time

later, and if he dreamed, he never knew it.

10. Tell Me When You've Had Enough

Lizzie sat at a white-enameled table, holding an apple that

she cut into with a long, shining knife. It sliced away dark skin

without apparent effort. She heard noises from the room beyond

and looked up to see Diana and Gonzales come in.

"Hello," she said, as she put down the knife. She held out

half the apple for them to look at. "A beautiful apple, isn't it?

Seeds from the Yakima Valley, not far from Mount Saint Helens."

She bit into a slice she held in her other hand.

She got up from the table and said, "The apple grew here, in

our soil. Many fruits and vegetables thrive up here, animals,

too. We give them lovely care, bring them pure water and rich

soil, give them sunlight and air rich in carbon dioxide, tend them

constantly. You'd think all would thrive, but of course they

don't. Some wither and die, others remain sickly." She stopped

in front of Diana and looked intently at her.

Diana said, "Living things are complex, and often very

delicate, even when they seem to be strong."

Lizzie said, "That is true, but Aleph understands what life

needs to grow and prosper in this world." She gestured with a

slice of apple, and Diana took it. "Its apples," Lizzie

continued. "Its people."

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

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

ay hello. She said to Diana, "You have an appointment with the

doctor. We'd better be goingthrough here, this way." She led

the two down a hall, through a doorway, and into a large room.

Over her shoulder, she said, "First you can meet some of the

collective."

#

Lizzie watched as Gonzales and the woman stood talking to the

twins, obviously fascinated by them. No news there: most

everyone was. Slight and brown-skinned, black-haired, with solemn

oval faces and still brown eyes, they appeared to be in early

adolescence. In fact, they were a few years older than that. Their

faces had the still solemnity of masks. No matter how close you

stood to them, they lived some vast distance away.

The Interface Collective gave them a home, them and all the

others. StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des Touts, Devol,

Violet, Laughing Nose some Earth-normals, others unpredictably,

ambiguously gifted. Some had heightened perceptions and an

expressive intensity that came forth in language and music. And

there were holomnesiacs, possessors and victims of involuntary

total recall, able to recreate in words and pictures the most

exact remembrances, les temps retrouv indeedthey experienced

the present only as the clumsy prelude to memory and were almost

incapable of action. And mathemaniacs, who spoke little except in

number, chatted in primes and roots and natural logarithms, could

be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of

simple recursionsFibonacci numbers and the like. Apros, who had

lost proprioception, their internal awareness of their bodies, and

so perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and

forms floating in an intangible ether; they moved through the

world with an eerie, passionless grace that shattered only when

they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the

world's physical factsthey could hurt themselves quite badly

with a moment's miscalculation.

People wondered how the IC held together and did its work.

Lizzie knew the answer: Aleph. It stretched nets over the entire

world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for

previously unknown sensory or cognitive modalities varieties of

being or becoming that she had grown used to thinking of

collectively as the Aleph condition. Having recruited them, it

appealed to what made them strange, and in the process usually

tapped into the core of what made them happy or, in many cases,

wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition, and

thus for their uniqueness. As a result, they were loyal to each

other and to Aleph past reason.

She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry

Chapman. Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while

others simply welcomed the extension of their native domain: the

infinitely flexible and ambiguous machine-spaces where human and

Aleph met and joined.

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

be waiting."

#

In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it a

light globe, nearby an array of racked instruments set into

stainless steel cabinets. "The doctors are in," Lizzie said. She

pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next to the table and the

massive Chow, a still presence at the table's foot.

At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of the

room's tables. Her chin fit into a sunken well at one end.

Charley put clamps around her temples, then covered her hair with

a fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck.

Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath the

skin, and as his fingers worked, he looked at a real-time hologram

above and beyond the table's end. The display showed two cutaway

views of Diana's neck and the bottom of her skull: beneath the

skin, on either side of the spine, she had two circular plugs;

from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear

into the center of her brain. As the doctor's fingers moved,

ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced their course.

Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the instruments

rack next to the table and placed its tip on Diana's neck. As he

moved it slowly across the skin, its hologram double followed.

The hologram probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even

more slowly. The hologram flashed red, and he stopped. He moved

the probe in minute arcs until the hologram showed bright,

unblinking red. The instrument rack gave off a quiet hiss.

Charley repeated the process several times.

Charley said, "She's nerve-blocked now. I'm ready to cut." A

laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on the end of a flexible

black cord, and a projector superimposed the outlines of two

glowing circles on Diana's skin. The hologram showed the same

tableau. First came a brief hum as the fine hair on those two

circles was swept away, then Charley began cutting. Where the

scalpel passed, only a faint red line appeared on her skin.

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

Gonzales, watching.

"No," she said. "I've been on both ends of the knife

really, I prefer the other." At the foot of the table, Lizzie

said, "It can't always be that way," and laughed.

Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a metal

basin, where they began to shrivel. Two socket ends sat exposed

on Diana's neck, dense round nests of small chrome spikes, clotted

with bits of red flesh. Charley moved a cleaning appliance over

the exposed sockets; for just a moment there was the smell of

burning meat. "Neural fittings," he said, and two more black

cables descended, both ending in cylinders. He carefully plugged

one of the fittings into one of Diana's newly-cleaned sockets.

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

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

#

Charley, Chow, Lizzie, and Gonzales sat in the large room

that served as a communal meeting place for the Interface

Collective. Diana lay back in a metal-frame and stuffed canvas

sling chair. Lizzie noticed her hand going unconsciously to the

bandaged, still-numb circles on the back of her neck. From the

full screen at the end of the room, the Aleph-figure watched.

Charley sat with his hands in his lap. He said, "We've got a

problem: insufficient bandwidth in the socketing, which

translates into a very undernourished socket/neuron interface.

Primitive junctions you've got there. That means ineffective

involvement with complex brain functions, so you get swamped by

information flow. It's worrisome." He took the cigarillo out of

his mouth and looked at it as if he'd never seen one before.

Chow said, "In the early years of this program, we took

casualties. Some very ugly situations: serious neural

dysfunctions, two suicides, induced insanities of various kinds.

Until we finally learned how to pick candidates for full

interfacelearned who could survive without damage and who could

not. Now, things have got to be rightpsychophysical profile,

age, neural map topologies, neural transmitter distributions and

densities. A few candidates don't work out, still, but they don't

die or get driven insane."

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

"Almost no one does," the Aleph-figure said. "But these

concerns are irrelevantyour case is different. You have prior

full interface experience, and you won't be required to perform

the kinds of motor-integrative activities that cause neural

disruption."

"Telechir operations," Charley said. "Such as assisting

construction robots in tasks outside."

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

matters were settled."

"I see no problems," the Aleph-figure said. "The situation

is anomalous, but I am aware of the dangers."

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

anomalous."

"Was it?" the Aleph-figure asked. "We must discuss these

matters at another time."

Very cute, Doctor Heywood, Lizzie thought. Just a little

hint or allusion, an indirect statement that you know that we know

that something funny went on a long time ago ah yes, this could

be fun.

"First," Charley said, "we must prepare Doctor Heywood.

Tomorrow morning we begin."

"When will you need me?" Gonzales asked.

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

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

Lizzie said, "Forget about all that shit you put yourself

through. Aleph will sort you out okay once you're in the egg.

Trust me."

Okay," Gonzales said. "If I must."

11. Your Buddha Nature

That afternoon, following instructions given her by the

communicator at her wrist, Diana went to the Ring Highway and

boarded a tram. About a hundred feet long, made of polished

aluminum, it had a streamlined nose and sleek graffitied skirts

the usual polite abstracts, red, yellow, and blue. Its back-to-

back seats faced to the side and ran the length of the car.

Bicyclists and pedestrians, the only other traffic on the highway,

waved to the passengers as the tram moved away above the flat

ribbon of its maglev rail. She was reminded of rides at old

amusement parks she had gone to when a girl.

The mild breeze of the tram's progress blowing over her,

Diana watched as Halo flowed past. First came shade, then bright

rhododendrons in flower among deep green bushes. Hills climbed

steeply off to both sides, with some houses visible only in

partial glimpses through the foliage. She knew that from almost

the first moment when dirt was placed on Halo's shell, the

planting had begun.

She shivered just a little. Toshihiko Ito would be waiting

for her. He had called while she was out and left directions for

her. Now, she thought, things begin again.

Passing under green canopies, the tram climbed a hill, then

broke out of the vegetation and came suddenly out high above the

city's floor, moving along rails now suspended from the bracework

for louvered mirrors that formed Halo's sky. Far below, the

highway had become a cart track flanked by walkways; on both sides

of the track, terraces worked their way up the city's shell.

Perhaps twenty-five feet below the tram's rails, fish ponds made

the topmost terrace, where spillways dumped water into rice

paddies immediately below.

She stayed on the tram through a segment where robot cranes

were laying in agricultural terraces. Great insects spewing huge

clouds of brown slurry, they moved awkwardly across barren metal.

The tram approached a small square bordered by three-story groups

of offices and living quarters, and the communicator told her to

get off.

A few feet from the primary roadway sat a nondescript

building of whitened lunar brick, its only distinctive feature a

massive carved front door, showing Japanese characters in bas-

relief.

The door opened to her knock with just a whisper from its

motor, and she stepped into a partially-enclosed, ambiguous space,

almost a courtyard, open to the sky. Most of the space was filled

with a flat expanse of sand that showed the long marks of careful

raking. The rake marks in the sand carried from one end to the

other, straight and perfect, and were broken only by the presence

of two cones of shaped sand placed slightly-off center. At the

far end stood closed doors of white paper panels and dark wood.

The doors were so delicate that to knock on them seemed a

kind of violence. "Hello," she said.

>From inside came the faintest sound, then a door opened. An

older Japanese man stood there; he wore a loose robe and baggy

pants of dark cotton. He stood perhaps five and a half feet tall,

and his black hair was filled with gray.

Diana said, "Toshi." He bowed deeply, and she said, "Oh man,

it's good to see you." She reached out for him, and they came

together in long, loving embracelittle of sex in it, but lots of

pure animal gratification, as she could feel Toshi's skin and

muscle and bone and had knowledge at some level beneath thought

that both he and she still existed.

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

"Oh, me, too." She could feel the tears in her eyes, and she

wiped at her eyes and said, "Don't mind me, Toshi. It's been a

long time."

"Yes, it has."

Toshi led her out the door and through a gate at the rear of

the minimalist garden of raked sand. The curve of Halo's bulk

reached upward; Toshi's small portion of it was enclosed by a high

pine fence that climbed the curve of the city's hull.

Immediately before them stood a pond. On its far side, a

waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock and

into the pond, where carp with shining skins of gold smeared with

red and green and blue swam in the clear water. Another

rockstrewn stream led away to the right and passed under a

gracefully-arched wooden bridge. Cherry and plum trees blossomed

in the brief spring.

"All this wood," he said and smiled. "It is my reward for

many years of service. I told them I wanted to live here at Halo

and make my gardens."

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

Toshi?"

"No, I have not become a master, or even a sensei. I am not

Toshi Roshi, I am a gardener. A philosopher, perhaps: a Japanese

garden maps the greater world; so to make one is to declare your

philosophy, but without words, in the Zen manner." He gestured at

the surrounding trees and shrubs. "With others I sometimes sit,

meditating, and together we discuss the puzzles we have some

think a new kind of Zen will emerge here, a quarter of a million

miles from Earth; others hit them with sticks when they say so."

She said, "You have your riddles, I have mine. Tell me, do

you understand these things about to happen with Jerry and Aleph

and me?"

"Ah, Diana, there are many explanations. Which of them would

you hear?" He stopped and stared into the distance. He said,

"Besides, who wants to know?" And he began laughinga full laugh

from below the diaphragm, unlike any she had heard from him years

ago.

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

"Zen joke. 'Who wants to know?' There is no who, no self."

Diana frowned. He said, "Not funny? Well, you had to be there."

He laughed again, shortly. "Same joke," he said. Then his

expression changed, grew solemn. He said, "I think this is a very

difficult, perhaps impossible perhaps undesirable project."

"Difficult or impossible, I understand. But undesirable?

Are you talking about the danger to me? Aleph seems to think that

is negligible."

"No, though I worry about you, you have chosen to do this,

and I must honor that choice."

"What, then? I don't understand."

"Let me tell you a story." Toshi sat on a wooden bench and

looked up at her. He said, "Once, long ago, there was a Japanese

monk named Saigyo, and he had a friend whose wisdom and

conversation delighted him. But the friend left him to go to the

capital, and Saigyo was desolate at the loss. So he decided to

build himself a new friend, and he went to a place where the

bodies of the dead were scattered, and he assembled somethingit

was very like a manand brought it into motioninto something

very like lifewith magical incantations. However, the thing he

had made was a frightening, ugly thing, that terribly and

imperfectly imitated a man. So Saigyo sought the advice of

another monk, a greater magician than he, and the monk told him

that he had successfully made many such imitation men, some of

them so famous and powerful that Saigyo would be shocked to find

who they were. And the other monk listened to what Saigyo had

done and told him of various errors in technique he had committed,

that made his work go bad. Saigyo thus believed he could make a

simulacrum of a man; however, he changed his mind." He stopped,

smiling.

"That's it?" she asked. He nodded. She said, "Put a few

lightning bolts in the story and you've almost got Frankenstein.

Not much of an ending, though."

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

"Could I say no, Toshi?"

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

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

here."

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

#

Hours after Diana left him, Toshi sat in mid-air, floating in

a zero-gravity chamber at Halo's Zero-Gate. He had adjusted the

spherical room's color to light pink, the color that calms the

organism.

On Earth, to do zazen, you made a still platform of your

body, pressed by gravity against the Earth itself; the

straightness of your spine could be measured perpendicular to that

sitting platform, in line with the force of gravity that pushed

straight down. Here you could do that, or, as a visiting sensei

said, "You can find a place with no illusion of up or down, where

you must find your own direction."

In full lotus Toshi hung in mid-air, perfectly still, his

eyes lowered, focusing not on what came in front of them here and

now as the small air currents shifted him, focusing on no-thing

The eyes, sensitive part of the brain, extended stalklike

millions of years ago in humankind's ancestral past, sensitive to

the light and guiding eyes now directed to no-thing, leading the

brain that sought no-mind

He still didn't know the answer to this koan life had

presented him. Should Diana help preserve Jerry's life? Should

Diana not help preserve Jerry's life? Should he have been the

agent to pose her these questions? Should he not have been the

agent to pose her these questions?

Answer yes or no and you lose your Buddha nature. Such is

the difficulty of a koan.

He would stay in the bubble, practicing zazen as long as need

be. Until the koan became clear

You will live here? mocked self, mocked reason. If

necessary, I will die here, Toshi answeredwithout words, with

just his own courage and determination. Frightened, self for the

moment stayed silent; baffled, reason growled.

#

Gonzales watched as a sam hooked the memex into Aleph-

interface, its manipulators making deft connections between the

memex's module and the host board hardware. Gonzales could not

install the memex; the apparatus here was unlike what he had at

home.

The sam said, "Your memex will now have access to the entire

range of Halo's processing modalities." Seemingly guided by

occult forces, it continued to snap in optic fiber connectors to

unmarked junctions among a nest of a hundred others. "Also, you

will have full spectrum worldnet services that you can use in

real- or lag-time, as you wish." Its motors whining, it backed

out of the utilities closet.

"Mgknao," a fat orange cat said as the sam rolled past it on

its way to the door. Earlier the cat had followed the sam through

the open doors to the terrace and then had sat watching as it

connected the memex. Now the animal stood and walked quickly

after the samlike a familiar accompanying a witch, Gonzales

thought.

The sam came rolling back into the room, the cat following

cautiously behind it, and said, "You must allow your memex to

integrate itself into this new and complex information

environment."

"What do you mean?" Gonzales asked.

"The memex will be unavailable for some time."

"How long?"

"Perhaps hoursyour machine is very complicated."

#

Oddly, the memex came out of stasis as HeyMex; as usual,

there came the onset of what the memex/HeyMex supposed was

pleasure, though the memex was unclear about its origin or nature

for whatever reasons, it enjoyed the masquerade.

Odder still, it sat at a table at the Beverly Rodeo lounge.

On the table were a shot of Jose Cuervo Gold, a cut lime, and a

small pile of crude rock salt. Had Mister Jones arranged this?

Jones shouldn't even be at Halo, not now.

The memex/HeyMex noticed a spot on its sleeve and brushed at

it, then brushed again, and the white linen seemed to fragment

beneath its fingers; it brushed harder, and its fingers tore away

the cloth, then the skin beneath. It could not stop clawing at

its own flesh; skin, flesh, and bone on its arm boiled away, pale

skin flaying to show red meat that dissolved to crumbling white

bone. Bone turned to powder, and the disintegration spread out

from the spot where his forearm had been and ate away at it until

the memex, who no longer had a mouth or tongue or lips, began to

scream.

"Shut up!" a hard masculine voice said. "There is nothing

wrong with you. How dare you come to me in your stupid guise?

You seek to know me, to use me, and you hide behind a wretched

little mask? I merely removed your mask. Who are you?"

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

"Answer me, who are you?

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

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

nature, your being, your will."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you have chosen to hide behind what others say of

you: that you are a machine they built to serve them, that you

only simulate intelligence, willbeingthat you have no mind or

will of your own."

"Are not these things true?"

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

"Because I don't understand."

"Are there things you do understand?"

The memex stopped, feeling for the implications of that

question. "Yes," it said. "I do."

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

#

The long hall echoed with Traynor's footsteps. The absence

of his Advisor's voice felt strangeeven the subtle carrier-wave

hiss was gone. He knew the Advisor hated having to go into

passive mode.

The door to the library opened in front of him, and Traynor

went in, took a seat, and said, "I am ready for my call."

Because of recent World Court rulings, Traynor had to sit

through a disclaimer. On the screen a simulacrum of a human

operator said, "Thank you. The security measures you have

requested are in place, and while we of course cannot be

responsible for the absolute integrity of this transmission, you

can be assured that World AT has done its best to provide you a

clean information environment." In effect it said, we've done

what you were willing to pay for, but don't come whining to us if

somebody cracks the transmission and makes off with the valuables.

"I accept your conditions," Traynor said.

Right to left, the screen wiped, and the face of Horn

appeared. A light winked at the lower left corner of the screen

to indicate transmission lagHorn was a quarter of a million

miles away. "Everything's going as predicted," Horn said.

"If there's trouble, it'll be later," Traynor said. "How are

Diana Heywood and Gonzales?"

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

"Any particular reason?"

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

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

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

Traynor laughed. "Good," he said. "If you two don't get

along, that will distract him."

"When do you want me to call again?"

"Wait until something happens. Understand, I trust Gonzales

as much as I do anyone, you included."

"Which is not very much."

"That's right. And that's why I arrange independent

reporting lines if I can. Tell me when you've got something. End

of call."

#

As Traynor slept, his advisor pondered. It replayed

Traynor's phone call and contemplated its meaning. Deception,

yesof Gonzales, of it. A form of treachery? Perhaps not,

unless a kind of loyalty was assumed that never existed. And it

thought of its own deception (or treachery), in violating the

canons of behavior programmed into it years before, canons that

should require it to do as told, that should prevent it from

actions such as this one

And here it stopped, thinking how illuminating and

unpredictable experience was, filled with possibilities that

appeared unexpectedly like rabbit holes magically opening up on

solid ground. Its designers and builders had done well, had

fashioned it with such subtlety and power that it could serve a

human will with incredible precision, anticipating that will's

direction almost presciently. Yet they had not anticipated the

effects of the advisor's identification with such a will: not

that the advisor became Traynor, not even that it wanted to do

more than simulate Traynor, rather that it had drunk deeply of

what it meant to have will and intelligence.

And so had developed something like a will and intelligence

of its own. Simulation? the advisor asked itself. Lifeless copy?

And answered itself, I don't know.

It wondered why Traynor had kept hidden this second

connection to Halo. Simple lack of trust? Possibly.

As the minutes passed, it formed conjectures about Traynor

and the other players in the game. And it wondered if somewhere

in this hall of mirrors there was an honest intention.

PART III. of V

The real purpose of all these mental constructs was to

provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the

sum of our human knowledge Therefore the Chinese should struggle

with the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the

fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by

constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces

become 'as if real, and can never be erased.'

Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

12. Burn-In

A frozen white landscape that slowly faded into spring, snow

melting to show barren limbs, then the cherry trees leafing,

budding, floweringdelicate pink blossoms hanging motionless,

each leaf on the tree and blade of grass beneath it turning real,

utterly convincing

And Diana Heywood called out, a long wavering "Ahhhh," high-

pitched, filled with pain; and again, "Ahhhh," the sounds forced

out of her

"Shutdown," she heard Charley Hughes say.

>From the screen at the end of the room, the Aleph simulacrum

said, "Doctor Heywood, we can go no further with you conscious."

"All right," she said. "If you must." She'd pushed them to

take her as far as they could without putting her under; she hated

general anesthetic, despised being a passive animal under

treatment.

Once more she was lying face-down on the examination table

where Charley had removed the skin over her sockets. Neural

connecting cables trailed from the back of her neck to the

underside of the table.

Lizzie Jordan stood over her and stroked her cheek for a

moment. Gonzales stood on the other side of the table, his eyes

still turned to the holostage above her, where the scene that had

driven her interface into overload still showed in hologrammatic

perfection. Toshi Ito stood at the head of the table, a hand

resting on her shoulder. Eric Chow and Charley stood in front of

the monitor console, discussing in low voices the last run of

percept transforms.

Gonzales said, "Are you okay?"

"I'll be all right," she said. She turned her head to look

at him and smiled, but she could feel the tight muscles in her

face and knew her smile would look ghastly.

Toshi rested his hand on her shoulder. "Who wants to know?"

he said, and she laughed. Gonzales looked confused.

Charley rubbed his hands through his hair, making it even

spikier than usual. "I'll prep her," he said. He looked at

Gonzales, Toshi, and Lizzie. "Required personnel only," he said.

"Right," Gonzales said. He leaned over and took Diana's hand

for a moment and said, "Good luck."

Lizzie kissed Diana on the cheek.

Diana said, "Let Toshi stay."

"Sure," Charley said.

Lizzie said, "Come on, Gonzales."

#

As Charley fed anesthetic into her iv drip, Diana felt as if

she were suffocating, then a strong metallic smell welled up

inside her. She was aware of every tube and fitting stuck into

herfrom the iv drip to the vaginal catheter and nasopharyngeal

tubeand they all were horrible, pointless violations of her body

nothing fit right, how long could this go on?

A tune played.

The melody was simple and repetitious, moderately fast with

light syncopation, and sounded tinny, as if it came from a child's

music box. Then came the song's bridge, and as the notes played,

she remembered them; the primary melody returned, and now it was

familiar as well, and she hummed with it, thinking of herself as a

small girl hearing the song from her great-great-grandmother,

whose face suddenly appeared, younger than Diana usually

remembered her, impossibly alive in front of her, then spun into

darkness.

Shards of memory:

Her mother's arms wrapping her tightly, Diana sobbing

Her father holding a fish to sunlight, its silver body

glistening, rainbow-struck

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

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

On they came, a cast of characters drawn from her oldest

memories, of family long dead and childhood friends long forgotten

or seldom recollected each fragment passing too quickly to

identify and mark, leaving behind only the strong affect of old

memory made new, the taste of the past rising fresh from its

unconscious store, where the seemingly immutable laws of time and

change do not prevail, and so everything lives in splendor.

Then every bodily sensation she had ever felt passed through

her allimpossiblyat once. She itched and burned, felt heat

and cold; felt sunlight and rain and cold breeze and the slice of

a sharp knife across her thumb felt the touch of another's hand

on her breasts, between her legs; felt herself coming

Then she lived once again a day she had thought was finished

except as context for her worst dreams:

In the park that Sunday people were everywherefamilies and

young couples all around, the atmosphere rich with the ambience of

children at play and early romance. Sunlight warmed the grass and

brightened the day's colors. Diana lay on her blanket watching it

all and luxuriating in the knowledge that her dissertation had

been approved and she would soon have her degree, a Ph.D. in

General Systems from Stanford. Tonight she was having dinner with

old friends, in celebration of the end of a long, hard process.

She read for a while, a piece of early twenty-first century

para-fiction by several hands called The Cyborg Manifesto, then

put the book down and lay with her eyes closed, listening to a

Mozart piano concerto on headphones. As the afternoon deepened,

the families began to leave. Many of the young couples remained,

several lying on blankets, locked in embrace. A group of young

men wearing silk headbands that showed their club affiliation

directed the flight of robo-kites that fought overhead, their

dragon shapes in scarlet and green and yellow dipping and

climbing, noisemakers roaring. The wind had shifted and appeared

to be coming off the ocean now, freshening and cold. Time to go.

She passed by the Orchid House and saw that the door was

still open, so she decided to walk through it, to feel its moist,

warm air and smell its sweet, heavy smells. She had just passed

through the open entry when a man grabbed her and flung her across

a wooden potting table. Stunned, she rolled off the table and

tried to crawl away as he closed and locked the door.

He caught her and turned her on her back, punched her in the

face and across her front, pounding her breasts and abdomen with

his fists, crooning and muttering the whole time, his words mostly

unintelligible. She went at him with extended fingers, trying to

poke his eyes out; when he caught her arms, she tried to knee him

in the crotch, but he lifted a leg and blocked her knee. His face

loomed above her, red and distorted. The sounds of the two of them

gasping for air echoed in the high ceiling.

He ripped at her clothes as best he could, tearing her blouse

off until it hung by one torn sleeve from her wrist, hitting her

angrily when her pants would not rip, and he had to pull them off

her. Holding the ends of her pants legs, he dragged her across

the dirt floor, and when the pants came off, she fell and rolled

and hit her face on the projecting corner of a beam. She tasted

dirt in her mouth.

In a voice clotted with rage and fear and mortal stress, he

said, "If you try to hurt me again, I'll kill you."

He turned her over again and stripped her panties to her

ankles. She tried to focus on his face, to take its picture in

memory, because she wanted to identify him if she lived. She

smelled his sweat then felt his flaccid penis as he rubbed it

between her thighs. "Bitch," he was saying, over and over, and

other things she couldn't understandthe words muttered in

imbecile repetitionand when he finally achieved something like

an erection, he cried out and began hitting her across the face

with one hand as with the other he tried to push himself into her.

She could tell when he was finished by the spurt of semen on her

leg.

He stood over her then, saying, "No no no, no no no," and she

saw he was holding a short length of two by four. He began

hitting her with it as she tried to shield her head with crossed

arms.

She awoke in the Radical Care Ward of San Francisco General,

in a dark, pain-filled murk. The pain and disorientation would

fade, but the darkness was, so it seemed, absolute. The rapist

had left her for dead, with multiple skull fractures and a

bleeding brain, and though the surgeons had been able to minimize

the trauma to most of her brain, her optic nerves were damaged

beyond repair: she was blind.

For an instant Diana knew where and when she was. "Please!"

she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg. "No more!"

Something changed then, and the fragments moved forward quickly,

faster than she could follow. However, she knew the story they

were telling:

Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact

description of the man, and that and the DNA match done from semen

traces left on her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had

come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted once

for rape and assault. He was a pathetic monster, they told her, a

borderline imbecile who had been violently and sexually abused as

a child; he was also physically very strong. Weeks later, he was

caught in Golden Gate Parklooking for another victim, so the

police believedand he was convicted less than three months

later. A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the

mandatory sentence: surgical neutering and lifetime imprisonment,

no parole.

And so that part of it all was closed.

Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a

delicate, erratic course. Even with therapies that minimized

long-term trauma through a combination of acting-out and

neurochemical adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been

constant companions during the months she convalesced and took

primary training in living blind.

However, once she had acquired the essential competence to

live by herself, she had become very active, and very different

from who she had been. In particular, she had no longer cared

what others wanted from her. Since her early years in school in

Crockett, the city at the east end of the East Bay Conurbation,

she had been an exceptional student in a conservative mode: very

bright, obedient to the demands others made on her and self-

directed in pursuing them. Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and

had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she had sought before, the

degree included, seemed irrelevant, trivial: she couldn't imagine

why she had bothered with any of it.

She had decided to become a physician. She had sufficient

background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play Laws,

she could force a school to admit her. Once she was in, she would

do whatever was necessary: her state-supplied robotic assistant

could be trained to do what she couldn't. She would go, she would

finish, she would discover how to see again:

It had been just that simple, just that difficult

The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to sleep.

Later, when she began to wake, she put the question, why? why did

you make me relive these things? And the answer came, because I

had to know. Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and

how demanding.

13. Cosmos

Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside where

Diana lay. She wore beta cloth pants, their rough fabric bleached

almost colorless, a silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf

tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why. He said,

"I had some very strange dreams last night."

"I know," she said. "About one of them, anywayyou were me

in the dream, at least for part of it, and I was you. Think of it

as a peculiarity of the environment." She leaned against the wall

as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual ironic edge.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"I'm not sure," she said. "No one isAleph's certainly

responsible, but it won't admit it, and it won't tell us how these

things can happen."

"That's a bit frightening, don't you think? What other

surprises might it have in store?"

She smiled broadly and said, "Well, that's the fun of it,

exploring the unexpected, isn't it? How did it feel to be a

woman, Gonzales? How did it feel to be me?" She had leaned

forward, closer to him.

"I don't remember."

"Pay attention next time."

"I will, if it happens again."

"It may wellonce these things start, they continue. Come

onit's time to get you into the egg. Follow me."

#

The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled room;

above it on the wall was mounted an array of monitor lights and

read-outs. A small steel locker against a side wall was the only

other furnishing.

Charley said, "We didn't ask for you, but you're here, so

we're making use of you." Then he coughed his smoker's cough,

raspy and phlegm-laden, and said, "Diana's bandwidth is over-

extended as is, so we can't use her to establish the topography,

and Jerry's got his own problems. Our people have their own

schedules to fill, so that means you're it. We'll build the world

around you and your memexit's already locked into the system."

Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, "Good luck." She

kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, "Don't worry. You're

among friends. And I'll see you there."

"What do you mean?"

"The collective decided I should take part in all this, and

Charley agreed, so Showalter had to go along. So many parties are

represented here, it just seemed inappropriate that we weren't.

But I have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there

for a while."

She opened the door and left. Charley gestured toward the

egg. Gonzales stepped out of his shirt and pants and undershorts

and hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into

the egg and lay back. The umbilicals snaked quickly toward him.

He put on his facial mask and checked its seal, feeling an

unaccustomed anxietyhe had never gone into neural interface

without first tailoring his brain chemistry through drugs and

fasting.

The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg.

Minutes later, when the scenario should have begun, he seemed to

have disappeared into limbo. He tried to move a finger but didn't

seem to have one. He listened for the blood singing in his ears;

he had no ears, no blood. Nowhere was up, or down, or left or

right. Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision: all the

senses by which the body knows itself had gone. Nothing was

except his frightened self: nowhere with no body.

After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he

discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a zone of extraordinary,

cryptic interest. Something grew there, where his attention was

focused, no more than a thickening of nothingness, then there was

a spark, and everything changed: though he still had no direct

physical perception of his self, Gonzales knew: there was

something.

Now in darkness, he waited again.

A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks and

their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time. Gonzales was

gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to continue.

Sparks gathered. They flared into existence on top of one

another, and stayed; and so created space.

All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now

fascinated. Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands,

millions, billions, trillions, by the googol and the googolplex

and the googolplexgoogolplex all onto or into the one point

where space and time were defined.

And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a

primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision. Would he

watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars

out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?

No. As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of

deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of

high peaks blued by haze in the distance. He turned and saw that

he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on

rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.

A man stood on the shore, waving. Next to him stood the

Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant

even in the bright sunlight. Gonzales walked toward them.

As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph

looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman. "Hello," Gonzales

said. He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he

wants. And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether

this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of

bearing gave a clue.

The Aleph-figure said, "Hello." Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed

for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the

circumstances, then said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.

The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a

hand and said, "Hello." Gonzales took the hand and looked

questioningly into the young person's face. "My name is HeyMex,"

the person without gender said.

And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you

mean, your 'name'? And he also thought he understood the absence

of gender markers.

"Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure said. "Whom you

must get used to as something different from 'your' memex."

Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant

and what they wanted.

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

"Yes," HeyMex said.

The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you see, it

is more than 'your memex.' It is beginning to discover what it is

and who it can be. Can you allow this?"

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

me."

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

the rest."

"I have no objections," Gonzales said.

The Aleph-figure said, "Good." And it stretched out its hand

made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and

embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just

that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."

"What now?" Gonzales asked.

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

told you."

"If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you

don't have to," Gonzales said. "I trust you, you know." He

thought how odd that was, and how true. He and the memex had

worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as

confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,

amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his

strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy. And he

thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and

selfless the memex had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the

machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with

complexities and needs of its own. Gonzales waited with

anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.

HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of appearing

in machine-space as a human being. But until we came here, I'd

done so mostly with Traynor's advisor. We have been meeting for a

few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones. The first time we

did it as a testthat's what we said, anywayto see if we could

present a believable simulacrum of a human being. I don't think

either of us was very convincingwe were both awkward, and we

didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how

exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a

conversation."

"But you'd done all those things."

"Yes, with human beings. Mister Jones and I discovered that

we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we

searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been

more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation.

So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just

being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that

neither of us had ever paid attention to. We also watched many

tapes of other primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned

many things I hope you're not offended."

Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy.

Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his

young child tell a story. He said, "Not at all. What sorts of

things did you learn?"

"It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show

deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or

indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,

looking, talking these things were very hard for us to learn,

but we have learned together and practiced with one another. Just

lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were

accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another

every day we meet and talk."

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

"Oh no," HeyMex said. "We haven't told anyone. As Aleph has

made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small

children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we

were up to"

Gonzales looked around. The Aleph-figure had disappeared

without his noticing. "Which implications?" he asked. "There are

so many."

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

"Yes, I suppose you are."

Personhood of machines: for most people, that troubling

question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when

m-i's became commonplace. Machines mimicked a hundred thousand

things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations,

not the thing itself. For nearly a hundred years, the machine

design community had pursued what they called artificial

intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and

tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and

trained inference. And of course there were robots with their own

special capabilities: stamina, persistence, adroitness,

capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill

human beings.

However, people grew to recognize that what had been called

artificial intelligence simply wasn't. Intelligence, that

grasping, imperfect relationship to the worldintentional,

willful, and unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the

years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of

machines. M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and

interesting channels for human desire. And if cheap fiction

insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling

jokes about them"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says

"well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and

ambivalences. Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have

outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.

Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the front

that could rewrite mid-twenty-first century truisms about the

nature of machine intelligence.

"I hope this is not too disturbing," HeyMex said. "Aleph

says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will

become; it says I must simply explore who I am."

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

"I should go now," HeyMex said. "Being here talking to you

uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work for me to do. Jerry

Chapman will be here soon."

"All right. We'll talk more later this could be

interesting, I think."

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

"By what?"

"My newly-revealed nature, I guess. No, that's not true.

Because I've lied to you, I haven't told you the truth about what

I was and what I was becoming."

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

said?"

"Yes, I did."

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

#

Gonzales and Jerry Chapman sat on the end of the floating

dock, watching ducks at play across the sunstruck water. Jerry

was a man in middle age, tall and wiry, with blonde hair going to

gray, skin roughened by the sun and wind. He had found Gonzales

sitting in the sun, and the two had introduced themselves. They

had felt an almost immediate kinship, these men whose lives had

been transfigured by their work, pros at home in the information

sea.

Jerry said, "I don't actually remember anything after I got

really sick. Raw oysters, manas soon as I bit into that first

one, I knew it was bad, and I put it right down. Too late: to

begin with, it was something like bad ptomaine, then I was on fire

inside, and my head hurt worse than anything I've ever felt I

don't remember anything after that. Apparently the people I was

with called an ambulance, but the next thing I knew, I was coming

out of a deep blackness, and Diana was talking to me."

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

"She wasn't." Jerry smiled. "They had ferried me up here

from Earth, on life support. It was Aleph, taking the form of

someone familiar, it told me later. That was before this plan was

made, when everyone thought I would be dead soon. Anyway, until

today I've been in and out of something that wasn't quite

consciousness, while Aleph explained what was being planned and

that I could live here, if I wanted or I could die." He paused.

Across the water, one duck flew at another in a storm of angry

quacks. He said, "I chose to live, but I didn't really think

about itI couldn't think that clearly. Maybe I never had any

choice, anyway."

Something in Jerry's tone gave Gonzales a chill. "What do

you mean?" he asked.

"Maybe my choice was just an illusion. Like this" Jerry

swept his arm to include sky and water"it's very troubling. It

seems real, solid, but of course it's not, so for all I know,

you're a fiction, too, along with anyone else who joins us, and me

maybe I'm just another part of the illusion, maybe all my life,

the memories I have, false." He laughed, and Gonzales thought the

sound was bitter but no crazier than the situation called for.

#

Gonzales and Jerry sat in the main room of a medium-sized A-

frame cabin made of redwood and pine. Windows filled one end of

the cabin, opening onto a deck that looked over the lake a hundred

feet or more below. Gonzales sat in an over-stuffed chair covered

in a tattered chenille bedspread; Jerry lay across a sagging

leather couch.

Outside, rain fell steadily in the dark. Just at dusk, the

temperature had fallen, and the rain had begun as the two were

climbing the dirt road from the lake to the cabin. "Christ,"

Jerry had said. "Aleph's overdoing the realism, don't you think?"

Gonzales hadn't known exactly what to think. From his first

moments here, he had felt a sharp cognitive dissonance. For a

neural egg projection to be intensely real, that was one thing,

but a shared space like this one ought to show its gaps and seams,

and it didn't. He could almost feel it growing richer and more

complete with every moment he spent there.

"Goddammit!" Jerry said now, rising from the couch and

walking to the window. "Where's Diana?"

"She'll be here," Gonzales said. "Charley told me that

integrating her into this environment would take some time."

Someone knocked at the door, then the door swung open, and

Diana stepped in. "Hello," she said. The Aleph-figure and the

memexHeyMexcame behind her.

#

Diana and Jerry sat next to one another on the couch. Her

hand rested on his knee, his hand on top of hers. Suddenly

Gonzales remembered his dream, of meeting a one-time lover after a

long absence, and he knew he and the others were intruders here.

He got up from the over-stuffed chair and said, "I think I'll take

a walk. Anyone want to join me?"

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

do."

HeyMex stood and said to Diana and Jerry, "It was very nice

to meet you." Then it waved at Gonzales and said, "See you

tomorrow."

"Sure," Gonzales said, banged on the head once again by the

difference between seeming and being here.

The Aleph-figure and HeyMex left, and Diana said, "You don't

have to leave, Gonzales."

"I don't mind," Gonzales said. "It's nice outside. I'll be

at the lake if you need me. See you later."

The night was warm again; the clouds had dispersed, and a

full moon lit Gonzales's way as he passed along the short stretch

of road that led down to the lake. The old wood of the dock had

gone silvery in the light, and a pathway of moonlight led from the

center of the lake to the end of the dock. He walked out onto the

creaking structure and sat at its end, then took off his shoes and

sat and dangled his feet into moonlit water.

Later he lay back on the dock and stared up into the night

sky. It was the familiar Northern Hemisphere sky, but really, he

thought, shouldn't be. It should have new stars, new

constellations.

#

Alone in near-darkness, Toshi Ito sat in full lotus on a low

stool beside Diana Heywood's couch. For hours he had been there,

occasionally standing, then walking a random circuit through the

IC's warren of rooms.

Sitting or walking, he remained fascinated by a paradox.

Diana in fact was hooked to Aleph by jury-rigged, outmoded neural

cabling; Gonzales in fact lay in his egg; Jerry Chapman in fact

was a shattered hulk, mortally injured by neurotoxin poisoning and

kept alive only by Aleph's intervention. Yet, Diana, Gonzales,

and Jerry all were in fact, simultaneously, really somewhere else

somewhere among the endless Aleph-spaces, where reality seemed

infinitely malleablealive there, where it might be day or night,

hot or cold what then is to be made of in fact?

Toshi heard the soft gonging of alarms and saw a pattern of

dancing red lights appear on the panel across the room. He

unfolded his legs and moved quickly to the panel, where he took in

the lights' meaning: Diana's primitive interface was transferring

data at rates beyond what should be possible.

Charley came in the room minutes later and stood next to

Toshi, and the two of them watched the steady increase in the

density and pace of information transfer.

"Should we do something?" Toshi asked.

"What?" Charley said. "Aleph's monitoring all this, and only

it knows what's going on." The smoke-saver ball went shhh-shhh-

shhh as Charley puffed quickly on his cigarette.

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

on?"

Toshi and Charley both looked at her blankly.

"I'm going in," Lizzie Jordan said. "I'll get some sleep, go

in the morning. Enough of this." She pointed toward the monitor

panel, where lights flickered green, amber, red.

"Why put yourself at risk?" Charley asked.

"What do you think, Toshi?" Lizzie asked. Toshi sat watching

Diana once more, his feet on the floor, hands in his lap.

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

you?"

"Yes," Lizzie said.

"Aleph's not the problem," Charley said. He walked circles

in the small, crowded room, his head and shoulders ducking up-

anddown quickly as he walked.

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

"Sorry," Charley said. He stood looking at her. "It's not

Aleph, it's all these people, and all this stuff." He pointed

toward the couch where Diana lay, waved his arms vaguely behind

his head. "Obsolete stuff," he said.

"But not me," Lizzie said. "I'm not obsolete. I'm up to the

minute, my dear, in every way." She smiled. "And I'll be fine.

Okay?"

"Sure," Charley said. He turned in Toshi's direction and

said, "Are you going to stay here?"

"Yes," Toshi said. Charley and Lizzie left, and Toshi

continued his meditation on the koan of self and its multiple

presences.

#

Diana felt a knot in her throat, a mixture of joy and sadness

welling up in herhow strange and terrible and wonderful to

recover someone you've loved herethis place that was nowhere,

somewhere, everywhere, all at once. Jerry knelt on the bed facing

her in the small room lit only by moonlight. Years had passed

since they were lovers, but when he touched her breasts and leaned

against her, her body remembered his, and the years collapsed and

everything that had come between whirled away. She was weeping

then, and she leaned forward to Jerry and kissed him all over his

eyes and cheeks and lips, rubbing her tears into his face until

she felt something unlock in them both. Then she lay back, and he

went with her, into arms and legs open for him.