Tom Maddox, Halo, Part 1


From the author:

You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in any
way you wish so long as you do not change them in any way or
receive money for them.

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

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

Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around.

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

tmaddox@halcyon.com.

November, 1994
--------------------------------------------------------------




HALO

Tom Maddox

To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen,
my friend; and all our lamented dead, lost in time.




ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



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

My wife Janis and son Tom. They have had to put up with the
problems of a novelist in the houseincluding arbitrary mood
swings and chronic unavailability for many of the usual pleasures
of life. To both, my love and gratitude for their love, patience,
and understanding.

My best friends: Leo Daugherty, Jeffrey Frohner, Bill Gibson
and Lee Graham.

My mother Jewell, my brother Bill and sister Janet.

Ellen Datlow: she published my first stories in Omni and
showed me how a really good editor works. Also, two friends who
patiently read through drafts of those stories before Ellen got
them: Geoff Hicks and Larry Reed.

The readers of various incarnations of this book: Beth
Meacham, my editor at Tor Books; Merilee Heifetz, my agent; Bruce
and Nancy Sterling, great readers; Melinda Howard and Gary
Worthington; Lynne Farr; Carol Poole. Also, the members of the
Evergreen Writers' Workshop, especially Pat Murphy.

The Usenet community, friend and foe, for ideas about a quite
astonishing number of things, and for the continuing fascination
of life online; with special thanks to Patricia O Tuana and the
members of "eniac."

The usual suspects at the Conference on the Fantastic, with a
special nod to Brian Aldiss, because we'd all be happier if there
were more like him running around.

At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave
technical advice. (Perhaps needless to say, any consequent
blunders are entirely mine.) Mike Beug and Paul Stamets, world-
class mycologists and explainers, talked to me about mushrooms and
provided invaluable references. Mark Papworth applied a coroner's
eye to a carcass I made. The faculty and students of the Habitats
Coordinated Studies Program, 1988-89 helped me to think about a
space habitat's ecosystem.

A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both
colleagues and students, at Evergreenthough I have to mention
Barbara Smith and David Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo
appearances.

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

PART I. of V

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.

Jean Baudrillard, America




1. Burning, Burning



On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the
egg. A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once
known as Burma, and now, after two days of drugs and fasting, he
was prepared: he had become an alien, at home in a distant
landscape.

His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread
white flesh torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On
the dark stained oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their
faces beatific in the cold fire. Staring at the animated carved
figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.

He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through
to the hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope
scuffing without noise across floors of bleached oak. Through the
open door at the hallway's end, morning's light through stained
glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow.
Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far
wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the
center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed
steel, cracked and waiting. One half-egg was filled with beige
tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark
plastic lying slack against the shell.

Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his
hair back into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over
it. He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his
navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head. Dropping it
to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan
pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale
skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes
grainy, stomach sore.

He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and
lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which
began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick
cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in
the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask
over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved
toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms. The
egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.

He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply
as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated
by drugs, meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to
relive his own terror, this was what moved him: access to the
many-worlds of human experiencetravel through space, time, and
probability all in one.

Virtual realities were everywherevirtual vacations, sex,
superstardom, you name itbut compared to the egg, they were just
high-res videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks
to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled
only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were
conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing
suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total
involvement through all sensory modalitiesthe worlds were so
compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the
waking world, as if it were a dream.

A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural
cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
#

It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan,
the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its
records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon.
He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a
central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's
work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in
front of them.

Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The
local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with
its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel
and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier,
SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the
home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his
memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.

So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had
explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal
functional relationships against reality. Wherever there were
movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there
were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails,
matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher
signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel
records themselves against government databases, and traced the
backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they
read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they
verified daily transaction logs.

Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it
had shown nothing but the usual inefficienciesGrossback didn't
run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he
didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor
SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would
come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at
their leisure.

Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end
of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-
out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane
out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with
whatever commercial flight's available there."

Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving.
Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he
had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features.
He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese
style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.

During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him
coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and
clenched teeth. Fair enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's
operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people
resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing
Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,
F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone
nervous.

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

"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone
else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's
official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought
down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.

Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"

Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything
about that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an
embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate
protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.

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

What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data
to examine before I can make an assessment."

"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look
like," Grossback said. His face had gone cold.

"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish
packing." For the moment, he just wanted to get out before
Grossback did something irretrievable, like threatening him or
offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales said. The other man said
nothing as Gonzales left the room.
#

Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of
low bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood
above the Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's
tattered version of Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the
walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak dresser,
tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in
from the twentieth centuryjust to give your average citizen that
rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had
been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards,
Gonzales had luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and
refrigerator.

Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and
Gonzales lay sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights
then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby
neck flaps and doing push ups.

He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the
cart paths that threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among
the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning
mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking
up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples,
thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the
Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government
agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near
perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more
than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building
pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.

Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was
trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in
Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military
dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was
so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still
restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of
governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free
information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive,
their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a
result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded
among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.

He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions
dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum
shock-cases, ready for transport. The other case held memory boxes
containing SenTrax Myanmar group's records.

When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest
news about Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment.
Gonzales was sure the m-i would think what he didGrossback was
dog dirty and scared they would find it.
#

At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited
for his plane. Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's
mufti, a tan gabardine two-piece suit over an open-collared white
linen shirt, dark brown slipover shoes. His hair was gathered
back into a ponytail held together by a silver ring made from
lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a soft brown
leather bag and the two shock-cases.

In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a
gilded and jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its
steps, beside the huge paw of a stone lion, a monk sat in full
lotus, his face shadowed by the animal rising massive and lumpy
and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were dyed orange by
sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes
passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.

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

"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up
behind him. It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight
rows of narrow wooden benches but was now emptyalmost all the
tourists would have joined the crush on the terraces of
Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the temple
plain.

"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also
very good exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."

It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar,
even the machines worked the black market. "No thanks."

"Extremely good rate, sir."

"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as
defective." The cart whirred as it moved away.

Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side
of the road, ready to come across and beg for pencils or money.
Gonzales caught the monk's eye and shook his head. The monk
shrugged and walked on, his orange robe billowing.

Where the hell was his plane? Soon hunter flares would cut
into the new moon's dark, and government drones would scurry
around the edges of the shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry
Myanmar trembled on the edge of chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix
of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various political postures, all
fierce, all contemptuous of the central government. They fought
with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack
missile, and they only quit when they died.

A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air.
Within seconds a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge
rectangular wing loaded with a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came
low over the dark mass of forest. Its running lights flashing red
and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above the field, wings
tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into the
bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that
the aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over
Gonzales in a whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a
whisper, and with a creak the plane kneeled on its gear, placing
the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales picked up his bags and
walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a hydraulic hiss,
and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.

"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function
flight glasses were tilted back on his forehead, where their
mirrored ovoid lenses made a blank second pair of eyes; a thin
strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed from their rim. Beneath
the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamedno cosmetic work
for this guy, Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway
"tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue
background.

"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case
in his right hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the
luggage locker. Gonzales put his bags into the steel compartment
and watched as the safety net pulled tight against the bags and
the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the first of eight
empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and
from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You
should engage your harness. If you need instructions, please say
so now."

Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder
and lap belts connected, then stretched against the harness,
feeling the sweat dry on his skin in the plane's cool interior.
"Thank you," said the voice.

The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as
the plane lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow
from the dome light vanished, then there were only the last
moments of orange sunlight coming through the bubble.

The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow,
with the temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light,
white stucco and gold tinted red and orange.

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

"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it
before, and besides, it had already been a long day.

The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left
and headed south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat
and tried to relax.

They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River
until they crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in
the interior darkness, Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard
the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's here. Partisan attack group,
probablyno recognition codes. Must be flying ultralightsour
radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."

"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.

"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign
charters." And he pointed to their transponder message flashing
above the primary displays:
THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY.
IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE
UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020.
It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.

The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION
WARNING, and a Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The
pilot said, "Fuck, they launched!" The swing-wing's turbines
screamed full out as the plane's computer took command, and the
pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just hanging on.

Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell,
corkscrewed, looped, climbed againsmart metal fish evading fiery
harpoons. Explosions blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical
bursts of flame followed immediately by hard thumping sounds and
shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as it followed its chaotic
path through the night.

Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around
it, its pilot in blazing outlinea stick figure with arms thrown
to the sky in the instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated
in flame.

Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned
to the pilot's yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the
night returned to blackness. "Collision averted," the plane's
computer said. "Time in red zone, six point eight nine seconds."

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

"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.

Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold
air from the plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt.
He glanced down to his lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself.
Really, everything happened too quickly for him to get that
scared.

A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front
of them and circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was
cast in matte black, but with a massive fuselage. It turned a
slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy predator looping fat,
slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that played across
their canopy.

The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.

Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade;
behind the transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored
pilot, twin cables running from the base of his neck. The Loup
Garou's wings slid forward into reverse-sweep, and it stood on its
tail and disappeared.

Gonzales strained against his taut harness.

"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.

"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking.
"What do you mean?"

"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight,
face red beneath the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the
pricks. They used us to troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot
flipped up his glasses and stared with pointless intensity out the
cockpit window, as if he could see through the blackness. "And
waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole flight." The
pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features
distorted into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had
welcomed Gonzales ninety minutes before. "Do you know how fucking
close we came?" he asked.

No, Gonzales shook his head. No.

"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to
touch," the pilot said. He swiveled his seat to face forward, and
Gonzales heard its locking mechanism click as he settled back into
his own seat, fear and shame spraying a wild neurochemical mix
inside his brain

Gonzales had never felt things like this beforedeath down
his spine and up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his
skin; death with a bad smell burning, burning




2. Anything I Can Do to Help You



As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained
glass, and the room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights
remained lit, steady rows of green above flickering columns of
numbers on the light blue face of the monitor panel.

A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked
slowly across the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then
left the room, its motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like
wind through dry grass.
#

The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the
flight computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok
landing grid and began its slide down an invisible pipe. They
went to touchdown guided by electronic hands.

The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said,
"I'll have to file a report on the attack. But you're luckyif
we had landed in Myanmar, government investigators would have been
on you like white on rice, and you could forget about leaving for
days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the time they process the
report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."

At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend
any time in Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.

Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in
him like the onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself,
he thought, really, nothing happened, except you got the shit
scared out of you, that's all.

As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went
to pick up his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat
watching as the plane went through its shutdown procedures.

Do something, Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount.
He pulled the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a
copy of your flight records."

"I can't do that."

"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was
almost killed while flying in your aircraft."

"So was I, man."

"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full
official route and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick
dump into my machine here, that's all it will take. I'll give you
authorization and receipt." Gonzales waited, keeping the pressure
on by his insistent gaze and posture.

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

Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat,
kneeled and opened the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the
pilot.

The man nodded and said, "Always."

"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record,
this is Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of
Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax. I am acquiring flight records
of this aircraft to assist in my investigation of certain events
that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at the
pilot. "That should do it," he said.

He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into
the access plug on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across
the panel as data began to spool into the quiescent memex. The
panel gonged softly to signal transfer was complete, and Gonzales
unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks," he said to the
pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.

Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself,
hey, memex, got a surprise for you when you wake up. He felt much
better.
#

A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a
brightly-lit tunnel with baby blue plastic and plaster walls
marked with signs in half a dozen languages promising swift
retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus graffiti smeared
everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages in
Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with
dialogue balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red
paint read in English, HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered
boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays of multi-wire cable marked
where surveillance cameras had been.

Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow
portal to International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless
holoscan robotsdark, wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and
tentacles and spiked sensor antennasworked the crowd, antennas
swiveling.

All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women:
Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out
from Asia's "dragons," world centers of research and
manufacturing, taking their low margins and hard sell to Europe
and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life.
Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres
armed with technical and scientific prowess and fueled by
persistent ambition.

They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity.
The United States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the
Asians had a hundred ways of making sure the American economy
didn't just roll over and die and take the prime North American
consumer market with it. Whether Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese,
Hong Kong Chinese-Canadiansthey bought some corporations and
merged with others, and Americans ended up working for General
Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their
paychecks they bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian
robotics.

Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and
Gonzales stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress,
blue-and-white checked headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked
his i.d., gave a quick, meaningless smileteeth white and perfect
under a black moustacheand waved him on.

Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small
Thai woman in a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across
yellow badges. Her features were pleasant and impassive; she wore
her black hair pulled tightly back and held with a clear plastic
comb. She stood behind a gray metal table; on the floor next to
it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its controls,
screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty
green walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages,
detailing in small type the many categories of contraband.

The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in
front of the table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases
on the table.

She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in
clear, neuter machine English: "Your person has been scanned and
cleared." She put the soft brown bag into the mouth of the
scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with a quiet beep. The
woman slid it back to Gonzales.

She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these
cases" as she pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each,
Gonzales screened the access panel with his left hand and tapped
in the entry codes with his right. The case lids lifted with a
soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic lights
flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black
plastic the size of a small safety deposit box.

Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration
Form the memex had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both
Myanmar and Thai governments. She looked into one of the cases
and pointed to a row of red-tagged and sealed memory modules.

The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These
modules we must hold to verify that they contain no contraband
information."

"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate
records."

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

"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have
nothing to hide, but the modules are important to my work."

She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be
examined by authorities in the city." The translator's tones
accurately reflected her lack of concern.

Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic
intransigence. For whatever occult reasons, this woman had
decided to fuck him around, and the harder he pushed, the worse
things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I assume they will
be returned to me as soon as possible."

"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is
unlikely that the examination can be completed before your
departure." She slid the case off her desk and to the floor
behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied bureaucrat's smile.
She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a thing of
the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said,
"How else can I help you?"
#

The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as
it did, banks of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's
perimeter, and the patterns of console lights went through a
series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was brought to a waking
state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour when the
desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.

Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose,
machine-connected: a new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored
catheter led from his water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv
feeds from both forearms. White sealant and anti-irritant paste
had clotted around the tubes from throat and mouth. The sharp
ozone smell of the paste was all over him.

An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands,
shining chrome claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then
it worked with hands and black flexible arms the thickness of a
stout rope to lift Gonzales from the egg and onto its own surface.

Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper.
"It's okay," the memex whispered through the room's speaker.
"It's okay."

Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and
considered his condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent
loss of gross motor control, no immediate parapsychological
effects (disorientations, amnesias, synesthesias)

Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white
tile, polished aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower."
Water hissed, and the shower stall door swung open. The water ran
down his skin and the sweat and paste rolled off his body.




3. Dancing in the Dark



The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front
window, down Capital Hill to the city and the bay. After a full
night's sleep, he felt recovered from the egg. "Halfway down the
hill stood a row of Contempo high-riseshalf a dozen shapes in
the mist, their sides laced with optic fiber in patterns of red,
blue, white, and yellow.

From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The Fine Arts
Network, showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads
Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes
Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's 'Ecstasy for Many
Kilometers.'"

"Cycle," Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen
split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access
search. In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service
cycled what it considered important: worsening social collapse in
England; another series of politico-economic triumphs for The Two
Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole #2 over the
Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole #3
obstinately holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching
for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations continuing
to evade best predictions

Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ,
this stuff had been going on forever it seemed

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

"A bad business," said the memex. "We are lucky to have
survived." It seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in
the egg, as though it, too, had come close to dying. Gonzales
didn't know how it experienced such things, given its limited
sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.

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

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

"Might as well."

On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden
behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat
up and said, "Still in Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming
back? I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates."

She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones;
her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint
parchment quality of age. Her small breasts sagged very little.
Body and face, she appeared an athletic fifty year old who had
perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven next
month.

Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic
while the two were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her
energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance.
Half the year she spent in Cozumel's Regeneration Villas, where
tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young. The
rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo
on Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami.
Top dollar, but she could afford it.

She and his father had been charter members of the
gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of the rich and old who
vied with the young for their society's resources. The young had
the strength and energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and
cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated their main
life's goal as "living until I am old enough to enjoy it."

Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cotton-robe
over her shoulders and said, "Call me. I'll be home in a week or
so. Be well."

Their talks, her taped messagesboth usually made him feel
baffled and angrybut today her self-absorption pricked sharper
than usual. I almost died, he wanted to tell her, they almost
killed me, mother.

But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from
Miami. And whose fault is that? a small voice asked. He had
chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get
and remain in the continental United States. Sometimes he felt
he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with
alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with
strong coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and
health-conscious Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality
and demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.

Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen
the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all
of them he had felt the same obsessive grasping at money and land
and power and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more
more more. At his parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern
Florida facessun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with
heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne, and
women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made
brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as
instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.

Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at
home at one end of the country than the other.

"No reply," Gonzales said.
#

The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged
among black lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death
gnawed at the edges of his torpor. He filled a bronze pipe with
small green sensemilla leaves and holed up in a haze of smoke and
drank tea.

The late afternoon light through the windows went to pure
Seattle Gray, the color of ennui and unemphatic despair, and his
solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and
wondered what it would be like to have a cat. Then he thought
about the truth of it, how often he would be gone and the cat left
to itself and the house's machines. "Here kitty kitty," the
cleaning robot would say, and the memex would want veterinary
programs and a diagnostic link fuck it, they all could live
without a cat.

Then a hunger kick came on him, and he decided to make
taboulleh. "You are not taking care of business," the memex said
to Gonzales as he stood chopping mint leaves, green onions and
tomato, squeezing lemon and stirring in bulgur wheat with the
patience of the deeply-stoned.

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

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

"I'm going to die, my friend." The smells of lemon and mint
drifted up to him, and he inhaled them deeply. He said, "Today,
maana, some day for sure and I'm still trying to understand
what that means to me now. To be productive, that is fine, but to
come to terms with my own mortality I think that is better."
The taboulleh was finished. It was beautiful; he wanted to rub
his face in it.
#

Not long after he finished eating, a package arrived from
Thailand. Inside layers of foam and strapping were the memory
modules the Thais had taken. When he plugged the modules into the
memex, they showed empty: zeroed, ready to be used again.

Gonzales stood looking at the racked modules in the memex
closet. I can't fucking believe it, he thought. In effect, the
audit had been cancelled out. Whatever data he or anyone else
collected at this point from SenTrax Myanmar would be essentially
useless, Grossback having been given time to cook the data if he
needed to do so. A fatal indeterminacy had settled on the whole
affair.

Grossback, you bastard, thought Gonzales. If you arranged
for the Thais to grab these boxes, maybe you are smarter and
meaner than I thought.

"Shit," Gonzales said.

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

"Nothing I can think of."
#

From the background of jungle plants and pastel walls and the
signature pieces of curved silver, HeyMex recognized the latest
incarnation of the Beverly Rodeo Hotel's public lounge. Mister
Jones preferred ostentation, even in simulacra.

HeyMex settled into a sling chair made of bright chrome and
stuffed chocolate-brown leather. HeyMex wore the usual baggy
pants and jacket of black cotton, a crumpled white linen shirt;
was smooth-faced and had close-cropped hair.

A figure shimmered into being in the chair opposite: silver
suit and red metal-laced shirt brilliant under lights; black-
framed glasses with dark lenses; greased hair combed straight
back, a little black goatee and moustache.

"Mister Jones," HeyMex said.

The other figure took a long, slow drag off a brown
cigarette. "HeyMex," it said. "What can I do for you?"

"It's Gonzales. Since we got back from Myanmar, he's been
passive, hasn't been taking care of business."

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

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

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

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

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

The world went translucent, then turned to smoke, and Mister
Jones disappeared back into his identity as Traynor's Advisor,
HeyMex into his as Gonzales's memex.

(Ask yourself why the two machines chose this elaborate
masquerade, or why no one knew these sorts of things were
happening. However, as to the who? and the why? there can be no
question. These are the new players, and these are their games.

So welcome to the new millennium.)




4. Privileged Not to Exist



When Gonzales returned home, he found a message from Traynor:
"Will arrange for transportation tomorrow morning, five a.m., from
Northern Seattle Airtrack to my estate. Be prepared for immediate
work. Pack the memex and twenty-two kilos personal luggage."

"Shit," Gonzales said. "We just got home. Twenty-two kilos,
huh? That means we'll be going where do you think?"

The memex said, "Somewhere in orbit."
#

The airport limo held its spot in a locked sequence of a
dozen vehicles moving away from the city at two hundred kilometers
an hour. Seattle's northern suburbs showed as patches of light
behind shifting mist and steady-falling rain. Overhead, cargo
blimps flying toward Vancouver moved through the clouds like great
cold water fish.

Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and yellow
searchlights played across a concrete landscape, and a gangling
assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a
brick wall: a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to
scrawl messages to the world at large. Gonzales could only read
GENT OF CHAN

With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into
North Seattle Airtrack, then turned into the private field access
road. A wire gate opened in front of them as it received the
codes the limo sent. Near the SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing
exactly like the one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to
Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the
memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated
himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.

The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the
blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-
wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted
until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were
landing.

As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake
Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on
the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final
approach 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.





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