Halo

by Tom Maddox

  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

&
nbsp; 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