Halo

by Tom Maddox

  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-

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sp; 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?"