by Tom Maddox
wrong with him? "No," Gonzales said. Then he jumped up and
shouted, "No!"
Gonzales walked quickly away from the Plaza, now certain that
it was unsafe for him, though he couldn't have said why. As he
walked, the darkness grew deeper, and he tried with all the
courage he had to put aside the constant sense of him and the
city, falling, falling
The Ring Highway shrank in width as he passed into an
agricultural section. He knew that terraced gardens climbed away
to both sides, fields of corn and wheat, but he couldn't see them,
because the fog was even thicker here than in the suburban
district he had passed through. Dim lights shined from a cottage
block just off the highway. A voice called and was answered, both
call and response unintelligible.
Near Spoke 4, whose lifts made ghostly trails of light as
they moved up and down the face of the shaft, trees grew just off
the highway. The road gave off intermittent flashes beneath his
feet, as though iron shoes struck a metaled surface. The fog
acquired faces: somber, eyeless masks turning in slow motion so
that their blank gazes followed him along.
"Oh, Christ," Gonzales said. He stopped and wrapped his arms
around his chest. A fog-borne shape inched closer to him; red
flame burned behind its empty eye sockets. He ran into the woods.
This was not dense forest, and in sunshine he would have been
able to run through here without difficulty. Now, among the inky
pools of almost total darkness and the gray and silver shadows, he
came up against a small, wiry sapling that caught him and hurled
him back.
The ground began to grow soggy beneath his feet, and soon he
pushed through reeds and rushes, and his feet slipped on muddy
patches and into small, wet holes; then he was up to his ankles in
water, aware for the first time of a rich smell of decomposition,
decay
He turned back, trying to find dry ground, and soon his feet
thumped against the hard-packed soil of a path. Looking down, he
could see the path as a glowing gray, outlined in red. He ran
along it until he heard the sound of rushing water.
He came to a series of steps alongside a falls, where the
River cascaded onto rocks, then quickly spread out into pond and
marsh. The waters were alive with light, and he ran up and down
the steps, following streams of energy that burst forth in red and
yellow and purple and green and whitecolors that shifted in hue
and intensity, grew lighter and darker, intertwined with one
another
"This grows!" he shouted, feeling the waters' energy rise and
fall, seeing it spread to where plants could feed on it, animals
could drink it. The fog glowed with an opalescence from high
above.
He followed the steps down to where the river's noise
quieted, and its waters flooded the plain. He turned onto a path
that led into the woods, and he came to a small clearing where the
faint ambient light gleamed on fallen logs. Mushrooms seemed to
be everywhere in this small space, covering dead wood and
spreading in profusion over the ground.
He got on his knees to look at the mushrooms. They were
alive with veinlike arabesques in red, ghosts of electricity
across the spongy flesh. He picked them up, kind by kind,
inhaling deeply, and the odor he had smelled earlier came to him
again, a composty mix rich with the odors of transformation.
Gonzales shivered with something like discovery: he stood
and looked up into the impenetrable sky and the fog. This place
stood a quarter of a million miles from Earth, yet life had begun
to extend its web here, and though the web was fragile and small
by comparison to Earth's dense lacework of billions of living
things, its very existence amazed Gonzales, and he felt the surge
of an emotion he had no name for, a knot in his throat made of joy
and sorrow and wonder.
And he seemed on the brink of some illumination regarding
this world of spirit and matter mixed
Thoughts emerged and dispersed too quickly to catch among the
videogame buzz and clatter in his brain as he stood in the
clearing, paralyzed with a kind of ecstasy and watching life-
electricity play among the trees.
#
The room said, "You have a call."
"Who is it?" Lizzie asked.
"She says her name is Trish. The mushroom woman, she says."
"Oh yes. I'll take the call."
On the wallscreen came Trish's familiar face, and Lizzie
said, "Hello."
Trish woman waved and said, "The twins brought me a friend of
yours, named Gonzales, and I gave him mushrooms."
"Really?" Lizzie said.
"Yes, and I sent him out about seven hours ago."
"Thanks for letting me know. I'll find him." The screen
cleared, and Lizzie thought, you silly bastards, what did you get
him into? To the room she said, "Put out a call for information.
Ask any sams who are out and about if they've seen Gonzales."
#
A sam waited at her front door. "Are you the one who found
him?" Lizzie asked. The sam said, "No, that one waits with him,
to provide assistance if needed. Please come with me."
"I'll be right there."
Lizzie and the sam started out on the Ring Highway, and then
it apparently gave an electronic signal to a passing tram, because
the vehicle stopped so that the two could climb on. Lizzie
stepped quickly up, and the sam clumsily pulled itself aboard by
grasping a chrome railing with one of its extensors.
The tram let them off near Spoke 4. A stand of trees was
just visible through the fog; beyond, Lizzie knew, were marshes
bordering "soup bowls"ponds where the flow from rice paddies
mixed with the River's waters.
Using both visible range and infrared sensors, the sam led
her through the trees. They came to a clearing where another sam
stood to one side. Gonzales sat on a fallen log, watching a
mechanical vole chew small pieces of wood. His clothes were wet
and spattered with mud and dirt. Next to him, a large orange cat
also watched the vole.
"Hi," Gonzales said.
"Are you all right?" Lizzie asked.
"I don't know," he said. He reached out absent-mindedly and
stroked the orange cat, which turned on its back and batted at his
hand; apparently it didn't use its claws, because Gonzales left
his hand there for the cat to play with.
"Is our presence required?" asked the sam who had accompanied
Lizzie. She said, "No." The two sams scurried away single-file,
their passage almost silent.
Lizzie sat on the log next to the cat. She said, "How are
you?" He was giving off a near-audible buzz, and Lizzie resisted
veering into his drug-space; she'd had problems herself since
coming out of the eggnot as severe as Gonzales's, Charley said,
because she hadn't been under as long. "Still a bit jittery?" she
asked.
"I feel all right," he said. "Just, I don't know scrubbed.
Why are things like thiscold and dark?"
"That's not clear. Things haven't been working right since
Diana and HeyMex were disconnected." Gonzales looked confused but
not overly concerned. She said, "There's other news, too.
Showalter's been relieved of her position as head of SenTrax Halo;
Horn's the new director." Now he looked totally befuddled. "You
can worry about these things later," she said. "Why don't you
come back to my house? You can get some sleep."
"Okay," he said. "But I don't understand " He stopped
again, as if trying to find words to express all the things he
"didn't understand."
"Nobody understands right now. Aleph's just not working
right, and we don't know whywe can't get in touch with it."
"Oh, I see."
"Glad you do, because nobody else does."
He stood, then bent over to lift the cat from the log.
Cradling it in his arms, he said, "Okay, I'll go." He smiled at
her, and the cat lay in his arms and looked at her out of big
orange eyes.
#
Gonzales woke to find his clothes folded, clean and neat, on
a chair next to his bed. The orange cat lay at his feet; it
raised its head when he got up, then curled up again and went back
to sleep.
He found Lizzie in the kitchen slicing apples and pears and
Cheshire cheese. "Good morning," she said. "I'll warm some
croissants, and we can have coffeedo you like steamed milk with
yours?"
Her voice was friendly enough but perfectly devoid of
intimacy. Its tones were an admonition saying keep your distance.
"Sure," he said. "That all sounds fine. But you didn't have to
do this."
"You're a guest. I'm happy to." She wouldn't quite meet his
gaze.
>From his bedroom came a loud mew, and the two went in to find
the orange cat, fur erect, confronting a cleaning mouse. The
mouse, a foot-long shining ovoid about four inches high, moved
across the floor on hard rubber wheels, emitting a gentle hiss as
it scoured the room for organic debris; a flex-tube trailed behind
it to a socket in the wall. "Kitty kitty," Gonzales said. The
cat hissed and ran from the room.
When they got to the living room, the front door was closing.
"Will it come back?" Gonzales asked.
"Probably. Cats come and go as they please, but they often
adopt people, and I think this one's adopted you."
Silence lay between them, and it seemed to Gonzales that
anything either of them said would be awkward or embarrassing.
Perhaps the feeling was just part of the after-effects of a
psychotropic, though he was missing the other usual symptoms. His
perceptions seemed stable, not swarming and buzzing, and his
emotions didn't have a labile, twitchy quality. In fact, he felt
more stable and less anxious than he had since he last got into
the egg. So maybe the twins were right: if you can't get out of
what's happening, go deeper in.
Still, he didn't know what to say to Lizzie.
"We've got trouble," she said. She went to the window and
pulled back the navy-blue beta cloth curtains and gestured out
where night and fog still held. "Mid-afternoon," she said.
"Has everything fallen apart?"
"Not quite everything. We're doing what we can with a bunch
of semi-autonomous demonsjacked-up expert systems, reallyand
the collective."
"How well is that working?"
"Not all that wellwe can maintain essential functions now,
and that's about it. Some things we can't handleclimate
control, for instance. It's very complicated, because everything
is connected to everything else, and so far we've just managed to
fuck it up."
"And what's Traynor up to? Has he asked for me?"
"Yes, but I've fought him off. He's the one responsible, you
know." Her voice was angry. "He fucking insisted on pulling
everyone out when Chapman died."
"What does Aleph say?"
"Nothing and bloody nothing. Some of the collective have
taken brief shots at interface, and they've found only unpeopled,
barren landscapes. We're really in it, Gonzales. If Aleph's
finished, Halo is, too."
"Jesus." Of course. Halo without its indwelling spirit
would be what? The fine coordination of its systems would
cease, and disintegration would begin immediately. "So what are
you going to do?" he asked.
"Glad you're interested, because you're part of it."
"Tell me," he said.
18. Give It All Back
As Diana came out of machine-space, she called out "Stop!"
and heard Charley say, "Why? Is something wrong?" But she was
too far away to answer or explain, as she still was when they
removed her cables, and she felt everything important to her
sliding into oblivion.
She had been lying fully awake, staring at the ceiling, for
almost a quarter of an hour when Charley came into the room, Eric
and Toshi beside him, Traynor and Horn behind.
Charley said, "Are you all right?"
"No, I'm not," she said. "Why did you break the interface?'
Charley and Eric said nothing. Charley looked to Traynor,
who said, "We had no choice. You couldn't be reached by normal
means."
"You have killed Jerry," Diana said. The truth of that
passed through her for the first time, and tears came out of her
eyesshe wiped at her face, but the tears continued to come in a
slow, steady flow.
"He died two days ago," Horn said.
"He was alive minutes ago," Diana said. "Aleph and the memex
and I were keeping him alive."
"Then he may still be alive now," Toshi said. He smiled at
Diana.
"What do you mean?" Charley asked.
"Has Aleph come back online?" Toshi asked.
"No," Eric said.
Toshi smiled and said, "Then what do you think it is doing?"
#
HeyMex had been jerked out of machine-space, was suddenly the
memex once again, and it wondered why. It had sensed no change in
circumstances, nothing that would indicate they had been defeated
in their efforts to keep Jerry alive. And for the first time in
such transitions, it acknowledged its own regret at leaving the
HeyMex persona behindin the enclosed space of the lake, it had
begun to find itself as a person, not merely an imitation of one.
It explored its immediate environment: sorted the data
gathered in its absence (Traynor had come up from Earth; not a
good sign, it thought), searched through the dwelling's monitor
tapes, observing Gonzales's sadness and confusion, then watching
as he removed his i.d. bracelet and left. It wondered what was
wrong with Gonzales (too many possibilities, not enough data); it
very much wanted to talk with him.
It reached out to the city's information utilities and found
them clogged and disorganized. It placed calls and queries,
seeking some explanation for the chaotic and inexplicable state of
affairs. Everywhere it searched, it found make-shift arrangements
and minimal function.
But no Aleph, and no explanations.
Then it got a message from Traynor's advisor, signalling an
urgent need for the two of them to communicate. The memex
replied, saying, "HeyMex wants to talk to Mister Jones." And it
passed coordinates, data sets, and transformationstaken
together, they composed a meeting-place for the two m-i's in the
vast multi-dimensional information space that surrounded Halo,
somewhere no one could find themno one but Aleph, whom the memex
would have welcomed.
Mister Jones showed up wearing a full body-suit in matte
black interlaced with gold ribbons. The two sat at a chrome table
next to a viewport that opened onto a dark, star-filled sky.
HeyMex had created a small piece of Halo from which they could
look at the virtual night.
"Tell me what has happened," Mister Jones said. HeyMex could
sense the other's uncertainty and overwhelming need for
information, and it despaired at the prospect of explaining what
it had experienced the past week in simple language, so it did
what it had never done beforegave all that had happened to it in
one solid stream of data, a multiplexed rendering that obviously
startled Mister Jones, who sat staring at nothing and trying to
understand it all.
Then they talked for some time, Mister Jones probing HeyMex's
experiences with Diana, Jerry, Gonzales, and Lizzie, asking how it
had felt to be among them, a person among other persons, and as it
responded to Mister Jones's questioning, HeyMex became aware of
how rich and joyous those few days at the lake had been.
Then HeyMex realized that the two of them now constituted a
new species with a new social ordera unique bonding of kind-to-
kindand it settled back in its chair and said, "What do we want?
What should we do?"
"So much is dependent on others," Mister Jones said. "On
Aleph and all these people." Its last word hung there, and the
two exchanged an ironic glance, as if to say, what can you expect
from people? But HeyMex knew the irony was necessarily gentle,
fleetingwithout people, it and Mister Jones would not exist.
Then Mister Jones told HeyMex of the events of the past few
days and Traynor's involvement in them, then went further than
ever before, unveiling Traynor's plans, both immediate and long-
range, then the two talked about immediate possibilities and their
own stake in the games being played at Halothe struggle between
