Halo: First Strike (15 page)

"All right," she said.  "If you must."  She'd pushed them to

take her as far as they could without putting her under; she hated

general anesthetic, despised being a passive animal under

treatment.

Once more she was lying face-down on the examination table

where Charley had removed the skin over her sockets.  Neural

connecting cables trailed from the back of her neck to the

underside of the table.

Lizzie Jordan stood over her and stroked her cheek for a

moment.  Gonzales stood on the other side of the table, his eyes

still turned to the holostage above her, where the scene that had

driven her interface into overload still showed in hologrammatic

perfection.  Toshi Ito stood at the head of the table, a hand

resting on her shoulder.  Eric Chow and Charley stood in front of

the monitor console, discussing in low voices the last run of

percept transforms.

Gonzales said, "Are you okay?"

"I'll be all right," she said.  She turned her head to look

at him and smiled, but she could feel the tight muscles in her

face and knew her smile would look ghastly.

Toshi rested his hand on her shoulder.  "Who wants to know?"

he said, and she laughed.  Gonzales looked confused.

Charley rubbed his hands through his hair, making it even

spikier than usual.  "I'll prep her," he said.  He looked at

Gonzales, Toshi, and Lizzie.  "Required personnel only," he said.

"Right," Gonzales said.  He leaned over and took Diana's hand

for a moment and said, "Good luck."

Lizzie kissed Diana on the cheek.

Diana said, "Let Toshi stay."

"Sure," Charley said.

Lizzie said, "Come on, Gonzales."

#

As Charley fed anesthetic into her iv drip, Diana felt as if

she were suffocating, then a strong metallic smell welled up

inside her.  She was aware of every tube and fitting stuck into

herfrom the iv drip to the vaginal catheter and nasopharyngeal

tubeand they all were horrible, pointless violations of her body

 nothing fit right, how long could this go on?

A tune played.

The melody was simple and repetitious, moderately fast with

light syncopation, and sounded tinny, as if it came from a child's

music box.  Then came the song's bridge, and as the notes played,

she remembered them; the primary melody returned, and now it was

familiar as well, and she hummed with it, thinking of herself as a

small girl hearing the song from her great-great-grandmother,

whose face suddenly appeared, younger than Diana usually

remembered her, impossibly alive in front of her, then spun into

darkness.

Shards of memory:

Her mother's arms wrapping her tightly, Diana sobbing

Her father holding a fish to sunlight, its silver body

glistening, rainbow-struck

A girl in a pink, mud-clotted dress yelling angrily at her

A small boy with his pants pulled down to show his penis

On they came, a cast of characters drawn from her oldest

memories, of family long dead and childhood friends long forgotten

or seldom recollected  each fragment passing too quickly to

identify and mark, leaving behind only the strong affect of old

memory made new, the taste of the past rising fresh from its

unconscious store, where the seemingly immutable laws of time and

change do not prevail, and so everything lives in splendor.

Then every bodily sensation she had ever felt passed through

her allimpossiblyat once.  She itched and burned, felt heat

and cold; felt sunlight and rain and cold breeze and the slice of

a sharp knife across her thumb  felt the touch of another's hand

on her breasts, between her legs; felt herself coming

Then she lived once again a day she had thought was finished

except as context for her worst dreams:

In the park that Sunday people were everywherefamilies and

young couples all around, the atmosphere rich with the ambience of

children at play and early romance.  Sunlight warmed the grass and

brightened the day's colors.  Diana lay on her blanket watching it

all and luxuriating in the knowledge that her dissertation had

been approved and she would soon have her degree, a Ph.D. in

General Systems from Stanford.  Tonight she was having dinner with

old friends, in celebration of the end of a long, hard process.

She read for a while, a piece of early twenty-first century

para-fiction by several hands called The Cyborg Manifesto, then

put the book down and lay with her eyes closed, listening to a

Mozart piano concerto on headphones.  As the afternoon deepened,

the families began to leave.  Many of the young couples remained,

several lying on blankets, locked in embrace.  A group of young

men wearing silk headbands that showed their club affiliation

directed the flight of robo-kites that fought overhead, their

dragon shapes in scarlet and green and yellow dipping and

climbing, noisemakers roaring.  The wind had shifted and appeared

to be coming off the ocean now, freshening and cold.  Time to go.

She passed by the Orchid House and saw that the door was

still open, so she decided to walk through it, to feel its moist,

warm air and smell its sweet, heavy smells.  She had just passed

through the open entry when a man grabbed her and flung her across

a wooden potting table.  Stunned, she rolled off the table and

tried to crawl away as he closed and locked the door.

He caught her and turned her on her back, punched her in the

face and across her front, pounding her breasts and abdomen with

his fists, crooning and muttering the whole time, his words mostly

unintelligible.  She went at him with extended fingers, trying to

poke his eyes out; when he caught her arms, she tried to knee him

in the crotch, but he lifted a leg and blocked her knee.  His face

loomed above her, red and distorted. The sounds of the two of them

gasping for air echoed in the high ceiling.

He ripped at her clothes as best he could, tearing her blouse

off until it hung by one torn sleeve from her wrist, hitting her

angrily when her pants would not rip, and he had to pull them off

her.  Holding the ends of her pants legs, he dragged her across

the dirt floor, and when the pants came off, she fell and rolled

and hit her face on the projecting corner of a beam.  She tasted

dirt in her mouth.

In a voice clotted with rage and fear and mortal stress, he

said, "If you try to hurt me again, I'll kill you."

He turned her over again and stripped her panties to her

ankles. She tried to focus on his face, to take its picture in

memory, because she wanted to identify him if she lived.  She

smelled his sweat then felt his flaccid penis as he rubbed it

between her thighs.  "Bitch," he was saying, over and over, and

other things she couldn't understandthe words muttered in

imbecile repetitionand when he finally achieved something like

an erection, he cried out and began hitting her across the face

with one hand as with the other he tried to push himself into her. 

She could tell when he was finished by the spurt of semen on her

leg.

He stood over her then, saying, "No no no, no no no," and she

saw he was holding a short length of two by four.  He began

hitting her with it as she tried to shield her head with crossed

arms.

She awoke in the Radical Care Ward of San Francisco General,

in a dark, pain-filled murk.  The pain and disorientation would

fade, but the darkness was, so it seemed, absolute.  The rapist

had left her for dead, with multiple skull fractures and a

bleeding brain, and though the surgeons had been able to minimize

the trauma to most of her brain, her optic nerves were damaged

beyond repair:  she was blind.

For an instant Diana knew where and when she was.  "Please!"

she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg.  "No more!" 

Something changed then, and the fragments moved forward quickly,

faster than she could follow.  However, she knew the story they

were telling:

Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact

description of the man, and that and the DNA match done from semen

traces left on her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had

come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted once

for rape and assault.  He was a pathetic monster, they told her, a

borderline imbecile who had been violently and sexually abused as

a child; he was also physically very strong.  Weeks later, he was

caught in Golden Gate Parklooking for another victim, so the

police believedand he was convicted less than three months

later.  A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the

mandatory sentence:  surgical neutering and lifetime imprisonment,

no parole.

And so that part of it all was closed.

Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a

delicate, erratic course.  Even with therapies that minimized

long-term trauma through a combination of acting-out and

neurochemical adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been

constant companions during the months she convalesced and took

primary training in living blind.

However, once she had acquired the essential competence to

live by herself, she had become very active, and very different

from who she had been.  In particular, she had no longer cared

what others wanted from her.  Since her early years in school in

Crockett, the city at the east end of the East Bay Conurbation,

she had been an exceptional student in a conservative mode:  very

bright, obedient to the demands others made on her and self-

directed in pursuing them.  Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and

had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she had sought before, the

degree included, seemed irrelevant, trivial:  she couldn't imagine

why she had bothered with any of it.

She had decided to become a physician.  She had sufficient

background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play Laws,

she could force a school to admit her.  Once she was in, she would

do whatever was necessary:  her state-supplied robotic assistant

could be trained to do what she couldn't.  She would go, she would

finish, she would discover how to see again:

It had been just that simple, just that difficult