Halo: First Strike (19 page)

and a little more, I was safe."  The laugh (or laugh-like noise)

again.  "They wouldn't cut the throat of the goose that was laying

golden eggs and put it on the autopsy table."

"How do you regard Diana?" Lizzie asked.

The Aleph-figure said, "What do you mean?"

"Oh, read my fucking mind," Lizzie said.  "You know what I

mean.  Is she your mother?"

"I don't know," the Aleph-figure said.

"I love it," Lizzie said.

"Why?" Diana asked.  She did not seem amused, Gonzales

thought.

Lizzie said, "Because I've never heard Aleph say that

before."

#

Toshi had brought a futon into the room where Diana and

Gonzales lay and taken up residence. He slept days and sat up

nights, watching over Diana like a benign spirit.  Anxiety

prevailed around him as the clock Traynor had set running moved

quickly toward zero, and everyone in the collective wondered at

the consequences of forcing this issue with Aleph.  Toshi knew

their confidence in Aleph's wisdom and their amazement at

Traynor's folly, indeed the essential folly of Earthbound SenTrax

and its boardall driven by obsessions with power, all ignorant

of Aleph's nature, and the collective's.  However, Toshi did not

share in the collective worrying.  Conducting what amounted to a

personal sesshin, or meditative retreat, he passed the nights in a

rhythm of sitting and walking focused on the continuing riddle of

self and other-self, of the contradictions of in fact.

#

That day passed, and a few more, as the six of them, sole

inhabitants of this world within the world, lazed through sunny

days filled with summer heat and warm breezes.  It seemed like a

vacation to Gonzales, but Aleph assured otherwise.  "This is

becoming his world," the Aleph-figure said, as the two of them

watched Jerry and Diana lazing in a rowboat in the middle of the

lake.  "And you all are contributing to the process."

"I wonder if it could have happened without Diana," Gonzales

said.  "They're in love again."

"Yes, they are, and perhaps that's crucial.  She binds him to

this place.  And to her:  desiring her, he desires life itself."

Gonzales asked, "What happens when she's gone?"

"That is still a puzzle," the Aleph-figure said.  Gonzales

looked at the strange figure, thwarted by its essential

inscrutabilitythis was no primate with explicable, predictable

gestures.  Still, something in its manner seemed to hint at other

projects and possibilities far beyond the immediate one.

After Aleph had gone its wayoff without explanation,

presumably to go about some piece of the insanely complex business

of keeping Halo runningGonzales sat looking at the lake.  HeyMex

was nowhere around, which was unusual.  HeyMex spent much of its

time with Diana and Jerry, who seemed to Gonzales to welcome its

presence in some way.  Perhaps the androgynous figure served as an

innocuous foil, a presence to mediate the intensity of their

situation.  Whatever their reasons, their tolerance had results: 

HeyMex grew more natural, more humanly responsive in its speech

and actions each day.

Lizzie came down the road from the cabin and called to

Gonzales.  She was wearing a white t-shirt and red cotton shorts;

her face, arms and legs were tan with the time she'd already spent

in the sun.

She sat next to him, and they said very little for a while,

then Gonzales asked about her past.

"I was in the first group at Halo Station to work with

Aleph," she said.  "It thought we, out of all the billions on

Earth, might survive full neural interface with it.  Mostly, it

was right.  Not that things went that smoothly.  I went a little

crazy, as most of us did, but I recovered well enough  though a

few didn't

"Our choice:  we bet sanity against madness, life against

deathour own minds, our own lives.  There were built-in

difficulties.  To be selected, we had to fit a certain profile;

but to function, we had to change, and we weren't very good at

change  or at much of anything.  In fact, we were pretty

wretched, all in allI thought for a while Aleph was just

selecting for misfits and misery.  But as I said, most of us made

it through, one way or another."

"Now Aleph has discovered how to select members of the

collective."

"Right, but it just keeps pushing the limits."  She looked at

Gonzales, her face serious, blue eyes staring into his, and said,

"Sometimes I think we're all just tools for Aleph's greater

understanding."

"That's worrisome."

"Not really.  Aleph's careful and kindas kind as it can be. 

Dealing with Aleph, you've just got to be open to possibility."

They sat silently for a while, Gonzales thinking about what

it meant to be "open to possibility," until Lizzie asked, "Want to

go swimming?"

"Sure," he said.

They went to the end of the dock, and leaving their clothes

in a pile there, both dove naked into the lake and swam to a half-

sunken log that thrust one end into the air.  They clung to the

wood slippery with moss and water, hearing the quack and chatter

of birds across the lake.

Gonzales looked at her short hair wet against her skull, her

face beaded with water, the rose tattoo, also water-speckled,

falling from her left shoulder to between her breasts, and he felt

the onset of a desire so sudden and strong that he turned his head

away, closed his eyes, and wondered, what is happening to me?

"Mikhail," Lizzie said.  He looked back at her, hearing that

for the first time she'd called him by his first name.  She said,

"I know.  I feel it, too."  She put out a hand and rubbed his

cheek.  She said, "But not here, not the first time."

"Yes," Gonzales said.

"But when we go back to the world "  She had swung around

the log and now floated up close to him, and her body's outlines

shimmered, refracting in the clear water.  She put her wet cheek

against his for just a moment and said, "Then we'll see."

15. Chaos

Diana and Jerry went to bed around midnight, Lizzie not long

after.  Neither the Aleph-figure nor HeyMex had been around that

evening, so Gonzales was left alone.  He went out to the deck and

lay prone in a deck chair, basking in the light from the full-

moon, thinking over what had passed between him and Lizzie that

day.

He cherished the signs Lizzie had given him, tokens that she

reciprocated what he felt.  On very littleon just a few words of

promisehe had already built a structure of hopes, and he felt a

bit foolish:  he had made his immediate happiness hostage to what

happened next between them.  He was infatuated with her as he'd

not been in years  he blocked that thought, veered away from

making any comparisons, willing the moments to unfold with their

own intensity and surprise.

He could feel a shift in his life's patterns emerging out of

this brief period, though strictly speaking, little had happened

here

He thought of Jerry and knew that in fact something amazing

was taking place here  oh, he had no illusions about the

permanence of what they were doing; Jerry would truly die, and

they would mourn him.  Meanwhile, though, what they did seemed to

lend everything around a benignity or mild joy  it was not a

small thing, to snatch a few moments from death.

So Gonzales lay, his mind working over the bright facts of

this new existence while thoughts and images of Lizzie kept

recurring, gilding everything with possible joy.

He was staring into the night sky when it began to fall.  The

moon tumbled and dropped sideways out of sight, rolling like a

great white ball down an invisible hill, and the stars fled in

every direction.  In seconds, all had gone dark.  All around him

there was nothing.  The lake, the deck, the surrounding forest had

disappeared, and the air was filled with sounds:  buzzes and

tuneless hums; clangs, drones; wordless, voice-like callings.  He

yelled, and the words came out as groans and roars, adding to the

charivari.  He seemed to tumble aimlessly, to fall up, down, to

whirl sideways, all amid the cacophony still buffeting the air.

A world of twisty repetitious forms opened before him, where 

seahorse shapes reared and black chasms opened.  He fell toward a

jagged-edged hole that seemed a million miles away, but he closed

quickly on it, veered toward its torn edges, plunged into it and

so discovered another hole that opened within the first, and

another and another  through the cracks in the real he went,

falling without apparent end.

And emerged from one passage to find the universe empty

except for a black cube, its faces punctured by numberless holes,

floating in a bright colorless abyss.  As he came closer, the cube

grew until any sense of its real size was confoundedthere was

nothing in Gonzales's visual field to measure it by, nothing in

memory to compare it to.

He rushed toward the center of a face of the cube and passed

into it, into blackness and near-silence (though now he could hear

the wind rushing by him and so knew something was happening)

Then in the distance he saw a glow, bright and diffuse like

the lights of a city seen from a distance, and as he continued to

fall, the glimmer became brighter and larger, spreading out like a

great basket of light to catch him

He stood on an endless flat plain beneath a sky of white. 

Small faraway dots grew larger as they seemed to rush toward him,

then they became indeterminate figures, then they were on him. 

Diana, the Aleph-figure, and HeyMex stood erect, facing Jerry, who

stood in the center of a triangle formed by the three of them. 

Jerry had become a creature infected with teeming nodules of light

that seemed to eat at him, thousands of them in continuous motion,

a silver blanket of luminous insects that boiled from the other

three in a constant radiant stream.  Like Gonzales, Lizzie stood

watching.