Halo: First Strike (23 page)

as all cultivators do, to isolate certain species and provide

favorable conditions for their growth.  But our 'seeds,' if you

will, the spores, are very small things, and to locate them,

isolate them, bring them to spawn, this requires delicacy and

techniquein a word, art."

She paused, and Gonzales nodded.

They came to a low structure of plastic sheets draped over

metal walls and stopped in front of a door labeled STERILE

INOCULATION ROOM.  They passed through a hanging sheet into an

anteroom to the sterile lab beyond.  She said, "Take a look

through the window here."  Beyond the window, small robots worked

at benches barely two feet high.  Like the robot he'd seen in the

Berkeley Rose Gardens, they had wheels for locomotion and grippers

with clusters of delicate fibroid fingers at their ends.

She said, "Their hands have a delicacy and precision no human

being can achieve.  And they are single-minded in their

concentration on the jobthey preserve our intentions completely

and purely."

"They are machines."

"If you wish."  She pointed through the window, where one of

the robots manipulated ugly looking inoculation needles as it

transferred some material into Petri dishes.  She said, "By their

gestures I can identify my sams, even in a crowd of others."

Gonzales said nothing.  She went on, "The pure mushroom

mycelium is used to inoculate sterile grain or sawdust and bran. 

The mycelium expands through the sterile medium, and the result is

known as spawn."

"Too much technical stuff," she said, and smiled.  "Once we

have spawn, the sams can take their baskets and go through Halo,

placing the spawn into dead grass and wood, into seedling roots 

and the spawn will grow and bear fruitmushrooms."  She paused. 

"Any questions?"  Gonzales shook his head, no.  "Then let's go

next door."

They left the lab anteroom through the hanging curtain and

turned left.  The building next to the lab was a fragile tent-like

structure of metal struts and draped sheets of colorful plastic

red, blue, yellow, and green.

"This way," she said, from behind him.  She said, "It's

around dinnertime for me.  Are you hungry?"

"Not really," he said.  "What is this place?"

"Home," she said.

The interior was filled with cheery, diffuse lightthe shaft

of sunlight Gonzales had seen outside here brought in and spread

around.  The place seemed almost conventional, with ordinary walls

and ceilings of painted wallboard.

The twins waited in the kitchen, among flowers and bright

yellow plastic work surfaces.  They sat at a central table and

chairs of bleached oak.

"Would you two like to eat?" Trish asked.

"Yes," the Alice twin said.  "And we think that Mister

Gonzales"she giggled"should have the special dinner."

"I don't think so," Trish said.

"What is she talking about?" Gonzales asked.

The woman seemed hesitant.  She said, "I supply the

collective with psychotropic mushrooms, varieties of Psilocybe for

the most part."

"They use them to prepare for interface," Gonzales said,

guessing.

"Sometimes," she said.  "At other times, it's not clear what

they're using them for."

"For inspiration," the Alice twin said.  "For imagination."

"Consolation," the Eurydice twin said.  "When I remember

Orpheus and our trip from the Undergroundthe terrible moment

when he looked back and so lost me foreverthen I am very sad,

and I eat Trish's mushrooms to plumb my sorrow.  And when I think

of the day I joined the maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces, I eat

Trish's mushroomswhich are the same as we ate that day, the body

of the godthen I recall the frenzy with which we attacked the

beautiful singer, and I recall my guilt afterward, and my sorrow,

but I take solace from the knowledge that the god was pleased."

"And I," the Alice twin said, "can grow ten feet tall."

"The mushrooms can serve many purposes," Trish said.

"You should eat mushrooms," the Alice twin said.  "You are

both sad and confused.  They will help you grow large or small as

the occasion demands."

"Perhaps I am sad and confused," Gonzales admitted.  "But I

think they would make me more so."  Around him, the room lights

pulsed ever so slightly, and the shapes at the edge of his vision

flickered.

"Confused into clarity," the Eurydice twin said.  "If you

cannot come up from Underground, you must go deeper in."

An absurd idea, but it put barbs into his skin and clung

there.  Gonzales asked, "Do the collective ever take the mushrooms

after interface?"  Often enough, he had prepared to go into the

egg by taking psychotropic drugs; why not the reverse, eat the

mushrooms to recover from interface?  And he thought, the logic of

Underground, of the Mirror.

Suddenly he felt anxiety grip him so he could hardly breathe. 

He tottered a bit, then sat in a chair and looked at the others. 

The three women watched as he sat breathing deeply.  He said, "I

want to take the mushrooms."

"Are you sure?" Trish asked.

"I want to."

"All right," she said.  "First I will feed the twins, then I

will prepare your mushrooms."

Trish went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic bag

filled with a mixture of vegetables and bean sprouts.  She pulled

the rubber stopper from an Erlenmeyer flask and poured oil into

the bottom of an unpainted metal wok that was heating over an open

gas ring.  She waited until light smoke came out of the wok, then

dumped in the vegetables and sprouts and stirred the mix for a

minute or two.  She unplugged the rice cooker, a ceramic-coated

steel canister, bright red, and carried it to where the twins sat.

She put shining aluminum plates and chopsticks in front of

the twins, opened the rice cooker and swept rice onto each plate,

then tilted the wok and poured the steaming mixture inside it onto

the rice.  "There," she said.  "That's for you two."  She looked

across to where Gonzales sat, now oddly calm, and she said, "I'll

be back in a minute."

The twins ate with their eyes fixed on Gonzales.

Trish came back with a small wire basket of mushrooms. 

"Psilocybe cubensis," she said.  "Of a variety cultivated here

that has undergone some changes from the Earth-bound kind."  She

held up an unremarkable mushroom with long white stem and brownish

cap.

"Do you ever make mistakes in identifying the mushrooms?"

Gonzales asked.

"No," Trish said.  She was smiling.  "We do not have to seek

among thousands of kinds for the right one, as mushroom hunters

do.  These are ours, grown as I told you, for our own needs."  She

lay the mushrooms on the chopping block and began to slice them. 

"I cleaned them in the shed," she said. When she was done, she

used the knife to slide the slices into a sky-blue ceramic bowl. 

She turned on the wok, poured more oil into it, and stood smiling

at Gonzales as the oil heated.  When the first smoke came, she

swept the mushrooms into the wok with quick motions of her

chopsticks.  She stirred them for perhaps half a minute, then

tilted the wok and poured them into the blue bowl.  She placed the

bowl in front of Gonzales and laid black lacquered chopsticks

across its rim.

Gonzales picked up the chopsticks, lifted his plate, and

began to eat, shoveling the mushrooms into his mouth.  Back at the

wok, she stirred more vegetables in and said, "I'm making my

dinner."

Gonzales sat back, looking at the empty bowl.  Well, he

thought, now we'll see.  He said, "How many kinds of mushrooms do

you grow?"

"Quite a few, some rather ordinary, others esotericfor

purposes of research.  Aleph determines what kinds, how many."

The twins had gone completely silent.  As Trish ate, they

watched Gonzales, who had gone totally fatalistic.  What he had

done seemed incredibly stupid, like applying heat to a burn

common sense would tell him that.  He smiled, thinking, what did

common sense have to do with his life these days?  The twins

smiled back at him.

"Who was that woman?" Gonzales asked.

"Who do you mean?" Trish asked.

"The old woman, the potter," Gonzales said.

"She makes pots, and she teaches," Trish said.  "She's

employed by SenTrax; she was brought here by Aleph."

"Why?" Gonzales asked.  What did SenTrax or Aleph have to do

with potting?

"Pour encourager les autres," one of the twins said,

distinctly.  Gonzales turned but couldn't tell who had spoken. 

Trish laughed.  "To encourage art at Halo," she said. 

"Pottery from lunar clay, stained glass and beta cloth tapestries

from lunar silica."

Gonzales sat thinking on these things until he realized that

Trish had finished eating some time ago, and they had been sitting

at the table for some timea very long time, it suddenly seemed

to Gonzales.  Involuntarily, he shoved his chair back from the

table.

Trish said, "It's all right."  The twins got up from their

chairs and walked behind him.  When he started to turn, he felt

their hands on his shoulders and neck, kneading muscles that went

liquid beneath their pressure.  Trish said, "It's begun.  Now you

must go walking around Halo, up and down in it, to and fro "  She

paused, and the twins' hands continued to work.  She said, "Walk

in the woods, see what we have growing there  shaggy manes,

garden giants, oyster and shiitake "

"Shiitake," he saidshi-i-ta-keythe name's syllables

falling like drops of molten metal through water

She said, "The twins can guide you, or a sam can take you

with it on an inoculation trip.  Or if you prefer, you can go by

yourself."

"Yes," he said, the image suddenly very compelling of him

walking around the entire circle of the space city, exploring,