Halo: First Strike (24 page)

finding out what lay beyond the visible.  "I'll go by myself."

She said, "Go where you wish."  Her black hair sparkled with

lights.  He wondered when she'd put them there, then thought maybe

they'd been there all along.

Behind him one of the twins whispered, "No need to be afraid. 

Go up, go down, where your fancy takes you."

17. Flying, Dying, Growing

Gonzales walked through a gloomy passageway where the ceiling

came down to barely a foot above his head, and the dim shapes of

massive machinery loomed in twilight.  Here in the deepest layers

of the city, he could hear Halo's most primitive voices:  water

from the upper world crashed and gurgled and sighed; hull plates

groaned under acceleration; turbines whined.

He was suddenly aware of his proximity to the unmoving

shield, the circle of crushed rock that sat just outside the

city's rim, protecting Halo's soft-bodied inhabitants from the

bursts of radiation that could cook their flesh.  Barely two

meters away inside the outer shield, the living ring rotated at

nearly two hundred miles per hour, and Gonzales had a sudden

picture in his mind's eye of the two ever so slightly brushing,

and of the horrible consequences, Halo tearing itself apart as the

fragile ring shattered on massive, unmoving rock

Gonzales froze as he saw strangely-shaped things moving among

the twining machinery.  "What?" he called.  "What?"

Shadows and light

Ahead a warm pool of yellowGonzales ran toward it.  Above

an open doorway, the sign read:

SPOKE 3 INTERNAL LIFT

INTENDED FOR HEAVY MACHINERY

The elevator's floor was scarred metal, and the walls were lined

with bent protecting struts of bright steel.  Gonzales stepped

inside.

"Will you take me up?" Gonzales asked.

"Yes," the lift said.  "How far do you want to go?"

"To Zero-Gate."  And Gonzales looked back into the darkness

beyond, realizing he was still afraid that whatever he had seen

there would come.  "Please, let's go," he said, the doors slid

closed, and he felt a surge of acceleration and heard the whine of

electric motors.

Gonzales watched the lift's progress on a lighted display

over the doorway.   When the lift stopped, he stood in silence,

euphoric in near-zero gravity, ready to fly.  He stepped through

the open doors and followed arrows along a small corridor of plain

steel walls and ceiling and a deck covered by thin protective

carpet, like a ship's interior.  His feet seemed ready to lift

from the flooring.

Overhead lights pulsed slowlydimming, color shifting into

the blue, the red, then back to yellow, growing brighter  a

musical note sounded just at the limits of hearing.  Gonzales

stopped, fascinated.  So beautiful, these little thingsHalo had

such odd surprises, when one looked closely.

A voice said, "Please choose traction slippers."  Gonzales

saw what seemed to be hundreds of soft black shoes stuck to the

wall by their own velcro soles.  He took a pair and slipped them

over his shoes, then tightened their top straps.  His fingers were

large, numb sausages at the end of long, long arms.

He stepped into a round chamber marked SPIN DECOUPLER and

walked out into the still center of the turning world.  As he

moved forward gingerly in the near-zero gravity, his feet

alternately stuck to the catwalk surface and pulled loose with

small ripping sounds.

He moved to the rail and looked into the open space of Zero-

Gate.  It opened out and out and out until he could feel the vast

sphere as a pressure in his chest.

People flew here, he had known that, but he had not imagined

how beautiful they would be, scores of them hanging from strutted

wings the colors of a dozen rainbows.  Most of the flyers wore

tights colored to match their sails, and they danced like

butterflies across the sky, calling to one another, their voices

the only sounds here, shouting warning and intention.

Then a flyer's wings collapsed as they caught on another

flyer's feet, and the man with crippled wings tumbled through the

air in something like slow motion, pulling in his wing braces as

he fell.  Gonzales wanted to scream.  He leaned over the railing

to watch as the flyer curled into a ball, his feet pointed toward

the wall in front of him, and hit the wall and seemed to sink into

its deep-padded surface.

The man grabbed bunched wall fabric and worked his way down

to a catwalk across the expanse of Zero-Gate almost directly in

front of Gonzales and pulled himself across the railing.  He stood

and waved.  All the other flyers cheered, their voices rising and

falling in a rhythmical chant with words Gonzales couldn't

understand.    

A voice said, "If you do not have clearance to fly, please

secure yourself with a safety line."  No, Gonzales thought, almost

in despair, I don't have clearance.  He didn't understand how to

flywhat was dangerous and what was not.  Looking behind him, he

saw chrome buckle ends spaced around the wall and went over and

pulled on one.  Safety line paid out until he stopped and looped

the line around his waist and snapped the buckle to it.

He suddenly felt himself falling.  His eyes told him he stood

tethered, but he was confused by the constant motion of the flyers

in the air around him, and he felt that nothing held him to the

ground (there was no ground), nothing could keep him from falling

into this sky canyon, this abyss.

A flyer came toward him then, sweeping across the intervening

space with the effortless grace of a dream of flight, the flyer's

wings marked with green and yellow dragons, body sheathed in

emerald tights, and Gonzales suddenly believed this was someone

come to get him, how or why he couldn't say.

He tried to get into the spin decoupler, but his safety line

restrained him until he unsnapped it, then he almost fell into the

metal cylinder as the line hissed home behind him.  Out of the

decoupler, he ran along the corridor, his steps taking him high

into the air so that he lost his balance and caromed off a wall

and rolled along the floor, his slippers grabbing fruitlessly at

the carpet with a series of brief ripping sounds.

He crawled toward an elevator, not the one he'd ridden up but

an ordinary passenger lift, empty thank god, and he tore the

slippers off his feet and stood and moved through the lift door. 

"Down," Gonzales said and felt the floor move and still felt

himself falling.

#

Gonzales had been sitting in the Plaza for some time.

Fifty meters away, against the wall of the Virtual Caf,

crawled a profusion of biomorphic shapes, large and small, all in

constant motion.  Delicate creatures of pink and green thread

floated on invisible currents; leering amoeboids with wide eyes

and gaping, saw-toothed mouths put out pseudopodia and flowed into

them; red corkscrews thrust in phallic rhythm against all they

touched; great undulating paramecium shapes swam like rays among

the smaller fauna

Gonzales floated somewhere among them:  he seemed to have

lost his body as well as his mind.  Inside his head a voice

lectured him on body knowledge:

Proprioception, the voice said, vision, and the vestibular

sensethey tell us we own the body we live in.  Think, man,

think:  where have you placed your body's senses?

Few people were in the Plaza.  Gonzales had stepped out of

the lift and into darkness and fog, an unfamiliar cityscape, where

clouds hung close to the ground and truncated shapes appeared

suddenly in the mist.

He heard the swish of a sam's passage and suddenly,

unpremeditatedly called out, "What is going on?  Why is it cold

and foggy?"

The sam stopped.  It said, "Why do you wish to know?"

"It just seems  unusual," Gonzales said.

"It is."

The sam's extensors moved with cryptic, malign intent, and

its words implied an uncertain threat as it said, "Do you require

assistance?"

What did it mean by that?  How did it know something was

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