Halo: First Strike (25 page)

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