Halo: First Strike (26 page)

urgent need for the two of them to communicate.  The memex

replied, saying, "HeyMex wants to talk to Mister Jones."  And it

passed coordinates, data sets, and transformationstaken

together, they composed a meeting-place for the two m-i's in the

vast multi-dimensional information space that surrounded Halo,

somewhere no one could find themno one but Aleph, whom the memex

would have welcomed.

Mister Jones showed up wearing a full body-suit in matte

black interlaced with gold ribbons.  The two sat at a chrome table

next to a viewport that opened onto a dark, star-filled sky. 

HeyMex had created a small piece of Halo from which they could

look at the virtual night.

"Tell me what has happened," Mister Jones said.  HeyMex could

sense the other's uncertainty and overwhelming need for

information, and it despaired at the prospect of explaining what

it had experienced the past week in simple language, so it did

what it had never done beforegave all that had happened to it in

one solid stream of data, a multiplexed rendering that obviously

startled Mister Jones, who sat staring at nothing and trying to

understand it all.

Then they talked for some time, Mister Jones probing HeyMex's

experiences with Diana, Jerry, Gonzales, and Lizzie, asking how it

had felt to be among them, a person among other persons, and as it

responded to Mister Jones's questioning, HeyMex became aware of

how rich and joyous those few days at the lake had been.

Then HeyMex realized that the two of them now constituted a

new species with a new social ordera unique bonding of kind-to-

kindand it settled back in its chair and said, "What do we want? 

What should we do?"

"So much is dependent on others," Mister Jones said.  "On

Aleph and all these people."  Its last word hung there, and the

two exchanged an ironic glance, as if to say, what can you expect

from people?  But HeyMex knew the irony was necessarily gentle,

fleetingwithout people, it and Mister Jones would not exist.

Then Mister Jones told HeyMex of the events of the past few

days and Traynor's involvement in them, then went further than

ever before, unveiling Traynor's plans, both immediate and long-

range, then the two talked about immediate possibilities and their

own stake in the games being played at Halothe struggle between

corporation and collective, the attempts, apparently failed, to

keep Jerry alive, the present unnerving absence of Aleph from Halo

and accompanying disorder.  And they talked of how they might

influence the course of things.

#

Lizzie was having a very hard time putting up with Traynor,

Horn, and their feeble excuses for what they'd done.  She said,

"This is a major fuck-up.  That's both my personal opinion and the

collective's judgment."

Around the horseshoe table, Charley and Eric next to her, on

her left, while Horn and Traynor sat across the table, facing her. 

The wallscreen was blankTraynor had insisted on at least a

preliminary discussion without the collective present.  The place

at the bend of the horseshoe was empty, testimony to Showalter's

fate.

"We are not to blame that conditions have not optimized,"

Horn said.  "You have managed what we would have thought

impossible.  You have immobilized Aleph."

"If you had left things alone, Aleph would be fine," Lizzie

said.

Traynor said, "You people overstepped the limits of the

project and allowed it to continue far beyond the point at which

it should have been stopped.  Our decision to remove Doctor

Heywood and the memex from the interface was proper."

Proper, right, fuck you, Lizzie thought.  At almost the exact

instant Diana and HeyMex were disconnected from their group

interface to Aleph, all direct connections to Aleph had

spontaneously terminated, and demons had triggered in all systems

as Aleph's active involvement in Halo's functioning had ceased. 

The collective had gone into full support mode to assist the

limited capabilities of the system demons.  At the moment Halo was

running on augmented near-automatic, a workable condition only so

long as nothing too irregular occurred.

"It was the wrong decision," Lizzie said.  "Taken against the

advice of the collective.  Speaking of which, I demand they be

present here.

"No," Horn said.

"I don't think that would be advisable," Traynor said.

"In that case," Lizzie said, "I will advise"the word dipped

in acid"an immediate work slowdown.  You can try to run this

city yourself."

Horn's face was red, and he was writing quickly in his

notebook.

Traynor looked at the ceiling, his gaze abstracted.  Yeah,

listen to your machine; get some rational advice, Lizzie thought. 

Traynor sat with a raised hand, indicating he would speak soon,

then said, "Bring them here."

"They're ready," Lizzie said.  She flipped a switch set into

the tabletop in front of her, and about a quarter of the

collective appeared on the screenthe rest were working.  Many

still talked among themselves, but the twins, sitting in the front

row, were silent and intense.

"All right," Traynor said.  "They're here.  Now what?"

"Any comments on what's happening?" Lizzie asked.  The talk

passing among the collective stopped, and they all looked toward

the screen.

Stumdog stood, heaving his bulk from the floor with an

audible wheeze, and moved forward from the crowd.  "Aleph is 

still there," he said.  "But far away, doing, oh doing, doingdoing

 something else."  He waved his hands, trying to sculpt the

invisible air into the things he could not describe, then moved

back and sat down.

"Thank you," Lizzie said.  Traynor and Horn looked at one

another, apparently amazed.  Assholes, thought Lizzie.

One of the twins stood.  She wore an absurd homemade skirt

with a rabbit graffitied on its front.  Her dark face was streaked

with white paint.  She said, "Rotovators spin, giant wheels

beneath your feet, as Halo revolves, and they sweep the wind

through the city, blow the seeds and pollen, bring breezes to cool

the angry brow.  Day follows night follows day.  Seasons begin

again, stirring dead roots, mixing memory and desire.  Crops grow,

we eat them.  Food turns to shit, we die."

The other twin, dressed in black coveralls, stood and said,

"And out of shit and death come life.  Jerry has gone to the

ovens, been rendered to his parts, given to the city.  But still

he lives and teeters on final annihilation in another world where

Aleph holds all Jerry's vast humanity in its tender grip."

The first twin said, "Aleph had helpers in this thing, but

you have taken them away, pair by pair, and now Aleph alone gives

life to Jerry.  Everything Aleph isto life, to Jerry.  What can

Aleph do?  Stupid bastards rob the tomb before the man inside can

live again."

"Give it all back," the second twin said.

"To Queen Maya the mother of Buddha," the first twin said. 

"To Isis the mother of Horus, Myrrha the mother of Adonis, to

Hagar the mother of Ishmael and Sarah the mother of Isaac, to Mary

the mother of Jesus, to Demeter, the mother of Persephone, stolen

by Hades."

"To all you steal from," the second twin said.  "All who are

born as well as all who give birth."

"Give it all back," the twins said in unison.  And the first

twin said, "That's about it, I think."  They turned their backs to

the camera and curtsied together for the collective.

"Hoot hoot hoot," came the sounds from the collective, "hoot

hoot hoot," louder and louder.

Part V. of V.

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all

profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later

every man will do all things and know everything.

Borges, "Funes, the Memorious"

19. Speaking, Dreaming, Fighting

At the moment Jerry died, Aleph acted.  Intuitively,

immediately, as you might offer a hand to a drowning person, it

reached out and laid hold of Jerry's self and preserved it.  Jerry

had lived inside Aleph, Aleph inside Jerryit could not abandon

him.

However, even for Aleph, whose resources were extravagant,

the rescue proved dear.  As it engaged Jerry, it had to disengage

from essential functions of its own:  in strokes that cut at its

heart, it relinquished control of Halo, then its very habitation

of Halo, in a process that quickly abstracted Aleph from the city,

the city from Aleph.  In a fateful proof of the essential

principle that a self must be embodied, Aleph dispersed among the

clouds of its own phase-space, the ties lost that bound it to the

world.  Jerry had been saved, Aleph lost.

Still, the situation contained possibilities.  Aleph had

never feared death, believing itself essentially immortal, but had

always been aware of the possibility of damage, whether through

accident or malice, so it had prepared, circumspectly, against the

thing it feared mostloss of self.  Now its damaged, fragmented

self discovered what Aleph had left behind:  a kind of emergency

kit, laid up against calamities not clearly imagined.

Dynamic and complex beyond any machine, perhaps any organism,

Aleph could not be replicated or contained by any conventional

means, so Aleph had devised an unconventional means, a new object

one capable of transcribing its complexity.  Aleph had made a

memory palace of language, in the form of a single, monstrous

sentence.

Now, encountering the sentence, what remained of Aleph

discovered:

The sentence unwinds according to laws built into its

structure, principles disclosed by its unwinding.  Discovery and

development occur at the same instant, one making the other

possible.  By saying the sentence, Aleph would discover what the

sentence held nextat every node of meaning within the sentence,

structures would unfold that named all Aleph had ever known and