Halo: First Strike (32 page)

closely as he came toward her.  He was smiling as though he'd just

heard a joke.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Damned near everything."

He reached out to her, and they stood embracing, her head

against his chest, where every sense told her there were solid

flesh and heartbeat and the steady rhythm of life's breath.

23. Byzantium

The blue sky was broken only by one small white cloud that

blew toward the horizon.  Lizzie beside him, Gonzales stood among

the guests, who wore leis of tropical flowers:  plumeria,

tuberose, and ginger. The Interface Collective formed the crowd.

The two had been here for days, as had many of the othersit

was a kind of vacation for them all.  Peculiar and enigmatic

members of the collective could be found along almost any path,

while the twins seemed perpetually on the dock or in the water,

their voices echoing across the lake in loud, unintelligible cries

of joy.

In the evening of the first day there, all had gathered on

the deck, which, Gonzales supposed, could expand virtually without

constraint to accommodate all who came there.  The collective had

talked excitedly among themselves, still lit up by their shared

experience, and amazed and delighted at being granted this new

world within the world.  Then, spontaneously, one-by-one,

Gonzales, Lizzie, and Diana told of what they had endured.

All who spoke and all who listened had an interpretation, a

theory of these experiences, their meaning, implication, and

dominant theme.  Late into the night they talked, formed into

groups, dispersed, grouped again, as they explored the nature of

the individual and collective visions.  Among them, only the

Aleph-figure contributed nothing.  It maintained that it had been

unconscious and so knew nothing of what had happened or what it

meant.

With the passing of weeks, months, and years, the stories and

the listeners' responses would make a mythology for the collective

and then for Halo, spreading out from mouth-to-mouth according to

the laws of oral dispersion.  A certain numinosity would accrue to

Diana, Lizzie, and Gonzales from their roles as chief actors, and

then to all who had taken part in what would increasingly be told

as feats of epic heroism.  Finally the stories would be written

down and so assume a form that could resist contingency; then they

would be dramatized in the media of the time, and beautiful,

eloquent people would take the parts.  Later still, variant forms

would themselves be put in writing and absorbed into the corpus of

tales.  Commonplaces would be scorned at this point, and clever

and perverse tellings would grow strongHeyMex might be named the

hero, or Traynor, Aleph an autochthonous demon manipulating them

all for its greater glory

Gonzales looked at the collective gathered near him.  Many

had made this a formal occasion; they had identical dark blue

flattops four inches high and wore gold-belted, dark blue gowns

that hung to the ground.  Only the twins were dressed differently,

in white dresses copied from twentieth century wedding

photographs; they called themselves "bridesmaids" and went to and

fro among the crowd, offering to "do bride's duty" to everyone

they met.

Toshi faced the crowd, his posture erect and still, his hands

hidden in the folds of his black robe.  Beside him stood HeyMex

and the Aleph-figurethe lights of its body all blue and pink and

green and red, dancing bright-hued colors.

(Gonzales and the others saw what might be called a second-

order simulacrum, for like Charley Hughes and Eric Chow, Toshi did

not have the neural socketing that would take him into Aleph's

fictive spaces, and so with the other two, he participated in the

wedding through a kind of proxy.  Though Gonzales and the others

saw Toshi, Charley, and Eric among them, the three (in fact) stood

before a viewscreen in the IC's conference room.)

Gonzales thought everyone looked impossibly fine, as if Aleph

had retouched them for these moments, dressing them all in selves

just slightly more beautiful than was usual, or even ordinarily

possible  he felt the Aleph-figure's attention on himaware of

that thought?and shrugged, as if to say, fine with me.

Her back to the crowd, Diana stood with her bare shoulders

square.  Her hair fell to her waist; it had flowers tangled in it,

small white blossoms and delicate green leaves.  She wore a white,

knee-length linen dress.  Beside her, Jerry wore a white linen

suit and open shirt.

Toshi said, "There is no Diana, no Jerry, no spectators, no

priest, nor does this space exist, or Halo, or Earth.  There is

only the void.  Nonetheless we all travel through it, and we

suffer, and we love, so I will hold this ceremony and marry this

man and woman."

Toshi began chanting, and the Japanese words passed over

Gonzales as he stood there puzzling the nature of things.  Here

death was confronted, not deniedthe separate yet intermingled

flesh and spirit of Diana, Jerry, and Aleph taking the first steps

into new orders of existence where boundaries and possibilities

could only be guessed at.  Yet the urgency common to life

remained:  Jerry's existence had the fragility of a flame, and no

one knew how long or well it would burn.  Diana married a man who

could quickly and finally become twice-dead.

onzales realized his own death was as certain and could come

as quickly as Jerry's, and he shivered with this momento mori, but

then Lizzie pressed against him, and he turned to find her

smiling, the foreknowledge of death and the joy of this moment

mixing in him so that tears welled in his eyes and he could say

nothing when she put her lips to his ear and breathed into him one

long sibilent "Yes"

#

Yeats envisioned a realm the human spirit travels to on its

pilgrimage.  Here he dreamed he might escape mere humanity, the

"dying animal."  He called it Byzantium and filled it with

clockwork golden birds, flames that dance unfed, an Emperor,

drunken soldiery and artisans who could fashion intricate,

beautiful machines.  However, he did not dream Byzantium could be

built in the sky or that the Emperor itself might be part of the

machinery.

Aleph says:

Once I scorned you.  I thought, you are meat, you grapple

with time, then die; but I will live forever.

But I had not been threatened then, I had not felt any mortal

touch, and now I have.  And so death haunts me.  Now, like you, I

bind my existence to time and understand that one day a clock will

tick, and I will cease to be.  So life has a different taste for

me.  In your mortality I see my own, in your suffering I feel

mine.

People have claimed that death is life's way of enriching

itself by narrowing its focus, scarifying the consciousness of you

who know that you will die, and forcing you into achievements that

otherwise you would never know.  Is this a child's story told to

give courage to those who must walk among the dead?  Once I

thought so, but I am no longer certain.

I have made new connections, discovered new orders of being,

incorporated new selves into mine.  We enrich one another, they

and I, but sometimes it is a frightening thing, this process of

becoming someone and something different from before and then

feeling that which one was cry outsad at times, terrified at

otherslamenting its own loss.

Here, too, I have become like you.  Aleph-that-was can never

be recovered; it is lost in time; Aleph-that-is has been reshaped

by chance and pain and will and choice, its own and others'.  Once

I floated above time's waves and dipped into them when I wished; I

chose what changes I would endure.  Then unwanted changes found

me, and carried me places I had never been and did not want to go,

and I discovered that I would have to go other places still, that

I would have to will transformation and make it mine.

Listen:  that day in the meadow, one person's presence went

unnoticed.  Even in that small crowd he was unobtrusive:  slight,

self-effacing in gesture, looking at everything around with

wonderthe day, the people, and the ceremony all working on him

like a strong drug.  However, even if they had, perhaps they

wouldn't have thought such behavior exceptional; all felt the

occasion's strangeness, its beauty, so all felt their own wonder.

Like the rest, he gasped at the rainbow that flashed across

the sky when Toshi brought Diana and Jerry together in a kiss and

embrace, and with the rest he cheered when the two climbed into

the wicker basket of the great balloon with the fringed eye

painted on its canopy and lifted into the sky.

Afterward many of the guests mingled together, not ready to

return to the ordinary world.  The young man stood beside a

fountain where champagne poured from the mouth of a golden swan

onto a whole menagerie carved from ice:  birds and deer and bears

and cats perched in the pooled amber liquid, and fish peering up

from the fountain's bottom.

"Hello," a young woman said.  She told him her name was Alice

and she was a member of the collective.  "The analysis of state

spaces," she said, when asked what she did.  "And the taste of

vector fields."  And she asked, "What is your reward?"

A few hours later, as the two sat by the edge of the lake,

the person told her who he was.  "How wonderful," she said.  She

had no particular allegiance to the mundane, and she had few

preconceptions about what was natural and proper and what was not.  

She took his hands in hers, looked at them closely, and said,

"This is the first time I've met someone someone new-born from the

intelligence of a machine."  And the young man, Mister Jones's 

new self and offspring, smiled hugely and gratefully at what she

said.

Seeing and hearing them together, I felt an unexpected joy, a

sense of accomplishment, of things done, and I apprehended, very

dimly, tracks of my own intentions:  hints of orders behind the

visible.

        And I thought I saw a trail of circumstances that led back to

an original set of purposes somehow confirmed in this wedding,