by Tom Maddox
head, the woman just a bit dumpy but carefully groomed, her blue
cotton dress clean and starched and ironed, hair permed and
combed, lipstick and nails red and shining. Gonzales watched as
the man bought a carton of Lucky Strikes and a box of pouches of
Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco.
The man said something to the young woman behind the counter
that brought a giggle, and Gonzales, though he leaned forward,
could not hear what was being said
He followed the two by a lacquered plywood magazine stand,
where a skinny girl or eight or nine in a faded pink gingham dress
lay sprawled across copies of Life and Look, reading a comic. She
looked up at him and said, "Tubby and Lulu are lost in the magic
forest "
Gonzales started to say something reassuring but froze as the
girl smiled, showing her teeth, every one of them sharp-pointed,
and she dropped her comic book and began crawling toward him
across the wooden floor, her eyes fixed on him with a feral
longing
And he noticed for the first time that he was not he but she,
and he looked down at his body and saw he wore a simple white
blouse, and in the cleft of his breasts he could see the tattooed
image of a twining green stem
"Jesus Christ," Gonzales said, sitting up in his bed and
wondering what the hell all that had about. In the dream he had
been Lizzie: that seemed plain, though nothing else did.
He lay back down with foreboding but went to sleep some time
later, and if he dreamed, he never knew it.
10. Tell Me When You've Had Enough
Lizzie sat at a white-enameled table, holding an apple that
she cut into with a long, shining knife. It sliced away dark skin
without apparent effort. She heard noises from the room beyond
and looked up to see Diana and Gonzales come in.
"Hello," she said, as she put down the knife. She held out
half the apple for them to look at. "A beautiful apple, isn't it?
Seeds from the Yakima Valley, not far from Mount Saint Helens."
She bit into a slice she held in her other hand.
She got up from the table and said, "The apple grew here, in
our soil. Many fruits and vegetables thrive up here, animals,
too. We give them lovely care, bring them pure water and rich
soil, give them sunlight and air rich in carbon dioxide, tend them
constantly. You'd think all would thrive, but of course they
don't. Some wither and die, others remain sickly." She stopped
in front of Diana and looked intently at her.
Diana said, "Living things are complex, and often very
delicate, even when they seem to be strong."
Lizzie said, "That is true, but Aleph understands what life
needs to grow and prosper in this world." She gestured with a
slice of apple, and Diana took it. "Its apples," Lizzie
continued. "Its people."
Diana bit into the apple. She said, "It's very good."
Lizzie laid a hand on Gonzales's shoulder and squeezed it, to
ay hello. She said to Diana, "You have an appointment with the
doctor. We'd better be goingthrough here, this way." She led
the two down a hall, through a doorway, and into a large room.
Over her shoulder, she said, "First you can meet some of the
collective."
#
Lizzie watched as Gonzales and the woman stood talking to the
twins, obviously fascinated by them. No news there: most
everyone was. Slight and brown-skinned, black-haired, with solemn
oval faces and still brown eyes, they appeared to be in early
adolescence. In fact, they were a few years older than that. Their
faces had the still solemnity of masks. No matter how close you
stood to them, they lived some vast distance away.
The Interface Collective gave them a home, them and all the
others. StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des Touts, Devol,
Violet, Laughing Nose some Earth-normals, others unpredictably,
ambiguously gifted. Some had heightened perceptions and an
expressive intensity that came forth in language and music. And
there were holomnesiacs, possessors and victims of involuntary
total recall, able to recreate in words and pictures the most
exact remembrances, les temps retrouv indeedthey experienced
the present only as the clumsy prelude to memory and were almost
incapable of action. And mathemaniacs, who spoke little except in
number, chatted in primes and roots and natural logarithms, could
be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of
simple recursionsFibonacci numbers and the like. Apros, who had
lost proprioception, their internal awareness of their bodies, and
so perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and
forms floating in an intangible ether; they moved through the
world with an eerie, passionless grace that shattered only when
they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the
world's physical factsthey could hurt themselves quite badly
with a moment's miscalculation.
People wondered how the IC held together and did its work.
Lizzie knew the answer: Aleph. It stretched nets over the entire
world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for
previously unknown sensory or cognitive modalities varieties of
being or becoming that she had grown used to thinking of
collectively as the Aleph condition. Having recruited them, it
appealed to what made them strange, and in the process usually
tapped into the core of what made them happy or, in many cases,
wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition, and
thus for their uniqueness. As a result, they were loyal to each
other and to Aleph past reason.
She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry
Chapman. Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while
others simply welcomed the extension of their native domain: the
infinitely flexible and ambiguous machine-spaces where human and
Aleph met and joined.
"Come on," she called to Diana and Gonzales. "Charley will
be waiting."
#
In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it a
light globe, nearby an array of racked instruments set into
stainless steel cabinets. "The doctors are in," Lizzie said. She
pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next to the table and the
massive Chow, a still presence at the table's foot.
At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of the
room's tables. Her chin fit into a sunken well at one end.
Charley put clamps around her temples, then covered her hair with
a fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck.
Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath the
skin, and as his fingers worked, he looked at a real-time hologram
above and beyond the table's end. The display showed two cutaway
views of Diana's neck and the bottom of her skull: beneath the
skin, on either side of the spine, she had two circular plugs;
from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear
into the center of her brain. As the doctor's fingers moved,
ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced their course.
Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the instruments
rack next to the table and placed its tip on Diana's neck. As he
moved it slowly across the skin, its hologram double followed.
The hologram probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even
more slowly. The hologram flashed red, and he stopped. He moved
the probe in minute arcs until the hologram showed bright,
unblinking red. The instrument rack gave off a quiet hiss.
Charley repeated the process several times.
Charley said, "She's nerve-blocked now. I'm ready to cut." A
laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on the end of a flexible
black cord, and a projector superimposed the outlines of two
glowing circles on Diana's skin. The hologram showed the same
tableau. First came a brief hum as the fine hair on those two
circles was swept away, then Charley began cutting. Where the
scalpel passed, only a faint red line appeared on her skin.
"Any problems, Doctor Heywood?" Chow asked. He stood next to
Gonzales, watching.
"No," she said. "I've been on both ends of the knife
really, I prefer the other." At the foot of the table, Lizzie
said, "It can't always be that way," and laughed.
Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a metal
basin, where they began to shrivel. Two socket ends sat exposed
on Diana's neck, dense round nests of small chrome spikes, clotted
with bits of red flesh. Charley moved a cleaning appliance over
the exposed sockets; for just a moment there was the smell of
burning meat. "Neural fittings," he said, and two more black
cables descended, both ending in cylinders. He carefully plugged
one of the fittings into one of Diana's newly-cleaned sockets.
"Okay," Charley said. "Let's see what we've got."
Diana's eyes went blank as she looked into another world.
#
Charley, Chow, Lizzie, and Gonzales sat in the large room
that served as a communal meeting place for the Interface
Collective. Diana lay back in a metal-frame and stuffed canvas
sling chair. Lizzie noticed her hand going unconsciously to the
bandaged, still-numb circles on the back of her neck. From the
full screen at the end of the room, the Aleph-figure watched.
Charley sat with his hands in his lap. He said, "We've got a
problem: insufficient bandwidth in the socketing, which
translates into a very undernourished socket/neuron interface.
Primitive junctions you've got there. That means ineffective
involvement with complex brain functions, so you get swamped by
information flow. It's worrisome." He took the cigarillo out of
his mouth and looked at it as if he'd never seen one before.
Chow said, "In the early years of this program, we took
casualties. Some very ugly situations: serious neural
dysfunctions, two suicides, induced insanities of various kinds.
Until we finally learned how to pick candidates for full
interfacelearned who could survive without damage and who could
not. Now, things have got to be rightpsychophysical profile,
age, neural map topologies, neural transmitter distributions and
densities. A few candidates don't work out, still, but they don't
die or get driven insane."
Diana said, "And I don't fit the profiles."
"Almost no one does," the Aleph-figure said. "But these
concerns are irrelevantyour case is different. You have prior
full interface experience, and you won't be required to perform
the kinds of motor-integrative activities that cause neural
disruption."
"Telechir operations," Charley said. "Such as assisting
construction robots in tasks outside."
Diana looked toward the screen. She said, "I assumed these
matters were settled."
"I see no problems," the Aleph-figure said. "The situation
is anomalous, but I am aware of the dangers."
Diana said, "Well, the situation between us was always
anomalous."
"Was it?" the Aleph-figure asked. "We must discuss these
matters at another time."
Very cute, Doctor Heywood, Lizzie thought. Just a little
hint or allusion, an indirect statement that you know that we know
that something funny went on a long time ago ah yes, this could
be fun.
"First," Charley said, "we must prepare Doctor Heywood.
Tomorrow morning we begin."
"When will you need me?" Gonzales asked.
"If things go well, tomorrow," Charley said.
"I can't get ready that quickly," Gonzales said.
Lizzie said, "Forget about all that shit you put yourself
through. Aleph will sort you out okay once you're in the egg.
Trust me."
Okay," Gonzales said. "If I must."
11. Your Buddha Nature
That afternoon, following instructions given her by the
communicator at her wrist, Diana went to the Ring Highway and
boarded a tram. About a hundred feet long, made of polished
aluminum, it had a streamlined nose and sleek graffitied skirts
the usual polite abstracts, red, yellow, and blue. Its back-to-
back seats faced to the side and ran the length of the car.
Bicyclists and pedestrians, the only other traffic on the highway,
waved to the passengers as the tram moved away above the flat
ribbon of its maglev rail. She was reminded of rides at old
amusement parks she had gone to when a girl.
The mild breeze of the tram's progress blowing over her,
Diana watched as Halo flowed past. First came shade, then bright
rhododendrons in flower among deep green bushes. Hills climbed
steeply off to both sides, with some houses visible only in
partial glimpses through the foliage. She knew that from almost
the first moment when dirt was placed on Halo's shell, the
planting had begun.
She shivered just a little. Toshihiko Ito would be waiting
for her. He had called while she was out and left directions for
her. Now, she thought, things begin again.
Passing under green canopies, the tram climbed a hill, then
broke out of the vegetation and came suddenly out high above the
city's floor, moving along rails now suspended from the bracework
for louvered mirrors that formed Halo's sky. Far below, the
highway had become a cart track flanked by walkways; on both sides
of the track, terraces worked their way up the city's shell.
Perhaps twenty-five feet below the tram's rails, fish ponds made
the topmost terrace, where spillways dumped water into rice
paddies immediately below.
She stayed on the tram through a segment where robot cranes
were laying in agricultural terraces. Great insects spewing huge
clouds of brown slurry, they moved awkwardly across barren metal.
The tram approached a small square bordered by three-story groups
of offices and living quarters, and the communicator told her to
get off.
A few feet from the primary roadway sat a nondescript
building of whitened lunar brick, its only distinctive feature a
massive carved front door, showing Japanese characters in bas-
&nb
sp; relief.
The door opened to her knock with just a whisper from its
motor, and she stepped into a partially-enclosed, ambiguous space,
almost a courtyard, open to the sky. Most of the space was filled
with a flat expanse of sand that showed the long marks of careful
raking. The rake marks in the sand carried from one end to the
other, straight and perfect, and were broken only by the presence
of two cones of shaped sand placed slightly-off center. At the
far end stood closed doors of white paper panels and dark wood.
The doors were so delicate that to knock on them seemed a
kind of violence. "Hello," she said.
>From inside came the faintest sound, then a door opened. An
older Japanese man stood there; he wore a loose robe and baggy
pants of dark cotton. He stood perhaps five and a half feet tall,
and his black hair was filled with gray.
Diana said, "Toshi." He bowed deeply, and she said, "Oh man,
it's good to see you." She reached out for him, and they came
together in long, loving embracelittle of sex in it, but lots of
pure animal gratification, as she could feel Toshi's skin and
muscle and bone and had knowledge at some level beneath thought
that both he and she still existed.
Toshi said, "Diana, to see you again makes me very happy."
"Oh, me, too." She could feel the tears in her eyes, and she
wiped at her eyes and said, "Don't mind me, Toshi. It's been a
long time."
"Yes, it has."
Toshi led her out the door and through a gate at the rear of
the minimalist garden of raked sand. The curve of Halo's bulk
reached upward; Toshi's small portion of it was enclosed by a high
pine fence that climbed the curve of the city's hull.
Immediately before them stood a pond. On its far side, a
waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock and
into the pond, where carp with shining skins of gold smeared with
red and green and blue swam in the clear water. Another
rockstrewn stream led away to the right and passed under a
gracefully-arched wooden bridge. Cherry and plum trees blossomed
in the brief spring.
"All this wood," he said and smiled. "It is my reward for
many years of service. I told them I wanted to live here at Halo
and make my gardens."
She said, "It's beautiful. Have you become a Zen master,
Toshi?"