Halo

by Tom Maddox

  "Too much technical stuff," she said, and smiled. "Once we

  have spawn, the sams can take their baskets and go through Halo,

  placing the spawn into dead grass and wood, into seedling roots

  and the spawn will grow and bear fruitmushrooms." She paused.

  "Any questions?" Gonzales shook his head, no. "Then let's go

  next door."

  They left the lab anteroom through the hanging curtain and

  turned left. The building next to the lab was a fragile tent-like

  structure of metal struts and draped sheets of colorful plastic

  red, blue, yellow, and green.

  "This way," she said, from behind him. She said, "It's

  around dinnertime for me. Are you hungry?"

  "Not really," he said. "What is this place?"

  "Home," she said.

  The interior was filled with cheery, diffuse lightthe shaft

  of sunlight Gonzales had seen outside here brought in and spread

  around. The place seemed almost conventional, with ordinary walls

  and ceilings of painted wallboard.

  The twins waited in the kitchen, among flowers and bright

  yellow plastic work surfaces. They sat at a central table and

  chairs of bleached oak.

  "Would you two like to eat?" Trish asked.

  "Yes," the Alice twin said. "And we think that Mister

  Gonzales"she giggled"should have the special dinner."

  "I don't think so," Trish said.

  "What is she talking about?" Gonzales asked.

  The woman seemed hesitant. She said, "I supply the

  collective with psychotropic mushrooms, varieties of Psilocybe for

  the most part."

  "They use them to prepare for interface," Gonzales said,

  guessing.

  "Sometimes," she said. "At other times, it's not clear what

  they're using them for."

  "For inspiration," the Alice twin said. "For imagination."

  "Consolation," the Eurydice twin said. "When I remember

  Orpheus and our trip from the Undergroundthe terrible moment

  when he looked back and so lost me foreverthen I am very sad,

  and I eat Trish's mushrooms to plumb my sorrow. And when I think

  of the day I joined the maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces, I eat

  Trish's mushroomswhich are the same as we ate that day, the body

  of the godthen I recall the frenzy with which we attacked the

  beautiful singer, and I recall my guilt afterward, and my sorrow,

  but I take solace from the knowledge that the god was pleased."

  "And I," the Alice twin said, "can grow ten feet tall."

  "The mushrooms can serve many purposes," Trish said.

  "You should eat mushrooms," the Alice twin said. "You are

  both sad and confused. They will help you grow large or small as

  the occasion demands."

  "Perhaps I am sad and confused," Gonzales admitted. "But I

  think they would make me more so." Around him, the room lights

  pulsed ever so slightly, and the shapes at the edge of his vision

  flickered.

  "Confused into clarity," the Eurydice twin said. "If you

  cannot come up from Underground, you must go deeper in."

  An absurd idea, but it put barbs into his skin and clung

  there. Gonzales asked, "Do the collective ever take the mushrooms

  after interface?" Often enough, he had prepared to go into the

  egg by taking psychotropic drugs; why not the reverse, eat the

  mushrooms to recover from interface? And he thought, the logic of

  Underground, of the Mirror.

  Suddenly he felt anxiety grip him so he could hardly breathe.

  He tottered a bit, then sat in a chair and looked at the others.

  The three women watched as he sat breathing deeply. He said, "I

  want to take the mushrooms."

  "Are you sure?" Trish asked.

  "I want to."

  "All right," she said. "First I will feed the twins, then I

  will prepare your mushrooms."

  Trish went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic bag

  filled with a mixture of vegetables and bean sprouts. She pulled

  the rubber stopper from an Erlenmeyer flask and poured oil into

  the bottom of an unpainted metal wok that was heating over an open

  gas ring. She waited until light smoke came out of the wok, then

  dumped in the vegetables and sprouts and stirred the mix for a

  minute or two. She unplugged the rice cooker, a ceramic-coated

  steel canister, bright red, and carried it to where the twins sat.

  She put shining aluminum plates and chopsticks in front of

  the twins, opened the rice cooker and swept rice onto each plate,

  then tilted the wok and poured the steaming mixture inside it onto

  the rice. "There," she said. "That's for you two." She looked

  across to where Gonzales sat, now oddly calm, and she said, "I'll

  be back in a minute."

  The twins ate with their eyes fixed on Gonzales.

  Trish came back with a small wire basket of mushrooms.

  "Psilocybe cubensis," she said. "Of a variety cultivated here

  that has undergone some changes from the Earth-bound kind." She

  held up an unremarkable mushroom with long white stem and brownish

  cap.

  "Do you ever make mistakes in identifying the mushrooms?"

  Gonzales asked.

  "No," Trish said. She was smiling. "We do not have to seek

  among thousands of kinds for the right one, as mushroom hunters

  do. These are ours, grown as I told you, for our own needs." She

  lay the mushrooms on the chopping block and began to slice them.

  "I cleaned them in the shed," she said. When she was done, she

  used the knife to slide the slices into a sky-blue ceramic bowl.

  She turned on the wok, poured more oil into it, and stood smiling

  at Gonzales as the oil heated. When the first smoke came, she

  swept the mushrooms into the wok with quick motions of her

  chopsticks. She stirred them for perhaps half a minute, then

  tilted the wok and poured them into the blue bowl. She placed the

  bowl in front of Gonzales and laid black lacquered chopsticks

  across its rim.

  Gonzales picked up the chopsticks, lifted his plate, and

  began to eat, shoveling the mushrooms into his mouth. Back at the

  wok, she stirred more vegetables in and said, "I'm making my

  dinner."

  Gonzales sat back, looking at the empty bowl. Well, he

  thought, now we'll see. He said, "How many kinds of mushrooms do

  you grow?"

  "Quite a few, some rather ordinary, others esotericfor

  purposes of research. Aleph determines what kinds, how many."

  The twins had gone completely silent. As Trish ate, they

  watched Gonzales, who had gone totally fatalistic. What he had

  done seemed incredibly stupid, like applying heat to a burn

  common sense would tell him that. He smiled, thinking, what did

  common sense have to do with his life these days? The twins

  smiled back at him.

  "Who was that woman?" Gonzales asked.

  "Who do you mean?" Trish asked.

  "The old woman, the potter," Gonzales said.

  "She makes pots, and she teaches," Trish said. "She's

  employed by SenTrax; she was brought here by Aleph."

  "Why?" Gonzales asked. What did SenTrax or Aleph have to do

  with potting?

  "Pour encourager les autres," one of the twins said,

&n
bsp; distinctly. Gonzales turned but couldn't tell who had spoken.

  Trish laughed. "To encourage art at Halo," she said.

  "Pottery from lunar clay, stained glass and beta cloth tapestries

  from lunar silica."

  Gonzales sat thinking on these things until he realized that

  Trish had finished eating some time ago, and they had been sitting

  at the table for some timea very long time, it suddenly seemed

  to Gonzales. Involuntarily, he shoved his chair back from the

  table.

  Trish said, "It's all right." The twins got up from their

  chairs and walked behind him. When he started to turn, he felt

  their hands on his shoulders and neck, kneading muscles that went

  liquid beneath their pressure. Trish said, "It's begun. Now you

  must go walking around Halo, up and down in it, to and fro " She

  paused, and the twins' hands continued to work. She said, "Walk

  in the woods, see what we have growing there shaggy manes,

  garden giants, oyster and shiitake "

  "Shiitake," he saidshi-i-ta-keythe name's syllables

  falling like drops of molten metal through water

  She said, "The twins can guide you, or a sam can take you

  with it on an inoculation trip. Or if you prefer, you can go by

  yourself."

  "Yes," he said, the image suddenly very compelling of him

  walking around the entire circle of the space city, exploring,

  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 wit
h 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