Halo: First Strike (12 page)

man small and red-haired and cocky, felt hat on the back of his

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