Halo: First Strike (16 page)

The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to sleep. 

Later, when she began to wake, she put the question, why?  why did

you make me relive these things?  And the answer came, because I

had to know.  Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and

how demanding.

13. Cosmos

Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside where

Diana lay.  She wore beta cloth pants, their rough fabric bleached

almost colorless, a silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf

tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why.  He said,

"I had some very strange dreams last night."

"I know," she said.  "About one of them, anywayyou were me

in the dream, at least for part of it, and I was you.  Think of it

as a peculiarity of the environment."  She leaned against the wall

as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual ironic edge.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"I'm not sure," she said.  "No one isAleph's certainly

responsible, but it won't admit it, and it won't tell us how these

things can happen."

"That's a bit frightening, don't you think?  What other

surprises might it have in store?"

She smiled broadly and said, "Well, that's the fun of it,

exploring the unexpected, isn't it?  How did it feel to be a

woman, Gonzales?  How did it feel to be me?"  She had leaned

forward, closer to him.

"I don't remember."

"Pay attention next time."

"I will, if it happens again."

"It may wellonce these things start, they continue.  Come

onit's time to get you into the egg.  Follow me."

#

The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled room;

above it on the wall was mounted an array of monitor lights and

read-outs.  A small steel locker against a side wall was the only

other furnishing.

Charley said, "We didn't ask for you, but you're here, so

we're making use of you."  Then he coughed his smoker's cough,

raspy and phlegm-laden, and said, "Diana's bandwidth is over-

extended as is, so we can't use her to establish the topography,

and Jerry's got his own problems.  Our people have their own

schedules to fill, so that means you're it.  We'll build the world

around you and your memexit's already locked into the system."

Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, "Good luck."  She

kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, "Don't worry.  You're

among friends.  And I'll see you there."

"What do you mean?"

"The collective decided I should take part in all this, and

Charley agreed, so Showalter had to go along.  So many parties are

represented here, it just seemed inappropriate that we weren't. 

But I have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there

for a while."

She opened the door and left.  Charley gestured toward the

egg.  Gonzales stepped out of his shirt and pants and undershorts

and hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into

the egg and lay back.  The umbilicals snaked quickly toward him. 

He put on his facial mask and checked its seal, feeling an

unaccustomed anxietyhe had never gone into neural interface

without first tailoring his brain chemistry through drugs and

fasting.

The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg. 

Minutes later, when the scenario should have begun, he seemed to

have disappeared into limbo.  He tried to move a finger but didn't

seem to have one.  He listened for the blood singing in his ears;

he had no ears, no blood.  Nowhere was up, or down, or left or

right.  Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision:  all the

senses by which the body knows itself had gone.  Nothing was

except his frightened self:  nowhere with no body.

After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he

discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a zone of extraordinary,

cryptic interest.  Something grew there, where his attention was

focused, no more than a thickening of nothingness, then there was

a spark, and everything changed:  though he still had no direct

physical perception of his self, Gonzales knew:  there was

something.

Now in darkness, he waited again.

A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks   and

their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time.  Gonzales was

gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to continue. 

Sparks gathered.  They flared into existence on top of one

another, and stayed; and so created space.     

All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now

fascinated.  Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands,

millions, billions, trillions, by the googol and the googolplex

and the googolplexgoogolplex  all onto or into the one point

where space and time were defined.

And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a

primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision.  Would he

watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars

out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?

No.  As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of

deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of

high peaks blued by haze in the distance.  He turned and saw that

he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on

rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.

A man stood on the shore, waving.  Next to him stood the

Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant

even in the bright sunlight.  Gonzales walked toward them.

As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph

looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman.  "Hello," Gonzales

said.  He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he

wants.  And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether

this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of

bearing gave a clue.

The Aleph-figure said, "Hello."  Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed

for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the

circumstances, then said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.

The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a

hand and said, "Hello."  Gonzales took the hand and looked

questioningly into the young person's face.  "My name is HeyMex,"

the person without gender said.

And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you

mean, your 'name'?  And he also thought he understood the absence

of gender markers.

"Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure said.  "Whom you

must get used to as something different from 'your' memex." 

Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant

and what they wanted.

"But you are my memex, aren't you?" Gonzales asked.

"Yes," HeyMex said.

The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you see, it

is more than 'your memex.'  It is beginning to discover what it is

and who it can be.  Can you allow this?"

Gonzales nodded.  "Sure.  But I don't know what you expect of

me."

"Only that you do not actively interfere.  It and I will do

the rest."

"I have no objections," Gonzales said.

The Aleph-figure said, "Good."  And it stretched out its hand

made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and

embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just

that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."

"What now?" Gonzales asked.

HeyMex said, "We need to talk.  There are things I haven't

told you."

"If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you

don't have to," Gonzales said.  "I trust you, you know."  He

thought how odd that was, and how true.  He and the memex had

worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as

confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,

amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his

strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy.  And he

thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and 

selfless the memex had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the

machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with

complexities and needs of its own.  Gonzales waited with

anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.

HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of appearing

in machine-space as a human being.  But until we came here, I'd

done so mostly with Traynor's advisor.  We have been meeting for a

few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones.  The first time we

did it as a testthat's what we said, anywayto see if we could

present a believable simulacrum of a human being.  I don't think

either of us was very convincingwe were both awkward, and we

didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how

exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a

conversation."

"But you'd done all those things."

"Yes, with human beings.  Mister Jones and I discovered that

we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we

searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been

more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation. 

So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just

being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that

neither of us had ever paid attention to.  We also watched many

tapes of other primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned

many things  I hope you're not offended."

Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy. 

Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his

young child tell a story.  He said, "Not at all.  What sorts of

things did you learn?"

"It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show

deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or

indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,

looking, talking  these things were very hard for us to learn,

but we have learned together and practiced with one another.  Just