Tom Maddox - Halo

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HALO
by TOM MADDOX (1991)
[VERSION 1.1 (Sep 11 03). If you find and correct errors in the text, please
update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.]
From the author:
You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in any way you
wish so long as you do not change them in any way or receive money for them.
I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the Net, but I
retain the copyright to the novel.
If you paid for these files, you were cheated; if you sold them, you have
cheated.
Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around.
If you have any comments on the book or this distribution, you can send
me e-mail at:
tmaddox@halcyon.com
November, 1994
To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen, my friend; and all
our lamented dead, lost in time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Here are some of the people I owe in the writing of this book.
My wife Janis and son Tom. They have had to put up with the problems of a
novelist in the house -- including arbitrary mood swings and chronic
unavailability for many of the usual pleasures of life. To both, my love and
gratitude for their love, patience, and understanding.
My best friends: Leo Daugherty, Jeffrey Frohner, Bill Gibson and Lee
Graham.
My mother Jewell, my brother Bill and sister Janet.
Ellen Datlow: she published my first stories in Omni and showed me how a
really good editor works. Also, two friends who patiently read through drafts
of those stories before Ellen got them: Geoff Hicks and Larry Reed.
The readers of various incarnations of this book: Beth Meacham, my editor
at Tor Books; Merilee Heifetz, my agent; Bruce and Nancy Sterling, great
readers; Melinda Howard and Gary Worthington; Lynne Farr; Carol Poole. Also,
the members of the Evergreen Writers' Workshop, especially Pat Murphy.
The Usenet community, friend and foe, for ideas about a quite astonishing
number of things, and for the continuing fascination of life online; with
special thanks to Patricia O Tuana and the members of "eniac."
The usual suspects at the Conference on the Fantastic, with a special nod
to Brian Aldiss, because we'd all be happier if there were more like him
running around.
At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave technical advice.
(Perhaps needless to say, any consequent blunders are entirely mine.) Mike
Beug and Paul Stamets, world-class mycologists and explainers, talked to me
about mushrooms and provided invaluable references. Mark Papworth applied a
coroner's eye to a carcass I made. The faculty and students of the Habitats
Coordinated Studies Program, 1988-89 helped me to think about a space
habitat's ecosystem.
A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both colleagues and
students, at Evergreen -- though I have to mention Barbara Smith and David
Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo appearances.
And all I've known who can find a piece of themselves in this book.
I. of V.
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.
Jean Baudrillard, America
1. Burning, Burning
On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the egg. A week ago
he had returned from Myanmar, the country once known as Burma, and now, after
two days of drugs and fasting, he was prepared: he had become an alien, at
home in a distant landscape.
His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread white flesh
torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On the dark stained oak
door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their faces beatific in the cold fire.
Staring at the animated carved figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my
eyes, in my brain.
He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through to the
hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope scuffing without noise
across floors of bleached oak. Through the open door at the hallway's end,
morning's light through stained glass made abstract patterns of crimson and
buttery yellow. Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far
wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the center of the
room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed steel, cracked and waiting. One
half-egg was filled with beige tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half
with hard dark plastic lying slack against the shell.
Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his hair back into
a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over it. He reached to his waist
and grabbed the bottom hem of his navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over
his head. Dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of
baggy tan pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale
skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes grainy,
stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back as
body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to balloon
underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and pushed their junction
ends home into the sockets set in the back of his neck. As the egg continued
to fill, he fit a mask over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled.
Catheters moved toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms.
The egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.
He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply as elation
punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated by drugs, meditation,
and the egg. No matter that he was going to relive his own terror, this was
what moved him: access to the many-worlds of human experience -- travel
through space, time, and probability all in one.
Virtual realities were everywhere -- virtual vacations, sex,
superstardom, you name it -- but compared to the egg, they were just high-res
videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks to simulate physical
presence, but the sensorium could be fooled only to a certain degree, and when
you inhabited a VR, you were conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion
depended on willing suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got
total involvement through all sensory modalities -- the worlds were so
compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the waking world,
as if it were a dream.
A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural cables and
injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan, the town in
central Myanmar where the government had moved its records decades earlier, in
the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. He sat with Grossback, the Division Head
of SenTrax Myanmar, at a central rosewood table in the main conference room.
The table's work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in
front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The local
SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with its primary
information utilities: all its records of personnel and materiel, and all
transactions among them. A month earlier, SenTrax Myanmar's reports had
triggered "look-see" alarms in the home company's passive auditing programs,
and Gonzales and his memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had explored data
structures and their contents, testing nominal functional relationships
against reality. Wherever there were movements of information, money,
equipment or personnel, there were records, and the two followed. They
searched cash trails, matched purchase orders to services and materiel,
verified voucher signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the
personnel records themselves against government databases, and traced the
backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they read contracts
and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they verified daily transaction
logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it had shown
nothing but the usual inefficiencies -- Grossback didn't run a particularly
taut operation, but, as of the moment, he didn't seem to have a corrupt one.
However, neither he nor SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final
report would come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at
their leisure.
Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end of
short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-out, eager to go.
He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane out of here late this
afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with whatever commercial flight's available
there."
Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving. Grossback was a
slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he had a light brown complexion,
black hair, and delicate features. He wore politically correct clothing in the
old-fashioned Burmese style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton
shirt.
During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him coldly and
correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and clenched teeth. Fair
enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's operation was suspect, and him along
with it. Anyway, people resented these outside intrusions almost every time;
representing Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,
F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone nervous.
"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback asked.
"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone else who could
arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's official airport, where
partisan groups had several times brought down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew
that.
Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"
Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything about
that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an embarrassment, not to mention
a reportable violation of corporate protocol. The man was either stupid or
desperate.
"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.
What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data to examine
before I can make an assessment."
"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look like," Grossback
said. His face had gone cold.
"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish packing." For
the moment, he just wanted to get out before Grossback did something
irretrievable, like threatening him or offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales
said. The other man said nothing as Gonzales left the room.
Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of low
bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood above the
Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's tattered version of
Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the walls, along with leaping dragon
holos, black teak dresser, tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that
had wandered in from the twentieth century -- just to give your average
citizen that rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had
been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards, Gonzales had
luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and refrigerator.
Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and Gonzales lay
sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights then was greeted just
after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby neck flaps and doing push ups.
He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the cart paths that
threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among the temples and pagodas as the
sun rose and turned the morning mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with
the towers sticking up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the
temples, thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the Conqueror
was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government agencies nested among
thousand year old pagodas, some in near perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu
Temple, myriad others no more than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit
by building pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.
Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was trying to
recover from late-twentieth century politics; in Myanmar's case, its
decades-long bout with round-robin military dictatorships and the chaos that
came in their wake. And as was so often the case in politically wobbly
countries, it still restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds
of governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free information flow
unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive, their use licensed by permits
almost impossible to get. As a result, Gonzales and the memex had been like
meat eaters stranded among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.
He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions dormant, it lay
nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum shock-cases, ready for
transport. The other case held memory boxes containing SenTrax Myanmar group's
records.
When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest news about
Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment. Gonzales was sure the
m-i would think what he did -- Grossback was dog dirty and scared they would
find it.
At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited for his
plane. Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's mufti, a tan
gabardine two-piece suit over an open-collared white linen shirt, dark brown
slipover shoes. His hair was gathered back into a ponytail held together by a
silver ring made from lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a
soft brown leather bag and the two shock-cases.
In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a gilded and
jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its steps, beside the huge paw of
a stone lion, a monk sat in full lotus, his face shadowed by the animal rising
massive and lumpy and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were dyed
orange by sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes
passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.
"Come tour the temples of ancient Pagan," a voice said. "Shwezigon,
Ananda, Thatbyinnu..."
"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up behind him.
It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight rows of narrow wooden
benches but was now empty -- almost all the tourists would have joined the
crush on the terraces of Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over
the temple plain.
"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also very good
exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."
It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar, even the
machines worked the black market. "No thanks."
"Extremely good rate, sir."
"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as defective." The cart
whirred as it moved away.
Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side of the
road, ready to come across and beg for pencils or money. Gonzales caught the
monk's eye and shook his head. The monk shrugged and walked on, his orange
robe billowing.
Where the hell was his plane? Soon hunter flares would cut into the new
moon's dark, and government drones would scurry around the edges of the
shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry Myanmar trembled on the edge of
chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various
political postures, all fierce, all contemptuous of the central government.
They fought with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack
missile, and they only quit when they died.
A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air. Within seconds
a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge rectangular wing loaded with
a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came low over the dark mass of forest. Its
running lights flashing red and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above
the field, wings tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into
the bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that the
aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over Gonzales in a
whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a whisper, and with a creak the
plane kneeled on its gear, placing the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales
picked up his bags and walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a
hydraulic hiss, and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.
"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function flight glasses
were tilted back on his forehead, where their mirrored ovoid lenses made a
blank second pair of eyes; a thin strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed
from their rim. Beneath the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamed -- no
cosmetic work for this guy, Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway
"tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue background.
"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case in his right
hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the luggage locker. Gonzales
put his bags into the steel compartment and watched as the safety net pulled
tight against the bags and the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the
first of eight empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and
from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You should engage
your harness. If you need instructions, please say so now."
Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder and lap
belts connected, then stretched against the harness, feeling the sweat dry on
his skin in the plane's cool interior. "Thank you," said the voice.
The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as the plane
lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow from the dome light
vanished, then there were only the last moments of orange sunlight coming
through the bubble.
The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow, with the
temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light, white stucco and gold
tinted red and orange.
"Man, that's a beautiful sight," the pilot said.
"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it before, and
besides, it had already been a long day.
The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left and headed
south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat and tried to relax.
They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River until they
crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in the interior darkness,
Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's
here. Partisan attack group, probably -- no recognition codes. Must be flying
ultralights -- our radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."
"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.
"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign charters." And he
pointed to their transponder message flashing above the primary displays: THIS
INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY. IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE UNDER U.N.
ACT OF 2020. It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.
The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION WARNING, and a
Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The pilot said, "Fuck, they
launched!" The swing-wing's turbines screamed full out as the plane's computer
took command, and the pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just
hanging on.
Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell,
corkscrewed, looped, climbed again -- smart metal fish evading fiery harpoons.
Explosions blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical bursts of flame followed
immediately by hard thumping sounds and shock waves that knocked the
swing-wing as it followed its chaotic path through the night.
Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around it, its
pilot in blazing outline -- a stick figure with arms thrown to the sky in the
instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated in flame.
Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned to the
pilot's yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the night returned to
blackness. "Collision averted," the plane's computer said. "Time in red zone,
six point eight nine seconds."
"What the hell?" Gonzales said. "What happened?"
"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.
Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold air from the
plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt. He glanced down to his
lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself. Really, everything happened too quickly for
him to get that scared.
A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front of them and
circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was cast in matte black, but
with a massive fuselage. It turned a slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy
predator looping fat, slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that played
across their canopy.
The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.
Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade; behind the
transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored pilot, twin cables running
from the base of his neck. The Loup Garou's wings slid forward into
reverse-sweep, and it stood on its tail and disappeared.
Gonzales strained against his taut harness.
"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.
"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking. "What do you
mean?"
"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight, face red
beneath the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the pricks. They used us
to troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot flipped up his glasses and stared
with pointless intensity out the cockpit window, as if he could see through
the blackness. "And waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole flight."
The pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features distorted
into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had welcomed Gonzales ninety
minutes before. "Do you know how fucking close we came?" he asked.
No, Gonzales shook his head. No.
"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to touch," the
pilot said. He swiveled his seat to face forward, and Gonzales heard its
locking mechanism click as he settled back into his own seat, fear and shame
spraying a wild neurochemical mix inside his brain...
Gonzales had never felt things like this before -- death down his spine
and up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his skin; death with a bad
smell burning, burning...
2. Anything I Can Do to Help You
As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained glass, and the
room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights remained lit, steady rows
of green above flickering columns of numbers on the light blue face of the
monitor panel.
A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked slowly
across the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then left the room, its
motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like wind through dry grass.
The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the flight
computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok landing grid and began
its slide down an invisible pipe. They went to touchdown guided by electronic
hands.
The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said, "I'll have to
file a report on the attack. But you're lucky -- if we had landed in Myanmar,
government investigators would have been on you like white on rice, and you
could forget about leaving for days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the time
they process the report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."
At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend any time in
Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.
Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in him like the
onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself, he thought, really, nothing
happened, except you got the shit scared out of you, that's all.
As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went to pick up
his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat watching as the plane
went through its shutdown procedures.
Do something, Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount. He pulled
the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a copy of your flight
records."
"I can't do that."
"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was almost killed
while flying in your aircraft."
"So was I, man."
"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full official route
and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick dump into my machine here,
that's all it will take. I'll give you authorization and receipt." Gonzales
waited, keeping the pressure on by his insistent gaze and posture.
The pilot said, "Okay, that ought to cover my ass."
Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat, kneeled and opened
the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the pilot.
The man nodded and said, "Always."
"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record, this is Mikhail
Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax.
I am acquiring flight records of this aircraft to assist in my investigation
of certain events that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at
the pilot. "That should do it," he said.
He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into the access
plug on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across the panel as data began to
spool into the quiescent memex. The panel gonged softly to signal transfer was
complete, and Gonzales unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks," he
said to the pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.
Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself, hey, memex,
got a surprise for you when you wake up. He felt much better.
A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a brightly-lit tunnel
with baby blue plastic and plaster walls marked with signs in half a dozen
languages promising swift retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus
graffiti smeared everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages
in Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with dialogue
balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red paint read in English,
HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays
of multi-wire cable marked where surveillance cameras had been.
Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow portal to
International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless holoscan robots -- dark,
wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and tentacles and spiked sensor antennas
-- worked the crowd, antennas swiveling.
All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women: Japanese,
Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out from Asia's "dragons,"
world centers of research and manufacturing, taking their low margins and hard
sell to Europe and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life.
Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres armed with
technical and scientific prowess and fueled by persistent ambition.
They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity. The United
States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the Asians had a hundred
ways of making sure the American economy didn't just roll over and die and
take the prime North American consumer market with it. Whether Japanese,
Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese-Canadians -- they bought some
corporations and merged with others, and Americans ended up working for
General Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their
paychecks they bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian robotics.
Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and Gonzales
stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress, blue-and-white checked
headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked his i.d., gave a quick, meaningless
smile -- teeth white and perfect under a black moustache -- and waved him on.
Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small Thai woman
in a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across yellow badges. Her
features were pleasant and impassive; she wore her black hair pulled tightly
back and held with a clear plastic comb. She stood behind a gray metal table;
on the floor next to it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its
controls, screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty green
walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages, detailing in small
type the many categories of contraband.
The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in front of the
table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases on the table.
She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in clear, neuter
machine English: "Your person has been scanned and cleared." She put the soft
brown bag into the mouth of the scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with a
quiet beep. The woman slid it back to Gonzales.
She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these cases" as
she pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each, Gonzales screened the access
panel with his left hand and tapped in the entry codes with his right. The
case lids lifted with a soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic
lights flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black plastic the
size of a small safety deposit box.
Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration Form the
memex had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both Myanmar and Thai
governments. She looked into one of the cases and pointed to a row of
red-tagged and sealed memory modules.
The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These modules we
must hold to verify that they contain no contraband information."
"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate records."
"Perhaps they are. We have not cleared them."
"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have nothing to
hide, but the modules are important to my work."
She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be examined by
authorities in the city." The translator's tones accurately reflected her lack
of concern.
Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic intransigence. For
whatever occult reasons, this woman had decided to fuck him around, and the
harder he pushed, the worse things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I
assume they will be returned to me as soon as possible."
"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is unlikely that the
examination can be completed before your departure." She slid the case off her
desk and to the floor behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied
bureaucrat's smile. She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a
thing of the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said,
"How else can I help you?"
The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as it did, banks
of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's perimeter, and the patterns
of console lights went through a series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was
brought to a waking state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour when
the desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.
Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose, machine-connected:
a new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored catheter led from his
water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv feeds from both forearms. White
sealant and anti-irritant paste had clotted around the tubes from throat and
mouth. The sharp ozone smell of the paste was all over him.
An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands, shining chrome
claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then it worked with hands and
black flexible arms the thickness of a stout rope to lift Gonzales from the
egg and onto its own surface.
Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper. "It's okay,"
the memex whispered through the room's speaker. "It's okay..."
Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and considered his
condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent loss of gross motor
control, no immediate parapsychological effects (disorientations, amnesias,
synesthesias)...
Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white tile, polished
aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower." Water hissed, and the shower
stall door swung open. The water ran down his skin and the sweat and paste
rolled off his body.
3. Dancing in the Dark
The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front window, down
Capital Hill to the city and the bay. After a full night's sleep, he felt
recovered from the egg. Halfway down the hill stood a row of Contempo
high-rises -- half a dozen shapes in the mist, their sides laced with optic
fiber in patterns of red, blue, white, and yellow.
From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The Fine Arts Network,
showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads Originals and Copies,' a
Euro/Com Production from the Cannes Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's
'Ecstasy for Many Kilometers.'"
"Cycle," Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen split into
windows, showing eight at a time in a random access search. In the screen's
upper-right corner, the Headline Service cycled what it considered important:
worsening social collapse in England; another series of politico-economic
triumphs for The Two Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole #2 over
the Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole #3 obstinately
holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching for an ugly part of the
graph; temperature fluctuations continuing to evade best predictions...
Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ, this stuff had
been going on forever it seemed...
He said, "Memex, what do you think about the attack?"
"A bad business," said the memex. "We are lucky to have survived." It
seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in the egg, as though it,
too, had come close to dying. Gonzales didn't know how it experienced such
things, given its limited sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear
of death.
"What's happening in the real world?" Gonzales asked.
"Your mother left a message for you. Do you want to look at it now?"
"Might as well."
On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden behind a sun
mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat up and said, "Still in
Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming back? I'd love to talk, but I just
won't pay those rates."
She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones; her face was
nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint parchment quality of age. Her
small breasts sagged very little. Body and face, she appeared an athletic
fifty year old who had perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven
next month.
Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic while the two
were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her energies and interests to
maintaining her health and appearance. Half the year she spent in Cozumel's
Regeneration Villas, where tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her
young. The rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo on
Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami. Top dollar, but
she could afford it.
She and his father had been charter members of the gerontocracy, that
ever-expanding league of the rich and old who vied with the young for their
society's resources. The young had the strength and energy of youth; the old
had wealth, power and cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated
their main life's goal as "living until I am old enough to enjoy it."
Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cotton-robe over her
shoulders and said, "Call me. I'll be home in a week or so. Be well."
Their talks, her taped messages -- both usually made him feel baffled and
angry -- but today her self-absorption pricked sharper than usual. I almost
died, he wanted to tell her, they almost killed me, mother.
But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from Miami. And whose
fault is that? a small voice asked. He had chosen to come here, as distant
Southern Florida as he could get and remain in the continental United States.
Sometimes he felt he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with
alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with strong
coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and health-conscious
Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality and demonstrativeness of
Southern Florida.
Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen the movers,
dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all of them he had felt the
same obsessive grasping at money and land and power and had heard the same
childish voices, wanting more more more. At his parents' parties, he
remembered dark Southern Florida faces -- sun-burned whites, blacks,
Hispanics; men with heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne,
and women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made brittle
footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as instinctively as a
child yanks its hand from a fire.
Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at home at one end
of the country than the other.
"No reply," Gonzales said.
The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged among black
lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death gnawed at the edges of his
torpor. He filled a bronze pipe with small green sensemilla leaves and holed
up in a haze of smoke and drank tea.
摘要：

HALObyTOMMADDOX(1991)[VERSION1.1(Sep1103).Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversionnumberby0.1andredistribute.]Fromtheauthor:Youmayreadthesefiles,copythem,anddistributetheminanywayyouwishsolongasyoudonotchangetheminanywayorreceivemoneyforthem.IhaveenteredHALOintothedistributionnetwor...

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