began to make a noise, a quarter-tone keening, once it was through
the door.
Steel boxes twenty meters high loomed amid concrete piers
reaching up to darkness. Soil pipes came out of the boxes and
threaded the piers; duct work held in place by taut guys crossed
beneath.
Still making its lament, the sam stopped at one of the boxes
and extended a piece of sheathed fiberoptic cable with a metal
fitting at the end; it plugged the fitting into a panel where
tell-tale lights flickered. It stood for perhaps half a minute,
exchanging information with the recycling furnace's control
mechanisms, then unplugged its cable and hissed across the metal
floor to the gurney. Behind it, a furnace door swung open.
Keening loudly, it pushed the gurney to the mouth of the open
door, stopped and was silent for a moment, then slid the bag from
the gurney into the furnace door.
PART IV. of V.
The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this
universe is stresscommunications breakdown.
Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"
16. Deeper Underground
Gonzales had awakened that morning to the sounds of the city
coming through the walls: distant creaks and crunches and faint,
almost sub-sonic rumbles, the voices of the great circle of metal
and crushed rock spinning across the night. Now he sat on his
terrace, one of half a dozen climbing the side of Halo's hull,
each built on the roof of the dwelling below. Five-petaled
frangipani blossoms, brilliant red and purple, exploded from the
thick, stubby branches of a tree just outside his front window.
The air smelled rich and moist this morning, sign of a high point
on the humidity curve, just before the start of a major
reclamation cycle; one of the smells of a city where everything
organic had to be preserved and transformedwater, oxygen, and
carbon, all rare and dear.
Below him, Ring Highway carried Halo's trafficin its
outside lanes, people on foot and bicycle; in the center lanes,
trams and freighters moving along magnetic rails. A young couple,
man and woman, knelt beside a rose bush growing beside the roadway
and examined its leaves. The woman laid a hand on the man's arm,
and he glanced up at her and smiled, then brushed her cheek with
his hand.
He was struck by the strangeness of this city, where the
small pieces of people's lives were elevated to the extraordinary
by their taking place in an artificial city and under an
artificial sky.
As a child he had flown into Tokyo with his family, back when
the trip took the better part of a day, and the incredible neon
density of the city had swept through him like a virus, and he had
thrown up the first meal (fish and noodles with chrysanthemum
leaves, he remembered) and stayed pale and feverish through most
of the first two days he'd spent there.
Tokyo he'd come to terms with quickly; about Halo, he didn't
know. Though he could read Halo's language and read its signs, he
knew the city was much farther awayin miles from home, yes, but
also along axes he could not measure. Halo contained an infinite
number of cities, an infinite number of possibilities, and so to
participate fully in Halo required opening yourself to a reality
that had gone multiplex, uncertain, frightening.
In fact, he was having trouble coming to grips with anything.
Since being taken from the egg, he had felt odd and uncomfortable,
and he continued to trod a hallucinatory edge, one he occasionally
stepped overlast night, as he lay trying to sleep, abstract
figures drawn in thin red lines played across his ceiling,
sweeping arabesques in an alien or fictive alphabet just beyond
human understanding
And there was Lizzie: she would not see him or talk to him
and gave no explanation except that she had problems of her own
right now. Gonzales felt an unspeakable sadness at the distance
between them. To the mocking voice that asked, what have you
lost? he could only answer, possibility. He had come back around
to where he was just a few days ago, but now that place seemed
unacceptable.
Gonzales put his coffee cup down and sat staring at it. Made
nondescript yet somehow foregrounded, apart from its surroundings
and projecting a numinous quality, an internal, entirely non-
visible shimmer, an indeterminacy of form
Click, Gonzales heard, a noise the universe made to itself
when it thought no one was listening, and he thought Christ, what
is going on here?
Feeling sick anxiety rising in his chest, he got up and went
into his bedroom; there he undid the complicated latch on his
wrist bracelet and placed it on the white-painted metal surface of
his dresser.
Anonymous, unmonitored, he passed through the living room and
out the door and walked away.
#
Gonzales strolled alongside Ring Highway, drawn to nothing in
particular but absolutely unwilling to go back to the empty block
of apartments and the isolation and anxiety waiting there.
He found himself in the Plaza, where Lizzie had taken him and
Diana their first night at Halo. He passed across the square, by
the sign that read VIRTUAL CAF, then stood motionless, watching
the flow of people around him. Some walked alone, striding
purposefully, or moving slowly, lost in thought; others walked
together, talking cheerfully or intently: monkey business,
Gonzales thought, wondering what HeyMex would say about these
people and their movementswhat did it all mean?
"Gonzales," he heard, his name called in a high-pitched,
unfamiliar singsong. He turned and saw the twins.
As they approached, one was muttering in a fast, low,
gibberish; she wore black coveralls and stared sadly at the
ground. The other was smiling; her face was daubed with white
paint, and she wore a white blouse and a peculiar skirt of light-
blue cloth that had been rough-cut and stitched together without
benefit of measurement or seams; on its front a crude likeness of
a rabbit had been drawn in red neon paint.
The smiling twin, the one whose dark skin was streaked with
white, said in clear tones and formal cadence, "Today she is
Alice." She pirouetted clumsily, her skirt billowing around her.
She said, "Her sister is Eurydice." She pointed to the other
girl, who buried her face in her hands. She said, "Alice is
sweetness and smiles, small steps and starched crinolines;
Eurydice is sorrow and languorous repose and black silk. Between
them they measure the poles of dream." She stepped back and
smiled; her twin smiled with her. "Are you having problems,
Mister Gonzales?" she asked. "The collective believe so. We
believe you are lost between worlds. Is this so?"
"Perhaps I am," he said.
"Well, then," she said. She put the index finger of her
right hand to pursed lips an
d her eyes looked back and forth.
"I'm thinking," she said. Seconds passed, then she said, "I know
what you must do."
"What's that?" Gonzales asked.
"Follow us," she said. The other twin nodded, spoke
gobbledygook, looked at Gonzales through a mask of intense sorrow,
as if on the verge of shedding endless tears.
"To where?" Gonzales asked.
"Don't be stupid," the Alice twin said. "Where would Alice
and Eurydice take you?"
"Down the rabbit hole?" Gonzales asked.
The Alice twin smiled; the Eurydice twin shook her head
"Underground?" Gonzales asked again.
The twins smiled in what seemed to be perfect
synchronization.
#
At the bottom of Spoke 2, where a lighted sign announced
ELEVATOR ARRIVES IN 10 MINUTES, the twins led Gonzales through
an arched tunnel under the spoke. As they walked, the two ahead
of him muttering back and forth in their unintelligible patter, he
realized the floor must be curving downward, passing underneath
the main level of the ring. Blue globes down the center of the
ceiling provided soft light. After about another hundred steps,
they came to a door at the tunnel's end. Across the door, bright
red lighted words said:
CASUAL SIGHTSEEING DISCOURAGED BEYOND THIS POINT.
DO YOU WISH TO ENTER?
The Alice twin turned and pointed to the sign. She shrugged
elaborately, as if to say, well?
"I want to enter," Gonzales said.
"Come in," the door said, and it slid sideways into its
frame.
The three stepped into a dim vastness, a world beneath the
world, and followed a central walkway marked with flashing arrows
and an intermittent legend that flashed, UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
FOLLOW LIGHTED PASSAGE.
They passed a series of workshops, partitioned cubicles
screened behind containment curtains. Light came from one open
doorway; the twins stopped, and the Eurydice twin gestured for
Gonzales to look inside.
Hundreds of pots stood on shelves that lined the small room's
walls from floor to ceiling. Many were simple, almost spherical
containers with wide top mouths, in baked red clay. Others of the
same shape were glazed and painted and marked with a single band
of color around the waist: bright primaries against clear pastels.
Still others were of complex shape and design, difficult to take
in at a glance.
An old woman sat bent over a potter's wheel. She crooned
tuneless gibberish as her large hands shaped the wet, spinning
clay. She looked up at Gonzales standing in the doorway. Her
face was deeply-lined, her skin pale; she had straight brows above
dark eyes. She wore an off-white dress that fell to the floor and
an apron of a black rubbery material. Her hair was covered by a
dark blue scarf that was pulled tight and tied at the back.
The old woman laughed, turned back to her wheel, and began to
croon once more. Under her hands the clay began to grow upward
and acquire form. She shaped it inside and out, demiurge reaching
into the heart of matter, until it became a squat-bottomed pot
rotating on the wheel.
The wheel stopped, and with quick, delicate movements she
placed the new-formed pot on a stand next to the wheel. She
reached inside the pot and her hands worked, but Gonzales couldn't
see precisely what she was doingher body screened him. Then she
took a rack of paints and brushes from a shelf above her head and
began to paint the surface of the pot.
As she worked, she looked up occasionally, but didn't seem to
mind the three of them standing there, so they stood and watched
Gonzales was fascinated by the quick intensity of her movements,
eager to see what the pot would look like.
Finally she turned it so they could see her work. On the
pot's side was a face, its nose and mouth just painted
protuberances in the clay, its eyes painted oval dimples. The
pot's bulbous shape distorted the features of the face, but as
Gonzales looked more closely at it, he saw
His own face, in malign parody, its features hideously
contorted.
The woman laughed, gleeful at his sudden recoil. She picked
up the pot and looked at the face, then at him, then at the pot
again, and she laughed again, very loudly, and squeezed the pot
between her clay-spattered hands, squeezed it again and again,
until it was a shapeless lump of color-shot clay. She threw the
lump across the room into a large metal bin that sat against the
far wall.
"Ohhhh," from the twins, their voices in unison. "Ohhhh."
"We're not frightened," the Alice twin said. The other twin
covered her face with her hands. "Silly old woman," the Alice
twin said.
The old woman's eyes stayed on Gonzales as she reached into a
plastic bag full of wet clay and separated out another clump to
work on. She was working it on the unmoving wheel when the twins
started making shrill hooting noises, and ran away.
Her crooning had begun again as Gonzales followed them down
the path.
#
Next to the path was a gateway, with a sign that said, in
glowing letters:
HALO MUSHROOM CULTIVATION CENTER
ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
BEYOND THIS POINT!
About a hundred feet from where Gonzales stood, a metal
stairway led up to a catwalk that passed over the mushroom farm.
He looked back along the shadowed way he'd come, then forward to
where small, isolated shafts of bright sunlight slanted down into
the mushroom farm, and beyond, to where shapes faded into
darkness. Either the twins had left him, or they had gone in
here.
Gonzales stepped up to the gateway and said, "Hello, I'm
looking for two girls, twins."
"One moment, please," the gateway said. As Gonzales had
expected, common courtesy would dictate that a gatekeeper
mechanism respond to those who didn't have the access key.
Gonzales stood bemused in the semi-darkness for some time,
until a woman came to the other side of the gate and said,
"Hello." She was small and darkher skin a delicate brown, eyes
black under just the slightest epicanthic fold. She wore black
boots to the knee, a long black skirt, a loose jacket of rose silk
with butterflies in darker rose brocade. She was exquisite, the
bones of her face delicate, her movements graceful. She said, "My
name is Trish. The twins are inside, waiting for you."
"My name is Gonzales."
"I know. Come in." As she said the final words, the gate
swung open. She waited, watching, as Gonzales stepped through,
and the gate closed behind him.
"How do you know my name?" he asked.
"From the collective. I am friends with many of them the
twins, of course, and others Lizzie." She stood solemnly
watching him, then said, "What do you know about mushroom
cultivation?"
"Nothing." All over Washington state, he was aware,
mushrooms grew
, and people hunted them with great dedication,
sometimes bringing back what they regarded as enormous successes:
chanterelle, boletus, shaggy mane, morel. In fact, to someone
from Southern Florida, the whole business had seemed not only
quaint and Northwestern, but also dangerous: Gonzales knew that
what seemed a lovely treat could be a destroying angel.
"All right." Trish stopped, and he stopped next to her. She
turned to him, and he was aware now of her deep red lips and white
teeth. She said, "Halo needs mushrooms as decomposersthey're
incredibly efficient at converting dead organic matter into
cellulose." Gonzales nodded. She said, "In a natural setting
whether here or on Earthspores compete: many die, and some find
a place where they can flourish, grow into a mycelial mass that
will fruit, become a mushroom. As mushroom growers, we intervene,
as all cultivators do, to isolate certain species and provide
favorable conditions for their growth. But our 'seeds,' if you
will, the spores, are very small things, and to locate them,
isolate them, bring them to spawn, this requires delicacy and
techniquein a word, art."
She paused, and Gonzales nodded.
They came to a low structure of plastic sheets draped over
metal walls and stopped in front of a door labeled STERILE
INOCULATION ROOM. They passed through a hanging sheet into an
anteroom to the sterile lab beyond. She said, "Take a look
through the window here." Beyond the window, small robots worked
at benches barely two feet high. Like the robot he'd seen in the
Berkeley Rose Gardens, they had wheels for locomotion and grippers
with clusters of delicate fibroid fingers at their ends.
She said, "Their hands have a delicacy and precision no human
being can achieve. And they are single-minded in their
concentration on the jobthey preserve our intentions completely
and purely."
"They are machines."
"If you wish." She pointed through the window, where one of
the robots manipulated ugly looking inoculation needles as it
transferred some material into Petri dishes. She said, "By their
gestures I can identify my sams, even in a crowd of others."
Gonzales said nothing. She went on, "The pure mushroom
mycelium is used to inoculate sterile grain or sawdust and bran.
The mycelium expands through the sterile medium, and the result is
known as spawn."