"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.
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