Halo: First Strike (13 page)

densities.  A few candidates don't work out, still, but they don't

die or get driven insane."

Diana said,  "And I don't fit the profiles."

"Almost no one does," the Aleph-figure said.  "But these

concerns are irrelevantyour case is different.  You have prior

full interface experience, and you won't be required to perform

the kinds of motor-integrative activities that cause neural

disruption."

"Telechir operations," Charley said.  "Such as assisting

construction robots in tasks outside."

Diana looked toward the screen.  She said, "I assumed these

matters were settled."

"I see no problems," the Aleph-figure said.  "The situation

is anomalous, but I am aware of the dangers."

Diana said, "Well, the situation between us was always

anomalous."

"Was it?" the Aleph-figure asked.  "We must discuss these

matters at another time."

Very cute, Doctor Heywood, Lizzie thought.  Just a little

hint or allusion, an indirect statement that you know that we know

that something funny went on a long time ago  ah yes, this could

be fun.

"First," Charley said, "we must prepare Doctor Heywood. 

Tomorrow morning we begin."

"When will you need me?" Gonzales asked.

"If things go well, tomorrow," Charley said.

"I can't get ready that quickly," Gonzales said.

Lizzie said, "Forget about all that shit you put yourself

through.  Aleph will sort you out okay once you're in the egg. 

Trust me."

Okay," Gonzales said.  "If I must."   

11.  Your Buddha Nature

That afternoon, following instructions given her by the

communicator at her wrist, Diana went to the Ring Highway and

boarded a tram.  About a hundred feet long, made of polished

aluminum, it had a streamlined nose and sleek graffitied skirts

the usual polite abstracts, red, yellow, and blue.  Its back-to-

back seats faced to the side and ran the length of the car. 

Bicyclists and pedestrians, the only other traffic on the highway,

waved to the passengers as the tram moved away above the flat

ribbon of its maglev rail.  She was reminded of rides at old

amusement parks she had gone to when a girl.

The mild breeze of the tram's progress blowing over her,

Diana watched as Halo flowed past.  First came shade, then bright

rhododendrons in flower among deep green bushes.  Hills climbed

steeply off to both sides, with some houses visible only in

partial glimpses through the foliage.  She knew that from almost

the first moment when dirt was placed on Halo's shell, the

planting had begun.

She shivered just a little.  Toshihiko Ito would be waiting

for her.  He had called while she was out and left directions for

her.  Now, she thought, things begin again.

Passing under green canopies, the tram climbed a hill, then

broke out of the vegetation and came suddenly out high above the

city's floor, moving along rails now suspended from the bracework

for louvered mirrors that formed Halo's sky.  Far below, the

highway had become a cart track flanked by walkways; on both sides

of the track, terraces worked their way up the city's shell.  

Perhaps twenty-five feet below the tram's rails, fish ponds made

the topmost terrace, where spillways dumped water into rice

paddies immediately below.

She stayed on the tram through a segment where robot cranes

were laying in agricultural terraces.  Great insects spewing huge

clouds of brown slurry, they moved awkwardly across barren metal. 

The tram approached a small square bordered by three-story groups

of offices and living quarters, and the communicator told her to

get off.

A few feet from the primary roadway sat a nondescript

building of whitened lunar brick, its only distinctive feature a

massive carved front door, showing Japanese characters in bas-

relief.

The door opened to her knock with just a whisper from its

motor, and she stepped into a partially-enclosed, ambiguous space,

almost a courtyard, open to the sky.  Most of the space was filled

with a flat expanse of sand that showed the long marks of careful

raking.  The rake marks in the sand carried from one end to the

other, straight and perfect, and were broken only by the presence

of two cones of shaped sand placed slightly-off center.   At the

far end stood closed doors of white paper panels and dark wood.

The doors were so delicate that to knock on them seemed a

kind of violence.  "Hello," she said.

>From inside came the faintest sound, then a door opened.  An

older Japanese man stood there; he wore a loose robe and baggy

pants of dark cotton.  He stood perhaps five and a half feet tall,

and his black hair was filled with gray.

Diana said, "Toshi."  He bowed deeply, and she said, "Oh man,

it's good to see you."  She reached out for him, and they came

together in long, loving embracelittle of sex in it, but lots of

pure animal gratification, as she could feel Toshi's skin and

muscle and bone and had knowledge at some level beneath thought

that both he and she still existed. 

Toshi said, "Diana, to see you again makes me very happy."

"Oh, me, too."  She could feel the tears in her eyes, and she

wiped at her eyes and said, "Don't mind me, Toshi.  It's been a

long time."

"Yes, it has."

Toshi led her out the door and through a gate at the rear of

the minimalist garden of raked sand.  The curve of Halo's bulk

reached upward; Toshi's small portion of it was enclosed by a high

pine fence that climbed the curve of the city's hull.

Immediately before them stood a pond.  On its far side, a

waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock and

into the pond, where carp with shining skins of gold smeared with

red and green and blue swam in the clear water.  Another

rockstrewn stream led away to the right and passed under a

gracefully-arched wooden bridge.  Cherry and plum trees blossomed

in the brief spring.

"All this wood," he said and smiled.  "It is my reward for

many years of service.  I told them I wanted to live here at Halo

and make my gardens."

She said, "It's beautiful.  Have you become a Zen master,

Toshi?"

"No, I have not become a master, or even a sensei.  I am not

Toshi Roshi, I am a gardener.  A philosopher, perhaps:  a Japanese

garden maps the greater world; so to make one is to declare your

philosophy, but without words, in the Zen manner."  He gestured at

the surrounding trees and shrubs.  "With others I sometimes sit,

meditating, and together we discuss the puzzles we have  some

think a new kind of Zen will emerge here, a quarter of a million

miles from Earth; others hit them with sticks when they say so."

She said, "You have your riddles, I have mine.  Tell me, do

you understand these things about to happen with Jerry and Aleph

and me?"

"Ah, Diana, there are many explanations.  Which of them would

you hear?"  He stopped and stared into the distance.  He said,

"Besides, who wants to know?"  And he began laughinga full laugh

from below the diaphragm, unlike any she had heard from him years

ago.

"I don't get it," she said.

"Zen joke.  'Who wants to know?'  There is no who, no self." 

Diana frowned.  He said, "Not funny?  Well, you had to be there." 

He laughed again, shortly.  "Same joke," he said.  Then his

expression changed, grew solemn.  He said, "I think this is a very

difficult, perhaps impossible  perhaps undesirable project."

"Difficult or impossible, I understand.  But undesirable? 

Are you talking about the danger to me?  Aleph seems to think that

is negligible."

"No, though I worry about you, you have chosen to do this,

and I must honor that choice."

"What, then?  I don't understand."

"Let me tell you a story."  Toshi sat on a wooden bench and

looked up at her.  He said, "Once, long ago, there was a Japanese

monk named Saigyo, and he had a friend whose wisdom and

conversation delighted him.  But the friend left him to go to the

capital, and Saigyo was desolate at the loss.  So he decided to

build himself a new friend, and he went to a place where the

bodies of the dead were scattered, and he assembled somethingit

was very like a manand brought it into motioninto something

very like lifewith magical incantations.  However, the thing he

had made was a frightening, ugly thing, that terribly and

imperfectly imitated a man.  So Saigyo sought the advice of

another monk, a greater magician than he, and the monk told him

that he had successfully made many such imitation men, some of

them so famous and powerful that Saigyo would be shocked to find

who they were.  And the other monk listened to what Saigyo had

done and told him of various errors in technique he had committed,

that made his work go bad.  Saigyo thus believed he could make a

simulacrum of a man; however, he changed his mind."  He stopped,

smiling.

"That's it?" she asked.  He nodded.  She said, "Put a few

lightning bolts in the story and you've almost got Frankenstein. 

Not much of an ending, though."

"This story is ambiguous, I think, as is your project."

"Could I say no, Toshi?"

"No, though I'm not sure you should say yes, either."

"Yet you were the one who called me, who asked me to come

here."

"True.  Like you, I am imprisoned by yes and no."

#

Hours after Diana left him, Toshi sat in mid-air, floating in

a zero-gravity chamber at Halo's Zero-Gate.  He had adjusted the

spherical room's color to light pink, the color that calms the

organism.

On Earth, to do zazen, you made a still platform of your

body, pressed by gravity against the Earth itself; the

straightness of your spine could be measured perpendicular to that