Halo: First Strike (21 page)

"You're kidding, right?"

"For the record, Eric."

Gonzales noticed with some fascination that Eric had begun to

sweat visibly as he and Charley talked, and now the man's eyes

seemed to grow larger, and he said, "He's deadhe's been dead, he

will be deadand he's worse dead than he was before  he'll tear

himself to pieces on the restraints, I supposethat's my

prognosis.  This is not a goddamn patient, Charley.  This is a

frog leg from biology class, that's all.  Man, we need to talk

this thing over with Aleph."

Charley said, "We can't contact Aleph; no one can."

"Fucking shit," Eric said.

Gonzales turned as the door behind him opened, and saw

Showalter and Horn coming in.  Showalter's nostrils were flared

she was angry and suspiciouswhile Horn was trying to look poker-

faced, but Gonzales could see through him like he was made of

glassthe motherfucker was happy; things were going the way he

wanted.

"The report I got was half an hour old," Showalter said. 

"What's new?"

"Talk to Eric," Charley said.

Lizzie went toward the side door, and Gonzales followed her

out of the room, along the narrow hallway and into the room where

Diana lay under black, webbed restraining straps.  Her face was

pale, but her vital signs were strong, and her neural activity was

high-end normal in all modes.  The twins sat next to her, making

comments unintelligible to anyone but themselves and intently

watching the monitor screen, where amber and green were the

predominant colors.

A great beefy man walked circles around Diana's couch.  He

had thick arms and a pot belly and a low forehead under thick

black hair; and his brow was wrinkled as if he were to puzzling

out the nature of things.  As he walked, the words tumbled out of

him.  When he saw Lizzie and Gonzales, he said, "Very unusual,

very tricky.  Troubling.  Troubling but interesting.  Very

troubling.  Very interesting.  When  whenwhenwwhenwhenwhen  when

I find, find it, hah, I'll know then."

Lizzie said, "Any recent changes?"

Shaking his head sideways, he continued to walk.

Lizzie went back into the hallway, and Gonzales stopped her

there by putting his hand on her arm.  He asked, "Are you all

right?"

"I don't know," she said, and he could read some of his own

trouble in her face.  But there was something else there, a closed

look to her face.  She said, "Please don't ask questions.  Too

much is going on now."

The door opened immediately when they came up, and they found

Showalter saying, "We are not meddling in those matters.  We are

asking you to give us a choice of actions."

"What's up?" Lizzie asked.

The four of them turned to look at the screen, which had

suddenly gone silent.

#

On the polished steel of the table, a gutted carcass lay.  On

the corpse's ventral surface, flaps of skin had been peeled back

to reveal the empty abdominal and thoracic cavities; on its dorsal

surface, the spine stood bare.  The top of the head had been sawn

off, the brain removed, the scalp dropped down to the neck.

A sam moved around the table, its stalks whispering beneath

it.  It pulled a steel trolley on which sat a number of labeled

plastic bags, each containing an organ.  The sam stopped and took

one of the bags from the table and set it next to the carcass's

open skull.  It slit the plastic with a serrated extensor, then

reached into the bag with a pair of spidery seven-fingered

"hands," gently lifted the brain inside, tilted it, and placed it

into the skull, then fit the skull's sawn top back in place. 

Using surgical thread and a needle appearing from an extensor, the

sam quickly basted the scalp flaps to hold the two parts of the

skull together.  As the minutes passed, the sam worked to replace

the carcass's organs and stitch its frontal edges. 

The sam pushed the trolley aside and brought up a gurney with

a shroud of white cotton lying open on it.  One extensor under the

corpse's thighs, the other under the top of its spine, the sam

lifted the corpse and placed it into the shroud.  It brought the

sides of the shroud together and, using again the silk thread and

needle, sewed the cotton shut.

The sam stood motionless for a moment, this part of the job

finished, then gathered the empty plastic bags and placed them in

a disposal chute.  It scrubbed the autopsy table, working quickly

with four stiff brushes held in its extensors, then washed the

table with a steam hose that came from the ceiling.

Guiding itself by infrared, the sam pushed the shroud-laden

gurney through a darkened hallway and into a freight elevator at

the hallway's end.  The elevator moved out to Halo's farthest

level, just inside the hull.

The sam pushed the gurney toward a doorway flanked by red

warning lights and a lit sign that read:

NO ACCESS WITHOUT EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION!

KEY CODE AND RETINAL CONFIRM REQUIRED!

The sam transmitted its access codes to the door as it went, got

the confirming codes, and didn't pause as it went through the

doors that swung open just in time to let it through.  The sam

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

of lunar-soil ceramic, colored a robin's egg blue, it stood

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