Halo: First Strike (4 page)

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-riseshalf 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 messagesboth usually made him feel

baffled and angrybut 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 facessun-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.

The late afternoon light through the windows went to pure

Seattle Gray, the color of ennui and unemphatic despair, and his

solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and

wondered what it would be like to have a cat.  Then he thought

about the truth of it, how often he would be gone and the cat left

to itself and the house's machines.  "Here kitty kitty," the

cleaning robot would say, and the memex would want veterinary

programs and a diagnostic link  fuck it, they all could live

without a cat.

Then a hunger kick came on him, and he decided to make

taboulleh.  "You are not taking care of business," the memex said

to Gonzales as he stood chopping mint leaves, green onions and

tomato, squeezing lemon and stirring in bulgur wheat with the

patience of the deeply-stoned.

"True," Gonzales said.  "I'm in no hurry."

"Why not?  Since your return from Asia, you have not been

productive."

"I'm going to die, my friend."  The smells of lemon and mint