come, something beautiful happens here.’ It didn’t look like rain. The stones were hot to the touch. Rather than arriving with the sunlight, heat seemed to generate itself between the eight rhyolite pillars around the fountain and spray upwards from there. Gaines sat all afternoon waiting for Alyssia, watching the glare move across the smooth oval cobbles. At four o’ clock, the sky clouded over. After a few grand but silent flashes of lightning, it seemed nothing else would happen. But by five it was pouring with rain.
‘Jesus, Alyssia,’ Gaines said. He went out to look for her, and was promptly drenched.
The town square he found empty but for some children, who ran about in front of him laughing and calling ‘La Cava! La Cava!’ in excited voices. He followed them into the covered market. That was deserted too. All over the Halo, people sell each other ordinary things, from empty bottles to leather belts. Here the stalls offered drip trays and shoes, ten inch holograms of very fat children wearing lace. Then loaves of bread like large smooth stones on a beach. Then meat. Strips, strings and slivers of meat. Long thin slices of meat hung up like translucent shower- curtains, with a sour iron smell. ‘Hey kids,’ called Gaines, temporarily unable to locate them. ‘La Cava!’ they called. The market was a dark, confusing maze. A workman’s cafe offered sesos rebosadas, sauteed brains, eaten standing up. His nostrils were full of that idea until the children led him into the light on the other side, and a different smell took over. Rain poured from the market eaves. The kids beckoned. Gaines stood looking out but suddenly found it impossible either to move or to describe what was happening in the second, smaller square which now revealed itself.
It was under two or three feet of water. The town sewers had backed up. Thigh-deep in putrid water, in which circled all kinds of waste from foecal matter to shattered packing crates, people had gathered to dance. Their clothes, stinking and soaked, clung to them. They were wading and chanting in groups, lifting their legs high, bending down to splash each other with diluted shit, as if this was an afternoon at the beach. Some of them were kneeling in it. Some were neither kneeling nor standing, but were leaning into one another, clasped together, obviously fucking. Gaines had his ideas about the world, but none of them covered this. He saw Alyssia right in there with them, laughing and beckoning to him. The children were tugging at his hands and grinning. Gaines pulled back as hard as he could and eventually broke free. As he ran off through the market, he thought he could hear a low booming sound somewhere deep under his feet.
It rained for eight hours more. Gaines didn’t want to sleep. He spent all night in the cloister, piped into an FTL router he had left in orbit; then, when the rain stopped and the sun came up, sat by the fountain until the morning heat began to dry him out. A little after ten, Alyssia Fignall arrived back. She looked tired, but clean and happy. She seemed full of energy. ‘Rig, you’ll burn up out here,’ she laughed, taking his arm. ‘Come in and have breakfast. I bought some bread in the market.’
Gaines shook his head.
‘What’s the matter?’
When he didn’t answer, she let go of his arm and said: ‘I knew it. I knew it! Rig,
She pulled at his arm again, but he wouldn’t move.
‘How is that different to what the original inhabitants did, up on the hilltop there, whoever they were, a hundred thousand years ago? How is it different to your fucking war?
‘Come on, Rig, how different is it?’
Gaines stared at her. A year and a half ago, she had written to him, ‘The bird cries here grow stranger and stranger. I sit and count the pillars around the fountain, while the tourist rockets lug themselves into the air above me like suitcases full of cheap souvenirs. I love it so. Oh Rig, please come!’
‘I just need to deal with this call,’ he said.
Alyssia gave him a look of death, to which he replied with one of his vague smiles. ‘I can see that there’s a lot of difference between us on this,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re disappointed.’ Suddenly the dial-up had his full attention. ‘What? What do you mean, “changed again”?’ Just as he got rid of whoever it was, the
‘Get that foul thing out of here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want it near me. Not today of all days.’
She walked into the house.
Gaines still kept a hologram of Alyssia aged fourteen, wearing the uniform of some EMC youth movement, always laughing out at him, always seeking to make contact. Twenty hours after she refused to leave Panamax IV, he stood in the PEARLANT control room at a loss. Activity had dropped off sharply. Since his previous visit, Case’s team, defeated by ancient labyrinthine physics, had abandoned the containment project: instead they’d pitched a tent of filmy blue halogen light at the centre of the space, around which knots of specialists gathered to stare thoughtfully at the figure which now occupied it.
Pearl had completed her long fall, dawn to dewy eve. She lay on her side on the allotropic carbon deck, one knee raised, the upper part of her body curved at the waist and propped up on her elbow. In the corner of her mouth appeared a humanising trace of what looked like dried toothpaste. Something had happened to her on the way down, as a result of which she now looked partly like a woman in a ruched metallic gown around five hundred years old, and partly like a cat. It was a different part every time Gaines blinked: sometimes the whole of the upper body was wrong, sometimes only one arm or leg. Limbs, skin, armature, nothing fitted together — the cat’s long- muzzled facial structure under the woman’s flesh, then the other way around. At the same time her eyes — when they were human eyes — had a film of hypnotic calm, even amusement, as if she was asking some unanswerable question, or as if you had caught her in some very sophisticated form of deshabille you could both enjoy; while the cat’s fur collected the light at the edges of the image, leading your gaze out into tenuousness, turbulence and eventual transparency.
It was hard not to see the resulting chimera as a statement — a picture or statue, an out-take from one of the vanished religiocultural pantheons of Ancient Earth. Though it seemed immobile when you first saw it, the figure was slowly writhing and moving, struggling not to become one thing or the other but to retain both styles of presentation at once. Gaines found himself silenced by the sheer effort of will involved. He felt privy to something no one should be able to see, the hidden mayhem of events prior to the real, the effort to remain complex in the face of the decohering and literalising forces of the universe. Beyond the arena of this struggle — beyond the knots of observers with their insufficiently imaginative physics, their failed intuitions — the light thinned out quickly to grey; a darkness higher up gave the illusion of unlimited space against which events as consistently weird as this might unfold.
Gaines stood there shaking his head and Case asked him, ‘What do you think now?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ Gaines said.
‘Things we can tell you,’ Case offered: ‘this isn’t the Aleph, but the Aleph’s still present.’
‘How do you know?’
‘We had an operator go back over the data. What it found was this: fifty minutes before the original convulsion, the Aleph began connecting itself to the maze —’ Here, Case brought up hologram schematics supposed to represent the six-and-four-fifths-dimension topology of the maze — ‘specifically to Sector VF14/2b, a structure of tunnels flooded with highly tuned superconducting liquids.’
‘I remember VF14,’ Gaines said, who had come through there with Emil Bonaventure’s group in, he thought, 2422 or 23. ‘Emil believed it was focused on the Tract.’ Not that they had had time to think anything much. The tunnels were fifty feet in diameter, tiled, dank as a disused subway, curving in directions that made no sense. In some places the stuff was like water. Others it ate into their excursion suits, or floated through them, or slushed around like warm saliva from someone else’s mouth. All he remembered was Johnnie Izzet vomiting blood into the headpiece of his suit, and someone else shouting, ‘Fucking shit!’ Johnnie’s blood coagulated instantly it touched the visor, as if it had come out in some transition state. Then the whole tube was alive with ionising radiation, along with something that sounded like music but couldn’t have been. Every direction was the wrong direction. Things
