don't remember anything after that. Apparently the people I was
with called an ambulance, but the next thing I knew, I was coming
out of a deep blackness, and Diana was talking to me.'
'I didn't think she was involved at that point.'
'She wasn't.' Jerry smiled. 'They had ferried me up here
from Earth, on life support. It was Aleph, taking the form of
someone familiar, it told me later. That was before this plan was
made, when everyone thought I would be dead soon. Anyway, until
today I've been in and out of something that wasn't quite
consciousness, while Aleph explained what was being planned and
that I could live here, if I wanted or I could die.' He paused.
Across the water, one duck flew at another in a storm of angry
quacks. He said, 'I chose to live, but I didn't really think
about itI couldn't think that clearly. Maybe I never had any
choice, anyway.'
Something in Jerry's tone gave Gonzales a chill. 'What do
you mean?' he asked.
'Maybe my choice was just an illusion. Like this' Jerry
swept his arm to include sky and water'it's very troubling. It
seems real, solid, but of course it's not, so for all I know,
you're a fiction, too, along with anyone else who joins us, and me
maybe I'm just another part of the illusion, maybe all my life,
the memories I have, false.' He laughed, and Gonzales thought the
sound was bitter but no crazier than the situation called for.
#
Gonzales and Jerry sat in the main room of a medium-sized A-
frame cabin made of redwood and pine. Windows filled one end of
the cabin, opening onto a deck that looked over the lake a hundred
feet or more below. Gonzales sat in an over-stuffed chair covered
in a tattered chenille bedspread; Jerry lay across a sagging
leather couch.
Outside, rain fell steadily in the dark. Just at dusk, the
temperature had fallen, and the rain had begun as the two were
climbing the dirt road from the lake to the cabin. 'Christ,'
Jerry had said. 'Aleph's overdoing the realism, don't you think?'
Gonzales hadn't known exactly what to think. From his first
moments here, he had felt a sharp cognitive dissonance. For a
neural egg projection to be intensely real, that was one thing,
but a shared space like this one ought to show its gaps and seams,
and it didn't. He could almost feel it growing richer and more
complete with every moment he spent there.
'Goddammit!' Jerry said now, rising from the couch and
walking to the window. 'Where's Diana?'
'She'll be here,' Gonzales said. 'Charley told me that
integrating her into this environment would take some time.'
Someone knocked at the door, then the door swung open, and
Diana stepped in. 'Hello,' she said. The Aleph-figure and the
memexHeyMexcame behind her.
#
Diana and Jerry sat next to one another on the couch. Her
hand rested on his knee, his hand on top of hers. Suddenly
Gonzales remembered his dream, of meeting a one-time lover after a
long absence, and he knew he and the others were intruders here.
He got up from the over-stuffed chair and said, 'I think I'll take
a walk. Anyone want to join me?'
'No,' the Aleph-figure said. 'HeyMex and I have more work to
do.'
HeyMex stood and said to Diana and Jerry, 'It was very nice
to meet you.' Then it waved at Gonzales and said, 'See you
tomorrow.'
'Sure,' Gonzales said, banged on the head once again by the
difference between seeming and being here.
The Aleph-figure and HeyMex left, and Diana said, 'You don't
have to leave, Gonzales.'
'I don't mind,' Gonzales said. 'It's nice outside. I'll be
at the lake if you need me. See you later.'
The night was warm again; the clouds had dispersed, and a
full moon lit Gonzales's way as he passed along the short stretch
of road that led down to the lake. The old wood of the dock had
gone silvery in the light, and a pathway of moonlight led from the
center of the lake to the end of the dock. He walked out onto the
creaking structure and sat at its end, then took off his shoes and
sat and dangled his feet into moonlit water.
Later he lay back on the dock and stared up into the night
sky. It was the familiar Northern Hemisphere sky, but really, he
thought, shouldn't be. It should have new stars, new
constellations.
#
Alone in near-darkness, Toshi Ito sat in full lotus on a low
stool beside Diana Heywood's couch. For hours he had been there,
occasionally standing, then walking a random circuit through the
IC's warren of rooms.
Sitting or walking, he remained fascinated by a paradox.
Diana in fact was hooked to Aleph by jury-rigged, outmoded neural
cabling; Gonzales in fact lay in his egg; Jerry Chapman in fact
was a shattered hulk, mortally injured by neurotoxin poisoning and
kept alive only by Aleph's intervention. Yet, Diana, Gonzales,
and Jerry all were in fact, simultaneously, really somewhere else
somewhere among the endless Aleph-spaces, where reality seemed
infinitely malleablealive there, where it might be day or night,
hot or cold what then is to be made of in fact?
Toshi heard the soft gonging of alarms and saw a pattern of
dancing red lights appear on the panel across the room. He
unfolded his legs and moved quickly to the panel, where he took in
the lights' meaning: Diana's primitive interface was transferring
data at rates beyond what should be possible.
Charley came in the room minutes later and stood next to
Toshi, and the two of them watched the steady increase in the
density and pace of information transfer.
