'Should we do something?' Toshi asked.
'What?' Charley said. 'Aleph's monitoring all this, and only
it knows what's going on.' The smoke-saver ball went shhh-shhh-
shhh as Charley puffed quickly on his cigarette.
Lizzie came through the door and said, 'What the hell's going
on?'
Toshi and Charley both looked at her blankly.
'I'm going in,' Lizzie Jordan said. 'I'll get some sleep, go
in the morning. Enough of this.' She pointed toward the monitor
panel, where lights flickered green, amber, red.
'Why put yourself at risk?' Charley asked.
'What do you think, Toshi?' Lizzie asked. Toshi sat watching
Diana once more, his feet on the floor, hands in his lap.
'Do what you will,' Toshi said. 'You trust Aleph, don't
you?'
'Yes,' Lizzie said.
'Aleph's not the problem,' Charley said. He walked circles
in the small, crowded room, his head and shoulders ducking up-
anddown quickly as he walked.
'Will you for fuck's sake stop?' Lizzie asked.
'Sorry,' Charley said. He stood looking at her. 'It's not
Aleph, it's all these people, and all this stuff.' He pointed
toward the couch where Diana lay, waved his arms vaguely behind
his head. 'Obsolete stuff,' he said.
'But not me,' Lizzie said. 'I'm not obsolete. I'm up to the
minute, my dear, in every way.' She smiled. 'And I'll be fine.
Okay?'
'Sure,' Charley said. He turned in Toshi's direction and
said, 'Are you going to stay here?'
'Yes,' Toshi said. Charley and Lizzie left, and Toshi
continued his meditation on the koan of self and its multiple
presences.
#
Diana felt a knot in her throat, a mixture of joy and sadness
welling up in herhow strange and terrible and wonderful to
recover someone you've loved herethis place that was nowhere,
somewhere, everywhere, all at once. Jerry knelt on the bed facing
her in the small room lit only by moonlight. Years had passed
since they were lovers, but when he touched her breasts and leaned
against her, her body remembered his, and the years collapsed and
everything that had come between whirled away. She was weeping
then, and she leaned forward to Jerry and kissed him all over his
eyes and cheeks and lips, rubbing her tears into his face until
she felt something unlock in them both. Then she lay back, and he
went with her, into arms and legs open for him.
Later they talked, and Diana watched the play of moonlight
over their bodies. She lay nestled against his chest, her chin in
the hollow beneath his jaw, and spoke with her mouth muffled
against him, as though sending messages through his bones.
Even as the moments swept by, she felt herself gathering them
into memory, aware of how few the two of them might have
Sometimes their laughter echoed in the room, and their voices
brightened as their shared memories became simply occasions for
present joy. Other times they lay silently, rendered speechless
by the play of memory or trying the immediate future's alarming
contingencies.
And at other times still, one or the other would make the
first tentative gesture, touching the other with unmistakable
intent, and find an almost instantaneous response, because each
was still hungry for the other, each recalled how brightly sexual
desire had burned between them, and both were fresh from a life
that left them hungry, unfulfilled.
Then they moved in the moonlight, changing shape and color,
their bodies going pale white, silver, gray, inky black,
werelovers under an unreal moon.
14. The Mind like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity
F. L. Traynor looked around at the group seated around the
table at the Halo SenTrax Group offices. He sat between Horn and
Showalter; directly across from him sat Charley Hughes and Eric
Chow, both glum. 'This operation is out of control,' Traynor
said.
He had arrived from Earth six hours earlier on a military
shuttle, unannounced and unexpected by anyone but Horn, who had
met him at Zero-Gate and led him to temporary quarters near the
Halo group building. He had spent the better part of the
afternoon being briefed by Horn.
'That's absurd,' Charley said.
'Is it?' Traynor asked. 'Then give me a status report on
Jerry Chapman, Diana Heywood, Mikhail Gonzales, Aleph.'
'They're fine,' Charley said. 'So is Lizzie Jordan, who
joined them in interface this morning.'
'Is she reporting?'
'No,' Chow said. 'Like the others, her total involvement in
the fictive space makes this impossible.'
'It's no problem,' Showalter said. 'We can rely on upon
Aleph for details.
'Your excessive dependence on Aleph is at the heart of this
matter,' Traynor said. 'As the decision trail reveals, no one
here has any real knowledge of what Aleph plans for Chapman, now
or later. So I'm going to set limits on this project.' He could
feel their anxiety rising, and he liked it. He said, 'One more
week in real-time, that's it. Then we pull the plug on this whole
business.'
'On Chapman,' Chow said.
'Necessarily,' Traynor said. 'Unless Aleph can be prevailed
upon to give us ongoing, detailed access to its shall we call
them experiments?'
