'Technically difficult or impossible,' Chow said.
'I can't agree to this,' Showalter said.
'You won't have to,' Traynor said. Next to him, Horn shifted
in his chair. 'You're being relieved of your position as Director
SenTrax Halo Group.'
#
Gonzales came in the side door, and Diana turned from the
stove and said, 'Good morning. Like some coffee?'
'Sure,' he said. 'You know, I slept on the dock, but I feel
fine.'
She said, 'Jerry will be out in a moment. Aleph and HeyMex
your memex right?are on the deck, waiting. Want some coffee?'
Gonzales took his coffee outside to the deck and joined the
others basking in the sunshine. All sat in Adirondack chairs,
rude and comfortable frames of smooth-sanded, polished pine.
Below the redwood platform, a thick forest of cedar, alder, pine,
and ironwood sloped toward the lake. In the middle distance, a
light haze had formed over the water; beyond the lake, a jagged
line of high mountains poked their tops into white clouds.
The Aleph-figure said, 'We must talk about what took place
some time ago. Diana and Jerry agree; the three of us have a
history, and you two should know it.'
A voice called from the other side of the cabin, then Lizzie
came around the corner, stopped in the shade and looked at them
all basking in the sunshine and said, 'Tough job, eh? But
somebody's got to do it.'
'Hello, Lizzie,' the Aleph-figure said, 'I was about to ask
Diana to tell the story of how she and Jerry and I first came
together. You know everyone except Jerry Chapman.'
'Oh, this is a good time,' Lizzie said. 'Hi, Jerry,' she
said.
'Hello,' Jerry said.
Lizzie looked at Diana and said, 'We've always known there
was a story, but Aleph never wanted to tell it.' She sat back in
her chair, rested her hand on Gonzales's wrist, and said to him,
'You all right?' He nodded.
The Aleph-figure said, 'Diana, you are the key to this story,
so you should tell it.'
'Very well,' she said. She took a deep breath and raised her
head. She said, 'It all happened some years ago, at Athena
Station. My research there was in computer-augmented eyesight. At
that time I was blindI had been attacked, very badly injured, a
few years before, and since then I had been driven by the idea
that my vision could be restored through machine interface.
'I first met Jerry when he came to visit my work-group. He
had come to Athena to help the local SenTrax group with the
primary information system, Aleph. It was experiencing delays and
difficulties, all unexplained nothing serious yet, but troubling
because so much was dependent on Alephthe functioning of Athena
Station, construction of the Orbital Energy Grid.
'In fact, he was not welcome at all. I was the problem he
was looking for, and at first I thought he had guessed that or
knew something. Because in working with Aleph I had caused changes
in it that neither of us anticipated or even know were possible.'
She paused, looking at Jerry to see if he wanted to add anything;
he motioned to her to go on.
'Ah yes, another thing you must know. The circumstances were
peculiar at best, but I became infatuated with Jerry from when we
first met. I liked his voice, I think when you're blind, voices
are so important
'Anyway, I showed him a fairly clumsy computer-assisted
vision program we had running. It used my neural interface
socketing but depended on lots of external hardwarecameras,
neural net integrators, that sort of thing. That's when I got my
first look at him, and I thought, fine, he'll do, and I believed I
could tell from the way he talked to me and looked at me that he
felt the same.'
'Love at first sight,' Gonzales said. 'Or sound. For both
of you.' He heard the irony in his own voice and wasn't sure he
meant it.
'Exactly,' she said. 'Involuntary, inappropriate, unwanted
love.' She stopped for a moment, then said, 'Or infatuation, as I
said or whatever you wish to call it. The words for these
things don't mean much to me anymore.
'It's quite a picture, in retrospect. I was conducting
apparently damaging experiments with the computer that kept the
space station and orbital power grid projects running, and Jerry
represented just what I had fearedan investigation. Meanwhile
the two of us were in the grip of some primal instinct that
neither one of us had acknowledged.
'He persisted, wanted details about our work. I stalled,
told him to go away, we couldn't be bothered. He went to his
people and told them he needed full, unimpeded access to what we
were doing, and they backed him. So he came back, and I fobbed
him off for as long as I could
'Then one night I was working late at the lab, and he called,
letting me know that he wouldn't be put off any longer, and
something more-or-less snapped: I couldn't keep it all going
anymore. The connection with Aleph had gotten strange and
unnerving, and I realized I had lost control, and I needed to talk
to someone.
'We got together that night, and we became lovers.' She
looked around, as if trying to decide how much she could tell
them. 'For the next two weeks we lived inside each other's skin.
I told him everything, including the real news I had, which was
that Aleph had changed, had developed a sense of selfhood,
purpose, will. It had lied to cover up what was going on between
us.'
'Had lied?' Lizzie asked. 'Did you understand what that
