this place. And to her: desiring her, he desires life itself.'
Gonzales asked, 'What happens when she's gone?'
'That is still a puzzle,' the Aleph-figure said. Gonzales
looked at the strange figure, thwarted by its essential
inscrutabilitythis was no primate with explicable, predictable
gestures. Still, something in its manner seemed to hint at other
projects and possibilities far beyond the immediate one.
After Aleph had gone its wayoff without explanation,
presumably to go about some piece of the insanely complex business
of keeping Halo runningGonzales sat looking at the lake. HeyMex
was nowhere around, which was unusual. HeyMex spent much of its
time with Diana and Jerry, who seemed to Gonzales to welcome its
presence in some way. Perhaps the androgynous figure served as an
innocuous foil, a presence to mediate the intensity of their
situation. Whatever their reasons, their tolerance had results:
HeyMex grew more natural, more humanly responsive in its speech
and actions each day.
Lizzie came down the road from the cabin and called to
Gonzales. She was wearing a white t-shirt and red cotton shorts;
her face, arms and legs were tan with the time she'd already spent
in the sun.
She sat next to him, and they said very little for a while,
then Gonzales asked about her past.
'I was in the first group at Halo Station to work with
Aleph,' she said. 'It thought we, out of all the billions on
Earth, might survive full neural interface with it. Mostly, it
was right. Not that things went that smoothly. I went a little
crazy, as most of us did, but I recovered well enough though a
few didn't
'Our choice: we bet sanity against madness, life against
deathour own minds, our own lives. There were built-in
difficulties. To be selected, we had to fit a certain profile;
but to function, we had to change, and we weren't very good at
change or at much of anything. In fact, we were pretty
wretched, all in allI thought for a while Aleph was just
selecting for misfits and misery. But as I said, most of us made
it through, one way or another.'
'Now Aleph has discovered how to select members of the
collective.'
'Right, but it just keeps pushing the limits.' She looked at
Gonzales, her face serious, blue eyes staring into his, and said,
'Sometimes I think we're all just tools for Aleph's greater
understanding.'
'That's worrisome.'
'Not really. Aleph's careful and kindas kind as it can be.
Dealing with Aleph, you've just got to be open to possibility.'
They sat silently for a while, Gonzales thinking about what
it meant to be 'open to possibility,' until Lizzie asked, 'Want to
go swimming?'
'Sure,' he said.
They went to the end of the dock, and leaving their clothes
in a pile there, both dove naked into the lake and swam to a half-
sunken log that thrust one end into the air. They clung to the
wood slippery with moss and water, hearing the quack and chatter
of birds across the lake.
Gonzales looked at her short hair wet against her skull, her
face beaded with water, the rose tattoo, also water-speckled,
falling from her left shoulder to between her breasts, and he felt
the onset of a desire so sudden and strong that he turned his head
away, closed his eyes, and wondered, what is happening to me?
'Mikhail,' Lizzie said. He looked back at her, hearing that
for the first time she'd called him by his first name. She said,
'I know. I feel it, too.' She put out a hand and rubbed his
cheek. She said, 'But not here, not the first time.'
'Yes,' Gonzales said.
'But when we go back to the world ' She had swung around
the log and now floated up close to him, and her body's outlines
shimmered, refracting in the clear water. She put her wet cheek
against his for just a moment and said, 'Then we'll see.'
15. Chaos
Diana and Jerry went to bed around midnight, Lizzie not long
after. Neither the Aleph-figure nor HeyMex had been around that
evening, so Gonzales was left alone. He went out to the deck and
lay prone in a deck chair, basking in the light from the full-
moon, thinking over what had passed between him and Lizzie that
day.
He cherished the signs Lizzie had given him, tokens that she
reciprocated what he felt. On very littleon just a few words of
promisehe had already built a structure of hopes, and he felt a
bit foolish: he had made his immediate happiness hostage to what
happened next between them. He was infatuated with her as he'd
not been in years he blocked that thought, veered away from
making any comparisons, willing the moments to unfold with their
own intensity and surprise.
He could feel a shift in his life's patterns emerging out of
this brief period, though strictly speaking, little had happened
here
He thought of Jerry and knew that in fact something amazing
was taking place here oh, he had no illusions about the
permanence of what they were doing; Jerry would truly die, and
they would mourn him. Meanwhile, though, what they did seemed to
lend everything around a benignity or mild joy it was not a
small thing, to snatch a few moments from death.
So Gonzales lay, his mind working over the bright facts of
this new existence while thoughts and images of Lizzie kept
recurring, gilding everything with possible joy.
He was staring into the night sky when it began to fall. The
