with four stiff brushes held in its extensors, then washed the
table with a steam hose that came from the ceiling.
Guiding itself by infrared, the sam pushed the shroud-laden
gurney through a darkened hallway and into a freight elevator at
the hallway's end. The elevator moved out to Halo's farthest
level, just inside the hull.
The sam pushed the gurney toward a doorway flanked by red
warning lights and a lit sign that read:
NO ACCESS WITHOUT EXPLICIT AUTHORIZATION!
KEY CODE AND RETINAL CONFIRM REQUIRED!
The sam transmitted its access codes to the door as it went, got
the confirming codes, and didn't pause as it went through the
doors that swung open just in time to let it through. The sam
began to make a noise, a quarter-tone keening, once it was through
the door.
Steel boxes twenty meters high loomed amid concrete piers
reaching up to darkness. Soil pipes came out of the boxes and
threaded the piers; duct work held in place by taut guys crossed
beneath.
Still making its lament, the sam stopped at one of the boxes
and extended a piece of sheathed fiberoptic cable with a metal
fitting at the end; it plugged the fitting into a panel where
tell-tale lights flickered. It stood for perhaps half a minute,
exchanging information with the recycling furnace's control
mechanisms, then unplugged its cable and hissed across the metal
floor to the gurney. Behind it, a furnace door swung open.
Keening loudly, it pushed the gurney to the mouth of the open
door, stopped and was silent for a moment, then slid the bag from
the gurney into the furnace door.
PART IV. of V.
The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this
universe is stresscommunications breakdown.
Donna Haraway, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs'
16. Deeper Underground
Gonzales had awakened that morning to the sounds of the city
coming through the walls: distant creaks and crunches and faint,
almost sub-sonic rumbles, the voices of the great circle of metal
and crushed rock spinning across the night. Now he sat on his
terrace, one of half a dozen climbing the side of Halo's hull,
each built on the roof of the dwelling below. Five-petaled
frangipani blossoms, brilliant red and purple, exploded from the
thick, stubby branches of a tree just outside his front window.
The air smelled rich and moist this morning, sign of a high point
on the humidity curve, just before the start of a major
reclamation cycle; one of the smells of a city where everything
organic had to be preserved and transformedwater, oxygen, and
carbon, all rare and dear.
Below him, Ring Highway carried Halo's trafficin its
outside lanes, people on foot and bicycle; in the center lanes,
trams and freighters moving along magnetic rails. A young couple,
man and woman, knelt beside a rose bush growing beside the roadway
and examined its leaves. The woman laid a hand on the man's arm,
and he glanced up at her and smiled, then brushed her cheek with
his hand.
He was struck by the strangeness of this city, where the
small pieces of people's lives were elevated to the extraordinary
by their taking place in an artificial city and under an
artificial sky.
As a child he had flown into Tokyo with his family, back when
the trip took the better part of a day, and the incredible neon
density of the city had swept through him like a virus, and he had
thrown up the first meal (fish and noodles with chrysanthemum
leaves, he remembered) and stayed pale and feverish through most
of the first two days he'd spent there.
Tokyo he'd come to terms with quickly; about Halo, he didn't
know. Though he could read Halo's language and read its signs, he
knew the city was much farther awayin miles from home, yes, but
also along axes he could not measure. Halo contained an infinite
number of cities, an infinite number of possibilities, and so to
participate fully in Halo required opening yourself to a reality
that had gone multiplex, uncertain, frightening.
In fact, he was having trouble coming to grips with anything.
Since being taken from the egg, he had felt odd and uncomfortable,
and he continued to trod a hallucinatory edge, one he occasionally
stepped overlast night, as he lay trying to sleep, abstract
figures drawn in thin red lines played across his ceiling,
sweeping arabesques in an alien or fictive alphabet just beyond
human understanding
And there was Lizzie: she would not see him or talk to him
and gave no explanation except that she had problems of her own
right now. Gonzales felt an unspeakable sadness at the distance
between them. To the mocking voice that asked, what have you
lost? he could only answer, possibility. He had come back around
to where he was just a few days ago, but now that place seemed
unacceptable.
Gonzales put his coffee cup down and sat staring at it. Made
of lunar-soil ceramic, colored a robin's egg blue, it stood
nondescript yet somehow foregrounded, apart from its surroundings
and projecting a numinous quality, an internal, entirely non-
visible shimmer, an indeterminacy of form
Click, Gonzales heard, a noise the universe made to itself
when it thought no one was listening, and he thought Christ, what
is going on here?
Feeling sick anxiety rising in his chest, he got up and went
into his bedroom; there he undid the complicated latch on his
wrist bracelet and placed it on the white-painted metal surface of
his dresser.
