took a rack of paints and brushes from a shelf above her head and
began to paint the surface of the pot.
As she worked, she looked up occasionally, but didn't seem to
mind the three of them standing there, so they stood and watched
Gonzales was fascinated by the quick intensity of her movements,
eager to see what the pot would look like.
Finally she turned it so they could see her work. On the
pot's side was a face, its nose and mouth just painted
protuberances in the clay, its eyes painted oval dimples. The
pot's bulbous shape distorted the features of the face, but as
Gonzales looked more closely at it, he saw
His own face, in malign parody, its features hideously
contorted.
The woman laughed, gleeful at his sudden recoil. She picked
up the pot and looked at the face, then at him, then at the pot
again, and she laughed again, very loudly, and squeezed the pot
between her clay-spattered hands, squeezed it again and again,
until it was a shapeless lump of color-shot clay. She threw the
lump across the room into a large metal bin that sat against the
far wall.
'Ohhhh,' from the twins, their voices in unison. 'Ohhhh.'
'We're not frightened,' the Alice twin said. The other twin
covered her face with her hands. 'Silly old woman,' the Alice
twin said.
The old woman's eyes stayed on Gonzales as she reached into a
plastic bag full of wet clay and separated out another clump to
work on. She was working it on the unmoving wheel when the twins
started making shrill hooting noises, and ran away.
Her crooning had begun again as Gonzales followed them down
the path.
#
Next to the path was a gateway, with a sign that said, in
glowing letters:
HALO MUSHROOM CULTIVATION CENTER
ABSOLUTELY NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
BEYOND THIS POINT!
About a hundred feet from where Gonzales stood, a metal
stairway led up to a catwalk that passed over the mushroom farm.
He looked back along the shadowed way he'd come, then forward to
where small, isolated shafts of bright sunlight slanted down into
the mushroom farm, and beyond, to where shapes faded into
darkness. Either the twins had left him, or they had gone in
here.
Gonzales stepped up to the gateway and said, 'Hello, I'm
looking for two girls, twins.'
'One moment, please,' the gateway said. As Gonzales had
expected, common courtesy would dictate that a gatekeeper
mechanism respond to those who didn't have the access key.
Gonzales stood bemused in the semi-darkness for some time,
until a woman came to the other side of the gate and said,
'Hello.' She was small and darkher skin a delicate brown, eyes
black under just the slightest epicanthic fold. She wore black
boots to the knee, a long black skirt, a loose jacket of rose silk
with butterflies in darker rose brocade. She was exquisite, the
bones of her face delicate, her movements graceful. She said, 'My
name is Trish. The twins are inside, waiting for you.'
'My name is Gonzales.'
'I know. Come in.' As she said the final words, the gate
swung open. She waited, watching, as Gonzales stepped through,
and the gate closed behind him.
'How do you know my name?' he asked.
'From the collective. I am friends with many of them the
twins, of course, and others Lizzie.' She stood solemnly
watching him, then said, 'What do you know about mushroom
cultivation?'
'Nothing.' All over Washington state, he was aware,
mushrooms grew, and people hunted them with great dedication,
sometimes bringing back what they regarded as enormous successes:
chanterelle, boletus, shaggy mane, morel. In fact, to someone
from Southern Florida, the whole business had seemed not only
quaint and Northwestern, but also dangerous: Gonzales knew that
what seemed a lovely treat could be a destroying angel.
'All right.' Trish stopped, and he stopped next to her. She
turned to him, and he was aware now of her deep red lips and white
teeth. She said, 'Halo needs mushrooms as decomposersthey're
incredibly efficient at converting dead organic matter into
cellulose.' Gonzales nodded. She said, 'In a natural setting
whether here or on Earthspores compete: many die, and some find
a place where they can flourish, grow into a mycelial mass that
will fruit, become a mushroom. As mushroom growers, we intervene,
as all cultivators do, to isolate certain species and provide
favorable conditions for their growth. But our 'seeds,' if you
will, the spores, are very small things, and to locate them,
isolate them, bring them to spawn, this requires delicacy and
techniquein a word, art.'
She paused, and Gonzales nodded.
They came to a low structure of plastic sheets draped over
metal walls and stopped in front of a door labeled STERILE
INOCULATION ROOM. They passed through a hanging sheet into an
anteroom to the sterile lab beyond. She said, 'Take a look
through the window here.' Beyond the window, small robots worked
at benches barely two feet high. Like the robot he'd seen in the
Berkeley Rose Gardens, they had wheels for locomotion and grippers
with clusters of delicate fibroid fingers at their ends.
She said, 'Their hands have a delicacy and precision no human
being can achieve. And they are single-minded in their
concentration on the jobthey preserve our intentions completely
and purely.'
'They are machines.'
