among thousands of kinds for the right one, as mushroom hunters
do. These are ours, grown as I told you, for our own needs.' She
lay the mushrooms on the chopping block and began to slice them.
'I cleaned them in the shed,' she said. When she was done, she
used the knife to slide the slices into a sky-blue ceramic bowl.
She turned on the wok, poured more oil into it, and stood smiling
at Gonzales as the oil heated. When the first smoke came, she
swept the mushrooms into the wok with quick motions of her
chopsticks. She stirred them for perhaps half a minute, then
tilted the wok and poured them into the blue bowl. She placed the
bowl in front of Gonzales and laid black lacquered chopsticks
across its rim.
Gonzales picked up the chopsticks, lifted his plate, and
began to eat, shoveling the mushrooms into his mouth. Back at the
wok, she stirred more vegetables in and said, 'I'm making my
dinner.'
Gonzales sat back, looking at the empty bowl. Well, he
thought, now we'll see. He said, 'How many kinds of mushrooms do
you grow?'
'Quite a few, some rather ordinary, others esotericfor
purposes of research. Aleph determines what kinds, how many.'
The twins had gone completely silent. As Trish ate, they
watched Gonzales, who had gone totally fatalistic. What he had
done seemed incredibly stupid, like applying heat to a burn
common sense would tell him that. He smiled, thinking, what did
common sense have to do with his life these days? The twins
smiled back at him.
'Who was that woman?' Gonzales asked.
'Who do you mean?' Trish asked.
'The old woman, the potter,' Gonzales said.
'She makes pots, and she teaches,' Trish said. 'She's
employed by SenTrax; she was brought here by Aleph.'
'Why?' Gonzales asked. What did SenTrax or Aleph have to do
with potting?
'Pour encourager les autres,' one of the twins said,
distinctly. Gonzales turned but couldn't tell who had spoken.
Trish laughed. 'To encourage art at Halo,' she said.
'Pottery from lunar clay, stained glass and beta cloth tapestries
from lunar silica.'
Gonzales sat thinking on these things until he realized that
Trish had finished eating some time ago, and they had been sitting
at the table for some timea very long time, it suddenly seemed
to Gonzales. Involuntarily, he shoved his chair back from the
table.
Trish said, 'It's all right.' The twins got up from their
chairs and walked behind him. When he started to turn, he felt
their hands on his shoulders and neck, kneading muscles that went
liquid beneath their pressure. Trish said, 'It's begun. Now you
must go walking around Halo, up and down in it, to and fro ' She
paused, and the twins' hands continued to work. She said, 'Walk
in the woods, see what we have growing there shaggy manes,
garden giants, oyster and shiitake '
'Shiitake,' he saidshi-i-ta-keythe name's syllables
falling like drops of molten metal through water
She said, 'The twins can guide you, or a sam can take you
with it on an inoculation trip. Or if you prefer, you can go by
yourself.'
'Yes,' he said, the image suddenly very compelling of him
walking around the entire circle of the space city, exploring,
finding out what lay beyond the visible. 'I'll go by myself.'
She said, 'Go where you wish.' Her black hair sparkled with
lights. He wondered when she'd put them there, then thought maybe
they'd been there all along.
Behind him one of the twins whispered, 'No need to be afraid.
Go up, go down, where your fancy takes you.'
17. Flying, Dying, Growing
Gonzales walked through a gloomy passageway where the ceiling
came down to barely a foot above his head, and the dim shapes of
massive machinery loomed in twilight. Here in the deepest layers
of the city, he could hear Halo's most primitive voices: water
from the upper world crashed and gurgled and sighed; hull plates
groaned under acceleration; turbines whined.
He was suddenly aware of his proximity to the unmoving
shield, the circle of crushed rock that sat just outside the
city's rim, protecting Halo's soft-bodied inhabitants from the
bursts of radiation that could cook their flesh. Barely two
meters away inside the outer shield, the living ring rotated at
nearly two hundred miles per hour, and Gonzales had a sudden
picture in his mind's eye of the two ever so slightly brushing,
and of the horrible consequences, Halo tearing itself apart as the
fragile ring shattered on massive, unmoving rock
Gonzales froze as he saw strangely-shaped things moving among
the twining machinery. 'What?' he called. 'What?'
Shadows and light
Ahead a warm pool of yellowGonzales ran toward it. Above
an open doorway, the sign read:
SPOKE 3 INTERNAL LIFT
INTENDED FOR HEAVY MACHINERY
The elevator's floor was scarred metal, and the walls were lined
with bent protecting struts of bright steel. Gonzales stepped
inside.
'Will you take me up?' Gonzales asked.
'Yes,' the lift said. 'How far do you want to go?'
'To Zero-Gate.' And Gonzales looked back into the darkness
beyond, realizing he was still afraid that whatever he had seen
there would come. 'Please, let's go,' he said, the doors slid
closed, and he felt a surge of acceleration and heard the whine of
