electric motors.
Gonzales watched the lift's progress on a lighted display
over the doorway. When the lift stopped, he stood in silence,
euphoric in near-zero gravity, ready to fly. He stepped through
the open doors and followed arrows along a small corridor of plain
steel walls and ceiling and a deck covered by thin protective
carpet, like a ship's interior. His feet seemed ready to lift
from the flooring.
Overhead lights pulsed slowlydimming, color shifting into
the blue, the red, then back to yellow, growing brighter a
musical note sounded just at the limits of hearing. Gonzales
stopped, fascinated. So beautiful, these little thingsHalo had
such odd surprises, when one looked closely.
A voice said, 'Please choose traction slippers.' Gonzales
saw what seemed to be hundreds of soft black shoes stuck to the
wall by their own velcro soles. He took a pair and slipped them
over his shoes, then tightened their top straps. His fingers were
large, numb sausages at the end of long, long arms.
He stepped into a round chamber marked SPIN DECOUPLER and
walked out into the still center of the turning world. As he
moved forward gingerly in the near-zero gravity, his feet
alternately stuck to the catwalk surface and pulled loose with
small ripping sounds.
He moved to the rail and looked into the open space of Zero-
Gate. It opened out and out and out until he could feel the vast
sphere as a pressure in his chest.
People flew here, he had known that, but he had not imagined
how beautiful they would be, scores of them hanging from strutted
wings the colors of a dozen rainbows. Most of the flyers wore
tights colored to match their sails, and they danced like
butterflies across the sky, calling to one another, their voices
the only sounds here, shouting warning and intention.
Then a flyer's wings collapsed as they caught on another
flyer's feet, and the man with crippled wings tumbled through the
air in something like slow motion, pulling in his wing braces as
he fell. Gonzales wanted to scream. He leaned over the railing
to watch as the flyer curled into a ball, his feet pointed toward
the wall in front of him, and hit the wall and seemed to sink into
its deep-padded surface.
The man grabbed bunched wall fabric and worked his way down
to a catwalk across the expanse of Zero-Gate almost directly in
front of Gonzales and pulled himself across the railing. He stood
and waved. All the other flyers cheered, their voices rising and
falling in a rhythmical chant with words Gonzales couldn't
understand.
A voice said, 'If you do not have clearance to fly, please
secure yourself with a safety line.' No, Gonzales thought, almost
in despair, I don't have clearance. He didn't understand how to
flywhat was dangerous and what was not. Looking behind him, he
saw chrome buckle ends spaced around the wall and went over and
pulled on one. Safety line paid out until he stopped and looped
the line around his waist and snapped the buckle to it.
He suddenly felt himself falling. His eyes told him he stood
tethered, but he was confused by the constant motion of the flyers
in the air around him, and he felt that nothing held him to the
ground (there was no ground), nothing could keep him from falling
into this sky canyon, this abyss.
A flyer came toward him then, sweeping across the intervening
space with the effortless grace of a dream of flight, the flyer's
wings marked with green and yellow dragons, body sheathed in
emerald tights, and Gonzales suddenly believed this was someone
come to get him, how or why he couldn't say.
He tried to get into the spin decoupler, but his safety line
restrained him until he unsnapped it, then he almost fell into the
metal cylinder as the line hissed home behind him. Out of the
decoupler, he ran along the corridor, his steps taking him high
into the air so that he lost his balance and caromed off a wall
and rolled along the floor, his slippers grabbing fruitlessly at
the carpet with a series of brief ripping sounds.
He crawled toward an elevator, not the one he'd ridden up but
an ordinary passenger lift, empty thank god, and he tore the
slippers off his feet and stood and moved through the lift door.
'Down,' Gonzales said and felt the floor move and still felt
himself falling.
#
Gonzales had been sitting in the Plaza for some time.
Fifty meters away, against the wall of the Virtual Caf,
crawled a profusion of biomorphic shapes, large and small, all in
constant motion. Delicate creatures of pink and green thread
floated on invisible currents; leering amoeboids with wide eyes
and gaping, saw-toothed mouths put out pseudopodia and flowed into
them; red corkscrews thrust in phallic rhythm against all they
touched; great undulating paramecium shapes swam like rays among
the smaller fauna
Gonzales floated somewhere among them: he seemed to have
lost his body as well as his mind. Inside his head a voice
lectured him on body knowledge:
Proprioception, the voice said, vision, and the vestibular
sensethey tell us we own the body we live in. Think, man,
think: where have you placed your body's senses?
Few people were in the Plaza. Gonzales had stepped out of
the lift and into darkness and fog, an unfamiliar cityscape, where
clouds hung close to the ground and truncated shapes appeared
suddenly in the mist.
He heard the swish of a sam's passage and suddenly,
unpremeditatedly called out, 'What is going on? Why is it cold
and foggy?'
The sam stopped. It said, 'Why do you wish to know?'
'It just seems unusual,' Gonzales said.
