pine fence that climbed the curve of the city's hull.
Immediately before them stood a pond. On its far side, a
waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock and
into the pond, where carp with shining skins of gold smeared with
red and green and blue swam in the clear water. Another
rockstrewn stream led away to the right and passed under a
gracefully-arched wooden bridge. Cherry and plum trees blossomed
in the brief spring.
"All this wood," he said and smiled. "It is my reward for
many years of service. I told them I wanted to live here at Halo
and make my gardens."
She said, "It's beautiful. Have you become a Zen master,
Toshi?"
"No, I have not become a master, or even a sensei. I am not
Toshi Roshi, I am a gardener. A philosopher, perhaps: a Japanese
garden maps the greater world; so to make one is to declare your
philosophy, but without words, in the Zen manner." He gestured at
the surrounding trees and shrubs. "With others I sometimes sit,
meditating, and together we discuss the puzzles we have some
think a new kind of Zen will emerge here, a quarter of a million
miles from Earth; others hit them with sticks when they say so."
She said, "You have your riddles, I have mine. Tell me, do
you understand these things about to happen with Jerry and Aleph
and me?"
"Ah, Diana, there are many explanations. Which of them would
you hear?" He stopped and stared into the distance. He said,
"Besides, who wants to know?" And he began laughinga full laugh
from below the diaphragm, unlike any she had heard from him years
ago.
"I don't get it," she said.
"Zen joke. 'Who wants to know?' There is no who, no self."
Diana frowned. He said, "Not funny? Well, you had to be there."
He laughed again, shortly. "Same joke," he said. Then his
expression changed, grew solemn. He said, "I think this is a very
difficult, perhaps impossible perhaps undesirable project."
"Difficult or impossible, I understand. But undesirable?
Are you talking about the danger to me? Aleph seems to think that
is negligible."
"No, though I worry about you, you have chosen to do this,
and I must honor that choice."
"What, then? I don't understand."
"Let me tell you a story." Toshi sat on a wooden bench and
looked up at her. He said, "Once, long ago, there was a Japanese
monk named Saigyo, and he had a friend whose wisdom and
conversation delighted him. But the friend left him to go to the
capital, and Saigyo was desolate at the loss. So he decided to
build himself a new friend, and he went to a place where the
bodies of the dead were scattered, and he assembled somethingit
was very like a manand brought it into motioninto something
very like lifewith magical incantations. However, the thing he
had made was a frightening, ugly thing, that terribly and
imperfectly imitated a man. So Saigyo sought the advice of
another monk, a greater magician than he, and the monk told him
that he had successfully made many such imitation men, some of
them so famous and powerful that Saigyo would be shocked to find
who they were. And the other monk listened to what Saigyo had
done and told him of various errors in technique he had committed,
that made his work go bad. Saigyo thus believed he could make a
simulacrum of a man; however, he changed his mind." He stopped,
smiling.
"That's it?" she asked. He nodded. She said, "Put a few
lightning bolts in the story and you've almost got Frankenstein.
Not much of an ending, though."
"This story is ambiguous, I think, as is your project."
"Could I say no, Toshi?"
"No, though I'm not sure you should say yes, either."
"Yet you were the one who called me, who asked me to come
here."
"True. Like you, I am imprisoned by yes and no."
#
Hours after Diana left him, Toshi sat in mid-air, floating in
a zero-gravity chamber at Halo's Zero-Gate. He had adjusted the
spherical room's color to light pink, the color that calms the
organism.
On Earth, to do zazen, you made a still platform of your
body, pressed by gravity against the Earth itself; the
straightness of your spine could be measured perpendicular to that
sitting platform, in line with the force of gravity that pushed
straight down. Here you could do that, or, as a visiting sensei
said, "You can find a place with no illusion of up or down, where
you must find your own direction."
In full lotus Toshi hung in mid-air, perfectly still, his
eyes lowered, focusing not on what came in front of them here and
now as the small air currents shifted him, focusing on no-thing
The eyes, sensitive part of the brain, extended stalklike
millions of years ago in humankind's ancestral past, sensitive to
the light and guiding eyes now directed to no-thing, leading the
brain that sought no-mind
He still didn't know the answer to this koan life had
presented him. Should Diana help preserve Jerry's life? Should
Diana not help preserve Jerry's life? Should he have been the
agent to pose her these questions? Should he not have been the
agent to pose her these questions?
Answer yes or no and you lose your Buddha nature. Such is
the difficulty of a koan.
He would stay in the bubble, practicing zazen as long as need
be. Until the koan became clear
You will live here? mocked self, mocked reason. If
necessary, I will die here, Toshi answeredwithout words, with
just his own courage and determination. Frightened, self for the
moment stayed silent; baffled, reason growled.
#
Gonzales watched as a sam hooked the memex into Aleph-
interface, its manipulators making deft connections between the
memex's module and the host board hardware. Gonzales could not
install the memex; the apparatus here was unlike what he had at
home.
The sam said, "Your memex will now have access to the entire
range of Halo's processing modalities." Seemingly guided by
occult forces, it continued to snap in optic fiber connectors to
unmarked junctions among a nest of a hundred others. "Also, you
will have full spectrum worldnet services that you can use in
real- or lag-time, as you wish." Its motors whining, it backed
out of the utilities closet.
"Mgknao," a fat orange cat said as the sam rolled past it on
its way to the door. Earlier the cat had followed the sam through
the open doors to the terrace and then had sat watching as it
connected the memex. Now the animal stood and walked quickly
after the samlike a familiar accompanying a witch, Gonzales
thought.
The sam came rolling back into the room, the cat following
cautiously behind it, and said, "You must allow your memex to
integrate itself into this new and complex information
environment."
"What do you mean?" Gonzales asked.
"The memex will be unavailable for some time."
"How long?"
"Perhaps hoursyour machine is very complicated."
#
Oddly, the memex came out of stasis as HeyMex; as usual,
there came the onset of what the memex/HeyMex supposed was