was taking place here oh, he had no illusions about the
permanence of what they were doing; Jerry would truly die, and
they would mourn him. Meanwhile, though, what they did seemed to
lend everything around a benignity or mild joy it was not a
small thing, to snatch a few moments from death.
So Gonzales lay, his mind working over the bright facts of
this new existence while thoughts and images of Lizzie kept
recurring, gilding everything with possible joy.
He was staring into the night sky when it began to fall. The
moon tumbled and dropped sideways out of sight, rolling like a
great white ball down an invisible hill, and the stars fled in
every direction. In seconds, all had gone dark. All around him
there was nothing. The lake, the deck, the surrounding forest had
disappeared, and the air was filled with sounds: buzzes and
tuneless hums; clangs, drones; wordless, voice-like callings. He
yelled, and the words came out as groans and roars, adding to the
charivari. He seemed to tumble aimlessly, to fall up, down, to
whirl sideways, all amid the cacophony still buffeting the air.
A world of twisty repetitious forms opened before him, where
seahorse shapes reared and black chasms opened. He fell toward a
jagged-edged hole that seemed a million miles away, but he closed
quickly on it, veered toward its torn edges, plunged into it and
so discovered another hole that opened within the first, and
another and another through the cracks in the real he went,
falling without apparent end.
And emerged from one passage to find the universe empty
except for a black cube, its faces punctured by numberless holes,
floating in a bright colorless abyss. As he came closer, the cube
grew until any sense of its real size was confoundedthere was
nothing in Gonzales's visual field to measure it by, nothing in
memory to compare it to.
He rushed toward the center of a face of the cube and passed
into it, into blackness and near-silence (though now he could hear
the wind rushing by him and so knew something was happening)
Then in the distance he saw a glow, bright and diffuse like
the lights of a city seen from a distance, and as he continued to
fall, the glimmer became brighter and larger, spreading out like a
great basket of light to catch him
He stood on an endless flat plain beneath a sky of white.
Small faraway dots grew larger as they seemed to rush toward him,
then they became indeterminate figures, then they were on him.
Diana, the Aleph-figure, and HeyMex stood erect, facing Jerry, who
stood in the center of a triangle formed by the three of them.
Jerry had become a creature infected with teeming nodules of light
that seemed to eat at him, thousands of them in continuous motion,
a silver blanket of luminous insects that boiled from the other
three in a constant radiant stream. Like Gonzales, Lizzie stood
watching.
The Aleph-figure called out to them, "Jerry's very sick," and
Gonzales felt a moment of superstitious awe and guilt, as if he
had been the one to trigger this by thinking about it.
"What can we do?" Lizzie asked.
"We can try to help him," the Aleph-figure said. "Stay here,
be patientwith all our resources, I can keep him together."
"What's the point?" Gonzales asked. "We can't stay like this
forever."
"No," the Aleph-figure said. "But if I have enough time, I
can replicate him here."
Out of her boiling river of light, Diana said, "Please!" her
voice ringing with her urgency and fear. Gonzales suddenly felt
ashamed that he was quibbling about what was possible here and
what was not, as if he knew. "I'll do it," he said. "I'll do
what I can."
"Just watch," the Aleph-figure said. "And wait.
#
Gonzales came up hard and crazy, his body shuddering
involuntarily, his vision reduced to a small, uncertain tunnel
through black mist, and practically his only coherent thought was,
what the hell is going on?
Showalter's voice said, "Is he in any danger?"
"No," Charley said. "But we didn't allow for proper
desynching, so his brain chemistry is aberrant."
"Good," Traynor's voice said, and Gonzales was really spooked
thenwhat the fuck was Traynor doing here? how long had he been
in the egg?
Charley said, "He's pulling his catheters loose. Let's get
some muscle relaxant in him, for Christ's sake."
Gonzales felt a brief flash of pain and heard a drug gun's
hiss, and when mechanical arms lifted him onto a gurney, he lay
quiet, stunned.
#
Gonzales came to full consciousness to find himself in a
three-bed ward watched over by a sam. Charley arrived within
minutes of Gonzales's waking, looking strung out, as if he hadn't
slept in days. His eyes were red-rimmed, his hair a chaotic nest
of free-standing spikes. "How are you feeling?" he asked.
"I'm not sure."
"You're basically all right, but your neurotransmitter
profiles haven't normalized, and so you might have a rough time
emotionally and perceptually for a while."
No shit, Gonzales thought. He'd come out of the egg mighty
ugly some other times, but had never had to cope with anything
like this. His body felt alive with nervous, uncontrollable
energy, as if his skin might jump off him and begin dancing to a
tune of its own. Everywhere he looked, the world seemed on the
edge of some vast change, as colors fluctuated ever so slightly,
and the outlines of objects went wobbly and uncertain. And he
felt anxiety everywhere, coming off objects like heat waves off a
desert rock, as if the physical world was radiating dread.
"For how long?" Gonzales asked.
"I don't know, but it might take a few days, might take more.
I've been watching your brain chemistry closely, and the
readjustment curve looks to me to be smooth but slow."
"How's Lizzie?"
"In the same boat, but doing a little better than youshe
wasn't under as long as you were. Doctor Heywood is still in full
interface."
"Why?"
"Because we couldn't start the desynching sequences."
"What? Why not?"
"Impossible to say. Same for your memexshe and it are
still locked into contact with Aleph and Jerry. At some point,
we'll have to do a physical disconnect and hope for the best."
"What the hell is going on here? What's wrong with Jerry?
Aleph said he was in trouble."
"His condition has changed for the worse. We're keeping him
alive now, but I don't know for how much longer. I don't even
know if we're going to try for much longer. Ask your boss."
"Traynor. He is here. I thought maybe I'd hallucinated
that."
"No, you didn't " As Charley's voice trailed off, Gonzales
could hear the implied finish: I wish you had. Charley said,
"I'll have someone find him and bring him in; he said he wanted to
talk to you as soon as you were awake."
#
Gonzales sat in a deep post-interface haze, listening to
Traynor berate SenTrax Group Halo. "These people have no sense of
responsibility," Traynor said.
"To SenTrax Board?" Gonzales asked.
"To anyone other than Aleph and the Interface Collective.