Trish's mushroomswhich are the same as we ate that day, the body
of the godthen I recall the frenzy with which we attacked the
beautiful singer, and I recall my guilt afterward, and my sorrow,
but I take solace from the knowledge that the god was pleased."
"And I," the Alice twin said, "can grow ten feet tall."
"The mushrooms can serve many purposes," Trish said.
"You should eat mushrooms," the Alice twin said. "You are
both sad and confused. They will help you grow large or small as
the occasion demands."
"Perhaps I am sad and confused," Gonzales admitted. "But I
think they would make me more so." Around him, the room lights
pulsed ever so slightly, and the shapes at the edge of his vision
flickered.
"Confused into clarity," the Eurydice twin said. "If you
cannot come up from Underground, you must go deeper in."
An absurd idea, but it put barbs into his skin and clung
there. Gonzales asked, "Do the collective ever take the mushrooms
after interface?" Often enough, he had prepared to go into the
egg by taking psychotropic drugs; why not the reverse, eat the
mushrooms to recover from interface? And he thought, the logic of
Underground, of the Mirror.
Suddenly he felt anxiety grip him so he could hardly breathe.
He tottered a bit, then sat in a chair and looked at the others.
The three women watched as he sat breathing deeply. He said, "I
want to take the mushrooms."
"Are you sure?" Trish asked.
"I want to."
"All right," she said. "First I will feed the twins, then I
will prepare your mushrooms."
Trish went to the refrigerator and took out a plastic bag
filled with a mixture of vegetables and bean sprouts. She pulled
the rubber stopper from an Erlenmeyer flask and poured oil into
the bottom of an unpainted metal wok that was heating over an open
gas ring. She waited until light smoke came out of the wok, then
dumped in the vegetables and sprouts and stirred the mix for a
minute or two. She unplugged the rice cooker, a ceramic-coated
steel canister, bright red, and carried it to where the twins sat.
She put shining aluminum plates and chopsticks in front of
the twins, opened the rice cooker and swept rice onto each plate,
then tilted the wok and poured the steaming mixture inside it onto
the rice. "There," she said. "That's for you two." She looked
across to where Gonzales sat, now oddly calm, and she said, "I'll
be back in a minute."
The twins ate with their eyes fixed on Gonzales.
Trish came back with a small wire basket of mushrooms.
"Psilocybe cubensis," she said. "Of a variety cultivated here
that has undergone some changes from the Earth-bound kind." She
held up an unremarkable mushroom with long white stem and brownish
cap.
"Do you ever make mistakes in identifying the mushrooms?"
Gonzales asked.
"No," Trish said. She was smiling. "We do not have to seek
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