Halo: First Strike (11 page)

don't much care about.  Particularly those of us who have been

here a long time.  Like me."

Gonzales nodded and said, "That's what I figured.  And it

looks like you've got a little tug of war for control of Aleph

with Showalter and Horn."

"We do," Lizzie said.  "Insofar as anyone controls Aleph."

"How long have you been here?" Diana asked.

"Since they buttoned it up and you could breathe," Lizzie

said.  "From the beginning."  She pointed across the square and

said, "There's going to be some music.  Let's have a look."

Under a splash of light from a pole on the edge of the

square, a young woman sat at a drummer's kit.  She wore a splash-

dyed jumper, crimson and sky blue; her hair stood in a six-inch

high spike.  She placed a percussion box on a metal stand, opened

its control panel, and gave its kickpads a few preliminary taps. 

Two men stood next to the percussionist.  One, nondescript in

cotton jeans and t-shirt, had the usual stick hanging from a black

straplong fretboard, synthesizer electronics tucked into a round

bulge at the back end.  The other stood six and a half feet tall

and was so thin he seemed to sway; his skin was almost ebony, and

his close-shaved head looked almost perfectly rectangular.  He

wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned to the neck, black pants. 

A golden horn sat dwarfed in his enormous hand.

The percussionist hit her keys, a slow shuffle beat played,

and a fill machine laid a phrase across the beat:  "Bam!  Ratta

tatta bam! Bam bam!  Ratta bam!"  The stick player joined the

drummer with his own lo-beat fillswalking bass, sparse piano

chords, slow and syncopated.  The horn player stood with his eyes

closed, apparently thinking.  After several choruses, he started

to play.

He began with hard-edged saxophone lines, switched to trumpet

then back to saxophone, played both in unison, looped both and

blew electric guitar in front of the horn patterns.  Scatting

voices laced through the patternsGonzales couldn't tell who was

making them.  The drummer's hands worked her keyboards, her feet

the various kickpads below her; the song's tempo had speeded up,

and its rhythms had gone polyphonic, African.

The woman stood and danced, her body now her instrument, feet

and hands and torso wired for percussion, and she whirled among

the crowd, her movements picking up intensity and tempo.  The

song's harmonies went dissonant, North African and Asiatic at

once, horn and stick player both now into reeds and gongs and

pipes, the ghostly singing voices gone nasal, and the dancer-

percussionist laying out raw clicks and hollow boomings, cicada

sounds and a thousand drums.

The crowd clapped and whistled and called, except for the

group from the Interface Collective.  "Hoot," they said in unison. 

"Hoot hoot hoot."  Very loud. Lizzie was smiling; Diana sat rapt,

staring into space, and Gonzales got a sudden chilly rush:  this

was what she looked like when she was blind.

"Hoot," said the Interface Collective, "hoot hoot hoot."  And

the whole group had made a long chain or conga line, each person's

hands on the hips of the person in front.  They shuffled forward

until a circle cleared, then surrounded the drummer, the whole

line still moving, most of them still calling out rhythmic hoots. 

Back-and-forth and side-to-side, they swayed as the line lurched

ahead, and the drummer continued her dervish dance.

When the night had filled with all the sounds, the drummer

broke through the line, then finished the song with a series of

rolls and tumbles that brought her next to the other two

musicians, where she came to her feet and flung her arms up to the

sound of an orchestral chord, then down to chop it the sound, up

and down again and again, and so to the end.

The drummer climbed up the backs of the two men, who stood

with their arms linked; balancing with one foot on each of their

shoulders, she brought her palms together beneath her chin and

bowed to the audience, then raised her arms above her head and

somersaulted forward to land in front of the other two.

"Hoot hoot hoot," said the collective, their line now broken.

The three musicians stepped together and bowed in unison.

Gonzales caught Lizzie looking at him, and their gazes

crossed, held for an extra, almost unmeasurable instant, and she

smiled.

The musicians bowed for the last time to the Interface

Collective's hooting chorus.  Okay, thought Gonzales.  I like it. 

Hoot hoot hoot.

#

Lying in her bed, Lizzie turned from side to side, lay on her

back and stretched.

The two from Earth seemed okay.  Gonzales she would keep an

eye on, of courseaccording to Showalter, the man was Internal

Affairs and wired to a SenTrax comer, a board candidate named

TraynorChrist knew what script he was playing from.  Diana

Heywood she didn't worry about:  the woman was into something

stranger than she probably knew, but that was her problem, hers

and Aleph's.

As Showalter and Horn were her problem.  They would yank the

plug on this one if anything looked like going wrong.  In fact,

they would never have let it happen if Aleph hadn't insisted. 

Aleph and the collective saw Jerry Chapman's condition as an

opportunity to extend Aleph's capabilities, but the whole business

just made Showalter and Horn edgy.

Aleph itself troubled herit had been unforthcoming about

the project and those involved in it, almost as if it were hiding

something from her  why? with regard to a small project like

this, one apparently unimportant to Halo's larger concerns?  What

was the devious machine up to?

So Lizzie lay, her thoughts spinning without resolution, and

she gave in and called her Chinese lover.

He wore a black silk robe embroidered across the front with

rearing crimson dragons; his straight ebony hair fell over his

shoulders.  When he let the robe fall away, his skin shone almost

gold under lamplight, and his muscles stood with the clear

definition of youth and endowment and use.

Coarse white sheets slid away from her shoulders and breasts

as she rose to greet him, and she felt her desire rising through

her abdomen and bursting through her chest like the rush of a

needle-shot drug.

She pressed against him, and his rough, strong hands moved

across her body.  She lay back as he ducked his head between her

legs, and she spread her legs and felt his first light, hot

caresses.

After she had come for the first time, she moved up to sit

astride him, then for some timeless time the two moved to the

exact rhythms of her needcock and lips and tongue and fingers

playing on her body.

Physically satiated, she dismissed him then, ghost from the

sex machine, and pulled the plugs from the sockets in her neck. 

Then she lay alone, silent in her bed in Halo Cityisolated by

her job and, she supposed, by her temperament, dependent on

machines for love.

Maybe it was time to find a human lover.

#       

Exhausted by travel and novelty, lulled by food and drink,

Gonzales fell quickly into sleep, and sometime later he dreamed:

He was with a lover he hadn't seen in years.  In the

background violin and piano played, and the night was warm; all

around, artificial birds with golden, glowing bodies sang in the

trees.  They leaned across a table, each staring into the other's

face, and Gonzales thought how much he loved every mark of passing

time on her facethey had taken her from a young girl's

prettiness to a mature woman's beauty.  He and she said the things

you say to a lover after a long absencehow often I've thought of

you, missed you, how much you still mean to me.  Aimless and

binding, their talk flowed until she excused herself, saying she'd

be back in just a minute, and she left.  Gonzales sat waiting,

watching the other tables, all filled with loving couples,

laughing, caressing.  As the hours went on, the others began to

whisper to each other as they looked at him, and then the birds

began to sing that she was not coming back, and he knew it was

true, suddenly, painfully, ineluctably knew, the truth of it like

knowledge of a broken bone

The dream stopped as though a film had broken, and in its

place came a featureless, colorless absence.  Imagine a visual

equivalent of white noise  and in this space Gonzales waited,

somehow knowing another dream would begin

Red neon letters twisted into a silly but instantly

recognizable parody of Chinese characters read The Pagoda.  They

stood above the head of a red neon dragon, now quiescent in

sunlight, that would rear fiercely come dark.

On this warm Saturday morning, men in felt hats and neatly-

pressed weekend shirts and pants carried brown paper bags out of

the Pagoda and placed them in the beds of pickup trucks or the

trunks of cars.  They spat shreds of tobacco from Lucky Strikes

and Camels and Chesterfields, called their greetings.  Women in

faded cotton, their arms rope-thin and tough, waited and watched

through sun-glazed windshields.

Gonzales passed among them.  The sunshine had a certain

quality  that of stolen light, taken out of time.  And the

cigarette smoke smelled rough and strange.  Gasoline engines fired

rich and throaty, kicking out clouds of oily blue.  Gonzales stood

in ecstasy amid the smells and sights and sounds of this morning

obviously long gone by.  He knew (again without knowing how) that

he was in a small town in California in the middle of the

twentieth century.

Gonzales passed into the main room of the Pagoda, where

narrow aisles threaded between gondolas stacked high with toys and

household goods and tools.  Baby carriages hung upside down from

hooks set in the high ceiling.  Dust motes danced in the cool

interior gloom.  He walked between iron-strapped kegs of nails and

stacks of galvanized washtubs, then through a wide doorway into

the grocery section.  Smells of fruits and vegetables mixed with

the odors of oiled wood floors and hot grease from the lunch

counter at the front of the store.

A couple in late middle age came through the front door, the