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
man small and red-haired and cocky, felt hat on the back of his
head, the woman just a bit dumpy but carefully groomed, her blue
cotton dress clean and starched and ironed, hair permed and
combed, lipstick and nails red and shining. Gonzales watched as
the man bought a carton of Lucky Strikes and a box of pouches of
Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco.
The man said something to the young woman behind the counter
that brought a giggle, and Gonzales, though he leaned forward,
could not hear what was being said
He followed the two by a lacquered plywood magazine stand,
where a skinny girl or eight or nine in a faded pink gingham dress
lay sprawled across copies of Life and Look, reading a comic. She
looked up at him and said, "Tubby and Lulu are lost in the magic
forest "
Gonzales started to say something reassuring but froze as the
girl smiled, showing her teeth, every one of them sharp-pointed,
and she dropped her comic book and began crawling toward him
across the wooden floor, her eyes fixed on him with a feral
longing
And he noticed for the first time that he was not he but she,
and he looked down at his body and saw he wore a simple white
blouse, and in the cleft of his breasts he could see the tattooed
image of a twining green stem
"Jesus Christ," Gonzales said, sitting up in his bed and