wondering what the hell all that had about. In the dream he had
been Lizzie: that seemed plain, though nothing else did.
He lay back down with foreboding but went to sleep some time
later, and if he dreamed, he never knew it.
10. Tell Me When You've Had Enough
Lizzie sat at a white-enameled table, holding an apple that
she cut into with a long, shining knife. It sliced away dark skin
without apparent effort. She heard noises from the room beyond
and looked up to see Diana and Gonzales come in.
"Hello," she said, as she put down the knife. She held out
half the apple for them to look at. "A beautiful apple, isn't it?
Seeds from the Yakima Valley, not far from Mount Saint Helens."
She bit into a slice she held in her other hand.
She got up from the table and said, "The apple grew here, in
our soil. Many fruits and vegetables thrive up here, animals,
too. We give them lovely care, bring them pure water and rich
soil, give them sunlight and air rich in carbon dioxide, tend them
constantly. You'd think all would thrive, but of course they
don't. Some wither and die, others remain sickly." She stopped
in front of Diana and looked intently at her.
Diana said, "Living things are complex, and often very
delicate, even when they seem to be strong."
Lizzie said, "That is true, but Aleph understands what life
needs to grow and prosper in this world." She gestured with a
slice of apple, and Diana took it. "Its apples," Lizzie
continued. "Its people."
Diana bit into the apple. She said, "It's very good."
Lizzie laid a hand on Gonzales's shoulder and squeezed it, to
ay hello. She said to Diana, "You have an appointment with the
doctor. We'd better be goingthrough here, this way." She led
the two down a hall, through a doorway, and into a large room.
Over her shoulder, she said, "First you can meet some of the
collective."
#
Lizzie watched as Gonzales and the woman stood talking to the
twins, obviously fascinated by them. No news there: most
everyone was. Slight and brown-skinned, black-haired, with solemn
oval faces and still brown eyes, they appeared to be in early
adolescence. In fact, they were a few years older than that. Their
faces had the still solemnity of masks. No matter how close you
stood to them, they lived some vast distance away.
The Interface Collective gave them a home, them and all the
others. StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des Touts, Devol,
Violet, Laughing Nose some Earth-normals, others unpredictably,
ambiguously gifted. Some had heightened perceptions and an
expressive intensity that came forth in language and music. And
there were holomnesiacs, possessors and victims of involuntary
total recall, able to recreate in words and pictures the most
exact remembrances, les temps retrouv indeedthey experienced
the present only as the clumsy prelude to memory and were almost
incapable of action. And mathemaniacs, who spoke little except in
number, chatted in primes and roots and natural logarithms, could
be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of
simple recursionsFibonacci numbers and the like. Apros, who had
lost proprioception, their internal awareness of their bodies, and
so perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and
forms floating in an intangible ether; they moved through the
world with an eerie, passionless grace that shattered only when
they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the
world's physical factsthey could hurt themselves quite badly
with a moment's miscalculation.
People wondered how the IC held together and did its work.
Lizzie knew the answer: Aleph. It stretched nets over the entire
world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for
previously unknown sensory or cognitive modalities varieties of
being or becoming that she had grown used to thinking of
collectively as the Aleph condition. Having recruited them, it
appealed to what made them strange, and in the process usually
tapped into the core of what made them happy or, in many cases,
wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition, and
thus for their uniqueness. As a result, they were loyal to each
other and to Aleph past reason.
She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry
Chapman. Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while
others simply welcomed the extension of their native domain: the
infinitely flexible and ambiguous machine-spaces where human and
Aleph met and joined.
"Come on," she called to Diana and Gonzales. "Charley will
be waiting."
#
In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it a
light globe, nearby an array of racked instruments set into
stainless steel cabinets. "The doctors are in," Lizzie said. She
pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next to the table and the
massive Chow, a still presence at the table's foot.
At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of the
room's tables. Her chin fit into a sunken well at one end.
Charley put clamps around her temples, then covered her hair with
a fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck.
Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath the
skin, and as his fingers worked, he looked at a real-time hologram
above and beyond the table's end. The display showed two cutaway
views of Diana's neck and the bottom of her skulclass="underline" beneath the
skin, on either side of the spine, she had two circular plugs;
from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear
into the center of her brain. As the doctor's fingers moved,
ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced their course.
Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the instruments
rack next to the table and placed its tip on Diana's neck. As he
moved it slowly across the skin, its hologram double followed.
The hologram probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even
more slowly. The hologram flashed red, and he stopped. He moved
the probe in minute arcs until the hologram showed bright,
unblinking red. The instrument rack gave off a quiet hiss.
Charley repeated the process several times.
Charley said, "She's nerve-blocked now. I'm ready to cut." A
laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on the end of a flexible
black cord, and a projector superimposed the outlines of two
glowing circles on Diana's skin. The hologram showed the same
tableau. First came a brief hum as the fine hair on those two
circles was swept away, then Charley began cutting. Where the
scalpel passed, only a faint red line appeared on her skin.
"Any problems, Doctor Heywood?" Chow asked. He stood next to
Gonzales, watching.
"No," she said. "I've been on both ends of the knife
really, I prefer the other." At the foot of the table, Lizzie
said, "It can't always be that way," and laughed.
Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a metal
basin, where they began to shrivel. Two socket ends sat exposed
on Diana's neck, dense round nests of small chrome spikes, clotted