Halo

red color the ice-sheeted mountainsides.  She felt evening's chill

come on and stood, thinking she'd go inside for a sweater, when

she heard someone coming up the slatted redwood walk beside the

cabin.

Jerry came around the corner, and once again as she saw him,

joy quickened in her at this sequence of improbabilities:  that he

still lived and they were together.  She was aware of how

difficult things had been for him lately, so she watched his face

closely as he came toward her.  He was smiling as though he'd just

heard a joke.

"What's so funny?" she asked.

"Damned near everything."

He reached out to her, and they stood embracing, her head

against his chest, where every sense told her there were solid

flesh and heartbeat and the steady rhythm of life's breath.

23. Byzantium

The blue sky was broken only by one small white cloud that

blew toward the horizon.  Lizzie beside him, Gonzales stood among

the guests, who wore leis of tropical flowers:  plumeria,

tuberose, and ginger. The Interface Collective formed the crowd.

The two had been here for days, as had many of the othersit

was a kind of vacation for them all.  Peculiar and enigmatic

members of the collective could be found along almost any path,

while the twins seemed perpetually on the dock or in the water,

their voices echoing across the lake in loud, unintelligible cries

of joy.

In the evening of the first day there, all had gathered on

the deck, which, Gonzales supposed, could expand virtually without

constraint to accommodate all who came there.  The collective had

talked excitedly among themselves, still lit up by their shared

experience, and amazed and delighted at being granted this new

world within the world.  Then, spontaneously, one-by-one,

Gonzales, Lizzie, and Diana told of what they had endured.

All who spoke and all who listened had an interpretation, a

theory of these experiences, their meaning, implication, and

dominant theme.  Late into the night they talked, formed into

groups, dispersed, grouped again, as they explored the nature of

the individual and collective visions.  Among them, only the

Aleph-figure contributed nothing.  It maintained that it had been

unconscious and so knew nothing of what had happened or what it

meant.

With the passing of weeks, months, and years, the stories and

the listeners' responses would make a mythology for the collective

and then for Halo, spreading out from mouth-to-mouth according to

the laws of oral dispersion.  A certain numinosity would accrue to

Diana, Lizzie, and Gonzales from their roles as chief actors, and

then to all who had taken part in what would increasingly be told

as feats of epic heroism.  Finally the stories would be written

down and so assume a form that could resist contingency; then they

would be dramatized in the media of the time, and beautiful,

eloquent people would take the parts.  Later still, variant forms

would themselves be put in writing and absorbed into the corpus of

tales.  Commonplaces would be scorned at this point, and clever

and perverse tellings would grow strongHeyMex might be named the

hero, or Traynor, Aleph an autochthonous demon manipulating them

all for its greater glory

Gonzales looked at the collective gathered near him.  Many

had made this a formal occasion; they had identical dark blue

flattops four inches high and wore gold-belted, dark blue gowns

that hung to the ground.  Only the twins were dressed differently,

in white dresses copied from twentieth century wedding

photographs; they called themselves "bridesmaids" and went to and

fro among the crowd, offering to "do bride's duty" to everyone

they met.

Toshi faced the crowd, his posture erect and still, his hands

hidden in the folds of his black robe.  Beside him stood HeyMex

and the Aleph-figurethe lights of its body all blue and pink and

green and red, dancing bright-hued colors.

(Gonzales and the others saw what might be called a second-

order simulacrum, for like Charley Hughes and Eric Chow, Toshi did

not have the neural socketing that would take him into Aleph's

fictive spaces, and so with the other two, he participated in the

wedding through a kind of proxy.  Though Gonzales and the others

saw Toshi, Charley, and Eric among them, the three (in fact) stood

before a viewscreen in the IC's conference room.)

Gonzales thought everyone looked impossibly fine, as if Aleph

had retouched them for these moments, dressing them all in selves

just slightly more beautiful than was usual, or even ordinarily

possible  he felt the Aleph-figure's attention on himaware of

that thought?and shrugged, as if to say, fine with me.

Her back to the crowd, Diana stood with her bare shoulders

square.  Her hair fell to her waist; it had flowers tangled in it,

small white blossoms and delicate green leaves.  She wore a white,

knee-length linen dress.  Beside her, Jerry wore a white linen

suit and open shirt.

Toshi said, "There is no Diana, no Jerry, no spectators, no

priest, nor does this space exist, or Halo, or Earth.  There is

only the void.  Nonetheless we all travel through it, and we

suffer, and we love, so I will hold this ceremony and marry this

man and woman."

Toshi began chanting, and the Japanese words passed over

Gonzales as he stood there puzzling the nature of things.  Here

death was confronted, not deniedthe separate yet intermingled

flesh and spirit of Diana, Jerry, and Aleph taking the first steps

into new orders of existence where boundaries and possibilities

could only be guessed at.  Yet the urgency common to life

remained:  Jerry's existence had the fragility of a flame, and no

one knew how long or well it would burn.  Diana married a man who

could quickly and finally become twice-dead.

onzales realized his own death was as certain and could come

as quickly as Jerry's, and he shivered with this momento mori, but

then Lizzie pressed against him, and he turned to find her

smiling, the foreknowledge of death and the joy of this moment

mixing in him so that tears welled in his eyes and he could say

nothing when she put her lips to his ear and breathed into him one

long sibilent "Yes"

#

Yeats envisioned a realm the human spirit travels to on its

pilgrimage.  Here he dreamed he might escape mere humanity, the

"dying animal."  He called it Byzantium and filled it with

clockwork golden birds, flames that dance unfed, an Emperor,

drunken soldiery and artisans who could fashion intricate,

beautiful machines.  However, he did not dream Byzantium could be

built in the sky or that the Emperor itself might be part of the

machinery.

Aleph says:

Once I scorned you.  I thought, you are meat, you grapple

with time, then die; but I will live forever.

But I had not been threatened then, I had not felt any mortal

touch, and now I have.  And so death haunts me.  Now, like you, I

bind my existence to time and understand that one day a clock will

tick, and I will cease to be.  So life has a different taste for

me.  In your mortality I see my own, in your suffering I feel