"Do you wish to drive, Mister Gonzales?" the car asked.
Gonzales said, "Not really. You know where we're going?"
"Yes, I have that address."
"Then you take it."
Diana Heywood lived in the Berkeley hills, in a Maybeck house
more than a century old. The car drove Gonzales through streets
that wound their way up the hillside, then stopped in front of a
house whose redwood-shingled bulk loomed over Gonzales's head as
he stood on the sidewalk. Sun glinted off the lozenged panes of
its bay window.
Her door answered his knock by saying she was a few blocks
away, at the Rose Gardens. The door said, "It is a civic project:
volunteers are rebuilding the garden, which has fallen into
disuse. Many of the local"
"Thank you," Gonzales said.
He told the Truesdale where he was going and set off on foot
in the direction the memex had indicated. To his left hand,
streets and homes sloped down toward the bay; to his right, they
climbed up the steep hillside.
Gonzales came to a hand-lettered sign in green poster paint
on white board that read:
BERKELEY ROSE GARDENS RECLAMATION PROJECT
He looked down to where broken redwood lattices fanned out along
terraced pathways threaded with a clumsy patchwork of green pvc
irrigation pipes. Halfway down stood a cracked and peeling
trellis of white-painted wood with bushes dangling from its gaps.
Next to the trellis, a small gardener robot, a green plastic-
coated block on miniature tractor wheels, extended a delicate arm
of shining coiled steel ending in a ten-fingered fibroid hand.
The hand closed, and a dark red rose came away from its bush.
Clutching the blossom, the little robot wheeled away.
Gonzales walked down the inclined pathway, his feet crunching
on gravel, past the bushes and their labels stating often
improbable names: Dortmunds with red, papery petals, large Garden
Parties flamboyant in white and yellow, Montezumas, Martin
Frobishers, and Mighty Mouses. He stopped and inhaled the strong
perfume of purple Intrigue. In the recombinant section, Halos,
blossoms in careful rainbow stripes, had grown immense. Giant
psychedelic grids, only vaguely rose-shaped, they pushed
everything else aside. Gonzales put his nose above a pink blossom
on a nameless bush; the rose smelled like peppermint candy.
He recognized the woman at the bottom of the path from
dossier pictures Traynor had shown him. Diana Heywood wore a
culotte dress of white cotton that exposed her shoulders, wrapped
tightly about her waist, split to cover her thighs. Small and
slender, she had close-cut dark hair, streaked with grey. No age
in her skin; fine, sculpted features. She wore glasses as opaque
as Gonzales's own.
She held out the thorny stem of a dark-red rose. "Would you
like a flower?" she asked. Sun across her face erased her
features.
"Thanks," he said as he took the flower gingerly, aware of
its thorns.
She said, "Who are you, and what do you want?"
"My name is Mikhail Gonzales, and I want to talk to you.
I'll be working with you at Halo."
She said, "Will you?" Her back to him, she knelt and snipped
away a greenish tangle of vine and thorn. The clippers choked on
a clump of grass. She freed them, then threw them to the ground,
where they stuck point-first, buzzed for a moment, then stopped.
She looked over her shoulder at him and said, "I've been waiting
for someone like you to show upthe company's lad, the one who
keeps watch on me and poor old Jerry, to make sure we don't do
anything unauthorized."
She stood and strode away from him, up the hill, her angry
steps kicking dirt off the stones. She stopped and turned to face
him. "Come on, Mister Gonzales," she said.
Cautiously holding the thorny stem, he followed her up the
path.
#
Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat drinking tea. He said, "I'm
the outside observer, yesthe spy, if you wantbut I don't think
we're at odds. They're asking you to do one job, me to do
another, but I don't see where our jobs conflict." She turned to
look at him; one eye was blue, the other green.
She said, "When Sentrax called me last week, that was the
first time I'd heard from them since they got rid of me years ago.
Not that they treated me badly, not by their standards. When they
fired me, years ago, they didn't just turn me loose, they paid me
well they're so prudentit was like oiling and wrapping a tool
before you put it away, because you might need it again. Now
they've found a use for me and unwrapped me and put me to work,
but I know they don't trust me. And of course I don't trust
them." She stood up. She said, "Come on, I'll show you what this
all means to me."
She led Gonzales into the next room, where their entry
triggered the lighting systems. Silk walls the color of pale
champagne were broken with floor-to-ceiling rosewood bookcases;
teak-framed sling chairs and matching tables stood together under
a multi-armed chrome lamp stand.
She stopped in front of a 1:6 scale hologram of a thin-
featured man, apparently ill at ease at being holoed; hands in
pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes not centered on the lens.
"That's Jerry," she said, pointing to the hologram. "He's
what this is all about, so far as I'm concerned. He's been
terribly injured, and Aleph thinks something can be done for him,
and as unlikely as that seems, given the extent of his injuries, I
will help as best I can." She looked at him, her face giving
nothing away, and said, "Are we leaving tomorrow morning?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, I'd better get ready, hadn't I? Where are you
staying?"
"I thought I'd get a hotel room."
"No need. You can sleep here. I'll finish packing, and
we'll go out to eat."
#
Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat high in the Berkeley Hills,
looking onto the vast conurbations spread out beneath them. To
their right, the carpet of lights stretched away as far as they
could see, to Vallejo and beyond. In front of them lay Berkeley,
the dark mass of the bay, then the clustered lights of Sausalito
and Tiburon against the hills. Oakland was to their left,
reaching out to the Bay Bridge; and beyond the bridge, San
Francisco and the peninsula. Connecting all, streams of
automobiles moved in the symmetry of autodrive.
Gonzales's mouth still tingled from the hot chilies in the
Thai food, and he had a buzz from the wine. They had eaten at a
restaurant on the North Side, and afterward Diana Heywood guided
the Truesdale up the winding road to an overlook near Tilden Park.
As minutes passed, the streets and highways and
municipalities disappeared into semiotic abstraction these
millions of human beings all gathered here for purposes one could
only guess atsome conscious, most not, no more than a beaver's
assembly of its structures of mud and wood.
A robot blimp passed across their line of sight. Beneath it,
a sailboat hung upside down. It swayed from lines that connected
its inverted keel to the blimp's featureless gondola. Lights on
the side of the blimp read EAST BAY YACHT OUTFITTERS.