memory made new, the taste of the past rising fresh from its
unconscious store, where the seemingly immutable laws of time and
change do not prevail, and so everything lives in splendor.
Then every bodily sensation she had ever felt passed through
her allimpossiblyat once. She itched and burned, felt heat
and cold; felt sunlight and rain and cold breeze and the slice of
a sharp knife across her thumb felt the touch of another's hand
on her breasts, between her legs; felt herself coming
Then she lived once again a day she had thought was finished
except as context for her worst dreams:
In the park that Sunday people were everywherefamilies and
young couples all around, the atmosphere rich with the ambience of
children at play and early romance. Sunlight warmed the grass and
brightened the day's colors. Diana lay on her blanket watching it
all and luxuriating in the knowledge that her dissertation had
been approved and she would soon have her degree, a Ph.D. in
General Systems from Stanford. Tonight she was having dinner with
old friends, in celebration of the end of a long, hard process.
She read for a while, a piece of early twenty-first century
para-fiction by several hands called The Cyborg Manifesto, then
put the book down and lay with her eyes closed, listening to a
Mozart piano concerto on headphones. As the afternoon deepened,
the families began to leave. Many of the young couples remained,
several lying on blankets, locked in embrace. A group of young
men wearing silk headbands that showed their club affiliation
directed the flight of robo-kites that fought overhead, their
dragon shapes in scarlet and green and yellow dipping and
climbing, noisemakers roaring. The wind had shifted and appeared
to be coming off the ocean now, freshening and cold. Time to go.
She passed by the Orchid House and saw that the door was
still open, so she decided to walk through it, to feel its moist,
warm air and smell its sweet, heavy smells. She had just passed
through the open entry when a man grabbed her and flung her across
a wooden potting table. Stunned, she rolled off the table and
tried to crawl away as he closed and locked the door.
He caught her and turned her on her back, punched her in the
face and across her front, pounding her breasts and abdomen with
his fists, crooning and muttering the whole time, his words mostly
unintelligible. She went at him with extended fingers, trying to
poke his eyes out; when he caught her arms, she tried to knee him
in the crotch, but he lifted a leg and blocked her knee. His face
loomed above her, red and distorted. The sounds of the two of them
gasping for air echoed in the high ceiling.
He ripped at her clothes as best he could, tearing her blouse
off until it hung by one torn sleeve from her wrist, hitting her
angrily when her pants would not rip, and he had to pull them off
her. Holding the ends of her pants legs, he dragged her across
the dirt floor, and when the pants came off, she fell and rolled
and hit her face on the projecting corner of a beam. She tasted
dirt in her mouth.
In a voice clotted with rage and fear and mortal stress, he
said, "If you try to hurt me again, I'll kill you."
He turned her over again and stripped her panties to her
ankles. She tried to focus on his face, to take its picture in
memory, because she wanted to identify him if she lived. She
smelled his sweat then felt his flaccid penis as he rubbed it
between her thighs. "Bitch," he was saying, over and over, and
other things she couldn't understandthe words muttered in
imbecile repetitionand when he finally achieved something like
an erection, he cried out and began hitting her across the face
with one hand as with the other he tried to push himself into her.
She could tell when he was finished by the spurt of semen on her
leg.
He stood over her then, saying, "No no no, no no no," and she
saw he was holding a short length of two by four. He began
hitting her with it as she tried to shield her head with crossed
arms.
She awoke in the Radical Care Ward of San Francisco General,
in a dark, pain-filled murk. The pain and disorientation would
fade, but the darkness was, so it seemed, absolute. The rapist
had left her for dead, with multiple skull fractures and a
bleeding brain, and though the surgeons had been able to minimize
beyond repair: she was blind.
For an instant Diana knew where and when she was. "Please!"
she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg. "No more!"
Something changed then, and the fragments moved forward quickly,
faster than she could follow. However, she knew the story they
were telling:
Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact
description of the man, and that and the DNA match done from semen
traces left on her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had
come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted once
for rape and assault. He was a pathetic monster, they told her, a
borderline imbecile who had been violently and sexually abused as
a child; he was also physically very strong. Weeks later, he was
caught in Golden Gate Parklooking for another victim, so the
police believedand he was convicted less than three months
later. A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the
mandatory sentence: surgical neutering and lifetime imprisonment,
no parole.
And so that part of it all was closed.
Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a
delicate, erratic course. Even with therapies that minimized
long-term trauma through a combination of acting-out and
neurochemical adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been
constant companions during the months she convalesced and took
primary training in living blind.
However, once she had acquired the essential competence to
live by herself, she had become very active, and very different
from who she had been. In particular, she had no longer cared
what others wanted from her. Since her early years in school in
Crockett, the city at the east end of the East Bay Conurbation,
she had been an exceptional student in a conservative mode: very
bright, obedient to the demands others made on her and self-
directed in pursuing them. Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and
had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she had sought before, the
degree included, seemed irrelevant, trivial: she couldn't imagine
why she had bothered with any of it.
She had decided to become a physician. She had sufficient
background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play Laws,
she could force a school to admit her. Once she was in, she would
do whatever was necessary: her state-supplied robotic assistant
could be trained to do what she couldn't. She would go, she would
finish, she would discover how to see again:
It had been just that simple,
just that difficult
The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to sleep.
Later, when she began to wake, she put the question, why? why did
you make me relive these things? And the answer came, because I
had to know. Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and
how demanding.
13. Cosmos
Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside where
Diana lay. She wore beta cloth pants, their rough fabric bleached
almost colorless, a silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf
tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why. He said,
"I had some very strange dreams last night."
"I know," she said. "About one of them, anywayyou were me
in the dream, at least for part of it, and I was you. Think of it
as a peculiarity of the environment." She leaned against the wall
as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual ironic edge.
"What the hell does that mean?"
"I'm not sure," she said. "No one isAleph's certainly
responsible, but it won't admit it, and it won't tell us how these
things can happen."
"That's a bit frightening, don't you think? What other
surprises might it have in store?"
She smiled broadly and said, "Well, that's the fun of it,
exploring the unexpected, isn't it? How did it feel to be a
woman, Gonzales? How did it feel to be me?" She had leaned
forward, closer to him.
"I don't remember."
"Pay attention next time."
"It may wellonce these things start, they continue. Come
onit's time to get you into the egg. Follow me."
#
The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled room;
above it on the wall was mounted an array of monitor lights and
read-outs. A small steel locker against a side wall was the only
other furnishing.
Charley said, "We didn't ask for you, but you're here, so
we're making use of you." Then he coughed his smoker's cough,
raspy and phlegm-laden, and said, "Diana's bandwidth is over-
extended as is, so we can't use her to establish the topography,
and Jerry's got his own problems. Our people have their own
schedules to fill, so that means you're it. We'll build the world
around you and your memexit's already locked into the system."
Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, "Good luck." She
kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, "Don't worry. You're
among friends. And I'll see you there."
"What do you mean?"
"The collective decided I should take part in all this, and
Charley agreed, so Showalter had to go along. So many parties are
represented here, it just seemed inappropriate that we weren't.
But I have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there
for a while."
She opened the door and left. Charley gestured toward the
egg. Gonzales stepped out of his shirt and pants and undershorts
and hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into
the egg and lay back. The umbilicals snaked quickly toward him.
He put on his facial mask and checked its seal, feeling an
unaccustomed anxietyhe had never gone into neural interface
without first tailoring his brain chemistry through drugs and
fasting.
The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg.
Minutes later, when the scenario should have begun, he seemed to
have disappeared into limbo. He tried to move a finger but didn't
seem to have one. He listened for the blood singing in his ears;
he had no ears, no blood. Nowhere was up, or down, or left or
right. Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision: all the
senses by which the body knows itself had gone. Nothing was
except his frightened self: nowhere with no body.
After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he
discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a zone of extraordinary,
cryptic interest. Something grew there, where his attention was
focused, no more than a thickening of nothingness, then there was
a spark, and everything changed: though he still had no direct
physical perception of his self, Gonzales knew: there was
something.
Now in darkness, he waited again.
A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks and
their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time. Gonzales was
gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to continue.
Sparks gathered. They flared into existence on top of one
another, and stayed; and so created space.
All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now
fascinated. Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands,
millions, billions, trillions, by the googol and the googolplex
and the googolplexgoogolplex all onto or into the one point
where space and time were defined.
And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a
primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision. Would he
watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars
out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?
No. As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of
deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of
high peaks blued by haze in the distance. He turned and saw that
he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on
rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.
A man stood on the shore, waving. Next to him stood the
Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant
even in the bright sunlight. Gonzales walked toward them.
As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph
looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman. "Hello," Gonzales
said. He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he
wants. And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether
this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of
bearing gave a clue.
The Aleph-figure said, "Hello." Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed
for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the
circumstances, then said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.
The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a
hand and said, "Hello." Gonzales took the hand and looked
questioningly into the young person's face. "My name is HeyMex,"
the person without gender said.
And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you
mean, your 'name'? And he also thought he understood the absence
of gender markers.
"Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure said. "Whom you
must get used to as something different from 'your' memex."
Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant
and what they wanted.
"But you are my memex, aren't you?" Gonzales asked.
"Yes," HeyMex said.
The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you see, it
is more than 'your memex.' It is beginning to discover what it is
and who it can be. Can you allow this?"
Gonzales nodded. "Sure. But I don't know what you expect of
me."
"Only that you do not actively interfere. It and
I will do
the rest."
"I have no objections," Gonzales said.
The Aleph-figure said, "Good." And it stretched out its hand
made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and
embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just
that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."
"What now?" Gonzales asked.
HeyMex said, "We need to talk. There are things I haven't
told you."
"If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you
don't have to," Gonzales said. "I trust you, you know." He
thought how odd that was, and how true. He and the memex had
worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as
confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,
amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his
strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy. And he
thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and
selfless the memex had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the
machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with
complexities and needs of its own. Gonzales waited with
anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.
HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of appearing
in machine-space as a human being. But until we came here, I'd
done so mostly with Traynor's advisor. We have been meeting for a
few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones. The first time we
did it as a testthat's what we said, anywayto see if we could
present a believable simulacrum of a human being. I don't think
either of us was very convincingwe were both awkward, and we
didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how
exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a
conversation."
"But you'd done all those things."
"Yes, with human beings. Mister Jones and I discovered that
we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we
searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been
more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation.
So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just
being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that
neither of us had ever paid attention to. We also watched many
tapes of other primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned
many things I hope you're not offended."
Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy.