Halo: First Strike by Eric S. Nylund Read Free Book Online Page B

entities.'
     
    'They aren't,' replied the priest."
    Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot
     
     
     
     
    6. Halo City, Aleph
     
     
     
    Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth and
    Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a mile-wide silver ring ready to
    be slipped on a stupendous finger.  Six spokes mark Halo's
    segments.  Elevators climb them across forty stories of artificial
    sky, up to the city's weightless hub and down to its final layer,
    just inside the outer skin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth
    normal.  There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur:  air and
    water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used
    again.  Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected:  a
    simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city. 
    From the mirror, sunlight works its way through a hatchwork of
    louvers and into Halo, where it sustains life.
     
    Aleph presides here:  Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator,
    the Universal Machine.  Aleph is beautiful as night is beautiful,
    as a sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful.  It is
    not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation.  What Aleph is, that
    remains to be explored.  One certain thing:  within the human
    universe, it is a new object, a new intention, a new possibility.
     
    Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath crushed
    lunar rock, where robots dug and planted, then had their memories
    of the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a
    black six-meter cube.  Inside the cube, billions of lights play,
    dancing the dance that is at the core of Aleph's being; from the
    cube, fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural
    columns connecting Aleph to its greater body, its subtle body,
    Halo.
     
    Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys
    around the sun, but here spring comes when Aleph wills, and is now
    in progress.  Valley walls thick-planted with green shrub climb
    steeply up from the valley floor.  A hummingbird with a scarlet
    blotch under its chin hovers over a blossom's pink and white open
    mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill. 
    Bees move from flower to flower.  Rhododendron and azalea bushes
    burst into color-saturated bloom.
     
    As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph, caretaker
    of the seasons, and night and morning, counts the city's breaths,
    and marks the course of its creatures big and small.  Bats fly
    overhead, their gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the
    bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions gotten
    through transceivers the size and weight of a grain of rice,
    embedded in their skulls.  Driven by precise artificial instinct,
    mechanical voles, creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over
    networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and
    tunnel under it, carrying seed.
     
    (A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its jaws
    close on one of the swift voles; there is a loud crackle, and the
    cat recoils with a squawk, its fur on end.  The vole scurries
    away.  The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)
     
    A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley floor.  It
    passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from the
    ground, rushing through small, rock-strewn courses, then winds
    among the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small
    ponds and lakes thick with detritus.
     
    >From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people, of
    things animal, plant and mineralthe stuff of a life web, an
    ecology.
     
    In many things, Earth provides.  However, between the city of
    six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways. 
    Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues its destinies, and in
    doing so affects other living things.  Thus, as Earth reaches out
    supporting, controlling, exploringAleph reaches back, and the
    planet below has begun to feel the  hard leverage of its
    immaterial