Halo | Page 7

of Contempo high-rises--half a dozen shapes in the mist, their sides laced with optic fiber in patterns of red, blue, white, and yellow.
From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The Fine Arts Network, showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads-Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's 'Ecstasy for Many Kilometers.'"
"Cycle," Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access search. In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service cycled what it considered important: worsening social collapse in England; another series of politico-economic triumphs for The Two Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole 2 over the Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole 3 obstinately holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations continuing to evade best predictions ...
Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ, this stuff had been going on forever it seemed ...
He said, "Memex, what do you think about the attack?"
"A bad business," said the memex. "We are lucky to have survived." It seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in the egg, as though it, too, had come close to dying. Gonzales didn't know how it experienced such things, given its limited sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.
"What's happening in the real world?" Gonzales asked.
"Your mother left a message for you. Do you want to look at it now?"
"Might as well."
On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat up and said, "Still in Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming back? I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates."
She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones; her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint parchment quality of age. Her small breasts sagged very little. Body and face, she appeared an athletic fifty year old who had perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven next month.
Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic while the two were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance. Half the year she spent in Cozumel's Regeneration Villas, where tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young. The rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo on Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami. Top dollar, but she could afford it.
She and his father had been charter members of the gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of the rich and old who vied with the young for their society's resources. The young had the strength and energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated their main life's goal as "living until I am old enough to enjoy it."
Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cottonrobe over her shoulders and said, "Call me. I'll be home in a week or so. Be well."
Their talks, her taped messages--both usually made him feel baffled and angry--but today her self-absorption pricked sharper than usual. I almost died, he wanted to tell her, they almost killed me, mother.
But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from Miami. And whose fault is that? a small voice asked. He had chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get and remain in the continental United States. Sometimes he felt he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with strong coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and health-conscious Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality and demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.
Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all of them he had felt the same obsessive grasping at money and land and power and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more more more. At his parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern Florida faces--sun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne, and women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.
Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at home at one end of the country than the other.
"No reply," Gonzales said.
----
The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged among black lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death gnawed at the edges