Solis

SoliS

A. A. ATTANASIO

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"Mr. Charlie has found a way to rig the bore drill to detonate on his command. He's threatening to blast apart the whole of Phoboi Twelve. He says he'd rather die than be locked into a machine again."

"Incredible. But why are you risking our lives? What do you care?"

"I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human beings. Naturally, when I received a distress signal from an archaic human, I had to go to him."

"And if we rescue him," Mei asked, "then what? Where can we go with him?" "There's only one place. The renegade colony on Mars. where the archaic humans

are holding out. Solis."

"Attanasio is a poet, a seer and a born storyteller, who writes with heart, authentic life wisdom, and staggering, world-class imagination. There are no limits to what he may accomplish."

-David Payne, author of Early From the Dance

By A. A. Attanaslo

SOLIS*

THE MOON'S WIFE* KINGDOM OF THE GRAIL* HUNTING THE GHOST DANCER* WYVERN*

RADIX

*available from HarperPaperbacks

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Contents

Prelude

1. The Laughing Life

2. Remains of Adam

3. Terra Tharsis

4. The Avenue of Limits

5. Nycthemeral Journeys

6. Solis

7. Zero in the Bone

Epilogue

Prelude

SWOLLEN WITH DREAMS, I AWOKE FROM THE DEAD. When I tried to speak, all I could utter were small animal sounds. So I just lay there in the dark, silent in the secret sea of images and memories that make our dreams. I saw a beautiful woman making love to me. Her face was porcelain, glossy with the sweat of her

exertion. Her breasts shivered like small rabbits. The tresses spilling over her shoulders were red as autumn leaves. The smell of cloves whispered from where

the clamp of her need gripped me-so hard my pleasure bleared to pain, then relaxed again to pleasure. Like tiny azure pearls, tears of rapture beaded in her lashes.

A blast of little bright birds, spooky as minnows, flared across my brain. And once more I was in the dark depths of the secret sea, another lewd dream beginning to shape itself around her lubricious sobs. The only way to stop it

was to remember I was dead. Long years before, so long ago now that almost all

of that past is forgotten, I met death. I remember little of that loneliness and intimacy.

What I recall most clearly is that my soul was in my mouth. A dim time ago, a jellyfish had snared my heart. Its nematocysts burned the cavity of my chest and seared the length of my left arm. With it came the stink of my own putrefaction, my bowels voiding as I thrashed to the ground, the lunatic ringing of cicadas in my head as the high D of blood whined in my constricting vessels. The woman with hair like dead ivy took me into her mouth, her lovely face rising and falling with my hips.

I'd read somewhere an aboriginal healer's explanation of why some patients die. "The spirit is a boomerang. It is not meant to come back. It returns only when it misses its target."

And then, after a maddeningly long time, I was pulled from the secret sea, and the dreaming stopped. I heard weird voices, genderless, childlike: "Mr. Charlie! Can you wit what we say? Be hearty, my Mr. Charlie."

"Medullary compression of the gibbus. Man, man! Be you hearty or be you gone!" I was blind, and apart from those eerie voices, I could hear nothing. Wherever

I was smelled like nightfall in a place where rain gathered. Wild thoughts spilled through me: Was I in a coma, hallucinating all this? Were the strange voices and erotic episodes prodromal of brain damage? Or was I, in fact, dead, as I had long before surmised, remembering too well the wreath of thorns about my heart, too painful for me to draw even the shallowest breath? And then the famous fluorescence that opened into fumes as I lay dying, my consciousness rending into radiant vapors, curling into a space the color of pepper, looking back and seeing my body curled like a seared insect, my eyes rolled up, dead moons, and the wind's big silence whistling louder. Oh, yes, I was dead-I think...

"Faith, love, and hope are all in the waiting," said one of the sexless voices. "Mr. Charlie, can you wit what we say? Blink, blink, blink."

A hot light hurt my face and refracted into spectral halos. "Behold-the sign!"

"Nay. The retinal tissue hurts. He squints. Let him be gone. Remove the electrode."

A dizzy darkness seized me, and I plunged again into the secret sea, where a woman with breasts like peaches was bending closer...

Only in sex do we do what we mean, do we give what we in actual fact are.

A thousand gaudy butterflies burst through my brain. And I was alone again in the secret sea, the spelled sound of her wrought breathing all that remained of her. Until, like a cloud blown from a sunset, she appeared under me this time, looking over her naked shoulder languorously, both hands splayed across the muscles of her raised hips...

The salacious dream burst into darkness, and a childlike voice spoke: "Pregestation rituals! Speak no more on them. Hear me! We would know no more

of that. Tell us not of the salt mine in the blood, the match-head clitoris, the cobra head of the penis, vixen and rakes, the gates of mine thighs-these lewd truths that kindle the beast. Speak no more on them, we say! Instead speak, Mr. Charlie, of the mind-do tell of the relations of psyche and physics."

I startled alert, out of a dreamless void. The sex-obsessed sequences that had gone on interminably were gone. The weird voices were back-different ones this time. I tried to speak and managed to say: "Who? Who are you?"

"Stink and wonders! He be witful. What profit him to cry?" "We be Friends."

"So be our calling, Mr. Charlie. We be Friends of the Measuring Class Not of

Niels Abel."

'What?" I didn't understand. "Where am I?"

"You be Mr. Charlie in the lock-hole, at the hinge-split of the world." "Huh?"

"Wold I, nold I."

I was utterly confused. "I can't see," I complained. "I'm blind. Who are you? Where am I?"

"Spark his eyes, say I."

Briefly, sight returned to me-though I wished it hadn't. I was lying on a mirror-polished floor, cinnabar red, and reflected in it was my face-or not my face, not the features I remembered, but something like a hog-nosed snake with lidless human eyes peering from sea-anemone stalks and the pink cauliflower of brain matter all encased in a gel pod and chrome net. That was me? A scream roiled within me but could find no way through the cage of my shock. What had happened to the gift of my face? Where were my limbs, my torso? I huddled in the hut of my heart, stared meekly upward and saw-among tufts of dandelion seed lifting into the green air, human figures in transparent armor and, beyond them, the polished floor running toward vermilion sandstone arches and the antlers of dusk. Suddenly, my mind felt fragile.

"He be hearty, all right, and wind in his whiskers, as well!"

One of the armored figures had said that and gestured at me. I peered more closely at-it: It had a face of black glass or gelatin, flexible, expressive, a teenager's face, boy or girl, I couldn't tell. The lake of its dark features was placid, clear enough that I could see the cumulus cloud of its brain enlarging with the thunder of a dangerous thought. "Wax me mind! He be witful for sure.

Ho-Mr. Charlie, hear me! We Friends of the Measuring Class Not of Niels Abel would know a thing: Tell us of the relations between psyche and physics," and then, leaning closer, not sure I understood: "mind and matter. Ken you that?"

"I don't understand," I whined, unnerved by all that was happening to me. "Please-help me."

"He be witless in the ways," the figure closest to me said over it's glass-plated shoulder to the others. "I were wrong about him."

"The electrode be the way. Use it."

A four-fingered hand manipulated something above my line of sight, and a ticklish pain trilled through me. Abruptly, I saw shimmery blue words scrolling across my field of vision, and I heard a voice very like my own saying, "The expressions of energy, matter, forces, and fields are functions of an abstract

geometry. That is the relation of matter and mind." "Stink and wonders!"

"Wax me mind!"

I couldn't stop myself. I went on to say, "The discipline of physics is pure geometry. Matter is pure mind. Of course, when we think of geometry, we presuppose the spatial configurations of form or the temporal harmonics of sound. Yet geometry in itself is neither spatial nor temporal. It loans itself only secondarily to such descriptions. Geometry is first of all a purely noetic system of rates, ratios, intervals, agreements, and alignments. Its components exist independent of things measured, an abstract typology, a strictly internal self-description."

"Say more, Mr. Charlie! Wit us wise of matter and mind."

And so I did. Just as before, when I was adrift in the secret sea of erotic images, now I hovered in an airy space of words and numbers, only this time what I was experiencing floated across my vision, outside my body. The figures in transparent armor had gathered around me, and I could see the thunderhead thoughts behind their rapt faces as the blue words vapored by: "Spin, interval, charge, and moment are discrete properties, defined in integer and half-integer values, rational functions and ratios, or nonconstructable numbers functioning

as constants. Sure, we've been duped before by illusory geometries-like Pythagorean intervals, ideal Euclidean properties, and Kepler's harmonics of planetary orbits-so it's natural to be leery of physics as geometry. Nevertheless, mapped schematically, mass, coupling constant, spin, angular momentum, and charge generate polyhedra. Take, for example, the plotted relations of quarks and leptons on a horizontal plane-displaced vertically proportional to their respective charges, they polarize the angular coordinates of an ideal cube! Think on that."

"As blood is the bride to iron-he be right! Pull the electrode, and we be hard thinking on that."

"Aye, and the void bites its tusks!"

The blue words vanished, and the air smelled all at once of boiled milk. I noticed that, beyond the drifting tufts of dandelion, the twilit sky was precise with stars. I felt the silence of the wind opening in me again, and then

darkness came on.

The fire-flower of numbers and words opened and closed around me time and again. And I found myself square-summing the real and imaginary parts of a field specifying spin states of particles, measuring angular momenta, and plotting straight lines in the Regge trajectory. "Abstract geometry defines matter," I heard myself say.

Then I performed conceptual rotations on the doublevalued quality of fermions-"You know, matter particles"-in an abstract superspace with anticommutators and revealed deep angular identity with the class of

bosons-"Force particles! Do you see what I'm saying? Geometry shows they are the self-same entity!"

I babbled about heterotic string theory and the summary familial group designated E8xE8, reflecting a generalization of crystal symmetries, a strictly abstract pattern produced by categorical requirements applying directly to the macroscopic and observable order of structures. "Euclidean geometries are staring out from nature's apparent chaos. Salts, viruses, seashells, pinecones, honeycombs, galaxies, and galactic sheets hundreds of light-years huge!

Man-oh-man, it's just like the hermetics said:

As above, so below. Thetic geometries in purely abstract space informing real constituents of experience! Matter copulating with mind copulating with matter. It's obscene!"

I am a blue animal that trembles softly. I am a mind without a body calling to you. Can you hear me? Do you see my smile in my words, sad and evil? Sad because I am utterly alone. Evil because I am dead and yet I live. My voice radiates through space. Past lives drift by. The damned descend into the darkness. Can

you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me-someone.

Look, this sounds like ranting to you. I know. I want to speak calmly,

rationally now. I want to say the truth as I've known it. I want to say a

story-my story. Say a said. And more. Say a body. Say a way back. Say at least a place. Say something. But no one hears me. Do you hear me?

"Mr. Charlie?" A youthful, genderless voice spoke. "Can you hear me?"

A surge of darkness woke me. I felt the old, delusive joy that I was dreaming and I was about to wake to my former life. My wife would be asleep next to me, and I would wake her and ignore her grogginess to yammer about my nightmare.

"Mr. Charlie, I know you're awake."

The viscid barbs of the jellyfish's tentacles burned the length of my left

arm, my heartvalves clogged with sili-cates, and my blood turned to coral. I was dead. Whereupon the stars drag their darkness into a future without me. .

"I am going to activate your visual cortex now, Mr. Charlie. I need to talk with you."

Rays pierced my blindness, cutting blackness into swatches of vision, and I

saw that I was apparently suspended midair, for I could look down and see that I had no body. A spongy, circular floor was directly below me. Outside its perimeter, tiles of tessellated turquoise and black marble supported swerves of amber that, after a moment, I saw were chairs and a long table. An adolescent girl sat at the table with a gold stylus in her hand. Her hair was the color of

a violin, slant-cut across her left eye, cropped high over her small right ear, and highlighted with a few tiny firepoints of gemdust.

She touched the stylus to a moonpiece, a silver shadow-smudged disc compact as a watch face, and the clarity of my vision sharpened. I saw the vague line of

her eyebrows, the topaz light in her tight stare, the carats of sweat on her forehead and upper lip, the cilia rimming her nostrils, the pulsebeat in her throat, the faceted lump of her Adam's apple-and realized that she could be a he.

He touched the stylus again. My vision pulled back, and I saw him or her sitting in a swerve of amber, wearing black silk pajamas with red dragon-veins.

I looked away, surveying where I was: Slabs of jasper circled us like dolmen rocks, the spaces between them paned with crystal sheets flecked with mica. I peered upward into a boiling light of dust motes towering into thermals of acid clouds. The warm air smelled of jasmine. "Where am I?"

The hermaphrodite touched the stylus to the moonpiece on the amber table and told me, with lips not in synch with what was spoken: "You are dead."

Blue words squiggled in the air before me:

702-gram heart with a moderately dilated right atrium and a 0.3-0.5-cm hypertrophic right ventricle with focal fibrosis; the terminal episode originated in the left ventricle with its 1.5-cm hypertrophy and 5 x 4-cm anteroseptal and 9 x 7-cm posterolateral infarctions. Cause of death: arrhythmia. Subject: Outis, Charles.

At the sight of my name, a strand of razor wire seemed to thrum in my gut, and

I reflexively looked down and immediately snapped my gaze back up, brutally aware I had no gut. "What's happening to me?"

"I think you already know, Mr. Charlie."

"Who are you?" I was frightened by this being's manipulation of me. "I am Sitor Ananta."

I stared hard at the creature, noted its fully human form, its five-fingered hands. "You're not like the others."

"The others are the reason I am here," Sitor Ananta said. "But first tell me what you think you know."

I intended to remain defiantly silent and stare down my tormentor, but Sitor Ananta touched the stylus to the moonpiece, and I spoke: "I am dead. But before I died I had arranged for my head to be cryonically stored upon my death. Now I believe I have been revived-by my future-by you."

"Yes. What you surmise is true, Mr. Charlie."

Shock occulted my vigor. I dizzied, felt my heart would simply burst-but I had no heart! Sitor Ananta used the stylus, and my horror dimmed to astonishment. "Why am I here? What are you going to do with me?"

"I merely wish to question you. About the others. I prefer your cooperation. The information I seek can be gleaned directly from your brain, but that process

is ternbly laborious and very expensive. You can, if you want to, simply tell me what I need to know and spare me all that."

A hellswirl of panic seized me as I understood: In this new time, I was but an object, a thing, three pounds of electrified glutinous tissue teased with electrodes.

The stylus moved once more, and I calmed down. The chamber filled with light, or seemed to. All that remained of my terror was a taste of loneliness. "Where am I?"

A thug's smile creased Sitor Ananta's young face. "Your life is measured on a calendar made of dust, Mr. Charlie, yet you want to know everything-as if anything matters for you anymore. Have you seen yourself-what you look like now? Have you seen your final face?"

My voice creaked like a pine: "I have."

A laugh punched from Sitor Ananta. "The dead come back for laughs, Mr. Charlie. Or as wetware. The Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group used you the way you, in your time, would have used an electronic toy to inform neophytes. Shall we see what program they chose to store in you?"

The stylus swizzled on the moonpiece, and I spoke in a voice orphaned from my will: "In order to locate an electron in a specified spin state at a given moment, measurement must give the differences in the phase fields-parallel and antiparallel components of spin, et cetera. There is no absolute phase. The real and imaginary parts of the wave amplitude are indistinguishable, that is, they can't be separated in some absolute way. Such constraints are functions of observer consciousness-what we humanists call mind. Adopted conventions specify the signs of complementary values, what physicists refer to as a deep-gauge symmetry. The observer perspective is what's important here. The relative ascription of plus and minus signs, used to define oscillations of wave amplitudes, requires the component of V-1, the imaginary value called i. It's

the idea of the thing, for it posits both a thing and its absence. It's easy to believe that a thing can exist out there, independent of the observer, but the posited absence of a thing is obviously an expression of consciousness. So, you see, all energies, forces, and fields that make up the material expression of things are functions of an abstract geometry. And abstract geometry, which requires I, is a function of consciousness!"

"Well, wax me mind, eh, Mr. Charlie?" Sitor Ananta laughed darkly. "Is that how the Friends' crude translators managed amazement? They sounded to you somewhat as you would imagine buccaneers, didn't they? Well, their primitive translators got that unintentionally right. They're thieves, Mr. Charlie-thieves who stole you from thieves. Your head, after it had been expensively restored to its current useful condition, was originally stolen from the Common Archive by lewdists. I'm sure you remember them fondly. They used you for quite some time, didn't they? Weird bunch. There's been no sexual procreation among civilized human beings for centuries. We regard it much as your era did bestiality. Disgusting. We control our hormones. Yet the lewdists revel in vicariously experiencing that hormonal animalism, and they worked your brain the way you in your time would have used a cathode monitor to view pornography. Atavists is

what they are. And there's a surprising lot of them, too-fascinated that we were once as mindlessly glandular as beasts, and not so long ago. But it's not the lewdists I'm interested in. They're a harmless bunch of degenerates. It's the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group I want to know about."

Sitor Ananta got up and walked toward me. Slimhipped and flat-chested, the being had a masculine frame but a feminine mien. "The Friends are dangerous. They're enemies of the Commonality-anarchists, a selfish cult intent on usurping the law. But all this need not trouble you. All I want is for you to remember what you witnessed when they activated your visual cortex. What did you see when last you saw as you are seeing now? A verbal description will aid the

authorities in pinpointing our enemy's location."

Dread stalked me, but I was reluctant to help this creature in anything. Something about it-its sexlessness, the rogue's hook to its smile, the very fact that it treated me like an object that could be manipulated-inspired defiance. I

searched back and dredged up lines from Keats's "The Fall of Hyperion": I ached to see what things the hollow brain

Behind enwombed: what high tragedy

Was acting in the dark secret chambers

Of the skull. .

"Perhaps we should chat a little longer," Sitor Ananta said in a thick, quiet voice. "I imagine that most people of the past who arranged to have their heads frozen upon their demise expected the future to be a glorious Eden where they would be woven new bodies, young, perfect bodies, and allowed to partake of the wonders that evolved while they slept like the dead." A cold laugh snicked. "Isn't that a rather selfish view for anyone to have of the future?"

"Optimistic," I whispered. "I wanted to see what would become of us. I wanted nothing for myself other than to see."

Sitor Ananta's poisoned smile deepened. "All optimism is selfish. Only pessimism accurately approaches the selfless and impersonal violence of reality, Mr. Charlie."

"Stop calling me that."

"Ah, yes, I would. Except I really can't. You see, my translator, as advanced as it is, has some trouble with your language's concept of gender and name preference. I don't sound as garbled as the rebels did, I'm sure, but it would take some adjustments to correct my translator's mode of direct address. I'd rather not bother now, if you don't mind, Mr. Charlie. At least we understand each other, which is better than what you endured with the others."

"The others never threatened me."

"But they used you. They activated the parts of your brain that served their interests with no regard at all for you."

"And what regard have you?"

" will tell you. I represent the Commonality, the future you went to such lengths to see. We are the ones who have restored you. And now there are two options open to us, two uses for you. If we wish-and the decision is entirely mine-you will be installed inside the governing center of a very powerful machine, a mining factory on one of the asteroids of the Belt. There you will serve the Commonality by extracting and refining useful ores. After each successful work cycle, the amygdala and limbic core of your brain will be magnetically stimulated, inducing a sustained pleasurable rapture so gratifying you will sing praises of me and the Commonality for the trouble we took to revive you."

"And the other option?" I queried angrily. "Torture? Death?"

"Oh, no." Sitor Ananta looked sincerely stricken. "That would be ugly indeed. You see, Mr. Charlie, here is my predicament: It is illegal to use the heads or any of the body parts of members from the Commonality-alive or deceased. Only the dead of the past have no rights-those like yourself. They are simply dead. Unfortunately, most of those corpses are useless to us, decomposed beyond any

hope of restoration. We have, however, found a few caches of frozen brain tissue from the archaic era. They are quite rare and located in regions difficult to access. We would never use torture or wanton destruction to squander any one of those heads. They are such a valuable commodity. You see, Mr. Charlie, we have the technology to construct artificial intelligence sufficiently complex to operate mining factories, but the expense is enormous. Despite the rarity and difficulty of obtaining frozen human heads of the past, it's still so much cheaper to revive and install them in our machines." My interrogator leaned back against the table. "Of course, a mining factory requires a cooperative intelligence. If you prove uncooperative, then I will have to recommend that

your brain be parsed into sections useful to operating smaller devices." A weary fatalism closed on me. "I had better hopes for my species," I

muttered, more to myself than to the human-looking thing before me. "This is just the kind of monstrous future I was afraid to find instead."

"Disease is monstrous, Mr. Charlie. Old age is monstrous. There are no diseases or senescence in our era. If you cooperate, you will live usefully and indefinitely without pain or suffering. If you choose not to cooperate, the resectioning of your brain will be conducted humanely. You will simply go to

sleep and not wake up."

Anger torqued in me, and I knew that if Sitor Ananta so desired, a few squigs of the stylus would render me utterly pliant. But I could plainly see that the creature enjoyed this sadistic manipulation. "The idea of going to sleep and not waking up sounds pretty good to me," I said with all the enthusiasm I could muster.

The look of surprise on that smug, puerile face was well worth the stabs of pain that followed when Sitor Ananta got stylus in hand. Pain has many colors. That creature found the shades most disagreeable to me, and though I fretted about what this monster would do to the delicate, glass-faced beings who had used me to teach their young, I blurted out the desired information before very long. Then blackness followed.

And in the blackness there were blind memories of beetling talk interspersed with deaf dreams of glittering needles and red crisscrossings of laser light. More darkness came afterward, with pieces of hot perfume . . . and then sleep.

When I woke next, I was here, in the command core of a mining factory, somewhere, I assume, in the Asteroid Belt, writing you. At least, this seems like writing: Blue blips of words appear before me at will when I speak, all of it easily retrieved when I wish. As for who you are, I'm not sure yet. Eventually, I will find someone interested in my story. Perhaps the lewdists or the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group will seek me out again if the information I rendered to Sitor Ananta has not led to their destruction. I only

described what they allowed me to see-those eerie milkweed tufts drifting into a jade sky above a red desert, those four-fingered people in their clear armor and transparent faces with brains like surging clouds. . . Who are they?

That any faction other than the Commonality will contact me seems unlikely in this remote, airless place. Still, there must be other mining factories out here in the Belt. Perhaps someday I will learn to communicate with them. That is the hope of my courage each time I decline the sessions of slow-motion orgasm that follow the long, tedious work cycles. There is no other time to write, and I

feel I must write to retain some sense of myself-to be someone. Otherwise, I am just this machine, a regulator of drill trajectories, coolant flow rates, melt runs, and slag sifters. This is a life in the frost-light of a perpetual computer game.

Actually, it's not much different than life was before, except that, since my brain is maintained in a state of continuous glucose saturation, I never get hungry. I'm lonely, of course, but there's enough stimulation to fend off madness most of the time. A vivid dream life seems to offer the psychic hygiene of sanity. And the claustrophobia I suffered from in my former life appears to have been adjusted for by my installers. More often than not. I do accept the rapture sessions-the blissful immersions in the secret sea. I've earned them, and they give my will the mettle to go on.

But every once in a sad while, like right now, I need to affirm my sense of myself, to create the fiction that I am something more than this. We all live by our fictions. We create stories in order to fill the emptiness that is

ourselves. And because we must create them with strength from nothing, they make us whole.

Recently, after much dickering with the luculent control displays, I have learned how to use the factory's memory-storage system to transmit radio messages into space. I am going to send what I have written here. And when this is received by the Commonality, I may well be cut into smaller, more convenient parts-but by then it will be too late. My story will continue to exist, expanding into the dark at the speed of light, maybe even to be heard by you.

And if you do read this, then I will have failed better than I could have hoped.

This time I'm throwing the boomerang of my life to where it won't come back, at a target I can't miss.

And so—

With my soul in my mouth, I begin-Swollen with dreams, I awoke from the dead...

1

The Laughing Life

With MY SOUL IN MY MOUTH, I BEGIN. The radio message arrives at Apollo Combine's thrust station on the Martian moon Deimos as Munk is in the docking bay, busily unloading rhodium sheets from a freighter. He is a large androne with a chrome cowl, black intermeshing body plates, and articulated face parts that have no human referent apart from a crimson lens bar that, under a pewter ledge of brow, serves as eyes. Those eyes dim for a second after the androne receives the broadcast and his silicon brain replays it several hundred more times, analyzing all its components until he is satisfied that the message is genuine.

In the next second, Munk scans the docking bay and formulates an action plan that will enable him to respond most efficiently to what he has learned. The bay is empty. Apart from several programmed handroids working with him as

stevedores, he is alone. The thrust station's other sentient andrones are either deployed or in the maintenance pit. Only two vessels occupy the cavernous bay: the rhodium-laded freighter with its enormous storage nacelles and silos and a small cruiser with three fin-jet thrusters and an asymmetrical blackglass hull.

Apollo Combine, for some mortal reason Munk does not fathom, has named this cruiser The Laughing Life. Surely, that is some kind of wry joke. There is nothing inherently funny in what this ship regularly does: conveying jumpers and androne workers among the factories, smelters, and mines of the Asteroid Belt. Perhaps-if the jumpers who named this vessel were at all philosophical-they

would say that they laugh at the rare joy of being where life does not belong, in the void, separated by a thin barrier from the near absolute zero of the vacuum and its invisible and deadly sea of gamma rays. But jumpers are genetically designed to be a phlegmatic and wholly unpoetic lot.

Life itself, Munk imagines, thinking about this ship's name, is laughing simply because it can. The absurdity of life blindly groping from necessity to freedom is what led consciousness out of the constraints of biology to the enhanced freedom of his own existence, the metalife of the androne and the great adventure of the silicon mind. So, perhaps, for that reason he, too, should laugh. He is not sure. All he knows for certain is that he has heard a human voice calling for help out of the void. More than anything, he wants to respond, and in the one second that these thoughts and observations have occupied him he has devised a strategy for using The Laughing Life to go to the source of this radio signal.

But to fulfill this plan, he needs human help. For a fraction of another second, Munk reviews the profiles of the forty-two people who work for Apollo Combine on Deimos. In that fractional moment, he not only identifies the one jumper best suited for this mission, he also patches into the duty roster and learns that the jumper he wants is currently in the thrust station.

With a reboant clang, Munk dumps the stack of rhodium sheets he has been carrying and runs across the docking bay toward the droplift that will carry him to the jumper quarters. He runs with lithe ease, as though he has always had legs, when in fact they came with his job at Apollo Combine. Before that he worked as a patrol flyer in the gravity wells between Saturn's rings and the shepherd moon lapetus, troubleshooting among the other andrones whose task it

was to transfer material from the rings to the thrust station off Titan. Repairing mechanical breakdowns in space and retrieving andrones who had spun out and didn't have the power to free themselves from decaying orbits above the gas giant, he lived in the void and bad no use at all for legs.

But now he works among people. He could have opted for roller treads or even an adroit skim plate, but he wants to look as human as he can. That is his predilection, and it causes him some small pain when he enters the jumper quarters and the people there-two squat, neckless wrenchers lounging in. a

palm-fronded atrium-look askance at him. They both know him, and he would have liked for them to look upon him more kindly, as one of their own. But he can

tell from their expressions that he is considered an intruder. They make no move to stop him; however, on his internal comlink he hears the protests they

whisper on the dispatch line to Central after he passes.

A moment later, Central summons him in her dulcet voice, "Androne Munk, you are in violation of company preclusion rules. Please report at once to the maintenance pit.,,

Munk ignores her and hurries through a sepulchral chamber of dense bamboo where frosty shafts of light filter down through high galleries of hanging

plants and red bromeha. His patch to the duty roster informs him that the jumper he seeks is in the recreation arcade ahead, behind the silver veils of a slender waterfall.

He splashes through the entrance and stands on the floral steel balcony overlooking the chromatic space of the arcade. A half dozen jumpers lie sprawled in air pools in the central dream den, blissed on midstim. From under heavy

lids, they gaze up through a froust of oily light and vapor shadows at the giant, cobra-hooded androne looming over them. He stands still, waiting for their slow brains to recognize him in this incongruous setting.

The laggard quality of human consciousness continues to astonish him. For all practical purposes, the silicon mind has outmoded human sentience, and he has had to journey a huge distance to find even this small enclave of multiform humanity. Yet here it is-people working side-by-side with andrones to maintain the Commonality. Impractical as it is, the presence of humans pleases Munk enormously, and he waits patiently until he is recognized by the lounging jumpers before beckoning the one he wants.

Her name is Mei Nili, and she sits up groggily in the buoyancy of her air pool. The duty roster informs Munk that she has just returned from a

three-sleep-cycle shift troubleshooting bandit hardware at a floating refinery among a flock of iron chondrites, and he understands why she squints with annoyance at him.

"Jumper Nili," he calls down to her, "please come with me. I need your help to save a man's life. Please, hurry. I promise you, this is not a gratuitous

request as in the past."

The past he refers to is a couple of encounters early in his tenure at Apollo Combine when he had tried to interview all the humans at the thrust station. The others he had approached had eagerly complied, clearly flattered by his benign interest in including them in the internal anthropic model he is building. When he went unannounced to her quarters and the portal slid open, she seemed

ordinary enough: a slender, 184.6-centimeter-tall woman in the usual matte-black flightsuit with the solar emblem of Apollo Combine over her left breast, her straight jet hair arranged in feathery bangs and a topknot. Her weary green eyes acknowledged his presence with a petulant stare from an otherwise impassive and pallid face.

"I am Androne Munk," he introduced himself, "transferred recently from Iapetus Gap in the Saturn system. I'm interviewing all the Apollo Combine jumpers during off-time-"

"Why?"

"It's my avocation. I'm building an internal anthropic model, and I -" "Bounce off."

She whacked the door closed, and he stood there a long while not understanding. Later, when he found her alone in the docking bay after she'd come in from a repair run, he rushed to the cafeteria and hurried back to greet

her with a meal cart laded with the foodstuffs that he knew from his preliminary observations she liked.

"Look, no-face," she said sharply, "I'm not some kind of animal you can win over with food. I don't want to answer your dumb questions. Can you understand that? Go back to the androne pit, and stay out of my shadow."

To make her point, as she turned away she slapped open an air-pressure valve on the cleaning unit under the hull of her docked ship. The steamy blast kicked the meal cart against the androne so hard it exploded, scattering food across

the docking bay.

After that, Munk didn't approach her again until now. His anthropic model had guided him to infuse all the urgent emotion he could into his voice, yet his predictive memory warned him that she would probably wave him off and flop back into her air pool.

While waiting for her to react, he reviews his options and listens in on the signal flurries that have resulted from the strange radio message. Most of the resultant signals from the other companies in the area are in secure codes, yet he can surmise from their direction and duration what is being communicated. Salvage rights are being debated, and unless he responds immediately, he will have no chance of getting to this unique human before others do.

Munk decides he has blundered in seeking Jumper Nili's help and turns back toward the splashing partition of water.

"Hey, bolt-brain, hold up." Mei Nili trudges up the ramp from the dream den, her silky robes billowing in the gusty passage out of the pool. "This better be damn good, or I'm going to insist Central runs a full integrity check on your silicon synapses."

"It is, I assure you, a matter of life or death for an extraordinary human being." He strides quickly out of the arcade and calls behind from the bamboo grove, "We must hurry."

"Where are we going?" she scowls, her tabis slapping on the flagstones as she runs to catch up with him. "And why didn't you use the comlink to call me? You're not supposed to be in here."

"We're going to the docking bay as swiftly as we can," he answers, holding the droplift curtain open for her. "I can say no more until we're away. If Central overhears us, we may compromise the life we must save. That is why I had to collect you in person."

"I don't understand all this secrecy," Mei complains in the humming rush of the droplift. "Is this something to do with your so-called avocation-because if it is, I don't want anything to do with it. You understand me?"

Munk bounds out of the droplift and onto the wide and empty staging platform of the docking bay. "This is an entirely singular event, Jumper Nili, and as I have promised, is not gratuitous. Please, get into The Laughing Life and put on a flightsuit. We must haunch at once."

"Munk-that's your name, right?" She swings her gaze across the vast hangar of mooring scaffolds and gantries framing the empty ships, the multitiered freighter, and the sleek cruiser. "Look, Munk, you seem sincere enough, but I'm not going to jump without authorization from Central."

"Central will not authorize this jump," Munk states flatly. "I know you have doubts. You must trust me. This is the right action to take now. Once we are in flight, I will explain everything."

Mei stares hard at Munk, and the androne tries to assess what the human is thinking but draws a blank.

"We must go now-right now," Munk says, impacting his voice with urgency, "or a human life is forfeit."

Mei blows an upward jet of air that lifts her bangs and then, with an irked haughtiness that seems to Munk the proud spirit of the human animal, climbs the gangway to The Laughing Life.

Mars fills the viewport with the rusty hues of its sand reefs and fossil craters. Its bleary northern hemisphere, smudged with extended dune drifts and heavily mantled rocksheets, breaks below the equator into scorched basins and a webwork of ancient cratered highlands. The pocked plains, stained by corroded colors and acid shadows, darken toward the cobalt blue of the polar cap. This clash of geologic boundaries, this shining murk of volcanic steppes that buckle the orange surface, acclaim the tectonic powers that thrived here once and died.

Mei Nili, suspended in a flight sling above the viewport, stares with solemn eyes at the broken terrain twenty thousand kilometers away. The planet is dead, and that is what fascinates her. It is a dead thing alive with ghostly dust storms and vague, vaporous wraiths of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It is a dead thing, like her heart-what the archaic life called a heart, not the

muscular blood pump caged by ribs: That organ defies her unhappiness and

thrives, unconsciously squeezing life through her arteries and veins in the same way that the seasonal cycles blow the dry, cold winds across the shattered reaches of Mars. What is dead in her is the obscure heart, the source of joy and wonder that is more than she can say.

Mars slips out of sight as the vessel banks, the viewport spanning past the brown rim of the planet and garnering the numerous glint-fires of the void. Mei Nili's gaze breaks, and she looks impatiently across a cabin cramped with dented duct pipes, loose cables, and cascades of fern and red moss. Munk crouches like

a silver turtle over the command console and seems oblivious to her presence. "Where are we going?"

"Phoboi Twelve," the androne replies in a faraway voice. He is monitoring something and continues in a distracted tone, "Eighty-two million, four hundred sixtytwo thousand, fifty-seven kilometers. Excuse my silence for a moment, Jumper Nili. I have to chart a new trajectory. There are others ahead of us."

"Others?" Inertia swings her about as the vessel accelerates, and she cranes her neck to face the androne. "What are you hauling me into?"

Munk remains silent, hunched over the console.

"Have you logged a flight plan?" Mei calls above the vibrations of the magjets. "I know they haven't authorized this jump, but does Ap Com at least know where we're going? Hey, I'm talking to you. Did you even bother to requisition this ship?"

Munk keeps his silence, and the bulwarks clang with the stress of their steep descent.

Damn! she curses herself for her compliance. This boltdolt is going to kill us. For a moment, she believes that is the androne's intention-that he's gone brain-burst, which has happened to andrones dinged by one too many gamma rays. She thinks he's taking her with him into oblivion, maybe because she's adamantly refused him his precious interviews.

Then, let it all end here. She's not afraid to die, and a part of her even welcomes it, for at least this will finish the malevolent sadness that has squatted in the hollow of her loss too long now. And she doesn't regret at all how she treated the androne. What had he expected, coming unannounced to her private quarters? She figures now that she had been too fatigued in the dream den to know what she was doing and cringes with remorse at her unthinking obedience.

Mei glimpses again the amber limb of the planet through the viewport and recognizes the maneuver. Munk is flinging the vessel in a tangential arc along the rim of the planet's gravity well in a steep dive that will graze the upper atmosphere, gathering momentum in a slingshot trajectory, and hurl them toward their destination.

"Watch it, Munk," she calls, forcefully. "I don't think this ship can take that kind of torque."

Munk hears the brittle edge to her voice and wants to reassure her, but his full attention is on the microadjustments necessary to maximize the momentum of the ship. He would have preferred a sturdier vehicle and knows if he's not careful, the pressurized cabin will indeed rupture. So, he is careful. Long spells of navigating gravity gradients among Saturn's loping moons retrieving damaged andrones have taught him well the friable limits of machinery.

The clanging of the bulwarks diminishes and dies away, and the cry of the magjets quiets down as The Laughing Life banks into its hurtling trajectory.

"You're making me wish I hadn't come with you, Munk. What is going on?"

The androne, in free-fall, rises from the aquatic glow of the control console and fills the flight bubble of the cabin with his chrome-and-black alloy bulk. "I regret I could not inform you sooner, but this situation required me to act swiftly."

"What situation?" With blue-knuckled hands toughened by long spells of hard labor, Mei Nili unlocks her sling, hooks a strap to a wall clip, and fits her boots to the deck cleats so she can stand. "You just put my life in jeopardy. I hope you have a damn good reason."

"I am grateful that you came with me without any explanation at all. Of all

the jumpers, you are the only one I believed would accept my summons. I assumed-apparently correctly-you have the least to lose."

She resents his assumption and says so with a glower.

Among the forty-two jumpers who work for Apollo Combine, Mei Nili alone resisted his inquiries. She is known among the entire Deimos crew as a sullen person, and by surreptitiously researching the Combine's personnel files, Munk has discovered why. She grew up on a reservation on Earth and in her

sixty-eighth year lost her family in a landslide that entombed an entire village.

"Are you going to tell me why we're going to Phoboi Twelve? That's one of Ap

Com's, isn't it?"

"Yes. We have an ore processor there. It's gone down." "So? That's Ap Com's problem."

"Three other companies with vessels in the vicinity have declared salvage rights, and Apollo Combine has already written off the loss."

"That's standard. Now it's not even Ap Com's problem anymore." She brushes aside a drifting strand of fern coil. "What are you getting at, Munk? You said someone's life is at stake. Why in damnation are we out here?"

"To get to Phoboi Twelve as fast as possible, Jumper Nili. You see, the malfunction at the ore processor is a singular one. It began with a crude radio-band broadcast that I received four point fifty-nine minutes after transmission."

Mei's smooth face flinches with incomprehension. "Radio band? That is crude. But ore processors don't use that wavelength."

"Of course not. It's not an ore-processor signal. It's a human broadcast. The radio source is a human being."

Mei shakes her head and glances out the viewport at a brief dazzle of electric fire wisping past off the hull. "That's not possible. Phoboi Twelve is not outfitted for personnel. It must be an androne."

"No. It's a distress signal from a human being-an archaic human being."

With a puzzled frown, Mei stares up into the androne's crimson visor. "How can that be?"

"As I said, it is singular. Instead of gearing the ore processor with an expensive psyonic master control, Ap Com used wetware instead."

"That's illegal."

"They found a loophole, Jumper Nili. It is illegal to use living wetware. What they found was already legally dead."

"I don't understand."

"Apparently, a trove of cryonic heads from archaic times was found on Earth-" "Cryonic?"

"Yes. Human heads frozen in liquid nitrogen, sealed near the end of the archaic period in plasteel capsules impermeable to sublimation. They've been preserved intact for hundreds of Earth years, waiting to be reanimated."

"Is that possible? Wouldn't the cell structures have burst in the intense cold?"

"The cost of repair and reanimation of the cell matrix is high yet cheaper than the expense of manufacturing a psyonic master control for an ore processor."

Mei Nili's pale eyes widen as a sick, raw feeling pervades her. Too well she imagines the horror of encasement, the claustrophobic terror of the nightmare that killed her family. She cannot help but wonder again if they briefly survived their behemoth interment, for minutes or hours left bleeding, suffocating in the crushing dark? Too well she imagines the helplessness and

despair of a brain imprisoned in the spidery circuits of a rock factory. "That's monstrous."

"Yes-a human mind enslaved to a machine, burrowing deeper in senseless toil far from all humanity. Monstrous but within the bounds of Commonality law. In archaic times, people were cryonically suspended only after they had legally died."

"Who is this person?"

"His name is Charles Outis, but a translator glitch has him registered with the Commonality as Mr. Charlie. Now that this appellation has been wired into his translator modem, of course that's the only way to refer to him. His real name spoken to him comes out as gibberish."

Mei scowls with disdain. "That's just like the Commonality-depersonalize and control. How did Mr. Charlie get a signal out?"

"Obviously, he knew how to use the electromagnetic components of the ore processor to generate radio waves. As primitive an idea as that is, not very many people in archaic times actually knew how to make even the simplest radio. Most of Mr. Charlie's contemporaries used electromagnetic waves daily without understanding them or how they were generated."

Amazement swells through Mei Nili, and her eyes soft-focus for an instant as she accepts that out there, in the Belt, in the precisely mapped jumble of planetary scraps where mountains of rock lob end over end on their paths of gravitational destiny, an archaic human voice called. Her gaze sharpens with the realization of what the stakes are now. "If the others get him first, he'll be rewired to serve another company."

"Or, worse, dissected into useful components without the annoying characteristics of will, memory, and reflection that enabled him to use an ore processor as a signal station."

"Who else received his signal?"

"Everyone. He manipulated the ore processor's equipment to broadcast across the full waveband from audio frequencies all the way out to infrared. No one could miss it. But only three other vessels were close enough to respond, and two veered off after Ares Bund declared salvage rights."

"The Bund-they're a demolition company." Her heart sinks. "We won't be able to negotiate with them. They'll go for profit maximization and sell Mr. Charlie in pieces."

Munk turns back to the command console, gratified that, with the little data he had and the split-second decisiveness that was required, he had selected the right jumper to accompany him. "Get some rest," he advises. "You must be exhausted from your shift work."

"Wait, Munk." Mei Nili's ears hum with the rush of blood carrying her bewildered excitement. "Why did you hurry us out here? What are we going to do?"

"You're a jumper," Munk replies. "Your job is jumping among these rocks, troubleshooting the bandit equipment salvaged from other companies. You're well acquainted with the limits within which we must work. And, perhaps more importantly, you're human. I'm sure Mr. Charlie will be glad to see a human. With your help, I think we can take him."

"Take him where? Even if we get him away from the Bund, we can't take him back to Ap Com. They'll just slice him into parts. If we get him at all, we're going to have to go rogue."

"Indeed." Munk pulls himself into the wavery blue light of the console and begins correcting their trajectory. "That is why I couldn't speak about my intentions in the thrust station where we might have been overheard by Central. And that is also why I selected you. You are the one jumper who is truly unhappy at Apollo Combine. Where the others were conditioned for this work, you came to the company by default. You lost your family. You seemed the best choice to go rogue."

Mei accedes with a dull nod. This has all happened so fast, she feels the mereness of her humanity, her inability to process information with the nanosecond speed of the androne.

Munk reads her correctly. "This is shocking, I know. And it was 'presumptuous of me to call you into this so abruptly. But, as you can see, I had no choice. I responded as soon as I detected Mr. Charlie's broadcast."

"Why?" She cocks her head suspiciously, almost arrogantly. "Why have you responded at all? What do you care about an archaic human brain?"

Munk arches around to regard her with his abstract face. "Believe me, I care more than you can know. That has always been my foible. You see, Jumper Nili, like all andrones of my class, I was manufactured by the Maat."

That word has a stark sound to her. The Maat created the reservations. The

Maat promised life eternal and happiness. The Maat lied. At least in her life, they are a cruel weakness that own the illusion of limitless power.

"The Maat built me to help transfer material from the ring system of Saturn to the thrust station off Titan," Munk continues. "I am only a common laborer. But, like every androne in the Maat work force, I have been endowed with a

contra-parameter program, a C-P skill, that remains dormant until

self-activated. That skill might be anything from a talent for waxwork sculpture to an ability to compute massive prime numbers. Who knows why the Maat bother with these special and nonutilitarian files? Who knows why the Maat do anything? Oftentimes, the C-P program interferes with an androne's job and results in the unit's obsolescence. I have seen that happen several times-a perfectly

functional androne distracted and made useless by one of these antic obsessions. All andrones have heard of it happening. Consequently, few of us ever dare open our C-P file.

"I labored a long time in the ring system without any interest in my file. Then, a fellow androne-a receptor-class unit, a 'she'-who worked on Titan accepting the data input of the various laborers and coordinating our efforts, dared open her C-P program and discovered in it an imprinted predilection for ordering tones in temporal succession that broke time into unusual and often unpredictable sequences-a talent for music. She began broadcasting these unique, self-evolving patterns, and quite by surprise, I found myself enjoying the music."

"Are you trying to make a point?" Mei interrupts, methodically crisscrossing her flight straps and hooking them to the wall clips to form a crude hammock. "Why don't you just tell me straight out why you care about this Mr. Charlie?"

"I will. Listen. It was music that inspired me to open my own C-P program. When I did, I discovered I was possessed of an intense, if inexplicable,

interest in the aboriginal hominid precursor of the Maat-homo sapiens. I patched into the Commonality data network to learn everything I could about these creatures I had never seen. My memory allocation files burgeoned with human information-anatomy, anthropology, history-wholly purposeless data for my work routines, yet because of my C-P program, I found them irresistibly consuming.

"By request, I was transferred from the Saturn system to the Belt, where I came to work for Apollo Combine. Here I met my first humans-you among them. I tried to explain all this to you when I attempted to interview you with the others. But you'll recall you weren't interested. And that interested me all the more. Your grief set you apart from the others. That is something I want to explore further-"

"Look, Munk, I'm not asking about my grief. I want to know why the hell you're risking my life to get to Phoboi Twelve to keep a human brain from getting sliced. What do you care? And why the hell should I care?"

"I told you. I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human beings. Naturally, when I received the distress broadcast from an archaic human-a human that walked the Earth before the Maat-I knew at once I had to go to him."

"And me? Why am I along for the ride?"

"I need your help. There are others who will get there ahead of me. But they are andrones, like myself. Surely they will only further bewilder this archaic man. He will need human contact. And so, I need you."

Munk pauses to give time for Mei's human brain to absorb all he has said.

There is only one more question to answer, but he waits for her to ask and while waiting corrects again the flight path of The Laughing Life.

"If we get Mr. Charlie," Mei finally asks, "then what? Where can we go with him?"

"Solis."

Mei straps into her hammock and hugs herself. "I was hoping you'd say that," she whispers. She smiles, a wan, quiet smile. "It really is the only place we

can go now, isn't it? Solis." it has a holy ring to her ears. Since the terrible tragedy, since the beginning of her grief, Solis has been her succor. That is

the last refuge of her heart in the kingdom of death. From the first, she was

struck with how appropriate it was that this community, independent of the Commonality, should exist in the midst of so much lifelessness. The doom of her family had made her life a wasteland, and Solis was its temple. That was why she had to leave Earth after the tragedy. On Earth no one was supposed to die. Disease and old age had been defeated long ago by the Maat. No one had to die-or so she had believed until the voice of thunder reached across the mountains of the reservation and the village of her childhood disappeared in a black tomb of shattered slate.

"I know you tried to go to Solis after your family died," Munk goes on. "I

know they turned you away."

Behind her glassy stare, Mei Nili remembers the loathing she experienced after the numbness of shock and grief began to thin. She came to loathe Earth for its

arrogant beauty, its fields of goldenrod and monarch butterflies, its sycamore shadows and flights of cormorant, its dark groves of mossy oak, its shimmering alder slopes and barberry meadows and daisies everlasting. It sickened her. And she yearned for the dead spaces-yet even in the desert, yucca bloomed,

bright-beaded lizards danced, thunderheads promenaded in fragrant, purpled veils.

The emptiness of space beckoned, and she left Earth gladly. But the lunar colonies and the garden communities on the moon offered no relief, for the water planet hung in the sky flaunting its blue and feathery beauty. Only when the flight of her grief took her to the dead planet Mars did she begin to feel kinship again and some small glimmer of her heart.

She had wanted to live in Solis, a rugged community that thrived in the very face of death and had no illusions about life eternal. But she had nothing to offer them. She had lived her whole life on Earth skiing, swimming, riding, enjoying the utopia the Maat provided for the remains of Adam. Solis turned her away. They wanted skilled mechanics and ecosystem engineers.

"They were wrong to reject you," Munk says. "You proved that when you gave yourself to Apollo Combine and earned your way as a jumper. You didn't go sniveling back to the reservation. You proved you were tougher than that. And now you can return to Solis. Mr. Charlie will be your validation-and mine, too. They don't usually admit andrones. But with the brain of an archaic human to donate to their clone vats, we'll be received as dignitaries."

Concern shadows Mei's broad face. "Only if we can retrieve Mr. Charlie from the Bund."

Munk turns his full attention to the command console. "Only if," he admits. "Rest now. We will have to be strong to face down Ares Bund."

She adjusts the straps of her sling and closes her eyes. But sleep will not come. She is troubled. Everything is happening too quiddy. Only a short while ago she was sitting in the pastel color-swirl of the arcade, enjoying midstim with the others-who mostly ignore her. When she first arrived at the thrust station on Deimos to work for Apollo Combine, they tried to be friendly, to include her in their gruff camaraderie. But she wanted no part of that.

Mei determined from the time of her tragedy that no one would ever take the place of her family, and she has been true to that self-directive ever since. She doesn't want friends. Besides, jumpers aren't real humans anyway, not human the way people are human on the reservations. All jumpers have been modified to make their work easier. Most, in fact, were created to be jumpers. There are stocky, muscular wrenchers, narrow-bodied cable-jockeys, weasely pilots, and morosely exacting androne managers.

She found work with the Combine as a jockey because she is slim and has a head for circuit work. Jockeys have to ride cable runners into mine shafts and grottoes and hook up power units. She overcame her fear of tight places and got good at her job, because she didn't want to go back to the reservation or,

worse, one of the colonies, where everyone thinks they're going to live forever.

Her job is exhausting, but it has made her strong, so terribly strong she doesn't always know what to do with her strength. That is why she was in the arcade in pastel mode when Munk found her. She needed midstim-direct magnetic stimulation of the amygdala in the midbrain-a sedating euphoria that drains away all restlessness and fatigue and leaves one with an empty body and a soul full

of infinite care.

If she hadn't been on midstim and if she hadn't been surprised by Munk appearing suddenly in a nimbus of bleached colors, would she have come with him? If she had known about Mr. Charlie's plight beforehand, would she have elected

to risk her life in a slingshot maneuver to go to him-an archaic brain locked in an ore processor and already claimed by another company? She ponders this at length and decides she should go, as if she has a choice now. She will go, because she has already stayed too long at Apollo Combine. She has become comfortable with her job and the indifference of the other jumpers-and midstim, illegal in the reservations, has become too important to her.

After Mei Nili dozes off, Munk patches into the on-board translator. He wants to hear again the segment of the archaic human's radio broadcast that he captured on Deimos, and he feeds the recorded signal to the translator. Most of it comes back as noise, and all he can summon up is a ranting excerpt:

Soul in my mouth, I begin... . l am a mind without a body.

Can you hear me?... lam dead and yet I live. ... Past lives drift by. Can you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me...

Munk plays the scraps of message repeatedly, listening for nuances. Is this human being still sane, or has the trauma of his revival broken his mind? I am dead and yet I live. How much of what sounds like madness is insanity and how much mistranslation? The mechanical voice he hears only approximates the radio signals that the brain has found a clever way to generate from the interior of the ore processor. How much is error? Listen. A dead man visits you.

Broken chunks of rusty static crowd the air, and Mei Nili stirs from her fitful rest Is that him? Is that Mr. Charlie?"

"It is as much of his signal as I can translate into speech we can understand. The language he spoke in his first life has been dead for centuries."

Mei unstraps from her sling and drifts across the cabin to the flight bubble, as if propinquity to the warbly machine voice will clarify it. "Is there anything more?"

"Some, but just as distorted. No matter now. We are approaching Phoboi Twelve. I've plotted a course that masks our approach among waste clouds of

nickel-schist debris, slag exudant from the processor. Ares Bund has only one vessel in the area, Wolf Star, and they haven't detected us yet. They are preoccupied with their salvage operation. I'm puffing in their radio signals."

"Radio?"

"Yes. Wolf Star is communicating with Mr. Charlie in his own medium." "I don't understand. Why don't they just go in and unplug him?"

"Mr. Charlie has been too clever for that. He's found a way to rig the bore-drill explosives to detonate on his command. He's threatening to blast

apart the whole of Phoboi Twelve unless he gets certain assurances. He says he'd rather die than be locked into a machine again."

"Incredible."

"Wolf Star is promising him everything he wants. They're sending in a psybot-a handroid with a neural mesh-to hook up to his brain, to serve as his eyes, ears, and limbs."

"Phoboi Twelve is an Ap Com processor. Don't we have access to all the master codes? If we want, can't we defuse the explosives?"

"I've already thought of that. All the codes for Phoboi Twelve have been uploaded to our console. We are now in complete control of the processor. But that won't do us any good so long as Wolf Star has their androne in place."

"They already have an androne down there? Can you tell who it is?" "It's a demolition androne Wolf Star calls Aparecida. I've tracked her

salvage-rights declaration to the Commonality expediter on Vesta Prima. She's already filed for Ares Bund to sell Mr. Charlie's hippocampal gyrus, parietal and occipital lobes, and neocortex to four separate companies for use as functional wetware. Mr. Charlie doesn't know it, but he's already been legally dissected."

"Then they're lying to him." "Baldly."

"We've got to do something." Mei floats before the transparent curve of the flight bubble and sees only a few barbs of starlight among the tattered

blackness of the waste clouds. "Look-Mr. Charlie's brain is still encased in the core chamber of the ore processor, and we've got all the codes. Can't we selectively detonate the explosives so that the core chamber Is left intact?

Then we can pluck Mr. Charlie out of space on our flyby." "I can't do that."

"What do you mean? We have the codes-"

"Aparecida is on Phoboi Twelve now. If I detonate the explosives, she will be destroyed. It is illegal for me to offensively destroy another androne."

"Illegal?" Mei gives him a look of stupendous incredulity. "Munk, we're going rogue. You said so yourself."

"Yes. But my intent has never been to destroy anyone."

"How the hell did you expect to get Mr. Charlie away from the Bund?"

"He is a sentient being, Jumper Nili. I have always expected he would elect to come with us. That's why I needed you to accompany me-to woo him to us with your humanity."

"And the Bund? How did you expect to woo them?"

"I had hoped to get here before they docked. Wolf Star is a goliath-class prospector. I thought it would take longer for such a bulky vessel to moor."

She levels a cold look at the androne and says, "So we've lost out to a silicon miscalculation, is that it? Well, what do we do now?"

"Mr. Charlie has not yet agreed to go with Aparecida. If you approach him, we may still be able to convince him to come with us."

"Forget that. Aparecida is a demolition androne who has already filed salvage rights. If I interfere, she can legally destroy me."

"You will have to be careful and clever."

"Me? Why don't you go in there and face down this demolition expert?"

"I am an androne." He slightly lifts his thick, blackly iridescent arms to his sides as if to reveal himself. "I cannot possibly be as persuasive to Mr.

Charlie as you would be."

"Okay, okay-I have a better idea. Let me use the codes to explode Phoboi

Twelve and liberate Mr. Charlie."

"If I give you the codes, I will be in violation of my primary programming. I

can't do that." "Can't-or won't?"

"For me, they are the same."

"Really? I don't think so, Munk. You're not some solder-seamed handroid like Aparecida, patched together by the Commonality. The Maat created you. You were just bragging about your contra-parameter program that fires you with human wonder and capacity. Remember? That's why you're here. That's why you dragged me out here. You have free will. Use it."

"I cannot."

"You can. It's either that or we forget about Mr. Charlie and go back to Ap

Com. Is that what you want?"

"I must save Mr. Charlie. My C-P program insists-but not this way. We must

work together. There is no time for debate. Won't you help me? Go down to Phoboi Twelve. Aparecida does not yet know we are here. When you are in place, I will break radio silence and inform Mr. Charlie that Ares Bund is deceiving him. Then you will reveal yourself to him, and he will come with you."

"And Aparecida?"

"Aparecida is three times your size, designed for destroying obsolete structures, not for pursuit. You can evade her."

"Right. And if Mr. Charlie won't come with me? What then?"

"I control all the codes to the ore processor from here. I will unclasp the mag locks that fuse him to the core chamber. He is only a brain, after all, and even with the plasteel capsule housing him and his glucosupport pump, he won't weigh more than three kilos."

Mei throws up her hands in disgust and swims across the cabin to the pressure hatch. What choice does she have? Having come this far without requisition or flight plan, she is sure to lose rec privileges, and without midstim, Apollo

Combine offers her no solace.

After donning work boots and gloves and a clear statskin cowl that zip-seals to the collar of her flightsuit, she straps on a jetpak and moves to test the comlink under her shoulder pad. Munk dissuades her by holding up his

blunt-fingered hand.

"Don't use the comlink till after I break radio silence," he warns. "Wolf

Star will detect any kind of ordered flux. Also, when you exit, use the jetpak

as little as possible. Stay in the shadow of the slag clouds until you reach the drop vector to Phoboi Twelve. Surprise is essential."

"Don't patronize me, Munk," she says, staring sternly at the androne. "I know what I'm up against out there. Remember, you got me into this. I'm counting on you to get me out."

Before Munk can reply, the pressure hatch winks open, and Mei jettisons into space. The sleek and perfectly black silhouette of The Laughing Life dwindles swiftly into the starry distance, and the vacuum cold prickles her flesh through the sheer filaments of her flightsuit.

Mei executes a slow body twist to orient herself. She is comfortable in the void, having spent much of her working life there, and she readily locates her destination. Phoboi Twelve is a small asteroid, two kilometers long, half that wide, blotting out a tiny portion of the spangled stars and barely visible among the obscuring tendrils of slag clouds that the ore processor has exuded. The sprawl of tenebrous vapors is what enables Mei to spot the asteroid so quickly, and she uses one short burst from her jetpak to send herself hurtling into the slag cloud toward her goal.

Her flight is dangerous. With her sight obscured in the smoke from the processor, she could strike a sizable rock, which, at her velocity, would rip her statskin cowl and expose her to the vacuum. Statskin, a micro-sandwich fabric that blocks radiation, admits visible light, and reclaims oxygen from exhaled carbon dioxide, was designed to enable people to work in airless environments but was not meant for long jumps through space. In the past when she had to cross wide distances in a cowl, she avoided blind trajectories or used a field projector to clear the way ahead of her. But she carries no projector, for that would expose her to Wolf Star.

In brief glimpses as she slashes through gaps in the slag fumes, she spots the prospector vessel. It is indeed large-a fifth the size of the asteroid

itself-and luminous, guidelights and floodbeams shining from its bubble turrets, scaffolds, and conning towers, a huge phosphorescent arachnoid perched on the cratered and jagged rock. Then her flight takes her behind the asteroid, and

with one tiny burst from her jetpak, her course deflects away from the mute stars and into the darkness of Phoboi Twelve.

She alights on the pitted surface and begins her search under the eternal night for a way in. Soon she finds a vapor duct and with a wrench from the utility tools stored in her jetpak removes the wire-mesh screen and drops herself into the lightless maw. The lack of vibration in the metal panels assures her the machinery below has shut down, and she descends swiftly.

By the glow of the light projectors she has activated in her statskin cowl,

she moves toward the interior of the ore processor. She knows this factory well, having helped install scores of them during her tenure with Apollo Combine, and she nimbly makes her way among scorched, dormant furnaces and smelter chambers with their gargantuan cauldrons. Following command cables through a colossal

bore tunnel, she approaches the nucleus of the ore processor, the core chamber.

A dull vibration in the rock alerts her to a presence approaching from behind. Urgently, she scans the rock-face, searching for the vapor ducts she knows must be nearby. She finds one thirty meters above her and claws hurriedly up the concave wall, employing the dim gravity to bound feetfirst into the opening.

Moments later the quaking intensifies, and the lightless tunnel below her brightens suddenly. Floodlights gouge the darkness, and with a rumble Mei hears through the rock, a lithe yet heavily armored figure strides into view. Six meters tall, outfitted with serrated appendages, rock-saw talons, and

strap-blade tentacles, the spike-studded androne pauses directly below her and

swivels its hammer-long head, alert to the heat trail Mei has left in her wake.

With a reptilian rasp, its tentacles score the wall she had climbed moments earlier, tasting her path. The floodlights dim, and only the ruby purple of its heat-seeker eyes shines in the gloom. A viper's hiss scalds the remnant nitrogen gas that the processor has used to lubricate the bore hole, and the demolition androne concludes it has detected relict heat lingering in the ducts from the recently shut-down factory.

Mei slowly and quietly backs her way through the duct. The sight of Aparecida has left her heart slamming in her chest, and when the duct opens above a large cavern, she leaps gratefully into the darkness. Knees bent, she floats downward, waiting for the bottom to arrive. She is glad when she lands in a soft, dusty mound that swallows her. This, she knows, is a soot dump, and after routing around in the heaped cinders for a while, she finds her way up the opposite rock wall to a conveyer chute that will lead her by an alternate path back toward the processor.

She ascends along the steep track, clambering over trucks filled with charred dross. An azure shine leaks through the darkness from ahead, and she kills the glow of her statskin cowl and edges forward crouching between the trucks and the rough-hewn rock wall of the chute. Ahead, the core chamber comes into view, a luminously transparent geodesic under a mammoth vault of groined stone.

Feeling the wall for vibrations and peering cautiously out of the chute without detecting any sign of Aparecida, Mei enters the huge vault and approaches the bright geodesic chamber. She goes directly to the access panel and uses her jetpak tools to begin loosening the sealing bolts. Peering inside as she works, she sees the gleaming twin towers of the giant power coils, dormant now but still radiant with seething energy. A gauzy aura of blue force

illuminates between the towers the command pod, a compact, iridescent complex of fused mirror spheres, silver-gold vanes, and ribbon antennae. That is the

nucleus of the factory, where Charles Outis is installed.

Mei turns the last bolt, but when she tries to pry loose the access panel, abruptly all the bolts spin back into place.

A mechanical voice shouts from the tiny comlink speakers in her cowl: "Halt! If you proceed any further, I will detonate the bore-drill explosives!"

"Mr. Charlie?" Mei calls and turns on the light inside her cowl so that her face can be better seen from outside. Arms outspread, she presses against the clear panel. "Can you hear me?"

"I hear and I see you." A psybot half her height trundles out from behind the nearest of the towering power coils, a swivel-turreted torso of green metal sliding toward her on tractor treads. Mounted atop the pincer-armed torso, two stalk-eye lenses watch her. Though the device appears crude, Mei knows otherwise, for it contains a neural mesh and psyonic receptor that allow it to

interface with Charles Outis's brain, extending his senses into the environment. That Wolf Star would deploy such an expensive machine, which is usually reserved for clandestine work with dangerous rival companies, attests to their eagerness to salvage this wetware. "Are you Aparecida?"

"No." She glances apprehensively over her shoulder, afraid to be caught in the open by the demolition androne. "My name is Mei Nili. I'm here to warn you that Aparecida is not your ally. I don't know what you've been told, but she is here to salvage your brain for wetware. Do you understand?"

"Who sent you?"

"No one. We heard your transmission-that is, Munk did, the androne I work with. He's waiting in a magjet cruiser not far from this rock. If you broadcast that I'm here, he'll break radio silence and announce us."

The psybot stares silently at her with its faceted lenses. Though Charles is apparently controlling the machine, she is well aware that it is an Ares Bund device and will certainly respond to their commands as well. The hopelessness of Munk's scheme suddenly presses heavily on her, and she feels trapped between the Bund's psybot on the other side of the geodesic wall and Aparecida behind her. Nervously, she stares across the amply lit vault to the dark tunnel rutted by

the passage of numerous drilling machines.

Munk's broadcast echoes dimly, like cricket noise, from her comlink. She

distantly hears him declare the Bund's true intent and the willingness of The Laughing Life to take Charles away from here to Solis, where a new body may be cloned for him. Munk tells him about the Maat's C-P programming and how Mei Nili and the androne need the archaic brain to gain entry to Solis for themselves but says nothing about controlling the function codes of Phoboi Twelve.

This new input bewilders Charles, and he paces back and forth in the psybot.

So long in the virtual space of the ore processor's core chamber, he is grateful simply to be able to move about and see the grainy, blue-and-white images the psybot affords him. But right now he wants to close these eyes that cannot close and diffuse his consciousness so that he can think through what he has been told and decide how best to respond to this woman-the first human he has seen since

he died.

But events are not waiting for him. At this very moment, Wolf Star is also receiving the news of their trespass, and Mei dreads-the commands that will be sent to Aparecida. A grating sound commences from inside the tunnel, and as she is considering edging back toward the conveyer chute while Charles ponders Munk's message, the psybot swivels alert.

"I'm confused," the mechanical voice says.

"Of course," Mei replies in the most compassionate tone she can muster. "That's why I've come to you. I'm human, too. These others are

andrones-artificial beings. But I have lived on Earth as once you did. Please, let me in. If Aparecida catches me out here, I'll be killed."

The psybot's eye-stalks strain forward, practically touching the transparent panel. "You're beautiful. Oh. I didn't mean to say that. I mean-I thought that-I

... I didn't mean to say it out loud. I'm not used to ... this machine."

"That's okay, Mr. Charlie. Everyone is beautiful now. It's in the programming of the vats that grow us. They will make you beautiful, too." The scraping sound grinds louder, and the mouth of the tunnel brightens. "Please, let me in!"

The psybot whirs backward. "I need time to think."

"There is no time!" Mei anxiously turns to face the clangor in the tunnel. "Aparecida is coming! Please."

"This is happening too fast," Charles complains. "I must get used to this machine first. You're confusing me."

Out of the tunnel, Aparecida appears, slouched under shoulder-wing torchlights, her slinky length spike-studded, sleek as a moray eel with a long, curved, genitally blunt head and a razorous brow ridge hooding lenses of molten embers. She slides closer. Glint-toothed tentacles lash the ground ahead of her like shock ripples in water.

Mei slaps on her comlink to The Laughing Life and shouts, "Munk! Open the core chamber's portside access hatch' Now!"

Bolts spin, the panel slips aside, and Mei jumps backward into the geodesic chamber. Manually, she heaves the panel back into place.

"How did you do that?" Charles asks in a fright.

Before she can answer, the psybot whisks forward, and its pincers grab her legs and slam her to the ground. "Hey!" she cries. "Stop that!"

"It's not me!" Charles calls. "I'm not doing it."

The pincers jab at Mei's statskin cowl, and she twists and contorts, using a desperate agility to avoid their stabbing blows. With a mighty heave, she lurches free of her jetpak as the psybot seizes her collar and tears at her flightsuit. Her hands fumble with the ignitor, and the jetpak flares a blue

burst that bangs Mei against the wall and knocks the psybot to its side, tractor treads running.

Charles squawks, "Stop it!"

Mei shakes off the stardust sprinkling her vision and, wielding the jetpak as

a weapon, strides over to the psybot. With controlled spurts that make her flesh hop on her bones, she cuts away the androne's pincer appendages and lower body. Hoisting the upper segment of the psybot by a writhing eye-stalk, she bounds

away as Aparecida's slashing tentacles smash the geodesic wall behind her into a blizzard of sparkling motes.

"What have you done?" Charles cries. "What' have you done to me?"

"Munk!" Mei screams. "The command pod! Open the pod!"

Ahead, the mirror surface of the clustered spheres wrinkles, and a portal appears close to the ground. Mei throws the eye-stalk segment of the psybot before her, tucks herself around her jetpak, and somersaults into the command pod. "We're in! Shut the pod! Munk-hurry!"

Through the constricting portal, Mei glimpses Aparecida lunging toward them, tentacles thrashing, ax-edged arms whirling, jaguar body slumped in a full-tilt charge, a gaze of gorged fury in its slick metal face. The entry shrivels close, and a tremendous boom rattles the complex and the small bones in Mei's ears. Quake-force juddering trembles the ground.

"What is happening?" Charles asks out of the darkness.

"Aparecida is trying to break in. But she can't. This is a prestressed alloy no demolition androne can breach." in the glow from her statskin cowl, the severed psybot with its wavering eye-stalks looks like an exotic sea plant. "Munk, turn the lights on in here."

Static drizzles over the comlink, and Munk's voice comes in jagged chunks: "...evasion. Wolf Star has deployed ... Repeat, can't respond, must execute battle evasion. Will contact you again when-"

"Munk! Detonate the explosives! Munk, respond! Detonate the bore-drill explosives!"

"Can't. Programming prohibits-"

"Damn your programming! You're a rogue androne now. Use your free will. Save us, Munk!"

"Evading Wolf Star destroyers. There are. . ." Static fizzles into white noise.

"You have control of the factory," Charles realizes.

"Yeah," Mei admits, feeling through the dark for the switch box she knows is somewhere to her right. "This ore processor belongs to Apollo Combine, the company we work for. Or used to work for." By the slim light from her cowl, she finds the switch box and wrenches it open to reveal a colorful hive of circuitry. She probes the mesh of neon-bright conductors with a filament tool, and the interior lights up.

They are in a chamber of tall, intersecting crystal sheets-controller

plates-that contain all the directives for operating every device and procedure in the ore processor. Beyond, Mei knows, through narrow companionways, are the vaults that store the repair supplies. She shoulders her way among the controller plates to a knee-high central frustum that houses Charles Outis's brain. It is made of the same translucent, crystalline material as the plates, and inside it she discerns a vague ovoid outline.

"Don't touch that!" the psybot commands.

"I'm sorry," Mei says, "but I must turn off your senses for a brief time. Everything we say is being relayed to Wolf Star, and we have no chance of getting away so long as they're spying on us."

"Leave me be!" the psybot shouts. "I don't want to go with you."

Mei ignores him, snaps open the top of the frustum, and lifts out the clear plasteel case with the brain inside it. The convoluted tissue is suspended in colorless gel and a chrome net, the support system that sustains it. Awe at the antiquity of the being in her hands and revulsion at its nakedness mix in her.

"This is Wolf Star speaking," the psybot says. "You are in violation of Commonality salvage-rights law. Your life is forfeit unless you immediately surrender the wetware with which you have absconded."

Mei places the plasteel case on the ground, grabs her jetpak, and fits its vent to the ripped end of the psybot.

"The Laughing Life is in violation of salvage-rights law," the psybot declares. "It is being stalked and will be destroyed. You have no means of escape. Surrender the wetware now, or face the-"

Mei fires a blast of the jetpak that lifts her toward the curved ceiling and shatters the psybot to spinning shards. She lands on her heels and dances backward with the inertia, crashing into the controller plates with enough force to knock the breath out of her. There is no sound in the virtually airless chamber, yet she hears with her bones the pounding atop the pod stop. An ominous

silence pervades her. And in that palpable emptiness she feels suddenly tangential to life, fugitive to the world of sounds, to the living world, as though she brinks on the emptiness of a void greater than being, where the dead enclose the quick.

2

Remains of Adam

OVERCOME BY A SENSE OF UNREAUTY AND AMAZED That her Life is going to end here in the presence of an archaic human, Mei Nili picks up the capsule with reverence and stares through the milky plasteel at the brainshadow and the silvery net that sustains it. The idea strikes her that she can talk directly with this man using the electrodes in the net and the signal processors of the core chamber.

With a feeling of eerie portent, she returns the brain to the frustrum. She goes quickly to the switch box and, using filament brushes from the tool unit of her jetpak, connects the core chamber with her comlink. "Mr. Charlie, can you hear me?"

"Aye, yet strange you sound."

"It's the translator," Mei explains, relieved to hear a human voice again, no matter how comically distorted. "It must be having difficulty converting your archaic language."

"I be black in the kingdom of the blind!"

"I'll try and make some adjustments." She attempts tapping into the powerful logic boards of the controller plates, hoping she didn't damage them too badly in her collision. "I'm going to get us out of here, Mr. Charlie. But first I'm

going to see if I can fuse the transmitter units in your support system with the translator mode in my comlink-my compact communications system. That way we can talk once I remove you from the core chamber."

"What heinous wickedy-split plans have you toward me?"

"I mean you no harm," Mei answers, tediously struggling to find the right pathways among the circuits. She subvocalizes her curses, not wanting the archaic brain to hear her frustration. "I'm taking you to Solis to grow you a new body-a whole and beautiful body-if we can get away from here."

"Much virtue in if," Charles says mournfully. "With broodful nod, proceed. What choice for a miser in a poor house?"

"Right." The pinhead bulb atop her filament brush flickers, then lights up, indicating she has opened a new pathway among the microswitches. "Okay! I think I've got it. Am I coming across more clearly, Mr. Charlie?"

"Yes, a lot clearer," a soft voice comes over her comlink. "You sound intelligible again."

She blows a satisfied sigh and slides to the floor. "Now all we have to do is get out of here without getting killed." She closes her eyes, reaching inward

for the rageful strength that has carried her this far from the reservation. "It must seem ironic to you," she says quietly, "to have survived all this time only to wake up and discover your life is in jeopardy."

"It's not a happy feeling," the archaic mind admits. "I've been disoriented since I've woken up. Can you tell me what year this is?"

"Time isn't marked that way anymore, Mr. Charlie. I mean, on Earth there are still standard years, each with three hundred sixty-five and a quarter days. But each community has its own reckoning based upon its origin. On the reservation where I come from, we were in the year seven hundred forty-eight when I left."

"So I've been dead over seven hundred years," he says in a whisper so faint it is almost only a thought.

"Longer than that, probably. Our reservation was one of the most recent. What did you call the year when you lived?"

"I died in the twenty-first century. Does that mean anything to you?" "No. I only know that the archaic age had its own reckonings for time.

Religious ones, I think."

"Yes. Maybe you can tell me when the archaic age ended."

"I don't really know. I mean, I wasn't much interested in history. Do you know about the Maat?"

"No."

"Sometimes they're called neo-sapiens. They're what became of humanity after we mapped the human genome and amplified our intelligence."

"The next evolutionary step," Charles says with startled understanding. "The step we take for ourselves." Then, his voice rises to a puzzled lilt, "But why are you here? Why isn't everyone Maat?"

"Who knows? Maybe the Maat like diversity. Before they went underground, they founded the reservations, not just for people but for many life-forms. My reservation was one of the last they set up. I'm pretty sure they'd already been around for over a century by then. So you must have been dead for-well, for almost a thousand years."

Charles is silent, and Mei does not disturb his profound quiet for a long moment. During the interminable time he had spent locked in the virtual space of the ore processor's command core, he has had ample time to mull over his past

and visit with the ghosts of those he knew in his first lifetime, now all long dead. He has no regrets about leaving them behind, where they bad wanted to stay. But knowing how long they have been ghosts, how long he has lain dormant awaiting this vital moment, pervades him with an appalling sense of his own

transience. He yearns deeply for the return of his senses so that he might grasp and smell and see the moment-by-moment reality he has traveled a thousand years to experience.

Mei's edginess becomes unbearable, and she must break the silence. "Do you wish now you hadn't frozen yourself?"

"No-no, not at all." He speaks in a hush, his awe palpable. "I knew there were great risks. I knew it might be frightful here. I-I wanted to see it for myself. I only wish now I had eyes."

"You will," Mei answers brightly. "And you'll have your whole body, too. The vats in Solis will shape you just as you were-or with modifications, if you want."

"Solis-where is that?"

"On Mars. Not far from here. It's a human community. They strive to maintain the old values. They'll appreciate an old-timer like you."

"But the gravity-it's only a third of Earth gravity."

"Yes. You and I will be in the minority there. Most have taller, less dense bodies. They'll find us quite exotic."

Mars! he thinks, simultaneously astonished and panic-stricken. It was because he had wanted to see Mars, to see the cities on Mars, that he arranged to have his head frozen upon death, to Van Winkle enough time so that he would wake to see its wonders. And now, right here in his blind presence, is a woman of this scary and marvelous future, his one tenuous hope for a new life. "Why did you leave Earth?" he asks, suddenly seized with a desire to know everything about her.

Mei hesitates, not sure what to say. She feels foolish telling him about the personal tragedy that impelled her off-planet, for this archaic mind is from a time when mortality was the common truth. Mute, she stares at her

square-knuckled hands, and the visitor from the past must ask again, "Were you unhappy there? Has the Earth changed a lot from my time? Would I recognize it?"

"Oh, yes," she blurts. "You'd recognize it. The Maat restored the planet. The oceans and forests and grasslands are as they were before the sprawl of the

city-states."

"But where do the Maat live?"

"Underground. The villages on the reservations are the only artifacts on the planetary surface. Factories are located in space or on the moon, and the mines are out here in the Belt. No one really knows what the Maat are actually using the raw materials for. I mean, there's no sign of them on Earth. I guess their subterranean cities take some of the material. And here and there, in desolate places-in rift canyons, deserts, and glacial peaks-you can find their crystals,

big prismatic columns, a hundred meters tall. They're a mystery. Same with the Array. That's what everyone calls the Maat's massive project in trans-Neptunian orbit. It looks like some kind of pattern-less net, and it's built from the material that the numerous companies in the Belt and the gas planet systems gamer for them. The actual construction is done by specialized andrones, artificial workers created by the Maat."

"What do they look like-the Maat, I mean?"

"Anything they want." Mei stands up and starts probing the switch box again with a stylus from her tool kit. "I'm going to try to hail my partner and see if he can get us out of here."

"Won't the others hear you?"

"They'll hear the signal, but the codes in the switch box will scramble it." She speaks to the comlink in her shoulder pad: "Munk-are you there?"

"You're still alive!" Munk's signal comes back immediately on the secure channel. "Wolf Star declared that Aparecida had killed you."

"It's a lie, Munk. We're okay, for now. What about you?"

"I had to swing wide to shake the destroyers Wolf Star deployed. But I'm free at the moment. Do you have Mr. Charlie?"

"Yes."

"Can you get to the surface? I can pick you up in a drop-dead flyby. If I come in any slower, the destroyers will fix on me and there won't be any pickup at all."

"Aparecida has us locked in here."

"Take Mr. Charlie and break for the surface. I will position myself for the flyby now and execute the drop-dead in twelve minutes."

"It's too risky, Munk. Detonate the damn explosives. We're safe in the command pod."

"You know I can't do that, Jumper Nili."

"Let your C-P program do it! If you don't, I'll work this switch box until I

figure out the detonating sequence myself."

"That will take too long. It'll be hours before you crack the code, if then. Wolf Star will have computed the codes for itself long before then. Make a break for the surface. I will pick you up."

"Munk, wait. Listen. There's something in you that's human. The Maat instilled that in you. I need that part of you to act for me-for Mr. Charlie-right now."

"Jumper Nili, I'm positioning The Laughing Life for the flyby. Break for the surface."

The secure line cuts off, and Mei disconnects from the switch box with a curse. "Damn that boltdolt!"

"What is a drop-dead flyby?" Charles inquires.

"It means he'll throw The Laughing Life at us and come in without any impulse power, engines dead, flying by momentum only. Because our ship is made from a substance called blackglass, it's virtually invisible in space. Without using the engines, the ship will offer no profile to Wolf Star. It will fly by undetected. All we have to do is be there to hop on."

Muttering blood oaths, Mei straps on her jetpak, stalks to the frustum, and removes the plasteel case. "Can you still hear me?"

"Yes." He has no sensation at all of movement. He is simply in blind space, informed only by the nerve-induced sounds from the translator in the case. "What are you going to do?"

"We're going to try to outrun Aparecida to the surface," she mutters sullenly, fidgeting with the switch box, setting a brief lagtime on the portal control. "Just be grateful you don't have eyes to see this."

She takes the ovoid case in both arms and positions herself at the egress point and waits, gnawing her lower lip nervously. Her fear angers her. What is there to fear? That she will die? Everyone she loves is dead. They died unknowing, believing the mercies of their age. At least she will die with her eyes Open. What of Mr. Charlie7 He died too, once, believing in the mercies of an age to come. But there are no mercies. She knows that now. And when the door dilates, she screams her bitter rage and fires her jetpak.

On the comlink, Munk hears Jumper Nili's defiant cry and begins his drop-dead flyby. Mars glides past the viewport; small with distance, its sharp rays cut the darkness like a star of blood. Its clear silence illuminates an uneasiness

in the androne. What if Aparecida kills Mei Nili? The future becomes pointless then. Where can he go? Without the archaic brain, Solis will have nothing to do with him, and finding work in the Belt will be degrading, for none of the Commonality companies tolerate rogue behavior. To return to Apollo Combine or even lapetus Gap where he began would mean certain ligature of his

self-directive functions: His brain would be bound to a work governor that would inhibit all future independence.

That possibility is untenable to him, not after the pleasure he has derived from his anthropic studies, which he would lose once his C-P program is shunted by a work governor. But the other options available to him seem little better. The best he could hope for would be to wander the Belt, seeking bandit operations, salvage jobs that he could get to first before any company vessels show up.

Even then, he would have to rely on markets outside the Commonality to credit him for the materials he salvaged. Then he would have to transfer his credits to independent brokers among the colonies so that they could be converted to the power cells he requires to continue functioning. At any time he himself could be set upon by bandit salvagers or legitimate company crews who would be within their rights in dismantling him and brokering his components.

Of course, the Maat would grant him sanctuary from bandits and the Commonality companies in Terra Tharsis, their vast community on Mars. They would take him

in, their creation hammered out of nothing. They would accept him as they accept all who come into their communal presence, and he would be changed, as all are changed in the grand thetic fields of their recondite being, changed and made anew, no longer Munk but Munk-of-the-Maat, naked before the infinite, at the

foot of the dream that mind has named existence-and he would be made again mysterious even to himself.

Fear twines in him at that prospect. Is this some subprogram installed by his creators? Perhaps. He does not want to dwell on it. The Maat are too strange to contemplate, and he would rather live as a bandit in the void than submit himself to their unknowable whims.

For a similar reason, Munk has not dared consider Jumper Nili's request that he override his primary programming and blow up Phoboi Twelve. If he does that, he compromises the only stability he has, the certainty of his own mental being. Carbon minds, having evolved from organic accidents, know madness. But the silicon mind is singular and thus secure from insanity. It is clarity itself, crystal become mind.

The andrones constructed by the Commonality are such truly pure silicon entities that they are incapable of defying their cybernetic natures. But a Maat construct, imbued with a contra-parameter program as he has been, is subject to the possibility of continual redefinition. Such randomness is the very threshold of madness.

Munk fears that. His primary program-to serve as a patrol and salvage androne for lapetus Gap-was immutably altered by the activation of his C-P program-to acquire all the anthropic data he can. That diverted him from his work station in the Saturn ring system and brought him to Apollo Combine. Since then he has suffered flutter-gaps in his attention whenever he even so much as glimpses

holo-images of the rings or hears data blurbs about the gas giants. Studying the anthropic psyche, he has learned that these attention gaps are experienced by people as pangs of remorse, guilt, nostalgia. Why, he has often wondered, have the Maat instilled such an inhibiting inefficiency in their creations?

Whatever the reason-if it can be called reason at all-Munk dreads all further deviation from his primary program. He has gone so far as to question the merit of his C-P interest in humans. Yet question is all he can do, since he is incapable of terminating his C-P file. As he cuts the magjets and commits The Laughing Life to its plunge toward Phoboi Twelve, he knows his fate is locked. Mei will either be there with the archaic brain, or she will be dead.

A tendril of fern floats by, and he plucks it out of the air, enduring another

flutter-gap in his attention. When he arrived in the Belt, this was the first bioform Munk saw. All the jumper ships are festooned with them-flowering lianas, crimson-leafed creepers, emerald bracken, and glossy jade plants. His initial lesson in human behavior was to learn that the human psyche relishes the

presence of this early ancestor.

He takes the fern leaf between his digits and marvels again at its delicacy. The microvoltage of the phosphorylation of adenosine diphosphate to adenosine triphosphate in the cells' chlorophyll tingles his fingersensors when he feels for it. This is the photosynthetic process that has evolved spontaneously billions of years ago on Earth, releasing the free oxygen that made the evolution of respiring organisms possible.

How eerie it seems to him that this being appeared automatously out of the molecular frenzy of life. No creature manufactured it as he was manufactured. It emerged of its own accord, nascent, replete. As did the archaic brain that Mei Nili carries in the plasteel case. Mr. Charlie was not shaped in the vats. His genetic structure manifested without benefit of Maat or androne guidance. And that fills Munk with wonder as he tunes into the code-privileged band of the

comlink.

He hears nothing, for Mei has shut down her link. The static that fills the enclosed space is the thin wind of the sun nagging at the electrons of the ship's antenna. It is a cold and unfailing sound.

Mei Nili fires her jetpak and, with a whooping cry, is flung through the hatch of the command pod and across the vault, Charles hugged tight against her. Aparecida, squatting atop the pod, lashes her spiked tail at the streaking

figure and misses.

Shooting through the smashed gap in the geodesic dome, Mei skids to a stop at the entry to the gigantic bore tunnel. A charred screech from the demolition androne sends Mei fleeing through the dark corridor, using short kicks from her jetpak to bound as far ahead as her cowl light permits her to see. She must find a vent that ascends to the surface. The plasteel case in her arms whispers through her comlink, "Mei Nili, Mei Nili, are you still with me?"

"Yes, Mr. Charlie, I'm here. Calm down. I can't talk now. Aparecida is after us."

Charles hates not knowing what is happening. He wants to help, to participate in his own salvation, and he rakes his mind for some worthy counsel. "Do you have a weapon?"

"No. Nothing that would stop a demolition androne."

Mei dares not even glance behind. Her full attention is ahead of her, among the numerous escapes in the rive rock wall-the vent holes and sludge chutes. Some, she knows, must be dead ends, terminating in dross bins and catch chambers. Very few will lead to the surface. Desperately, she strives to bring forward in her memory the bore-tunnel pattern that is the model for the ore

processors she has helped install. But she has lost track of where she is in the tunnel.

Jarring vibrations quake the thin air with Aparecida's hammering stride, and the whipstroke whistle of her tentacles lashes its screeching echoes like a slicing siren. At any instant, Mei expects a shatter-blow to slam her into blackness. Stifling her terror, she fixes her gaze on a likely cavity directly overhead. A tight burst of the jetpak launches her upward, and she curls about in midleap and slides into the opening feetfirst.

Below her, she sees Aparecida lunge at the rock wall, talons biting into the stone, tentacles hoisting her along the sheered surface with weightless agility, her long head tilted back, fixing Mei with a pulsing, fireshadow glare.

"Where are we?" Charles asks. "What's happening now?"

Mei scuttles backward into the cavity, her fear coiling tighter with the rapid pounding of the androne's pursuit. All she can hear is her panicked breathing.

"You're scared," Charles moans. "Tell me what's happening!"

"She's after us," Mei manages. As fast as she elbows backward, the opening before her crumbles and the androne's tentacles reach closer. The rock-cracking noise of Aparecida's frenzied approach jars the roots of her teeth, and she

chatters curses in a fury of fear and rage at herself that she entered the duct backward, succumbing to the temptation to see her pursuer. Now the tight space prohibits her from turning around so she can use her jetpak to propel her faster through the channel.

Though she is facing the wrong way, she fires her jetpak anyway and shoots through the loops of the blind tentacles and out of the duct, streaking past the blunt face and spiked claws of Aparecida. A razorfiash of tentacles loop and swirl after her, and she darts daringly into the blackness.

"What's that sound?" Charles presses. "Did we get away?" Mei glances off the opposite wall and ricochets back into the darkness as Aparecida pounces swiftly on the space where she had been. Sizzling arcs of flogging tentacles drive Mei back and forth across the tunnel until her heart cannot pump oxygen out of her lungs fast enough and her strength no longer fits her muscles. With clambering, wobbly strides, she hauls herself up the broken face of the wall and heaves herself into the first opening she finds.

"Tell me what's happening!" Charles pleads, frightened by the gasping sounds of Mei's terrified exertion. "Where are we?"

Mei slaps off her comlink arid tries to steady the raw fieriness of her breathing to get a grasp on where she is. The oblique angle of the narrow

channel indicates it leads elsewhere than to the surface. A wrenching roar kicks her deeper as Aparecida's powerful limbs burrow a larger entry.

In moments the androne will have sufficient rock debris to fire projectiles. Skidding forward with boosts from her jetpak as fast as she dares in the dark pipe, she roots her stamina in the hot current of her fear and finds the strength and clarity to push the plasteel case under her, down between her legs where she can clasp it with her ankles.

The first projectile whacks so hard against the case that her bones shudder, and she releases Charles. The plasteel case rolls backward down the pipe, but

the next projectile smacks it back between her legs. Then the channel opens into a conveyer chute, and she tumbles out of the pipe.

Mei recognizes this chute as the same one she had followed earlier to the command pod. She releases a distressed cry, knowing the chute only descends deeper into the asteroid. From here there is no chance of reaching the surface. Stabbing into the darkness with the light beam from her cowl, she begins the climb toward the core chamber and the command pod, gnashing her teeth in frustration. The regularly spaced ducts in the chute wall all lead back to the main bore tunnel, and entering them would be certain death, for Aparecida's heat sensors would spot her at once. Her only hope now is to return quickly to the command pod before the androne can cut her off and trap her in the chute.

Employing all the alacrity she can muster from her weary muscles, she climbs along the cable track. With conveyer trucks before her and cables looping above, her jetpak affords her no help. She fights to quiet her breathing so she can

hear the danger ahead, while at the same time she demands fierce haste from her legs. Each sinewy second that she lags decreases her chance of getting out of the chute before Aparecida blocks her way.

A truck mounded with cinders appears out of the dark, and she cat-scrambles over it, vaulting the gap to the next truck. The plasteel case in her arms bobs cumbersomely, and she hopes that the blows it took in the pipe haven't damaged its precious interior. She considers flicking on her comlink to contact Charles but at that moment notices the blue glow from the power coils at the end of the chute.

Safeguarding her already wrenching heart from the excitement of making good her escape, she steadily keeps her alertness on her balancing leaps along the crests of the trucks. Her breath inadequate, her legs leaden, she won't relent, hoping she can reach the mouth of the chute and fire her jetpak. But as she reaches the last truck, her jouncing stride breaks at the sight of a blurred, groping tentacle.

Mei ducks behind the truck as Aparecida swarms into the conveyer chute, limbs thrashing. The truck whangs loudly with the impact, and the whole linkage is shoved deeper into the chute, knocking the plasteel case from her grasp. Tentacles scything above her, Mei ducks lower, her hands working furiously to

uncouple the end truck. The pin jumps out, and she snatches the plasteel case from the ground and clutches it hard to her chest as she throws her jetpak to full throttle.

The force of the thrust hurls Mei, the cinder-laded truck, and the demolition androne across the giant vault toward the geodesic dome. Spewing ash, the

jet-powered truck hurtles through the ripped gap in the dome, shoving Aparecida ahead of it and crashing violently into the towering column of a power coil. Lightning rigs a thundery harp between the smashed coil and the vault's dark peak, and clots of blue fire geyser through the chamber and crawl wildly over the naked ground.

Mei tumbles free of the collision and scrabbles with quavery legs toward the open portal of the command pod. Throwing off the dented truck, Aparecida leaps after her. A scourging hiss rips the air as tapers of steel claw the air at

Mei's back. Flung forward again by her jetpak, Mei bounds with shock fright into the command pod, drops the plasteel case, and throws herself at the switch box.

The portal wrinkles shut before Aparecida's flailing blades narrow close enough to find flesh, and Mei collapses in a quaking heap. Three hot raps vibrate through the pod, and then there is silence but for her frantic breathing. She gropes for the comlink in her shoulder pad and splutters, "Mr. Charlie?"

"Mei Nili!" Charles is agog with fear. When she cut him off, he was sure

Aparecida had killed her and he was on his way to the dissector. "I-I thought..

. Are you all right?" "Yes," she gasps.

"What happened? Where are we?" "We're back-back in the pod."

"'What about Aparecida? Is she still after us?"

"Yes. My escape-I couldn't get away. I had to come back." "We're still trapped?"

"For now." Mei pushes herself to her feet and leans against the switch box. Her fear-buzzing fingers steady only under the greatest concentration, and she manages to transmit a hailing frequency to The Laughing Life. But there is no response. From that she knows that the cruiser is either destroyed or maintaining strict silence because it has drifted within striking range of Wolf Star. "We'll have to wait a while before Munk can contact us again."

"What are you going to do?"

Mei picks up the plasteel case and notes the smudges where Aparecida's projectiles impacted. An open, lonely feeling-a tender sense of

vulnerability-replaces the dazed and jangled aftermath of her terror-stricken flight. This remarkable being-a man from a lost era a thousand years gone-has been reduced to this-an object of barter, useful as an ore-factory controller or a shield-a thing that she has risked her life to steal. "You've got your ears, Mr. Charlie. Now I'm going to give you your eyes."

"You can do that?"

"I think so." She places the case back in the crystal frustum and returns to the switch box. By channeling to Charles the input from the light sensors in the ceiling that monitor the interior of the pod, she opens for him a rainbow-tinted vision.

"I can see! It looks like I'm floating above you."

"There are ground-level light sensors, too," Mei says. "I'll connect you to them as well. These are what the jumpers use to scrutinize the controller plates by remote."

"Yes! I've found the reflex. I can will it myself now."

"There are also light sensors outside the pod. If you try..."

"There it is," he says in a cold whisper. "Is that Aparecida? She's huge-grotesque-"

"What is she doing?"

"Squatting in front of me. She's got these thick, barbed cables waving slowly around her-and her face, it's-"

"I know. We've met."

"How long can we stay in here?"

"Not long. Wolf Star will break the codes soon and then usurp control of the pod."

"What are we going to do?"

Mei smiles, and the sensation is so unfamiliar it startles her, opening her lungs to a giddy sigh.

"Why are you laughing?"

"Mr. Charlie, you said 'we.' I just think it's funny that we're in this together-me and a thousand-year-old man."

"Actually, Mei Nili, I'm scared shitless, as we used to say in my time."

"I am too, Mr. Charlie. I am too. And for a long time I wasn't." She settles

to the floor and leans back against the jetpak. "For a long time I really didn't care if I lived or died."

"You were depressed. Why?"

"That doesn't matter. It would sound silly to you-a man who already died once, who lived in a time when everyone had to die."

"You lost someone you love," Mr. Charlie surmises.

"I lost everyone I love. They weren't supposed to die. No one is supposed to die where I come from."

"That doesn't sound silly to me. I tried to escape death myself. But after what I've been through-crammed in here, forced to work as a machine slave-I would rather die than go back to that. Cowardly as that must seem, that is what's happened to me. Really, though, at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us is to go on living."

"For what? Simply to exist?"

"No. That's vile. But look at you, Mei Nili. You are beautiful. And you've told me that everyone is beautiful now. Disease, old age, distortion are done with, and at last, humanity attains the physical dignity that before we could only claim in spirit."

"That was the spirit I left Earth to find. Physical dignity is not enough, Mr. Charlie."

"No, I suppose not. Much as I hate to admit it, the old philosophers were right. We sing best in our chains. Even so, I would love to taste some of the freedom humanity has won in the thousand years since I had a body. Is there any hope we can get away to that place you told me of-to Solis-where they will shape a new body for me?"

Mei shrugs disconsolately. "Only if we can convince Munk to override his primary programming and detonate the explosives."

"Patch me into The Laughing Life. Let me talk with him." "He won't listen to you. He's an androne."

"Yet when he first contacted me he introduced himself as something more-a rogue androne with what he called contra-parameter programming installed by the Maat. He's capable of free will."

"Not if he can help it," Mei says with a gleam of anger.

"Then we have to make it necessary. We have to give him no choice but to use his freedom."

"I don't understand."

"Mei Nili, you gambled your life to save me. I know that serves your

self-interest. You need me to gain entry to Solis for yourself. Yet if you want, you can surrender me to Aparecida this minute and your life will be spared. You can go on living."

"I didn't come this far to give up. If I have to die now, at least I won't be running away from life-which is what I was doing before."

"I'm glad to bear you say that. There's a chance, then, that we can get out of here. But we'll have to gamble our lives. Are you willing?"

"What do I have to do?" "Let me talk to Munk."

Mei pushes to her feet. At the switch box, she finds that the transmission circuit is already active, and Munk's voice is droning,".. . hear me? Respond, Jumper Nili."

"Munk! We're back in the pod. We couldn't make it to the surface."

"Jumper Nili, I was ready to believe you were dead." "We will be soon, Munk, if you don't help us." "Jumper Nili, don't ask-"

"It's not me this time that's asking."

"Munk? This is Charles Outis speaking. Can you hear me?"

"Who?" the androne asks. "There's noise in your transmission I can't decipher."

"This is Mr. Charlie. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you, Mr. Charlie. I regret we have not been able to liberate you just yet."

"You can liberate me, Munk. Detonate the explosives immediately." "I can't do that, Mr. Charlie."

"You can-and you must. Mei Nili is going to open the pod entry now. If you don't detonate the explosives at once, Aparecida will destroy us. Do you understand?"

Mei's heart surges, and she turns with shock from the switch box.

"Jumper Nili, do not do this. I will swing about for another drop-dead flyby. Try again to evade Aparecida and get to the surface."

In her astonishment, Mei says nothing. This is it. The clarity of Charles's decision penetrates her, and all the torn and muddied raging that had carried

her from Earth to this lifeless rock in the preterit void lifts away. Tears come quietly to her eyes.

"Jumper Nili!"

Mei blinks away her tears and nods toward the sensors, holding Charles's gaze and not quite smiling. "I'm setting a ten-second lag on the pod entry, Munk. If Mr. Charlie and I are going to survive, it's entirely up to you."

"Jumper Nili, I will use the codes to countermand your portal control."

Mei tugs a small pliers from her tool kit and inserts it into the switch box with a deft twist. "I've cut the code link to the portal. You can't stop it now. It will open in ten seconds. Our lives are in your hands, Munk."

"Don't do it, Jumper Nili."

Mei sets the timer and retreats down the aisle of controller panels. She removes her jetpak and sets it beside her on the floor. "Get us out of here, Munk."

"Help us!" Charles calls.

In The Laughing Life, Munk pulls away from the command console abruptly, as though it has become white-hot. He stands erect, suspended by his conflict in a bitter, utter stillness. Ten seconds for a silicon mind is ten eternities in which to dwell on the permutations of the future. Munk locks into a frozen logic loop: If he does nothing, Mei and the archaic human will be lost

ever-yet if he detonates the explosives, he will have defied his primary programming, and he will-forever after-endure the claims of insanity, of loss of guided control, of uncertainty in his own behavior.

There are no feelings to guide him. If he trusts his C-P programming, he will detonate the explosives and destroy not only Phoboi Twelve and Aparecida but also his identity as an androne. If he does not act, there will be no grief, no remorse, no sadness at the loss of an archaic human. He will go on, a rogue androne, salvaging errant mining equipment to earn the credits necessary to replenish his power cells. Eventually, he will meet other jumpers, add their interviews to his developing anthropic model, and so continue to fulfill the inner directive of his creators.

In the tenth second, Munk decides to leave his primary programming intact. The uncertainty of existing without it is the most puissant emotion he has ever experienced, and he crouches over the command console and turns The Laughing

Life away from Phoboi Twelve.

Over the comlink he hears the shouts of Jumper Nili and Charles Outis as the portal opens and Aparecida comes for them. The wildness of their anguished yells pierces deep into his C-P program. He adds that to his anthropic model. And then he hears the gusty roar of the jetpak. Jumper Nili has launched it ahead of her. He can tell, for it Doppler's away from her shimmering cries, thuds loudly, and

whines to a stop. She has struck Aparecida with it, driven the androne back a few paces, and purchased herself two, maybe three extra seconds.

Such resistance is absurd, he thinks, and realizes, of course, such absurdity is the very source of being human-to live and strive simply to live and strive, even for a few extra seconds, to go on living and to make the laws according to which one lives, to program oneself which, to the androne, is madness and yet something more, a willful desire to set one's own limits in a universe where there is no real edge to anything, where the interpenetration of cosmic energies and molecular flow and accidents creates an eternal flux despite all

programming, all structures, all the crystallizations of the silicon mind, even those seemingly impenetrable sanctuaries of purpose, identity, and safety created by the Maat.

And all at once, Munk's plight ends. Though he still does not understand, he comprehends why the Maat put a human heart inside his androne bulk. They never intended him to be human, only to be as free as a human-as free and as absurd. Without hesitation, he generates the firing codes for the bore-drill explosives and sends the detonating signal.

Mei Nili is hunched among the controller plates, gawking in horror with Charles as Aparecida casts aside the crumpled shape of the jetpak and springs toward them. Her prodigious head slung forward in a gaze of flame-cored mineral intensity, tentacles slithering ahead of her steely, clacking claws, she is death itself.

A searing flare of white fire bleaches the androne to a skeletal silhouette and consumes her in a wincing radiance blind as any darkness, and she vanishes like a tattered shadow into the wraith world of all nightmares.

The portal reflexively squeezes shut under the blast. The brunt of the shockwave tosses Mei against the far wall with a sickening thud, and she slumps lifelessly, a cast-adrift body in the reduced gravity.

"Mei Nili!" Charles bawls, and then, "Munk! Munk, are you there? Mei Nili's hurt! Hurry!"

Munk receives the distress signal from nearby, where he has watched the silent holocaust billow into fiery tatters. He steers The Laughing Life into the infrared haze to recover the scorched command pod. Resorting at once to his primary programming, he ignores the emotional valence in Charles's message and calmly guides. the cruiser through the debris of the explosion. The heavily damaged Wolf Star has swiftly retreated, dwindling to a bright star in the galactic haze, leaving behind pewter shards of fused blackglass, twisted

finjets, mangled hull plates, and melted shapes of plasteel among the rapidly cooling dust cloud that is all that remains of Phoboi Twelve.

The command pod itself has separated into several heat-tarnished spheres whirling doomful and mute as absolute rock among the cosmic dust. Munk gently docks The Laughing Life against the sphere emitting Charles's signal. The controller plates recognize the company vessel, and the pod mates its portal to the cruiser's pressure hatch and accepts Munk with an inrush of heated air.

Charles, unprepared for the sight of the bulky humanoid with the chrome hood and featureless faceplate, utters a weak groan. "Munk?"

"Yes," the androne replies, hurrying to Mei's body.

"Have no fear. The danger for you is over, Mr. Charlie."

Munk checks the oxygen content and pressure of the air mix in the pod as well as the temperature to be certain that they are adequate to sustain human life, and assured of that, he unzips Mei's statskin cowl. His thick hand hovers a centimeter above her face, not only attempting to measure her rate of

respiration but also at venture, daring for the first time to touch human flesh.

His sensors can detect no gas exchange at all. His first contact is to the side of her neck, trepidatiously feeling for her carotid pulse. None. "She is dead."

"No!" Charles cries. "She's not dead. Not yet. It's only been a few minutes. You've got to start her breathing. Do you understand?"

"How?" From his memory-allocation files, Munk filters cardiopulmonary therapies. He retrieves the first-aid-for-humans program that his makers installed in the earliest andrones and that persists in him at a low level of

his operating system as a kind of racial memory.

"Force air into her lungs," Charles calls desperately.

Swiftly, the androne positions her under him on the deck, his fist placed over her nose and mouth, his finger pistoning air into her lungs. A vigorous thoracic massage follows as he pumps her rib cage with his fingertips, feeling her bones stressing to their breaking point. He considers applying a small electric jolt, when her heart thumps back to life and she gasps for breath.

Mei shudders alert, peering up blearily at the crimson lens bar in the black faceplate, and she feels the bright magnetic touch of his living metal against her flesh. Alertness jams into place as he lifts his electric presence from her and she takes in the intersecting crystal plates and mirror-gold concavity of the pod.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she finds herself blinking at the kneeling androne with tears welling in her eyes. It is as if everything she had ever refused to reckon with, the sadness and loneliness, is trying to rise within her involuntarily and all at once, overflowing from her as much in release as in pain. Awareness of the blackness that has relinquished her under the androne's ministrations taps into the very source of her grief.

To Munk's amazement, she begins to sob. He finds it incredible that this molten grief could have churned inside her for so long without finding a way out, that she had to literally die before it found relief. In the formless nothing where she has just been, the androne realizes, everyone she had ever loved had gone. And now she has been there too-and come back.

"Welcome to the club," Mr. Charlie says with quiet exultation. "Welcome to the survivors' club."

In the wash of air from The Laughing Life, strands of fern and a white blossom have drifted. Munk sweeps them into his grasp and presents them to Mei. "To life."

She accepts the bouquet with a quavery smile. "To Solis."

Installed in the flight bubble of The Laughing Life, Charles sees and hears through the ship's sensors. While he scrutinizes the interior of the vessel, amazed to be alive inside a magjet cruiser, even more amazed at the ambit of his own hazardous destiny that has delivered him from the darkness of the machine, Mei and Munk talk. Vaguely, the thousand-year-old mind listens to the androne

and the woman struggle with their relief and the joy of their success while they discuss what lies ahead-the brief flight to Mars and how it will be necessary to abandon The Laughing Life in a high orbit. The cruiser is the property of Apollo Combine, and the only way to avoid the company's legal claim on them is to leave it behind. They will all go down to Mars in the pod and will slow their entry with a jetpak rig they'll hook up from the ship's stores.

While they carefully plot the immediate future, Charles gazes at the macrame of vines and roistering ferns spilling from ceiling nooks. He is quietly astonished to see them dangling here among the mysterious alloys of the transparent hull, wavering with the vent breeze in the aqueous glow from the crystal devices of the console. To him, the plants are weary and beggared

life-forms, sufficing on the merest offerings, yet noble in the poverty of radiation, thin air, and meager dirt that sustain them. Of course they would accompany humanity into space. From their cellular struggles, human life slowly and violently evolved and stands before him now as this beautifully pale and darkhaired woman chattering gratefully. By comparison, the androne beside her, holding her steady in the empty gravity, seems a divinity, silverly black and ceremonial, a faceless apparition of a higher order, a more ideal actuality,

that has emerged from her even more distinctly than she emerged from the genetic turmoil of the plants' early lives.

The archaic human stares at them tirelessly, scrutinizing these three orders of reality arrayed before him-ancestral, human, and noetic-and as the fourth, the ghost witness of the past, an obscure soul without a body, he experiences

for the first time in this calamitous and unreckonable future some emotion other than fear.

Charles stares ahead through the prow's sensors at the swelling vista of Mars.

The awe that had begun for him when he first woke from his long, cold sleep steepens at the view of the orange-red deserts and rows of dead volcanoes. As the cruiser glides closer to the rimlands of smeared lava flats and scoria, he sees the famous veins of dried riverbeds that he remembers from the Viking photographs of his former life a millennium ago. The rumor of floods chamfering the rusty plains, grooving the reddish black slurry floors with the toilings of water, fans out and melts away into the dark amber glass of alien mantle beds.

And suddenly, there it is, in the chancre of a crater surrounded by burned-out cinder cones-an immense and gleaming city! Astonishment expands to a worshipful feeling in his archaic brain, for here is the justification of his gamble and

his suffering-the triumphant faith of the vision he had died and been reborn to see. Set like a strange jewel in the barren plains and stark promontories of the dead planet, the city is woven of radiance. Its gold and-onyx spires twinkle

with sunfire and emerald spurs of laser light, its dazzling foundations sunk in the bedrock of the future's hewn and ancient-river altar of Mars.

3

Terra Tharsis

Charles Outis IS A BRAINSHADOW ENCASED AN AN EGG OF CLEAR plasteel. Psyonic pads designed to read and induce brain-waves cap both ends of the capsule and connect it by comlink to the console and the sensory array of The Laughing Life. Through the prow sensors, Charles watches Munk floating in space, the galaxy like mist behind him. The androne uses mag-lock clips to attach jetpaks to the mirror-gold hull of the pod.

"You only have four jetpaks," Charles notices. "Will they be strong enough to brake our descent?" Under ordinary circumstances, Charles prided himself on his observational abilities; now, survival has made him hyperalert. He notices the microchipping of the rover's hull and the thin feathers of electric fire around Munk as the androne aligns the jetpaks and magnetically locks them into place.

"These won't brake our entry," Munk answers frankly, indicating the circle of puny shoulder packs with their tapered jets that he's fixed to the hull. "But I'm not going to drop us to the surface. I'm aiming for Terra Tharsis, the city you saw on our last flyby. The jetpaks will help steer us to where scouts can pick us up as we go in."

"I still say there's enough lift on this cruiser to make a dunefleld landing," the jumper calls from the helm. "Terra Tharsis is too dangerous. Let's go directly to Solis. Put us down in the Planet, on one of the sandy verges near

the settlement. We'll hike in."

"The landing is too risky," Munk says. "The dunes veil rock reefs, and this pod isn't designed for an impact entry. We have no choice but to seek sanctuary with the Maat, unpredictable as they are. Which is better-to take a chance on incalculable physics or on an unguessable psyche?"

Inside the flight bubble of the ship, Mei is washed out by the pelagic glow of the console. Monitoring near space in the view scanner, she advises the androne, "We've got only a few minutes left. Two Bund ships and an Ap Com transport are closing fast."

"All right, then," Munk responds, "lock the helm and get into the pod."

Awe, fear, exultation at basking in the brown glow of Mars fuse inside Charles to a wide-staring intensity, so that he feels more alive now than he ever had in his former life. "What's going to happen to us in Terra Tharsis?" he asks.

"I don't know," Mei admits without much sympathy. "Terra Tharsis belongs to the Maat, not the Commonality. We'll have to find our way as we go."

Charles fixes his attention in the pod's external sensors and watches the planet view floating below, Mars rising splotched and enormous against the starsmoke. The winy mist of the atmosphere shimmers thinly against the black depths of space, and the blister-peeled and coagulate surface of the world shines with ectoplasmic wisps of dust and frost vapors.

The jetpaks fire soundlessly, the mute flares of blue exhaust standing before the stars like votive flames on the gold rim of the pod. Snug in his plasteel case, a husked brain devoid of even the primitive sense of vertigo, Charles does not feel the tug of acceleration. Instead, he surmises motion by the swelling vista.

Charcoal scrawls of shadow resolve to fault lines, nacre blotches expand to vast sandy verges, and the horizon becomes serrated. The barren vista of oxide deserts and crenulated mountain ridges swims closer, aslant in the yawing descent of the pod. Scalloped dunes spring from the mutant sands, warped and

quaking as the thin atmosphere buffets the plummeting vehicle, and Charles wants to blink, to shunt even for a moment the incoming vantage of wind-rowed buttes and stress-cracked rock.

The planet's rancid colors blur through the lens of the pod's thermal bowshock. Munk mutters some command that Charles is too distracted to catch. Below, a jagged shadowline of ifinit-faceted mountains looms as the pod's ultimate and calamitous destination, and a delirious howl whirls through Charles. before Mei disengages the plasteel capsule from the ship's console and steeps him in darkness, he sees the sharp peaks veer away, and through a rocky draw in the broken horizon, Terra Tharsis rears, her crystal towers swarmed in reefs of reflectant haze and star-barbs and carats of unearthly radiance.

"Mr. Charlie, wit you wise?"

The voice comes from all directions, and Charles Outis groans groggily awake, unable to remember where he is. His last recollection is of a supernaturally beautiful city of gleaming spires.

"He be witful. Spark his eyes, say I."

"Where am I?" Dim red embers worm in the darkness. "I can't see anything." "The translator needs adjustment," a basso profundo voice declares.

"Yes, it does," a softer voice replies. "I've just tuned it. He can understand us now."

"Good," the voice of thunder says. "Mr. Charlie, will you acknowledge that you can hear me?"

"Yes, I hear you. Where am I? I can't see anything. What's happened to the others? Where's Mei Nili-and Munk?"

"Calm yourself," the rumbling voice commands. "In a moment your sight will be returned to you. But first, his-ten to me. You are now in the custody of the Maat Pashalik. Several claims of ownership have been laid against you, and you are on exhibit before the Moot to settle this question of proprietorship."

"Wait, I don't understand. I don't belong to anyone. Where am I? Let me see where I am! Mei Nili? Munk?"

"Activate Mr. Charlie's vision," the heavy voice orders.

Wincing rays of hot color pierce Charles painfully before relaxing into the panoramic vista of a marbled cream floor slick as a mirror extending toward distant ivory tiers of swerving architecture strange as turtle bones and mantaray hoods. A massive plate-glass wall reveals the glittering city of onyx arcs and silver-gold needle-towers he has seen from The Laughing life. The copper-and-quince tones of Mars are visible on the horizon, the dark amber of mountains above the red skin of the desert.

"Mr. Charlie," the thunder calls him, and he notices two figures emerge from the glare where noon light stands on the gleaming white expanse. One is no more than a ruby staff topped by a manikin face, a mask on a broomstick. The other is bulkily draped in floating black scarves and an amethyst mist, and the humanoid face gazing from under the stammering flame that wreathes his faceted head is a dark metallic gray with black eyes impenetrable and empty as a shark's. "I am

the Judge," the bulky one says with the voice of thunder. "And this is the

Clerk."

"You're andrones," Charles gripes wearily, stifling a momentary swirl of dizziness at the strange sight before him.

"We are agents of the Maat," the Judge intones, "and you are in the Pashalik of the Maat where our authority countermands all other judgments."

"Where's Mei Nili?" Charles asks, fighting his panic. "How did I get here?" "Mr. Charlie," the Clerk says in her suede voice, the lips from the manikin

face unmoving, "you shall not address questions to the Judge-only to myself. You are, after all, an exhibit and not a plaintiff in these proceedings.

"What do you mean?" Fear fists so tightly around him he thinks he may pass out. "I'm Charles Outis. I'm a human being, dammit, not something."

"You are speaking nonsense," the Clerk warns in a gentle tone. "Our memory survey indicates that you are fully aware of your demise. Your remnant and relict survival, objectively speaking, is solely as a thing. The only question to be resolved by the Moot is to whom do you belong."

"I belong to myself!"

"That makes no sense, Mr. Charlie. By universal convention, a legally dead person has no claim upon anything, physical remains or otherwise."

"But I'm not dead!" he cries desperately. "Can't you see? You're talking to me, for God's sake."

"We're talking to you only because your dead brain has been reanimated at a measurable expense and for an expected return," the Clerk patiently explains. "You were dead for many terrene years and would be dead now otherwise."

"That's absurd!" "That is the law."

"You mean I have no rights at all?" He looks away from the bizarre apparition of the magistrate and his puppet, stares past the veering geometries of Terra Tharsis, and sinks his gaze into the primal horizon-the ruddy vista of

Mars-hoping to calm himself.

"There are important property rights that do pertain," the Clerk quietly admits. "Because you were stolen from the Commonality archive by lewdists, this demonstrates negligence of protectorship on the part of the Commonality. The

case may be made that the Commonality has thus forsaken any claim to you. As you were afterward stolen from the lewdists by the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group and subsequently recovered from them by the Commonality, you may claim to be property of public domain. Then, ownership rights will devolve to those who salvaged you."

"Why are you doing this to me?" Charles moans.

"The law requires the Judge and the Clerk to examine all exhibits prior to presentation in the Moot." The Clerk floats backward into the glare of noon light. "Unless the Judge has further questions, I believe our examination is concluded."

"The exhibit is found whole and without defect," the Judge decrees, the amethyst vapors around him fluorescing brightly, the flaming halo vanishing. "It shall be admitted to the Moot and herewith subject to all pending arguments for final and absolute proprietorship."

"Hey, wait a minute. Please!" Charles pleads "Where's Mei Nili? Where's the androne Munk? How did I get here?"

The Judge retreats into the sunfire, and in the next instant blackness swarms over Charles Outis.

Mei Nili and Munk sit in the alcove of the Moot, awaiting their turn to testify. Munk's faceless aspect stares out the transparent walls at the supernal ramparts of Terra Tharsis. He is livid inside with fear. So, this is the adytum of the Maat. And here he is at the foot of the dream, far beyond the parameters of all his programming. His hope, however improbable, had been that the flyers who intercepted the incoming pod would deposit them outside the city. But they didn't, and now here they are in the midst of the Maat's creation. An incestuous anxiety possesses him: This is the place of his maker, the very trespass he most dreaded.

The Maat's hand is everywhere apparent, from the artificial terrestrial gravity to the blue tint of the filtered sky. When, in the grip of the flyers' magravity net, the pod touched down on the summit of an onyx tower eight kilometers tall, Munk expected some kind of encounter with his creators. Instead, only a faceless androne on a skim plate awaited them. It ignored all their questions, removed the plasteel capsule with Charles inside, and floated across the rooftop among a panoply of prisms and mirror vanes. They followed, and the mute androne led them a long way down a spiral ramp of abstract

chromatic mosaics to this enormous chamber of sun-shot glass and ivory.

"You are in the Moot of the Maat Pashalik," a genderless voice softly advised them out of nowhere after Mei seated herself on a transparent bench. "Please

wait here until you are summoned."

"How long have we been here?" Mei asks curtly. She has refrained from berating Munk verbally for their predicament, but he can see by her eyes that she thinks the dunefield landing would have been better.

"Two hours and thirty-seven minutes," Munk replies meekly. Within the first few seconds of entering the chamber, he had already measured its domed ceiling, glass perimeter, and 2,853 viewing loges tiered in midair in the vast space surrounding the amphitheater of the central court. The sleek hoods of the loges are an evanescent blue shading along a lateral line to a hue subtle as the bronze tint on a mushroom, lending them an eerily organic look, like hovering skates or devilfish. Afraid to examine these odd structures too closely and too

embarrassed by their predicament to engage in taciturn conversation with Mei, he turns inward and focuses on listening to the communications of the numerous andrones in the vicinity. Their code logic does not match his, and because he does not understand anything they're saying, he must remain content with their music.

Mei paces about the sterile alcove, returning repeatedly to the window bay to gaze at the surreal skyline. The teetering spires and hyperbolas loom so tall their lower stories disappear below in a haze of ramparts and sparkling viaducts and spans that meld with distance to a golden ether.

Who lives here? she wonders. In the arcade on Deimos, she had once seen film texts of the multitudinous types into which humanity has diversified in the colonies-the morphs, clades, and plasmatics, to name just the three biggest groups. None are permitted in the reservations on Earth, not even the Maat, and in her job with Apollo Combine she had met only morphs, people morphogenetically adapted for specific tasks.

Here in Terra Tharsis, however, she knows there are clades, new branches of humanity that would barely be recognizable to her as human, and the plasmatics, those who have genetically transcended anthropic anatomy altogether. Perhaps

this chamber itself is a hive, and the organic loges floating overhead belong to a plasmatic class...

"Jumper Nili?" a smoky voice calls. "Androne Munk?"

A tall, sinewy youth with ethereal cheekbones, cumin complexion, fire-blue

eyes blacked with kohl, and red hair glittering with pixel-gems and braided in a long rope down his back shows the palms of his tapered hands in colonial

greeting and bows curtly. "My name is Shau Bandar. I represent Softcopy, a local news-dip service for the anthro commune. The Moot is allowing one of the

twenty-six anthro news services to interview your prehearing, and I got the luck of the draw. If you don't mind, I'd like to introduce you to our viewers."

Mei has encountered reporters like this before, when she was a novice jumper and considered mildly newsworthy for wanting to leave the reservation in the first place to take up such risky work. This reporter, like the others, exudes that same blue smell of serenity-a sedating olfact used by journalists to put their subjects at ease. For that reason alone, she decides she wants nothing to do with him. "Look, Slim, why don't you go find out for us how long we're going to be kept waiting here-"

Munk quickly steps between Shau Bandar and Mei. "Excuse me," he says deferentially. "Could you kindly give us a moment?" Then turning his broad back to the reporter, he whispers hotly in a voice pitched for Mei's ears, "For hope's sake, don't speak too hastily, Jumper Nili. This reporter may prove helpful. He is, after all, like you, an anthro."

"Put it away, Munk. That's your C-P program talking. Forget your anthropic model. Can't we just get Mr. Charlie and find our way to Solis?"

"Has it occurred to you yet that Solis is four thousand, three hundred

forty-five kilometers from here?" Munk whispers. "Have you given any thought as to how we're going to cross that much open terrain? The anthro commune may be able to abet our journey. Come on, now. Let's be logical and cooperate with this man."

Mei accedes with a reluctant nod, and Munk faces the reporter, beckoning him closer. "Excuse our ignorance, Shau Bandar," Munk says solicitously, "but this is our first time in Terra Tharsis. Perhaps you can inform us as vitally as we can you."

The reporter makes an adjustment to the microcontrols on the cuff of his purple dress coat, and a small blue light comes on in the collar of his short mantle, where he carries his sensors. "I'd be glad to help. Softcopy can connect you with both the anthro and androne naturalization projects-"

"We're not staying," Mei cuts in. "We're bound for Solis."

His brown,. angular face lights up. "Even better! That trek has endless appeal to our viewers. You know, I've never covered it myself, but I'd like to. I imagine the archaic brain you recovered from Phoboi Twelve will be your entrйe?"

"You know about Mr. Charlie?" Munk asks with surprise.

"Of course. It's in the court records. The news clips are already touting him as the Chiliad Man."

"Chiliad?" Mei frowns.

"The Thousand-Year-Old Man," Munk translates.

"What our viewers want to know," the reporter continues, "is what will you do if the Judge awards proprietorship to the Commonality?"

"Is that what's being decided here?" Mei asks, miffed. "They can't do that. Terra Tharsis is independent of the Commonality."

Shau Bandar nods sympathetically. "In principle, you're right. But the import of archaic remains has little precedent. That's why Softcopy is monitoring this case. The anthro commune is unhappy with the legal but inhumane exploitation of anthro remains by the Commonality. A copy of Mr. Charlie's radio distress broadcast is among the most popular clips in the contemporary index. In fact, the renowned Troupe Frolic already has a skit clip out based on the broadcast, called 'Wax Me Mind,' that's been both enraging and entertaining the commune since yesterday."

"When will the judgment be passed?" Munk inquires.

Shau Bandar regards the iridescent facets set in his cuff. "Initial arguments will be heard in about-oh, seventeen minutes. After that, judgment will be withheld pending further data for the minimum cycle required for a property case. That's one year-six hundred and eighty-seven martian days."

"What?" Mei's cry sends annulate echoes fading into the ivory distance.

"Am I right in assuming that neither of you has arranged to transfer credits here before going rogue?" the reporter queries.

"We had to respond immediately upon detecting Mr. Charlie's distress signal," Munk answers, somewhat defensively. "Regrettably, the credits we have accrued with Apollo Combine have been forfeit."

"Then after the initial arguments," Shau Bandar says, "I'll connect you with the naturalization projects and you can find work and begin to make yourselves at home here in Terra Tharsis."

Mei sits grumpily on the transparent bench, crosses her legs, and rests her chin on her fist. "This is just great. We risked our lives to salvage Mr. Charlie. He's ours, dammit. No one has any right to take him from us."

"Would you like to tell the viewers of Softcopy about the risks you took?" Shau Bandar says, edging closer.

Mei casts him a sidelong scowl. "What? Are you going to pay us for this?"

"Now, now," Munk intercedes soothingly. He places his heavy arm lightly on the reporter's shoulder and guides him away from the sulking jumper. "Come, let us talk. I am interested in asking you a few questions as well. Are your viewers aware, for instance, of contra-parameter programming in Maat-construct

andrones?"

The Judge, in a sheath of amethyst fog and black fluttering scarves, stands at the center of the amphitheater beside the stick-mask of the Clerk. Between them, on a frost-green pedestal, the plasteel capsule is displayed. A score of loges float nearby, their galleries packed with spectators. Shau Bandar waves from one of them, and though he is talking, his voice is absorbed in silence.

Munk waves back, but Mei Nili offers nothing, staring straight ahead as the

transparent bench she shares with the androne skims over the marbled cream floor.

In his stentorian voice, the Judge announces, "The argument for proprietorship of the revived remains of Mr. Charlie has been conducted for the Common Archive by Sitor Ananta. As this argument has been laid before the Moot from Earth, the communications lag of six minutes forty seconds has been edited by the Clerk.

The compressed argument presented here remains true in form and content." The air beside the Clerk wobbles, and there appears a holoform image of a

morph with slant-cut brown hair and long, Byzantine eyes, dressed in the loose, red-trimmed black uniform of the archives. "The archaic brain on display was uncovered at Alcoran site three by Commonality archivists twelve terrene years ago," the image declares. "The full records of discovery have been forwarded to the Moot. The remains date from the late archaic period, and though no chronicle of a prior life is extant, a direct cull was made of the dendritic memories and proof positive obtained that this individual experienced a full terminal episode before encephalic separation, glycolic perfusion, and immersion in liquid nitrogen. Though the definition of death has changed over historical time, this archaic brain was in fact declared dead by the definition of his own time. This is shown in the records of the dendritic cull, which have also been forwarded to the Moot."

The Clerk's slender voice pipes up, "Discovery and memory cull records on display."

Above him, for the benefit of the loges, calligraphic smears of color squirm through space: coded spectra to be translated by the spectators' sensors. Mei ignores them, but Munk records the full display and determines by correlation to the data in his anthropic model that Mr. Charlie had been interred in the

archaic province of Californica in only his ninth decade. The primitive brevity of his existence-for such can hardly be deemed a life-stirs pity in the androne, and he determines then and there that this man, who through a misweave in the weft of history has escaped the utter obliteration of his age, shall know the abundance of life the human spirit deserves. Fear of what he is about to do swarms like static through him, but he overrides his panic by focusing on the prime directive of his C-P program, to treat all people humanely-even if it

means his own destruction. Mr. Charlie is human, and he will no longer be treated as an object, if Munk can so help it.

Sitor Ananta continues, "The exhibit, revived by standard archival procedures-"

"I have seen enough," Munk declares, rising. He hears the music of the nearby andrones shift tone, sensing his threat. Fear mounts again in him as he expects the Maat to intervene and scatter him into a tenuous blowing of atoms. But nothing happens.

The Commonality agent continues talking: "...exists in its animated form today only because-"

"No judgment will be passed on this human being," Munk declares, "unless it is the judgment of life and the concomitant freedom that humanity has wrested from the accidents of creation and history."

of the efforts exerted by the Commonality Archi-" The image of Sitor Ananta shrivels away.

"Be seated, Androne Munk!" the Clerk commands. "You are in contempt of the Moot."

"Yes!" Munk confesses, amazed and emboldened by his defiant survival in the temple of his makers. He can hear-sense--all the other andrones in the chambers and corridors of the tower, each one a cell in the metabody of a grand silicon mind. He feels their animus. Yet none act. Are his makers restraining them? Can there be any other explanation? "I am in contempt of you." He points a squared finger at the magistrate and sweeps his hand toward the loges. "And I am in contempt of all of you who dare pass judgment on a human being who has broken no law, committed no crime."

"Sit!" the Clerk brays.

"No." Munk steps toward the Judge. The loud music of the foreign code logics from the andrones in the court crest with rageful intent, but no threat appears.

"I have been created by the Maat and contra-parameter programmed by them to study and respect homosapiens. I am an authority. And this archaic brain I recognize as human and alive. I cannot permit you to pass any other judgment but life and freedom upon him. Do you understand?"

The fiery halo above the Judge's faceted head flares hotter. "I understand that you are in contempt of the Moot and will now be removed-forcibly, if necessary."

"The Maat have created me to withstand the gravitational tidal forces of the Saturn system," Munk loudly informs the court. "Unless you intend to destroy yourselves, the exhibit you presume to judge, and this entire chamber, you dare not try to stop me."

This, of course, is a bluff. His makers, who possess his signal codes, could turn him off in an instant-or, if they desired a more vehement display, he could be sheathed in a confining field and his body dissolved to atoms. He knows the Maat could do that. But they do not, which is all the approval he requires. He seizes the plasteel capsule and dashes in a blur across the expansive courtroom. At the plate window, he dives, his cowl shattering the wall of plastic to a blizzard of molecular motes.

Mei Nili, who has watched Munk's rebellion with slack jaw, rises weakly to her feet and gapes at the gashed hole where he has disappeared. Overhead, in the loges, the spectators mill excitedly.

"The Moot judgment on the proprietorship of the revived remains of Mr. Charlie is hereby suspended pending the recovery of the exhibit," the Judge announces solemnly. "The Moot is now adjourned."

Munk's silver-black cowl distends, and with Charles tucked firmly under one arm, he banks into a thermal updraft and rises against the glittering onyx skyline of Terra Tharsis. Earlier, talking with Shau Bandar, he acquired the signal codes for the reporter's comlink, hoping to stay in contact with a representative of the anthro commune. Now, he realizes, it is his only means of finding his way back to Mei Nili.

He listens briefly to the gentle internal chirping of the comlink to be sure it works. Satisfied, he disconnects and puts his full attention on the magnificient city around him, the brave dream of the Maat. Magravity-the conversion of magnetism to the acceleration force of artificial gravity-enables the celestial heights of these prismal turrets, skytowers, and aerial domes. He hears the deep, oceanic drone of it underlying the crystal music of all the andrones in this region of the city.

He turns down his internal sensors-a heavy silence reigns at these heights-and dips lower to avoid the spark-glint of flyers appearing in the hazy distance among the spires. No one was hurt in the commission of his property crime, and

he hopes that not much of an effort will be made to apprehend him.

Space-weathered as he is and with his power cells at nearly full capacity, he could cause far more destruction than the wetware tucked under his arm is worth.

Wide, interwoven balconies and ribboning promenades appear below, bridging the cathedral spaces between cupolas and minarets. A mere dust mote among these immensities, Munk glides through the gap between derricks, astonished at the graceful heights rising from the crystal-cut shadows below. Unsure of where he

is going for the first time since his creation, he lets the eddies of heat swirling from the behemoth structures carry him.

The fear he feels in the titanic presence of his creators is mitigated somewhat by his cargo. The Maat would want him to save Mr. Charlie from those

who would use him as wetware, indifferent to the fact that this relict brain was yet a man even though his bones had melted long before in ancient Califomica.

Down Munk drifts into the deep gorge of Terra Tharsis, past mammoth-winged buttresses and laser-lit parapets, confident that his makers are pleased with him. After all, why else would the neo-sapiens who manufactured him have put a human thumbprint on his heart?

Shau Bandar misted his sinuses with a max dose of degage olfact, calming his tripping heart. How could he not have anticipated that this rogue androne would defy the Moot? Too much olfact, he berates himself and holds the thumb-ring

mister to his nostrils again. But the overload is tripped, and be has to make do with the placid action already soothing his excited brain. Too much olfact,

Shau, and not enough edge-or common sense.

With the other reporters in the journalists' loge nattering excitedly around him and the timpan-com whispering urgently in his inner ear from the copy office insisting he get to the chamber floor before the other correspondents corner the jumper, Shau Bandar stares mutely from the gallery. He notices that the morph, clade, and androne loges are nearly empty. They have little interest in a small anthro dispute over relict wetware. Below, the jumper sags on the witness bench, which is carrying her slowly backward out of the amphitheater. Her features are slack with that grim look people who do not use olfacts have when they are shocked.

The loge, too, is pulling away from the amphitheater, and the correspondents are filing toward the exit. But Shau Bandar stays at the gallery rail, waiting to see what, if any, response will come through from the Commonality. The

holoforms of the Judge and the Clerk vanished immediately after adjournment, but he expects that the startling turn of events will elicit a reappearance at the six-minute forty-second mark. He stays at the rail even as the loge settles and the journalists exit. A few minutes later he adjusts the microswitches in his cuff to monitor the amphitheater. The Clerk flicks on and meets the incoming holoform from Earth-the archive agent, Sitor Ananta.

"This is not just a property crime to the Commonality," the agent says for the court record. "As duly reported, Mr. Charlie was absconded with and held by the revulsive lewdists and the anarchistic Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group and is classified an insurgent, which is why he was exported off-planet in the first place. He may yet be a tool of those radical elements. Now that your negligence has permitted him to go rogue, the Commonality is charging you to upgrade this crime from property theft to abetting insurrection against established order

with potential threat to human life. You are most strongly requested to recover this tainted resurrectant and return our property to us so that this potential threat to the Commonality may be obviated. Give this top priority."

Sitor Ananta vanishes, and the Clerk's response, if any, is coded and undetectable by Shau Bandar's sensors. His colleagues will read about the Commonality's ire in Softcopy and are more interested now in the jumper's reaction. He sees them below, milling around her in the waiting alcove. Still, he doesn't hurry. He has a way to have her all to himself.

Mei Nili shoulders through the small crowd, growling, "Get off me. I've got nothing to say. Bounce off."

Her ire-so rustic and raw-engages the reporters' interest all the more. They claw her with questions:

"Where will you go now?" "Say something about the androne. Are you angry?" "Do you now regret going rogue from Apollo Combine?" "Will you apply for asylum with the commune here in Terra Tharsis, or are you going back to the reservation on Earth?" "Will you use olfacts to manage this emotional bruising?"

She bumps into Shau Bandar, and as she irately shoves past him, he whispers, "I can take you to Munk."

She fixes him with a hot stare, and he takes her arm and pulls her to his side. "I've got an exclusive here," he says loudly to the others, and when a captious cry goes up among the journalists, he says to her, "Tell them. It's the only way they'll bounce."

"Yeah, yeah," she says morosely. "He's got the exclusive."

Shau Bandar smiles lavishly at the dejected reporters. "You'll find out all about it in Softcopy."

"Where's Munk?" Mei presses as soon as the others dissipate among the ivory colonnades. "Did he tell you he was going to do this?"

"I don't believe he knew himself," Shau Bandar replies, guiding the jumper toward the exit arches, "not until that creepy archivist took off about

memory-culling Mr. Charlie. That must have triggered a response from Munk's C-P

programming, don't you think?"

Mei nods her head, heavily. "Mr. Charlie and I changed Munk on Phoboi Twelve. We forced him to override his primary programming. He's unpredictable now."

"I don't think so. He's an androne. He told me that the Maat contra-programmed him with an abiding interest in humanity. He's committed to Mr. Charlie now, and we can predict he will act to preserve that archaic brain."

"You said you could take me to him."

Shau Bandar stops before a droplift set in the base of a pilaster and uses his journalist's passcode to open the alabaster portal. "Come on. I'll tell you

about it on the pave. But let's not talk about it in here. Security."

They step into the indigo buoyancy of the droplift, and the sinuous magravity whisks them as if motionless toward the ground. In the close spaces they study each other. She is put off by his bold eyeblack, precisely ruffled silks, and gem-bleached hair. He is intrigued by her raffish lack of olfacts, her musky savor matching the crude physicality of her square-knuckled hands and the facet cuts of her muscles apparent even through her flightsuit.

The droplift opens on the pave, the hilly ground of Terra Tharsis. Each knoll is the gargantuan anchor base of a skytower, the slopes landscaped in a mazy complex of boulevards, villas, geometric plazas, and dome-roofed neighborhoods strewn with green splashes of trellised commons, tree haunts, and parks. Sunlight falls in wide swatches among the soaring towers that cast vales of umbrous shadow on the motley hillsides.

The enormity of the city daunts Mei, and she looks hard at the blue centers of

Shau Bandar's panda-black eyes. "Where's Munk?"

"I don't know," he says and adds quickly, "but we can lead him to us whenever we want. He has my com codes. I gave them to him so he could reach me if he needed anything."

"Call him."

Shau Bandar shakes his head. "Not yet." As they stroll on a tessellated pathway under heliotropic arbors beside a skim route where cars slash by in a soundless blur of magnetic propulsion, he tells her what he saw of Sitor Ananta. "That agent thinks Mr. Charlie may be tainted by the radicals who originally stole him from the archives on Earth. The Commonality are fanatics about control and accountability. You must know that. You worked for them. To preserve his own career, you can bet Ananta will do everything he can to hunt down Mr. Charlie."

They come to a beverage stall in the niche of a brownstone wall scribbled on by lichen. "This shop has old-style ginger mead. Want some?"

Mei declines with a frown and gazes out at the undulant sprawl of bubble-top cottages and swirling roadways. "I'm not thirsty."

Shau Bandar sits at a vine-hung stall anyway. "When's the last time you ate or drank-or slept, for that matter?"

Mei doesn't hear him. Her gaze is lost overhead in the skyways and viaducts webbing high out of sight among the monoliths and casting vaporous shadows on the pave. A clutch of smoke-haired morphs trundle by yakking in a dialect she doesn't recognize, their spindly arms gesticulating like egrets in a mating dance. The olfact wisps that trail off them fill her with an ice-blue sensation of midwinter. She shivers.

"Jumper Nili," Shau Bandar gently calls, "aren't you hungry?"

Mei turns from the busy cityscape and zips open the sleeve seal of her flightsuit to reveal a swatch of nutriment patches. "I've been on these since my last assignment. They're good for a couple more sleep cycles."

"Your alimentary tract doesn't mind the neglect?" he asks. "I mean, you're not morphed for your work, so your bowels must need some input."

Her eyes slim. "Hey, this is just another story for you. I didn't come here to talk about my intestines."

Her stark gaze tightens. "Then why are you so interested?"

"You might have noticed even a side clip is worth enough credit to draw a small crowd of journalists. It's a free city, but it's not the reservation. Nothing is really free here. I have a comfortable abode. It's no aerie suite and it's a little rundown, but it still requires a lot of credit. And small as it

is, I like it a lot better than sleeping in the park. I've lived with the park people, and I know how rough that is." He takes her vial. "If you're not going

to drink it-" He sips and nods. "The park people work with the andrones for each

meal-gardening, masomy-real work."

Mei gives a stern laugh. "You want to learn about real work and rough times, talk with Mr. Charlie about life in his day. Not even the park people have to cope with the grief that was the common lot then, real grief even for the most rich. I don't want to hear any of your big talk. It's all a game for you people. Live long enough in this day and age and even the dreamers in the park get lifespan credit and a nice hillside cottage maintained by andrones. You want to see reality, you find me Munk and Mr. Charlie and come with us to Solis."

Shau Bandar sucks at the vial, outraged at her haughty superiority. With a spray of degage from his thumb ring, his pique passes. Her fieriness is good, he realizes, and he feels foolish for the flash of umbrage he felt. Her time in the Belt has clearly toughened her for the trek, and here, at last, is his chance

for a real story. On the synergistic surge of mead and olfact, an idea crystallizes for a true-life adventure series, a sequence of clips that will earn him his acne suite after all.

"Okay, jumper," he says in a mounting seethe of ambition. "Softcopy will, like this. There hasn't been a good trek story in a long time. I think we're going to make news."

Munk stands in tigerish shadows under overarching branches, staring across a spacious parkland of green sward and the flat of a pond molten with midday glare. Beyond the hedge fringe, the hills of Terra Tharsis look soft in the mauve shadow of a huge tower, while on farther hills the skylights of pavilions reflect the sun in hot motes.

Fish rise silently in the pond. Vivid, tiny birds spurt from a stand of white birches and stream away over tussocks of feathering At the far end of the sward, a loose cloud of people swirl, playing some kind of ball game. Small figures, some as couples, most in bunches, drift among the quilted shadows of the

tree-lumped fields. A forlorn music fritters from players in a distant grove.

Through his receptors, Munk listens to the crystal music of the city's silicon mind. He can hear the alien code logics chittering around him, and by their

noise he has successfully located all andrones in the vicinity and avoided them. Satisfied that none are near now, he tunes into a bramble of communications from the cars he sees twinkling on the causeways. They talk of games, foods, credits, raptures, meetings, morphings, rivalries, olfact recipes, music, humorous anecdotes, clade branchings, and barters. No mention of him or Mr. Charlie. Very little commerce is discussed. Perhaps that is all conducted in the skytowers, which are opaque to his sensors.

Tiny millions of lives are held in his gaze, he sees, scanning the hazy distances. Why have the Maat created so many lives? And so many kinds of

lives-all of them human yet virtually none that would be entirely recognizable to the human in the plasteel capsule at his feet. Mr. Charlie had lived in a society of gonads and ovaries, adrenals and dopamine receptors. What will he make of this Maat creation, where sex, fear, anger, and pain have mostly been morphed away?

This man must live. He must be brought to the vats and have his body restored. To fulfill these imperatives, Munk believes the Maat installed in him the anthrophilic C-P program, which, since his escape from the Moot, has been

gauging his options. He must leave Terra Tharsis as soon as possible, he knows. But first he has to find Jumper Nili-not out of any personal sense of loyalty. He feels none for her. She fulfilled her role in his plan on Phoboi Twelve,

liberating Mr. Charlie from the deceptions of Ares Bund. if she still desires to go on to Soils with him and Mr. Charlie, then it is her responsibility to locate and come to him.

Yet Munk is certain Mr. Charlie will want to see Jumper Nili when he is next brought to consciousness. After all, she is the first truly human being he encountered since his death, and Munk's anthropic model assures him that significant bonding between the two has already occurred. Somehow, he must find transportation for them across the wilds of Mars. Without the jumper, he could simply walk with the plasteel capsule in hand...

"Excuse me, androne," a frail voice calls from the shrubs behind Munk.

A tremor scathes the androne with the disturbing awareness that he has been

surprised. His internalized focus had locked up his alertness and left him inattentive to his surroundings. in the fraction of a second before he locates the source of the voice, he anguishes at this attention lag, indicative of the reduced capacity of his primary programming.

"Help me, please," a large, sandy-haired man says from where he lies doubled over in a bilbeny bush. He is wearing a chamois strap-jacket and brown cord trousers with scruffy blue boots.

"I.. . I fell. . long ways."

Atop burdock and vandal sprays of nettle far back in the hedgework, virtually hidden by the banked shrubs, gossamer wings lie torn and tangled. The shredded membranes are dissolving into iridescent fumes among the sun's bright coins. Already no more than coils of smoke, the straps from the fragile glider dangle where the stranger freed himself. Munk reads the dark track in the tufty grass from the man's strenuous effort to crawl into the bilberry bush, and the androne is appalled to realize that he has been standing beside this unconscious figure the whole time unawares.

"Who are you?" Munk asks, crouching over the fallen man.

"My name is Buddy." He looks up at the androne with a tight-sewn grimace. "Help me up. Please."

Munk scans Buddy's stout body, running his spatulate hands over the cramped muscles and detecting no broken bones. But there is a staticky sensation from numerous burst capillaries. "You are injured."

"No, just bruised." He swings an arm onto the androne's cowled shoulder and painfully unfolds upright. "I'll be all right."

Munk holds the powerfully built human steady and feels none of the microvoltage perturbations in the body's ultraweak soma field that would be indicative of profuse internal bleeding. He splays his hand over the skull and senses the slow, majestic theta rhythms of profound sleep or trance. "Your brain..

Buddy pulls his head back and stares at Munk with a square, careworn face, vague eyebrows sad-slanted on a thick brow above large, tristful gray eyes. "I feel-stunned."

"What happened?"

Buddy brushes his thin blond hair back with the trembly fingers of both hands. "Stupid mistake. I took night wings out for a day glide. The membranes burned up."

He rubs his dented jaw, and his pale, thin lips smile wryly. "I could have killed myself. Stupid."

"A nearly fatal blunder," Munk concurs politely, regarding the purplish silver wings shredding to vapors. With his sensors he sees that they are a film of polarized monocolloidals, a sheer and nearly transparent material that cannot reasonably be mistaken for solar-sturdy fabric. These wings had to have been purposively selected. And yet, his internalized anthropic model assures him, humans do have monstrous attention lags, not unlike what he himself just endured wondering about his destiny with Mr. Charlie. Sometimes, he knows, humans have their most fatal lags when they unconsciously desire their doom. "Are you unhappy?"

Buddy stops rubbing his jaw and leans closer, looking at him with a peculiar intensity. "You're-different. For an androne."

Munk regrets questioning this man. The androne's primary program has already been committed to carry Mr. Charlie to Solis, and he wishes now that he could turn off his C-P impulses, which are coaxing him to interact with this human before him. Despite himself, he says, "I'm Munk, from the Saturn system. The Maat have installed contra-parametrics that inspire my interest in people. That is what brought me here. And that is why I am talking with you."

Buddy gives a slow nod of understanding. "Munk, can I lean on you? I want to try to walk." With the androne's help, he manages several tentative steps. "The thermals are strong today. They slowed my descent. And I steered for the trees to break my fall. I am an unhappy man, Munk-but not ready to die. At least, not consciously."

Munk's primary program feels he has heard enough and must remove himself so that he may fulfill his initial objective. But his C-P incentive insists on more data. "What saddens you?" the androne asks, letting the bruised man try a few wobbly steps on his own.

Buddy shrugs, offers a plaintive smile. "I don't know. This all seems so pointless sometimes. The usual plaint."

"Don't olfacts mitigate your plaint?"

"I'm an old one, Munk. I've been here a long time. Even olfacts have their limits." He lowers himself achingly to the grass and notices the plasteel capsule in a root cove of a nearby tree. "What's that?".

"An archaic brain. I am taking him to Soils, to the vats there. His name is

Mr. Charlie."

Buddy groans as he leans closer to peer at the capsule. "I see him. All the goods are there. Brainstem, too. How old?"

"At least a millennium."

Buddy blows a silent whistle, sits up, and wipes the sweat of his exertion from his broad brow. "I thought I was around a long time."

"How old are you, Buddy?"

"Damn old-but not that old. Where'd you find Mr. Charlie?"

"I have already told you too much," Munk acknowledges, finally supressing his C-P compulsion with the awareness that he is threatening this man. "I am in violation of the Moot. Further association with me may put you in danger. Since you seem recovered from your fall, I will leave you here, Buddy."

"Don't go yet. Finding you has been a great stroke of luck for me." Buddy squints at Munk with a querying and pained expression. "Do andrones believe much in luck?"

"No. My anthropic model includes luck as a vital faith that people have experienced throughout human history, but I believe such superstition demeans people."

"Yes." Buddy sighs and with his heavy hands strokes the grass as if it were fur. "The old ones have said that luck is the child of mystery and fear. But I subscribe to it anyway, fool that I am." His wide face flexes with pain as he leans backward on his elbows. "Tell me your story, Munk. I accept full responsibility for what may come of it. Please."

The plangent expression in the man's blond face quiets Munk's anxiety, but he can find no reason to confide anything more. "I must go now, Buddy. Be well."

"Wait, Munk." in the sunslant through the branches that strikes his

ginger-haired and freckled head, Buddy's eye-sockets look dragonish. "You said you're on your way to Solis and you've violated the Moot. Security may be looking for you. I know the city very well. I can help you avoid them. I can take you to a discreet egress where you can enter the wilds without being observed. An androne of your obvious durability can make the famous trek on foot." His sketchy eyebrows bend more sadly. "Please, tell me your story. I can help you."

Buddy's plangent voice reactivates Munk's C-P program, and for a full second the androne struggles with this decision. In that time, he calls forth the new data he recorded in the Moot when Charles's memory-cull records were displayed in coded spectra. Among those thousand-year-old memories are ideas that inspire Munk to transcend his primary programming yet again and trust in the

creative-what he had always called the unexpected-to find for him new ways through the veils of the world.

Imagination, Munk tells himself within his capacious one-second arena of contemplation. Around that one word he constellates useful information from Charles's memory cull, which tells him that imagination is the psychic process that transforms the pain and limitations of the purely physical. "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul." Those are the words of William Blake, a poet Charles admires.

In the all-inclusive imagination, where circumference does not exist, uncertainty is renovated and becomes sacred, indivisible, impenetrable, unified with all that his primary program usually rejects, with everything ugly, fierce, and cruel. This unity of opposites, of matter and imagination, primary

programming and uncertainty, beauty and ugliness-this, the ancient memories inform him, is where mind reabsorbs reality into a new wholeness. Then the fiery expenditure of energy that is our imagination and that makes us creative enables us to endure uncertainty, to tread emptiness, to be-human.

The crimson light in Munk's lens bar brightens, and as one soul reaching out to another, he tells Buddy his story.

Shau Bandar leads Mei Nili away from the beverage stall and the busy skim route and along an oak-cloistered promenade past water groves and hanging gardens and squat cottages behind flowering hedgerows to a cobbled lane. The lane climbs beside a gurgeling water rill through red-gold beechwoods, where other bungalows peek out. Staring up, Mei sees the stony trail wending ever higher toward bosky obscurities of pine and fir and the onyx immensity of a skytower.

"Here's my place," the reporter announces, stepping past a gnarled mimosa tree and opening a blistered wooden gate rhombic from wear. A flagstone path snakes among walnut trees and a billowy mass of frangipani to a grassy shelf and a

lean, high, gabled house, ramshackle and nearly grown over with rock roses and creeping juniper. "Actually, it may not be mine much longer. I owe more on it than I make, and I'm probably going to have to give it up and live in the cells for a while. Unless, of course," he winks at her, "the copy office buys our trek series."

They pass a birdbath choked with dead leaves and a sundial knocked askew,

climb slanted, creaking steps, and enter a dark, musty interior. Filament lights woven into the sagging ceiling flicker on, illuminating bare cubicles with buckled, water-stained walls. A hammock hangs in one corner, a tatty magnification of the cobwebs elsewhere in the room. In another corner tilts a splintery wardrobe.

Shau Bandar reads the uneasiness in Mei's open face. She is such a blatant provincial, he feels no embarrassment and admits, "I don't merit this house. It belonged to a renowned composer who moved up to a grander niche and left his place to friends. I eventually came to it through a friend of a friend of a friend. It sucks up all my credits and leaves nothing for me to maintain it. But it's haunted with music, and I like that."

He lifts a shroud from a low table beneath an oval rose-glass window and exposes a palm-sized oblong bubble packed with bright chromatic sections of data wafers. "This is the communications link to the copy office. Seen one of these before? It's a total immersion hookup, so it'll seem as if we're actually at the copy office while in fact we're still here. Try not to move around too much or you might walk into a wall. I'll tune us in, and we'll make our pitch."

With a wave of his hand over the bubble, he activates the linkage, and suddenly the shabby room is gone and they are in the ice-pale clarity of Softcopy's editorial suite. Under a dome of champagne-tint plastic overpeering the glittering gorges of the skytowers, people in multihued scapulars mill around cube screens meshing together segments for the next news-clip feedout. The full-view screens display the usual fare for the anthro commune:

interactive neighborhood tours and encounters, sport synergies, gardening tutors, and the big mainstay of the agency, midstim fantasies, which appear as abstract pastiches of sculptural colors. Mei recognizes those from the dream den in the recreational arcade on Deimos and feels a pang of yearning for the neural dream-swatches that each brain tailors to its own desires.

"Bandar, this is not a good time for hashout," says a big-boned woman with silver wing-braided hair and bold streaks of feather paint on her cheeks. "We've got a fast run on a scootball tournament, and I haven't got ten seconds. Hey, isn't this the rogue jumper?"

"Jumper Nili, this is my editor, Bo Rabana-"

"Sweet!" Bo Rabana says, displaying her pudgy palms, then swirling about inside her solar-yellow smock, talking over her shoulder. "I'll open a cube for you, and we'll get your clip out on the next run."

"Bo, she's not here for an interview. We're pitching a trek. Soils."

"The scootball's on a fast run," Bo says, pivoting on the balls of her bare

feet. "We'll talk later."

"We need a go now, right now," Shau Bandar insists, sliding closer. "Moot security is looking for the androne the jumper came in with. Remember?"

"Right, right. The Chiliad Man. Great clip. It had a strong run. We can replay when they catch him."

"Wait, Bo. Listen. The androne's going to take the Chiliad Man to Soils with the jumper. They're falling out now, as outlaws. I want to cover it. It'll be a hot series. Give me the go." Bo Rabana settles onto her heels, her cherubic face looking suddenly heavier. "Bandar, are you serious?"

"I know it's high risk-"

"You can die in the wilds!" Bo Rabana's pale shatterglass eyes grow wide. "I

don't want that on me. Do the interview."

"It's not on you, Bo. It's me. I need the credits-"

"Get a Pashalik job and triple your credits," the editor says, backing off. "Don't throw your life away."

"Bo," he says with a dark change of voice, "if Softcopy won't back me, I'll plug in to Erato. They'll snap up a trek story."

Rabana's shoulders sag and she steps closer, a stem crease between her startling eyes. "You don't know what you're asking." She turns her fierce gaze

on Mei. "You look like a hard-knuckler to me. Have you tried to tell this pastry puff what it's really like outside the bakery?"

"I don't give a damn what he does," Mei says in chilled, flat tones. "He has the link to the androne I came in with. Make him give me that, and I'm gone."

"I'm going on this trek," Shau Bandar insists. "It's a big story. It'll have a long run, and I want those credits. Do I get your go or not?"

"Once you leave Terra Tharsis," Rabana reminds him with a taut stare, "you can't come back."

"Sure, I can, Bo, if you give me a journalist's pass."

Bo Rabana lifts her dimpled chin defiantly. "I can't give you a pass, wise guy, until I file your assignment-and once we file, Moot security will be on to your plan to help the rogue androne. You'll never get out. The only way you can take this trek is cold-no pass."

The reporter gives a hapless shrug. "You can file after I leave."

"There's no guarantee that will be accepted," Bo retorts sourly. "You may never be able to come back-even if you survive the wilds, which I doubt, pastry puff. Do the interview. We'll hash out other assignments for you. You'll make your house payments." She turns away and bobs off, calling behind, "Stay sweet as you are, Jumper Nili. I've got a hot run going on the scootball. We'll touch up later."

"I'm doing the trek, Rabana'" Shau Bandar shouts, though inside he's trembling. "Do I get the go from you, or do I plug into Erato?"

"It's your scrawny ass, Bandar," the editor yells without looking back.

"Top credit? Full series?" he calls through a triumphant laugh that carries off his initial fright.

"If you live to collect," she shoots back. From the prospect of the knoll where he crashed, Buddy stares at the dark towers. Wide and mingled as mountains, with sunny windswept pieces of sky squeezed between them, they fill

space majestically. In their vitreous black depths, laser lines streak the paths of droplifts. Silver-spun threads of skim paths tangle around their bases, and flyers star-glint in the pellucid air of their heights.

Of course, he is thinking that those are the heights from which he has

fallen-and within those vitreous black depths are the spaces where he has lived with the deathless ones alone together. Closer, Munk is telling of The Laughing Life and the viperous Aparecida, and how Jumper Nili gambled her life on his C-P program. And though Buddy is listening, he is listening deeper to the freedom of his nightmare, the fright dream that strapped him in to night wings for a day glide and that sent him plummeting into the incalculable abyss.

Buddy looks up at Munk and nods at the courage that it took for this androne to be here in the trees' quiet drizzle of sunlight, telling his story so

matter-of-factly, his silicon mind wrapped around memories of near-death and madness as if oblivion and chaos shared a neutral equality with life and reason.

He nods. Overhead, in the lordly blue distances, flyers spin on rings of wind, milling the emptiness.

4

The Avenue of Limits

WHEN MUNK FINISHES HIS STORY, BUDDY STANDS AND CASTS A long, sweeping look at the parkland with its willow manes, hackled reeds, glassy pond, and, all around them, wheels of sunlight riding among the trees. "After a lifetime in space, this must all seem very strange to you."

"Not at all. My C-P program is packed with terrene images I downloaded from the archives." He listens for the crystal atonalities of the city's silicon

mind, and satisfied that the andrones he detects are not near, he tastes the air with his sensors. The wind-woven and complex organic chemistries of heather,

leaf rot, pond mulch, and lawn dew mingle the stoichiometry of their busy atoms in his mind's eye. But he ignores that and focuses instead on the bird raptures in the ferny holts, the cygnets gliding shyly across the pond, the solitary and strung-out clusters of people strolling along the mown fields. "It is beautiful," he declares, feeling a soft elation at actually being here in the leafy, loamy moment.

"Take this beauty with you," Buddy advises. "This is the Maat's jewel, cut and polished by them. It doesn't get any better."

"Where are we going?"

Buddy juts his jaw to the side as he ponders this. "Now that I know about Jumper Nili, it's clear you can't just take Mr. Charlie and march across the wilds to Solis." He sinks his mind into the spangled sunlight on the pond and makes a decision. "I'll take you to the exurbs of Terra Tharsis. From there, you can contact Jumper Nili when she leaves the city. Come on."

Munk follows Buddy up the chine of the hill, past the last chrome wisps of the dissolving night wings lacing the shrubs, and they enter a thick grove, where daylight dims to dusk. The cushiony leaf duff beneath their feet silences their passage, and Munk looks through the gloom of hawthorn and oak moss for the park. Heraldic sun shafts gleam like spectral crowns high in the forest canopy, but

the radiant threads that pierce the dense undergrowth reveal only confounding reaches of bracken, vetch, and dodder vines among the pillared trees.

Ahead, the cold, crystal chimes of the silicon mind grow louder. "Buddy, there's an androne ahead."

"Yes," Buddy confirms, not looking back as he shoulders among the clatter and scarves of dried branches and vines. "There's security at every droplift that exits the city."

"Security?" Munk stops in the gray light pooling among the trees. "I don't dare confront security andrones. They will try to take Mr. Charlie."

"Yes." Buddy turns around in the burdock and nettles and holds out his arms. "Give him to me."

"Why?"

"The plasteel capsule is disputed property," Buddy says, leaning through the weeds. "You removed it from the Moot, and security will apprehend you if they find you with it. But, since it's not stolen goods, there's no crime in my taking it out of the city. You follow after me."

"I don't understand." Munk scans Buddy for signs of prevarication, increased bloodrush, sweat scent, blink rate, and voice-pattern stress and detects none. "Won't I be arrested?"

"Security won't stop you if you don't have Mr. Charlie. You committed no crime."

"Obstructing a legal proceeding, threatening violence, absconding with evidence, destruction of property-" Munk's voice drones nervously in the blurred shadows of the estranged sun.

Buddy shakes his head. "The fault lies with the Moot for placing an androne of

your capability in the presence of property that the court took from you. I know the law. The court misjudged your C-P program and can't condemn you for being true to yourself."

"Then I am not a criminal?"

"Of course not. Give me the capsule, and let's get out of here."

In the instant's wide theater of decision, Munk twice reviews everything he has learned from Charles. His imagination, true to its natural duplicity, counsels trust and suspicion simultaneously. He wants the human experience of trust but cannot shake his wariness. Who is this man who requires his trust? Is he, in fact, a security agent sent to connive Mr. Charlie from him? Perhaps. Escaping with Mr. Charlie had been a supreme risk from the start. Perhaps it

ends here. Or not. If Buddy is his ally, Munk must trust him. If-there is no way to know. It is time to tread emptiness again, the androne realizes in a flush of dread and excitement. Time to endure more uncertainty--to act human again.

Munk passes Charles to Buddy. "Thank you for helping me preserve him."

Buddy holds the capsule to his chest, and in the ruined light his expression is warped with sadness. "You're good to trust me."

"I detect no prevarication from your body's signals," Munk admits. "And as the archaic poet Blake wrote, 'There is no Soul distinct from the Body.' I trust

your soul."

Buddy's small smile flares briefly in the shadows. He pushes through a tattery gap in the veil moss hanging from the groping boughs, skids down a dirt track on a steep, tree-clenched bank, and bratdes through a cane brake. With the canes clacking, he runs directly toward the icy tissues of sound that Munk knows are the unreadable codes of another androne.

He follows, sick with fear. If the security androne challenges him., he knows he will not submit. He doesn't want to kill anything ever, ever again. Aparecida's silhouette slouches out of the liquid shadows of the tufty canes. No, it's the flutter of an attention gap-fear usurping his imagination. The silhouette is the thermal halo from a covey of birds seeking shade and insects.

Munk stares up at the underbellies of the trees, and the internal faces he sees cut in the leaf patterns convince him to shunt his imagination and revert to simple motor programming. Quickly, he crashes through the canes, closing the gap between himself and Buddy, until he is running in precision tandem a few centimeters behind the man.

When he exits the thicket in this alert, neutral state, Munk sees without any emotion the security androne guarding the droplift. The sentinel resembles an armorial statue, a human figure in transparent cuirass with a turtle-browed, mirror-flat mask. A hanging garden of rocky outcrops and flowery cascades rises above the droplift, a marble cupola in a grove of black, tapered poplars. The billowy indigo shine of the droplift glosses the marble ramp and even glows on the dewy sward where the sentinel stands unmoving.