A. Attanasio - SoliS

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.
Without hesitation, Buddy walks across the lawn and past the guard toward the droplift. Munk stays in close lockstep, until they reach the security androne. He pauses, unable to move. No physical force holds him. It's his own deep-level fascination that's immobilized him.
He snaps out of simple motor programming and realizes that he has stopped because some part of him recognizes this androne. A swift search shows that Charles encountered andrones much like this one when he was first revived on Earth. Their masks carried watery reflections of faces.
A face now appears in the fiat pan of the mask-the soft, roguish features of Sitor Ananta. "You are in violation of Commonality law, Androne Munk. Return Mr. Charlie at once to the Commonality agent in Terra Tharsis."
"Munk!" Buddy calls. "Let's go."
Munk hurries to Buddy's side. "Sitor Ananta came through that androne."
"Ignore him," Buddy says and strides over to the directory, a plastic cube balanced on one point. Ice-green vapors spiral at its core, faster and brighter at the touch of his hand and the plasteel capsule. "The Commonality has no jurisdiction in Terra Tharsis, Solis, or the wilds between them."
Munk reads the code lights in the cube and sees that Buddy has ordered a short droplift, up and over the wall. Reassured by this simple route, he follows the
man into the indigo light of the cupola and hears no more the thriving, brittle music of the city's silicon mind.
Shau Bandar leaves his credit cuff on the lacquered table in the narrow house haunted by music. The cuff is useless outside the city. He looks around a last time at the faded walls with their pastel print of lobster pots and cacti. Someone else now will have to make sense of that or redecorate. No one is allowed to hold property in Terra Tharsis if they leave, even temporarily, and though he's unhappy about giving up this house, he's excited by his decisiveness. He is finally making something grand of his life. He tells himself that when he returns he'll have enough credits for a house twice as large and each room replete with the most expensive shapeshift furniture.
He bounds down the cricketing steps of the skinny house without looking back and meets Mei Nili among the walnut trees, where she's been waiting while he spent his last moment with the house. "Are you sure you want to do this?" she asks gruffly. "I have nothing to lose, but I'm not so sure about you."
"Never more sure of anything," he answers and briskly leads the way along the sinuous flagstone path. He salutes the skewed sundial and clogged birdbath and barges through the crooked gate. On the walk down the stony lane beside the creek, he explains that Softcopy has arranged for a droplift to the Outlands where a skim car will take them to the caravansary. All expenses are covered. "There's always credit available for an insider willing to risk everything on the outside. Even a lazy, impoverished lichen like me will get a big run in the news clips."
"Especially if you die," Mei points out.
The journalist agrees with a fatalistic shrug. "It's the biggest thrill of all-the shadow of death."
On the walk through the oak cloisters down to the pave, Shau Bandar talks nervously about what lies ahead, recounting news clips of caravans eaten by sandstorms and shreeks, voracious, bristle-fanged biots created in the vats of Solis to scavenge the wilds and discourage pilgrims.
Mei only half listens, attentive to the supernatural beauty of the hills. She has had to relearn the future too often since she last felt beauty. She has no idea where or even if she will be tomorrow, but for now, the heavenward towers and the shafts of sunmist on the hazy, cluttered hillsides are enough.
Autumnal shimmers of wind sweep the pave with smoked brightness and a radiant chill. Mei is still staring up at the gusty heights of sparkling onyx when Shau leads her into a tight alley. In the dark, a boast of indigo light breathes.
The city's vallation is a four-kilometer-high rampart, twelve spans deep. It rims the caldera brink of Olympus Mons, enclosing the great skytowers of Terra Tharsis and their hillside purlieus. The barrier has the seamlessly smooth and black-green luster of jasper but is composed of a Maat alloy impervious to sensors. The mirror-vanes atop the encircling parapet serve as both detectors and signal scramblers so that from outside the vallation contact with the city is impossible.
Despite this isolation, an extensive community thrives outside the city under the stupendous wall. Sustained by the gravity shadow of Terra Tharsis, which provides near-terrestrial conditions, exurbs sprawl across the broad slopes of the extinct volcano in a coruscating expanse of solar mills and antennae. The mills amplify the weak sunlight that bleeds through the perpetual cloud banks churning in the penumbra of the city's magravity field. The Maat weather system stores heat and moisture in this surrounding area, and so, while there is no dearth of water for the Outlands, energy must be milled from the thermals and the wan sun.
Shau Bandar explains this and more to Mei Nili on the long drive through the skimways outside the city. Displacing his anxiety about the safety he has abandoned for this rich adventure, he points out the gigantic, androne-managed farms on the watery horizons. He has been out here on assignment before and knows the names of all the districts: Sky-Bowl with its power factories, the agrarian pastures and fish hatcheries of Willow, the congested thorpes of Britty, and the elegant estates in an opulent district called the Honor of
Giants.
"Where do all these people come from?" Mei wonders. Even in the cool interior of the rented car, the air smells of swamp and thunder. Mountainous blue clouds hang in eerie stillness above the chain of hills and their clusters of hamlets and silver-foil roofs. "They aren't protected here by the Maat, are they?"
"No. They live in jeopardy of their lives, all of them." The car drives itself, preprogrammed for their destination at the very fringe of the exurbs, and Shau stares disconsolately at the smoky hills and the heat ripples on the skimway. "Actually, two hundred years ago-over four hundred terrene years ago-the exurbs were much larger. That was during the frantic Exodus of Light, when millions came here from all the colonies literally wanting to die in the rarefied air of Mars. Death passages were all the rage back then. The population here are remnants of that weird faith that got It, the idea that consciousness is light liberated into a glorious and rapturous field state called the tesseract range when the physical organism dies. Bizarre, huh?"
"Lately, it's living that seems bizarre to me," Mei mutters, pressing her fingertips to the cool plastic dome. She touches the speed-blurred images of the low stone houses with their shiny roofs and asks, "Why do these people live here? What do they want?"
"Most have come from the Commonality range towns on Luna," the journalist answers, stifling a yawn. "They believe the work is easier here. And they're probably right. You know how tight the labor strictures are in the Commonality. Also, work here affords each of them the chance of admittance to the Pashalik."
Among vegetable plots and sodden, sunken fields, roundhouses in unrendered concrete slip past. "Do many actually get in to Terra Tharsis?"
"If they accrue enough credits and an insider like myself leaves."
Mei hears the edginess in his voice. "Do you regret leaving? You know you can go back now. Just call Munk for me."
"Go back to what?" He crosses his lanky legs and clasps his hands over his knee. "You saw my elegant house that I'm about to lose unless I go to work for the Pashalik monitoring andrones. No. I want adventure-and credits. This is what I want." He puts his olfact ring to his nostrils, then presents it to her.
She declines by turning her attention from him to the pastel roundhouses with their foil roofs and red-dirt gardens. "How long have you lived in Terra Tharsis?"
"I'm forty-two."
"Mars years?"
He nods, distracted by the electrical nearness of the purple clouds with their flutters of lightning. "You'd think with all these hopefuls teeming out here to get in the city, they'd shut down the vats."
"The Maat have a life-type agenda."
"Is that what they believe on the reservation? Ha." He looks at her naked face, smells her sweet-sour body odor, and feels once more his sorrowing astonishment at her rustic mien. "The Maat have no agenda. If the commune didn't insist on racial parities, the whole city would have gone plasmatic centuries ago. The Maat don't care."
With violet tremors in the piled clouds and trundling thunder, a dazzle of rain sizzles toward them on the skimway and pummels the clear top of the car. "Have you ever had an encounter?"
"Nope. And all the encounters I've followed up for Softcopy were bogus. The Maat are so far inside now they're not even bodies anymore. That's what I think. They have no more truck with us than we do with apes in the aboriginal forests."
Veils of rain smoke off the hot rooftops and steam along the empty road. For a long while, they ride in silence, Mei worried about Munk and Mr. Charlie, Shau still debating the merits and dangers of the impending trek. In the blue darkness, under the hammering rain, the world draws closer.
Buddy, holding Charles Outis in his arms, stands with Munk in a grassy verge under the giant vallation of Terra Tharsis. The droplift that carried them out of the city has deposited them on a hummock overlooking low, tinsel-roofed cities strewn brightly under toppling clouds. The androne glances up at the indigo blur of the vanishing droplift vortex, relieved that his creative willingness to trust this stranger has indeed delivered him from the city of his makers. The noise of the city's silicon mind has vanished entirely, and he senses no other andrones using Maat codes nearby.
"Where do we go from here?" he asks, scanning the cluttered plain. On the steep horizon, lizards of lightning squirm among the mauve thundetheads of an isolated storm.
"I think I know, Munk." Buddy hands Charles to the androne and removes his chamois strap-jacket. "If the jumper you came in with wants to make the trek, she'll have to start from the Avenue of Limits. We'll go there." He slings his jacket over his shoulder and wades through the tall grass.
Munk cradles Charles in the crook of one arm but does not budge. He senses waftings of ozone from the storm and the distant chatter of thunder. "You have kept your word, Buddy. Show me the direction to the Avenue of Limits, and we can part here."
Buddy stops among the feathery grass. "I'd like to come along," he says, almost apologetically. "The Avenue of Limits is at the fringe of the Outlands, on the edge of the wilds. It's a big place and a long walk from here. But there's a skim station in Sky-Bowl, not far away. From there, we can ride to the Avenue of Limits and you can use the reponer's codes to contact him. What do you say?"
Munk regards the man for a full level second, playing various motives though his anthropic model again and again, until finally he must admit, "I don't understand why you should care at all about me."
"It's a new one for your anthropic model, isn't it?" Buddy's strong face with its imprint of sadness nods once. "Anomie."
"A psychic state of isolation and disorientation," the androne recites. "That is the unhappiness you confessed to me."
"Yes. That is my unhappiness." His strong face looks weak, and he says with a slow, aching solemnity, "I belong in the wilderness now. Can I go along with you?"
"To die?" Munk asks ingenuously.
Buddy gives a vigorous shake of his head that scatters his sweat-wrung hair over his eyes. "No. I don't want to kill myself. I want to test this life. To make it stronger."
Munk absorbs this, and it prints in his silicon brain as something heard before. He plays back words from Mr. Charlie's broadcast: "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."
"We will go together then," Munk decides, glad to participate in yet another human being's story.
"Good." Buddy winks. "We'd better get going before the rain gets here."
In the oblique light slanting through the storm clouds onto the immense vallation of Terra Tharsis, the weather displays massive and strange contours, and the androne feels very small among the powers of the world. He follows Buddy through the feathery grass toward the wide, cluttered horizon of human life.
Mei Nili and Shau Bandar arrive at the Avenue of Limits with the rush of night. The oblate and gaseous sun shudders among the cindercones and black volcanic hills on the serrated horizon like demonland's burning portal. Sbau takes the yoke and slides the rental car onto a terminus bed along the shoulder of the skimway. The doors wing open on the sultry, incandescent dusk.
"Why are we stopping here?" Mei asks.
"I want to record the sunset over the Avenue of Limits. It's a good bridge shot for the first clip." He steps out into the simmering evening.
To one side, in the direction from where they have come, the citadel of Terra Tharsis dominates the highlands, the breadth of its vallation dark as a ruby in the long sun shafts, the skytowers silver-veiled and dazzling with laser points of gemlight. In streaks, flares, and fiery globes, the scarlet-plumed sky hoards the last of the day's sun, and the rooftops on the lava slopes shimmer with purple flames.
In the other direction, the wilds of Mars catch the twilight in gleams of amber glass and crimson smears of slurry, a dim and barren badland that stretches away into darkness. Shanty sheds crowded among behemoth warehouses and industrial barns front the wilderness. Lux wires and torch globes pour light like magma through the tight lanes and burrows at the very brink of the hungry darkness.
"This is the Avenue of Limits," Shau announces, fortifying himself with a sniff of ergal from a pinky ring. The stimulating olfact makes the stifling heat seem more bearable, even invigorating. With an expression of determination, he looks to Mei, who has gotten out of the car and strolls away from him. "From here, the journey to Solis really begins. Rabana's been in touch by cable phone to the local copy office in Britty, and they've relayed her messages on my timpan-com. She says Softcopy has data on three caravans lading for departure from here to Solis. But two are sure losers, religious fanatics from the Outlands who expect divine help in crossing the wilds."
Mei listens absently. She stands at the edge of the terminus bed, staring down the slope of the skimway to where the concrete-block walls and derelict buildings begin. No people are in sight, "it looks abandoned."
"It is," Shau says, stepping alongside her and pointing into the distance to where a devastated swatch of debris breaks the shoreline of packed-together sheds, ricks, storeyards, and longhouses. "A failback took seven whole blocks out a short while ago. The magravity border fluctuates. It usually extends into the wilds about a kilometer beyond here. But sometimes it falls back, and when that happens, whole sections of the Avenue are ripped apart by the abrupt gravitational shift. The clips I've seen are really spectacular-whole buildings launching into the sky and breaking apart. Some of the debris has been found a hundred kilometers away."
Shadow shapes stir within the crepuscular fields below, but when Mei looks closer they are only cane-grass stirring in the wind among piles of old scantlings. "What about the third caravan Rabana found-is that a more reliable group?"
The reporter juts his lower lip dubiously. "The trek captain is some kind of entrepreneur, but he's also an extraordinary mechanic. He's run a wilderness-tour service out of Britty for years. A wealthy eccentric from the Honor of Giants has hired him to captain the trek and is putting up the credits for the equipment. She wants to donate all her energy and assets to Solis and is determined to get there in one piece. With her backing and his expertise, this caravan is our best shot. Softcopy will pay our passage in exchange for the exclusive news-clip and drama rights."
"Someone's down there," Mei says, pointing to the junkyard below them. "They've been watching us."
"I don't see anyone."
Mei fixes her focus on the ruddy yellow lux wires grid-ding the Avenue of Limits and with her sharper peripheral vision spies figures crouching, through the scrub of the eroded hills. "They're coming," she says, backing from the edge of the terminus bed. "Call Munk."
"I don't see anyone."
Mei slips into the car. But she has no credit codes to activate it and hops out again. "Come on, Bandar. Let's get out of here."
The reporter approaches the vehicle casually, orgulous with the olfact sparking in him. "I've been here before. There's nothing to be afraid of. If you saw anyone, it's probably the traders who lurk around the storehouses, wanting to barter."
"Just get us out of here."
Shau eases behind the yoke and taps his cuff onto the credit plate, but the car doesn't start. He adjusts the microswitch insets in his cuff and tries again. But the control panel remains dark. "I don't get it," he mumbles.
"Call Munk, dammit."
The reporter fidgets with his cuff switches and is shaking his head bewildered when the first figures shamble up the embankment. Against the sky's last opal cracks of light they are hunched, hooded silhouettes wielding pipes and clubs. Their sudden shrieks snap Shau's fixation with his cuff controls, and he rears back in fright.
"Damn! They must have cut the power cables to the skimway."
Mei reaches across him and pulls down his door, slapping the lock into place. "Get Munk on the com-link, Bandar. Do it!"
Shau complies with trembling fingers. "Munk! Munk! Androne, are you reading?"
Ten big mongrel morphs leap about the car, slamming their clubs on the plastic dome. With the third blow it cracks, and with the next one it shatters into a splash of molecular dust. Whoops and hollers flap into the night, and large, splayed, four-fingered hands reach in and yank the passengers from the car.
Mei tucks her knees and kicks out with all her might, pushing free of her assailant. She twists to the ground and scuttles on all fours. But two other morphs seize her arms, and she's hoisted upright to see Shau flopped facedown on the hood of the car, the hulking bandits tearing off his jacket and his rings. His mouth is wide with pain and fear, his teeth black with blood. One of the morphs grabs the reporter's long braid of hair and jerks his head back. Another slides a curve of blade under Shau's straining throat.
"No!" Mei screams.
Delirious hollers carom shrilly into the night, warbling into howls at the sight of the slim jumper writhing between her captors.
Beads of dark blood appear under Shau Bandar's jaw, and his eyes swivel wildly in their sockets. He groans in thick guttural bursts, pleading for his life.
Up from the embankment where the morphs first appeared, a silver cowl rises, cloaking a darkness with no face. "S-ss-s-t!" the androne directs a hypercompressed packet of sound waves at the morph holding the knife, and the blade wrenches free and clatters into the car.
"Let them go," Munk commands in a thunderous voice.
The morphs drop Mei and release Shau, then rapidly scatter, dissolving into the darkness with tattered whines and aimless cries. A moment later, a pipe wings out of the dark, slashing toward where Mei has risen to one knee. The androne bounds forward in a chrome streak and plucks the projectile out of the air less than a meter from the jumper's head. With a deft wrist snap, the pipe whirls whistling back into the night and finds a mortal shriek.
"I came as quickly as I could," Munk says, helping Mei to her feet. "I heard your distress on the link."
"Help Bandar," she says. "He's been cut."
"I'm okay," Shau declares tartly. He holds a shred of his shirt to the superficial cut at his throat and glares wrathfully into the dark where the morphs retreated. "They slashed my dignity more than my flesh. Gruesome things! They're distorts, not people. They must be destroyed."
"Who are they?" Mei asks, rubbing feeling back into her wrists.
"I tell you, they're distorts," Shau croaks with anger. "There's no real law in the Outlands. Rogues run their own vats out here and morph gangs of homicidal brutes-distorts-to protect their territories. Sometimes the distorts range wildly. The posses that hunt them down are always a popular run in the news clips."
Mei puts a hand on the plasteel capsule under the androne's arm. "Munk, where have you been? Why did you run away?"
"You know why I fled with Mr. Charlie."
"I know," she says, drearily. "Your C-P program."
"Yes. Since Phoboi Twelve, I can actually hear my imagination as loudly as my primary programming. I could not bear to imagine what Sitor Ananta wanted to do with Mr. Charlie. I know it would have been clearly inhumane."
Shau thumps his sandaled foot against the skim plate of the car, irate that he lost his jacket and recording mantle and with them his chance to report on an androne with a human spirit. "Now look! I have to get a new link. I lost everything!"
"Do you at least know where we're going?" Mei asks testily, approaching him. She peeks under his jaw to view the wound and sees only a gray smear of blood in the dark.
"Of course I do," he answers defensively and nudges her away with some
annoyance. "Raza's. It's just down the bluff. But we can't ride there The distorts cut the damn power cables. And even if they hadn't, we can't operate this car without the credit patch in my jacket."
"Buddy has a rental car," Munk suggests. "I met him in Terra Tharsis. He helped me to get out. But I had to leave him behind when your distress call came. He couldn't move fast enough."
"Where is he?" Mei asks.
"About sixty-three kilometers down the Avenue of Limits."
"You ran sixty kilos from the time I called you?" the reporter asks.
"I can move much faster than that," Munk replies modestly, "but there are structures to avoid on the Avenue. And it is warm here. My coolant system was nearly overtaxed."
"You must have spent a lot of power," Mei notes. Despite herself, she can't help admiring the androne's spunk, at the very least.
"Yes. I depleted fifty-two percent of my power cells to get here quickly. But the expenditure was required."
Shau heartily agrees. "I'll say! They were going to kill us."
"But how are we going to charge your cells?" Mei places a concerned hand on the androne's breastplate and feels the dew-chill of it. "We have no credits."
"Get me to a link," Shau says, "and we'll see what Softcopy can do."
"I have already contacted Buddy," Munk acknowledges. "He says he will meet us at Rey Raza's garage. It's only a few kilometers from here. I will carry the two of you."
"And me without my damn recorder!" Shau kicks the car's skim plate again. "This would have been the perfect lead-in!"
Munk spends a moment adding this behavior to his anthropic model. Mr. Charlie had declared that we all live by our fictions, and here is a bleeding man who grieves for the story he has lost. Mei Nili herself has an incredulous look on her face, as if she is convinced a life can be overremembered.
The androne regards them both with quiet satisfaction, proud that he has preserved two dewdrop lives from the void. Staring at these human creatures his strength has kept whole, he feels right. He knows this feeling is the cyberkinesis of his C-P program, his own subjectivity, but that doesn't seem to matter.
He feels a mutual kinship with Jumper Nili's cool detachment and the reporter's hot ambition. He yearns to see Mr. Charlie, the ancestor of his maker, whole before him. And yet-and yet, he is an androne. His yearning is the calm fury of his maker.
He remembers floating in the delicious cold of farside Saturn, tiny in the penumbra of the gas giant, knowing that he knew he was a programmed being. He experienced an echo of that humbling smallness under the immense vallation of Terra Tharsis. And now here, again, he knows he is becoming an accident, like everything else.
Jumper Nili has seen something become nothing when her family died, and he almost saw that tonight. He has never witnessed a human death. The very thought oozes with unhappiness and makes him recall that there are light-years of silence surrounding him. That fact mutes his sadness.
Once again, he determines that he will defend these frail residues of human life with all the strength in his power cells. That pleases him, or at least makes him less unhappy with his smallness under the tumultuous sky and the slowness of time.
Clutching Charles Outis between them, Mei Nili and Shau Bandar ride in the embrace of Munk's arms. They bound over the main artery past hip-roofed sheds, gaunt storage towers, oxide-stained corrugated fences, weathered warehouses, a graveyard of rust-gutted drums, and desolate crossroads grimly empty under the blazon of lux wires. At the reporter's command, they stop before a wide garage with a pyramid of latticed metal on the roof and a. circular sign hanging above the open port announcing:
RAZA'S TOURS OF THE WILDS.
Within the tall port of the garage are three big sand rovers, painted a glaring white with RAZA stenciled in red on the vent-ribbed runners. Slender
laser cannon mounted under the eaves of the garage swivel aggressively, and Munk turns his reflectant cowl toward them.
"State your business!" a gravelly voice exclaims over a speaker system.
"Rey? This is Shau Bandar from Softcopy! We're here for the trek."
"Sorry," an unamplified voice says. "You can't be too careful on the Avenue of Limits."
A wiry, falcon-faced man with a shaved head, tiny mustache-Ups at the corners of his wide grinning mouth, and green splashes of face paint under his eyes strides across the port. He's dressed in scarlet and gold clothes, a magnificent fullness of pleats and panels and intricate braiding, baggy as a bright, rackety kite. "I am Rey Raza," he proclaims boisterously, through a gleeful smile. Wrinkles of merriment seam his face, but his small, hooded eyes regard the world with a mean squint. "Softcopy said you were coming. Where are your recorders?"
"Distorts jumped us," Shau says, stepping out from behind the androne. "Munk here saved our lives. The distorts probably still have my jacket. If we act quickly, we can use it to help target a posse."
Rey Raza tosses a thick laugh at the reporter. "You've seen too many news clips, Bandar. There are no posses on the Avenue of Limits. Here we are ruled by the one and true law, the natural night of primacy itself."
"What about justice?" Bandar complains.
The tour guide shrugs. "Justice, moral right, equity, and due consideration to the weak have no value whatsoever here or in the great and terrible land beyond these limits. You'd better get that straight now, Mr. Journalist, for there will be no turning back once we are away."
"Sand rovers will take several days to make the crossing to Solis," Munk notes. "Are there no flyers available?"
"You are clearly from a far and distant system, Munk," Rey Raza observes chidingly. "You're a Jovian deep-space patrol-class androne, I'd judge from your looks. And those legs have been augmented, haven't they? Must be unbearably hot for you around here."
"I am from lapetus Gap in the Saturn system. My legs were fitted for me by Apollo Combine on Deimos. And, yes, I find this heat enervating. Most of my power is spent cooling my systems."
"Didn't you tell them anything, Bandar? Flyers– really." Rey Raza waves them inside. "It's not a good time of day for street talk. Will you join me for some refreshment? Munk, I don't think I have the right power amps for your kind of cold-body cells, but you're welcome to look over my equipment. As for flyers-well, Terra Tharsis and Solis just don't permit flyers anywhere near them. Ah, here is the archaic brain." He presses his forehead to the plasteel capsule. "He's dreaming. Maybe of Earth. I'll bet he feels more awake now than when he wakes next among us, eh?"
The interior of the capacious garage smells acridly of lube oil and lathed metal. Behind the three sand rovers, a wire-mesh partition isolates a machinist's pit, engine hoist, and a tool-and-die shop. Raza admits Munk to the generator deck and leads Mei and Shau past the dimly lit work areas to the back of the garage.
A sheet metal door slides open on a radiant room with the clean redolence of woodwork. Blue straw mats cover the floor, and yellow paper screens, like vertical louvers, section the suite. Between the screens, strips of a kitchen and a sleep cubicle are visible, both with wooden furniture-floral-carved pantry, painted cupboard, swivel stools, a trestle cot, and lacquered side tables.
A blond wood table and fanback chairs in the front room squeeze Mei's heart, and a tear startles down her cheek. She lowers her face to smell the spray of wildflowers in the table's centerpiece, trying to hide her emotion.
Rey Raza places an airy hand on her shoulder. "You're exhausted. I can see the fray light around you."
Shau, surprised, starts to explain, "Rey's from a strong-eye clade. He sees some infra and ultra, bodylights-"
"It's the wood," Mei manages to get out, feels stronger for it, lifts her head
and wipes her eyes. "I haven't been close enough to smell and touch wood since I left Earth. I didn't know how much I missed it."
Shau puts a fist to his forehead, regretting again the absence of his recorder. He's convinced that these are the moments that will make his clips run. "Rey, rye got to call in."
"Use the cable phone by the cot." Rey points the way, then says with mesmeric softness to Mei, "You must sleep. Tomorrow Grielle comes. She is the woman on the death passage. Like all passagers, she's eager and will want to leave at once. So we will skip the refreshments and let you rest now. You may have the cot, and Shau can sleep in the rover. I have more work to do in the shop and will stay there. Good night."
Before she can demur, he exits through the metal door, and she is left alone to touch the satiny wood and, for the first time, the palpable distance from her origin. She feels rent from her past, her family, and she rends herself from the table. She doesn't want to think about that now, On Phoboi Twelve, in the black moments when she was actually dead, she learned release. She is appalled that she will have to learn it again.
In the cubicle she finds the reporter sitting at the edge of the cot, brushing the off-pad on the cable phone. His smile, for all its meekness, is warm. "I'm sorry about the distorts," he says. "Rabana just scolded me for stopping. I should have come straight here and skipped the damn sunset."
Mei's eyes lower to meet his, then swing up, weary and burned by tears. "We're alive. That's enough for me right now." She sits down on the cot and unzips her boots. "Is Softcopy going to take care of you?"
"They're sending me a new link and a recorder mantle." He thumbs the lux pad, and the cubicle lights dim. "I'm going to wait outside for the courier. What I wouldn't give for a whiff right now. Oh, well, I won't see that ring again. Ease, Jumper Nili. Ease and the countenance of dreams."
A slat of dark blue light glows dully from the latrine. She strips off her flightsuit and throws it in the sanitizing hamper. While it's running, she unpeels the nutriment patches from her forearm, all of them spent, and drops them in the disposer. The sonic shower dispels her last resistance to the fatigue she's been feeling since Terra Tharsis. She retrieves her clean flightsuit, zips it on loosely, and collapses onto the cot.
Pulling onto the concrete apron of the tour office lot Buddy kills the electric engine of his black and bulky rental car. He waits under the gaze of the laser cannon until Munk appears with Rey Raza and Shau Bandar. The androne, still holding Charles, introduces Buddy, and the stocky man removes a credit clip from his jacket and passes it to Rey.
"Round trip?" Rey asks, backing toward the garage.
"One way," the man with the quiet eyes says.
"A passager?" Rey inquires.
Buddy shakes his head. "No. Just a traveler."
"Not all travelers are admitted to Soils, you know," Rey points out as he takes the credit clip inside to book passage. "A one-way trek both ways is expensive."
"Whatever it costs," Buddy replies.
"Munk called you an old one," the reporter says as they stroll into the garage port. "Are you filed with Softcopy?"
"Yes," Buddy admits and adds with a gentle, mysterious patience, "But I don't want you pulling it up, if you can restrain yourself. I don't want that with me on this trek."
"I don't think I can restrain myself, Buddy," Shau confesses, again wishing he had his mantle, which could access old clips immediately. "I'm a reporter, and what you've just said is far too tempting. Why would an old one go on a trek-unless it's a death passage?"
"It's not," Buddy answers and looks to the street, where a courier van has pulled up.
"We'll talk," Shau promises and hurries out of the garage.
Munk asks Buddy, "What was that about?"
"Most of the old ones have files with the news services." Buddy shrugs. "I'm no different. But my past is. Where most of the old ones were intent on working with the Maat and building great worlds, I feared the strange new breed and worked mischief against them. It was a short-lived insurrection. But a Maat and some other people died. I was apprehended and reconditioned. Now I feel indifference where before I was hateful."
"The Maat forgave you," Munk says.
"No." Buddy's small smile carries no malice. "They altered my brain."
Shau approaches with his arms full of bubble-wrapped packages. "It's all here," he exults with exaggerated enthusiasm. "I am again the eyes of millions!"
Rey returns Buddy's credit clip and helps Shau unpack. The recorder jacket and mantle are desert-ready, tailored in sturdy canvas, dark brown and sere. The reporter slings it over his shoulders, and a delighted Rey assumes his most ingratiating air for the camera and takes Shau on a tour of the shop.
Munk stands in the port, staring out into the Martian night. Buddy pats him affectionately on the arm, then crawls back into the rental car to sleep. The crystal music of a silicon and chimes from farther down the Avenue of Limits, too far away to be a threat just now. Nearby, he hears the journalist's recorder whispering to itself. Then it, too, is silent. Soon everyone is asleep, their brains as disengaged from the continuum of actual events as is Charles's in his plasteel sleep.
A jeweldust of stars gleams in galactic vapor trails over the black horizon. There is much for Munk to add to his anthropic model and review, but before he does, he tracks the night sky. In the heavens' swirling turbulence, Earth's silver-blue star stares over them unblinking.
At the first smear of dawn, a skim-flight truck pulls up before Rey Raza's garage and mindless loader handroids begin depositing large high-impact crates. A mocha-skinned woman with long eyes and short black hair braided in tight designs on her pattern-shaved head emerges from the cab. She is dressed in a slinky green gown of firepoints that fluoresce like auroras as she walks forward under the tracking laser cannon. Standing before Munk, she places her thin fingers on Charles.
"Dear man," she whispers to the archaic brain, "we meet going in opposite directions. By the grace and acts of light, I will get you to Solis, and you will be the last of the first men with whom I speak."
"That is a touching sentiment," Munk states.
The angular woman cocks a fine eyebrow. "What does an androne know of sentiment?"
"Enough to recognize it when I see it. You must be Grielle Aspect."
Her dark, elongated eyes, assess Munk calmly. "I've liked you from the moment you defied the Moot. I believe we will be famous friends."
"How do you know of me and Mr. Charlie?"
"I watch the news clips," she says, turning her chin to her shoulder, revealing a clean, haughty profile as she peers into the garage. "I'm leaving this world, dear androne, not my mind. Knowledge still is power-as it was in Mr. Charlie's time. As it ever will be."
Rey emerges from the floodlit ranks of sand rovers, his scarlet, satiny loose suit like a gray cloud around him in the dusky light. "Grielle! All is in readiness for this happy, happy occasion."
"Fine, Rey." She waves wearily at the mounting stack of crates. "I have decided to bring a larger offering to the good workers of Solis. Lux tubing, psyonic core units, semblor parts-"
"Psyonics?" Rey shakes his bald head. "No, no, Grielle, we can't have that. Essentia won't stand for it. We'll have fanatics and pirates all over us. It's going to be hard enough with the shrieks and the devil storms. We don't need psychopaths intent on destroying us."
Shau Bandar hurries out of the garage, pulling his recorder mantle over his desert jacket. "Fanatics? Come on, Rey. Softcopy viewers regard the Anthropos Essentia favorably. Maybe you can soften your tone for the clips." He shows his palms to Grielle Aspect. "So you're the passager funding this trek. My viewers would love to hear your-"
"Turn that thing off," Grielle snaps. "My passage is not some curiosity item for a damn news-clip service."
"Hey, Softcopy is helping fund this trek, too," Shau retorts indignantly. "The anthro commune respects what you're doing, Outlander Aspect. How about a little respect for them?"
"Why should I respect people who live redundant lives?" She tilts her head back as if peeking, at something very small. "They're never going to experience revelation coddled in their commune. The icky mess of a caterpillar in its cocoon. The light is out here, Bandar, shining on the world as it is. The truth of the world is in its suffering. Now, turn that thing off, or I'll scratch your corneas."
"Save the speeches, Aspect," Shau goads her as he steps closer, the small blue recorder light shining from the collar of his mantle. "What Softcopy wants to know is how you amassed your fortune. Is it true that you run zombie vats and staff your farms with distorts?"
Grielle lunges at him, and he dances backward with an angry laugh, crowing, "Another act of light, Outlander Aspect?"
Rey steps between them, deftly catching the journalist by the pleat of his jacket while stopping Grielle's attack with one knurled finger touching her firmly between the eyes. "You," he says sternly to Shau, "will refrain from recording the passager, or I will have to put my penury aside and cancel our contract. And you," he levels his mean squint on Grielle. "Our contract says nothing about exporting psyonics to Solis. I won't allow it."
Grielle stands taller, adjusts the flounce of her gown. "You will have to compromise, Rey dear. Elsewise, I will make other arrangements."
"With whom?" he asks archly. "I am the only wilds runner you can trust to get you there alive. Unless, of course, as you are on a death passage, Grielle, you don't mind dying in the wilds."
During this minor fracas, Buddy pulls himself out of the electric car parked on the concrete apron and stands rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
"Who the hell is he?" Grielle gripes.
"He's an old one, Outlander," Shau says from over Rey's shoulder. "You know-the icky mess inside the cocoon."
"What are you doing here?" Her eyes are star-webbed in the floodlights, and her glossy face, with its feline hollows and sharp planes, looks carved of dark wood. "Are you a passager, too?"
"No, lady, I'm not." Buddy casually shows his palms and nods. "My name's Buddy. I'm going to Solis to broaden my horizons-make more room for meaning in my life."
"No matter how broad your horizons, Buddy dear, it's still the same mess, just more of it. You may have been around a long time, but clearly, you've not yet seen the light. Open your eyes." Not waiting for a response, she puts her arm over Rey's shoulders and steers him into the bright garage for a private conversation.
Shau confronts Buddy. "I viewed your file last night. You were a real hitter in the good old days. Would you comment on that for our viewers?"
Buddy yawns. "I've changed."
"You sure have. Cortical surgery qualifies as quite a big change, I'd say. Even in Mr. Charlie's time, lobotomy was considered cruel. Do you honestly think your punishment is just? I mean, given the heinous nature of your crimes?"
"It's not a punishment."
"Then you've become completely passive, is that it? You accept yourself wholly as you are?"
"I'm not a sociopath anymore, if that's what you mean." Buddy drifts away toward the empty avenue and the weedlots beyond, where dawn shines in laminar streaks, like a sky-wide agate above the desert.
"Last night Buddy told you not to read his file," Munk says to the journalist from where he stands motionless, conserving his power for the arduous trek ahead. "Why did you disregard his explicit wish?"
"Come on, Munk," Shau says, focusing his recorder on Buddy's retreating back. "Use your C-P program and tell me."
"Your empathic capacity is atrophied from a lifetime of self-centered development," Munk supposes. "Buddy's desires matter far less to you than your own."
Shau looks to the androne with a vexed moue. "My desires serve the commune. I want to know what the people want to know."
"And individual rights?" the androne asks. "What of those who wish to stand apart from the commune?"
"Spare me the sociophilosophy," Shau says, walking back to the shop. "If people were always good or always anything, we'd be andrones, wouldn't we?"
Munk stands alone in the dawn, considering the psyonic core units in their high-impact crates. Those are pieces of the silicon mind. Dormant now, but when they are assembled and activated, they will think, feel, and have the capacity to imagine as he does. He hears Grielle and Rey softly arguing about the units.
"I tell you," the man rasps, "the Solis cults will target us if we take those crates."
Grielle sniffs derisively. "We're a target for them anyway with that androne along."
"Munk is Mr. Charlie's guardian. The Anthropos Essentia can understand that. We're conveying an archaic brain, for Maat's sake!"
Munk's archive files produce no information on cult activity in or around Solis. But the Anthropos Essentia are famous. They are the zealous anthros who several martian centuries ago founded Solis. Originally, their settlement was entirely divorced from the Maat and the silicon mind. It makes sense to Munk that they would oppose importing psyonics.
Of course, since the Exodus of Light two centuries ago, when the planet became crowded with death passagers and their hangers-on, Anthropos Essentia has been a minority even in their own stronghold of Solis. Munk is glad when Rey grumpily agrees to convey the psyonic units. The anthros' genetic purity is a fiction of the past. Mind is wider than life and should not be hindered by animal fears.
Munk directs his attention to the dawn, the stellar fire that long ago initiated the journeys of carbon and silicon to this moment. It seems to the androne that everything is woven of that light. The carbon creatures arguing about utilizing pieces of the silicon mind and the stars dissolving in the brightening air are a living tapestry of light.
For three-tenths of a second, Munk indulges himself in these thoughts. He stops listening warily for other andrones, stops caring what the people around him are saying, and fills himself with the biggest plausible thought in his mind: Everything really is made from one fire, the fire of all the stars. In that furious light, the stars forge the elements, strew them into the black void, and then stand around and watch the frantic atoms huddling together at the cold limits, sharing their small heat and enormous dreams.
5
Nycthemeral Journeys
MEI NILI ROUSES FROM A DEEP BLACK SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF voices and the mute drone of engines. She slides off the cot and shuffles into the latrine. Sitting there, she suddenly realizes how much she misses her old habits and routines-the dream den with its ineffable midstim, her solitary jumps in the company of mindless andrones, the simplicity of nutripatches. Her old life required no thought, only mechanical reasoning and decent reflexes, but this new life is nothing but thought, weighed possibilities, wearisome gambits. No use looking back now, she scolds herself She hears her stomach growling louder than the engine purr outside. Someone shouts her name, and without hurrying, she dips through the sonic shower in her flightsuit.
Through the morning's startling brightness, she catches sight of Rey Raza's hulking sand rovers. They fill the bleak avenue in front of the garage with a pageantry of blackglass viewdomes and brilliant white hulls. Already a small
crowd has gathered around them, people covered head to toe in colorful scarves, peering through the dark slits of their headwraps at the large flex-treads with their traction belts of polished gold.
Farther down the road, a sturdy dune climber with giant blue tires and a silver tarpaulin pulled tightly over its contents waits, watched over by Munk. A few of the locals have gathered there too, waving their iridescent scarves at the unusual androne.
"Come on, Mei," Shau Bandar calls impatiently from the sunny apron of the garage. He has the gold-foil hood of his desert jacket pulled up and is wearing wraparound reflectants across his eyes. "Raza says everything's ready. We're leaping into the wilds!"
In the center of the garage, a topo map has been projected on the concrete floor. Rey and an angular woman in desert togs and clear statskin cowl wade through the holoform, discussing the journey ahead. A burly fellow with no face paint sits on a chrome faldstool under the chain loops of an engine hoist, arms crossed, his blond face closed around a melancholy ease, as if he's seen all this before and is resigned to its dire outcome.
"Thank you for joining us," the woman facetiously greets Mei. The long, carved eyelines in her shrewd face seem indifferent, but there's no ignoring the haughtiness of her aloof stare. "I am Grielle Aspect."
Mei shows her palms. "And I'm-"
"Mei, dear, the androne and the nose from Softcopy have told me all about you. Have you met Buddy yet, the old one your androne brought with him from the city?"
Mei and Buddy perfunctorily show their palms. "What does that mean-old one?" she asks.
Grielle wags a silver-nailed finger at her and points to where Shau paces, recording them with the blue lens in his shoulder harness. "Stand over there, dear. You're in time to hear the details Rey and I have worked out."
Mei walks through the ruddy ghost image of the martian landscape and sits on the bench.
"As I am the founding sponsor and major contributor to this trek," Grielle says, speaking to Shau's recorder, "I have the privilege of directing our passage to Solis. In all practical considerations, I defer, of course, to our pilot, Morphe Raza. Among the numerous tractor paths that diverge from here and converge on Solis, the pilot accepts my choice of Nebraska Trace. I've chosen that path because it passes through the ruins of Sarna Neve, where the Acts of Light first became dogma."
Mei pipes up, "But is Nebraska Trace the safest and most direct route to Solis? Munk and I want to get Mr. Charlie to where he can become a whole man again as quickly as possible."
"That's entirely irrelevant," Grielle sniffs and adjusts the olfact setting under her cowl to maximum calm. "You're here to listen, Mei dear. I have already explained, I am the director."
"Nebraska Trace adds three days to our crossing," Rey interjects, kneeling in the topo map, bent over with his flat nose almost touching the lucid craterland. "But the weather looks very good. And I see no major shreek migrations in that area."
"What about the psyonic core units?" Shau asks. "Are you still concerned they'll attract marauders?"
"They might," Grielie concedes with a wary nod. "That's why the psyonics will be conveyed in a separate dune climber well away from the caravan, if there are marauders, we will have to defend ourselves, not machine parts. For that same reason, I have directed the androne Munk to travel apart from us."
"That's not smart," Mei objects. "He's Mr. Charlie's best protection, and we'll all be a lot safer if we stay together. Where is Mr. Charlie? Munk isn't carrying him."
"I installed him in the second rover," Rey answers, "where you and Softcopy will ride. I'll pilot all the vehicles from the lead rover. The dune climber will take the point. And the androne can scout ahead-"
"You installed Mr. Charlie?" Mei asks, standing up. "You mean, he's awake?"
"I suggest you sit down, dear, and listen. These will be nycthemeral journeys, that is, each will be a day and a night long. We will stop at dawn to affirm the Acts of Light, as has been done since the first pilgrims … " She stops talking as Mei walks out of the garage, then glares at Rey. "Find another cosponsor. I don't want to travel with this rude jumper."
"It'll take days," Rey mumbles, crawling on his hands and knees with his face grazing the planet's blighted surface. "And we won't find anyone with deeper pockets than Softcopy. Besides, the weather is clement now. Later in the season-" He looks up with a dubious frown. "The dust storms from the south make it tougher."
"Don't go away miffed, Mei dear," Grielle calls with mock concern.
The jumper ignores her and walks into a solar frenzy of hard radiant light bounding off the desert floor and sparkling sharply from the scarves of the crowd. She steers herself toward the glare of the second rover and slips among the onlookers without acknowledging their keen stares and friendly waves.
Clambering up the tread-guard, she pulls herself atop the runner and climbs the inset steps in the hull among the tinted viewdomes to the bridge. There, standing at the taifrail, she waves at Munk. The androne raises both arms and shifts the reflectance of his cowl to catch the morning sun in a wink of starfire.
"Come on in," a muffled voice calls from below. "The hatch is unlocked."
Mei dilates the hatch at her feet and drops through the companionway into the forward cabin's aqua-lit interior. Pellucid daylight washed of glare filters through the blackglass dome and mingles with the watery glow from the console.
"Good morning, Mei," a cheerful voice says.
"Mr. Charlie?" Mei calls. The bright cabin appears empty, until she sees the plasteel capsule bracketed by platinum clamps under the console.
"Grielle Aspect is hauling a couple tons of psyonic parts to Solis," Munk's voice comes out of the dome speakers, "and Rey used some of those components to hook up Mr. Charlie. We've been talking to each other over the rover's com-link."
"It's a great talk," Charles Outis says enthusiastically. "I'm learning about the death passage and its impact on modern society. And the sky-I see the sky through the rover's outside sensors! It's bright-and pink!"
"The thin atmosphere carries dust right into space," the androne says. "Most of the particles are less than a thousandth of a millimeter, the most effective size to scatter red light." From his post before the dune climber, Munk turns his empty face toward the jumper. "I have been hearing a firsthand account of the archaic bonding practice called family from Mr. Charlie-from his childhood! Can you imagine? Neonatal memories. How very rare."
"Mr. Charlie," Mei sits down in the gray, form-fit hug of a deck chair. "Did you hear about Terra Tharsis and the Moot?"
"I heard it all," Charles tells her. "I spoke with everyone while you were sleeping-Rey Raza, Grielle Aspect, Buddy-"
"Aspect is acting like we're baggage," she complains. "And she's lugging us three days out of our way for some damned religious observance."
"Don't be upset," Charles says brightly. "We're on Mars! We got away from the Judge and Sitor Ananta. I met the Judge, and he didn't seem very favorably disposed to my plea for freedom."
"Mr. Charlie," Munk cuts in. "I must tell you that I saw Sitor Ananta in the facepan of a sentinel androne."
"What? Wait a minute," Mei asks. "Who is Sitor Ananta?"
"The Commonality agent who tortured me," Charles replies. "A maladjusted hermaphrodite."
"Probably a morph," Munk says.
"Morphs, clades, anthros," Charles sounds perplexed. "It doesn't make any difference. Trust me, Sitor Ananta is dangerous."
"At the Moot he charged that the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group tampered with your brain," the androne says. "I don't have much on them. They're a faction of clades, aren't they, Jumper Nili?"
"I think so," she replies through a morose frown. "Maybe, yes. The name is familiar. There are so many reservations, I can't remember them all. Ours was exclusively anthro, but we'd heard of the clades."
"Can someone please explain-" Charles begins.
"Clades," Munk hurries to elucidate, "branches– genetic variants on the human genome, not just morphologic changes like the gender shifts and body-shaping of morphs, but whole new neurologies, new biokinetic paradigms, new species.-like the Maat."
Mei ignores the sadness that talk of Earth stirs in her and adds, "The Maat are the most successful of the clades. They're the branch that has expanded its intelligence the furthest. Other branches have grown in different directions. The Friends, I think, are factions of an adrenal or parasyinpathetic clade. I don't remember exactly. But they hate authority of all kinds and live with what seems to us anthros a peculiar passion for certain kinds of mathematics."
Charles remembers the humanoids with four-fingered hands, delicate, glass-faced beings who used him to teach their young. "My torturer told me that the Friends are rebels or something."
Munk's voice enters assuredly, "I have here what you recorded in your broadcast: "They're enemies of the Commonality-anarchists, a selfish cult intent on usurping the law.'"
"The Commonality are full of themselves," Mei says bitterly.
Charles asks, "Who exactly is-"
"The Commonality?" Munk anticipates him again. "They are a cartel of all the anthro and morph colonies on Earth, Luna, Mars, and the Belt who were set up by the Maat to help collect materials for neo-sapien projects."
"They throw their weight around a lot," Mei adds. "I think they feel the Maat have gone on to another reality and left this one for them."
"Well," Charles says, "all I want to know is whether or not Sitor Ananta is coming after me."
"The Commonality thinks you're a weapon," Munk responds, his voice lively but his body motionless in the brash sunlight. "We have to get you to Solis. That's a neutral settlement."
As Mei and Munk talk, Charles uses the desert rover's external cameras to direct his attention to his surroundings. It's enough, he tells himself, staring through the seething air above the red iron desert. It's enough to have lived to see Mars.
The 360-degree vista displaces his dread with wonder. The surface looks pretty much like a desert, but the Avenue of Limits is as alien a scene as he's ever imagined. He sees the sleek, multitiered contours of the other rovers parked in a row and behind them the imposing skyline of silos and warehouses with their odd architectural character, looking to him like a queer blend of Chinese and art deco. The people, too, are both seen before and utterly singular, swathed head to toe in multicolored mummy windings, bobbing in slow rhythms like tribal dancers, polishing the air with their glittery veils.
A feeling of awe and unreality pervades Charles, and he says earnestly, "It's enough that I've lived to see people on Mars."
Shau Bandar has chosen to ride alone in the third rover so that he can better record the dramatic start of the trek. Sitting on the rover's bridge above the swarming crowd, he adjusts his reflectors to play back an earlier interview with Rey Raza, queuing it for a leader to explain what he is going to record next.
Rey stands in playback blue before the open bay to his garage five minutes in the past. In the background the locals bob-dance, tatterdemalion garb floating around them like kelp, handkerchiefs dazzling blessings over Grielle and Buddy, who are making their way toward the shining rovers.
"The leap start," Shau begins feeding lines into his recorder, "is perhaps the most famous part of any desert trek from the Outlands, Rey. How do you plan to use it for this crossing to Solis?"
"Routinely," Rey answers, his bright splash-painted face grinning solicitously. "Raza Tours has been leapstarting for more than thirty years. Spectacular as these jumps are, for Raza Tours they're purely routine."
"Could you tell Mr. Charlie," Shau says, "and our off-world viewers who may
not know about leap-starting, what it is?"
Rey's bald head gleams like a dolphin's in the false-color playback. "Okay. See, when properly constructed vehicles cross the perimeter of the city and pass from terrene to martian gravity, the abrupt downshift in acceleration sends them flying. We've all seen the tragic consequences of magravity fallback here along the Avenue of Limits. Whole blocks of warehouses exploded across hundreds of kilometers. Well, we harness that powerful force, and with the aerokinetic design of our desert rovers we fly deep into the wilds. Raza's Tours has been doing this for thirty years. It's a great attraction for day trekkers. The physics is very accurate. The thin martian atmosphere and the sixty-two percent dimmer gravity are exploited to keep our vessels aloft long enough to reach specially prepared landing strips. . ."
Satisfied, Shau turns off the playback and pans the crowd with his recorder. The swaddled onlookers stir excitedly as the rovers begin gliding forward.
"Get in your cabin now, Bandar," Rey calls over the com-link.
The reporter shows his palms to the scarf-fluttering bystanders and descends the companionway, constricting the hatch after him. In the aquamarine glow of the forward cabin, he removes his reflectors and sits in a deck chair, its flexform contours hugging him securely. Anonymous storehouses drift by, and the vehicles bank off the road and slide through the weedlots with little sound and no vibration.
The shimmering foil roofs of the Outland thorpes rise like star clusters above the blunt skyline of the Avenue of Units. The horizon wide expanse of Olympus Mons shines flamingo-pink, and a mauve band of knobby clouds in strict procession sail a wide circuit, trawling slack, blue nets of rain. Among the walloping weeds, a narrow orange-gravel road appears, running straight toward the shattered buttes.
"Okay. Everybody push back in your seats," Rey calls over the link. "We're going to leap."
Shau's flexform chair tightens, and he has to lift his chest to keep his recorder focused through the viewport. Ahead, the big blue wheels of the dune climber are a blur as the heavy vehicle hurtles down the runway and flies up the long, curved ramp at the far end. With a clangorous peal of thunder, the dune climber shoots high into the tangerine sky. Then the rover in front of Shau accelerates, and he hears the engine under him churning more powerfully.
Another boom of thunder, and the rover that shoots up the ramp ahead of them dwindles instantly into the cloudless void. The ascending roadway swoops before them, the broken shards of the desert floor tilt away, and with a force that yanks a gasp out of the reporter and presses his face flesh tight to his skull, the sky jolts closer.
Munk watches the dune climber and the first two sand rovers catapult into the martian sky. Shau Bandar's rover shoots down the road after them, bounces up the ramp, and fires into the blue, leaving behind a sonic burst that shudders with the other echoes across the horizon. The androne follows the arcing speck until it vanishes over the distant reef rocks. Then he dashes swiftly down the runway and up the incline.
Gravity sheers away in a giddy heave, and the buttes, pinnacles, and fins of the desert spread out before him. By distending his cowl and catching the upsurge of heat from the warming rock floor, he lifts higher. In the woven distance, mountain peaks merge into one another and melt like clouds in the thermal drafts.
One glance behind reveals the giant sprawl of Olympus Mons and the violet mass of boiling cumuli ringing the caldera. Terra Tharsis catches the morning light in wet reflections of layered air, a mirage that amplifies the crystal depths of the city in fractured glints. The androne hears no sign of the silicon mind from there, and the diadem city wavers silently in the transparent veils of heat.
Munk ascends, soaring toward the purple heights, relishing the cooler temperature. None of the generators in Rey Raza's garage were adequate to recharge his power cells, and he is grateful for every opportunity now to conserve energy. The trek across the 4,345 kilometers to Solis will take seven
days, the tour expert has estimated, and Munk feels that with the cooler conditions and lighter gravity, his power cells will keep him active for the entire trip.
Feeling optimistic, the androne gazes down beneficently at the elemental fire reflecting from the bronze gravel flats. Among vast splash-petals and widening ripples of henna sand, he spots the drop spots where the dune climber and the sand rovers have landed. The dust plumes downwind, and Munk stares through it until he is sure all the vehicles have landed safely.
The task assigned him by Rey is to fly ahead a full day and night's journey, scouting the territory for threats. Apart from sandstorms, which are atypical this time of year and which the topo map would warn about, he is to watch out for shreeks and marauders. Munk is eager to see a shreek, for they are catalogued as the most ferocious of biots-bioforms eco-adapted to scavenge the wilds and thrive off each other and any other life-forms they can apprehend. They look fierce in the archival infoclip, whose verbal description begins, "Imagine a three-meter-long, four-meter-tall tropical fish half a meter wide and transparent as glass. . ." Their snicking, grotesquely nimble, transparent mouth parts scissor their prey apart with slow deliberation. But they are mindless and less dangerous than the marauders.
Sweeping the rusty ridges and rocky pleats below, Munk detects no life-forms at all. In the sepia distance are the three Tharsis volcanoes, each ten kilometers high and evenly spaced seven hundred kilometers apart on the buckled horizon. Like the shawled, hunched bodies of the three fates from archaic mythology, they will watch over the caravan from portside the entire trek, and Munk finds himself pondering what judgment they will pass on the pilgrims at the limits of this world before he catches himself and turns off his imaginal subprogram.
Then, gliding down in a widening spiral, he listens deeply and hears far off the tiny noises of the caravan's silicon pilots. Among that distant chirping is the psyonic hookup that reads and translates Charles Outis's brain-waves, and the androne is calmed knowing that the archaic human is alert again and aware that he is on his way to a better life.
The wide, cratered land narrows toward a labyrinth of torture monuments: rock racks and toppled blocks, tilted stone benches, needle spires, and eerie hatchet arches, all a morbid green-black and trembling like flames in the reverberate air. Taking last advantage of his loft, the androne turns into the wind, swivels upright, and walks down the air's invisible steps toward the floor of the wasteland.
With the dune climber in the lead, the caravan churns across the desert flats at thirty-five knots, flagging streamers of dust behind it. For all the available daylight hours, they travel without stop, flares of shadow over the sands. From the lead rover, Rey Raza takes advantage of Charles Outis's curiosity and Shau Bandar's attentive recorder to flaunt his knowledge of the wilds. He identifies the thorny silver-green beach balls clustered in the shadow gulches as zubu cactus, the first biota to thrive on Mars. He also points out the three giant cindercones on the blighted planet rim-the Tharsis Montes.
"it's no coincidence that these huge volcanoes are the same height above the datum surface-the sea level," He nods to Charles's camera eye. "It's the maximum height a mountain on Mars can build to before the planetary crust breaks under it and lava spills over the land. We're on the smooth ride of one of those spills now."
Charles stares disconsolately at the melted hills. Since his salvation on Phoboi Twelve, wonder persists in a hushed, distant corner of his soul. But nearer, dread mounts. He is afraid, though at first he is not sure of what. Mars is eerily beautiful, and he is inclined to think that the calamitous landscape with its pocked craters among strange liquid-looking bluffs disturbs his earthly expectations, especially with the console's computer noise clicking and whistling around him like whale music.
But that's not it. After a few moments' reflection, as Rey natters on about types of lava, Charles narrows the source of his nebulous dread down to one face-Sitor Ananta's. Munk's news that he has recently seen that cruel visage in
the facepan of a sentinel androne has been working on Charles. Evil pursues them. The bitter memory of the pain-raked eternity that Sitor Ananta inflicted hardens Charles's fear to a brittle panic.
Dwelling on that, he feels that his mind could snap, it is difficult enough to be bodiless and at the mercy of this unguessable future without a terror of helplessness and torture to overcome. He reaches for a deep breath to calm his fright and teeters at the brink of his disembodied emptiness, lungless, limbless, boneless, virtually nonexistent.
An immeasurable longing displaces his fear. He wants to be whole again. Passionate courage rises from this longing, and he determines that he will not be afraid anymore.
Outside, through the rover's cameras, he sees welded boulders the color of whisky glide past. And the blighted landscape shimmers with untouchable veils.
At sunset the craterland blazes blood-red, and the rovers shift to infraview, their cooler engines running faster through the spectral landscape. The desert's vaporous plant life is easier to see in the long light. Ghostly blooms of thermal shadows billow from the nooks and crevices of the crater outcrops, each species a different shade of fire.
"At night it becomes obvious why this track is called the Nebraska Trace," Rey announces. "Mr. Charlie, later you can tell us about Nebraska, the archaic land where the flora here originated. All these scrawny plants you're seeing shining in the dark are biots of terrene species and carry their names with their redesigned genes. That pink smoke in the graben to our left is prairie cordgrass, and that skeletal shrub among the boulders is yarrow. Tansy and purple clover grow in abundance on the lee of dunes. And if you stare off there to the far right ahead of us where the tableland begins, you can see a whole mosaic of foxtail, gayfeather, and prairie sage."
In the sudden darkness the sky crackles with stars. Bioluminescent insects zag in the darkness. Rey, who sleeps less than twenty minutes a day, continues his colloquy with Charles Outis on the features of the two moons. He explains how the smaller moon, Deimos, rising full in the east at dusk will still be a brilliant silver tuft in the eastern sky when the sun rises, because like someone walking down an up escalator, it travels against the planet's rotation.
The oblate moon, Phobos, on the other hand, ascends in the west on its eight-hour sprint across the sky, displaying all its waxing phases but never reaching fullness before it plunges into the planet's shadow. Rey begins relating a folktale about the frustrations of Phobos, until Grielle, who shares the front rover with him, feels compelled to tell him to shut up. Buddy and Mei Nili have already fallen asleep in their flexform recliners, wearied from a day spent getting acquainted with one-third gravity and talking about archaic times with Charles Outis.
Alone in the third rover, Shau Bandar records the night through infraview, tracking the undulant wraiths in the smoky light. Gradually, the sedative olfacts in the air supply put him to sleep too, and after a while the recorder in his mantle automatically shuts off.
A moment later the midstim begins, and the animal gods, full of their resolutions and silences, awake in a dream. Shau becomes a tree with quarrelsome branches. He lives underwater in a tide rip that is breaking him into pieces. But instead of vital fluids spilling out of his broken parts, he bleeds music.
Lavender creases of dawn unfold as the caravan comes to a stop on a shelf rock above a vista of desolate craters. Munk's silver cowl glints below, where he stands on a sandstone anvil overlooking the couloir that cuts the most direct path through the rings within rings of cratered waste.
Rey tells the androne to wait down there, and Munk makes no objection, for the hike up the slope would cost a tenth of a percent of his remaining power. The temperature is a sultry minus fifty degrees centigrade, and he needs to conserve strength for the torrid hours to come. He climbs down the dark side of the anvil, squats between two zubu cacti, and listens and watches through his com-link with the reporter.
The rovers have backed together, and crablike handroids from under the chassis
quickly erect a transparent pavilion. Protected by the warm air pressure of the tent, the pilgrims frolic in the fainter gravity. Shau Bandar whirls triple somersaults in the air, and Rey lifts the back end of the dune climber with his bare hands to check the wheel bearings. In the orange shine of the thermalux at the center of the pavilion, Grielle Aspect opens her long-sleeved arms and beckons the others.
"I am the Light," she chants. "Stranger to nothing. I stand against the ancient life of remembered darkness and summon all of you to yourselves. The body is a drug. It deforms consciousness with its hormones and secretions. I am here to tell you to drop the body. Let yourself go. Become the light you are."
Buddy sits on the runner guard, looking groggy. Mei Nili jumps from the back of the rover and with two practiced leaps crosses the enclosure and is standing at the clear wall gazing down toward Munk.
"Good to see you again, Munk," she whispers on her link line to the androne.
She can't see me in the dark, Munk knows. She wonders what I make of this odd human behavior.
"Are we supposed to be doing anything?" Charles asks over their link. "I mean, are we participants?"
A laugh bursts from Grielle. "Whether you know it or not, you are all participants." She swivels about, pointing fingers at each of them. "Rey Raza wants the credits and thrills. Shau Bandar wants credits and fame. Mei Nili wants escape. Buddy wants escape. People, you are all participants. Even you, Mr. Charlie, even you want a body and a future."
"What about Munk?" Mei asks. "Isn't he a participant?"
Grielle snuffs the thermalux. Sheets of fire hover in the sky over the dark, riven terrain. "All consciousness is light." She wheels around in the ebb shadows, her arms outstretched under the blazing sky. "But the body deforms us with its chemical powers, it addicts us to its hungers. The body is a drug. Let the body go."
She dances up close to Shau and says directly to his recorder, "Wanting is not the way. I invite each of you to become the Light that you are but do not know."
"What do we have to do?" Charles Outis asks.
Rey rolls his eyes, and Buddy rests his forehead in his hand.
"There is only one path to the absolute freedom of pure consciousness and light, dear Mr. Charlie," Grielle says, pointing her body toward the rover where he watches through the sensors. "One path-but not the path you've taken, Mr. Charlie. Not more wanting. Not more organic life. The one path is death."
"You really think there's consciousness after death?" the archaic man asks.
"Let's get this ritual done," Rey almost whines. "We've got a long way to go."
With a flourish of her robes, Grielle shifts her attention to the reporter, who is still bounding among the rovers, flipping and twisting with clumsy vigor through the air. "Bandar, dear, educate our archaic guest, will you? Show him an infoclip or something on consciousness and light. Ignorance is such an ugly trait"
Grielle disappears into the back hatch of the lead rover, and Rey follows. Immediately, the flat, crablike handroids emerge and begin disassembling the tent. Shau back-flips into the rover and conks his head sharply enough so that he collapses to his knees and retreats with a sheepish grin. Mei waves to the residual darkness in the canyon below where Munk waits and then joins Buddy in the second rover.
"There may be consciousness after death," she tells Charles, plopping into a deck chair, "but no one who's died is talking."
"That woman Grielle is a fanatic," Charles mutters. "Religion doesn't seem to have gotten any less irrational in the millennium I've been gone."
"Actually," Munk comes in over the link, "the Acts of Light is not a religion. They don't postulate a supreme being, nor do they codify human behavior-apart from their willingness to terminate their lives. Most of their belief system is actually founded in science. Close empirical observation has shown that consciousness is not a state or function of the brain, nor does it interact with the brain."
"How can that be?" Charles asks.
It's true," the androne asserts. "Memory, reflection, planning, learning, choice, and creativity all take place regularly in the brain without consciousness. Unconscious brain activity guides these functions. They're all automatic brain processes. Consciousness itself is nothing more than a witness."
"Where does Grielle's light' come in?" Charles inquires with an audible frown.
Shau snorts. "Even in your time, science knew that matter and energy had equivalence. That all matter had once been energy at the time of the Big Bang-"
"But there's more," Munk submits. "If consciousness is not a function of the brain, as science shows, then it may well be, as the Acts of Light decree, a standing wave pattern in a wider dimension, the tesseract range. When any neurology-carbon or silicon-gets complex enough, it receives the standing wave, which is there all along. In that way, consciousness enters life and suffers the indignities of physical limits until death liberates us."
"Then what?" Charles asks.
"Then the Guest is free!" Grielle Aspect announces over the link, "if you live long enough, Mr. Charlie, you will feel the rightness of this. Life is a physical phenomenon. Consciousness is not!"
Dust devils tilt over the red land. Sand blooms swell on a distant horizon like giant sorrel mushrooms. Ball light-fling bounces over cobbles and the solemnities of boulders under a perfectly clear, pink sky. Strewn over the gritty terrain at unexpected intervals are the remains of earlier caravans smitten by dust storms-flex-treads twisted in the sand like pocked snakeskin, crazed pieces of blackglass embedded in roan dune drifts, and bleached bones scattered like so much debris across the gravel under the blast of heaven.
Charles Outis is surprised to see human skulls among the shattered ribs and femur bones protruding from the coagulated red sandstone. He interrupts the lively discussion among the other pilgrims to ask, "Is there no respect for the dead anymore?"
"Not in the wilds," Shau Bandar replies nonchalantly. "What happens out here simply happens."
"It is my suspicion that the isolationists of Soils strew these bones to dissuade travelers," Grielle Aspect says, to which the others respond with grouchy mumbles.
Dune lemurs scurry along the gully of an ancient streambed. Suddenly, from behind them, a gleam of air shimmers like a pursuing will-o'-the-wisp.
"Shreek!" Rey Raza calls. "Shreek on the portside!"
Virtually invisible in the sunlight, the transparent predator appears at first as a blur. Then one of the bigeared, tufty-furred dune lemurs is plucked from the scattering bunch, and the carnal face of the thing reveals itself as the lemur is macerated in midair.
"It looks like a huge angelfish," Charles remarks, observing the airborne beast's thin protoplasmic body and whirring fins.
"But," Mei Nili adds, "with the face of a piranha."
With a jaw-thrust blur of teeth, the shreek swiftly bolts down the lemur, the prey's shredded flesh and crushed bones becoming a mere shadow in the clear bulk of the carnivore. And then, in a ripple of caught sunlight, the beast is gone.
"Good heavens, what was that creature it ate?" Charles asks.
"Dune lemur," Rey answers.
"A biot," Munk adds over the link from where he rides on the dune climber. "They were templated from a hybrid of the Gila monster and the mongoose."
"Weren't there wild animals in your time?" Shau inquires.
"Of course," Charles responds, "but nothing like that. Most predators in my time lived in game preserves."
"Not unlike the reserves the Maat have provided for anthros on Earth in our time," Grielle says, her sarcasm palpable even over the com-link. "We're wild animals to them. And we're on the loose."
Mei ignores her and asks, "Mr. Charlie, what do you miss most about your old life-apart from your body, that is?"
alt was an avaricious and desperate time," Charles mutters, reminiscing. "I don't miss much. Just the people I knew then. My wife. My friends."
"Your wife," Shau's voice comes over the com-link. "What was she like?"
"She was a playwright. She wrote for children-and the child in adults. She kept getting younger the more she wrote."
"Was she frozen, too?" the reporter inquires.
"No," Charles replies sadly. "Everything she learned, she learned by heart. Even death."
"Shreek to starboard," Rey interrupts. "There must be a nest of them near here. They usually congregate along ejecta blankets."
Charles scans the starboard side and spots the mica-flash of a shreek high on the rampart of a nearby crater rim.
"Unlike the moon or Mercury," Rey lectures, "the craters on Mars have much larger ejecta blankets. Impacts here made a bigger mess. That's because the ground rock and soil on Mars contain subsurface water ice. On impact, the ice melted and the gooey ejects formed those characteristic smear contours that terrace the ground for kilometers around a crater. It makes roving difficult, but the biots love it because it provides a lot of shade surface."
The discussion veers into a description of martian flora and fauna, all biots genetically manufactured in earlier efforts to terraform the planet. While the com-link among the rovers is noisy with history and observations, Rey turns off Charles Outis and adjusts the olfact level of the following rovers' air supply, releasing narcolfact in the cabins. He sets a timer to do the same in the rover he is sharing with Grielle and excuses himself to go to the latrine. When he emerges, he is wearing a statskin cowl and gloves.
Grielle lies slumped in the deck chair where a moment earlier she had been vigorously denouncing the contamination of Mars's pristine sterility. Munk calls on the com-link, "Mr. Charlie? Jumper Nili?"
At the console, Rey brings the caravan to a stop. They are on a nacre flat of silica dust with the mesas of broken crater rims surrounding them. A sand cloud rises from a nearby scarp, and a trundle-carrier emerges from the shadow side of a ferruginous outcropping. The earner is pitted and rust-streaked and clanks across the rubble-strewn ground with a pulmonary wheezing.
"Marauders!" Munk cries out and jumps down from the dune climber. "Raza! Ready your laser cannon. Raza? Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Munk." The wing-hatch at the side of the lead rover opens, and Rey emerges. "Stay where you are."
"Where are the pilgrims?" the androne inquires.
"They are in the rovers, where I left them." Rey waves to the noisy trundle-carrier, and it smokes to a stop beside Munk with a viper whistle that stings the thin air. The side of the trundle-carrier lifts with a brutal bang, releasing eight big distorts in patched, remnant pressure suits and dented battle helmets. Just visible through their slit visors, burnt red eyes stare wildly from bone brows and angry faces of wet, twitching muscle.
As Munk whirls toward them across the sand bed, intent on ripping the marauders out of their suits, a figure appears. It has the full and exact appearance of a man, but because he steps out wearing only a gemdust shawl, slacks, and slippers, the androne assumes he is a semblor. Sure enough, infrascan reveals the figure is not human but a man-shaped volume of plasma, given shape and direction by remote control.
Munk instantly recognizes the effeminate and raffish features of Sitor Ananta in the face of the plasma being. The Commonality agent swaggers through the distort squad, unconcerned about the attacking androne. A cold smile touches his sharp lips.
The semblor points a small device at Munk, and a sound of shattering glass breaks across the androne's mind. Suddenly, he cannot move. He stands immobilized in the dust billow his attack stirred up.
Sitor Ananta approaches the paralyzed androne and taps a pseudofinger against Munk's breastplate. "You once worked for the Commonality," he says smugly. "lapetus Gap readily provided me with your signal codes. And now you are again what you always were-a puppet."
The semblor turns away abruptly and confronts Rey. "Where is the wetware?"
"I deactivated Mr. Charlie," Rey answers, "before I put the others to sleep.
I'll disengage him."
"Let the distorts do it," the semblor says. "Where?"
Rey gestures toward the second rover. "I patched him into the console. It's a delicate hookup. You'd better let me free him."
"Tear him loose," Sitor Ananta orders the distorts, and they lurch toward the rover. "He won't be needing to communicate anymore."
"And my credits?" Rey queries.
"Already in your account at your new house in the Honor of Giants," the semblor promises. "We'll bang up your rover so you can claim you struggled to get away. But the other equipment will have to be sacrificed with the bodies."
"Fine, fine," Rey agrees. "You're paying me enough to replace them ten times over."
Munk listens to this from far inside his locked body. The signal codes have shut down all his primary programming-his motor reflexes and proprioception-but his C-P program remains alert and stares helplessly through his sensory apparatus as the distorts swarm toward Charles's rover.
The androne shifts his focus internally, to where the shatterglass sounds of the interfering signals propagate. Outside, time seems to slow down as he accesses the virtual space of the signal that has invaded his body. A voice gels out of the static:
Androne Munk, this is lapetus Gap comptroller advising you that your signal codes have been released to Commonality agent Sitor Ananta through the Rogue And ronc Reclamation Decree. Recognition of your contra-parameter programming, however, now indicates that your rogue status may be self-justified Herewith, then, I am activating your conscience reviewer. You now have one point three seconds to justify your rogue behavior. If you cannot define your current
status to the satisfaction of the reviewer, this signal will permanently shut down your C-P program. Begin now.
Munk reviews all his behavior since activating his C-P program in the cold reaches off Saturn. "My actions speak for themselves," he says inwardly to the reviewer. But his body remains rigid.
Through his visor, he sees the array of distorts aiming toward Charles's rover. "I am the protector of an archaic human being," he announces. And still his body stays locked.
"My C-P program has guided my actions since lapetus Gap," he avers. "It guides me now. Respect it and release me."
Nothing.
"I have done no wrong! Allow me to fulfill my program."
Sitor Ananta is caught with a glint of amused malice in his sharp eyes, and Munk tries to amplify the rage that this malevolent expression makes him feel. But to no avail.
"What do you want from me, then?" Munk bawls.
No answer. He reviews his past actions again, looking for infractions. "I killed Aparecida by default," he asserts. "I had to save human lives."
The glass of the signal codes continues crashing inside him.
He pleads. He cajoles. He provides an eloquent colloquy on the nature of will and imagination, concluding with the Blake quote, "No Body save the Soul!"
The paralysis continues.
"There's nothing more I can do," he finally admits. "I have no other defense but that I am alive. Does that count for anything?"
The bursting glass resounds louder. One-tenth of a second remains. Satisfy the reviewer now, or you will be terminated.
Munk can think of nothing more to say; knowing it is useless to repeat himself, he says nothing. The light of the world is pellucid, flecked with glints of silica dust suspended in the air. This is the last he will see of anything, he accepts. One last giddy instant remains. Morning vapor clouds streak the sky like stretch marks. The rusty buttes and parapet rocks sink deeper into his sight. They will continue their billion-year journey into sand. And the sight of them, hard and real, hammers him free of all abstraction. And for that last instant of his being, the androne sees he is a mirage sparkle in
the stone poverty of the land. All mind is but a tear in the fabric of nothingness, like a rip in water that quickly heals over.
Munk laughs. With his final thought, he understands why this is the laughing life. Life is the laugh of the actual in the face of nothing. There is so much to sense, think, and emote about, so much life to endure, such fullness of good and bad-and all of it, suddenly, nothing. Only laughter fits the gap. And he laughs luminously with the great swell of being nothing.
Androne Munk, you have satisfied the reviewer that you are validly fulfilling your contra-parameter programming. You are herewith released from all allegiance to the Commonality. Go in freedom and focus.
The sound of breaking glass stops. Immediately, his attention is flung into his anthropic model, and time lunges forward. Flailing the area with a siren scream, his body abruptly resumes spinning, jetting a rooster tail of sand into the sky. The distorts cringe. The semblor frantically jabs his signal device at Munk, while Rey scuttles backward beneath a ragged cry toward the caravan.
With a slashing blow, Munk strikes the semblor, and it explodes in a hissing thrash of lightning. Laser fire from the handguns of the crouching distorts kicks against his breastplate and heaves him backward. He sits down, and the sand around him turns to glass under the hacking laser light.
A sick feeling of power-cell depletion whims up in Munk, and he lurches to his feet, wrapping his reflectant cowl about him. With deft tilts of his shield, he mirrors the laser fire back, and one of the distorts erupts, the scarlet wings of his ribs splaying apart like a cocoon bursting into a brilliant butterfly.
Munk attacks. Ignoring the widening exhaustion in his body, he lopes among the firing distorts, swiping at them with a blindingly swift but lethal economy of movement. In moments they are strewn among the rocks, slovenly rags in a greasy mess. And there is suddenly again only one moment left. The laser fire has exhausted his power cells.
Rey clambers toward the open wing-hatch of his rover and steals a terrified glance over his shoulder. Munk commits the last of his power to snatch a gun from the limp hand of a distort and levels it on the pilot in the hatchway.
Rey quails, and the console behind him shrieks with metal ripping. The androne missed! Disbelieving, he peers with dread and caution through the weave of his fingers.
Munk stands unmoving, shooting arm extended. A thick moment passes before Rey realizes that the androne has gone dormant. The lens bar in the featureless puzzle of his face is unlit. Rey's amazement distracts him from the fact that an androne could not miss at this range.
"Raza," Grielle croaks from inside the rover.
In rumpled, clumsily donned desert gear, the pilgrims stumble from the vehicles. Rey can see the heat leaking from their loose seams like blood. Then the self-seals kick in, and the faces behind the dear statskin veils flush warmer.
Rey recognizes their shock and acts with impulsive indignation. "Those creatures almost killed us! We have to disconnect the archaic head. It's tainted wetware."
Shau faces away from the mangled bodies of the dead but holds his recorder on the corpses a moment longer. "What is he talking about?" he asks, looking to the others.
Mei gazes in mute and revulsed candor at the dead distorts. Buddy walks over to Munk and stares down the length of the androne's aiming arm.
"The brain we're carrying is tainted," Rey insists. "The anarchists programmed it like a machine, and I stupidly installed it in the console. At the anarchists' signal, it must have usurped your air supply and knocked you out. It would have gotten me, too, if I hadn't been in the latrine, near an emergency statskin. I saw it all. Munk killed them, but the heat from their laser fire sapped his power. I was in here fighting the console, trying to override the wetware's domination. I finally shut him down, but I couldn't clean the air. Munk saw my problem, and with his last act, he blew open the console and freed you."
"It's true," Grielle gasps and steps groggily from the rover. "He was in the
latrine when it happened."
"Mr. Charlie is not tainted," Mei declares, shaking her head.
"He might be," Shau says. "I mean, his file says he was held on Earth for quite a while by lewdists and anarchists."
"What are you saying, Pilgrim Nili?" Rey asks with feigned anger. "I nearly got killed trying to save you!"
"If Mr. Charlie were tainted," Mei persists, "he would have detonated the explosives on Phoboi Twelve when he still had the codes. Anarchists destroy. He hasn't destroyed anything."
"He called those distorts down on us, I'm sure of it," Rey insists.
Grielle throws her hands up in dismay. "We don't need Mr. Charlie to go on. Let's leave him shut down and get away from here."
"But what about Munk?" Mei asks. "We can't leave him here."
Rey looks shocked. "We can't lug a deep-space patrol-class androne. He's made of supermassive alloy. It'll take a full rover moving at half speed to carry him anywhere."
"The dune climber could handle him," Buddy states.
Grielle, who is staring at Rey with a perplexed impatience, hands on her hips, says, "I'm the caravan director, and I will not dump a fortune in psyonic core units to haul a rundown androne."
"He just saved your life," Shau points out, catches the sudden wry cock of her head, and shrugs. "Though I guess for a passager that doesn't mean a whole lot."
Grielle passes an apologetic look to the others and says, "I am grateful that Munk saved our lives. For myself, I want to die on the Walk of Freedom in Solis, in the traditional way. But if I had died here, I woЧитать дальше