Attanasio, AA - Solis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What happened?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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