Attanasio, AA - Solis

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.