Solis

by Attanasio, AA

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

  the docking bay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Munk remains silent, hunched over the console.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She resents his assumption and says so with a glower.

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

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

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

  Com's, isn't it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "That's illegal."

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

  "I don't understand."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Who is this person?"

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

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

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

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

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

  "Who else received his signal?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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