She ascends along the steep track, clambering over trucks filled with charred dross. An azure shine leaks through the darkness from ahead, and she kills the glow of her statskin cowl and edges forward crouching between the trucks and the rough-hewn rock wall of the chute. Ahead, the core chamber comes into view, a luminously transparent geodesic under a mammoth vault of groined stone.
Feeling the wall for vibrations and peering cautiously out of the chute without detecting any sign of Aparecida, Mei enters the huge vault and approaches the bright geodesic chamber. She goes directly to the access panel and uses her jetpak tools to begin loosening the sealing bolts. Peering inside as she works, she sees the gleaming twin towers of the giant power coils, dormant now but still radiant with seething energy. A gauzy aura of blue force
illuminates between the towers the command pod, a compact, iridescent complex of fused mirror spheres, silver-gold vanes, and ribbon antennae. That is the
nucleus of the factory, where Charles Outis is installed.
Mei turns the last bolt, but when she tries to pry loose the access panel, abruptly all the bolts spin back into place.
A mechanical voice shouts from the tiny comlink speakers in her cowl: "Halt! If you proceed any further, I will detonate the bore-drill explosives!"
"Mr. Charlie?" Mei calls and turns on the light inside her cowl so that her face can be better seen from outside. Arms outspread, she presses against the clear panel. "Can you hear me?"
"I hear and I see you." A psybot half her height trundles out from behind the nearest of the towering power coils, a swivel-turreted torso of green metal sliding toward her on tractor treads. Mounted atop the pincer-armed torso, two stalk-eye lenses watch her. Though the device appears crude, Mei knows otherwise, for it contains a neural mesh and psyonic receptor that allow it to
interface with Charles Outis's brain, extending his senses into the environment. That Wolf Star would deploy such an expensive machine, which is usually reserved for clandestine work with dangerous rival companies, attests to their eagerness to salvage this wetware. "Are you Aparecida?"
"No." She glances apprehensively over her shoulder, afraid to be caught in the open by the demolition androne. "My name is Mei Nili. I'm here to warn you that Aparecida is not your ally. I don't know what you've been told, but she is here to salvage your brain for wetware. Do you understand?"
"Who sent you?"
"No one. We heard your transmission-that is, Munk did, the androne I work with. He's waiting in a magjet cruiser not far from this rock. If you broadcast that I'm here, he'll break radio silence and announce us."
The psybot stares silently at her with its faceted lenses. Though Charles is apparently controlling the machine, she is well aware that it is an Ares Bund device and will certainly respond to their commands as well. The hopelessness of Munk's scheme suddenly presses heavily on her, and she feels trapped between the Bund's psybot on the other side of the geodesic wall and Aparecida behind her. Nervously, she stares across the amply lit vault to the dark tunnel rutted by
the passage of numerous drilling machines.
Munk's broadcast echoes dimly, like cricket noise, from her comlink. She
distantly hears him declare the Bund's true intent and the willingness of The Laughing Life to take Charles away from here to Solis, where a new body may be cloned for him. Munk tells him about the Maat's C-P programming and how Mei Nili and the androne need the archaic brain to gain entry to Solis for themselves but says nothing about controlling the function codes of Phoboi Twelve.
This new input bewilders Charles, and he paces back and forth in the psybot.
So long in the virtual space of the ore processor's core chamber, he is grateful simply to be able to move about and see the grainy, blue-and-white images the psybot affords him. But right now he wants to close these eyes that cannot close and diffuse his consciousness so that he can think through what he has been told and decide how best to respond to this woman-the first human he has seen since
he died.
But events are not waiting for him. At this very moment, Wolf Star is also receiving the news of their trespass, and Mei dreads-the commands that will be sent to Aparecida. A grating sound commences from inside the tunnel, and as she is considering edging back toward the conveyer chute while Charles ponders Munk's message, the psybot swivels alert.
"I'm confused," the mechanical voice says.
"Of course," Mei replies in the most compassionate tone she can muster. "That's why I've come to you. I'm human, too. These others are
andrones-artificial beings. But I have lived on Earth as once you did. Please, let me in. If Aparecida catches me out here, I'll be killed."
The psybot's eye-stalks strain forward, practically touching the transparent panel. "You're beautiful. Oh. I didn't mean to say that. I mean-I thought that-I
... I didn't mean to say it out loud. I'm not used to ... this machine."
"That's okay, Mr. Charlie. Everyone is beautiful now. It's in the programming of the vats that grow us. They will make you beautiful, too." The scraping sound grinds louder, and the mouth of the tunnel brightens. "Please, let me in!"
The psybot whirs backward. "I need time to think."
"There is no time!" Mei anxiously turns to face the clangor in the tunnel. "Aparecida is coming! Please."
"This is happening too fast," Charles complains. "I must get used to this machine first. You're confusing me."
Out of the tunnel, Aparecida appears, slouched under shoulder-wing torchlights, her slinky length spike-studded, sleek as a moray eel with a long, curved, genitally blunt head and a razorous brow ridge hooding lenses of molten embers. She slides closer. Glint-toothed tentacles lash the ground ahead of her like shock ripples in water.
Mei slaps on her comlink to The Laughing Life and shouts, "Munk! Open the core chamber's portside access hatch' Now!"
Bolts spin, the panel slips aside, and Mei jumps backward into the geodesic chamber. Manually, she heaves the panel back into place.
"How did you do that?" Charles asks in a fright.
Before she can answer, the psybot whisks forward, and its pincers grab her legs and slam her to the ground. "Hey!" she cries. "Stop that!"
"It's not me!" Charles calls. "I'm not doing it."
The pincers jab at Mei's statskin cowl, and she twists and contorts, using a desperate agility to avoid their stabbing blows. With a mighty heave, she lurches free of her jetpak as the psybot seizes her collar and tears at her flightsuit. Her hands fumble with the ignitor, and the jetpak flares a blue
burst that bangs Mei against the wall and knocks the psybot to its side, tractor treads running.
Charles squawks, "Stop it!"
Mei shakes off the stardust sprinkling her vision and, wielding the jetpak as
a weapon, strides over to the psybot. With controlled spurts that make her flesh hop on her bones, she cuts away the androne's pincer appendages and lower body. Hoisting the upper segment of the psybot by a writhing eye-stalk, she bounds
away as Aparecida's slashing tentacles smash the geodesic wall behind her into a blizzard of sparkling motes.
"What have you done?" Charles cries. "What' have you done to me?"
"Munk!" Mei screams. "The command pod! Open the pod!"
Ahead, the mirror surface of the clustered spheres wrinkles, and a portal appears close to the ground. Mei throws the eye-stalk segment of the psybot before her, tucks herself around her jetpak, and somersaults into the command pod. "We're in! Shut the pod! Munk-hurry!"
Through the constricting portal, Mei glimpses Aparecida lunging toward them, tentacles thrashing, ax-edged arms whirling, jaguar body slumped in a full-tilt charge, a gaze of gorged fury in its slick metal face. The entry shrivels close, and a tremendous boom rattles the complex and the small bones in Mei's ears. Quake-force juddering trembles the ground.
"What is happening?" Charles asks out of the darkness.
"Aparecida is trying to break in. But she can't. This
is a prestressed alloy no demolition androne can breach." in the glow from her statskin cowl, the severed psybot with its wavering eye-stalks looks like an exotic sea plant. "Munk, turn the lights on in here."
Static drizzles over the comlink, and Munk's voice comes in jagged chunks: "...evasion. Wolf Star has deployed ... Repeat, can't respond, must execute battle evasion. Will contact you again when-"
"Munk! Detonate the explosives! Munk, respond! Detonate the bore-drill explosives!"
"Can't. Programming prohibits-"
"Damn your programming! You're a rogue androne now. Use your free will. Save us, Munk!"
"Evading Wolf Star destroyers. There are. . ." Static fizzles into white noise.
"You have control of the factory," Charles realizes.
"Yeah," Mei admits, feeling through the dark for the switch box she knows is somewhere to her right. "This ore processor belongs to Apollo Combine, the company we work for. Or used to work for." By the slim light from her cowl, she finds the switch box and wrenches it open to reveal a colorful hive of circuitry. She probes the mesh of neon-bright conductors with a filament tool, and the interior lights up.
They are in a chamber of tall, intersecting crystal sheets-controller
plates-that contain all the directives for operating every device and procedure in the ore processor. Beyond, Mei knows, through narrow companionways, are the vaults that store the repair supplies. She shoulders her way among the controller plates to a knee-high central frustum that houses Charles Outis's brain. It is made of the same translucent, crystalline material as the plates, and inside it she discerns a vague ovoid outline.
"Don't touch that!" the psybot commands.
"I'm sorry," Mei says, "but I must turn off your senses for a brief time. Everything we say is being relayed to Wolf Star, and we have no chance of getting away so long as they're spying on us."
"Leave me be!" the psybot shouts. "I don't want to go with you."
Mei ignores him, snaps open the top of the frustum, and lifts out the clear plasteel case with the brain inside it. The convoluted tissue is suspended in colorless gel and a chrome net, the support system that sustains it. Awe at the antiquity of the being in her hands and revulsion at its nakedness mix in her.
"This is Wolf Star speaking," the psybot says. "You are in violation of Commonality salvage-rights law. Your life is forfeit unless you immediately surrender the wetware with which you have absconded."
Mei places the plasteel case on the ground, grabs her jetpak, and fits its vent to the ripped end of the psybot.
"The Laughing Life is in violation of salvage-rights law," the psybot declares. "It is being stalked and will be destroyed. You have no means of escape. Surrender the wetware now, or face the-"
Mei fires a blast of the jetpak that lifts her toward the curved ceiling and shatters the psybot to spinning shards. She lands on her heels and dances backward with the inertia, crashing into the controller plates with enough force to knock the breath out of her. There is no sound in the virtually airless chamber, yet she hears with her bones the pounding atop the pod stop. An ominous
silence pervades her. And in that palpable emptiness she feels suddenly tangential to life, fugitive to the world of sounds, to the living world, as though she brinks on the emptiness of a void greater than being, where the dead enclose the quick.
2
Remains of Adam
OVERCOME BY A SENSE OF UNREAUTY AND AMAZED That her Life is going to end here in the presence of an archaic human, Mei Nili picks up the capsule with reverence and stares through the milky plasteel at the brainshadow and the silvery net that sustains it. The idea strikes her that she can talk directly with this man using the electrodes in the net and the signal processors of the core chamber.
With a feeling of eerie portent, she returns the brain to the frustrum. She goes quickly to the switch box and, using filament brushes from the tool unit of her jetpak, connects the core chamber with her comlink. "Mr. Charlie, can you hear me?"
"Aye, yet strange you sound."
"It's the translator," Mei explains, relieved to hear a human voice again, no matter how comically distorted. "It must be having difficulty converting your archaic language."
"I be black in the kingdom of the blind!"
"I'll try and make some adjustments." She attempts tapping into the powerful logic boards of the controller plates, hoping she didn't damage them too badly in her collision. "I'm going to get us out of here, Mr. Charlie. But first I'm
going to see if I can fuse the transmitter units in your support system with the translator mode in my comlink-my compact communications system. That way we can talk once I remove you from the core chamber."
"What heinous wickedy-split plans have you toward me?"
"I mean you no harm," Mei answers, tediously struggling to find the right pathways among the circuits. She subvocalizes her curses, not wanting the archaic brain to hear her frustration. "I'm taking you to Solis to grow you a new body-a whole and beautiful body-if we can get away from here."
"Much virtue in if," Charles says mournfully. "With broodful nod, proceed. What choice for a miser in a poor house?"
"Right." The pinhead bulb atop her filament brush flickers, then lights up, indicating she has opened a new pathway among the microswitches. "Okay! I think I've got it. Am I coming across more clearly, Mr. Charlie?"
"Yes, a lot clearer," a soft voice comes over her comlink. "You sound intelligible again."
She blows a satisfied sigh and slides to the floor. "Now all we have to do is get out of here without getting killed." She closes her eyes, reaching inward
for the rageful strength that has carried her this far from the reservation. "It must seem ironic to you," she says quietly, "to have survived all this time only to wake up and discover your life is in jeopardy."
"It's not a happy feeling," the archaic mind admits. "I've been disoriented since I've woken up. Can you tell me what year this is?"
"Time isn't marked that way anymore, Mr. Charlie. I mean, on Earth there are still standard years, each with three hundred sixty-five and a quarter days. But each community has its own reckoning based upon its origin. On the reservation where I come from, we were in the year seven hundred forty-eight when I left."
"So I've been dead over seven hundred years," he says in a whisper so faint it is almost only a thought.
"Longer than that, probably. Our reservation was one of the most recent. What did you call the year when you lived?"
"I died in the twenty-first century. Does that mean anything to you?" "No. I only know that the archaic age had its own reckonings for time.
Religious ones, I think."
"Yes. Maybe you can tell me when the archaic age ended."
"I don't really know. I mean, I wasn't much interested in history. Do you know about the Maat?"
"No."
"Sometimes they're called neo-sapiens. They're what became of humanity after we mapped the human genome and amplified our intelligence."
"The next evolutionary step," Charles says with startled understanding. "The step we take for ourselves." Then, his voice rises to a puzzled lilt, "But why are you here? Why isn't everyone Maat?"
"Who knows? Maybe the Maat like diversity. Before they went underground, they founded the reservations, not just for people but for many life-forms. My reservation was one of the last they set up. I'm pretty sure they'd already been around for over a century by then. So you must have been dead for-well, for almost a thousand years."
Charles is silent, and Mei does not disturb his profound quiet for a long moment. During the interminable time he had spent locked in the virtual space of the ore processor's command core, he has had ample time to mull over his past
and visit with the ghosts of those he knew in his first lifetime, now all long dead. He has no regrets about leaving them behind, where they bad wanted to stay. But knowing how long they have been ghosts, how long he has lain dormant awaiting this vital moment, pervades him with a
n appalling sense of his own
transience. He yearns deeply for the return of his senses so that he might grasp and smell and see the moment-by-moment reality he has traveled a thousand years to experience.
Mei's edginess becomes unbearable, and she must break the silence. "Do you wish now you hadn't frozen yourself?"
"No-no, not at all." He speaks in a hush, his awe palpable. "I knew there were great risks. I knew it might be frightful here. I-I wanted to see it for myself. I only wish now I had eyes."
"You will," Mei answers brightly. "And you'll have your whole body, too. The vats in Solis will shape you just as you were-or with modifications, if you want."
"Solis-where is that?"
"On Mars. Not far from here. It's a human community. They strive to maintain the old values. They'll appreciate an old-timer like you."
"But the gravity-it's only a third of Earth gravity."
"Yes. You and I will be in the minority there. Most have taller, less dense bodies. They'll find us quite exotic."
Mars! he thinks, simultaneously astonished and panic-stricken. It was because he had wanted to see Mars, to see the cities on Mars, that he arranged to have his head frozen upon death, to Van Winkle enough time so that he would wake to see its wonders. And now, right here in his blind presence, is a woman of this scary and marvelous future, his one tenuous hope for a new life. "Why did you leave Earth?" he asks, suddenly seized with a desire to know everything about her.
Mei hesitates, not sure what to say. She feels foolish telling him about the personal tragedy that impelled her off-planet, for this archaic mind is from a time when mortality was the common truth. Mute, she stares at her
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