square-knuckled hands, and the visitor from the past must ask again, "Were you unhappy there? Has the Earth changed a lot from my time? Would I recognize it?"
"Oh, yes," she blurts. "You'd recognize it. The Maat restored the planet. The oceans and forests and grasslands are as they were before the sprawl of the
city-states."
"But where do the Maat live?"
"Underground. The villages on the reservations are the only artifacts on the planetary surface. Factories are located in space or on the moon, and the mines are out here in the Belt. No one really knows what the Maat are actually using the raw materials for. I mean, there's no sign of them on Earth. I guess their subterranean cities take some of the material. And here and there, in desolate places-in rift canyons, deserts, and glacial peaks-you can find their crystals,
big prismatic columns, a hundred meters tall. They're a mystery. Same with the Array. That's what everyone calls the Maat's massive project in trans-Neptunian orbit. It looks like some kind of pattern-less net, and it's built from the material that the numerous companies in the Belt and the gas planet systems gamer for them. The actual construction is done by specialized andrones, artificial workers created by the Maat."
"What do they look like-the Maat, I mean?"
"Anything they want." Mei stands up and starts probing the switch box again with a stylus from her tool kit. "I'm going to try to hail my partner and see if he can get us out of here."
"Won't the others hear you?"
"They'll hear the signal, but the codes in the switch box will scramble it." She speaks to the comlink in her shoulder pad: "Munk-are you there?"
"You're still alive!" Munk's signal comes back immediately on the secure channel. "Wolf Star declared that Aparecida had killed you."
"It's a lie, Munk. We're okay, for now. What about you?"
"I had to swing wide to shake the destroyers Wolf Star deployed. But I'm free at the moment. Do you have Mr. Charlie?"
"Yes."
"Can you get to the surface? I can pick you up in a drop-dead flyby. If I come in any slower, the destroyers will fix on me and there won't be any pickup at all."
"Aparecida has us locked in here."
"Take Mr. Charlie and break for the surface. I will position myself for the flyby now and execute the drop-dead in twelve minutes."
"It's too risky, Munk. Detonate the damn explosives. We're safe in the command pod."
"You know I can't do that, Jumper Nili."
"Let your C-P program do it! If you don't, I'll work this switch box until I
figure out the detonating sequence myself."
"That will take too long. It'll be hours before you crack the code, if then. Wolf Star will have computed the codes for itself long before then. Make a break for the surface. I will pick you up."
"Munk, wait. Listen. There's something in you that's human. The Maat instilled that in you. I need that part of you to act for me-for Mr. Charlie-right now."
"Jumper Nili, I'm positioning The Laughing Life for the flyby. Break for the surface."
The secure line cuts off, and Mei disconnects from the switch box with a curse. "Damn that boltdolt!"
"What is a drop-dead flyby?" Charles inquires.
"It means he'll throw The Laughing Life at us and come in without any impulse power, engines dead, flying by momentum only. Because our ship is made from a substance called blackglass, it's virtually invisible in space. Without using the engines, the ship will offer no profile to Wolf Star. It will fly by undetected. All we have to do is be there to hop on."
Muttering blood oaths, Mei straps on her jetpak, stalks to the frustum, and removes the plasteel case. "Can you still hear me?"
"Yes." He has no sensation at all of movement. He is simply in blind space, informed only by the nerve-induced sounds from the translator in the case. "What are you going to do?"
"We're going to try to outrun Aparecida to the surface," she mutters sullenly, fidgeting with the switch box, setting a brief lagtime on the portal control. "Just be grateful you don't have eyes to see this."
She takes the ovoid case in both arms and positions herself at the egress point and waits, gnawing her lower lip nervously. Her fear angers her. What is there to fear? That she will die? Everyone she loves is dead. They died unknowing, believing the mercies of their age. At least she will die with her eyes Open. What of Mr. Charlie7 He died too, once, believing in the mercies of an age to come. But there are no mercies. She knows that now. And when the door dilates, she screams her bitter rage and fires her jetpak.
On the comlink, Munk hears Jumper Nili's defiant cry and begins his drop-dead flyby. Mars glides past the viewport; small with distance, its sharp rays cut the darkness like a star of blood. Its clear silence illuminates an uneasiness
in the androne. What if Aparecida kills Mei Nili? The future becomes pointless then. Where can he go? Without the archaic brain, Solis will have nothing to do with him, and finding work in the Belt will be degrading, for none of the Commonality companies tolerate rogue behavior. To return to Apollo Combine or even lapetus Gap where he began would mean certain ligature of his
self-directive functions: His brain would be bound to a work governor that would inhibit all future independence.
That possibility is untenable to him, not after the pleasure he has derived from his anthropic studies, which he would lose once his C-P program is shunted by a work governor. But the other options available to him seem little better. The best he could hope for would be to wander the Belt, seeking bandit operations, salvage jobs that he could get to first before any company vessels show up.
Even then, he would have to rely on markets outside the Commonality to credit him for the materials he salvaged. Then he would have to transfer his credits to independent brokers among the colonies so that they could be converted to the power cells he requires to continue functioning. At any time he himself could be set upon by bandit salvagers or legitimate company crews who would be within their rights in dismantling him and brokering his components.
Of course, the Maat would grant him sanctuary from bandits and the Commonality companies in Terra Tharsis, their vast community on Mars. They would take him
in, their creation hammered out of nothing. They would accept him as they accept all who come into their communal presence, and he would be changed, as all are changed in the grand thetic fields of their recondite being, changed and made anew, no longer Munk but Munk-of-the-Maat, naked before the infinite, at the
foot of the dream that mind has named existence-and he would be made again mysterious even to himself.
Fear twines in him at that prospect. Is this some subprogram installed by his creators? Perhaps. He does not want to dwell on it. The Maat are too strange to contemplate, and he would rather live as a bandit in the void than submit himself to their unknowable whims.
For a similar reason, Munk has not dared consider Jumper Nili's request that he override his primary programming and blow up Phoboi Twelve. If he does that, he compromises the only stability he has, the certainty of his own mental being. Carbon minds, having evolved from organic accidents, know madness. But the silicon mind is singular and thus secure from insanity. It is clarity itself, crystal become mind.
The andrones constructed by the Commonality are such truly pure silicon entities that they are incapable of defying their cybernetic natures. But a Maat construct, imbued with a contra-parameter program as he has been, is subject to the possibility of continual redefinition. Such randomness is the very threshold of madness.
Munk fears that. His primary program-to serve as a patrol and salvage androne for lapetus Gap-was immutably altered by the activation of his C-P program-to acquire all the anthropic data he can. That diverted him from his work station in the Saturn ring system and brought him to Apollo Combine. Since then he has suffered flutter-gaps in his attention whenever he even so much as glimpses
holo-images of the rings or hears data blurbs about the gas giants. Studying the anthropic psy
che, he has learned that these attention gaps are experienced by people as pangs of remorse, guilt, nostalgia. Why, he has often wondered, have the Maat instilled such an inhibiting inefficiency in their creations?
Whatever the reason-if it can be called reason at all-Munk dreads all further deviation from his primary program. He has gone so far as to question the merit of his C-P interest in humans. Yet question is all he can do, since he is incapable of terminating his C-P file. As he cuts the magjets and commits The Laughing Life to its plunge toward Phoboi Twelve, he knows his fate is locked. Mei will either be there with the archaic brain, or she will be dead.
A tendril of fern floats by, and he plucks it out of the air, enduring another
flutter-gap in his attention. When he arrived in the Belt, this was the first bioform Munk saw. All the jumper ships are festooned with them-flowering lianas, crimson-leafed creepers, emerald bracken, and glossy jade plants. His initial lesson in human behavior was to learn that the human psyche relishes the
presence of this early ancestor.
He takes the fern leaf between his digits and marvels again at its delicacy. The microvoltage of the phosphorylation of adenosine diphosphate to adenosine triphosphate in the cells' chlorophyll tingles his fingersensors when he feels for it. This is the photosynthetic process that has evolved spontaneously billions of years ago on Earth, releasing the free oxygen that made the evolution of respiring organisms possible.
How eerie it seems to him that this being appeared automatously out of the molecular frenzy of life. No creature manufactured it as he was manufactured. It emerged of its own accord, nascent, replete. As did the archaic brain that Mei Nili carries in the plasteel case. Mr. Charlie was not shaped in the vats. His genetic structure manifested without benefit of Maat or androne guidance. And that fills Munk with wonder as he tunes into the code-privileged band of the
comlink.
He hears nothing, for Mei has shut down her link. The static that fills the enclosed space is the thin wind of the sun nagging at the electrons of the ship's antenna. It is a cold and unfailing sound.
Mei Nili fires her jetpak and, with a whooping cry, is flung through the hatch of the command pod and across the vault, Charles hugged tight against her. Aparecida, squatting atop the pod, lashes her spiked tail at the streaking
figure and misses.
Shooting through the smashed gap in the geodesic dome, Mei skids to a stop at the entry to the gigantic bore tunnel. A charred screech from the demolition androne sends Mei fleeing through the dark corridor, using short kicks from her jetpak to bound as far ahead as her cowl light permits her to see. She must find a vent that ascends to the surface. The plasteel case in her arms whispers through her comlink, "Mei Nili, Mei Nili, are you still with me?"
"Yes, Mr. Charlie, I'm here. Calm down. I can't talk now. Aparecida is after us."
Charles hates not knowing what is happening. He wants to help, to participate in his own salvation, and he rakes his mind for some worthy counsel. "Do you have a weapon?"
"No. Nothing that would stop a demolition androne."
Mei dares not even glance behind. Her full attention is ahead of her, among the numerous escapes in the rive rock wall-the vent holes and sludge chutes. Some, she knows, must be dead ends, terminating in dross bins and catch chambers. Very few will lead to the surface. Desperately, she strives to bring forward in her memory the bore-tunnel pattern that is the model for the ore
processors she has helped install. But she has lost track of where she is in the tunnel.
Jarring vibrations quake the thin air with Aparecida's hammering stride, and the whipstroke whistle of her tentacles lashes its screeching echoes like a slicing siren. At any instant, Mei expects a shatter-blow to slam her into blackness. Stifling her terror, she fixes her gaze on a likely cavity directly overhead. A tight burst of the jetpak launches her upward, and she curls about in midleap and slides into the opening feetfirst.
Below her, she sees Aparecida lunge at the rock wall, talons biting into the stone, tentacles hoisting her along the sheered surface with weightless agility, her long head tilted back, fixing Mei with a pulsing, fireshadow glare.
"Where are we?" Charles asks. "What's happening now?"
Mei scuttles backward into the cavity, her fear coiling tighter with the rapid pounding of the androne's pursuit. All she can hear is her panicked breathing.
"You're scared," Charles moans. "Tell me what's happening!"
"She's after us," Mei manages. As fast as she elbows backward, the opening before her crumbles and the androne's tentacles reach closer. The rock-cracking noise of Aparecida's frenzied approach jars the roots of her teeth, and she
chatters curses in a fury of fear and rage at herself that she entered the duct backward, succumbing to the temptation to see her pursuer. Now the tight space prohibits her from turning around so she can use her jetpak to propel her faster through the channel.
Though she is facing the wrong way, she fires her jetpak anyway and shoots through the loops of the blind tentacles and out of the duct, streaking past the blunt face and spiked claws of Aparecida. A razorfiash of tentacles loop and swirl after her, and she darts daringly into the blackness.
"What's that sound?" Charles presses. "Did we get away?" Mei glances off the opposite wall and ricochets back into the darkness as Aparecida pounces swiftly on the space where she had been. Sizzling arcs of flogging tentacles drive Mei back and forth across the tunnel until her heart cannot pump oxygen out of her lungs fast enough and her strength no longer fits her muscles. With clambering, wobbly strides, she hauls herself up the broken face of the wall and heaves herself into the first opening she finds.
"Tell me what's happening!" Charles pleads, frightened by the gasping sounds of Mei's terrified exertion. "Where are we?"
Mei slaps off her comlink arid tries to steady the raw fieriness of her breathing to get a grasp on where she is. The oblique angle of the narrow
channel indicates it leads elsewhere than to the surface. A wrenching roar kicks her deeper as Aparecida's powerful limbs burrow a larger entry.
In moments the androne will have sufficient rock debris to fire projectiles. Skidding forward with boosts from her jetpak as fast as she dares in the dark pipe, she roots her stamina in the hot current of her fear and finds the strength and clarity to push the plasteel case under her, down between her legs where she can clasp it with her ankles.
The first projectile whacks so hard against the case that her bones shudder, and she releases Charles. The plasteel case rolls backward down the pipe, but
the next projectile smacks it back between her legs. Then the channel opens into a conveyer chute, and she tumbles out of the pipe.
Mei recognizes this chute as the same one she had followed earlier to the command pod. She releases a distressed cry, knowing the chute only descends deeper into the asteroid. From here there is no chance of reaching the surface. Stabbing into the darkness with the light beam from her cowl, she begins the climb toward the core chamber and the command pod, gnashing her teeth in frustration. The regularly spaced ducts in the chute wall all lead back to the main bore tunnel, and entering them would be certain death, for Aparecida's heat sensors would spot her at once. Her only hope now is to return quickly to the command pod before the androne can cut her off and trap her in the chute.
Employing all the alacrity she can muster from her weary muscles, she climbs along the cable track. With conveyer trucks before her and cables looping above, her jetpak affords her no help. She fights to quiet her breathing so she can
hear the danger ahead, while at the same time she demands fierce haste from her legs. Each sinewy second that she lags decreases her chance of getting out of the chute before Aparecida blocks her way.
A truck mounded with cinders appears out of the dark, and she cat-scrambles over it, vaulting the gap to the next truck. The plasteel case in her arms bobs cumbersomely, and she hopes that the blows it took in the pipe haven't damaged its preciou
s interior. She considers flicking on her comlink to contact Charles but at that moment notices the blue glow from the power coils at the end of the chute.
Safeguarding her already wrenching heart from the excitement of making good her escape, she steadily keeps her alertness on her balancing leaps along the crests of the trucks. Her breath inadequate, her legs leaden, she won't relent, hoping she can reach the mouth of the chute and fire her jetpak. But as she reaches the last truck, her jouncing stride breaks at the sight of a blurred, groping tentacle.
Mei ducks behind the truck as Aparecida swarms into the conveyer chute, limbs thrashing. The truck whangs loudly with the impact, and the whole linkage is shoved deeper into the chute, knocking the plasteel case from her grasp. Tentacles scything above her, Mei ducks lower, her hands working furiously to
uncouple the end truck. The pin jumps out, and she snatches the plasteel case from the ground and clutches it hard to her chest as she throws her jetpak to full throttle.
The force of the thrust hurls Mei, the cinder-laded truck, and the demolition androne across the giant vault toward the geodesic dome. Spewing ash, the
jet-powered truck hurtles through the ripped gap in the dome, shoving Aparecida ahead of it and crashing violently into the towering column of a power coil. Lightning rigs a thundery harp between the smashed coil and the vault's dark peak, and clots of blue fire geyser through the chamber and crawl wildly over the naked ground.
Mei tumbles free of the collision and scrabbles with quavery legs toward the open portal of the command pod. Throwing off the dented truck, Aparecida leaps after her. A scourging hiss rips the air as tapers of steel claw the air at
Mei's back. Flung forward again by her jetpak, Mei bounds with shock fright into the command pod, drops the plasteel case, and throws herself at the switch box.
The portal wrinkles shut before Aparecida's flailing blades narrow close enough to find flesh, and Mei collapses in a quaking heap. Three hot raps vibrate through the pod, and then there is silence but for her frantic breathing. She gropes for the comlink in her shoulder pad and splutters, "Mr. Charlie?"
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