"Mei Nili!" Charles is agog with fear. When she cut him off, he was sure
Aparecida had killed her and he was on his way to the dissector. "I-I thought..
. Are you all right?" "Yes," she gasps.
"What happened? Where are we?" "We're back-back in the pod."
"'What about Aparecida? Is she still after us?"
"Yes. My escape-I couldn't get away. I had to come back." "We're still trapped?"
"For now." Mei pushes herself to her feet and leans against the switch box. Her fear-buzzing fingers steady only under the greatest concentration, and she manages to transmit a hailing frequency to The Laughing Life. But there is no response. From that she knows that the cruiser is either destroyed or maintaining strict silence because it has drifted within striking range of Wolf Star. "We'll have to wait a while before Munk can contact us again."
"What are you going to do?"
Mei picks up the plasteel case and notes the smudges where Aparecida's projectiles impacted. An open, lonely feeling-a tender sense of
vulnerability-replaces the dazed and jangled aftermath of her terror-stricken flight. This remarkable being-a man from a lost era a thousand years gone-has been reduced to this-an object of barter, useful as an ore-factory controller or a shield-a thing that she has risked her life to steal. "You've got your ears, Mr. Charlie. Now I'm going to give you your eyes."
"You can do that?"
"I think so." She places the case back in the crystal frustum and returns to the switch box. By channeling to Charles the input from the light sensors in the ceiling that monitor the interior of the pod, she opens for him a rainbow-tinted vision.
"I can see! It looks like I'm floating above you."
"There are ground-level light sensors, too," Mei says. "I'll connect you to them as well. These are what the jumpers use to scrutinize the controller plates by remote."
"Yes! I've found the reflex. I can will it myself now."
"There are also light sensors outside the pod. If you try..."
"There it is," he says in a cold whisper. "Is that Aparecida? She's huge-grotesque-"
"What is she doing?"
"Squatting in front of me. She's got these thick, barbed cables waving slowly around her-and her face, it's-"
"I know. We've met."
"How long can we stay in here?"
"Not long. Wolf Star will break the codes soon and then usurp control of the pod."
"What are we going to do?"
Mei smiles, and the sensation is so unfamiliar it startles her, opening her lungs to a giddy sigh.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Mr. Charlie, you said 'we.' I just think it's funny that we're in this together-me and a thousand-year-old man."
"Actually, Mei Nili, I'm scared shitless, as we used to say in my time."
"I am too, Mr. Charlie. I am too. And for a long time I wasn't." She settles
to the floor and leans back against the jetpak. "For a long time I really didn't care if I lived or died."
"You were depressed. Why?"
"That doesn't matter. It would sound silly to you-a man who already died once, who lived in a time when everyone had to die."
"You lost someone you love," Mr. Charlie surmises.
"I lost everyone I love. They weren't supposed to die. No one is supposed to die where I come from."
"That doesn't sound silly to me. I tried to escape death myself. But after what I've been through-crammed in here, forced to work as a machine slave-I would rather die than go back to that. Cowardly as that must seem, that is what's happened to me. Really, though, at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us is to go on living."
"For what? Simply to exist?"
"No. That's vile. But look at you, Mei Nili. You are beautiful. And you've told me that everyone is beautiful now. Disease, old age, distortion are done with, and at last, humanity attains the physical dignity that before we could only claim in spirit."
"That was the spirit I left Earth to find. Physical dignity is not enough, Mr. Charlie."
"No, I suppose not. Much as I hate to admit it, the old philosophers were right. We sing best in our chains. Even so, I would love to taste some of the freedom humanity has won in the thousand years since I had a body. Is there any hope we can get away to that place you told me of-to Solis-where they will shape a new body for me?"
Mei shrugs disconsolately. "Only if we can convince Munk to override his primary programming and detonate the explosives."
"Patch me into The Laughing Life. Let me talk with him." "He won't listen to you. He's an androne."
"Yet when he first contacted me he introduced himself as something more-a rogue androne with what he called contra-parameter programming installed by the Maat. He's capable of free will."
"Not if he can help it," Mei says with a gleam of anger.
"Then we have to make it necessary. We have to give him no choice but to use his freedom."
"I don't understand."
"Mei Nili, you gambled your life to save me. I know that serves your
self-interest. You need me to gain entry to Solis for yourself. Yet if you want, you can surrender me to Aparecida this minute and your life will be spared. You can go on living."
"I didn't come this far to give up. If I have to die now, at least I won't be running away from life-which is what I was doing before."
"I'm glad to bear you say that. There's a chance, then, that we can get out of here. But we'll have to gamble our lives. Are you willing?"
"What do I have to do?" "Let me talk to Munk."
Mei pushes to her feet. At the switch box, she finds that the transmission circuit is already active, and Munk's voice is droning,".. . hear me? Respond, Jumper Nili."
"Munk! We're back in the pod. We couldn't make it to the surface."
"Jumper Nili, I was ready to believe you were dead." "We will be soon, Munk, if you don't help us." "Jumper Nili, don't ask-"
"It's not me this time that's asking."
"Munk? This is Charles Outis speaking. Can you hear me?"
"Who?" the androne asks. "There's noise in your transmission I can't decipher."
"This is Mr. Charlie. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Mr. Charlie. I regret we have not been able to liberate you just yet."
"You can liberate me, Munk. Detonate the explosives immediately." "I can't do that, Mr. Charlie."
"You can-and you must. Mei Nili is going to open the pod entry now. If you don't detonate the explosives at once, Aparecida will destroy us. Do you understand?"
Mei's heart surges, and she turns with shock from the switch box.
"Jumper Nili, do not do this. I will swing about for another drop-dead flyby. Try again to evade Aparecida and get to the surface."
In her astonishment, Mei says nothing. This is it. The clarity of Charles's decision penetrates her, and all the torn and muddied raging that had carried
her from Earth to this lifeless rock in the preterit void lifts away. Tears come quietly to her eyes.
"Jumper Nili!"
Mei blinks away her tears and nods toward the sensors, holding Charles's gaze and not quite smiling. "I'm setting a ten-second lag on the pod entry, Munk. If Mr. Charlie and I are going to survive, it's entirely up to you."
"Jumper Nili, I will use the codes to countermand your portal control."
Mei tugs a small pliers from her tool kit and inserts it into the switch box with a deft twist. "I've cut the code link to the portal. You can't stop it now. It will open in ten seconds. Our lives are in your hands, Munk."
"Don't do it, Jumper Nili."
Mei sets the timer and retreats down the aisle of controller panels. She removes her jetpak and sets it beside her on the floor. "Get us out of here, Munk."
"Help us!" Charles calls.
In The Laughing Life, Munk pulls away from the command console abruptly, as though it has become white-hot. He stands erect, suspended by his conflict in a bitter, utter stillness. Ten seconds
for a silicon mind is ten eternities in which to dwell on the permutations of the future. Munk locks into a frozen logic loop: If he does nothing, Mei and the archaic human will be lost
ever-yet if he detonates the explosives, he will have defied his primary programming, and he will-forever after-endure the claims of insanity, of loss of guided control, of uncertainty in his own behavior.
There are no feelings to guide him. If he trusts his C-P programming, he will detonate the explosives and destroy not only Phoboi Twelve and Aparecida but also his identity as an androne. If he does not act, there will be no grief, no remorse, no sadness at the loss of an archaic human. He will go on, a rogue androne, salvaging errant mining equipment to earn the credits necessary to replenish his power cells. Eventually, he will meet other jumpers, add their interviews to his developing anthropic model, and so continue to fulfill the inner directive of his creators.
In the tenth second, Munk decides to leave his primary programming intact. The uncertainty of existing without it is the most puissant emotion he has ever experienced, and he crouches over the command console and turns The Laughing
Life away from Phoboi Twelve.
Over the comlink he hears the shouts of Jumper Nili and Charles Outis as the portal opens and Aparecida comes for them. The wildness of their anguished yells pierces deep into his C-P program. He adds that to his anthropic model. And then he hears the gusty roar of the jetpak. Jumper Nili has launched it ahead of her. He can tell, for it Doppler's away from her shimmering cries, thuds loudly, and
whines to a stop. She has struck Aparecida with it, driven the androne back a few paces, and purchased herself two, maybe three extra seconds.
Such resistance is absurd, he thinks, and realizes, of course, such absurdity is the very source of being human-to live and strive simply to live and strive, even for a few extra seconds, to go on living and to make the laws according to which one lives, to program oneself which, to the androne, is madness and yet something more, a willful desire to set one's own limits in a universe where there is no real edge to anything, where the interpenetration of cosmic energies and molecular flow and accidents creates an eternal flux despite all
programming, all structures, all the crystallizations of the silicon mind, even those seemingly impenetrable sanctuaries of purpose, identity, and safety created by the Maat.
And all at once, Munk's plight ends. Though he still does not understand, he comprehends why the Maat put a human heart inside his androne bulk. They never intended him to be human, only to be as free as a human-as free and as absurd. Without hesitation, he generates the firing codes for the bore-drill explosives and sends the detonating signal.
Mei Nili is hunched among the controller plates, gawking in horror with Charles as Aparecida casts aside the crumpled shape of the jetpak and springs toward them. Her prodigious head slung forward in a gaze of flame-cored mineral intensity, tentacles slithering ahead of her steely, clacking claws, she is death itself.
A searing flare of white fire bleaches the androne to a skeletal silhouette and consumes her in a wincing radiance blind as any darkness, and she vanishes like a tattered shadow into the wraith world of all nightmares.
The portal reflexively squeezes shut under the blast. The brunt of the shockwave tosses Mei against the far wall with a sickening thud, and she slumps lifelessly, a cast-adrift body in the reduced gravity.
"Mei Nili!" Charles bawls, and then, "Munk! Munk, are you there? Mei Nili's hurt! Hurry!"
Munk receives the distress signal from nearby, where he has watched the silent holocaust billow into fiery tatters. He steers The Laughing Life into the infrared haze to recover the scorched command pod. Resorting at once to his primary programming, he ignores the emotional valence in Charles's message and calmly guides. the cruiser through the debris of the explosion. The heavily damaged Wolf Star has swiftly retreated, dwindling to a bright star in the galactic haze, leaving behind pewter shards of fused blackglass, twisted
finjets, mangled hull plates, and melted shapes of plasteel among the rapidly cooling dust cloud that is all that remains of Phoboi Twelve.
The command pod itself has separated into several heat-tarnished spheres whirling doomful and mute as absolute rock among the cosmic dust. Munk gently docks The Laughing Life against the sphere emitting Charles's signal. The controller plates recognize the company vessel, and the pod mates its portal to the cruiser's pressure hatch and accepts Munk with an inrush of heated air.
Charles, unprepared for the sight of the bulky humanoid with the chrome hood and featureless faceplate, utters a weak groan. "Munk?"
"Yes," the androne replies, hurrying to Mei's body.
"Have no fear. The danger for you is over, Mr. Charlie."
Munk checks the oxygen content and pressure of the air mix in the pod as well as the temperature to be certain that they are adequate to sustain human life, and assured of that, he unzips Mei's statskin cowl. His thick hand hovers a centimeter above her face, not only attempting to measure her rate of
respiration but also at venture, daring for the first time to touch human flesh.
His sensors can detect no gas exchange at all. His first contact is to the side of her neck, trepidatiously feeling for her carotid pulse. None. "She is dead."
"No!" Charles cries. "She's not dead. Not yet. It's only been a few minutes. You've got to start her breathing. Do you understand?"
"How?" From his memory-allocation files, Munk filters cardiopulmonary therapies. He retrieves the first-aid-for-humans program that his makers installed in the earliest andrones and that persists in him at a low level of
his operating system as a kind of racial memory.
"Force air into her lungs," Charles calls desperately.
Swiftly, the androne positions her under him on the deck, his fist placed over her nose and mouth, his finger pistoning air into her lungs. A vigorous thoracic massage follows as he pumps her rib cage with his fingertips, feeling her bones stressing to their breaking point. He considers applying a small electric jolt, when her heart thumps back to life and she gasps for breath.
Mei shudders alert, peering up blearily at the crimson lens bar in the black faceplate, and she feels the bright magnetic touch of his living metal against her flesh. Alertness jams into place as he lifts his electric presence from her and she takes in the intersecting crystal plates and mirror-gold concavity of the pod.
And then, quite unexpectedly, she finds herself blinking at the kneeling androne with tears welling in her eyes. It is as if everything she had ever refused to reckon with, the sadness and loneliness, is trying to rise within her involuntarily and all at once, overflowing from her as much in release as in pain. Awareness of the blackness that has relinquished her under the androne's ministrations taps into the very source of her grief.
To Munk's amazement, she begins to sob. He finds it incredible that this molten grief could have churned inside her for so long without finding a way out, that she had to literally die before it found relief. In the formless nothing where she has just been, the androne realizes, everyone she had ever loved had gone. And now she has been there too-and come back.
"Welcome to the club," Mr. Charlie says with quiet exultation. "Welcome to the survivors' club."
In the wash of air from The Laughing Life, strands of fern and a white blossom have drifted. Munk sweeps them into his grasp and presents them to Mei. "To life."
She accepts the bouquet with a quavery smile. "To Solis."
Installed in the flight bubble of The Laughing Life, Charles sees and hears through the ship's sensors. While he scrutinizes the interior of the vessel, amazed to be alive inside a magjet cruiser, even more amazed at the ambit of his own hazardous destiny that has delivered him from the darkness of the machine, Mei and Munk talk. Vaguely, the thousand-year-old mind listens to the androne
and the woman struggle with their relief and the joy of their success while they discuss what lies ahead-the brief flight to Mars and how it will be n
ecessary to abandon The Laughing Life in a high orbit. The cruiser is the property of Apollo Combine, and the only way to avoid the company's legal claim on them is to leave it behind. They will all go down to Mars in the pod and will slow their entry with a jetpak rig they'll hook up from the ship's stores.
While they carefully plot the immediate future, Charles gazes at the macrame of vines and roistering ferns spilling from ceiling nooks. He is quietly astonished to see them dangling here among the mysterious alloys of the transparent hull, wavering with the vent breeze in the aqueous glow from the crystal devices of the console. To him, the plants are weary and beggared
life-forms, sufficing on the merest offerings, yet noble in the poverty of radiation, thin air, and meager dirt that sustain them. Of course they would accompany humanity into space. From their cellular struggles, human life slowly and violently evolved and stands before him now as this beautifully pale and darkhaired woman chattering gratefully. By comparison, the androne beside her, holding her steady in the empty gravity, seems a divinity, silverly black and ceremonial, a faceless apparition of a higher order, a more ideal actuality,
that has emerged from her even more distinctly than she emerged from the genetic turmoil of the plants' early lives.
The archaic human stares at them tirelessly, scrutinizing these three orders of reality arrayed before him-ancestral, human, and noetic-and as the fourth, the ghost witness of the past, an obscure soul without a body, he experiences
for the first time in this calamitous and unreckonable future some emotion other than fear.
Charles stares ahead through the prow's sensors at the swelling vista of Mars.
The awe that had begun for him when he first woke from his long, cold sleep steepens at the view of the orange-red deserts and rows of dead volcanoes. As the cruiser glides closer to the rimlands of smeared lava flats and scoria, he sees the famous veins of dried riverbeds that he remembers from the Viking photographs of his former life a millennium ago. The rumor of floods chamfering the rusty plains, grooving the reddish black slurry floors with the toilings of water, fans out and melts away into the dark amber glass of alien mantle beds.
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