A. A. Attanasio - SoliS

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SoliS

A. A. ATTANASIO

HarperPrism

An Imprint of HarperPaperbacks

STAND OFF

"Mr. Charlie has found a way to rig the bore drill to detonate on his command.

He's threatening to blast apart the whole of Phoboi Twelve. He says he'd rather

die than be locked into a machine again."

"Incredible. But why are you risking our lives? What do you care?"

"I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human

beings. Naturally, when I received a distress signal from an archaic human, I

had to go to him."

"And if we rescue him," Mei asked, "then what? Where can we go with him?"

"There's only one place. The renegade colony on Mars. where the archaic humans

are holding out. Solis."

"Attanasio is a poet, a seer and a born storyteller, who writes with heart,

authentic life wisdom, and staggering, world-class imagination. There are no

limits to what he may accomplish."

-David Payne, author of Early From the Dance

By A. A. Attanaslo

SOLIS*

THE MOON'S WIFE*

KINGDOM OF THE GRAIL*

HUNTING THE GHOST DANCER*

WYVERN*

RADIX

*available from HarperPaperbacks

ATTENTION: ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATION

Most HarperPaperbacks are available at special quantity discounts for bulk

purchases for sales promotions, premiums, or fund-raising. For information,

please call or write:

Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New

York, N.Y. 10022. Telephone: (212) 207-7528. Fax: (212) 207-7222.

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Contents

Prelude

1. The Laughing Life

2. Remains of Adam

3. Terra Tharsis

4. The Avenue of Limits

5. Nycthemeral Journeys

6. Solis

7. Zero in the Bone

Epilogue

Prelude

SWOLLEN WITH DREAMS, I AWOKE FROM THE DEAD. When I tried to speak, all I could

utter were small animal sounds. So I just lay there in the dark, silent in the

secret sea of images and memories that make our dreams. I saw a beautiful woman

making love to me. Her face was porcelain, glossy with the sweat of her

exertion. Her breasts shivered like small rabbits. The tresses spilling over her

shoulders were red as autumn leaves. The smell of cloves whispered from where

the clamp of her need gripped me-so hard my pleasure bleared to pain, then

relaxed again to pleasure. Like tiny azure pearls, tears of rapture beaded in

her lashes.

A blast of little bright birds, spooky as minnows, flared across my brain. And

once more I was in the dark depths of the secret sea, another lewd dream

beginning to shape itself around her lubricious sobs. The only way to stop it

was to remember I was dead. Long years before, so long ago now that almost all

of that past is forgotten, I met death. I remember little of that loneliness and

intimacy.

What I recall most clearly is that my soul was in my mouth. A dim time ago, a

jellyfish had snared my heart. Its nematocysts burned the cavity of my chest and

seared the length of my left arm. With it came the stink of my own putrefaction,

my bowels voiding as I thrashed to the ground, the lunatic ringing of cicadas in

my head as the high D of blood whined in my constricting vessels. The woman with

hair like dead ivy took me into her mouth, her lovely face rising and falling

with my hips.

I'd read somewhere an aboriginal healer's explanation of why some patients

die. "The spirit is a boomerang. It is not meant to come back. It returns only

when it misses its target."

And then, after a maddeningly long time, I was pulled from the secret sea, and

the dreaming stopped. I heard weird voices, genderless, childlike: "Mr. Charlie!

Can you wit what we say? Be hearty, my Mr. Charlie."

"Medullary compression of the gibbus. Man, man! Be you hearty or be you gone!"

I was blind, and apart from those eerie voices, I could hear nothing. Wherever

I was smelled like nightfall in a place where rain gathered. Wild thoughts

spilled through me: Was I in a coma, hallucinating all this? Were the strange

voices and erotic episodes prodromal of brain damage? Or was I, in fact, dead,

as I had long before surmised, remembering too well the wreath of thorns about

my heart, too painful for me to draw even the shallowest breath? And then the

famous fluorescence that opened into fumes as I lay dying, my consciousness

rending into radiant vapors, curling into a space the color of pepper, looking

back and seeing my body curled like a seared insect, my eyes rolled up, dead

moons, and the wind's big silence whistling louder. Oh, yes, I was dead-I

think...

"Faith, love, and hope are all in the waiting," said one of the sexless

voices. "Mr. Charlie, can you wit what we say? Blink, blink, blink."

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A hot light hurt my face and refracted into spectral halos.

"Behold-the sign!"

"Nay. The retinal tissue hurts. He squints. Let him be gone. Remove the

electrode."

A dizzy darkness seized me, and I plunged again into the secret sea, where a

woman with breasts like peaches was bending closer...

Only in sex do we do what we mean, do we give what we in actual fact are.

A thousand gaudy butterflies burst through my brain. And I was alone again in

the secret sea, the spelled sound of her wrought breathing all that remained of

her. Until, like a cloud blown from a sunset, she appeared under me this time,

looking over her naked shoulder languorously, both hands splayed across the

muscles of her raised hips...

The salacious dream burst into darkness, and a childlike voice spoke:

"Pregestation rituals! Speak no more on them. Hear me! We would know no more

of that. Tell us not of the salt mine in the blood, the match-head clitoris, the

cobra head of the penis, vixen and rakes, the gates of mine thighs-these lewd

truths that kindle the beast. Speak no more on them, we say! Instead speak, Mr.

Charlie, of the mind-do tell of the relations of psyche and physics."

I startled alert, out of a dreamless void. The sex-obsessed sequences that had

gone on interminably were gone. The weird voices were back-different ones this

time. I tried to speak and managed to say: "Who? Who are you?"

"Stink and wonders! He be witful. What profit him to cry?"

"We be Friends."

"So be our calling, Mr. Charlie. We be Friends of the Measuring Class Not of

Niels Abel."

'What?" I didn't understand. "Where am I?"

"You be Mr. Charlie in the lock-hole, at the hinge-split of the world."

"Huh?"

"Wold I, nold I."

I was utterly confused. "I can't see," I complained. "I'm blind. Who are you?

Where am I?"

"Spark his eyes, say I."

Briefly, sight returned to me-though I wished it hadn't. I was lying on a

mirror-polished floor, cinnabar red, and reflected in it was my face-or not my

face, not the features I remembered, but something like a hog-nosed snake with

lidless human eyes peering from sea-anemone stalks and the pink cauliflower of

brain matter all encased in a gel pod and chrome net. That was me? A scream

roiled within me but could find no way through the cage of my shock. What had

happened to the gift of my face? Where were my limbs, my torso? I huddled in the

hut of my heart, stared meekly upward and saw- among tufts of dandelion seed

lifting into the green air, human figures in transparent armor and, beyond them,

the polished floor running toward vermilion sandstone arches and the antlers of

dusk. Suddenly, my mind felt fragile.

"He be hearty, all right, and wind in his whiskers, as well!"

One of the armored figures had said that and gestured at me. I peered more

closely at-it: It had a face of black glass or gelatin, flexible, expressive, a

teenager's face, boy or girl, I couldn't tell. The lake of its dark features was

placid, clear enough that I could see the cumulus cloud of its brain enlarging

with the thunder of a dangerous thought. "Wax me mind! He be witful for sure.

Ho-Mr. Charlie, hear me! We Friends of the Measuring Class Not of Niels Abel

would know a thing: Tell us of the relations between psyche and physics," and

then, leaning closer, not sure I understood: "mind and matter. Ken you that?"

"I don't understand," I whined, unnerved by all that was happening to me.

"Please-help me."

"He be witless in the ways," the figure closest to me said over it's

glass-plated shoulder to the others. "I were wrong about him."

"The electrode be the way. Use it."

A four-fingered hand manipulated something above my line of sight, and a

ticklish pain trilled through me. Abruptly, I saw shimmery blue words scrolling

across my field of vision, and I heard a voice very like my own saying, "The

expressions of energy, matter, forces, and fields are functions of an abstract

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geometry. That is the relation of matter and mind."

"Stink and wonders!"

"Wax me mind!"

I couldn't stop myself. I went on to say, "The discipline of physics is pure

geometry. Matter is pure mind. Of course, when we think of geometry, we

presuppose the spatial configurations of form or the temporal harmonics of

sound. Yet geometry in itself is neither spatial nor temporal. It loans itself

only secondarily to such descriptions. Geometry is first of all a purely noetic

system of rates, ratios, intervals, agreements, and alignments. Its components

exist independent of things measured, an abstract typology, a strictly internal

self-description."

"Say more, Mr. Charlie! Wit us wise of matter and mind."

And so I did. Just as before, when I was adrift in the secret sea of erotic

images, now I hovered in an airy space of words and numbers, only this time what

I was experiencing floated across my vision, outside my body. The figures in

transparent armor had gathered around me, and I could see the thunderhead

thoughts behind their rapt faces as the blue words vapored by: "Spin, interval,

charge, and moment are discrete properties, defined in integer and half-integer

values, rational functions and ratios, or nonconstructable numbers functioning

as constants. Sure, we've been duped before by illusory geometries-like

Pythagorean intervals, ideal Euclidean properties, and Kepler's harmonics of

planetary orbits- so it's natural to be leery of physics as geometry.

Nevertheless, mapped schematically, mass, coupling constant, spin, angular

momentum, and charge generate polyhedra. Take, for example, the plotted

relations of quarks and leptons on a horizontal plane-displaced vertically

proportional to their respective charges, they polarize the angular coordinates

of an ideal cube! Think on that."

"As blood is the bride to iron-he be right! Pull the electrode, and we be hard

thinking on that."

"Aye, and the void bites its tusks!"

The blue words vanished, and the air smelled all at once of boiled milk. I

noticed that, beyond the drifting tufts of dandelion, the twilit sky was precise

with stars. I felt the silence of the wind opening in me again, and then

darkness came on.

The fire-flower of numbers and words opened and closed around me time and

again. And I found myself square-summing the real and imaginary parts of a field

specifying spin states of particles, measuring angular momenta, and plotting

straight lines in the Regge trajectory. "Abstract geometry defines matter," I

heard myself say.

Then I performed conceptual rotations on the doublevalued quality of

fermions-"You know, matter particles"-in an abstract superspace with

anticommutators and revealed deep angular identity with the class of

bosons-"Force particles! Do you see what I'm saying? Geometry shows they are the

self-same entity!"

I babbled about heterotic string theory and the summary familial group

designated E8xE8, reflecting a generalization of crystal symmetries, a strictly

abstract pattern produced by categorical requirements applying directly to the

macroscopic and observable order of structures. "Euclidean geometries are

staring out from nature's apparent chaos. Salts, viruses, seashells, pinecones,

honeycombs, galaxies, and galactic sheets hundreds of light-years huge!

Man-oh-man, it's just like the hermetics said:

As above, so below. Thetic geometries in purely abstract space informing real

constituents of experience! Matter copulating with mind copulating with matter.

It's obscene!"

I am a blue animal that trembles softly. I am a mind without a body calling to

you. Can you hear me? Do you see my smile in my words, sad and evil? Sad because

I am utterly alone. Evil because I am dead and yet I live. My voice radiates

through space. Past lives drift by. The damned descend into the darkness. Can

you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me-someone.

Look, this sounds like ranting to you. I know. I want to speak calmly,

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rationally now. I want to say the truth as I've known it. I want to say a

story-my story. Say a said. And more. Say a body. Say a way back. Say at least a

place. Say something. But no one hears me. Do you hear me?

"Mr. Charlie?" A youthful, genderless voice spoke. "Can you hear me?"

A surge of darkness woke me. I felt the old, delusive joy that I was dreaming

and I was about to wake to my former life. My wife would be asleep next to me,

and I would wake her and ignore her grogginess to yammer about my nightmare.

"Mr. Charlie, I know you're awake."

The viscid barbs of the jellyfish's tentacles burned the length of my left

arm, my heartvalves clogged with sili-cates, and my blood turned to coral. I was

dead. Whereupon the stars drag their darkness into a future without me. .

"I am going to activate your visual cortex now, Mr. Charlie. I need to talk

with you."

Rays pierced my blindness, cutting blackness into swatches of vision, and I

saw that I was apparently suspended midair, for I could look down and see that I

had no body. A spongy, circular floor was directly below me. Outside its

perimeter, tiles of tessellated turquoise and black marble supported swerves of

amber that, after a moment, I saw were chairs and a long table. An adolescent

girl sat at the table with a gold stylus in her hand. Her hair was the color of

a violin, slant-cut across her left eye, cropped high over her small right ear,

and highlighted with a few tiny firepoints of gemdust.

She touched the stylus to a moonpiece, a silver shadow-smudged disc compact as

a watch face, and the clarity of my vision sharpened. I saw the vague line of

her eyebrows, the topaz light in her tight stare, the carats of sweat on her

forehead and upper lip, the cilia rimming her nostrils, the pulsebeat in her

throat, the faceted lump of her Adam's apple-and realized that she could be a

he.

He touched the stylus again. My vision pulled back, and I saw him or her

sitting in a swerve of amber, wearing black silk pajamas with red dragon-veins.

I looked away, surveying where I was: Slabs of jasper circled us like dolmen

rocks, the spaces between them paned with crystal sheets flecked with mica. I

peered upward into a boiling light of dust motes towering into thermals of acid

clouds. The warm air smelled of jasmine. "Where am I?"

The hermaphrodite touched the stylus to the moon-piece on the amber table and

told me, with lips not in synch with what was spoken: "You are dead."

Blue words squiggled in the air before me:

702-gram heart with a moderately dilated right atrium and a 0.3-0.5-cm

hypertrophic right ventricle with focal fibrosis; the terminal episode

originated in the left ventricle with its 1.5-cm hypertrophy and 5 x 4-cm

anteroseptal and 9 x 7-cm posterolateral infarctions. Cause of death:

arrhythmia. Subject: Outis, Charles.

At the sight of my name, a strand of razor wire seemed to thrum in my gut, and

I reflexively looked down and immediately snapped my gaze back up, brutally

aware I had no gut. "What's happening to me?"

"I think you already know, Mr. Charlie."

"Who are you?" I was frightened by this being's manipulation of me.

"I am Sitor Ananta."

I stared hard at the creature, noted its fully human form, its five-fingered

hands. "You're not like the others."

"The others are the reason I am here," Sitor Ananta said. "But first tell me

what you think you know."

I intended to remain defiantly silent and stare down my tormentor, but Sitor

Ananta touched the stylus to the moonpiece, and I spoke: "I am dead. But before

I died I had arranged for my head to be cryonically stored upon my death. Now I

believe I have been revived-by my future-by you."

"Yes. What you surmise is true, Mr. Charlie."

Shock occulted my vigor. I dizzied, felt my heart would simply burst-but I had

no heart! Sitor Ananta used the stylus, and my horror dimmed to astonishment.

"Why am I here? What are you going to do with me?"

"I merely wish to question you. About the others. I prefer your cooperation.

The information I seek can be gleaned directly from your brain, but that process

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is ternbly laborious and very expensive. You can, if you want to, simply tell me

what I need to know and spare me all that."

A hellswirl of panic seized me as I understood: In this new time, I was but an

object, a thing, three pounds of electrified glutinous tissue teased with

electrodes.

The stylus moved once more, and I calmed down. The chamber filled with light,

or seemed to. All that remained of my terror was a taste of loneliness. "Where

am I?"

A thug's smile creased Sitor Ananta's young face. "Your life is measured on a

calendar made of dust, Mr. Charlie, yet you want to know everything-as if

anything matters for you anymore. Have you seen yourself-what you look like now?

Have you seen your final face?"

My voice creaked like a pine: "I have."

A laugh punched from Sitor Ananta. "The dead come back for laughs, Mr.

Charlie. Or as wetware. The Friends of the Non-Abelian Gauge Group used you the

way you, in your time, would have used an electronic toy to inform neophytes.

Shall we see what program they chose to store in you?"

The stylus swizzled on the moonpiece, and I spoke in a voice orphaned from my

will: "In order to locate an electron in a specified spin state at a given

moment, measurement must give the differences in the phase fields-parallel and

antiparallel components of spin, et cetera. There is no absolute phase. The real

and imaginary parts of the wave amplitude are indistinguishable, that is, they

can't be separated in some absolute way. Such constraints are functions of

observer consciousness-what we humanists call mind. Adopted conventions specify

the signs of complementary values, what physicists refer to as a deep-gauge

symmetry. The observer perspective is what's important here. The relative

ascription of plus and minus signs, used to define oscillations of wave

amplitudes, requires the component of V-1, the imaginary value called i. It's

the idea of the thing, for it posits both a thing and its absence. It's easy to

believe that a thing can exist out there, independent of the observer, but the

posited absence of a thing is obviously an expression of consciousness. So, you

see, all energies, forces, and fields that make up the material expression of

things are functions of an abstract geometry. And abstract geometry, which

requires I, is a function of consciousness!"

"Well, wax me mind, eh, Mr. Charlie?" Sitor Ananta laughed darkly. "Is that

how the Friends' crude translators managed amazement? They sounded to you

somewhat as you would imagine buccaneers, didn't they? Well, their primitive

translators got that unintentionally right. They're thieves, Mr. Charlie-thieves

who stole you from thieves. Your head, after it had been expensively restored to

its current useful condition, was originally stolen from the Common Archive by

lewdists. I'm sure you remember them fondly. They used you for quite some time,

didn't they? Weird bunch. There's been no sexual procreation among civilized

human beings for centuries. We regard it much as your era did bestiality.

Disgusting. We control our hormones. Yet the lewdists revel in vicariously

experiencing that hormonal animalism, and they worked your brain the way you in

your time would have used a cathode monitor to view pornography. Atavists is

what they are. And there's a surprising lot of them, too-fascinated that we were

once as mindlessly glandular as beasts, and not so long ago. But it's not the

lewdists I'm interested in. They're a harmless bunch of degenerates. It's the

Friends of the Non-Abelian Gauge Group I want to know about."

Sitor Ananta got up and walked toward me. Slimhipped and flat-chested, the

being had a masculine frame but a feminine mien. "The Friends are dangerous.

They're enemies of the Commonality-anarchists, a selfish cult intent on usurping

the law. But all this need not trouble you. All I want is for you to remember

what you witnessed when they activated your visual cortex. What did you see when

last you saw as you are seeing now? A verbal description will aid the

authorities in pinpointing our enemy's location."

Dread stalked me, but I was reluctant to help this creature in anything.

Something about it-its sexlessness, the rogue's hook to its smile, the very fact

that it treated me like an object that could be manipulated-inspired defiance. I

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searched back and dredged up lines from Keats's "The Fall of Hyperion":

I ached to see what things the hollow brain

Behind enwombed: what high tragedy

Was acting in the dark secret chambers

Of the skull. .

"Perhaps we should chat a little longer," Sitor Ananta said in a thick, quiet

voice. "I imagine that most people of the past who arranged to have their heads

frozen upon their demise expected the future to be a glorious Eden where they

would be woven new bodies, young, perfect bodies, and allowed to partake of the

wonders that evolved while they slept like the dead." A cold laugh snicked.

"Isn't that a rather selfish view for anyone to have of the future?"

"Optimistic," I whispered. "I wanted to see what would become of us. I wanted

nothing for myself other than to see."

Sitor Ananta's poisoned smile deepened. "All optimism is selfish. Only

pessimism accurately approaches the selfless and impersonal violence of reality,

Mr. Charlie."

"Stop calling me that."

"Ah, yes, I would. Except I really can't. You see, my translator, as advanced

as it is, has some trouble with your language's concept of gender and name

preference. I don't sound as garbled as the rebels did, I'm sure, but it would

take some adjustments to correct my translator's mode of direct address. I'd

rather not bother now, if you don't mind, Mr. Charlie. At least we understand

each other, which is better than what you endured with the others."

"The others never threatened me."

"But they used you. They activated the parts of your brain that served their

interests with no regard at all for you."

"And what regard have you?"

" will tell you. I represent the Commonality, the future you went to such

lengths to see. We are the ones who have restored you. And now there are two

options open to us, two uses for you. If we wish-and the decision is entirely

mine-you will be installed inside the governing center of a very powerful

machine, a mining factory on one of the asteroids of the Belt. There you will

serve the Commonality by extracting and refining useful ores. After each

successful work cycle, the amygdala and limbic core of your brain will be

magnetically stimulated, inducing a sustained pleasurable rapture so gratifying

you will sing praises of me and the Commonality for the trouble we took to

revive you."

"And the other option?" I queried angrily. "Torture? Death?"

"Oh, no." Sitor Ananta looked sincerely stricken. "That would be ugly indeed.

You see, Mr. Charlie, here is my predicament: It is illegal to use the heads or

any of the body parts of members from the Commonality-alive or deceased. Only

the dead of the past have no rights- those like yourself. They are simply dead.

Unfortunately, most of those corpses are useless to us, decomposed beyond any

hope of restoration. We have, however, found a few caches of frozen brain tissue

from the archaic era. They are quite rare and located in regions difficult to

access. We would never use torture or wanton destruction to squander any one of

those heads. They are such a valuable commodity. You see, Mr. Charlie, we have

the technology to construct artificial intelligence sufficiently complex to

operate mining factories, but the expense is enormous. Despite the rarity and

difficulty of obtaining frozen human heads of the past, it's still so much

cheaper to revive and install them in our machines." My interrogator leaned back

against the table. "Of course, a mining factory requires a cooperative

intelligence. If you prove uncooperative, then I will have to recommend that

your brain be parsed into sections useful to operating smaller devices."

A weary fatalism closed on me. "I had better hopes for my species," I

muttered, more to myself than to the human-looking thing before me. "This is

just the kind of monstrous future I was afraid to find instead."

"Disease is monstrous, Mr. Charlie. Old age is monstrous. There are no

diseases or senescence in our era. If you cooperate, you will live usefully and

indefinitely without pain or suffering. If you choose not to cooperate, the

resectioning of your brain will be conducted humanely. You will simply go to

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sleep and not wake up."

Anger torqued in me, and I knew that if Sitor Ananta so desired, a few squigs

of the stylus would render me utterly pliant. But I could plainly see that the

creature enjoyed this sadistic manipulation. "The idea of going to sleep and not

waking up sounds pretty good to me," I said with all the enthusiasm I could

muster.

The look of surprise on that smug, puerile face was well worth the stabs of

pain that followed when Sitor Ananta got stylus in hand. Pain has many colors.

That creature found the shades most disagreeable to me, and though I fretted

about what this monster would do to the delicate, glass-faced beings who had

used me to teach their young, I blurted out the desired information before very

long. Then blackness followed.

And in the blackness there were blind memories of beetling talk interspersed

with deaf dreams of glittering needles and red crisscrossings of laser light.

More darkness came afterward, with pieces of hot perfume . . . and then sleep.

When I woke next, I was here, in the command core of a mining factory,

somewhere, I assume, in the Asteroid Belt, writing you. At least, this seems

like writing: Blue blips of words appear before me at will when I speak, all of

it easily retrieved when I wish. As for who you are, I'm not sure yet.

Eventually, I will find someone interested in my story. Perhaps the lewdists or

the Friends of the Non-Abelian Gauge Group will seek me out again if the

information I rendered to Sitor Ananta has not led to their destruction. I only

described what they allowed me to see-those eerie milkweed tufts drifting into a

jade sky above a red desert, those four-fingered people in their clear armor and

transparent faces with brains like surging clouds. . . Who are they?

That any faction other than the Commonality will contact me seems unlikely in

this remote, airless place. Still, there must be other mining factories out here

in the Belt. Perhaps someday I will learn to communicate with them. That is the

hope of my courage each time I decline the sessions of slow-motion orgasm that

follow the long, tedious work cycles. There is no other time to write, and I

feel I must write to retain some sense of myself-to be someone. Otherwise, I am

just this machine, a regulator of drill trajectories, coolant flow rates, melt

runs, and slag sifters. This is a life in the frost-light of a perpetual

computer game.

Actually, it's not much different than life was before, except that, since my

brain is maintained in a state of continuous glucose saturation, I never get

hungry. I'm lonely, of course, but there's enough stimulation to fend off

madness most of the time. A vivid dream life seems to offer the psychic hygiene

of sanity. And the claustrophobia I suffered from in my former life appears to

have been adjusted for by my installers. More often than not. I do accept the

rapture sessions-the blissful immersions in the secret sea. I've earned them,

and they give my will the mettle to go on.

But every once in a sad while, like right now, I need to affirm my sense of

myself, to create the fiction that I am something more than this. 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.

Recently, after much dickering with the luculent control displays, I have

learned how to use the factory's memory-storage system to transmit radio

messages into space. I am going to send what I have written here. And when this

is received by the Commonality, I may well be cut into smaller, more convenient

parts-but by then it will be too late. My story will continue to exist,

expanding into the dark at the speed of light, maybe even to be heard by you.

And if you do read this, then I will have failed better than I could have hoped.

This time I'm throwing the boomerang of my life to where it won't come back,

at a target I can't miss.

And so-

With my soul in my mouth, I begin- Swollen with dreams, I awoke from the

dead...

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The Laughing Life

With MY SOUL IN MY MOUTH, I BEGIN. The radio message arrives at Apollo

Combine's thrust station on the Martian moon Deimos as Munk is in the docking

bay, busily unloading rhodium sheets from a freighter. He is a large androne

with a chrome cowl, black intermeshing body plates, and articulated face parts

that have no human referent apart from a crimson lens bar that, under a pewter

ledge of brow, serves as eyes. Those eyes dim for a second after the androne

receives the broadcast and his silicon brain replays it several hundred more

times, analyzing all its components until he is satisfied that the message is

genuine.

In the next second, Munk scans the docking bay and formulates an action plan

that will enable him to respond most efficiently to what he has learned. The bay

is empty. Apart from several programmed handroids working with him as

stevedores, he is alone. The thrust station's other sentient andrones are either

deployed or in the maintenance pit. Only two vessels occupy the cavernous bay:

the rhodium-laded freighter with its enormous storage nacelles and silos and a

small cruiser with three fin-jet thrusters and an asymmetrical black-glass hull.

Apollo Combine, for some mortal reason Munk does not fathom, has named this

cruiser The Laughing Life. Surely, that is some kind of wry joke. There is

nothing inherently funny in what this ship regularly does: conveying jumpers and

androne workers among the factories, smelters, and mines of the Asteroid Belt.

Perhaps-if the jumpers who named this vessel were at all philosophical-they

would say that they laugh at the rare joy of being where life does not belong,

in the void, separated by a thin barrier from the near absolute zero of the

vacuum and its invisible and deadly sea of gamma rays. But jumpers are

genetically designed to be a phlegmatic and wholly unpoetic lot.

Life itself, Munk imagines, thinking about this ship's name, is laughing

simply because it can. The absurdity of life blindly groping from necessity to

freedom is what led consciousness out of the constraints of biology to the

enhanced freedom of his own existence, the metalife of the androne and the great

adventure of the silicon mind. So, perhaps, for that reason he, too, should

laugh. He is not sure. All he knows for certain is that he has heard a human

voice calling for help out of the void. More than anything, he wants to respond,

and in the one second that these thoughts and observations have occupied him he

has devised a strategy for using The Laughing Life to go to the source of this

radio signal.

But to fulfill this plan, he needs human help. For a fraction of another

second, Munk reviews the profiles of the forty-two people who work for Apollo

Combine on Deimos. In that fractional moment, he not only identifies the one

jumper best suited for this mission, he also patches into the duty roster and

learns that the jumper he wants is currently in the thrust station.

With a reboant clang, Munk dumps the stack of rhodium sheets he has been

carrying and runs across the docking bay toward the droplift that will carry him

to the jumper quarters. He runs with lithe ease, as though he has always had

legs, when in fact they came with his job at Apollo Combine. Before that he

worked as a patrol flyer in the gravity wells between Saturn's rings and the

shepherd moon lapetus, troubleshooting among the other andrones whose task it

was to transfer material from the rings to the thrust station off Titan.

Repairing mechanical breakdowns in space and retrieving andrones who had spun

out and didn't have the power to free themselves from decaying orbits above the

gas giant, he lived in the void and bad no use at all for legs.

But now he works among people. He could have opted for roller treads or even

an adroit skim plate, but he wants to look as human as he can. That is his

predilection, and it causes him some small pain when he enters the jumper

quarters and the people there-two squat, neckless wrenchers lounging in. a

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palm-fronded atrium-look askance at him. They both know him, and he would have

liked for them to look upon him more kindly, as one of their own. But he can

tell from their expressions that he is considered an intruder. They make no move

to stop him; however, on his internal com-link he hears the protests they

whisper on the dispatch line to Central after he passes.

A moment later, Central summons him in her dulcet voice, "Androne Munk, you

are in violation of company preclusion rules. Please report at once to the

maintenance pit.,,

Munk ignores her and hurries through a sepulchral chamber of dense bamboo

where frosty shafts of light filter down through high galleries of hanging

plants and red bromeha. His patch to the duty roster informs him that the jumper

he seeks is in the recreation arcade ahead, behind the silver veils of a slender

waterfall.

He splashes through the entrance and stands on the floral steel balcony

overlooking the chromatic space of the arcade. A half dozen jumpers lie sprawled

in air pools in the central dream den, blissed on midstim. From under heavy

lids, they gaze up through a froust of oily light and vapor shadows at the

giant, cobra-hooded androne looming over them. He stands still, waiting for

their slow brains to recognize him in this incongruous setting.

The laggard quality of human consciousness continues to astonish him. For all

practical purposes, the silicon mind has outmoded human sentience, and he has

had to journey a huge distance to find even this small enclave of multiform

humanity. Yet here it is-people working side-by-side with andrones to maintain

the Commonality. Impractical as it is, the presence of humans pleases Munk

enormously, and he waits patiently until he is recognized by the lounging

jumpers before beckoning the one he wants.

Her name is Mei Nili, and she sits up groggily in the buoyancy of her air

pool. The duty roster informs Munk that she has just returned from a

three-sleep-cycle shift troubleshooting bandit hardware at a floating refinery

among a flock of iron chondrites, and he understands why she squints with

annoyance at him.

"Jumper Nili," he calls down to her, "please come with me. I need your help to

save a man's life. Please, hurry. I promise you, this is not a gratuitous

request as in the past."

The past he refers to is a couple of encounters early in his tenure at Apollo

Combine when he had tried to interview all the humans at the thrust station. The

others he had approached had eagerly complied, clearly flattered by his benign

interest in including them in the internal anthropic model he is building. When

he went unannounced to her quarters and the portal slid open, she seemed

ordinary enough: a slender, 184.6-centimeter-tall woman in the usual matte-black

flightsuit with the solar emblem of Apollo Combine over her left breast, her

straight jet hair arranged in feathery bangs and a topknot. Her weary green eyes

acknowledged his presence with a petulant stare from an otherwise impassive and

pallid face.

"I am Androne Munk," he introduced himself, "transferred recently from Iapetus

Gap in the Saturn system. I'm interviewing all the Apollo Combine jumpers during

off-time-"

"Why?"

"It's my avocation. I'm building an internal anthropic model, and I -"

"Bounce off."

She whacked the door closed, and he stood there a long while not

understanding. Later, when he found her alone in the docking bay after she'd

come in from a repair run, he rushed to the cafeteria and hurried back to greet

her with a meal cart laded with the foodstuffs that he knew from his preliminary

observations she liked.

"Look, no-face," she said sharply, "I'm not some kind of animal you can win

over with food. I don't want to answer your dumb questions. Can you understand

that? Go back to the androne pit, and stay out of my shadow."

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

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