SoliS

"What about the androne Munk?" Mei presses.
"Come on, Hannas!" Exu trills. "These foundlings are unbearable." He modulates his voice to carry his ire, "Jumper Nili, Soils does not tolerate andrones more complex than scout-class. Munk belongs in deep space, not on Mars."
"Okay, dear, we're done here now." Hannas budges her mate to begin their retreat and says charitably as they backstep in tandem, "The androne Munk's power cells have been recharged. The Maat arranged payment for that from Terra Tharsis. Perhaps they have some use for him. They are his manufacturers, after all."
"But there won't be any use for him here in Soils," Exu admonishes. "If you go out to see him, Jumper Nili, I'm sorry to say you'll have to reapply for admission. One archaic brain won't get you into Solis twice. And this next time, you may be turned away. Be advised."
"Don't be too harsh, dear. She offers us no direct credit, but the archaic brain she delivered is already bringing in news-clip funds, and the agent would pay dearly for possession-"
Exu glares angrily at his lifebond. "Is that the consideration that lizard wants? He can forget it. No deals with the Commonality. The archaic brain stays here."
As if one person, the martians slide fluidly backward down the stairs, and Hannas twitters in his ear, "All he asks is that the brain be given over to the Anthropos Essentia to be bodywoven in their vats. He probably has some arrangement with them. But if there is any trouble-say, a theft of the brain or an accident-it will not be with our people. Our hands are clean, and the credit remains with us. What do you say?"
Exu shows his teeth to the gaping terrenes. "I say, when the credit is good, consideration comes easily. Let's go."
Since waking from the void, Munk keeps drifting in and out of virtual reality. For long intervals, some episodes as much as half a second in duration, he reviews events from his recent past and has even begun modifying them, trying out variations on what might have been. He daydreams.
While he and Buddy wander among the stony eskers on the perimeter of Soils, Munk wonders where he would be now if he had not detonated the explosives on Phoboi Twelve that killed Aparecida. Mei Nili and Mr. Charlie are gone-as they would have been on the path not taken. But there they would have been dead. On this path, he died, so to speak, and when he came back, the people he saved are gone and he can't stop hoping after them and pondering how events might have turned out differently.
Buddy is talking architecture, about the orange pyramids visible just beyond the lux towers and their lances of sunlight. "Those are the vats of the Anthropos Essentia," Buddy says. "Charles Outis will be taken there."
"Who?" Munk asks. He speculates about what might have happened if he had not acted impulsively in the Moot and stolen the plasteel capsule. Maybe the Moot would have found in their favor. He realizes now, he acted too precipitously…
"Charles Outis is Mr. Charlie," Buddy says and taps the com-link in his shoulder pad to hear whether it's sending. "Munk, are you all right?"
Munk drives quickly through an internal analysis and affirms, "I am fine. But-" He pauses, weighs whether this revelation is the right choice or if he should keep his own counsel about his enhanced subjectivity.
"But what?" Buddy presses. His face through the clear statskin cowl appears pallid, his eyes larger, holding the solar stars from the lux towers.
"Since I have been revived," the androne confesses, "I have been obsessed with my past."
An understanding smile touches Buddy's thin lips. "It's your C-P program. Your little taste of oblivion broke the program's seamless internal narrative. Now it's more obvious to the preconscious monitoring systems in you that there are other ways to tell your story-more human ways."
Munk feels his attention slipping toward the daylight silence of the rocky landscape and its brilliant oxides, but he restrains himself from thinking about what would have happened if he had ignored Mr. Charlie's initial broadcast and never left Apollo Combine. Instead he asks, "Why did you make me this way? I mean, why did you give me an anthrophilic contra-parameter program?"
"It's not anthrophilic," Buddy says, stepping closer, a compassionate crease between his luculent eyes. "Munk, don't you see? It's anthropic"
The androne scans Buddy's face and body profile time and again, searching for the signs of double entendre, metaphor, or just plain outright deception that must be there. "Human?" Munk queries. "Are you saying that my C-P program is designed to make me eventually experience reality as a human?"
"Yes."
"That's not possible!"
"What? You don't believe that humanity is nothing more than a pattern?" Buddy edges even closer, looking up at the faceless abstraction of the androne's head with an incredulous expression. "You've been around Mr. Charlie too long, Munk. Your thinking's become archaic."
"No," Munk says. "I understand that consciousness is emergent. I know it is
generated through pattern complexity, whether of dendrites or electron tunneling junctions. I understand that. But I can't believe that I am-that."
"Yes, Munk," Buddy asserts, staring earnestly into the ruby-bright depths of his lens bar. "You are human. We have made you that way."
"Why?"
"To be here with me right now," Buddy answers at once. "I need you to fulfill the aftermath of my passing."
Munk represses the trembling conflict in him between elation and blatant disbelief and acknowledges aloud, "My responsibility to Mr. Charlie is replete. He has been delivered to Solis. So has Mei Nili. Then, I guess, I am wholly free to serve you-my maker."
"Good." A frantic quiet plays across Buddy's thick features, as though he's just coming to a precarious realization. "Hold on. I'm having a prescient memory-"
Munk extends an arm to steady Buddy, who suddenly looks as if he is about to fall asleep. "I don't understand," the androne says.
Buddy snatches at Munk's arm and snaps out of it. He blinks, and a crisp alertness seizes his stare. "I remembered what's going to happen." He cocks his head and blinks again. "I'm going to leave now. Once I'm gone, Buddy won't remember anything about me or you. His last memory will be of falling out of the skies in Terra Tharsis. He will find his way back to the outsiders' camp behind us, and in time he will realize that he has been exiled from Terra Tharsis by the Maat for his crime against himself: attempted suicide. And you-" A hot smile flashes across his face, and he almost bursts into laughter. "Ah, you have your work cut out for you."
"Again, I don't understand …" Munk trails off, for Buddy has seized his faceplate and pulled himself up very close, lifting his legs off the ground and practically climbing up the androne's front.
"My time in time is done in time," Buddy chants, his face a white moon, his eyes lit from within. "Good-bye. Munk."
Buddy lets go, and as his body falls, Munk involuntarily enters suspended time. Briefly, a light like blue smoke phosphoresces in the space between them, an amethyst fire that blusters violently even in slow time. Then it is gone, leaving comet feathers dazzling on the path of its dwindling flight through the pink lens of the horizon.
In a splash of dust, Buddy falls at Munk's feet and gazes up at the androne with a bewildered look shading to fright. Munk moves to help him up, but the man pushes away in a startled crabwalk. He flips over and scamps up the path among the boulders and out of sight.
Munk moves to follow, then stops himself. Inside, in the imaginal space behind his lens bar, he can still see Buddy fleeing among large talons of rock. He is running through horizontal rays of fiery dust that cut time into strata. On the lowest level, he is running through the woven light of the desert. Slightly above that view of him, he has already reached the camp of storm-battered pressure tents and reflector domes. A notch higher, the sky is full of the pink twigs of nightfall, and he is crouched with others beside a thermalux telling his story of life in Terra Tharsis as an old one, which no one believes. For many levels, he huddles at night in the thermal leaks of tents and works with others by day erecting a wind turbine, eventually earning his own tent…