SoliS

"Look, Munk, I'm not asking about my grief. I want to know why the hell you're risking my life to get to Phoboi Twelve to keep a human brain from getting sliced. What do you care? And why the hell should I care?"
"I told you. I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human beings. Naturally, when I received the distress broadcast from an archaic human– a human that walked the Earth before the Maat-I knew at once I had to go to him."
"And me? Why am I along for the ride?"
"I need your help. There are others who will get there ahead of me. But they are andrones, like myself. Surely they will only further bewilder this archaic man. He will need human contact. And so, I need you."
Munk pauses to give time for Mei's human brain to absorb all he has said. There is only one more question to answer, but he waits for her to ask and while waiting corrects again the flight path of The Laughing Life.
"If we get Mr. Charlie," Mei finally asks, "then what? Where can we go with him?"
"Solis."
Mei straps into her hammock and hugs herself. "I was hoping you'd say that," she whispers. She smiles, a wan, quiet smile. "It really is the only place we can go now, isn't it? Solis." it has a holy ring to her ears. Since the terrible tragedy, since the beginning of her grief, Solis has been her succor. That is the last refuge of her heart in the kingdom of death. From the first, she was
struck with how appropriate it was that this community, independent of the Commonality, should exist in the midst of so much lifelessness. The doom of her family had made her life a wasteland, and Solis was its temple. That was why she had to leave Earth after the tragedy. On Earth no one was supposed to die. Disease and old age had been defeated long ago by the Maat. No one had to die-or so she had believed until the voice of thunder reached across the mountains of the reservation and the village of her childhood disappeared in a black tomb of shattered slate.
"I know you tried to go to Solis after your family died," Munk goes on. "I know they turned you away."
Behind her glassy stare, Mei Nili remembers the loathing she experienced after the numbness of shock and grief began to thin. She came to loathe Earth for its
arrogant beauty, its fields of goldenrod and monarch butterflies, its sycamore shadows and flights of cormorant, its dark groves of mossy oak, its shimmering alder slopes and barberry meadows and daisies everlasting. It sickened her. And she yearned for the dead spaces-yet even in the desert, yucca bloomed, bright-beaded lizards danced, thunderheads promenaded in fragrant, purpled veils.
The emptiness of space beckoned, and she left Earth gladly. But the lunar colonies and the garden communities on the moon offered no relief, for the water planet hung in the sky flaunting its blue and feathery beauty. Only when the flight of her grief took her to the dead planet Mars did she begin to feel kinship again and some small glimmer of her heart.
She had wanted to live in Solis, a rugged community that thrived in the very face of death and had no illusions about life eternal. But she had nothing to offer them. She had lived her whole life on Earth skiing, swimming, riding, enjoying the utopia the Maat provided for the remains of Adam. Solis turned her away. They wanted skilled mechanics and ecosystem engineers.
"They were wrong to reject you," Munk says. "You proved that when you gave yourself to Apollo Combine and earned your way as a jumper. You didn't go sniveling back to the reservation. You proved you were tougher than that. And now you can return to Solis. Mr. Charlie will be your validation-and mine, too. They don't usually admit andrones. But with the brain of an archaic human to donate to their clone vats, we'll be received as dignitaries."
Concern shadows Mei's broad face. "Only if we can retrieve Mr. Charlie from the Bund."
Munk turns his full attention to the command console. "Only if," he admits. "Rest now. We will have to be strong to face down Ares Bund."
She adjusts the straps of her sling and closes her eyes. But sleep will not come. She is troubled. Everything is happening too quiddy. Only a short while ago she was sitting in the pastel color-swirl of the arcade, enjoying midstim with the others-who mostly ignore her. When she first arrived at the thrust station on Deimos to work for Apollo Combine, they tried to be friendly, to include her in their gruff camaraderie. But she wanted no part of that.
Mei determined from the time of her tragedy that no one would ever take the place of her family, and she has been true to that self-directive ever since. She doesn't want friends. Besides, jumpers aren't real humans anyway, not human the way people are human on the reservations. All jumpers have been modified to make their work easier. Most, in fact, were created to be jumpers. There are stocky, muscular wrenchers, narrow-bodied cable-jockeys, weasely pilots, and morosely exacting androne managers.
She found work with the Combine as a jockey because she is slim and has a head for circuit work. Jockeys have to ride cable runners into mine shafts and grottoes and hook up power units. She overcame her fear of tight places and got good at her job, because she didn't want to go back to the reservation or, worse, one of the colonies, where everyone thinks they're going to live forever.
Her job is exhausting, but it has made her strong, so terribly strong she doesn't always know what to do with her strength. That is why she was in the arcade in pastel mode when Munk found her. She needed midstim– direct magnetic stimulation of the amygdala in the midbrain-a sedating euphoria that drains away all restlessness and fatigue and leaves one with an empty body and a soul full of infinite care.
If she hadn't been on midstim and if she hadn't been surprised by Munk appearing suddenly in a nimbus of bleached colors, would she have come with him? If she had known about Mr. Charlie's plight beforehand, would she have elected to risk her life in a slingshot maneuver to go to him-an archaic brain locked in an ore processor and already claimed by another company? She ponders this at length and decides she should go, as if she has a choice now. She will go, because she has already stayed too long at Apollo Combine. She has become comfortable with her job and the indifference of the other jumpers-and midstim, illegal in the reservations, has become too important to her.
After Mei Nili dozes off, Munk patches into the on-board translator. He wants to hear again the segment of the archaic human's radio broadcast that he captured on Deimos, and he feeds the recorded signal to the translator. Most of it comes back as noise, and all he can summon up is a ranting excerpt:
Soul in my mouth, I begin… . l am a mind without a body.
Can you hear me?… lam dead and yet I live. … Past lives drift by. Can you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me…
Munk plays the scraps of message repeatedly, listening for nuances. Is this human being still sane, or has the trauma of his revival broken his mind? I am dead and yet I live. How much of what sounds like madness is insanity and how much mistranslation? The mechanical voice he hears only approximates the radio signals that the brain has found a clever way to generate from the interior of the ore processor. How much is error? Listen. A dead man visits you.
Broken chunks of rusty static crowd the air, and Mei Nili stirs from her fitful rest Is that him? Is that Mr. Charlie?"
"It is as much of his signal as I can translate into speech we can understand. The language he spoke in his first life has been dead for centuries."
Mei unstraps from her sling and drifts across the cabin to the flight bubble, as if propinquity to the warbly machine voice will clarify it. "Is there anything more?"
"Some, but just as distorted. No matter now. We are approaching Phoboi Twelve. I've plotted a course that masks our approach among waste clouds of nickel-schist debris, slag exudant from the processor. Ares Bund has only one vessel in the area, Wolf Star, and they haven't detected us yet. They are preoccupied with their salvage operation. I'm puffing in their radio signals."