"I don't think so. He's an androne. He told me that the Maat contra-programmed him with an abiding interest in humanity. He's committed to Mr. Charlie now, and we can predict he will act to preserve that archaic brain."
"You said you could take me to him."
Shau Bandar stops before a droplift set in the base of a pilaster and uses his journalist's passcode to open the alabaster portal. "Come on. I'll tell you
about it on the pave. But let's not talk about it in here. Security."
They step into the indigo buoyancy of the droplift, and the sinuous magravity whisks them as if motionless toward the ground. In the close spaces they study each other. She is put off by his bold eyeblack, precisely ruffled silks, and gem-bleached hair. He is intrigued by her raffish lack of olfacts, her musky savor matching the crude physicality of her square-knuckled hands and the facet cuts of her muscles apparent even through her flightsuit.
The droplift opens on the pave, the hilly ground of Terra Tharsis. Each knoll is the gargantuan anchor base of a skytower, the slopes landscaped in a mazy complex of boulevards, villas, geometric plazas, and dome-roofed neighborhoods strewn with green splashes of trellised commons, tree haunts, and parks. Sunlight falls in wide swatches among the soaring towers that cast vales of umbrous shadow on the motley hillsides.
The enormity of the city daunts Mei, and she looks hard at the blue centers of
Shau Bandar's panda-black eyes. "Where's Munk?"
"I don't know," he says and adds quickly, "but we can lead him to us whenever we want. He has my com codes. I gave them to him so he could reach me if he needed anything."
"Call him."
Shau Bandar shakes his head. "Not yet." As they stroll on a tessellated pathway under heliotropic arbors beside a skim route where cars slash by in a soundless blur of magnetic propulsion, he tells her what he saw of Sitor Ananta. "That agent thinks Mr. Charlie may be tainted by the radicals who originally stole him from the archives on Earth. The Commonality are fanatics about control and accountability. You must know that. You worked for them. To preserve his own career, you can bet Ananta will do everything he can to hunt down Mr. Charlie."
They come to a beverage stall in the niche of a brownstone wall scribbled on by lichen. "This shop has old-style ginger mead. Want some?"
Mei declines with a frown and gazes out at the undulant sprawl of bubble-top cottages and swirling roadways. "I'm not thirsty."
Shau Bandar sits at a vine-hung stall anyway. "When's the last time you ate or drank-or slept, for that matter?"
Mei doesn't hear him. Her gaze is lost overhead in the skyways and viaducts webbing high out of sight among the monoliths and casting vaporous shadows on the pave. A clutch of smoke-haired morphs trundle by yakking in a dialect she doesn't recognize, their spindly arms gesticulating like egrets in a mating dance. The olfact wisps that trail off them fill her with an ice-blue sensation of midwinter. She shivers.
"Jumper Nili," Shau Bandar gently calls, "aren't you hungry?"
Mei turns from the busy cityscape and zips open the sleeve seal of her flightsuit to reveal a swatch of nutriment patches. "I've been on these since my last assignment. They're good for a couple more sleep cycles."
"Your alimentary tract doesn't mind the neglect?" he asks. "I mean, you're not morphed for your work, so your bowels must need some input."
Her eyes slim. "Hey, this is just another story for you. I didn't come here to talk about my intestines."
Her stark gaze tightens. "Then why are you so interested?"
"You might have noticed even a side clip is worth enough credit to draw a small crowd of journalists. It's a free city, but it's not the reservation. Nothing is really free here. I have a comfortable abode. It's no aerie suite and it's a little rundown, but it still requires a lot of credit. And small as it
is, I like it a lot better than sleeping in the park. I've lived with the park people, and I know how rough that is." He takes her vial. "If you're not going
to drink it-" He sips and nods. "The park people work with the andrones for each
meal-gardening, masomy-real work."
Mei gives a stern laugh. "You want to learn about real work and rough times, talk with Mr. Charlie about life in his day. Not even the park people have to cope with the grief that was the common lot then, real grief even for the most rich. I don't want to hear any of your big talk. It's all a game for you people. Live long enough in this day and age and even the dreamers in the park get lifespan credit and a nice hillside cottage maintained by andrones. You want to see reality, you find me Munk and Mr. Charlie and come with us to Solis."
Shau Bandar sucks at the vial, outraged at her haughty superiority. With a spray of degage from his thumb ring, his pique passes. Her fieriness is good, he realizes, and he feels foolish for the flash of umbrage he felt. Her time in the Belt has clearly toughened her for the trek, and here, at last, is his chance
for a real story. On the synergistic surge of mead and olfact, an idea crystallizes for a true-life adventure series, a sequence of clips that will earn him his acne suite after all.
"Okay, jumper," he says in a mounting seethe of ambition. "Softcopy will, like this. There hasn't been a good trek story in a long time. I think we're going to make news."
Munk stands in tigerish shadows under overarching branches, staring across a spacious parkland of green sward and the flat of a pond molten with midday glare. Beyond the hedge fringe, the hills of Terra Tharsis look soft in the mauve shadow of a huge tower, while on farther hills the skylights of pavilions reflect the sun in hot motes.
Fish rise silently in the pond. Vivid, tiny birds spurt from a stand of white birches and stream away over tussocks of feathering At the far end of the sward, a loose cloud of people swirl, playing some kind of ball game. Small figures, some as couples, most in bunches, drift among the quilted shadows of the
tree-lumped fields. A forlorn music fritters from players in a distant grove.
Through his receptors, Munk listens to the crystal music of the city's silicon mind. He can hear the alien code logics chittering around him, and by their
noise he has successfully located all andrones in the vicinity and avoided them. Satisfied that none are near now, he tunes into a bramble of communications from the cars he sees twinkling on the causeways. They talk of games, foods, credits, raptures, meetings, morphings, rivalries, olfact recipes, music, humorous anecdotes, clade branchings, and barters. No mention of him or Mr. Charlie. Very little commerce is discussed. Perhaps that is all conducted in the skytowers, which are opaque to his sensors.
Tiny millions of lives are held in his gaze, he sees, scanning the hazy distances. Why have the Maat created so many lives? And so many kinds of
lives-all of them human yet virtually none that would be entirely recognizable to the human in the plasteel capsule at his feet. Mr. Charlie had lived in a society of gonads and ovaries, adrenals and dopamine receptors. What will he make of this Maat creation, where sex, fear, anger, and pain have mostly been morphed away?
This man must live. He must be brought to the vats and have his body restored. To fulfill these imperatives, Munk believes the Maat installed in him the anthrophilic C-P program, which, since his escape from the Moot, has been
gauging his options. He must leave Terra Tharsis as soon as possible, he knows. But first he has to find Jumper Nili-not out of any personal sense of loyalty. He feels none for her. She fulfilled her role in his plan on Phoboi Twelve,
liberating Mr. Charlie from the deceptions of Ares Bund. if she still desires to go on to Soils with him and Mr. Charlie, then it is her responsibility to locate and come to him.
Yet Munk is certain Mr. Charlie will want to see Jumper Nili when he is next brought to consciousness. After all, she is the first truly human being he encountered since his death, and Munk's anthropic model assures him that significant bonding between the two has already occurred. Somehow, he must find transportation for them across the wilds of Mars. Without the jumper, he could simply walk with the plasteel capsule in hand...