"Excuse me, androne," a frail voice calls from the shrubs behind Munk.
A tremor scathes the androne with the disturbing awareness that he has been
surprised. His internalized focus had locked up his alertness and left him inattentive to his surroundings. in the fraction of a second before he locates the source of the voice, he anguishes at this attention lag, indicative of the reduced capacity of his primary programming.
"Help me, please," a large, sandy-haired man says from where he lies doubled over in a bilbeny bush. He is wearing a chamois strap-jacket and brown cord trousers with scruffy blue boots.
"I.. . I fell. . long ways."
Atop burdock and vandal sprays of nettle far back in the hedgework, virtually hidden by the banked shrubs, gossamer wings lie torn and tangled. The shredded membranes are dissolving into iridescent fumes among the sun's bright coins. Already no more than coils of smoke, the straps from the fragile glider dangle where the stranger freed himself. Munk reads the dark track in the tufty grass from the man's strenuous effort to crawl into the bilberry bush, and the androne is appalled to realize that he has been standing beside this unconscious figure the whole time unawares.
"Who are you?" Munk asks, crouching over the fallen man.
"My name is Buddy." He looks up at the androne with a tight-sewn grimace. "Help me up. Please."
Munk scans Buddy's stout body, running his spatulate hands over the cramped muscles and detecting no broken bones. But there is a staticky sensation from numerous burst capillaries. "You are injured."
"No, just bruised." He swings an arm onto the androne's cowled shoulder and painfully unfolds upright. "I'll be all right."
Munk holds the powerfully built human steady and feels none of the microvoltage perturbations in the body's ultraweak soma field that would be indicative of profuse internal bleeding. He splays his hand over the skull and senses the slow, majestic theta rhythms of profound sleep or trance. "Your brain..
Buddy pulls his head back and stares at Munk with a square, careworn face, vague eyebrows sad-slanted on a thick brow above large, tristful gray eyes. "I feel-stunned."
"What happened?"
Buddy brushes his thin blond hair back with the trembly fingers of both hands. "Stupid mistake. I took night wings out for a day glide. The membranes burned up."
He rubs his dented jaw, and his pale, thin lips smile wryly. "I could have killed myself. Stupid."
"A nearly fatal blunder," Munk concurs politely, regarding the purplish silver wings shredding to vapors. With his sensors he sees that they are a film of polarized monocolloidals, a sheer and nearly transparent material that cannot reasonably be mistaken for solar-sturdy fabric. These wings had to have been purposively selected. And yet, his internalized anthropic model assures him, humans do have monstrous attention lags, not unlike what he himself just endured wondering about his destiny with Mr. Charlie. Sometimes, he knows, humans have their most fatal lags when they unconsciously desire their doom. "Are you unhappy?"
Buddy stops rubbing his jaw and leans closer, looking at him with a peculiar intensity. "You're-different. For an androne."
Munk regrets questioning this man. The androne's primary program has already been committed to carry Mr. Charlie to Solis, and he wishes now that he could turn off his C-P impulses, which are coaxing him to interact with this human before him. Despite himself, he says, "I'm Munk, from the Saturn system. The Maat have installed contra-parametrics that inspire my interest in people. That is what brought me here. And that is why I am talking with you."
Buddy gives a slow nod of understanding. "Munk, can I lean on you? I want to try to walk." With the androne's help, he manages several tentative steps. "The thermals are strong today. They slowed my descent. And I steered for the trees to break my fall. I am an unhappy man, Munk-but not ready to die. At least, not consciously."
Munk's primary program feels he has heard enough and must remove himself so that he may fulfill his initial objective. But his C-P incentive insists on more data. "What saddens you?" the androne asks, letting the bruised man try a few wobbly steps on his own.
Buddy shrugs, offers a plaintive smile. "I don't know. This all seems so pointless sometimes. The usual plaint."
"Don't olfacts mitigate your plaint?"
"I'm an old one, Munk. I've been here a long time. Even olfacts have their limits." He lowers himself achingly to the grass and notices the plasteel capsule in a root cove of a nearby tree. "What's that?".
"An archaic brain. I am taking him to Soils, to the vats there. His name is
Mr. Charlie."
Buddy groans as he leans closer to peer at the capsule. "I see him. All the goods are there. Brainstem, too. How old?"
"At least a millennium."
Buddy blows a silent whistle, sits up, and wipes the sweat of his exertion from his broad brow. "I thought I was around a long time."
"How old are you, Buddy?"
"Damn old-but not that old. Where'd you find Mr. Charlie?"
"I have already told you too much," Munk acknowledges, finally supressing his C-P compulsion with the awareness that he is threatening this man. "I am in violation of the Moot. Further association with me may put you in danger. Since you seem recovered from your fall, I will leave you here, Buddy."
"Don't go yet. Finding you has been a great stroke of luck for me." Buddy squints at Munk with a querying and pained expression. "Do andrones believe much in luck?"
"No. My anthropic model includes luck as a vital faith that people have experienced throughout human history, but I believe such superstition demeans people."
"Yes." Buddy sighs and with his heavy hands strokes the grass as if it were fur. "The old ones have said that luck is the child of mystery and fear. But I subscribe to it anyway, fool that I am." His wide face flexes with pain as he leans backward on his elbows. "Tell me your story, Munk. I accept full responsibility for what may come of it. Please."
The plangent expression in the man's blond face quiets Munk's anxiety, but he can find no reason to confide anything more. "I must go now, Buddy. Be well."
"Wait, Munk." in the sunslant through the branches that strikes his
ginger-haired and freckled head, Buddy's eye-sockets look dragonish. "You said you're on your way to Solis and you've violated the Moot. Security may be looking for you. I know the city very well. I can help you avoid them. I can take you to a discreet egress where you can enter the wilds without being observed. An androne of your obvious durability can make the famous trek on foot." His sketchy eyebrows bend more sadly. "Please, tell me your story. I can help you."
Buddy's plangent voice reactivates Munk's C-P program, and for a full second the androne struggles with this decision. In that time, he calls forth the new data he recorded in the Moot when Charles's memory-cull records were displayed in coded spectra. Among those thousand-year-old memories are ideas that inspire Munk to transcend his primary programming yet again and trust in the
creative-what he had always called the unexpected-to find for him new ways through the veils of the world.
Imagination, Munk tells himself within his capacious one-second arena of contemplation. Around that one word he constellates useful information from Charles's memory cull, which tells him that imagination is the psychic process that transforms the pain and limitations of the purely physical. "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul." Those are the words of William Blake, a poet Charles admires.
In the all-inclusive imagination, where circumference does not exist, uncertainty is renovated and becomes sacred, indivisible, impenetrable, unified with all that his primary program usually rejects, with everything ugly, fierce, and cruel. This unity of opposites, of matter and imagination, primary