programming and uncertainty, beauty and ugliness-this, the ancient memories inform him, is where mind reabsorbs reality into a new wholeness. Then the fiery expenditure of energy that is our imagination and that makes us creative enables us to endure uncertainty, to tread emptiness, to be-human.
The crimson light in Munk's lens bar brightens, and as one soul reaching out to another, he tells Buddy his story.
Shau Bandar leads Mei Nili away from the beverage stall and the busy skim route and along an oak-cloistered promenade past water groves and hanging gardens and squat cottages behind flowering hedgerows to a cobbled lane. The lane climbs beside a gurgeling water rill through red-gold beechwoods, where other bungalows peek out. Staring up, Mei sees the stony trail wending ever higher toward bosky obscurities of pine and fir and the onyx immensity of a skytower.
"Here's my place," the reporter announces, stepping past a gnarled mimosa tree and opening a blistered wooden gate rhombic from wear. A flagstone path snakes among walnut trees and a billowy mass of frangipani to a grassy shelf and a
lean, high, gabled house, ramshackle and nearly grown over with rock roses and creeping juniper. "Actually, it may not be mine much longer. I owe more on it than I make, and I'm probably going to have to give it up and live in the cells for a while. Unless, of course," he winks at her, "the copy office buys our trek series."
They pass a birdbath choked with dead leaves and a sundial knocked askew,
climb slanted, creaking steps, and enter a dark, musty interior. Filament lights woven into the sagging ceiling flicker on, illuminating bare cubicles with buckled, water-stained walls. A hammock hangs in one corner, a tatty magnification of the cobwebs elsewhere in the room. In another corner tilts a splintery wardrobe.
Shau Bandar reads the uneasiness in Mei's open face. She is such a blatant provincial, he feels no embarrassment and admits, "I don't merit this house. It belonged to a renowned composer who moved up to a grander niche and left his place to friends. I eventually came to it through a friend of a friend of a friend. It sucks up all my credits and leaves nothing for me to maintain it. But it's haunted with music, and I like that."
He lifts a shroud from a low table beneath an oval rose-glass window and exposes a palm-sized oblong bubble packed with bright chromatic sections of data wafers. "This is the communications link to the copy office. Seen one of these before? It's a total immersion hookup, so it'll seem as if we're actually at the copy office while in fact we're still here. Try not to move around too much or you might walk into a wall. I'll tune us in, and we'll make our pitch."
With a wave of his hand over the bubble, he activates the linkage, and suddenly the shabby room is gone and they are in the ice-pale clarity of Softcopy's editorial suite. Under a dome of champagne-tint plastic overpeering the glittering gorges of the skytowers, people in multihued scapulars mill around cube screens meshing together segments for the next news-clip feedout. The full-view screens display the usual fare for the anthro commune:
interactive neighborhood tours and encounters, sport synergies, gardening tutors, and the big mainstay of the agency, midstim fantasies, which appear as abstract pastiches of sculptural colors. Mei recognizes those from the dream den in the recreational arcade on Deimos and feels a pang of yearning for the neural dream-swatches that each brain tailors to its own desires.
"Bandar, this is not a good time for hashout," says a big-boned woman with silver wing-braided hair and bold streaks of feather paint on her cheeks. "We've got a fast run on a scootball tournament, and I haven't got ten seconds. Hey, isn't this the rogue jumper?"
"Jumper Nili, this is my editor, Bo Rabana-"
"Sweet!" Bo Rabana says, displaying her pudgy palms, then swirling about inside her solar-yellow smock, talking over her shoulder. "I'll open a cube for you, and we'll get your clip out on the next run."
"Bo, she's not here for an interview. We're pitching a trek. Soils."
"The scootball's on a fast run," Bo says, pivoting on the balls of her bare
feet. "We'll talk later."
"We need a go now, right now," Shau Bandar insists, sliding closer. "Moot security is looking for the androne the jumper came in with. Remember?"
"Right, right. The Chiliad Man. Great clip. It had a strong run. We can replay when they catch him."
"Wait, Bo. Listen. The androne's going to take the Chiliad Man to Soils with the jumper. They're falling out now, as outlaws. I want to cover it. It'll be a hot series. Give me the go." Bo Rabana settles onto her heels, her cherubic face looking suddenly heavier. "Bandar, are you serious?"
"I know it's high risk-"
"You can die in the wilds!" Bo Rabana's pale shatterglass eyes grow wide. "I
don't want that on me. Do the interview."
"It's not on you, Bo. It's me. I need the credits-"
"Get a Pashalik job and triple your credits," the editor says, backing off. "Don't throw your life away."
"Bo," he says with a dark change of voice, "if Softcopy won't back me, I'll plug in to Erato. They'll snap up a trek story."
Rabana's shoulders sag and she steps closer, a stem crease between her startling eyes. "You don't know what you're asking." She turns her fierce gaze
on Mei. "You look like a hard-knuckler to me. Have you tried to tell this pastry puff what it's really like outside the bakery?"
"I don't give a damn what he does," Mei says in chilled, flat tones. "He has the link to the androne I came in with. Make him give me that, and I'm gone."
"I'm going on this trek," Shau Bandar insists. "It's a big story. It'll have a long run, and I want those credits. Do I get your go or not?"
"Once you leave Terra Tharsis," Rabana reminds him with a taut stare, "you can't come back."
"Sure, I can, Bo, if you give me a journalist's pass."
Bo Rabana lifts her dimpled chin defiantly. "I can't give you a pass, wise guy, until I file your assignment-and once we file, Moot security will be on to your plan to help the rogue androne. You'll never get out. The only way you can take this trek is cold-no pass."
The reporter gives a hapless shrug. "You can file after I leave."
"There's no guarantee that will be accepted," Bo retorts sourly. "You may never be able to come back-even if you survive the wilds, which I doubt, pastry puff. Do the interview. We'll hash out other assignments for you. You'll make your house payments." She turns away and bobs off, calling behind, "Stay sweet as you are, Jumper Nili. I've got a hot run going on the scootball. We'll touch up later."
"I'm doing the trek, Rabana'" Shau Bandar shouts, though inside he's trembling. "Do I get the go from you, or do I plug into Erato?"
"It's your scrawny ass, Bandar," the editor yells without looking back.
"Top credit? Full series?" he calls through a triumphant laugh that carries off his initial fright.
"If you live to collect," she shoots back. From the prospect of the knoll where he crashed, Buddy stares at the dark towers. Wide and mingled as mountains, with sunny windswept pieces of sky squeezed between them, they fill
space majestically. In their vitreous black depths, laser lines streak the paths of droplifts. Silver-spun threads of skim paths tangle around their bases, and flyers star-glint in the pellucid air of their heights.
Of course, he is thinking that those are the heights from which he has
fallen-and within those vitreous black depths are the spaces where he has lived with the deathless ones alone together. Closer, Munk is telling of The Laughing Life and the viperous Aparecida, and how Jumper Nili gambled her life on his C-P program. And though Buddy is listening, he is listening deeper to the freedom of his nightmare, the fright dream that strapped him in to night wings for a day glide and that sent him plummeting into the incalculable abyss.