"Call Munk, dammit."
The reporter fidgets with his cuff switches and is shaking his head bewildered when the first figures shamble up the embankment. Against the sky's last opal cracks of light they are hunched, hooded silhouettes wielding pipes and clubs. Their sudden shrieks snap Shau's fixation with his cuff controls, and he rears
back in fright.
"Damn! They must have cut the power cables to the skimway."
Mei reaches across him and pulls down his door, slapping the lock into place. "Get Munk on the comlink, Bandar. Do it!"
Shau complies with trembling fingers. "Munk! Munk! Androne, are you reading?" Ten big mongrel morphs leap about the car, slamming their clubs on the plastic
dome. With the third blow it cracks, and with the next one it shatters into a splash of molecular dust. Whoops and hollers flap into the night, and large, splayed, four-fingered hands reach in and yank the passengers from the car.
Mei tucks her knees and kicks out with all her might, pushing free of her assailant. She twists to the ground and scuttles on all fours. But two other morphs seize her arms, and she's hoisted upright to see Shau flopped facedown on the hood of the car, the hulking bandits tearing off his jacket and his rings. His mouth is wide with pain and fear, his teeth black with blood. One of the morphs grabs the reporter's long braid of hair and jerks his head back. Another slides a curve of blade under Shau's straining throat.
"No!" Mei screams.
Delirious hollers carom shrilly into the night, warbling into howls at the sight of the slim jumper writhing between her captors.
Beads of dark blood appear under Shau Bandar's jaw, and his eyes swivel wildly in their sockets. He groans in thick guttural bursts, pleading for his life.
Up from the embankment where the morphs first appeared, a silver cowl rises, cloaking a darkness with no face. "S-ss-s-t!" the androne directs a hypercompressed packet of sound waves at the morph holding the knife, and the blade wrenches free and clatters into the car.
"Let them go," Munk commands in a thunderous voice.
The morphs drop Mei and release Shau, then rapidly scatter, dissolving into the darkness with tattered whines and aimless cries. A moment later, a pipe wings out of the dark, slashing toward where Mei has risen to one knee. The androne bounds forward in a chrome streak and plucks the projectile out of the air less than a meter from the jumper's head. With a deft wrist snap, the pipe whirls whistling back into the night and finds a mortal shriek.
"I came as quickly as I could," Munk says, helping Mei to her feet. "I heard your distress on the link."
"Help Bandar," she says. "He's been cut."
"I'm okay," Shau declares tartly. He holds a shred of his shirt to the superficial cut at his throat and glares wrathfully into the dark where the morphs retreated. "They slashed my dignity more than my flesh. Gruesome things! They're distorts, not people. They must be destroyed."
"Who are they?" Mei asks, rubbing feeling back into her wrists.
"I tell you, they're distorts," Shau croaks with anger. "There's no real law
in the Outlands. Rogues run their own vats out here and morph gangs of homicidal brutes-distorts--to protect their territories. Sometimes the distorts range wildly. The posses that hunt them down are always a popular run in the news clips."
Mei puts a hand on the plasteel capsule under the androne's arm. "Munk, where have you been? Why did you run away?"
"You know why I fled with Mr. Charlie."
"I know," she says, drearily. "Your C-P program."
"Yes. Since Phoboi Twelve, I can actually hear my imagination as loudly as my primary programming. I could not bear to imagine what Sitor Ananta wanted to do with Mr. Charlie. I know it would have been clearly inhumane."
Shau thumps his sandaled foot against the skim plate of the car, irate that he lost his jacket and recording mantle and with them his chance to report on an androne with a human spirit. "Now look! I have to get a new link. I lost everything!"
"Do you at least know where we're going?" Mei asks testily, approaching him. She peeks under his jaw to view the wound and sees only a gray smear of blood in the dark.
"Of course I do," he answers defensively and nudges her away with some
annoyance. "Raza's. It's just down the bluff. But we can't ride there The distorts cut the damn power cables. And even if they hadn't, we can't operate this car without the credit patch in my jacket."
"Buddy has a rental car," Munk suggests. "I met him in Terra Tharsis. He helped me to get out. But I had to leave him behind when your distress call came. He couldn't move fast enough."
"Where is he?" Mei asks.
"About sixty-three kilometers down the Avenue of Limits."
"You ran sixty kilos from the time I called you?" the reporter asks.
"I can move much faster than that," Munk replies modestly, "but there are structures to avoid on the Avenue. And it is warm here. My coolant system was nearly overtaxed."
"You must have spent a lot of power," Mei notes. Despite herself, she can't help admiring the androne's spunk, at the very least.
"Yes. I depleted fifty-two percent of my power cells to get here quickly. But the expenditure was required."
Shau heartily agrees. "I'll say! They were going to kill us."
"But how are we going to charge your cells?" Mei places a concerned hand on the androne's breastplate and feels the dew-chill of it. "We have no credits."
"Get me to a link," Shau says, "and we'll see what Softcopy can do."
"I have already contacted Buddy," Munk acknowledges. "He says he will meet us at Rey Raza's garage. It's only a few kilometers from here. I will carry the two of you."
"And me without my damn recorder!" Shau kicks the car's skim plate again. "This would have been the perfect lead-in!"
Munk spends a moment adding this behavior to his anthropic model. Mr. Charlie had declared that we all live by our fictions, and here is a bleeding man who grieves for the story he has lost. Mei Nili herself has an incredulous look on her face, as if she is convinced a life can be overremembered.
The androne regards them both with quiet satisfaction, proud that he has preserved two dewdrop lives from the void. Staring at these human creatures his strength has kept whole, he feels right. He knows this feeling is the cyberkinesis of his C-P program, his own subjectivity, but that doesn't seem to matter.
He feels a mutual kinship with Jumper Nili's cool detachment and the reporter's hot ambition. He yearns to see Mr. Charlie, the ancestor of his maker, whole before him. And yet-and yet, he is an androne. His yearning is the calm fury of his maker.
He remembers floating in the delicious cold of farside Saturn, tiny in the penumbra of the gas giant, knowing that he knew he was a programmed being. He experienced an echo of that humbling smallness under the immense vallation of Terra Tharsis. And now here, again, he knows he is becoming an accident, like everything else.
Jumper Nili has seen something become nothing when her family died, and he almost saw that tonight. He has never witnessed a human death. The very thought oozes with unhappiness and makes him recall that there are light-years of silence surrounding him. That fact mutes his sadness.
Once again, he determines that he will defend these frail residues of human life with all the strength in his power cells. That pleases him, or at least makes him less unhappy with his smallness under the tumultuous sky and the slowness of time.
Clutching Charles Outis between them, Mei Nili and Shau Bandar ride in the embrace of Munk's arms. They bound over the main artery past hip-roofed sheds, gaunt storage towers, oxide-stained corrugated fences, weathered warehouses, a graveyard of rust-gutted drums, and desolate crossroads grimly empty under the blazon of lux wires. At the reporter's command, they stop before a wide garage with a pyramid of latticed metal on the roof and a. circular sign hanging above the open port announcing:
RAZA'S TOURS OF THE WILDS.
Within the tall port of the garage are three big sand rovers, painted a glaring white with RAZA stenciled in red on the vent-ribbed runners. Slender