"What do you mean?" Mei breaks away from the androne who is leading her. "Buddy's coming with me. He's a human-an old one."
"I am sorry."
She approaches Buddy, who looks at her wistfully. "We part here," he says.
Head tilted, she stares closely at him, searching for traits she could not have missed in their harrowing days in the wilds-the static blur of a semblor, the clade signs of pupil shape and finger count. He seems profoundly
human-though he has always displayed the quiescent alertness of a human biot-an organic androne. "Who are you?" she insists.
"Forgive me for telling you this way, but I am of the Maat," he confides. "We are not permitted to enter Solis."
Mei blinks back her surprise. "You're joking!"
"Go with Mr. Charlie," he counsels, pointing to the androne with the plasteel capsule in his arms. "And take Shau with you. I'll stay with Munk and see that he's revived."
A dizzy astonishment shoves through her as she tries to remember anything at all exceptional about this man. From the time the water cycler broke down three days ago, he suffered too, and she scowls with disbelief. "I-I thought you had powers."
"Not to strike water from rocks," he smiles. "At least, not without the right hardware. You'd better go now, or you'll get separated from Mr. Charlie."
"Will I see you again?" she asks, backing away. He waves and smiles with a soft, languid sorrow.
Munk wakes up on a ferric precipice overlooking the spangling starfire of Solis. Instantly he knows where he is and, by comparing the angle and inclination of the sun to his last reading, exactly how much time has elapsed since his power cells emptied. He sharp-focuses on Buddy, who is sitting on a flat boulder watching him quietly through the clear veil of his statskin. The scout-class andrones who recharged him retreat with their cables and clamps toward a silver balloon lashed to a utility gondola. The musical clangor of the winch retracting the chains, nets, and grapnel hooks that carried him here bong and clank dully in the thin atmosphere.
Buddy relates all that has happened since Munk lost consciousness. He concludes by pointing to the harlequin fields of reflector domes and colorful pressure tents on the perimeter of the city, where those denied admission squat. The tent city looks squalid with its patchwork fabrics and its cheap solar mills glinting from atop ragged canopies like tinsel pinwheels. "We've been left out here with the rejects-you because you were never human and me because I am the wrong kind of human."
Sudden fear tightens Munk's field of awareness. None of his sensors detect any sign that Buddy is other than a feral man, though he knows if he touches his cranium he will feel the slow benthic rhythms of a tranced consciousness. From the first, he knew Buddy was cortically augmented, but he has assumed the man
was made less, not more. He decides to speak his fear. "You are Maat?"
Buddy nods gently. "I'm on a mission. I'm supposed to deliver this man to here-to these camps."
Munk scans the miserable clutter of storm-battered tents. "He may die here." "He may well," Buddy accedes. "Or he may flourish as our view of his future
indicates. But the timelines are closed for him in Terra Tharsis." "Why?"
With a comradely smile, Buddy rises and approaches the androne. "You like this person I am inhabiting, don't you?"
"He is a human. My C-P program-"
"For whatever reason," Buddy says kindly, a gloved hand touching the androne's alloy arm. "You like him. So you will not interfere with his development. When I leave him here, you will not muddle with his life. You will go your own way. As
I must."
Overhead, the repair andrones' gondola floats by, the silver balloon trawling into the morning breeze. Munk does not budge his attention from the forlorn man before him. "My sensors do not detect any foreign organism in this man. If you are what you say, where are you?"
"I'm here as an energy pattern in his brain," Buddy replies. "When he attempted to kill himself with the night wings, I came into his body to save
him." "Why?"
Buddy barks a laugh. "Your C-P program is insatiable." He walks to the crumbly edge of the precipice where a vague track wends past the balesome camp and downward among vermilion boulders toward the sunny buildings. "Walk with me, Munk, and we will talk about freedom and destiny."
Mei Nili sways gently in a pressure sling strung between two lux stanchions. While the pressure bags cocooning her left arm and thigh perfuse electrolytic fluid into her blood flow to remedy her dehydration, she gazes across the flagstone colonnade to where Charles Outis is being examined by several utilitarian scanner drones. She has yet to see a human being.
The colonnade where the andrones have hung her is lushly green as any dream den, and she thinks it may actually be biotectured. Apart from the lux fixtures and maroon flagstones, the area looks genetically designed: The buttress roots of huge trees partition the colonnade into separate chambers. Fern curtains and
moss veils hang from the high galleries, where flame-bright birds click and fret and occasionally screech. If she peers upward through the green levels and rocks her head, she believes she can see the texture of the filter dome she knows must be there.
Mei turns her attention back to Charles, in the nave across from her. The scanner andrones have attached him to an elaborate weave of psyonic hardware.
She wonders if this is the same equipment the caravan lugged. A camera array has been erected above the plasteel capsule in its chromatic mesh of filament bundles, and Mei takes this as a sign that Charles is okay and these will be his eyes.
So intently does she watch the andrones' ministrations, she does not notice the figure who has stepped to the foot of her sling until he speaks: "Solis welcomes you."
Mei startles and sits up on an elbow to see the effeminate face of the
Commonality agent she had encountered at the Moot. "You're-"
"Sitor Ananta." A corner of his mouth smiles, but his caramel eyes study her mirthlessly. "I arrived from our mother planet days ago. I've been waiting for you."
"We're outside the Commonality and the Pashalik," Mei reminds him. "You have no authority here."
"I need no authority here." His smile sharpens. "Solis makes much of being a free state. I am here as an individual, Jumper Nili, as are you. And we will both act as individuals, won't we?"
Mei forces herself to calmness by subvocalizing a panic-management chant. She must get free of the sling to defend herself, but when her hand moves to unstrap the pressure bags, Sitor Ananta lays a moist hand on hers.
"That won't be necessary," he informs her, wetting his lips with his tongue, tasting the air around her. The avidity in his tawny eyes chills the pith of her. "I cannot stay long. The reception agents want to meet you-not andrones this time, but the free and simple people of Soils, free of olfacts and simpletons of the olfactual science that is my art."
Mei unstraps her arm and leg and wipes the back of her hand on the sling. "You can't wipe it off," he says, shaking his head and pinching his chin
ruefully. "It's already entered your blood."
She rolls out of the sling and pushes pugnaciously close, ready to block or punch. "What've you put in me?" she asks hotly.
His creamy smile does not flinch. "A mild euphoric-this time." He points a finger at her nose, and she hops backward.
In midstep, the haptic drug swells into her brain, and the edge of her anger dulls. She hears the plash of rivulets and small waterfalls from somewhere among the giant trees, and the cedary cinnamon of the tree smoke expands her sinuses. This eases the thumping of her heart, and she regards the Commonality agent with calmness and dignity.
He doesn't appear as threatening now that she is standing. He's slender,
almost frail, a shimmery wraith in silken, flouncy green chemise and white baggy
slacks cut at midshin to display crimson-trimmed black socks and slippers. When he moves, his terrene body drifts with balletic ease in the lighter gravity, and he seems nearly insubstantial.