Munk arches around to regard her with his abstract face. 'Believe me, I care more than you can know. That has always been my foible. You see, Jumper Nili, like all andrones of my class, I was manufactured by the Maat.'
That word has a stark sound to her. The Maat created the reservations. The
Maat promised life eternal and happiness. The Maat lied. At least in her life, they are a cruel weakness that own the illusion of limitless power.
'The Maat built me to help transfer material from the ring system of Saturn to the thrust station off Titan,' Munk continues. 'I am only a common laborer. But, like every androne in the Maat work force, I have been endowed with a
contra-parameter program, a C-P skill, that remains dormant until
self-activated. That skill might be anything from a talent for waxwork sculpture to an ability to compute massive prime numbers. Who knows why the Maat bother with these special and nonutilitarian files? Who knows why the Maat do anything? Oftentimes, the C-P program interferes with an androne's job and results in the unit's obsolescence. I have seen that happen several times-a perfectly
functional androne distracted and made useless by one of these antic obsessions. All andrones have heard of it happening. Consequently, few of us ever dare open our C-P file.
'I labored a long time in the ring system without any interest in my file. Then, a fellow androne-a receptor- class unit, a 'she'-who worked on Titan accepting the data input of the various laborers and coordinating our efforts, dared open her C-P program and discovered in it an imprinted predilection for ordering tones in temporal succession that broke time into unusual and often unpredictable sequences-a talent for music. She began broadcasting these unique, self-evolving patterns, and quite by surprise, I found myself enjoying the music.'
'Are you trying to make a point?' Mei interrupts, methodically crisscrossing her flight straps and hooking them to the wall clips to form a crude hammock. 'Why don't you just tell me straight out why you care about this Mr. Charlie?'
'I will. Listen. It was music that inspired me to open my own C-P program. When I did, I discovered I was possessed of an intense, if inexplicable,
interest in the aboriginal hominid precursor of the Maat-homo sapiens. I patched into the Commonality data network to learn everything I could about these creatures I had never seen. My memory allocation files burgeoned with human information-anatomy, anthropology, history-wholly purposeless data for my work routines, yet because of my C-P program, I found them irresistibly consuming.
'By request, I was transferred from the Saturn system to the Belt, where I came to work for Apollo Combine. Here I met my first humans-you among them. I tried to explain all this to you when I attempted to interview you with the others. But you'll recall you weren't interested. And that interested me all the more. Your grief set you apart from the others. That is something I want to explore further-'
'Look, Munk, I'm not asking about my grief. I want to know why the hell you're risking my life to get to Phoboi Twelve to keep a human brain from getting sliced. What do you care? And why the hell should I care?'
'I told you. I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human beings. Naturally, when I received the distress broadcast from an archaic human-a human that walked the Earth before the Maat-I knew at once I had to go to him.'
'And me? Why am I along for the ride?'
'I need your help. There are others who will get there ahead of me. But they are andrones, like myself. Surely they will only further bewilder this archaic man. He will need human contact. And so, I need you.'
Munk pauses to give time for Mei's human brain to absorb all he has said.
There is only one more question to answer, but he waits for her to ask and while waiting corrects again the flight path of The Laughing Life.
'If we get Mr. Charlie,' Mei finally asks, 'then what? Where can we go with him?'
'Solis.'
Mei straps into her hammock and hugs herself. 'I was hoping you'd say that,' she whispers. She smiles, a wan, quiet smile. 'It really is the only place we
can go now, isn't it? Solis.' it has a holy ring to her ears. Since the terrible tragedy, since the beginning of her grief, Solis has been her succor. That is
the last refuge of her heart in the kingdom of death. From the first, she was
struck with how appropriate it was that this community, independent of the Commonality, should exist in the midst of so much lifelessness. The doom of her family had made her life a wasteland, and Solis was its temple. That was why she had to leave Earth after the tragedy. On Earth no one was supposed to die. Disease and old age had been defeated long ago by the Maat. No one had to die-or so she had believed until the voice of thunder reached across the mountains of the reservation and the village of her childhood disappeared in a black tomb of shattered slate.
'I know you tried to go to Solis after your family died,' Munk goes on. 'I
know they turned you away.'
Behind her glassy stare, Mei Nili remembers the loathing she experienced after the numbness of shock and grief began to thin. She came to loathe Earth for its
arrogant beauty, its fields of goldenrod and monarch butterflies, its sycamore shadows and flights of cormorant, its dark groves of mossy oak, its shimmering alder slopes and barberry meadows and daisies everlasting. It sickened her. And she yearned for the dead spaces-yet even in the desert, yucca bloomed,
bright-beaded lizards danced, thunderheads promenaded in fragrant, purpled veils.
The emptiness of space beckoned, and she left Earth gladly. But the lunar colonies and the garden communities on the moon offered no relief, for the water planet hung in the sky flaunting its blue and feathery beauty. Only when the flight of her grief took her to the dead planet Mars did she begin to feel kinship again and some small glimmer of her heart.
