brainshadow and the silvery net that sustains it. The idea strikes her that she can talk directly with this man using the electrodes in the net and the signal processors of the core chamber.
With a feeling of eerie portent, she returns the brain to the frustrum. She goes quickly to the switch box and, using filament brushes from the tool unit of her jetpak, connects the core chamber with her comlink. 'Mr. Charlie, can you hear me?'
'Aye, yet strange you sound.'
'It's the translator,' Mei explains, relieved to hear a human voice again, no matter how comically distorted. 'It must be having difficulty converting your archaic language.'
'I be black in the kingdom of the blind!'
'I'll try and make some adjustments.' She attempts tapping into the powerful logic boards of the controller plates, hoping she didn't damage them too badly in her collision. 'I'm going to get us out of here, Mr. Charlie. But first I'm
going to see if I can fuse the transmitter units in your support system with the translator mode in my comlink-my compact communications system. That way we can talk once I remove you from the core chamber.'
'What heinous wickedy-split plans have you toward me?'
'I mean you no harm,' Mei answers, tediously struggling to find the right pathways among the circuits. She subvocalizes her curses, not wanting the archaic brain to hear her frustration. 'I'm taking you to Solis to grow you a new body-a whole and beautiful body-if we can get away from here.'
'Much virtue in if,' Charles says mournfully. 'With broodful nod, proceed. What choice for a miser in a poor house?'
'Right.' The pinhead bulb atop her filament brush flickers, then lights up, indicating she has opened a new pathway among the microswitches. 'Okay! I think I've got it. Am I coming across more clearly, Mr. Charlie?'
'Yes, a lot clearer,' a soft voice comes over her comlink. 'You sound intelligible again.'
She blows a satisfied sigh and slides to the floor. 'Now all we have to do is get out of here without getting killed.' She closes her eyes, reaching inward
for the rageful strength that has carried her this far from the reservation. 'It must seem ironic to you,' she says quietly, 'to have survived all this time only to wake up and discover your life is in jeopardy.'
'It's not a happy feeling,' the archaic mind admits. 'I've been disoriented since I've woken up. Can you tell me what year this is?'
'Time isn't marked that way anymore, Mr. Charlie. I mean, on Earth there are still standard years, each with three hundred sixty-five and a quarter days. But each community has its own reckoning based upon its origin. On the reservation where I come from, we were in the year seven hundred forty-eight when I left.'
'So I've been dead over seven hundred years,' he says in a whisper so faint it is almost only a thought.
'Longer than that, probably. Our reservation was one of the most recent. What did you call the year when you lived?'
'I died in the twenty-first century. Does that mean anything to you?' 'No. I only know that the archaic age had its own reckonings for time.
Religious ones, I think.'
'Yes. Maybe you can tell me when the archaic age ended.'
'I don't really know. I mean, I wasn't much interested in history. Do you know about the Maat?'
'No.'
'Sometimes they're called neo-sapiens. They're what became of humanity after we mapped the human genome and amplified our intelligence.'
'The next evolutionary step,' Charles says with startled understanding. 'The step we take for ourselves.' Then, his voice rises to a puzzled lilt, 'But why are you here? Why isn't everyone Maat?'
'Who knows? Maybe the Maat like diversity. Before they went underground, they founded the reservations, not just for people but for many life-forms. My reservation was one of the last they set up. I'm pretty sure they'd already been around for over a century by then. So you must have been dead for-well, for almost a thousand years.'
Charles is silent, and Mei does not disturb his profound quiet for a long moment. During the interminable time he had spent locked in the virtual space of the ore processor's command core, he has had ample time to mull over his past
and visit with the ghosts of those he knew in his first lifetime, now all long dead. He has no regrets about leaving them behind, where they bad wanted to stay. But knowing how long they have been ghosts, how long he has lain dormant awaiting this vital moment, pervades him with an appalling sense of his own
transience. He yearns deeply for the return of his senses so that he might grasp and smell and see the moment-by-moment reality he has traveled a thousand years to experience.
Mei's edginess becomes unbearable, and she must break the silence. 'Do you wish now you hadn't frozen yourself?'
'No-no, not at all.' He speaks in a hush, his awe palpable. 'I knew there were great risks. I knew it might be frightful here. I-I wanted to see it for myself. I only wish now I had eyes.'
'You will,' Mei answers brightly. 'And you'll have your whole body, too. The vats in Solis will shape you just as you were-or with modifications, if you want.'
'Solis-where is that?'
'On Mars. Not far from here. It's a human community. They strive to maintain the old values. They'll appreciate
