He follows, sick with fear. If the security androne challenges him., he knows he will not submit. He doesn't want to kill anything ever, ever again. Aparecida's silhouette slouches out of the liquid shadows of the tufty canes. No, it's the flutter of an attention gap-fear usurping his imagination. The silhouette is the thermal halo from a covey of birds seeking shade and insects.
Munk stares up at the underbellies of the trees, and the internal faces he sees cut in the leaf patterns convince him to shunt his imagination and revert to simple motor programming. Quickly, he crashes through the canes, closing the gap between himself and Buddy, until he is running in precision tandem a few centimeters behind the man.
When he exits the thicket in this alert, neutral state, Munk sees without any emotion the security androne guarding the droplift. The sentinel resembles an armorial statue, a human figure in transparent cuirass with a turtle-browed, mirror-flat mask. A hanging garden of rocky outcrops and flowery cascades rises above the droplift, a marble cupola in a grove of black, tapered poplars. The billowy indigo shine of the droplift glosses the marble ramp and even glows on the dewy sward where the sentinel stands unmoving.
Without hesitation, Buddy walks across the lawn and past the guard toward the droplift. Munk stays in close lockstep, until they reach the security androne. He pauses, unable to move. No physical force holds him. It's his own deep-level fascination that's immobilized him.
He snaps out of simple motor programming and realizes that he has stopped because some part of him recognizes this androne. A swift search shows that Charles encountered andrones much like this one when he was first revived on Earth. Their masks carried watery reflections of faces.
A face now appears in the fiat pan of the mask-the soft, roguish features of Sitor Ananta. 'You are in violation of Commonality law, Androne Munk. Return Mr. Charlie at once to the Commonality agent in Terra Tharsis.'
'Munk!' Buddy calls. 'Let's go.'
Munk hurries to Buddy's side. 'Sitor Ananta came through that androne.' 'Ignore him,' Buddy says and strides over to the directory, a plastic cube
balanced on one point. Ice-green vapors spiral at its core, faster and brighter at the touch of his hand and the plasteel capsule. 'The Commonality has no jurisdiction in Terra Tharsis, Solis, or the wilds between them.'
Munk reads the code lights in the cube and sees that Buddy has ordered a short droplift, up and over the wall. Reassured by this simple route, he follows the
man into the indigo light of the cupola and hears no more the thriving, brittle music of the city's silicon mind.
Shau Bandar leaves his credit cuff on the lacquered table in the narrow house haunted by music. The cuff is useless outside the city. He looks around a last time at the faded walls with their pastel print of lobster pots and cacti. Someone else now will have to make sense of that or redecorate. No one is allowed to hold property in Terra Tharsis if they leave, even temporarily, and though he's unhappy about giving up this house, he's excited by his
decisiveness. He is finally making something grand of his life. He tells himself that when he returns he'll have enough credits for a house twice as large and each room replete with the most expensive shapeshift furniture.
He bounds down the cricketing steps of the skinny house without looking back and meets Mei Nili among the walnut trees, where she's been waiting while he spent his last moment with the house. 'Are you sure you want to do this?' she asks gruffly. 'I have nothing to lose, but I'm not so sure about you.'
'Never more sure of anything,' he answers and briskly leads the way along the sinuous flagstone path. He salutes the skewed sundial and clogged birdbath and barges through the crooked gate. On the walk down the stony lane beside the creek, he explains that Softcopy has arranged for a droplift to the Outlands where a skim car will take them to the caravansary. All expenses are covered. 'There's always credit available for an insider willing to risk everything on the outside. Even a lazy, impoverished lichen like me will get a big run in the news clips.'
'Especially if you die,' Mei points out.
The journalist agrees with a fatalistic shrug. 'It's the biggest thrill of all-the shadow of death.'
On the walk through the oak cloisters down to the pave, Shau Bandar talks nervously about what lies ahead, recounting news clips of caravans eaten by sandstorms and shreeks, voracious, bristle-fanged biots created in the vats of Solis to scavenge the wilds and discourage pilgrims.
Mei only half listens, attentive to the supernatural beauty of the hills. She has had to relearn the future too often since she last felt beauty. She has no idea where or even if she will be tomorrow, but for now, the heavenward towers and the shafts of sunmist on the hazy, cluttered hillsides are enough.
Autumnal shimmers of wind sweep the pave with smoked brightness and a radiant chill. Mei is still staring up at the gusty heights of sparkling onyx when Shau leads her into a tight alley. In the dark, a boast of indigo light breathes.
The city's vallation is a four-kilometer-high rampart, twelve spans deep. It rims the caldera brink of Olympus Mons, enclosing the great skytowers of Terra Tharsis and their hillside purlieus. The barrier has the seamlessly smooth and black-green luster of jasper but is composed of a Maat alloy impervious to sensors. The mirror-vanes atop the encircling parapet serve as both detectors and signal scramblers so that from outside the vallation contact with the city is impossible.
Despite this isolation, an extensive community thrives outside the city under the stupendous wall. Sustained by the gravity shadow of Terra Tharsis, which provides near-terrestrial conditions, exurbs sprawl across the broad slopes of the extinct volcano in a coruscating expanse of solar mills and antennae. The mills amplify the weak sunlight that bleeds through the perpetual cloud banks churning in the penumbra of the city's magravity field. The Maat weather system stores heat and moisture in this surrounding area, and so, while there is no dearth of water for the Outlands, energy must be milled from the thermals and the wan sun.
Shau Bandar explains this and more to Mei Nili on the long drive through the skimways outside the city. Displacing his anxiety about the safety he has abandoned for this rich adventure, he points out the gigantic, androne-managed farms on the watery horizons. He has been out here on assignment before and knows the names of all the districts: Sky-Bowl with its power factories, the agrarian pastures and fish hatcheries of Willow, the congested thorpes of Britty, and the elegant estates in an opulent district called the Honor of
Giants.
'Where do all these people come from?' Mei wonders. Even in the cool interior of the rented car, the air smells
