be too late. My story will continue to exist, expanding into the dark at the speed of light, maybe even to be heard by you.
And if you do read this, then I will have failed better than I could have hoped.
This time I'm throwing the boomerang of my life to where it won't come back, at a target I can't miss.
And so—
With my soul in my mouth, I begin-Swollen with dreams, I awoke from the dead...
1
The Laughing Life
With MY SOUL IN MY MOUTH, I BEGIN. The radio message arrives at Apollo Combine's thrust station on the Martian moon Deimos as Munk is in the docking bay, busily unloading rhodium sheets from a freighter. He is a large androne with a chrome cowl, black intermeshing body plates, and articulated face parts that have no human referent apart from a crimson lens bar that, under a pewter ledge of brow, serves as eyes. Those eyes dim for a second after the androne receives the broadcast and his silicon brain replays it several hundred more times, analyzing all its components until he is satisfied that the message is genuine.
In the next second, Munk scans the docking bay and formulates an action plan that will enable him to respond most efficiently to what he has learned. The bay is empty. Apart from several programmed handroids working with him as
stevedores, he is alone. The thrust station's other sentient andrones are either deployed or in the maintenance pit. Only two vessels occupy the cavernous bay: the rhodium-laded freighter with its enormous storage nacelles and silos and a small cruiser with three fin-jet thrusters and an asymmetrical blackglass hull.
Apollo Combine, for some mortal reason Munk does not fathom, has named this cruiser The Laughing Life. Surely, that is some kind of wry joke. There is nothing inherently funny in what this ship regularly does: conveying jumpers and androne workers among the factories, smelters, and mines of the Asteroid Belt. Perhaps-if the jumpers who named this vessel were at all philosophical-they
would say that they laugh at the rare joy of being where life does not belong, in the void, separated by a thin barrier from the near absolute zero of the vacuum and its invisible and deadly sea of gamma rays. But jumpers are genetically designed to be a phlegmatic and wholly unpoetic lot.
Life itself, Munk imagines, thinking about this ship's name, is laughing simply because it can. The absurdity of life blindly groping from necessity to freedom is what led consciousness out of the constraints of biology to the enhanced freedom of his own existence, the metalife of the androne and the great adventure of the silicon mind. So, perhaps, for that reason he, too, should laugh. He is not sure. All he knows for certain is that he has heard a human voice calling for help out of the void. More than anything, he wants to respond, and in the one second that these thoughts and observations have occupied him he has devised a strategy for using The Laughing Life to go to the source of this radio signal.
But to fulfill this plan, he needs human help. For a fraction of another second, Munk reviews the profiles of the forty-two people who work for Apollo Combine on Deimos. In that fractional moment, he not only identifies the one jumper best suited for this mission, he also patches into the duty roster and learns that the jumper he wants is currently in the thrust station.
With a reboant clang, Munk dumps the stack of rhodium sheets he has been carrying and runs across the docking bay toward the droplift that will carry him to the jumper quarters. He runs with lithe ease, as though he has always had legs, when in fact they came with his job at Apollo Combine. Before that he worked as a patrol flyer in the gravity wells between Saturn's rings and the shepherd moon lapetus, troubleshooting among the other andrones whose task it
was to transfer material from the rings to the thrust station off Titan. Repairing mechanical breakdowns in space and retrieving andrones who had spun out and didn't have the power to free themselves from decaying orbits above the gas giant, he lived in the void and bad no use at all for legs.
But now he works among people. He could have opted for roller treads or even an adroit skim plate, but he wants to look as human as he can. That is his predilection, and it causes him some small pain when he enters the jumper quarters and the people there-two squat, neckless wrenchers lounging in. a
palm-fronded atrium-look askance at him. They both know him, and he would have liked for them to look upon him more kindly, as one of their own. But he can
tell from their expressions that he is considered an intruder. They make no move to stop him; however, on his internal comlink he hears the protests they
whisper on the dispatch line to Central after he passes.
A moment later, Central summons him in her dulcet voice, 'Androne Munk, you are in violation of company preclusion rules. Please report at once to the maintenance pit.,,
Munk ignores her and hurries through a sepulchral chamber of dense bamboo where frosty shafts of light filter down through high galleries of hanging
plants and red bromeha. His patch to the duty roster informs him that the jumper he seeks is in the recreation arcade ahead, behind the silver veils of a slender waterfall.
He splashes through the entrance and stands on the floral steel balcony overlooking the chromatic space of the arcade. A half dozen jumpers lie sprawled in air pools in the central dream den, blissed on midstim. From under heavy
lids, they gaze up through a froust of oily light and vapor shadows at the giant, cobra-hooded androne looming over them. He stands still, waiting for their slow brains to recognize him in this incongruous setting.
The laggard quality of human consciousness continues to astonish him. For all practical purposes, the silicon mind has outmoded human sentience, and he has had to journey a huge distance to find even this small enclave of multiform humanity. Yet here it is-people working side-by-side with andrones to maintain the Commonality. Impractical as it is, the presence of humans pleases Munk enormously, and he waits patiently until he is recognized by the lounging jumpers before beckoning the one he wants.
Her name is Mei Nili, and she sits up groggily in the buoyancy of her air pool. The duty roster informs Munk that she has just returned from a
