three-sleep-cycle shift troubleshooting bandit hardware at a floating refinery among a flock of iron chondrites, and he understands why she squints with annoyance at him.
'Jumper Nili,' he calls down to her, 'please come with me. I need your help to save a man's life. Please, hurry. I promise you, this is not a gratuitous
request as in the past.'
The past he refers to is a couple of encounters early in his tenure at Apollo Combine when he had tried to interview all the humans at the thrust station. The others he had approached had eagerly complied, clearly flattered by his benign interest in including them in the internal anthropic model he is building. When he went unannounced to her quarters and the portal slid open, she seemed
ordinary enough: a slender, 184.6-centimeter-tall woman in the usual matte-black flightsuit with the solar emblem of Apollo Combine over her left breast, her straight jet hair arranged in feathery bangs and a topknot. Her weary green eyes acknowledged his presence with a petulant stare from an otherwise impassive and pallid face.
'I am Androne Munk,' he introduced himself, 'transferred recently from Iapetus Gap in the Saturn system. I'm interviewing all the Apollo Combine jumpers during off-time-'
'Why?'
'It's my avocation. I'm building an internal anthropic model, and I -' 'Bounce off.'
She whacked the door closed, and he stood there a long while not understanding. Later, when he found her alone in the docking bay after she'd come in from a repair run, he rushed to the cafeteria and hurried back to greet
her with a meal cart laded with the foodstuffs that he knew from his preliminary observations she liked.
'Look, no-face,' she said sharply, 'I'm not some kind of animal you can win over with food. I don't want to answer your dumb questions. Can you understand that? Go back to the androne pit, and stay out of my shadow.'
To make her point, as she turned away she slapped open an air-pressure valve on the cleaning unit under the hull of her docked ship. The steamy blast kicked the meal cart against the androne so hard it exploded, scattering food across
the docking bay.
After that, Munk didn't approach her again until now. His anthropic model had guided him to infuse all the urgent emotion he could into his voice, yet his predictive memory warned him that she would probably wave him off and flop back into her air pool.
While waiting for her to react, he reviews his options and listens in on the signal flurries that have resulted from the strange radio message. Most of the resultant signals from the other companies in the area are in secure codes, yet he can surmise from their direction and duration what is being communicated. Salvage rights are being debated, and unless he responds immediately, he will have no chance of getting to this unique human before others do.
Munk decides he has blundered in seeking Jumper Nili's help and turns back toward the splashing partition of water.
'Hey, bolt-brain, hold up.' Mei Nili trudges up the ramp from the dream den, her silky robes billowing in the gusty passage out of the pool. 'This better be damn good, or I'm going to insist Central runs a full integrity check on your silicon synapses.'
'It is, I assure you, a matter of life or death for an extraordinary human being.' He strides quickly out of the arcade and calls behind from the bamboo grove, 'We must hurry.'
'Where are we going?' she scowls, her tabis slapping on the flagstones as she runs to catch up with him. 'And why didn't you use the comlink to call me? You're not supposed to be in here.'
'We're going to the docking bay as swiftly as we can,' he answers, holding the droplift curtain open for her. 'I can say no more until we're away. If Central overhears us, we may compromise the life we must save. That is why I had to collect you in person.'
'I don't understand all this secrecy,' Mei complains in the humming rush of the droplift. 'Is this something to do with your so-called avocation-because if it is, I don't want anything to do with it. You understand me?'
Munk bounds out of the droplift and onto the wide and empty staging platform of the docking bay. 'This is an entirely singular event, Jumper Nili, and as I have promised, is not gratuitous. Please, get into The Laughing Life and put on a flightsuit. We must haunch at once.'
'Munk-that's your name, right?' She swings her gaze across the vast hangar of mooring scaffolds and gantries framing the empty ships, the multitiered freighter, and the sleek cruiser. 'Look, Munk, you seem sincere enough, but I'm not going to jump without authorization from Central.'
'Central will not authorize this jump,' Munk states flatly. 'I know you have doubts. You must trust me. This is the right action to take now. Once we are in flight, I will explain everything.'
Mei stares hard at Munk, and the androne tries to assess what the human is thinking but draws a blank.
'We must go now-right now,' Munk says, impacting his voice with urgency, 'or a human life is forfeit.'
Mei blows an upward jet of air that lifts her bangs and then, with an irked haughtiness that seems to Munk the proud spirit of the human animal, climbs the gangway to The Laughing Life.
Mars fills the viewport with the rusty hues of its sand reefs and fossil craters. Its bleary northern hemisphere, smudged with extended dune drifts and heavily mantled rocksheets, breaks below the equator into scorched basins and a webwork of ancient cratered highlands. The pocked plains, stained by corroded colors and acid shadows, darken toward the cobalt blue of the polar cap. This clash of geologic boundaries, this shining murk of volcanic steppes that buckle the orange surface, acclaim the tectonic powers that thrived here once and died.
Mei Nili, suspended in a flight sling above the viewport, stares with solemn eyes at the broken terrain twenty thousand kilometers away. The planet is dead, and that is what fascinates her. It is a dead thing alive with ghostly dust storms and vague, vaporous wraiths of frozen carbon dioxide and water. It is a dead thing, like her heart-what the archaic life called a heart, not the
