Solis Page 2

  the idea of the thing, for it posits both a thing and its absence. It's easy to believe that a thing can exist out there, independent of the observer, but the posited absence of a thing is obviously an expression of consciousness. So, you see, all energies, forces, and fields that make up the material expression of things are functions of an abstract geometry. And abstract geometry, which requires I, is a function of consciousness!"

  "Well, wax me mind, eh, Mr. Charlie?" Sitor Ananta laughed darkly. "Is that how the Friends' crude translators managed amazement? They sounded to you somewhat as you would imagine buccaneers, didn't they? Well, their primitive translators got that unintentionally right. They're thieves, Mr. Charlie-thieves who stole you from thieves. Your head, after it had been expensively restored to its current useful condition, was originally stolen from the Common Archive by lewdists. I'm sure you remember them fondly. They used you for quite some time, didn't they? Weird bunch. There's been no sexual procreation among civilized human beings for centuries. We regard it much as your era did bestiality. Disgusting. We control our hormones. Yet the lewdists revel in vicariously experiencing that hormonal animalism, and they worked your brain the way you in your time would have used a cathode monitor to view pornography. Atavists is

  what they are. And there's a surprising lot of them, too-fascinated that we were once as mindlessly glandular as beasts, and not so long ago. But it's not the lewdists I'm interested in. They're a harmless bunch of degenerates. It's the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group I want to know about."

  Sitor Ananta got up and walked toward me. Slimhipped and flat-chested, the being had a masculine frame but a feminine mien. "The Friends are dangerous. They're enemies of the Commonality-anarchists, a selfish cult intent on usurping the law. But all this need not trouble you. All I want is for you to remember what you witnessed when they activated your visual cortex. What did you see when last you saw as you are seeing now? A verbal description will aid the

  authorities in pinpointing our enemy's location."

  Dread stalked me, but I was reluctant to help this creature in anything. Something about it-its sexlessness, the rogue's hook to its smile, the very fact that it treated me like an object that could be manipulated-inspired defiance. I

  searched back and dredged up lines from Keats's "The Fall of Hyperion": I ached to see what things the hollow brain

  Behind enwombed: what high tragedy

  Was acting in the dark secret chambers

  Of the skull. .

  "Perhaps we should chat a little longer," Sitor Ananta said in a thick, quiet voice. "I imagine that most people of the past who arranged to have their heads frozen upon their demise expected the future to be a glorious Eden where they would be woven new bodies, young, perfect bodies, and allowed to partake of the wonders that evolved while they slept like the dead." A cold laugh snicked. "Isn't that a rather selfish view for anyone to have of the future?"

  "Optimistic," I whispered. "I wanted to see what would become of us. I wanted nothing for myself other than to see."

  Sitor Ananta's poisoned smile deepened. "All optimism is selfish. Only pessimism accurately approaches the selfless and impersonal violence of reality, Mr. Charlie."

  "Stop calling me that."

  "Ah, yes, I would. Except I really can't. You see, my translator, as advanced as it is, has some trouble with your language's concept of gender and name preference. I don't sound as garbled as the rebels did, I'm sure, but it would take some adjustments to correct my translator's mode of direct address. I'd rather not bother now, if you don't mind, Mr. Charlie. At least we understand each other, which is better than what you endured with the others."

  "The others never threatened me."

  "But they used you. They activated the parts of your brain that served their interests with no regard at all for you."

  "And what regard have you?"

  " will tell you. I represent the Commonality, the future you went to such lengths to see. We are the ones who have restored you. And now there are two options open to us, two uses for you. If we wish-and the decision is entirely mine-you will be installed inside the governing center of a very powerful machine, a mining factory on one of the asteroids of the Belt. There you will serve the Commonality by extracting and refining useful ores. After each successful work cycle, the amygdala and limbic core of your brain will be magnetically stimulated, inducing a sustained pleasurable rapture so gratifying you will sing praises of me and the Commonality for the trouble we took to revive you."

  "And the other option?" I queried angrily. "Torture? Death?"

  "Oh, no." Sitor Ananta looked sincerely stricken. "That would be ugly indeed. You see, Mr. Charlie, here is my predicament: It is illegal to use the heads or any of the body parts of members from the Commonality-alive or deceased. Only the dead of the past have no rights-those like yourself. They are simply dead. Unfortunately, most of those corpses are useless to us, decomposed beyond any

  hope of restoration. We have, however, found a few caches of frozen brain tissue from the archaic era. They are quite rare and located in regions difficult to access. We would never use torture or wanton destruction to squander any one of those heads. They are such a valuable commodity. You see, Mr. Charlie, we have the technology to construct artificial intelligence sufficiently complex to operate mining factories, but the expense is enormous. Despite the rarity and difficulty of obtaining frozen human heads of the past, it's still so much cheaper to revive and install them in our machines." My interrogator leaned back against the table. "Of course, a mining factory requires a cooperative intelligence. If you prove uncooperative, then I will have to recommend that

  your brain be parsed into sections useful to operating smaller devices." A weary fatalism closed on me. "I had better hopes for my species," I

  muttered, more to myself than to the human-looking thing before me. "This is just the kind of monstrous future I was afraid to find instead."

  "Disease is monstrous, Mr. Charlie. Old age is monstrous. There are no diseases or senescence in our era. If you cooperate, you will live usefully and indefinitely without pain or suffering. If you choose not to cooperate, the resectioning of your brain will be conducted humanely. You will simply go to

  sleep and not wake up."

  Anger torqued in me, and I knew that if Sitor Ananta so desired, a few squigs of the stylus would render me utterly pliant. But I could plainly see that the creature enjoyed this sadistic manipulation. "The idea of going to sleep and not waking up sounds pretty good to me," I said with all the enthusiasm I could muster.

  The look of surprise on that smug, puerile face was well worth the stabs of pain that followed when Sitor Ananta got stylus in hand. Pain has many colors. That creature found the shades most disagreeable to me, and though I fretted about what this monster would do to the delicate, glass-faced beings who had used me to teach their young, I blurted out the desired information before very long. Then blackness followed.

  And in the blackness there were blind memories of beetling talk interspersed with deaf dreams of glittering needles and red crisscrossings of laser light. More darkness came afterward, with pieces of hot perfume . . . and then sleep.

  When I woke next, I was here, in the command core of a mining factory, somewhere, I assume, in the Asteroid Belt, writing you. At least, this seems like writing: Blue blips of words appear before me at will when I speak, all of it easily retrieved when I wish. As for who you are, I'm not sure yet. Eventually, I will find someone interested in my story. Perhaps the lewdists or the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group will seek me out again if the information I rendered to Sitor Ananta has not led to their destruction. I only

  described what they allowed me to see-those eerie milkweed tufts drifting into a jade sky above a red desert, those four-fingered people in their clear armor and transparent faces with brains like surging clouds. . . Who are they?

  That any faction other than the Commonality will contact me seems unlikely in this remote,
airless place. Still, there must be other mining factories out here in the Belt. Perhaps someday I will learn to communicate with them. That is the hope of my courage each time I decline the sessions of slow-motion orgasm that follow the long, tedious work cycles. There is no other time to write, and I

  feel I must write to retain some sense of myself-to be someone. Otherwise, I am just this machine, a regulator of drill trajectories, coolant flow rates, melt runs, and slag sifters. This is a life in the frost-light of a perpetual computer game.

  Actually, it's not much different than life was before, except that, since my brain is maintained in a state of continuous glucose saturation, I never get hungry. I'm lonely, of course, but there's enough stimulation to fend off madness most of the time. A vivid dream life seems to offer the psychic hygiene of sanity. And the claustrophobia I suffered from in my former life appears to have been adjusted for by my installers. More often than not. I do accept the rapture sessions-the blissful immersions in the secret sea. I've earned them, and they give my will the mettle to go on.

  But every once in a sad while, like right now, I need to affirm my sense of myself, to create the fiction that I am something more than this. We all live by our fictions. We create stories in order to fill the emptiness that is

  ourselves. And because we must create them with strength from nothing, they make us whole.

  Recently, after much dickering with the luculent control displays, I have learned how to use the factory's memory-storage system to transmit radio messages into space. I am going to send what I have written here. And when this is received by the Commonality, I may well be cut into smaller, more convenient parts-but by then it will 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

  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 com
e 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."