Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  And suddenly, there it is, in the chancre of a crater surrounded by burned-out cinder cones-an immense and gleaming city! Astonishment expands to a worshipful feeling in his archaic brain, for here is the justification of his gamble and

  his suffering-the triumphant faith of the vision he had died and been reborn to see. Set like a strange jewel in the barren plains and stark promontories of the dead planet, the city is woven of radiance. Its gold and-onyx spires twinkle

  with sunfire and emerald spurs of laser light, its dazzling foundations sunk in the bedrock of the future's hewn and ancient-river altar of Mars.

  3

  Terra Tharsis

  Charles Outis IS A BRAINSHADOW ENCASED AN AN EGG OF CLEAR plasteel. Psyonic pads designed to read and induce brain-waves cap both ends of the capsule and connect it by comlink to the console and the sensory array of The Laughing Life. Through the prow sensors, Charles watches Munk floating in space, the galaxy like mist behind him. The androne uses mag-lock clips to attach jetpaks to the mirror-gold hull of the pod.

  "You only have four jetpaks," Charles notices. "Will they be strong enough to brake our descent?" Under ordinary circumstances, Charles prided himself on his observational abilities; now, survival has made him hyperalert. He notices the microchipping of the rover's hull and the thin feathers of electric fire around Munk as the androne aligns the jetpaks and magnetically locks them into place.

  "These won't brake our entry," Munk answers frankly, indicating the circle of puny shoulder packs with their tapered jets that he's fixed to the hull. "But I'm not going to drop us to the surface. I'm aiming for Terra Tharsis, the city you saw on our last flyby. The jetpaks will help steer us to where scouts can pick us up as we go in."

  "I still say there's enough lift on this cruiser to make a dunefleld landing," the jumper calls from the helm. "Terra Tharsis is too dangerous. Let's go directly to Solis. Put us down in the Planet, on one of the sandy verges near

  the settlement. We'll hike in."

  "The landing is too risky," Munk says. "The dunes veil rock reefs, and this pod isn't designed for an impact entry. We have no choice but to seek sanctuary with the Maat, unpredictable as they are. Which is better-to take a chance on incalculable physics or on an unguessable psyche?"

  Inside the flight bubble of the ship, Mei is washed out by the pelagic glow of the console. Monitoring near space in the view scanner, she advises the androne, "We've got only a few minutes left. Two Bund ships and an Ap Com transport are closing fast."

  "All right, then," Munk responds, "lock the helm and get into the pod."

  Awe, fear, exultation at basking in the brown glow of Mars fuse inside Charles to a wide-staring intensity, so that he feels more alive now than he ever had in his former life. "What's going to happen to us in Terra Tharsis?" he asks.

  "I don't know," Mei admits without much sympathy. "Terra Tharsis belongs to the Maat, not the Commonality. We'll have to find our way as we go."

  Charles fixes his attention in the pod's external sensors and watches the planet view floating below, Mars rising splotched and enormous against the starsmoke. The winy mist of the atmosphere shimmers thinly against the black depths of space, and the blister-peeled and coagulate surface of the world shines with ectoplasmic wisps of dust and frost vapors.

  The jetpaks fire soundlessly, the mute flares of blue exhaust standing before the stars like votive flames on the gold rim of the pod. Snug in his plasteel case, a husked brain devoid of even the primitive sense of vertigo, Charles does not feel the tug of acceleration. Instead, he surmises motion by the swelling vista.

  Charcoal scrawls of shadow resolve to fault lines, nacre blotches expand to vast sandy verges, and the horizon becomes serrated. The barren vista of oxide deserts and crenulated mountain ridges swims closer, aslant in the yawing descent of the pod. Scalloped dunes spring from the mutant sands, warped and

  quaking as the thin atmosphere buffets the plummeting vehicle, and Charles wants to blink, to shunt even for a moment the incoming vantage of wind-rowed buttes and stress-cracked rock.

  The planet's rancid colors blur through the lens of the pod's thermal bowshock. Munk mutters some command that Charles is too distracted to catch. Below, a jagged shadowline of ifinit-faceted mountains looms as the pod's ultimate and calamitous destination, and a delirious howl whirls through Charles. before Mei disengages the plasteel capsule from the ship's console and steeps him in darkness, he sees the sharp peaks veer away, and through a rocky draw in the broken horizon, Terra Tharsis rears, her crystal towers swarmed in reefs of reflectant haze and star-barbs and carats of unearthly radiance.

  "Mr. Charlie, wit you wise?"

  The voice comes from all directions, and Charles Outis groans groggily awake, unable to remember where he is. His last recollection is of a supernaturally beautiful city of gleaming spires.

  "He be witful. Spark his eyes, say I."

  "Where am I?" Dim red embers worm in the darkness. "I can't see anything." "The translator needs adjustment," a basso profundo voice declares.

  "Yes, it does," a softer voice replies. "I've just tuned it. He can understand us now."

  "Good," the voice of thunder says. "Mr. Charlie, will you acknowledge that you can hear me?"

  "Yes, I hear you. Where am I? I can't see anything. What's happened to the others? Where's Mei Nili-and Munk?"

  "Calm yourself," the rumbling voice commands. "In a moment your sight will be returned to you. But first, his-ten to me. You are now in the custody of the Maat Pashalik. Several claims of ownership have been laid against you, and you are on exhibit before the Moot to settle this question of proprietorship."

  "Wait, I don't understand. I don't belong to anyone. Where am I? Let me see where I am! Mei Nili? Munk?"

  "Activate Mr. Charlie's vision," the heavy voice orders.

  Wincing rays of hot color pierce Charles painfully before relaxing into the panoramic vista of a marbled cream floor slick as a mirror extending toward distant ivory tiers of swerving architecture strange as turtle bones and mantaray hoods. A massive plate-glass wall reveals the glittering city of onyx arcs and silver-gold needle-towers he has seen from The Laughing life. The copper-and-quince tones of Mars are visible on the horizon, the dark amber of mountains above the red skin of the desert.

  "Mr. Charlie," the thunder calls him, and he notices two figures emerge from the glare where noon light stands on the gleaming white expanse. One is no more than a ruby staff topped by a manikin face, a mask on a broomstick. The other is bulkily draped in floating black scarves and an amethyst mist, and the humanoid face gazing from under the stammering flame that wreathes his faceted head is a dark metallic gray with black eyes impenetrable and empty as a shark's. "I am

  the Judge," the bulky one says with the voice of thunder. "And this is the

  Clerk."

  "You're andrones," Charles gripes wearily, stifling a momentary swirl of dizziness at the strange sight before him.

  "We are agents of the Maat," the Judge intones, "and you are in the Pashalik of the Maat where our authority countermands all other judgments."

  "Where's Mei Nili?" Charles asks, fighting his panic. "How did I get here?" "Mr. Charlie," the Clerk says in her suede voice, the lips from the manikin

  face unmoving, "you shall not address questions to the Judge-only to myself. You are, after all, an exhibit and not a plaintiff in these proceedings.

  "What do you mean?" Fear fists so tightly around him he thinks he may pass out. "I'm Charles Outis. I'm a human being, dammit, not something."

  "You are speaking nonsense," the Clerk warns in a gentle tone. "Our memory survey indicates that you are fully aware of your demise. Your remnant and relict survival, objectively speaking, is solely as a thing. The only question to be resolved by the Moot is to whom do you belong."

  "I belong to myself!"

  "That makes no sense, Mr. Charlie. By universal convention, a legally dead person has no claim upon anything, physical remains or otherwise."
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  "But I'm not dead!" he cries desperately. "Can't you see? You're talking to me, for God's sake."

  "We're talking to you only because your dead brain has been reanimated at a measurable expense and for an expected return," the Clerk patiently explains. "You were dead for many terrene years and would be dead now otherwise."

  "That's absurd!" "That is the law."

  "You mean I have no rights at all?" He looks away from the bizarre apparition of the magistrate and his puppet, stares past the veering geometries of Terra Tharsis, and sinks his gaze into the primal horizon-the ruddy vista of

  Mars-hoping to calm himself.

  "There are important property rights that do pertain," the Clerk quietly admits. "Because you were stolen from the Commonality archive by lewdists, this demonstrates negligence of protectorship on the part of the Commonality. The

  case may be made that the Commonality has thus forsaken any claim to you. As you were afterward stolen from the lewdists by the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group and subsequently recovered from them by the Commonality, you may claim to be property of public domain. Then, ownership rights will devolve to those who salvaged you."

  "Why are you doing this to me?" Charles moans.

  "The law requires the Judge and the Clerk to examine all exhibits prior to presentation in the Moot." The Clerk floats backward into the glare of noon light. "Unless the Judge has further questions, I believe our examination is concluded."

  "The exhibit is found whole and without defect," the Judge decrees, the amethyst vapors around him fluorescing brightly, the flaming halo vanishing. "It shall be admitted to the Moot and herewith subject to all pending arguments for final and absolute proprietorship."

  "Hey, wait a minute. Please!" Charles pleads "Where's Mei Nili? Where's the androne Munk? How did I get here?"

  The Judge retreats into the sunfire, and in the next instant blackness swarms over Charles Outis.

  Mei Nili and Munk sit in the alcove of the Moot, awaiting their turn to testify. Munk's faceless aspect stares out the transparent walls at the supernal ramparts of Terra Tharsis. He is livid inside with fear. So, this is the adytum of the Maat. And here he is at the foot of the dream, far beyond the parameters of all his programming. His hope, however improbable, had been that the flyers who intercepted the incoming pod would deposit them outside the city. But they didn't, and now here they are in the midst of the Maat's creation. An incestuous anxiety possesses him: This is the place of his maker, the very trespass he most dreaded.

  The Maat's hand is everywhere apparent, from the artificial terrestrial gravity to the blue tint of the filtered sky. When, in the grip of the flyers' magravity net, the pod touched down on the summit of an onyx tower eight kilometers tall, Munk expected some kind of encounter with his creators. Instead, only a faceless androne on a skim plate awaited them. It ignored all their questions, removed the plasteel capsule with Charles inside, and floated across the rooftop among a panoply of prisms and mirror vanes. They followed, and the mute androne led them a long way down a spiral ramp of abstract

  chromatic mosaics to this enormous chamber of sun-shot glass and ivory.

  "You are in the Moot of the Maat Pashalik," a genderless voice softly advised them out of nowhere after Mei seated herself on a transparent bench. "Please

  wait here until you are summoned."

  "How long have we been here?" Mei asks curtly. She has refrained from berating Munk verbally for their predicament, but he can see by her eyes that she thinks the dunefield landing would have been better.

  "Two hours and thirty-seven minutes," Munk replies meekly. Within the first few seconds of entering the chamber, he had already measured its domed ceiling, glass perimeter, and 2,853 viewing loges tiered in midair in the vast space surrounding the amphitheater of the central court. The sleek hoods of the loges are an evanescent blue shading along a lateral line to a hue subtle as the bronze tint on a mushroom, lending them an eerily organic look, like hovering skates or devilfish. Afraid to examine these odd structures too closely and too

  embarrassed by their predicament to engage in taciturn conversation with Mei, he turns inward and focuses on listening to the communications of the numerous andrones in the vicinity. Their code logic does not match his, and because he does not understand anything they're saying, he must remain content with their music.

  Mei paces about the sterile alcove, returning repeatedly to the window bay to gaze at the surreal skyline. The teetering spires and hyperbolas loom so tall their lower stories disappear below in a haze of ramparts and sparkling viaducts and spans that meld with distance to a golden ether.

  Who lives here? she wonders. In the arcade on Deimos, she had once seen film texts of the multitudinous types into which humanity has diversified in the colonies-the morphs, clades, and plasmatics, to name just the three biggest groups. None are permitted in the reservations on Earth, not even the Maat, and in her job with Apollo Combine she had met only morphs, people morphogenetically adapted for specific tasks.

  Here in Terra Tharsis, however, she knows there are clades, new branches of humanity that would barely be recognizable to her as human, and the plasmatics, those who have genetically transcended anthropic anatomy altogether. Perhaps

  this chamber itself is a hive, and the organic loges floating overhead belong to a plasmatic class...

  "Jumper Nili?" a smoky voice calls. "Androne Munk?"

  A tall, sinewy youth with ethereal cheekbones, cumin complexion, fire-blue

  eyes blacked with kohl, and red hair glittering with pixel-gems and braided in a long rope down his back shows the palms of his tapered hands in colonial

  greeting and bows curtly. "My name is Shau Bandar. I represent Softcopy, a local news-dip service for the anthro commune. The Moot is allowing one of the

  twenty-six anthro news services to interview your prehearing, and I got the luck of the draw. If you don't mind, I'd like to introduce you to our viewers."

  Mei has encountered reporters like this before, when she was a novice jumper and considered mildly newsworthy for wanting to leave the reservation in the first place to take up such risky work. This reporter, like the others, exudes that same blue smell of serenity-a sedating olfact used by journalists to put their subjects at ease. For that reason alone, she decides she wants nothing to do with him. "Look, Slim, why don't you go find out for us how long we're going to be kept waiting here-"

  Munk quickly steps between Shau Bandar and Mei. "Excuse me," he says deferentially. "Could you kindly give us a moment?" Then turning his broad back to the reporter, he whispers hotly in a voice pitched for Mei's ears, "For hope's sake, don't speak too hastily, Jumper Nili. This reporter may prove helpful. He is, after all, like you, an anthro."

  "Put it away, Munk. That's your C-P program talking. Forget your anthropic model. Can't we just get Mr. Charlie and find our way to Solis?"

  "Has it occurred to you yet that Solis is four thousand, three hundred

  forty-five kilometers from here?" Munk whispers. "Have you given any thought as to how we're going to cross that much open terrain? The anthro commune may be able to abet our journey. Come on, now. Let's be logical and cooperate with this man."

  Mei accedes with a reluctant nod, and Munk faces the reporter, beckoning him closer. "Excuse our ignorance, Shau Bandar," Munk says solicitously, "but this is our first time in Terra Tharsis. Perhaps you can inform us as vitally as we can you."

  The reporter makes an adjustment to the microcontrols on the cuff of his purple dress coat, and a small blue light comes on in the collar of his short mantle, where he carries his sensors. "I'd be glad to help. Softcopy can connect you with both the anthro and androne naturalization projects-"

  "We're not staying," Mei cuts in. "We're bound for Solis."

  His brown,. angular face lights up. "Even better! That trek has endless appeal to our viewers. You know, I've never covered it myself, but I'd like to. I imagine the archaic brain you recovered from Phoboi Twelve will be you
r entrйe?"

  "You know about Mr. Charlie?" Munk asks with surprise.

  "Of course. It's in the court records. The news clips are already touting him as the Chiliad Man."

  "Chiliad?" Mei frowns.

  "The Thousand-Year-Old Man," Munk translates.

  "What our viewers want to know," the reporter continues, "is what will you do if the Judge awards proprietorship to the Commonality?"

  "Is that what's being decided here?" Mei asks, miffed. "They can't do that. Terra Tharsis is independent of the Commonality."

  Shau Bandar nods sympathetically. "In principle, you're right. But the import of archaic remains has little precedent. That's why Softcopy is monitoring this case. The anthro commune is unhappy with the legal but inhumane exploitation of anthro remains by the Commonality. A copy of Mr. Charlie's radio distress broadcast is among the most popular clips in the contemporary index. In fact, the renowned Troupe Frolic already has a skit clip out based on the broadcast, called 'Wax Me Mind,' that's been both enraging and entertaining the commune since yesterday."

  "When will the judgment be passed?" Munk inquires.

  Shau Bandar regards the iridescent facets set in his cuff. "Initial arguments will be heard in about-oh, seventeen minutes. After that, judgment will be withheld pending further data for the minimum cycle required for a property case. That's one year-six hundred and eighty-seven martian days."

  "What?" Mei's cry sends annulate echoes fading into the ivory distance.

  "Am I right in assuming that neither of you has arranged to transfer credits here before going rogue?" the reporter queries.

  "We had to respond immediately upon detecting Mr. Charlie's distress signal," Munk answers, somewhat defensively. "Regrettably, the credits we have accrued with Apollo Combine have been forfeit."

  "Then after the initial arguments," Shau Bandar says, "I'll connect you with the naturalization projects and you can find work and begin to make yourselves at home here in Terra Tharsis."

  Mei sits grumpily on the transparent bench, crosses her legs, and rests her chin on her fist. "This is just great. We risked our lives to salvage Mr. Charlie. He's ours, dammit. No one has any right to take him from us."