Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  "Yes. That is my unhappiness." His strong face looks weak, and he says with a slow, aching solemnity, "I belong in the wilderness now. Can I go along with you?"

  "To die?" Munk asks ingenuously.

  Buddy gives a vigorous shake of his head that scatters his sweat-wrung hair over his eyes. "No. I don't want to kill myself. I want to test this life. To make it stronger."

  Munk absorbs this, and it prints in his silicon brain as something heard before. He plays back words from Mr. Charlie's broadcast: "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." "We will go together then," Munk decides, glad to participate in yet another

  human being's story.

  "Good." Buddy winks. "We'd better get going before the rain gets here." In the oblique light slanting through the storm clouds onto the immense

  vallation of Terra Tharsis, the weather displays massive and strange contours, and the androne feels very small among the powers of the world. He follows Buddy through the feathery grass toward the wide, cluttered horizon of human life.

  Mei Nili and Shau Bandar arrive at the Avenue of Limits with the rush of night. The oblate and gaseous sun shudders among the cindercones and black volcanic hills on the serrated horizon like demonland's burning portal. Sbau takes the yoke and slides the rental car onto a terminus bed along the shoulder of the skimway. The doors wing open on the sultry, incandescent dusk.

  "Why are we stopping here?" Mei asks.

  "I want to record the sunset over the Avenue of Limits. It's a good bridge shot for the first clip." He steps out into the simmering evening.

  To one side, in the direction from where they have come, the citadel of Terra Tharsis dominates the highlands, the breadth of its vallation dark as a ruby in the long sun shafts, the skytowers silver-veiled and dazzling with laser points of gemlight. In streaks, flares, and fiery globes, the scarlet-plumed sky hoards the last of the day's sun, and the rooftops on the lava slopes shimmer with purple flames.

  In the other direction, the wilds of Mars catch the twilight in gleams of

  amber glass and crimson smears of slurry, a dim and barren badland that

  stretches away into darkness. Shanty sheds crowded among behemoth warehouses and industrial barns front the wilderness. Lux wires and torch globes pour light

  like magma through the tight lanes and burrows at the very brink of the hungry darkness.

  "This is the Avenue of Limits," Shau announces, fortifying himself with a

  sniff of ergal from a pinky ring. The stimulating olfact makes the stifling heat seem more bearable, even invigorating. With an expression of determination, he looks to Mei, who has gotten out of the car and strolls away from him. "From here, the journey to Solis really begins. Rabana's been in touch by cable phone to the local copy office in Britty, and they've relayed her messages on my

  timpan-com. She says Softcopy has data on three caravans lading for departure from here to Solis. But two are sure losers, religious fanatics from the Outlands who expect divine help in crossing the wilds."

  Mei listens absently. She stands at the edge of the terminus bed, staring down the slope of the skimway to where the concrete-block walls and derelict

  buildings begin. No people are in sight. "it looks abandoned."

  "It is," Shau says, stepping alongside her and pointing into the distance to where a devastated swatch of debris breaks the shoreline of packed-together sheds, ricks, storeyards, and longhouses. "A failback took seven whole blocks out a short while ago. The magravity border fluctuates. It usually extends into the wilds about a kilometer beyond here. But sometimes it falls back, and when that happens, whole sections of the Avenue are ripped apart by the abrupt gravitational shift. The clips I've seen are really spectacular-whole buildings launching into the sky and breaking apart. Some of the debris has been found a hundred kilometers away."

  Shadow shapes stir within the crepuscular fields below, but when Mei looks closer they are only cane-grass stirring in the wind among piles of old scantlings. "What about the third caravan Rabana foundis that a more reliable group?"

  The reporter juts his lower lip dubiously. "The trek captain is some kind of entrepreneur, but he's also an extraordinary mechanic. He's run a

  wilderness-tour service out of Britty for years. A wealthy eccentric from the Honor of Giants has hired him to captain the trek and is putting up the credits for the equipment. She wants to donate all her energy and assets to Solis and is determined to get there in one piece. With her backing and his expertise, this caravan is our best shot. Softcopy will pay our passage in exchange for the exclusive news-clip and drama rights."

  "Someone's down there," Mei says, pointing to the junkyard below them. "They've been watching us."

  "I don't see anyone."

  Mei fixes her focus on the ruddy yellow lux wires grid-ding the Avenue of Limits and with her sharper peripheral vision spies figures crouching, through the scrub of the eroded hills. "They're coming," she says, backing from the edge of the terminus bed. "Call Munk."

  "I don't see anyone."

  Mei slips into the car. But she has no credit codes to activate it and hops out again. "Come on, Bandar. Let's get out of here."

  The reporter approaches the vehicle casually, orgulous with the olfact

  sparking in him. "I've been here before. There's nothing to be afraid of. If you saw anyone, it's probably the traders who lurk around the storehouses, wanting

  to barter."

  "Just get us out of here."

  Shau eases behind the yoke and taps his cuff onto the credit plate, but the car doesn't start. He adjusts the microswitch insets in his cuff and tries again. But the control panel remains dark. "I don't get it," he mumbles.

  "Call Munk, dammit."

  The reporter fidgets with his cuff switches and is shaking his head bewildered when the first figures shamble up the embankment. Against the sky's last opal cracks of light they are hunched, hooded silhouettes wielding pipes and clubs. Their sudden shrieks snap Shau's fixation with his cuff controls, and he rears

  back in fright.

  "Damn! They must have cut the power cables to the skimway."

  Mei reaches across him and pulls down his door, slapping the lock into place. "Get Munk on the comlink, Bandar. Do it!"

  Shau complies with trembling fingers. "Munk! Munk! Androne, are you reading?" Ten big mongrel morphs leap about the car, slamming their clubs on the plastic

  dome. With the third blow it cracks, and with the next one it shatters into a splash of molecular dust. Whoops and hollers flap into the night, and large, splayed, four-fingered hands reach in and yank the passengers from the car.

  Mei tucks her knees and kicks out with all her might, pushing free of her assailant. She twists to the ground and scuttles on all fours. But two other morphs seize her arms, and she's hoisted upright to see Shau flopped facedown on the hood of the car, the hulking bandits tearing off his jacket and his rings. His mouth is wide with pain and fear, his teeth black with blood. One of the morphs grabs the reporter's long braid of hair and jerks his head back. Another slides a curve of blade under Shau's straining throat.

  "No!" Mei screams.

  Delirious hollers carom shrilly into the night, warbling into howls at the sight of the slim jumper writhing between her captors.

  Beads of dark blood appear under Shau Bandar's jaw, and his eyes swivel wildly in their sockets. He groans in thick guttural bursts, pleading for his life.

  Up from the embankment where the morphs first appeared, a silver cowl rises, cloaking a darkness with no face. "S-ss-s-t!" the androne directs a hypercompressed packet of sound waves at the morph holding the knife, and the blade wrenches free and clatters into the car.

  "Let them go," Munk commands in a thunderous voice.

  The morphs drop Mei and release Shau, then rapidly scatter, dissolving into the darkness with tattered wh
ines and aimless cries. A moment later, a pipe wings out of the dark, slashing toward where Mei has risen to one knee. The androne bounds forward in a chrome streak and plucks the projectile out of the air less than a meter from the jumper's head. With a deft wrist snap, the pipe whirls whistling back into the night and finds a mortal shriek.

  "I came as quickly as I could," Munk says, helping Mei to her feet. "I heard your distress on the link."

  "Help Bandar," she says. "He's been cut."

  "I'm okay," Shau declares tartly. He holds a shred of his shirt to the superficial cut at his throat and glares wrathfully into the dark where the morphs retreated. "They slashed my dignity more than my flesh. Gruesome things! They're distorts, not people. They must be destroyed."

  "Who are they?" Mei asks, rubbing feeling back into her wrists.

  "I tell you, they're distorts," Shau croaks with anger. "There's no real law

  in the Outlands. Rogues run their own vats out here and morph gangs of homicidal brutes-distorts--to protect their territories. Sometimes the distorts range wildly. The posses that hunt them down are always a popular run in the news clips."

  Mei puts a hand on the plasteel capsule under the androne's arm. "Munk, where have you been? Why did you run away?"

  "You know why I fled with Mr. Charlie."

  "I know," she says, drearily. "Your C-P program."

  "Yes. Since Phoboi Twelve, I can actually hear my imagination as loudly as my primary programming. I could not bear to imagine what Sitor Ananta wanted to do with Mr. Charlie. I know it would have been clearly inhumane."

  Shau thumps his sandaled foot against the skim plate of the car, irate that he lost his jacket and recording mantle and with them his chance to report on an androne with a human spirit. "Now look! I have to get a new link. I lost everything!"

  "Do you at least know where we're going?" Mei asks testily, approaching him. She peeks under his jaw to view the wound and sees only a gray smear of blood in the dark.

  "Of course I do," he answers defensively and nudges her away with some

  annoyance. "Raza's. It's just down the bluff. But we can't ride there The distorts cut the damn power cables. And even if they hadn't, we can't operate this car without the credit patch in my jacket."

  "Buddy has a rental car," Munk suggests. "I met him in Terra Tharsis. He helped me to get out. But I had to leave him behind when your distress call came. He couldn't move fast enough."

  "Where is he?" Mei asks.

  "About sixty-three kilometers down the Avenue of Limits."

  "You ran sixty kilos from the time I called you?" the reporter asks.

  "I can move much faster than that," Munk replies modestly, "but there are structures to avoid on the Avenue. And it is warm here. My coolant system was nearly overtaxed."

  "You must have spent a lot of power," Mei notes. Despite herself, she can't help admiring the androne's spunk, at the very least.

  "Yes. I depleted fifty-two percent of my power cells to get here quickly. But the expenditure was required."

  Shau heartily agrees. "I'll say! They were going to kill us."

  "But how are we going to charge your cells?" Mei places a concerned hand on the androne's breastplate and feels the dew-chill of it. "We have no credits."

  "Get me to a link," Shau says, "and we'll see what Softcopy can do."

  "I have already contacted Buddy," Munk acknowledges. "He says he will meet us at Rey Raza's garage. It's only a few kilometers from here. I will carry the two of you."

  "And me without my damn recorder!" Shau kicks the car's skim plate again. "This would have been the perfect lead-in!"

  Munk spends a moment adding this behavior to his anthropic model. Mr. Charlie had declared that we all live by our fictions, and here is a bleeding man who grieves for the story he has lost. Mei Nili herself has an incredulous look on her face, as if she is convinced a life can be overremembered.

  The androne regards them both with quiet satisfaction, proud that he has preserved two dewdrop lives from the void. Staring at these human creatures his strength has kept whole, he feels right. He knows this feeling is the cyberkinesis of his C-P program, his own subjectivity, but that doesn't seem to matter.

  He feels a mutual kinship with Jumper Nili's cool detachment and the reporter's hot ambition. He yearns to see Mr. Charlie, the ancestor of his maker, whole before him. And yet-and yet, he is an androne. His yearning is the calm fury of his maker.

  He remembers floating in the delicious cold of farside Saturn, tiny in the penumbra of the gas giant, knowing that he knew he was a programmed being. He experienced an echo of that humbling smallness under the immense vallation of Terra Tharsis. And now here, again, he knows he is becoming an accident, like everything else.

  Jumper Nili has seen something become nothing when her family died, and he almost saw that tonight. He has never witnessed a human death. The very thought oozes with unhappiness and makes him recall that there are light-years of silence surrounding him. That fact mutes his sadness.

  Once again, he determines that he will defend these frail residues of human life with all the strength in his power cells. That pleases him, or at least makes him less unhappy with his smallness under the tumultuous sky and the slowness of time.

  Clutching Charles Outis between them, Mei Nili and Shau Bandar ride in the embrace of Munk's arms. They bound over the main artery past hip-roofed sheds, gaunt storage towers, oxide-stained corrugated fences, weathered warehouses, a graveyard of rust-gutted drums, and desolate crossroads grimly empty under the blazon of lux wires. At the reporter's command, they stop before a wide garage with a pyramid of latticed metal on the roof and a. circular sign hanging above the open port announcing:

  RAZA'S TOURS OF THE WILDS.

  Within the tall port of the garage are three big sand rovers, painted a glaring white with RAZA stenciled in red on the vent-ribbed runners. Slender

  laser cannon mounted under the eaves of the garage swivel aggressively, and Munk turns his reflectant cowl toward them.

  "State your business!" a gravelly voice exclaims over a speaker system. "Rey? This is Shau Bandar from Softcopy! We're here for the trek."

  "Sorry," an unamplified voice says. "You can't be too careful on the Avenue of

  Limits."

  A wiry, falcon-faced man with a shaved head, tiny mustache-Ups at the corners of his wide grinning mouth, and green splashes of face paint under his eyes strides across the port. He's dressed in scarlet and gold clothes, a magnificent fullness of pleats and panels and intricate braiding, baggy as a bright, rackety kite. "I am Rey Raza," he proclaims boisterously, through a gleeful smile. Wrinkles of merriment seam his face, but his small, hooded eyes regard the world with a mean squint. "Softcopy said you were coming. Where are your recorders?"

  "Distorts jumped us," Shau says, stepping out from behind the androne. "Munk here saved our lives. The distorts probably still have my jacket. If we act quickly, we can use it to help target a posse."

  Rey Raza tosses a thick laugh at the reporter. "You've seen too many news clips, Bandar. There are no posses on the Avenue of Limits. Here we are ruled by the one and true law, the natural night of primacy itself."

  "What about justice?" Bandar complains.

  The tour guide shrugs. "Justice, moral right, equity, and due consideration to the weak have no value whatsoever here or in the great and terrible land beyond these limits. You'd better get that straight now, Mr. Journalist, for there will be no turning back once we are away."

  "Sand rovers will take several days to make the crossing to Solis," Munk notes. "Are there no flyers available?"

  "You are clearly from a far and distant system, Munk," Rey Raza observes chidingly. "You're a Jovian deep-space patrol-class androne, I'd judge from your looks. And those legs have been augmented, haven't they? Must be unbearably hot for you around here."

  "I am from lapetus Gap in the Saturn system. My legs were fitted for me by Apollo Combine on Deimos. And, yes, I find this heat enervat
ing. Most of my power is spent cooling my systems."

  "Didn't you tell them anything, Bandar? Flyers-really." Rey Raza waves them inside. "It's not a good time of day for street talk. Will you join me for some refreshment? Munk, I don't think I have the right power amps for your kind of cold-body cells, but you're welcome to look over my equipment. As for

  flyers-well, Terra Tharsis and Solis just don't permit flyers anywhere near them. Ah, here is the archaic brain." He presses his forehead to the plasteel capsule. "He's dreaming. Maybe of Earth. I'll bet he feels more awake now than when he wakes next among us, eh?"

  The interior of the capacious garage smells acridly of lube oil and lathed metal. Behind the three sand rovers, a wire-mesh partition isolates a machinist's pit, engine hoist, and a tool-and-die shop. Raza admits Munk to the generator deck and leads Mei and Shau past the dimly lit work areas to the back of the garage.

  A sheet metal door slides open on a radiant room with the clean redolence of woodwork. Blue straw mats cover the floor, and yellow paper screens, like vertical louvers, section the suite. Between the screens, strips of a kitchen and a sleep cubicle are visible, both with wooden furniture-floral-carved pantry, painted cupboard, swivel stools, a trestle cot, and lacquered side tables.

  A blond wood table and fanback chairs in the front room squeeze Mei's heart, and a tear startles down her cheek. She lowers her face to smell the spray of wildflowers in the table's centerpiece, trying to hide her emotion.

  Rey Raza places an airy hand on her shoulder. "You're exhausted. I can see the fray light around you."

  Shau, surprised, starts to explain, "Rey's from a strong-eye clade. He sees some infra and ultra, bodylights-"

  "It's the wood," Mei manages to get out, feels stronger for it, lifts her head

  and wipes her eyes. "I haven't been close enough to smell and touch wood since I

  left Earth. I didn't know how much I missed it."

  Shau puts a fist to his forehead, regretting again the absence of his recorder. He's convinced that these are the moments that will make his clips run. "Rey, rye got to call in."

  "Use the cable phone by the cot." Rey points the way, then says with mesmeric softness to Mei, "You must sleep. Tomorrow Grielle comes. She is the woman on the death passage. Like all passagers, she's eager and will want to leave at once. So we will skip the refreshments and let you rest now. You may have the cot, and Shau can sleep in the rover. I have more work to do in the shop and will stay there. Good night."