Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  the stone poverty of the land. All mind is but a tear in the fabric of nothingness, like a rip in water that quickly heals over.

  Munk laughs. With his final thought, he understands why this is the laughing life. Life is the laugh of the actual in the face of nothing. There is so much to sense, think, and emote about, so much life to endure, such fullness of good and bad-and all of it, suddenly, nothing. Only laughter fits the gap. And he laughs luminously with the great swell of being nothing.

  Androne Munk, you have satisfied the reviewer that you are validly fulfilling your contra-parameter programming. You are herewith released from all allegiance to the Commonality. Go in freedom and focus.

  The sound of breaking glass stops. Immediately, his attention is flung into his anthropic model, and time lunges forward. Flailing the area with a siren scream, his body abruptly resumes spinning, jetting a rooster tail of sand into the sky. The distorts cringe. The semblor frantically jabs his signal device at Munk, while Rey scuttles backward beneath a ragged cry toward the caravan.

  With a slashing blow, Munk strikes the semblor, and it explodes in a hissing thrash of lightning. Laser fire from the handguns of the crouching distorts kicks against his breastplate and heaves him backward. He sits down, and the sand around him turns to glass under the hacking laser light.

  A sick feeling of power-cell depletion whims up in Munk, and he lurches to his feet, wrapping his reflectant cowl about him. With deft tilts of his shield, he mirrors the laser fire back, and one of the distorts erupts, the scarlet wings

  of his ribs splaying apart like a cocoon bursting into a brilliant butterfly.

  Munk attacks. Ignoring the widening exhaustion in his body, he lopes among the firing distorts, swiping at them with a blindingly swift but lethal economy of movement. In moments they are strewn among the rocks, slovenly rags in a greasy mess. And there is suddenly again only one moment left. The laser fire has exhausted his power cells.

  Rey clambers toward the open wing-hatch of his rover and steals a terrified glance over his shoulder. Munk commits the last of his power to snatch a gun from the limp hand of a distort and levels it on the pilot in the hatchway.

  Rey quails, and the console behind him shrieks with metal ripping. The androne missed! Disbelieving, he peers with dread and caution through the weave of his fingers.

  Munk stands unmoving, shooting arm extended. A thick moment passes before Rey realizes that the androne has gone dormant. The lens bar in the featureless puzzle of his face is unlit. Rey's amazement distracts him from the fact that an androne could not miss at this range.

  "Raza," Grielle croaks from inside the rover.

  In rumpled, clumsily donned desert gear, the pilgrims stumble from the vehicles. Rey can see the heat leaking from their loose seams like blood. Then the self-seals kick in, and the faces behind the dear statskin veils flush warmer.

  Rey recognizes their shock and acts with impulsive indignation. "Those creatures almost killed us! We have to disconnect the archaic head. It's tainted wetware."

  Shau faces away from the mangled bodies of the dead but holds his recorder on the corpses a moment longer. "What is he talking about?" he asks, looking to the others.

  Mei gazes in mute and revulsed candor at the dead distorts. Buddy walks over to Munk and stares down the length of the androne's aiming arm.

  "The brain we're carrying is tainted," Rey insists. "The anarchists programmed it like a machine, and I stupidly installed it in the console. At the

  anarchists' signal, it must have usurped your air supply and knocked you out. It would have gotten me, too, if I hadn't been in the latrine, near an emergency statskin. I saw it all. Munk killed them, but the heat from their laser fire sapped his power. I was in here fighting the console, trying to override the wetware's domination. I finally shut him down, but I couldn't clean the air.

  Munk saw my problem, and with his last act, he blew open the console and freed you."

  "It's true," Grielle gasps and steps groggily from the rover. "He was in the

  latrine when it happened."

  "Mr. Charlie is not tainted," Mei declares, shaking her head.

  "He might be," Shau says. "I mean, his file says he was held on Earth for quite a while by lewdists and anarchists."

  "What are you saying, Pilgrim Nili?" Rey asks with feigned anger. "I nearly got killed trying to save you!"

  "If Mr. Charlie were tainted," Mei persists, "he would have detonated the explosives on Phoboi Twelve when he still had the codes. Anarchists destroy. He hasn't destroyed anything."

  "He called those distorts down on us, I'm sure of it," Rey insists.

  Grielle throws her hands up in dismay. "We don't need Mr. Charlie to go on. Let's leave him shut down and get away from here."

  "But what about Munk?" Mei asks. "We can't leave him here."

  Rey looks shocked. "We can't lug a deep-space patrol-class androne. He's made of supermassive alloy. It'll take a full rover moving at half speed to carry him anywhere."

  "The dune climber could handle him," Buddy states.

  Grielle, who is staring at Rey with a perplexed impatience, hands on her hips, says, "I'm the caravan director, and I will not dump a fortune in psyonic core units to haul a rundown androne."

  "He just saved your life," Shau points out, catches the sudden wry cock of her head, and shrugs. "Though I guess for a passager that doesn't mean a whole lot."

  Grielle passes an apologetic look to the others and says, "I am grateful that Munk saved our lives. For myself, I want to die on the Walk of Freedom in Solis, in the traditional way. But if I had died here, I would be as free. I say we

  dump the androne and get on with our trek."

  "Well, I'm not leaving Munk," Mei says, crossing her arms.

  "Are any of us leaving?" Grielle asks with exasperation. "Do the rovers still run, Rey?"

  "Yes, I'm sure of it," he says, glad to divert the conversation away from culpability. He pokes his head into the cabin and calls back, "The androne's shot was precise. It destroyed only the remote air controller."

  "Then I say we go now," Grielle presses, "before any more distorts find us." Buddy steps past Grielle and peeks into the cabin. "Looks to me like Munk's

  shot also burned out the laser cannon controls. That right, Rey?"

  "Hmm, yes," Rey admits, having already vainly tried to activate those weapons to cauterize all witnesses. "I guess he figured the wetware could have used the cannon against us."

  "His shot was precise," Buddy observes softly. His hard, dolorous stare seems an indictment, and Rey is about to protest when the man says, "We'll need your help mounting Munk to a rover."

  "Okay," Rey concedes, not relenting his mean squint for an instant. "I'll have the handroids load him on the third rover. But Grielle and I are going ahead. We're not slowing down for the androne."

  "Mei," Buddy asks, "can you pilot a desert rover?" "In my sleep."

  "I'm the director of this caravan," Grielle protests. "My decision is what counts."

  "I don't think so," Shau says and pans from Grielle in her outrage to the scattered skull shards and pink brain sludge glistening among the rocks. "We're in the wilds now. I don't think anything counts here except survival."

  The handroids crab-swarm over Munk and within the hour have him securely strapped to the roof of the third rover. While they work, Rey Raza examines the vehicles, acting concerned about damage. A boiling mix of dread and anger seethe in him, and he's glad when the others go off to look over the distorts'

  trundle-carrier. Enraged that his business deal with the Commonality has been undone by the androne, he is determined to destroy the pilgrims. They will join Grielle on her death-passage sooner than she expected. Under the engine manifold of the second rover, he loosens a critical deck plate.

  "I think we should at least talk with Mr. Charlie," Mei Nili is saying as she

  returns with the group from the trundle-carrier.

  "He's an abomination." Grielle Aspect
says with a revulsed sneer. "Think on him: a wad of brain tissue intent on only one thing-flesh. I told him, flesh is darkness. Though the flesh is in the light, the light is not in the flesh. It would be far better for him if we broke him open on the rocks."

  Shau Bandar, walking a wide circle around the two, objects. "Doesn't it count that he's a thousand years old? He's a living piece of our history."

  "What did you find in that rusty box?" Rey asks from where he is supervising the handroids' rock burial of the distorts.

  "It's a dangerous piece of junk," Mel says. "It's corroded throughout. The compression ducts could blow anytime."

  "We should get away from it soon," Rey concurs. "Others may be tracking it." "There was a semblor in the carrier." Buddy reports. "We found a plasma

  booster pump that has just been used."

  "Yes, yes, that's tight," Rey murmurs, rocking back on his heels, submerging his anxiety as he studies Buddy's face. There are none of the telltale

  heat-blotches of anger, so Rey is convinced he knows nothing, though there is a furrow of suspicion in the man's blockbrow. "I saw a semblor emerge. Munk burst it right away. Then the laser fire began."

  "The handroids are done," Grielle notices, standing with one hand on the jut of her hip as she assesses Munk. The androne's limbs have been loosened and his body mounted prone on the rover's roof in the shape of a humanoid swastika. "We can still fulfill most of our nycthemeral journey if we depart now."

  "Leave those guns here," Rey warns Shau, who is hefting the laser pistol the handroids removed from Munk's grip. "It's probably tainted and could be used by other distorts to target us."

  "I want to talk to Mr. Charlie," Mei says.

  "You can ride with that wetware if you want," Rey responds sternly, "but I won't activate him on this caravan. Forget it." He turns on one toe and motions for Grielle to follow.

  "We're all corpses-to-be," Grielle says blithely as she strolls past the burial mounds of orange rocks. "Better to give oneself to the light than be taken by the darkness."

  Under the weight of the androne, the third rover crawls only half as fast as the others, and the crate-laded dune climber and the lead rover with Rey and Grielle in it ride far ahead. Mei, who pilots the second rover in full desert gear in the event of another accident, loses sight of them and slows down so as not to lose her rear view of Munk.

  "I think Raza betrayed us," Buddy speaks sadly from the deck chair beside the jumper. Like the others, he too, wears a statskin cowl and sealed togs, his fabric ruddy and smudged on the side where he crawled under the trundle-carrier to find the plasma booster pump. "A semblor wouldn't come into the desert to stalk a signalcarrier. Distorts can do that. The semblor was here to meet with someone."

  "If we could speak to Munk," Mei says, "we'd know for sure. But I think you're right. Raza probably cut a deal with the Commonality for Mr. Charlie."

  Shau looks down from his perch in the observation bubble behind the forward cabin. "We don't know that. So Rabana says Raza's story is plausible." He holds a hand to his left ear, catching a message in his timpan-com. "When the Commonality found out Softcopy was covering Mr. Charlie's trek, they sent her some officious report warning that the archaic brain had been tampered with by the, ah, let's see-Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group. That's what Ananta charged in the Moot. But who are these Friends?"

  "A clade on Earth," Mei answers. "My understanding is they branched into people with an emotional craving for a certain mathematics-"

  "Right, here it is," the reporter indicates with an abstracted expression, calling up a file on his corneal display. "They branched a hundred and

  fifty-eight terrene years ago-enjambed limbic and cortical plexes-blah blah blah-ah, here's what we want: They abide no authority at all, not even reservation strictures, and are general troublemakers for the Commonality. I don't see any record of violence, though. They seem to be more mischievous and

  insubordinate than destructive."

  "They would have the know-how to trigger wetware," Mei accedes, "but I can't believe that those number-dreamers would do that to an archaic brain. Maybe-"

  "Hold up!" Shau shouts. His frantic face glares down between his knees from his sling in the bubble. "Stop the rover! The local office is hearing an ultrahigh pitch over my comlink. The androne dispatcher says it's a pressure whistle. It's coming from under us, in the drive-train. The rover's going to blow!"

  Instantly, Mei Nili shuts down the engine, stops the third rover by cutting off the autopilot, throws open all the hatches, and exits through the port companionway, all with the fluid ease of her long training. Buddy barges out the starboard side, and Shau lifts himself through the popped-open bubble, leaps

  from the top of the rover, and lands in a dust-splash among the cauterized rocks.

  Running is swift and easy over the gravelly desert, and Mei and Buddy bound toward the shelter of talus rocks that have spilled from the scorched slopes of a crumbling crater rim. Awkward in his cumbersome desert gear, Shau trails behind. In a twinkling gust of static sparks and a thump of thunder, the second rover explodes. Chunks of white hull roll flashing into the sky, and a spray of flйchettes cut iridescent tracks in the pink atmosphere. One fragment strikes the back of the reporter's mantle as he bolts over the cold ancient ash, and he flops forward, his neck cleanly broken.

  Mei rushes toward his fallen body but stops when she sees the queer angle of his head and the lifeless gape of his face.

  Buddy passes Mei, kneels over Shau, and rips open the reporter's statskin cowl. "The cold will preserve him," he explains, gasping with exertion. "He's intact. If we get him to Solis soon, he can be revived."

  "Mr. Charlie," Mei rasps, looking back at the twisted debris of the rover. She jogs to the wreck and finds the plasteel capsule nestled among tangles of shredded metal. Its surface is spalled and cloudy with scratches, but the case itself is whole. She picks it up and scrutinizes it, trying to see if the shock of the blast damaged the interior.

  Buddy strides past, carrying Shau in his arms. The corpse's face is

  powder-blue, the lips silvery white. "We'd better check Munk's rover carefully." Mei lifts her angry face to the pale rose sky and screams, "Raza!"

  Nude sandstone walls and maroon monument rocks crown the cliff crest where the dune climber and the first desert rover have stopped. These are the ruins of

  Sama Neve, a famous center of passage centuries ago, during the Exodus of Light, and Grielle believes Rey stopped to offer her this fabulous view. She speaks reverently, "'At last, I see the last.' That was first said here, Rey. Think on the freedom of-"

  "Did you see that?" Rey asks, pointing down the long escarpment to the alkali basin where he spotted the sparkle of the exploding rover, "That flash?"

  Grielle's dreamy gaze surveys the golden desert below and selects a glimmer from among the strewn boulders on the nearby slope. "Yes, what is it?"

  Rey widens his eyes in mock surprise. "I think that was one of the rovers! It exploded!"

  Grielle presses against the viewport, frowning to see what looks like a white blossom on the desert floor, it's a blast cloud of sand. "Those fools!"

  "That damn jumper must have flooded the compression tanks," Rey says, doing

  the same, reaching across the burned gash of the console and stroking the sensor pads that will flood the compression tanks. In the next few minutes the tanks will explode and Grielle will make her passage sooner than she expected. He's pleased with himself that he has at least arranged for her to do so in the presence of Sarna Neve. "I better take the dune climber down there and see if anyone can be saved. Stay here, and I'll call you if it's safe."

  Grielle makes a feeble attempt to detain him, but he exits quickly and closes the wing-hatch after him. She is moved by his humane urgency and stands to watch him sprint up the salmon-colored rise of sandstone to the dune climber. He

  bounds into the cab and starts rolling downslope, the big blue wheels scattering

&nb
sp; gravel in fins behind him.

  Less than halfway down the escarpment, the dune climber fishtails to an abrupt halt. The glimmer among the strewn boulders that Grielle had glimpsed earlier flickerflashes toward Rey. In the red dust kicked up by his hard stop, the disclike bodies, whirling fins, and raving mouth parts of the shreeks materialize.

  The white tarpaulin, now peach-red with sand, pulls away under their biting frenzy, exposing the cumbrous crates in the carry bay. More rocks spit skyward as Rey swings the dune climber around and starts churning up the boulder-waned slope. The shreeks thrash among the crates with shuddering might and bang their

  .pugnacious bodies against the spinning wheels. Splats of squashed shreek spin away in widening vectors, and Grielle, who is watching appalled, thinks Rey is going to elude them. She looks for the comlink to encourage him.

  Then one of the shreeks slams into the cab of the dune climber, and the canopy roof wings into the air. Grielle's heart thumps, and she steadies herself with a bracing gust of degage. Only the olfact enables her to stand still and watch the dune climber weasel among the scarp boulders, scrambling back toward the ridge. She scans the burnt console before her, trying to recall how Rey drove this thing. She wants to go to him, to drive the shreeks off if she can. But the

  array of sensor pads are just so many jeweled lights to her.

  The dune climber disappears from Grielle's vantage. Four heartbeats later, her breath is snatched away when the climber shoots over the rim of the scarp and lofts into the air, wheels blurring. It smacks onto the road in front of the rover, toppling the crates from its carry bay under the shrill screams of its brakes.

  Rey pulls himself from the cab, and Grielle opens the side hatch for him. Shreeks flap up from below, etched into the visible by veils of dust. And though they are thronging toward Rey, she stands in the doorway to help him, to sacrifice herself if necessary. Under the gaze of Sarna Neve and the hundreds of millions who passed here, she can do no less for so valiant a man.