Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  Munk dizzies. A whole life unfurls before him. He skims ahead and sees Buddy in a caravan heading west into the pumice winds of the red desert, returning to Terra Tharsis. And above that, the opal-black heights of the Maat city where there is no death.

  His vision dissolves in a blind roar of images a thousand years deep-and still there is Buddy, at this far-gone time under the anvil of a tree. The stony land is patch-quilted with lichen and sloping swards, and groves of strata-tiered trees bloom among the rocky outcrops under a flame-blue sky.

  Munk startles alert to find himself gazing at lucent grains of dust glittering in the space where a moment before a craze-eyed Buddy stood. He can hear the crunching of the icy gravel as the man flees among the erratic boulders. The androne doesn't know what to do. The sounds fade away, and Buddy entirely

  disappears into the silence of his future.

  Solis dazzles under the minarets of sunfire that are capturing that day's power. Terraced on the ramparts of ancient impact craters, the settlement hoards light, from the prism-cut lofts at the craters' edges to the glass hangars and mirror panes of the huddled warrens on the desert floor. Among a jumble of red ivy bunkers and ginger stonework arbors, two small orange pyramids catch his attention, and he remembers Buddy saying, "Those are the vats of the Anthropos Essentia; Mr. Charlie will be taken there."

  Only, the Maat had called Mr. Charlie by his untranslated name, and it had sounded like a rattle of wind over shale. Munk repeats it, "Charles Outis," and the noise goes off aimlessly across the gritty swells of land.

  He telescopes in on the orange pyramids and says the name more softly. Then his vision pulls back with the thought that the Maat could have left Buddy anywhere they wanted and certainly closer to the tent camp. That the neo-sapiens would bring the androne to this precise place is significant, he assumes, and he scans more slowly the journey down the heather-choked gullies and ice-splotched cobble flats to the stone wall and a dolmen door with a niter beard. Hidden by fan boulders and a torpid mound of rocks, the door is visible only from this venue.

  There are blisters of rime around the touch pad that will listen for the correct code signal to open the door. As Munk stares at the amplified image of the pad, giddy disbelief overtakes all his reservations. The touch pad is identical to the type used by lapetus Gap. and he is confident that his familiarity with this lock system will enable him to feel out the admittance code.

  He starts forward, then stops and asks himself where he thinks he's going. To find Charles Outis he confirms to himself and continues on his way, leaving unspoken his expectation of confronting the people in the settlement and finding out if the Maat are right. Maybe there is a place for him among the last tribes at the end of the world.

  He strides boldly across the desolation, and as he approaches the lithic entryway, he makes no effort to hide himself-for if he is indeed human, he belongs in Solis.

  7

  Zero in the Bone

  MEL NILI HAS SEEN THE SOUS CLADES-THE MARTIANS-numerous times in news clips, but in person they seem much bigger. They stand bristle-headed and

  narrow-shouldered above the counselors from the terrene anthro commune. The counselors, dressed in the sere-and-buff tunics and toque caps of the Solis autocracy, are tall and slender-muscled from their lives in the thin gravity of Mars. They crane their necks to look up at Exu and Hannas Bowans' marsupial faces, and watching them together, the jumper marvels again at the diversity of human life outside the reservation.

  The martians flitter away across the Fountain Court in their eerie synchronized gait, and in moments they are lost among the hive bustle of numerous other martians crossing through the plaza's chords of sunlight and broken spectra.

  "Clades," Grielle Aspect snickers from behind Mei. "I'm glad to be getting away from this genetic circus. You should come with me."

  Mei tilts her head back and gives a sour look. "Maybe when I'm as old as you, I'll be ready to end it, too."

  "Oh, I'm not ending it, Mei dear." Grielle smiles seraphically. "I'm becoming light-true freedom. No more of this shapeshifting---morphs, clades, and plasmatics-it's disgusting. The light is pure and timeless."

  "If you believe that," Mei says, pointing with her eyes to Grielle's wimple and opaline apron, the traditional garments of a passager, "why are you paying

  to revive Shau?"

  "Rey Raza died trying to save him-to save all of you," Grielle says softly, her eyes unfocusing. "I saw him die. It was a terrible thing. I would bring him back if I could." Her gaze tightens. "But I can't. So, it's the journalist. Maybe he'll see the light and die properly. If we leave the flesh in the right way, we never have to come back, you know."

  Sitor Ananta steps past them to greet the approaching counselors. A whiff of a cold fragrance tingles in his wake, and Mei experiences a discoloring in her soul. "That agent is using olfacts to sway the people around him."

  Grielle winks slyly. "Don't you just envy him? Even I can't afford olfacts that effective. If I could, you'd all be passagers."

  The three anthro counselors show their palms, introduce themselves, and conduct the pilgrims on a walking tour of Greater FreeSolis. The settlement is large, but the interface among the clade cantonments, the anthro commune, and

  the Anthropos Essentia enclaves is a triangular plaza with the Fountain Court at the center. Strolling across the garnet flagstones, they have the opportunity to see all the human types in their bright and often outre garb: the martians with their back-bending stalk legs and bouffant manes, the whippet-thin wraiths of

  the Anthropos Essentia in their orange frocks and headwraps, and the aboriginals looking so simian in their contour jackets and flexfabrics. A counselor points out that even some of the elaborate air plants hanging among the strati-form galleries under the blue-glass canopy are plasmatics, humans in wholly inhuman form. Another counselor explains how selective Solis has been about the numbers and types of human variants it has integrated within its biotecture.

  Their patter is endless, and Mei interrupts to ask where Mr. Charlie is. In reply, the counselors talk about the vats and point out on a holoform map of the settlement two compact orange pyramids at the old end. Then Grielle wants to see the Walk of Freedom, and a section of the map expands to show the famous

  crystal-gravel path leaving the ebony gate and curving under a skull-mounted catafaique into a field of human bones and mummified corpses.

  At tour's end, on a balcony overlooking the Rainbow Court, there is a meal of vegetables and hatchery steaks. Sitor Ananta is magnificent with the counselors, amusing and charming them. Several times Mei tries to direct the conversation to the olfacts, but no one seems to care. The meal continues with amicable cheer, eventually even the jumper laughing with the others over Grielle's pantomime of

  a martian.

  "When will I see Mr. Charlie?" Mei asks the counselors after the meal. The counselors confer as they lead the way between two silvery walls of

  electrostatically suspended water and up an automated rampway to a bunker of black, blockcut rock scribbled with ivy. This is the anthro lodge where the agent will be staying, and he lingers under the dragon-eye lintel for the counselors' reply.

  They can't agree on whether the bodyweave will be complete in two or three days. The vats are busy designing clades for the cold new worlds beyond the Belt.

  "Too late," Grielle decides. "I bad hoped to speak with him before my

  passage-you know, dears, I really want to confront the poor man with the error

  of his ways. But I don't think he's slept in his flesh a thousand years to argue with me. So I am gone. Tomorrow I commit my last act of light as a human."

  Mei is left in the purple-tile vestibule of the hostel where she will reside until she earns enough credit for her own suite. Grielle and the counselors depart into the saffron afternoon, and the jumper uses the password the counselors have given her to enter a cloister of blackglass cubicles.

  From inside her own chamber, the w
alls to the corridor and the outside are transparent, and she can see the serrated rooftops, a hint of the clustered rainbows from the Fountain Court, and the broken shoulders of the crater rim, rubescent in the long sunlight.

  "Jumper Nili," a familiar voice calls from the doorway. Shau Bandar stands there wearing the green caftan of the vats and a thick grin. "Are you in there?"

  Mei hurries to touch the entry pad, and he strides in, the door sliding shut behind him. He pivots, displaying his partly shaved scalp, the close-cropped

  hair like red hackles. Without his face paint, he looks no different from any of the men in the hamlets of her reservation on Earth.

  "I've been in the beverage stall across the way," he says, "waiting for you to return. So what do you think? How did the vat doctors do?"

  "I think it's a tough way to get a haircut."

  They laugh and skim palms, and he plops onto a flexform chair and grins at her. "They say I was dead for days. But it was like being asleep. I don't even remember what happened."

  Mei sits in the window bay and tells him what happened. They talk excitedly about Softcopy's betrayal and how close he has come to the absolute edge of departure. From down the blackglass corridor, Sitor Ananta slinks into view. He flicks his palms at them. "Open the door. I know you're in there."

  Shau moves to slap the door pad, and Mei stops him. An angry light flexes in her eyes, a twinkle of fear at its core. "Don't! He's dangerous. He uses psycholfacts to manipulate people."

  Shau looks surprised. "That's the Commonality agent we saw in the Moot, the one who wants to reclaim Mr. Charlie. Those agents are rascals. That's why Mr. Charlie fears him. But they can't use psychokinetic substances. It's against the mandate, and you know how righteous those tightasses are about that."

  "Open the door, you two," Sitar Ananta calls with a timbre surprisingly deep for his slender frame. "I want to speak to you about Mr. Charlie."

  "Let's just ignore him," Mei advises.

  "He knows we're here. Why must we hide?" "I think he's crazy."

  Shau rolls his eyes in disbelief. "We're the crazy ones, Jumper Nili. That's what I found out in the vats. You left the reservation, I left Terra Tharsis-for what? To hide? I've been dead. What is there left to be afraid of?" He reaches for the entry pad. "Don't worry. I'll talk with him."

  "Bandar, don't!" Mei calls.

  The glass door parts, and Sitor Ananta, grinning coldly, enters in a cloud of dreams. Munk has no trouble figuring out the admittance codes to open the stone portal that enters Solis. His large frame is cramped in the lightless corridor, and he must proceed stooped and sideways. With infrascan he sees that the walls are composed of an unfamiliar alloy. He wants to pause and examine it, but a reverberant pulsing summons him from ahead, and he is eager to see where this entryway leads.

  Farther. along, the walls begin to weep. The substance that dews on the slick surface is mostly water, yet at his touch he feels the helical waverings of molecular linkages. He identifies chains of methylated proteins before he realizes that the corridor ahead is smaller. He cannot hope to go forward and decides to retreat. But behind him the hall is also tighter than when he passed through, and in a gust of surprise, he sees that the passageway is soundlessly constricting.

  The androne tentatively pits his strength against the contracting walls, but their force is too great even for him. Viscous sheets of organic fluid slicken all surfaces. The floor, too, is wet, and he has no purchase to apply any resistance. In moments, the ceiling is weighing heavily on his shoulders, and he is obliged to bend over, then forced to curl up. The dense liquid envelops him.

  The contracting walls close around him, then stop. Nothing more happens, and Munk begins to think that he has been encased alive, maybe indefinitely He computes that with his fully charged power cells he could remain conscious in this immobilized state for centuries; he is too frightened to determine how

  many. Then he senses movement. The corridor slowly shunts him inward, the strong peristaltic motion sweeping him in his liquid sac deeper into Solis.

  Abruptly, space opens around him, and he is adrift in a thick fluid of inductor enzymes that sheathe him in a strong electromagnetic field. He senses that the field is being directed from an outside source, but already his

  sensors, under the influence of the field, are shutting down. He cannot move his limbs, and his infraview goes blind.

  Darkness and silence possess him. He is alert, but he has no referents. Time,

  too, seems distorted. He searches for his internal anthropic model and finds nothing. Panic swirls in him, and then that, also, fades away. He floats in emptiness, outside and inside reduced to nothing. Only his consciousness persists, his ineffable and enclosing sense of I am.

  The hallucinations begin with a mushroom cloud of billowing images. He's aware of this phenomenon from the archives: sensory-deprivation hallucinations. When external stimulation is deprived, the brain generates living images to fill the void. Always, before, when he turned his sensors off, he filled the emptiness with his anthropic model but never for intervals longer than a second.

  Now, with no sensory or internal models, he thrives in a flux of images, memories folding into lucid dreams-the aqua-green ripples in a shallow marine pool rhyming with the glow of The Laughing Life's flight bubble as he overrides his primary programming and initiates the code sequence that ignites Phoboi Twelve into a blue-white fireball.

  The blunt, leering snout of a moray eel shoves out of the crimson cloud of planet dust and swells into Aparecida's sleek visage. Choice and chance, she says with the voice of the musical dispatcher from Lapetus Gap, and suddenly he is flying above the agate clouds of Saturn listening to music. He never said farewell to the androne in the control pod on Titan who broadcast that music.

  They never met, yet she laved him with her creativity for years until he woke to the choice to take a chance on himself.

  All the experiences that followed from his choice to activate his

  contra-parameter program sluice through him in a fiery plume of images, like the outbound incandesence of Phoboi Twelve's explosion. His life has been an explosion, he sees, cooling at the edges to the pixel dust of memories. The void that surrounds those memories is misty with the fractal diminutions of endless associations and augmentations-the magical zone of the imagination, its flowstreams of hallucinatory shapes shrinking ever farther into virtual space, like a tree whose madness of tiny roots tightens on nothing.

  His consciousness slips free of all he can remember and imagine. Everything he has been in spacetime and in mind, everything he could be, all of his life goes off like fireworks and dwindles sparkling into darkness.

  He is alert in the darkness, which is really not darkness or light but an isotropic dearth of sensation, a nothingness in which only his sense of awareness persists. He is the busy work of atoms, force lines of intersecting fields, a clear flame full of shapes, the quivery glistening in the lens of a startled eye.

  A brown iris flexes around the black depth of a pupil. It blinks, and he pulls away to see two brown eyes staring shrilly from a submerged human face. Wavy

  hair streams like shreds of brown sargassum, and the bloated, staring face is drowned before he realizes he is not seeing a face but a reflection.

  Munk thrashes convulsively. Beset with chest cramps and a roaring in his head, he surges upward and breaks the mirror gloss of the surface. Chilled air scalds his sinus and lungs, and his loud sucking gasp drums echoes out of the brightness. Quaking with shock and oxygen hunger, he flops to his back in the saline buoyancy and sees that he is floating in a tank big as a pond.

  Star-webbed rows of lights shine blindingly overhead, illuminating the slick green water and the ceramic lip of the tank.

  He huffs laboriously, kicking his legs to keep his head up and holding his hands before his face-human hands, with trembling fingers and blue-pink fingernails and the palms etched with fine lines of destiny.

  "What is your name?" a vo
ice calls from beyond the tank's edge.

  In the cold air above the steaming surface of the green fluid, his head and hands float, and a laugh breaks through his gasping. He gapes at the smoke of

  his laughter in the cold air and laughs again, choking and gulping oxygen. He is respiring! The astounding truth of what has happened knocks him breathless

  again, and he coughs jets of steam.

  "What is your name, man?" the booming voice calls again:

  He wrenches enough air into his lungs to shout, "Munk." A handroid slides onto the edge of the tank and extends a coiling arm. "Solis welcomes you, Munk."

  Munk seizes the arm and pulls himself to the side of the tank, where he hangs

  shivering, panting, trying to understand.

  "Rise, Munk," the handroid beckons. "The people would have you among them." Munk stills his excitement enough to stare at his human nakedness and listen

  inward. An effulgence of psychic energies churns within him, but the virtual reality of his C-P program is gone and with it his capacity to function mentally in suspended time. He listens for code signals and hears only his own rasping

  and the slosh of the tank's edge.

  Heart slamming, he pulls himself out of the mist-wreathed liquid and sits heavily on the rim of the vat. The handroid steadies him with a coil arm lashed around his torso, and Munk hangs there staring at men and women naked as he. They are smiling and laughing and rushing across the glaring white tiles waving to him with towels and blankets. A racket of triumphant music swells under the hard lights, and a splash of rose petals hits him between the eyes.

  For a day and a night, Sitor Ananta uses his psycholfacts to make Mei Nili and Shau Bandar irresistible to each other. He sits in a flexform with his back to the luminous window, a motionless silhouette in the room watching the two naked, glistening bodies grappling with their irreparable passion. He can tell from the forgotten fear on their faces, from the startled pleasure of their weary features, that sensuality is a happy calamity for them.