Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  "Okay, jumper," he says in a mounting seethe of ambition. "Softcopy will, like this. There hasn't been a good trek story in a long time. I think we're going to make news."

  Munk stands in tigerish shadows under overarching branches, staring across a spacious parkland of green sward and the flat of a pond molten with midday glare. Beyond the hedge fringe, the hills of Terra Tharsis look soft in the mauve shadow of a huge tower, while on farther hills the skylights of pavilions reflect the sun in hot motes.

  Fish rise silently in the pond. Vivid, tiny birds spurt from a stand of white birches and stream away over tussocks of feathering At the far end of the sward, a loose cloud of people swirl, playing some kind of ball game. Small figures, some as couples, most in bunches, drift among the quilted shadows of the

  tree-lumped fields. A forlorn music fritters from players in a distant grove.

  Through his receptors, Munk listens to the crystal music of the city's silicon mind. He can hear the alien code logics chittering around him, and by their

  noise he has successfully located all andrones in the vicinity and avoided them. Satisfied that none are near now, he tunes into a bramble of communications from the cars he sees twinkling on the causeways. They talk of games, foods, credits, raptures, meetings, morphings, rivalries, olfact recipes, music, humorous anecdotes, clade branchings, and barters. No mention of him or Mr. Charlie. Very little commerce is discussed. Perhaps that is all conducted in the skytowers, which are opaque to his sensors.

  Tiny millions of lives are held in his gaze, he sees, scanning the hazy distances. Why have the Maat created so many lives? And so many kinds of

  lives-all of them human yet virtually none that would be entirely recognizable to the human in the plasteel capsule at his feet. Mr. Charlie had lived in a society of gonads and ovaries, adrenals and dopamine receptors. What will he make of this Maat creation, where sex, fear, anger, and pain have mostly been morphed away?

  This man must live. He must be brought to the vats and have his body restored. To fulfill these imperatives, Munk believes the Maat installed in him the anthrophilic C-P program, which, since his escape from the Moot, has been

  gauging his options. He must leave Terra Tharsis as soon as possible, he knows. But first he has to find Jumper Nili-not out of any personal sense of loyalty. He feels none for her. She fulfilled her role in his plan on Phoboi Twelve,

  liberating Mr. Charlie from the deceptions of Ares Bund. if she still desires to go on to Soils with him and Mr. Charlie, then it is her responsibility to locate and come to him.

  Yet Munk is certain Mr. Charlie will want to see Jumper Nili when he is next brought to consciousness. After all, she is the first truly human being he encountered since his death, and Munk's anthropic model assures him that significant bonding between the two has already occurred. Somehow, he must find transportation for them across the wilds of Mars. Without the jumper, he could simply walk with the plasteel capsule in hand...

  "Excuse me, androne," a frail voice calls from the shrubs behind Munk.

  A tremor scathes the androne with the disturbing awareness that he has been

  surprised. His internalized focus had locked up his alertness and left him inattentive to his surroundings. in the fraction of a second before he locates the source of the voice, he anguishes at this attention lag, indicative of the reduced capacity of his primary programming.

  "Help me, please," a large, sandy-haired man says from where he lies doubled over in a bilbeny bush. He is wearing a chamois strap-jacket and brown cord trousers with scruffy blue boots.

  "I.. . I fell. . long ways."

  Atop burdock and vandal sprays of nettle far back in the hedgework, virtually hidden by the banked shrubs, gossamer wings lie torn and tangled. The shredded membranes are dissolving into iridescent fumes among the sun's bright coins. Already no more than coils of smoke, the straps from the fragile glider dangle where the stranger freed himself. Munk reads the dark track in the tufty grass from the man's strenuous effort to crawl into the bilberry bush, and the androne is appalled to realize that he has been standing beside this unconscious figure the whole time unawares.

  "Who are you?" Munk asks, crouching over the fallen man.

  "My name is Buddy." He looks up at the androne with a tight-sewn grimace. "Help me up. Please."

  Munk scans Buddy's stout body, running his spatulate hands over the cramped muscles and detecting no broken bones. But there is a staticky sensation from numerous burst capillaries. "You are injured."

  "No, just bruised." He swings an arm onto the androne's cowled shoulder and painfully unfolds upright. "I'll be all right."

  Munk holds the powerfully built human steady and feels none of the microvoltage perturbations in the body's ultraweak soma field that would be indicative of profuse internal bleeding. He splays his hand over the skull and senses the slow, majestic theta rhythms of profound sleep or trance. "Your brain..

  Buddy pulls his head back and stares at Munk with a square, careworn face, vague eyebrows sad-slanted on a thick brow above large, tristful gray eyes. "I feel-stunned."

  "What happened?"

  Buddy brushes his thin blond hair back with the trembly fingers of both hands. "Stupid mistake. I took night wings out for a day glide. The membranes burned up."

  He rubs his dented jaw, and his pale, thin lips smile wryly. "I could have killed myself. Stupid."

  "A nearly fatal blunder," Munk concurs politely, regarding the purplish silver wings shredding to vapors. With his sensors he sees that they are a film of polarized monocolloidals, a sheer and nearly transparent material that cannot reasonably be mistaken for solar-sturdy fabric. These wings had to have been purposively selected. And yet, his internalized anthropic model assures him, humans do have monstrous attention lags, not unlike what he himself just endured wondering about his destiny with Mr. Charlie. Sometimes, he knows, humans have their most fatal lags when they unconsciously desire their doom. "Are you unhappy?"

  Buddy stops rubbing his jaw and leans closer, looking at him with a peculiar intensity. "You're-different. For an androne."

  Munk regrets questioning this man. The androne's primary program has already been committed to carry Mr. Charlie to Solis, and he wishes now that he could turn off his C-P impulses, which are coaxing him to interact with this human before him. Despite himself, he says, "I'm Munk, from the Saturn system. The Maat have installed contra-parametrics that inspire my interest in people. That is what brought me here. And that is why I am talking with you."

  Buddy gives a slow nod of understanding. "Munk, can I lean on you? I want to try to walk." With the androne's help, he manages several tentative steps. "The thermals are strong today. They slowed my descent. And I steered for the trees to break my fall. I am an unhappy man, Munk-but not ready to die. At least, not consciously."

  Munk's primary program feels he has heard enough and must remove himself so that he may fulfill his initial objective. But his C-P incentive insists on more data. "What saddens you?" the androne asks, letting the bruised man try a few wobbly steps on his own.

  Buddy shrugs, offers a plaintive smile. "I don't know. This all seems so pointless sometimes. The usual plaint."

  "Don't olfacts mitigate your plaint?"

  "I'm an old one, Munk. I've been here a long time. Even olfacts have their limits." He lowers himself achingly to the grass and notices the plasteel capsule in a root cove of a nearby tree. "What's that?".

  "An archaic brain. I am taking him to Soils, to the vats there. His name is

  Mr. Charlie."

  Buddy groans as he leans closer to peer at the capsule. "I see him. All the goods are there. Brainstem, too. How old?"

  "At least a millennium."

  Buddy blows a silent whistle, sits up, and wipes the sweat of his exertion from his broad brow. "I thought I was around a long time."

  "How old are you, Buddy?"

  "Damn old-but not that old. Where'd you find Mr. Charlie?"

  "I have already to
ld you too much," Munk acknowledges, finally supressing his C-P compulsion with the awareness that he is threatening this man. "I am in violation of the Moot. Further association with me may put you in danger. Since you seem recovered from your fall, I will leave you here, Buddy."

  "Don't go yet. Finding you has been a great stroke of luck for me." Buddy squints at Munk with a querying and pained expression. "Do andrones believe much in luck?"

  "No. My anthropic model includes luck as a vital faith that people have experienced throughout human history, but I believe such superstition demeans people."

  "Yes." Buddy sighs and with his heavy hands strokes the grass as if it were fur. "The old ones have said that luck is the child of mystery and fear. But I subscribe to it anyway, fool that I am." His wide face flexes with pain as he leans backward on his elbows. "Tell me your story, Munk. I accept full responsibility for what may come of it. Please."

  The plangent expression in the man's blond face quiets Munk's anxiety, but he can find no reason to confide anything more. "I must go now, Buddy. Be well."

  "Wait, Munk." in the sunslant through the branches that strikes his

  ginger-haired and freckled head, Buddy's eye-sockets look dragonish. "You said you're on your way to Solis and you've violated the Moot. Security may be looking for you. I know the city very well. I can help you avoid them. I can take you to a discreet egress where you can enter the wilds without being observed. An androne of your obvious durability can make the famous trek on foot." His sketchy eyebrows bend more sadly. "Please, tell me your story. I can help you."

  Buddy's plangent voice reactivates Munk's C-P program, and for a full second the androne struggles with this decision. In that time, he calls forth the new data he recorded in the Moot when Charles's memory-cull records were displayed in coded spectra. Among those thousand-year-old memories are ideas that inspire Munk to transcend his primary programming yet again and trust in the

  creative-what he had always called the unexpected-to find for him new ways through the veils of the world.

  Imagination, Munk tells himself within his capacious one-second arena of contemplation. Around that one word he constellates useful information from Charles's memory cull, which tells him that imagination is the psychic process that transforms the pain and limitations of the purely physical. "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul." Those are the words of William Blake, a poet Charles admires.

  In the all-inclusive imagination, where circumference does not exist, uncertainty is renovated and becomes sacred, indivisible, impenetrable, unified with all that his primary program usually rejects, with everything ugly, fierce, and cruel. This unity of opposites, of matter and imagination, primary

  programming and uncertainty, beauty and ugliness-this, the ancient memories inform him, is where mind reabsorbs reality into a new wholeness. Then the fiery expenditure of energy that is our imagination and that makes us creative enables us to endure uncertainty, to tread emptiness, to be-human.

  The crimson light in Munk's lens bar brightens, and as one soul reaching out to another, he tells Buddy his story.

  Shau Bandar leads Mei Nili away from the beverage stall and the busy skim route and along an oak-cloistered promenade past water groves and hanging gardens and squat cottages behind flowering hedgerows to a cobbled lane. The lane climbs beside a gurgeling water rill through red-gold beechwoods, where other bungalows peek out. Staring up, Mei sees the stony trail wending ever higher toward bosky obscurities of pine and fir and the onyx immensity of a skytower.

  "Here's my place," the reporter announces, stepping past a gnarled mimosa tree and opening a blistered wooden gate rhombic from wear. A flagstone path snakes among walnut trees and a billowy mass of frangipani to a grassy shelf and a

  lean, high, gabled house, ramshackle and nearly grown over with rock roses and creeping juniper. "Actually, it may not be mine much longer. I owe more on it than I make, and I'm probably going to have to give it up and live in the cells for a while. Unless, of course," he winks at her, "the copy office buys our trek series."

  They pass a birdbath choked with dead leaves and a sundial knocked askew,

  climb slanted, creaking steps, and enter a dark, musty interior. Filament lights woven into the sagging ceiling flicker on, illuminating bare cubicles with buckled, water-stained walls. A hammock hangs in one corner, a tatty magnification of the cobwebs elsewhere in the room. In another corner tilts a splintery wardrobe.

  Shau Bandar reads the uneasiness in Mei's open face. She is such a blatant provincial, he feels no embarrassment and admits, "I don't merit this house. It belonged to a renowned composer who moved up to a grander niche and left his place to friends. I eventually came to it through a friend of a friend of a friend. It sucks up all my credits and leaves nothing for me to maintain it. But it's haunted with music, and I like that."

  He lifts a shroud from a low table beneath an oval rose-glass window and exposes a palm-sized oblong bubble packed with bright chromatic sections of data wafers. "This is the communications link to the copy office. Seen one of these before? It's a total immersion hookup, so it'll seem as if we're actually at the copy office while in fact we're still here. Try not to move around too much or you might walk into a wall. I'll tune us in, and we'll make our pitch."

  With a wave of his hand over the bubble, he activates the linkage, and suddenly the shabby room is gone and they are in the ice-pale clarity of Softcopy's editorial suite. Under a dome of champagne-tint plastic overpeering the glittering gorges of the skytowers, people in multihued scapulars mill around cube screens meshing together segments for the next news-clip feedout. The full-view screens display the usual fare for the anthro commune:

  interactive neighborhood tours and encounters, sport synergies, gardening tutors, and the big mainstay of the agency, midstim fantasies, which appear as abstract pastiches of sculptural colors. Mei recognizes those from the dream den in the recreational arcade on Deimos and feels a pang of yearning for the neural dream-swatches that each brain tailors to its own desires.

  "Bandar, this is not a good time for hashout," says a big-boned woman with silver wing-braided hair and bold streaks of feather paint on her cheeks. "We've got a fast run on a scootball tournament, and I haven't got ten seconds. Hey, isn't this the rogue jumper?"

  "Jumper Nili, this is my editor, Bo Rabana-"

  "Sweet!" Bo Rabana says, displaying her pudgy palms, then swirling about inside her solar-yellow smock, talking over her shoulder. "I'll open a cube for you, and we'll get your clip out on the next run."

  "Bo, she's not here for an interview. We're pitching a trek. Soils."

  "The scootball's on a fast run," Bo says, pivoting on the balls of her bare

  feet. "We'll talk later."

  "We need a go now, right now," Shau Bandar insists, sliding closer. "Moot security is looking for the androne the jumper came in with. Remember?"

  "Right, right. The Chiliad Man. Great clip. It had a strong run. We can replay when they catch him."

  "Wait, Bo. Listen. The androne's going to take the Chiliad Man to Soils with the jumper. They're falling out now, as outlaws. I want to cover it. It'll be a hot series. Give me the go." Bo Rabana settles onto her heels, her cherubic face looking suddenly heavier. "Bandar, are you serious?"

  "I know it's high risk-"

  "You can die in the wilds!" Bo Rabana's pale shatterglass eyes grow wide. "I

  don't want that on me. Do the interview."

  "It's not on you, Bo. It's me. I need the credits-"

  "Get a Pashalik job and triple your credits," the editor says, backing off. "Don't throw your life away."

  "Bo," he says with a dark change of voice, "if Softcopy won't back me, I'll plug in to Erato. They'll snap up a trek story."

  Rabana's shoulders sag and she steps closer, a stem crease between her startling eyes. "You don't know what you're asking." She turns her fierce gaze

  on Mei. "You look like a hard-knuckler to me. Have you tried to tell this pastry puff
what it's really like outside the bakery?"

  "I don't give a damn what he does," Mei says in chilled, flat tones. "He has the link to the androne I came in with. Make him give me that, and I'm gone."

  "I'm going on this trek," Shau Bandar insists. "It's a big story. It'll have a long run, and I want those credits. Do I get your go or not?"

  "Once you leave Terra Tharsis," Rabana reminds him with a taut stare, "you can't come back."

  "Sure, I can, Bo, if you give me a journalist's pass."

  Bo Rabana lifts her dimpled chin defiantly. "I can't give you a pass, wise guy, until I file your assignment-and once we file, Moot security will be on to your plan to help the rogue androne. You'll never get out. The only way you can take this trek is cold-no pass."

  The reporter gives a hapless shrug. "You can file after I leave."

  "There's no guarantee that will be accepted," Bo retorts sourly. "You may never be able to come back-even if you survive the wilds, which I doubt, pastry puff. Do the interview. We'll hash out other assignments for you. You'll make your house payments." She turns away and bobs off, calling behind, "Stay sweet as you are, Jumper Nili. I've got a hot run going on the scootball. We'll touch up later."

  "I'm doing the trek, Rabana'" Shau Bandar shouts, though inside he's trembling. "Do I get the go from you, or do I plug into Erato?"

  "It's your scrawny ass, Bandar," the editor yells without looking back.

  "Top credit? Full series?" he calls through a triumphant laugh that carries off his initial fright.

  "If you live to collect," she shoots back. From the prospect of the knoll where he crashed, Buddy stares at the dark towers. Wide and mingled as mountains, with sunny windswept pieces of sky squeezed between them, they fill

  space majestically. In their vitreous black depths, laser lines streak the paths of droplifts. Silver-spun threads of skim paths tangle around their bases, and flyers star-glint in the pellucid air of their heights.

  Of course, he is thinking that those are the heights from which he has