Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  Before she can demur, he exits through the metal door, and she is left alone

  to touch the satiny wood and, for the first time, the palpable distance from her origin. She feels rent from her past, her family, and she rends herself from the table. She doesn't want to think about that now, On Phoboi Twelve, in the black moments when she was actually dead, she learned release. She is appalled that

  she will have to learn it again.

  In the cubicle she finds the reporter sitting at the edge of the cot, brushing the off-pad on the cable phone. His smile, for all its meekness, is warm. "I'm sorry about the distorts," he says. "Rabana just scolded me for stopping. I should have come straight here and skipped the damn sunset."

  Mei's eyes lower to meet his, then swing up, weary and burned by tears. "We're alive. That's enough for me right now." She sits down on the cot and unzips her boots. "Is Softcopy going to take care of you?"

  "They're sending me a new link and a recorder mantle." He thumbs the lux pad, and the cubicle lights dim. "I'm going to wait outside for the courier. What I wouldn't give for a whiff right now. Oh, well, I won't see that ring again. Ease, Jumper Nili. Ease and the countenance of dreams."

  A slat of dark blue light glows dully from the latrine. She strips off her flightsuit and throws it in the sanitizing hamper. While it's running, she unpeels the nutriment patches from her forearm, all of them spent, and drops them in the disposer. The sonic shower dispels her last resistance to the fatigue she's been feeling since Terra Tharsis. She retrieves her clean flightsuit, zips it on loosely, and collapses onto the cot.

  Pulling onto the concrete apron of the tour office lot Buddy kills the electric engine of his black and bulky rental car. He waits under the gaze of the laser cannon until Munk appears with Rey Raza and Shau Bandar. The androne, still holding Charles, introduces Buddy, and the stocky man removes a credit clip from his jacket and passes it to Rey.

  "Round trip?" Rey asks, backing toward the garage. "One way," the man with the quiet eyes says.

  "A passager?" Rey inquires.

  Buddy shakes his head. "No. Just a traveler."

  "Not all travelers are admitted to Soils, you know," Rey points out as he takes the credit clip inside to book passage. "A one-way trek both ways is expensive."

  "Whatever it costs," Buddy replies.

  "Munk called you an old one," the reporter says as they stroll into the garage port. "Are you filed with Softcopy?"

  "Yes," Buddy admits and adds with a gentle, mysterious patience, "But I don't want you pulling it up, if you can restrain yourself. I don't want that with me on this trek."

  "I don't think I can restrain myself, Buddy," Shau confesses, again wishing he had his mantle, which could access old clips immediately. "I'm a reporter, and what you've just said is far too tempting. Why would an old one go on a

  trek-unless it's a death passage?"

  "It's not," Buddy answers and looks to the street, where a courier van has pulled up.

  "We'll talk," Shau promises and hurries out of the garage. Munk asks Buddy, "What was that about?"

  "Most of the old ones have files with the news services." Buddy shrugs. "I'm

  no different. But my past is. Where most of the old ones were intent on working with the Maat and building great worlds, I feared the strange new breed and worked mischief against them. It was a short-lived insurrection. But a Maat and some other people died. I was apprehended and reconditioned. Now I feel indifference where before I was hateful."

  "The Maat forgave you," Munk says.

  "No." Buddy's small smile carries no malice. "They altered my brain." Shau approaches with his arms full of bubble-wrapped packages. "It's all

  here," he exults with exaggerated enthusiasm. "I am again the eyes of millions!" Rey returns Buddy's credit clip and helps Shau unpack. The recorder jacket and

  mantle are desert-ready, tailored in sturdy canvas, dark brown and sere. The reporter slings it over his shoulders, and a delighted Rey assumes his most ingratiating air for the camera and takes Shau on a tour of the shop.

  Munk stands in the port, staring out into the Martian night. Buddy pats him affectionately on the arm, then crawls back into the rental car to sleep. The crystal music of a silicon and chimes from farther down the Avenue of Limits,

  too far away to be a threat just now. Nearby, he hears the journalist's recorder whispering to itself. Then it, too, is silent. Soon everyone is asleep, their brains as disengaged from the continuum of actual events as is Charles's in his plasteel sleep.

  A jeweldust of stars gleams in galactic vapor trails over the black horizon. There is much for Munk to add to his anthropic model and review, but before he does, he tracks the night sky. In the heavens' swirling turbulence, Earth's silver-blue star stares over them unblinking.

  At the first smear of dawn, a skim-flight truck pulls up before Rey Raza's garage and mindless loader handroids begin depositing large high-impact crates. A mocha-skinned woman with long eyes and short black hair braided in tight designs on her pattern-shaved head emerges from the cab. She is dressed in a

  slinky green gown of firepoints that fluoresce like auroras as she walks forward under the tracking laser cannon. Standing before Munk, she places her thin fingers on Charles.

  "Dear man," she whispers to the archaic brain, "we meet going in opposite directions. By the grace and acts of light, I will get you to Solis, and you will be the last of the first men with whom I speak."

  "That is a touching sentiment," Munk states.

  The angular woman cocks a fine eyebrow. "What does an androne know of sentiment?"

  "Enough to recognize it when I see it. You must be Grielle Aspect."

  Her dark, elongated eyes, assess Munk calmly. "I've liked you from the moment you defied the Moot. I believe we will be famous friends."

  "How do you know of me and Mr. Charlie?"

  "I watch the news clips," she says, turning her chin to her shoulder, revealing a clean, haughty profile as she peers into the garage. "I'm leaving this world, dear androne, not my mind. Knowledge still is power-as it was in Mr. Charlie's time. As it ever will be."

  Rey emerges from the floodlit ranks of sand rovers, his scarlet, satiny loose suit like a gray cloud around him in the dusky light. "Grielle! All is in readiness for this happy, happy occasion."

  "Fine, Rey." She waves wearily at the mounting stack of crates. "I have decided to bring a larger offering to the good workers of Solis. Lux tubing, psyonic core units, semblor parts-"

  "Psyonics?" Rey shakes his bald head. "No, no, Grielle, we can't have that. Essentia won't stand for it. We'll have fanatics and pirates all over us. It's going to be hard enough with the shrieks and the devil storms. We don't need psychopaths intent on destroying us."

  Shau Bandar hurries out of the garage, pulling his recorder mantle over his desert jacket. "Fanatics? Come on, Rey. Softcopy viewers regard the Anthropos Essentia favorably. Maybe you can soften your tone for the clips." He shows his palms to Grielle Aspect. "So you're the passager funding this trek. My viewers would love to hear your-"

  "Turn that thing off," Grielle snaps. "My passage is not some curiosity item for a damn news-clip service."

  "Hey, Softcopy is helping fund this trek, too," Shau retorts indignantly. "The anthro commune respects what you're doing, Outlander Aspect. How about a little respect for them?"

  "Why should I respect people who live redundant lives?" She tilts her head back as if peeking, at something very small. "They're never going to experience revelation coddled in their commune. The icky mess of a caterpillar in its cocoon. The light is out here, Bandar, shining on the world as it is. The truth of the world is in its suffering. Now, turn that thing off, or I'll scratch your corneas."

  "Save the speeches, Aspect," Shau goads her as he steps closer, the small blue recorder light shining from the collar of his mantle. "What Softcopy wants to know is how you amassed your fortune. Is it true that you run zombie vats and staff your farms with distorts?"


  Grielle lunges at him, and he dances backward with an angry laugh, crowing, "Another act of light, Outlander Aspect?"

  Rey steps between them, deftly catching the journalist by the pleat of his jacket while stopping Grielle's attack with one knurled finger touching her firmly between the eyes. "You," he says sternly to Shau, "will refrain from recording the passager, or I will have to put my penury aside and cancel our contract. And you," he levels his mean squint on Grielle. "Our contract says nothing about exporting psyonics to Solis. I won't allow it."

  Grielle stands taller, adjusts the flounce of her gown. "You will have to compromise, Rey dear. Elsewise, I will make other arrangements."

  "With whom?" he asks archly. "I am the only wilds runner you can trust to get you there alive. Unless, of course, as you are on a death passage, Grielle, you don't mind dying in the wilds."

  During this minor fracas, Buddy pulls himself out of the electric car parked on the concrete apron and stands rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  "Who the hell is he?" Grielle gripes.

  "He's an old one, Outlander," Shau says from over Rey's shoulder. "You know-the icky mess inside the cocoon."

  "What are you doing here?" Her eyes are star-webbed in the floodlights, and her glossy face, with its feline hollows and sharp planes, looks carved of dark wood. "Are you a passager, too?"

  "No, lady, I'm not." Buddy casually shows his palms and nods. "My name's Buddy. I'm going to Solis to broaden my horizons-make more room for meaning in my life."

  "No matter how broad your horizons, Buddy dear, it's still the same mess, just more of it. You may have been around a long time, but clearly, you've not yet seen the light. Open your eyes." Not waiting for a response, she puts her arm over Rey's shoulders and steers him into the bright garage for a private conversation.

  Shau confronts Buddy. "I viewed your file last night. You were a real hitter in the good old days. Would you comment on that for our viewers?"

  Buddy yawns. "I've changed."

  "You sure have. Cortical surgery qualifies as quite a big change, I'd say.

  Even in Mr. Charlie's time, lobotomy was considered cruel. Do you honestly think your punishment is just? I mean, given the heinous nature of your crimes?"

  "It's not a punishment."

  "Then you've become completely passive, is that it? You accept yourself wholly as you are?"

  "I'm not a sociopath anymore, if that's what you mean." Buddy drifts away toward the empty avenue and the weedlots beyond, where dawn shines in laminar streaks, like a sky-wide agate above the desert.

  "Last night Buddy told you not to read his file," Munk says to the journalist from where he stands motionless, conserving his power for the arduous trek ahead. "Why did you disregard his explicit wish?"

  "Come on, Munk," Shau says, focusing his recorder on Buddy's retreating back. "Use your C-P program and tell me."

  "Your empathic capacity is atrophied from a lifetime of self-centered development," Munk supposes. "Buddy's desires matter far less to you than your own."

  Shau looks to the androne with a vexed moue. "My desires serve the commune. I

  want to know what the people want to know."

  "And individual rights?" the androne asks. "What of those who wish to stand apart from the commune?"

  "Spare me the sociophilosophy," Shau says, walking back to the shop. "If people were always good or always anything, we'd be andrones, wouldn't we?"

  Munk stands alone in the dawn, considering the psyonic core units in their high-impact crates. Those are pieces of the silicon mind. Dormant now, but when they are assembled and activated, they will think, feel, and have the capacity to imagine as he does. He hears Grielle and Rey softly arguing about the units.

  "I tell you," the man rasps, "the Solis cults will target us if we take those crates."

  Grielle sniffs derisively. "We're a target for them anyway with that androne along."

  "Munk is Mr. Charlie's guardian. The Anthropos Essentia can understand that. We're conveying an archaic brain, for Maat's sake!"

  Munk's archive files produce no information on cult activity in or around Solis. But the Anthropos Essentia are famous. They are the zealous anthros who several martian centuries ago founded Solis. Originally, their settlement was entirely divorced from the Maat and the silicon mind. It makes sense to Munk that they would oppose importing psyonics.

  Of course, since the Exodus of Light two centuries ago, when the planet became crowded with death passagers and their hangers-on, Anthropos Essentia has been a minority even in their own stronghold of Solis. Munk is glad when Rey grumpily agrees to convey the psyonic units. The anthros' genetic purity is a fiction of the past. Mind is wider than life and should not be hindered by animal fears.

  Munk directs his attention to the dawn, the stellar fire that long ago initiated the journeys of carbon and silicon to this moment. It seems to the androne that everything is woven of that light. The carbon creatures arguing about utilizing pieces of the silicon mind and the stars dissolving in the brightening air are a living tapestry of light.

  For three-tenths of a second, Munk indulges himself in these thoughts. He stops listening warily for other andrones, stops caring what the people around him are saying, and fills himself with the biggest plausible thought in his mind: Everything really is made from one fire, the fire of all the stars. In that furious light, the stars forge the elements, strew them into the black

  void, and then stand around and watch the frantic atoms huddling together at the cold limits, sharing their small heat and enormous dreams.

  5

  Nycthemeral Journeys

  MEI NILI ROUSES FROM A DEEP BLACK SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF voices and the mute drone of engines. She slides off the cot and shuffles into the latrine. Sitting there, she suddenly realizes how much she misses her old habits and routines-the dream den with its ineffable midstim, her solitary jumps in the company of mindless andrones, the simplicity of nutripatches. Her old life required no thought, only mechanical reasoning and decent reflexes, but this new life is nothing but thought, weighed possibilities, wearisome gambits. No use looking back now, she scolds herself She hears her stomach growling louder than the engine purr outside. Someone shouts her name, and without hurrying, she dips through the sonic shower in her flightsuit.

  Through the morning's startling brightness, she catches sight of Rey Raza's hulking sand rovers. They fill the bleak avenue in front of the garage with a pageantry of blackglass viewdomes and brilliant white hulls. Already a small

  crowd has gathered around them, people covered head to toe in colorful scarves, peering through the dark slits of their headwraps at the large flex-treads with their traction belts of polished gold.

  Farther down the road, a sturdy dune climber with giant blue tires and a

  silver tarpaulin pulled tightly over its contents waits, watched over by Munk. A

  few of the locals have gathered there too, waving their iridescent scarves at the unusual androne.

  "Come on, Mei," Shau Bandar calls impatiently from the sunny apron of the garage. He has the gold-foil hood of his desert jacket pulled up and is wearing wraparound reflectants across his eyes. "Raza says everything's ready. We're leaping into the wilds!"

  In the center of the garage, a topo map has been projected on the concrete floor. Rey and an angular woman in desert togs and clear statskin cowl wade through the holoform, discussing the journey ahead. A burly fellow with no face paint sits on a chrome faldstool under the chain loops of an engine hoist, arms crossed, his blond face closed around a melancholy ease, as if he's seen all this before and is resigned to its dire outcome.

  "Thank you for joining us," the woman facetiously greets Mei. The long, carved eyelines in her shrewd face seem indifferent, but there's no ignoring the haughtiness of her aloof stare. "I am Grielle Aspect."

  Mei shows her palms. "And I'm-"

  "Mei, dear, the androne and the nose from Softcopy have told me all about you. Have you met Buddy yet, the
old one your androne brought with him from the

  city?"

  Mei and Buddy perfunctorily show their palms. "What does that mean-old one?" she asks.

  Grielle wags a silver-nailed finger at her and points to where Shau paces, recording them with the blue lens in his shoulder harness. "Stand over there, dear. You're in time to hear the details Rey and I have worked out."

  Mei walks through the ruddy ghost image of the martian landscape and sits on the bench.

  "As I am the founding sponsor and major contributor to this trek," Grielle says, speaking to Shau's recorder, "I have the privilege of directing our passage to Solis. In all practical considerations, I defer, of course, to our pilot, Morphe Raza. Among the numerous tractor paths that diverge from here and converge on Solis, the pilot accepts my choice of Nebraska Trace. I've chosen that path because it passes through the ruins of Sarna Neve, where the Acts of Light first became dogma."

  Mei pipes up, "But is Nebraska Trace the safest and most direct route to Solis? Munk and I want to get Mr. Charlie to where he can become a whole man again as quickly as possible."

  "That's entirely irrelevant," Grielle sniffs and adjusts the olfact setting under her cowl to maximum calm. "You're here to listen, Mei dear. I have already explained, I am the director."

  "Nebraska Trace adds three days to our crossing," Rey interjects, kneeling in the topo map, bent over with his flat nose almost touching the lucid craterland. "But the weather looks very good. And I see no major shreek migrations in that area."

  "What about the psyonic core units?" Shau asks. "Are you still concerned they'll attract marauders?"

  "They might," Grielie concedes with a wary nod. "That's why the psyonics will be conveyed in a separate dune climber well away from the caravan, if there are marauders, we will have to defend ourselves, not machine parts. For that same reason, I have directed the androne Munk to travel apart from us."