Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  "That's not smart," Mei objects. "He's Mr. Charlie's best protection, and we'll all be a lot safer if we stay together. Where is Mr. Charlie? Munk isn't carrying him."

  "I installed him in the second rover," Rey answers, "where you and Softcopy will ride. I'll pilot all the vehicles from the lead rover. The dune climber will take the point. And the androne can scout ahead-"

  "You installed Mr. Charlie?" Mei asks, standing up. "You mean, he's awake?"

  "I suggest you sit down, dear, and listen. These will be nycthemeral journeys, that is, each will be a day and a night long. We will stop at dawn to affirm the Acts of Light, as has been done since the first pilgrims ..." She stops talking as Mei walks out of the garage, then glares at Rey. "Find another cosponsor. I don't want to travel with this rude jumper."

  "It'll take days," Rey mumbles, crawling on his hands and knees with his face grazing the planet's blighted surface. "And we won't find anyone with deeper pockets than Softcopy. Besides, the weather is clement now. Later in the

  season-" He looks up with a dubious frown. "The dust storms from the south make it tougher."

  "Don't go away miffed, Mei dear," Grielle calls with mock concern.

  The jumper ignores her and walks into a solar frenzy of hard radiant light bounding off the desert floor and sparkling sharply from the scarves of the crowd. She steers herself toward the glare of the second rover and slips among the onlookers without acknowledging their keen stares and friendly waves.

  Clambering up the tread-guard, she pulls herself atop the runner and climbs the inset steps in the hull among the tinted viewdomes to the bridge. There, standing at the taifrail, she waves at Munk. The androne raises both arms and shifts the reflectance of his cowl to catch the morning sun in a wink of starfire.

  "Come on in," a muffled voice calls from below. "The hatch is unlocked."

  Mei dilates the hatch at her feet and drops through the companionway into the forward cabin's aqua-lit interior. Pellucid daylight washed of glare filters through the blackglass dome and mingles with the watery glow from the console.

  "Good morning, Mei," a cheerful voice says.

  "Mr. Charlie?" Mei calls. The bright cabin appears empty, until she sees the plasteel capsule bracketed by platinum clamps under the console.

  "Grielle Aspect is hauling a couple tons of psyonic parts to Solis," Munk's voice comes out of the dome speakers, "and Rey used some of those components to hook up Mr. Charlie. We've been talking to each other over the rover's

  comlink."

  "It's a great talk," Charles Outis says enthusiastically. "I'm learning about the death passage and its impact on modern society. And the sky-I see the sky through the rover's outside sensors! It's bright-and pink!"

  "The thin atmosphere carries dust right into space," the androne says. "Most of the particles are less than a thousandth of a millimeter, the most effective size to scatter red light." From his post before the dune climber, Munk turns his empty face toward the jumper. "I have been hearing a firsthand account of the archaic bonding practice called family from Mr. Charlie-from his childhood! Can you imagine? Neonatal memories. How very rare."

  "Mr. Charlie," Mei sits down in the gray, form-fit hug of a deck chair. "Did you hear about Terra Tharsis and the Moot?"

  "I heard it all," Charles tells her. "I spoke with everyone while you were sleeping-Rey Raza, Grielle Aspect, Buddy-"

  "Aspect is acting like we're baggage," she complains. "And she's lugging us three days out of our way for some damned religious observance."

  "Don't be upset," Charles says brightly. "We're on Mars! We got away from the Judge and Sitor Ananta. I met the Judge, and he didn't seem very favorably disposed to my plea for freedom."

  "Mr. Charlie," Munk cuts in. "I must tell you that I saw Sitor Ananta in the facepan of a sentinel androne."

  "What? Wait a minute," Mei asks. "Who is Sitor Ananta?"

  "The Commonality agent who tortured me," Charles replies. "A maladjusted hermaphrodite."

  "Probably a morph," Munk says.

  "Morphs, clades, anthros," Charles sounds perplexed. "It doesn't make any difference. Trust me, Sitor Ananta is dangerous."

  "At the Moot he charged that the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group

  tampered with your brain," the androne says. "I don't have much on them. They're a faction of clades, aren't they, Jumper Nili?"

  "I think so," she replies through a morose frown. "Maybe, yes. The name is familiar. There are so many reservations, I can't remember them all. Ours was exclusively anthro, but we'd heard of the clades."

  "Can someone please explain-" Charles begins.

  "Clades," Munk hurries to elucidate, "branches-genetic variants on the human genome, not just morphologic changes like the gender shifts and body-shaping of morphs, but whole new neurologies, new biokinetic paradigms, new species.-like the Maat."

  Mei ignores the sadness that talk of Earth stirs in her and adds, "The Maat are the most successful of the clades. They're the branch that has expanded its intelligence the furthest. Other branches have grown in different directions. The Friends, I think, are factions of an adrenal or parasyinpathetic clade. I don't remember exactly. But they hate authority of all kinds and live with what seems to us anthros a peculiar passion for certain kinds of mathematics."

  Charles remembers the humanoids with four-fingered hands, delicate,

  glass-faced beings who used him to teach their young. "My torturer told me that the Friends are rebels or something."

  Munk's voice enters assuredly, "I have here what you recorded in your broadcast: "They're enemies of the Commonality-anarchists, a selfish cult intent on usurping the law.'"

  "The Commonality are full of themselves," Mei says bitterly. Charles asks, "Who exactly is-"

  "The Commonality?" Munk anticipates him again. "They are a cartel of all the anthro and morph colonies on Earth, Luna, Mars, and the Belt who were set up by the Maat to help collect materials for neo-sapien projects."

  "They throw their weight around a lot," Mei adds. "I think they feel the Maat have gone on to another reality and left this one for them."

  "Well," Charles says, "all I want to know is whether or not Sitor Ananta is coming after me."

  "The Commonality thinks you're a weapon," Munk responds, his voice lively but his body motionless in the brash sunlight. "We have to get you to Solis. That's a neutral settlement."

  As Mei and Munk talk, Charles uses the desert rover's external cameras to direct his attention to his surroundings. It's enough, he tells himself, staring through the seething air above the red iron desert. It's enough to have lived to see Mars.

  The 360-degree vista displaces his dread with wonder. The surface looks pretty much like a desert, but the Avenue of Limits is as alien a scene as he's ever imagined. He sees the sleek, multitiered contours of the other rovers parked in

  a row and behind them the imposing skyline of silos and warehouses with their odd architectural character, looking to him like a queer blend of Chinese and art deco. The people, too, are both seen before and utterly singular, swathed head to toe in multicolored mummy windings, bobbing in slow rhythms like tribal dancers, polishing the air with their glittery veils.

  A feeling of awe and unreality pervades Charles, and he says earnestly, "It's enough that I've lived to see people on Mars."

  Shau Bandar has chosen to ride alone in the third rover so that he can better record the dramatic start of the trek. Sitting on the rover's bridge above the swarming crowd, he adjusts his reflectors to play back an earlier interview with Rey Raza, queuing it for a leader to explain what he is going to record next.

  Rey stands in playback blue before the open bay to his garage five minutes in the past. In the background the locals bob-dance, tatterdemalion garb floating around them like kelp, handkerchiefs dazzling blessings over Grielle and Buddy, who are making their way toward the shining rovers.

  "The leap start," Shau begins feeding lines into his recorder, "is perhaps the most famo
us part of any desert trek from the Outlands, Rey. How do you plan to use it for this crossing to Solis?"

  "Routinely," Rey answers, his bright splash-painted face grinning solicitously. "Raza Tours has been leapstarting for more than thirty years. Spectacular as these jumps are, for Raza Tours they're purely routine."

  "Could you tell Mr. Charlie," Shau says, "and our off-world viewers who may

  not know about leapstarting, what it is?"

  Rey's bald head gleams like a dolphin's in the false-color playback. "Okay. See, when properly constructed vehicles cross the perimeter of the city and pass from terrene to martian gravity, the abrupt downshift in acceleration sends them flying. We've all seen the tragic consequences of magravity fallback here along the Avenue of Limits. Whole blocks of warehouses exploded across hundreds of kilometers. Well, we harness that powerful force, and with the aerokinetic

  design of our desert rovers we fly deep into the wilds. Raza's Tours has been doing this for thirty years. It's a great attraction for day trekkers. The physics is very accurate. The thin martian atmosphere and the sixtytwo percent dimmer gravity are exploited to keep our vessels aloft long enough to reach specially prepared landing strips. . ."

  Satisfied, Shau turns off the playback and pans the crowd with his recorder. The swaddled onlookers stir excitedly as the rovers begin gliding forward.

  "Get in your cabin now, Bandar," Rey calls over the comlink.

  The reporter shows his palms to the scarf-fluttering bystanders and descends the companionway, constricting the hatch after him. In the aquamarine glow of the forward cabin, he removes his reflectors and sits in a deck chair, its flexform contours hugging him securely. Anonymous storehouses drift by, and the vehicles bank off the road and slide through the weedlots with little sound and no vibration.

  The shimmering foil roofs of the Outland thorpes rise like star clusters above the blunt skyline of the Avenue of Units. The horizon wide expanse of Olympus Mons shines flamingo-pink, and a mauve band of knobby clouds in strict

  procession sail a wide circuit, trawling slack, blue nets of rain. Among the walloping weeds, a narrow orange-gravel road appears, running straight toward the shattered buttes.

  "Okay. Everybody push back in your seats," Rey calls over the link. "We're going to leap."

  Shau's flexform chair tightens, and he has to lift his chest to keep his recorder focused through the viewport. Ahead, the big blue wheels of the dune climber are a blur as the heavy vehicle hurtles down the runway and flies up the long, curved ramp at the far end. With a clangorous peal of thunder, the dune climber shoots high into the tangerine sky. Then the rover in front of Shau accelerates, and he hears the engine under him churning more powerfully.

  Another boom of thunder, and the rover that shoots up the ramp ahead of them dwindles instantly into the cloudless void. The ascending roadway swoops before them, the broken shards of the desert floor tilt away, and with a force that yanks a gasp out of the reporter and presses his face flesh tight to his skull, the sky jolts closer.

  Munk watches the dune climber and the first two sand rovers catapult into the martian sky. Shau Bandar's rover shoots down the road after them, bounces up the ramp, and fires into the blue, leaving behind a sonic burst that shudders with the other echoes across the horizon. The androne follows the arcing speck until it vanishes over the distant reef rocks. Then he dashes swiftly down the runway and up the incline.

  Gravity sheers away in a giddy heave, and the buttes, pinnacles, and fins of the desert spread out before him. By distending his cowl and catching the upsurge of heat from the warming rock floor, he lifts higher. In the woven distance, mountain peaks merge into one another and melt like clouds in the thermal drafts.

  One glance behind reveals the giant sprawl of Olympus Mons and the violet mass of boiling cumuli ringing the caldera. Terra Tharsis catches the morning light

  in wet reflections of layered air, a mirage that amplifies the crystal depths of the city in fractured glints. The androne hears no sign of the silicon mind from there, and the diadem city wavers silently in the transparent veils of heat.

  Munk ascends, soaring toward the purple heights, relishing the cooler temperature. None of the generators in Rey Raza's garage were adequate to recharge his power cells, and he is grateful for every opportunity now to conserve energy. The trek across the 4,345 kilometers to Solis will take seven

  days, the tour expert has estimated, and Munk feels that with the cooler conditions and lighter gravity, his power cells will keep him active for the entire trip.

  Feeling optimistic, the androne gazes down beneficently at the elemental fire reflecting from the bronze gravel flats. Among vast splash-petals and widening ripples of henna sand, he spots the drop spots where the dune climber and the sand rovers have landed. The dust plumes downwind, and Munk stares through it until he is sure all the vehicles have landed safely.

  The task assigned him by Rey is to fly ahead a full day and night's journey, scouting the territory for threats. Apart from sandstorms, which are atypical this time of year and which the topo map would warn about, he is to watch out for shreeks and marauders. Munk is eager to see a shreek, for they are catalogued as the most ferocious of biots-bioforms eco-adapted to scavenge the wilds and thrive off each other and any other life-forms they can apprehend. They look fierce in the archival infoclip, whose verbal description begins,

  "Imagine a three-meter-long, four-meter-tall tropical fish half a meter wide and transparent as glass. . ." Their snicking, grotesquely nimble, transparent mouth parts scissor their prey apart with slow deliberation. But they are mindless and less dangerous than the marauders.

  Sweeping the rusty ridges and rocky pleats below, Munk detects no life-forms at all. In the sepia distance are the three Tharsis volcanoes, each ten kilometers high and evenly spaced seven hundred kilometers apart on the buckled horizon. Like the shawled, hunched bodies of the three fates from archaic mythology, they will watch over the caravan from portside the entire trek, and Munk finds himself pondering what judgment they will pass on the pilgrims at the limits of this world before he catches himself and turns off his imaginal subprogram.

  Then, gliding down in a widening spiral, he listens deeply and hears far off the tiny noises of the caravan's silicon pilots. Among that distant chirping is the psyonic hookup that reads and translates Charles Outis's brain-waves, and the androne is calmed knowing that the archaic human is alert again and aware that he is on his way to a better life.

  The wide, cratered land narrows toward a labyrinth of torture monuments: rock racks and toppled blocks, tilted stone benches, needle spires, and eerie hatchet arches, all a morbid green-black and trembling like flames in the reverberate air. Taking last advantage of his loft, the androne turns into the wind, swivels upright, and walks down the air's invisible steps toward the floor of the wasteland.

  With the dune climber in the lead, the caravan churns across the desert flats at thirty-five knots, flagging streamers of dust behind it. For all the available daylight hours, they travel without stop, flares of shadow over the sands. From the lead rover, Rey Raza takes advantage of Charles Outis's curiosity and Shau Bandar's attentive recorder to flaunt his knowledge of the

  wilds. He identifies the thorny silver-green beach balls clustered in the shadow gulches as zubu cactus, the first biota to thrive on Mars. He also points out

  the three giant cindercones on the blighted planet rim-the Tharsis Montes. "it's no coincidence that these huge volcanoes are the same height above the

  datum surface-the sea level," He nods to Charles's camera eye. "It's the maximum height a mountain on Mars can build to before the planetary crust breaks under

  it and lava spills over the land. We're on the smooth ride of one of those spills now."

  Charles stares disconsolately at the melted hills. Since his salvation on Phoboi Twelve, wonder persists in a hushed, distant corner of his soul. But nearer, dread mounts. He is afraid, though at first he is not sure of what. Mars
is eerily beautiful, and he is inclined to think that the calamitous landscape with its pocked craters among strange liquid-looking bluffs disturbs his earthly expectations, especially with the console's computer noise clicking and

  whistling around him like whale music.

  But that's not it. After a few moments' reflection, as Rey natters on about types of lava, Charles narrows the source of his nebulous dread down to one

  face-Sitor Ananta's. Munk's news that he has recently seen that cruel visage in

  the facepan of a sentinel androne has been working on Charles. Evil pursues them. The bitter memory of the pain-raked eternity that Sitor Ananta inflicted hardens Charles's fear to a brittle panic.

  Dwelling on that, he feels that his mind could snap. it is difficult enough to be bodiless and at the mercy of this unguessable future without a terror of helplessness and torture to overcome. He reaches for a deep breath to calm his fright and teeters at the brink of his disembodied emptiness, lungless,

  limbless, boneless, virtually nonexistent.

  An immeasurable longing displaces his fear. He wants to be whole again. Passionate courage rises from this longing, and he determines that he will not be afraid anymore.

  Outside, through the rover's cameras, he sees welded boulders the color of whisky glide past. And the blighted landscape shimmers with untouchable veils.

  At sunset the craterland blazes bloodred, and the rovers shift to infraview, their cooler engines running faster through the spectral landscape. The desert's vaporous plant life is easier to see in the long light. Ghostly blooms of

  thermal shadows billow from the nooks and crevices of the crater outcrops, each species a different shade of fire.

  "At night it becomes obvious why this track is called the Nebraska Trace," Rey announces. "Mr. Charlie, later you can tell us about Nebraska, the archaic land where the flora here originated. All these scrawny plants you're seeing shining in the dark are biots of terrene species and carry their names with their redesigned genes. That pink smoke in the graben to our left is prairie