cordgrass, and that skeletal shrub among the boulders is yarrow. Tansy and purple clover grow in abundance on the lee of dunes. And if you stare off there to the far right ahead of us where the tableland begins, you can see a whole mosaic of foxtail, gayfeather, and prairie sage."
In the sudden darkness the sky crackles with stars. Bioluminescent insects zag in the darkness. Rey, who sleeps less than twenty minutes a day, continues his colloquy with Charles Outis on the features of the two moons. He explains how
the smaller moon, Deimos, rising full in the east at dusk will still be a brilliant silver tuft in the eastern sky when the sun rises, because like someone walking down an up escalator, it travels against the planet's rotation.
The oblate moon, Phobos, on the other hand, ascends in the west on its eight-hour sprint across the sky, displaying all its waxing phases but never reaching fullness before it plunges into the planet's shadow. Rey begins relating a folktale about the frustrations of Phobos, until Grielle, who shares the front rover with him, feels compelled to tell him to shut up. Buddy and Mei Nili have already fallen asleep in their flexform recliners, wearied from a day spent getting acquainted with one-third gravity and talking about archaic times with Charles Outis.
Alone in the third rover, Shau Bandar records the night through infraview, tracking the undulant wraiths in the smoky light. Gradually, the sedative olfacts in the air supply put him to sleep too, and after a while the recorder in his mantle automatically shuts off.
A moment later the midstim begins, and the animal gods, full of their resolutions and silences, awake in a dream. Shau becomes a tree with quarrelsome branches. He lives underwater in a tide rip that is breaking him into pieces.
But instead of vital fluids spilling out of his broken parts, he bleeds music.
Lavender creases of dawn unfold as the caravan comes to a stop on a shelf rock above a vista of desolate craters. Munk's silver cowl glints below, where he stands on a sandstone anvil overlooking the couloir that cuts the most direct path through the rings within rings of cratered waste.
Rey tells the androne to wait down there, and Munk makes no objection, for the hike up the slope would cost a tenth of a percent of his remaining power. The temperature is a sultry minus fifty degrees centigrade, and he needs to conserve strength for the torrid hours to come. He climbs down the dark side of the
anvil, squats between two zubu cacti, and listens and watches through his comlink with the reporter.
The rovers have backed together, and crablike handroids from under the chassis
quickly erect a transparent pavilion. Protected by the warm air pressure of the tent, the pilgrims frolic in the fainter gravity. Shau Bandar whirls triple somersaults in the air, and Rey lifts the back end of the dune climber with his bare hands to check the wheel bearings. In the orange shine of the thermalux at the center of the pavilion, Grielle Aspect opens her long-sleeved arms and beckons the others.
"I am the Light," she chants. "Stranger to nothing. I stand against the ancient life of remembered darkness and summon all of you to yourselves. The body is a drug. It deforms consciousness with its hormones and secretions. I am here to tell you to drop the body. Let yourself go. Become the light you are."
Buddy sits on the runner guard, looking groggy. Mei Nili jumps from the back of the rover and with two practiced leaps crosses the enclosure and is standing at the clear wall gazing down toward Munk.
"Good to see you again, Munk," she whispers on her link line to the androne. She can't see me in the dark, Munk knows. She wonders what I make of this odd
human behavior.
"Are we supposed to be doing anything?" Charles asks over their link. "I mean, are we participants?"
A laugh bursts from Grielle. "Whether you know it or not, you are all participants." She swivels about, pointing fingers at each of them. "Rey Raza wants the credits and thrills. Shau Bandar wants credits and fame. Mei Nili wants escape. Buddy wants escape. People, you are all participants. Even you, Mr. Charlie, even you want a body and a future."
"What about Munk?" Mei asks. "Isn't he a participant?"
Grielle snuffs the thermalux. Sheets of fire hover in the sky over the dark, riven terrain. "All consciousness is light." She wheels around in the ebb shadows, her arms outstretched under the blazing sky. "But the body deforms us with its chemical powers. it addicts us to its hungers. The body is a drug. Let the body go."
She dances up close to Shau and says directly to his recorder, "Wanting is not the way. I invite each of you to become the Light that you are but do not know."
"What do we have to do?" Charles Outis asks.
Rey rolls his eyes, and Buddy rests his forehead in his hand.
"There is only one path to the absolute freedom of pure consciousness and light, dear Mr. Charlie," Grielle says, pointing her body toward the rover where he watches through the sensors. "One path-but not the path you've taken, Mr. Charlie. Not more wanting. Not more organic life. The one path is death."
"You really think there's consciousness after death?" the archaic man asks. "Let's get this ritual done," Rey almost whines. "We've got a long way to go." With a flourish of her robes, Grielle shifts her attention to the reporter,
who is still bounding among the rovers, flipping and twisting with clumsy vigor through the air. "Bandar, dear, educate our archaic guest, will you? Show him an infoclip or something on consciousness and light. Ignorance is such an ugly trait"
Grielle disappears into the back hatch of the lead rover, and Rey follows. Immediately, the flat, crablike handroids emerge and begin disassembling the tent. Shau back-flips into the rover and conks his head sharply enough so that he collapses to his knees and retreats with a sheepish grin. Mei waves to the residual darkness in the canyon below where Munk waits and then joins Buddy in the second rover.
"There may be consciousness after death," she tells Charles, plopping into a deck chair, "but no one who's died is talking."
"That woman Grielle is a fanatic," Charles mutters. "Religion doesn't seem to have gotten any less irrational in the millennium I've been gone."
"Actually," Munk comes in over the link, "the Acts of Light is not a religion. They don't postulate a supreme being, nor do they codify human behavior-apart from their willingness to terminate their lives. Most of their belief system is actually founded in science. Close empirical observation has shown that consciousness is not a state or function of the brain, nor does it interact with the brain."
"How can that be?" Charles asks.
It's true," the androne asserts. "Memory, reflection, planning, learning, choice, and creativity all take place regularly in the brain without consciousness. Unconscious brain activity guides these functions. They're all automatic brain processes. Consciousness itself is nothing more than a witness."
"Where does Grielle's light' come in?" Charles inquires with an audible frown. Shau snorts. "Even in your time, science knew that matter and energy had
equivalence. That all matter had once been energy at the time of the Big Bang-" "But there's more," Munk submits. "If consciousness is not a function of the
brain, as science shows, then it may well be, as the Acts of Light decree, a standing wave pattern in a wider dimension, the tesseract range. When any neurology-carbon or silicon-gets complex enough, it receives the standing wave, which is there all along. In that way, consciousness enters life and suffers the indignities of physical limits until death liberates us."
"Then what?" Charles asks.
"Then the Guest is free!" Grielle Aspect announces over the link. "if you live long enough, Mr. Charlie, you will feel the rightness of this. Life is a
physical phenomenon. Consciousness is not!"
Dust devils tilt over the red land. Sand blooms swell on a distant horizon like giant sorrel mushrooms. Ball light-fling bounces over cobbles and the solemnities of boulders under a perfectly clear, pink sky. Strewn over the gritty terrain at unexpected intervals are the remains of earlier caravans smitten by
dust storms-flex-treads twisted in the sand like pocked snakeskin, crazed pieces of blackglass embedded in roan dune drifts, and bleached bones scattered like so much debris across the gravel under the blast of heaven.
Charles Outis is surprised to see human skulls among the shattered ribs and femur bones protruding from the coagulated red sandstone. He interrupts the lively discussion among the other pilgrims to ask, "Is there no respect for the dead anymore?"
"Not in the wilds," Shau Bandar replies nonchalantly. "What happens out here simply happens."
"It is my suspicion that the isolationists of Soils strew these bones to dissuade travelers," Grielle Aspect says, to which the others respond with grouchy mumbles.
Dune lemurs scurry along the gully of an ancient streambed. Suddenly, from behind them, a gleam of air shimmers like a pursuing will-o'-the-wisp.
"Shreek!" Rey Raza calls. "Shreek on the portside!"
Virtually invisible in the sunlight, the transparent predator appears at first as a blur. Then one of the bigeared, tufty-furred dune lemurs is plucked from
the scattering bunch, and the carnal face of the thing reveals itself as the lemur is macerated in midair.
"It looks like a huge angelfish," Charles remarks, observing the airborne beast's thin protoplasmic body and whirring fins.
"But," Mei Nili adds, "with the face of a piranha."
With a jaw-thrust blur of teeth, the shreek swiftly bolts down the lemur, the prey's shredded flesh and crushed bones becoming a mere shadow in the clear bulk of the carnivore. And then, in a ripple of caught sunlight, the beast is gone.
"Good heavens, what was that creature it ate?" Charles asks. "Dune lemur," Rey answers.
"A biot," Munk adds over the link from where he rides on the dune climber. "They were templated from a hybrid of the Gila monster and the mongoose."
"Weren't there wild animals in your time?" Shau inquires.
"Of course," Charles responds, "but nothing like that. Most predators in my time lived in game preserves."
"Not unlike the reserves the Maat have provided for anthros on Earth in our time," Grielle says, her sarcasm palpable even over the comlink. "We're wild animals to them. And we're on the loose."
Mei ignores her and asks, "Mr. Charlie, what do you miss most about your old life-apart from your body, that is?"
alt was an avaricious and desperate time," Charles mutters, reminiscing. "I
don't miss much. Just the people I knew then. My wife. My friends."
"Your wife," Shau's voice comes over the comlink. "What was she like?" "She was a playwright. She wrote for children-and the child in adults. She
kept getting younger the more she wrote."
"Was she frozen, too?" the reporter inquires.
"No," Charles replies sadly. "Everything she learned, she learned by heart. Even death."
"Shreek to starboard," Rey interrupts. "There must be a nest of them near here. They usually congregate along ejecta blankets."
Charles scans the starboard side and spots the mica-flash of a shreek high on the rampart of a nearby crater rim.
"Unlike the moon or Mercury," Rey lectures, "the craters on Mars have much larger ejecta blankets. Impacts here made a bigger mess. That's because the ground rock and soil on Mars contain subsurface water ice. On impact, the ice melted and the gooey ejects formed those characteristic smear contours that terrace the ground for kilometers around a crater. It makes roving difficult, but the biots love it because it provides a lot of shade surface."
The discussion veers into a description of martian flora and fauna, all biots genetically manufactured in earlier efforts to terraform the planet. While the comlink among the rovers is noisy with history and observations, Rey turns off Charles Outis and adjusts the olfact level of the following rovers' air supply, releasing narcolfact in the cabins. He sets a timer to do the same in the rover he is sharing with Grielle and excuses himself to go to the latrine. When he emerges, he is wearing a statskin cowl and gloves.
Grielle lies slumped in the deck chair where a moment earlier she had been vigorously denouncing the contamination of Mars's pristine sterility. Munk calls on the comlink, "Mr. Charlie? Jumper Nili?"
At the console, Rey brings the caravan to a stop. They are on a nacre flat of silica dust with the mesas of broken crater rims surrounding them. A sand cloud rises from a nearby scarp, and a trundle-carrier emerges from the shadow side of a ferruginous outcropping. The earner is pitted and rust-streaked and clanks across the rubble-strewn ground with a pulmonary wheezing.
"Marauders!" Munk cries out and jumps down from the dune climber. "Raza! Ready your laser cannon. Raza? Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Munk." The wing-hatch at the side of the lead rover opens, and
Rey emerges. "Stay where you are."
"Where are the pilgrims?" the androne inquires.
"They are in the rovers, where I left them." Rey waves to the noisy
trundle-carrier, and it smokes to a stop beside Munk with a viper whistle that stings the thin air. The side of the trundle-carrier lifts with a brutal bang, releasing eight big distorts in patched, remnant pressure suits and dented battle helmets. Just visible through their slit visors, burnt red eyes stare wildly from bone brows and angry faces of wet, twitching muscle.
As Munk whirls toward them across the sand bed, intent on ripping the marauders out of their suits, a figure appears. It has the full and exact appearance of a man, but because he steps out wearing only a gemdust shawl, slacks, and slippers, the androne assumes he is a semblor. Sure enough, infrascan reveals the figure is not human but a man-shaped volume of plasma, given shape and direction by remote control.
Munk instantly recognizes the effeminate and raffish features of Sitor Ananta in the face of the plasma being. The Commonality agent swaggers through the distort squad, unconcerned about the attacking androne. A cold smile touches his sharp lips.
The semblor points a small device at Munk, and a sound of shattering glass breaks across the androne's mind. Suddenly, he cannot move. He stands immobilized in the dust billow his attack stirred up.
Sitor Ananta approaches the paralyzed androne and taps a pseudofinger against Munk's breastplate. "You once worked for the Commonality," he says smugly. "lapetus Gap readily provided me with your signal codes. And now you are again what you always were-a puppet."
The semblor turns away abruptly and confronts Rey. "Where is the wetware?"
"I deactivated Mr. Charlie," Rey answers, "before I put the others to sleep.
I'll disengage him."
"Let the distorts do it," the semblor says. "Where?"
Rey gestures toward the second rover. "I patched him into the console. It's a delicate hookup. You'd better let me free him."
"Tear him loose," Sitor Ananta orders the distorts, and they lurch toward the rover. "He won't be needing to communicate anymore."
"And my credits?" Rey queries.
"Already in your account at your new house in the Honor of Giants," the semblor promises. "We'll bang up your rover so you can claim you struggled to get away. But the other equipment will have to be sacrificed with the bodies."
"Fine, fine," Rey agrees. "You're paying me enough to replace them ten times over."
Munk listens to this from far inside his locked body. The signal codes have shut down all his primary programming-his motor reflexes and proprioception-but his C-P program remains alert and stares helplessly through his sensory apparatus as the distorts swarm toward Charles's rover.
The androne shifts his focus internally, to where the shatterglass sounds of the interfering signals propagate. Outside, time seems to slow down as he accesses the virtual space of the signal that has invaded his body. A voice gels out of the static:
Androne Munk, this is lapetus Gap comptroller advising you that your signal codes have been released to Commonality agent Sitor Ananta through the Rogue And ronc Reclamation Decree. Recognition of your contra-parameter programming, however, now indicates that your rogue
status may be self-justified Herewith, then, I am activating your conscience reviewer. You now have one point three seconds to justify your rogue behavior. If you cannot define your current
status to the satisfaction of the reviewer, this signal will permanently shut down your C-P program. Begin now.
Munk reviews all his behavior since activating his C-P program in the cold reaches off Saturn. "My actions speak for themselves," he says inwardly to the reviewer. But his body remains rigid.
Through his visor, he sees the array of distorts aiming toward Charles's rover. "I am the protector of an archaic human being," he announces. And still his body stays locked.
"My C-P program has guided my actions since lapetus Gap," he avers. "It guides me now. Respect it and release me."
Nothing.
"I have done no wrong! Allow me to fulfill my program."
Sitor Ananta is caught with a glint of amused malice in his sharp eyes, and Munk tries to amplify the rage that this malevolent expression makes him feel. But to no avail.
"What do you want from me, then?" Munk bawls.
No answer. He reviews his past actions again, looking for infractions. "I
killed Aparecida by default," he asserts. "I had to save human lives." The glass of the signal codes continues crashing inside him.
He pleads. He cajoles. He provides an eloquent colloquy on the nature of will and imagination, concluding with the Blake quote, "No Body save the Soul!"
The paralysis continues.
"There's nothing more I can do," he finally admits. "I have no other defense but that I am alive. Does that count for anything?"
The bursting glass resounds louder. One-tenth of a second remains. Satisfy the reviewer now, or you will be terminated.
Munk can think of nothing more to say; knowing it is useless to repeat himself, he says nothing. The light of the world is pellucid, flecked with glints of silica dust suspended in the air. This is the last he will see of anything, he accepts. One last giddy instant remains. Morning vapor clouds streak the sky like stretch marks. The rusty buttes and parapet rocks sink deeper into his sight. They will continue their billion-year journey into sand. And the sight of them, hard and real, hammers him free of all abstraction. And for that last instant of his being, the androne sees he is a mirage sparkle in
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