Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  But Rey barrels into her, frantically shoving against her, trying to reach the console and abort the flooding of the compression tanks. Grielle, however,

  thinks he is eager to get her out of harm's way, for she can see the shreeks slashing closer. Their grinding jaws electrify hearing, sending hurting vibrations into the small bones of her head. She tries to help him by closing the wing-batch, but he hurls her aside the instant before she can reach the lever. In his obvious zeal to save her, he exposes his back. Grielle and he scream together as a flashing streak of fangs scythes through the hatchway and severs his ham tendons.

  Grielle watches in rigid horror as Rey collapses across the console, blood smoking from his legs, the shreek gnashing loudly as its teeth crunch into bone. She can't breathe.

  Wildly flailing at the console to stop the imminent explosion, Rey enters the stop sequence just as the shreek completes its bone-crushing clamp on his leg and hauls him howling from the rover. A magnetic wind of sheer terror whisks Grielle to the hatch lever, and she secures the rover.

  Standing at the viewport in an aching twist of fright and shocked stupor, she observes firsthand the feeding habits of the shreek. They do not compete once the prey is seized. They float in a circle of quiet, shared ecstasy. Only the successful predator feeds. It hovers over the writhing body it has hobbled, swiftly scissors it into parts, and does not share a crumb of bone.

  In an astonishingly brief time, it is done. Then, like a shift of wind, the whole shimmery school of them is gone, and no trace of Rey Raza remains but the smeared imprint of his last agony in the coppery sand.

  Late in the day, with the bloated sun looking corrugated among the ruins of

  Sarna Neve, Mei Nili and Buddy find Grielle Aspect sitting stupefied with

  olfacts in her rover. While Buddy examines the battered dune climber, Mei shakes Grielle alert and finds out about Rey's heroic death. Grielle refuses to believe that Rey had anything to do with the destruction of the second rover, which killed Shau Bandar. "He sacrificed himself to save me," she whispers through her drugged torpor. "He could have fed me to them instead. I was ready to die. I

  wanted it, but he shoved me back. He saved me."

  The dune climber remains functional, and Mei programs the rover's computer to autopilot it along with the rover lugging Munk's body. Slowly, the caravan departs Sama Neve and trundles into the night. Ghostly vegetative blooms ripple on the sandstone ridges in a nocturnal wind-foxtail, bitter dock, cordgrass, and yarrow-the profuse flora of the spores carried across the shoreless dark from

  the blue star that is Earth.

  A few hours later, the water cycler in the pilot rover emits a raspy groan and cuts out. By dawn the blackglass viewdomes are foggy with exhaled moisture,

  which Buddy and Mei carefully sop up with their scarves and squeeze into empty nutripouches. Mei retreats to the rover that is carrying Munk, but the water cycler there is dormant, its power cells drained by disuse because the rover has been emptied of air to carry Shau Bandar's frozen body. When Mei tries to hook the cycler to the engine's power drive, the circuits, already straining from the supermassive weight of the androne, shut down. For most of that day, Mei and Buddy struggle to revive the engine.

  "Abandon the androne," Grielle demands, "or we're all going to die out here. Is that what you want?"

  "Go take a sniff, Grielle," Mel gripes from under the chassis. "Do you want to die out here, old one?" Grielle asks Buddy.

  He looks up from where he is kneeling in the auburn sand, holding a lux torch for Mei and shrugs. "We're three days from Solis. We can make it without a water cycler if we don't panic:"

  "Life is a panic," Grielle states derisively and turns her head to take another gust of dлgage. With all the olfact she's been doing since yesterday's tragedy, she's less talkative than before, yet she manages to add, "Our senses detect only the smallest fraction of what is. Why do you want to go on living in this poverty?"

  Mei and Buddy ignore her, and she drifts back to the pilot rover. Inside, she seriously contemplates activating the engine and leaving them behind with their precious androne. But when she looks over the laser-gashed console, she can't figure out how to run the damn thing, and the possibility that she might blow herself up stymies her angry ambition. She wants her passing to be ritualized. Rey Raza died for her that she herself might die with ritual exactitude in Solis, and she will not squander that gift.

  Instead, she stares admiringly at the dune climber parked in the shadow of a pinion rock, its burden of psyonic crates promising her a welcome reception in Solis. For that, she will have to wait. But she won't wait thirsty. She helps herself to one of the pouches of reclaimed water and sips it. The acrid taste makes her grimace, but she finishes the pouch anyway. She's the director. This is her caravan, and this her water.

  Late in the afternoon the caravan is running again on autopilot, but all the reclaimed water is gone, consumed by Grielle. To conserve body moisture, the pilgrims keep their statskins on and don't talk. The dry martian air, which whirls in scarlet dust devils through the wake of the vehicles, seems to penetrate the rover's seals and even the statskins, but that is a

  thirst-inspired hallucination. To counter it, Mei and Buddy accept doses of

  Grielle's olfacts. and physical discomfort relents to a spongy ease.

  Mesas appear along the horizon, scabrous and blood-colored, sacrificial altars in the setting sun. Embraced by their flexform deck chairs, the pilgrims each seep deeper into themselves as night comes on and the spectral smoke of the

  alien plant life appears in the infraview. Sleep cuts through them sporadically, rips in the fabric of their drugged minds that thirst stitches whole again-until another dose of olfacts slashes them free.

  When dawn arrives as an enormous apocalypse that ignites a landscape of ferrous peaks and reefs of blowing dust, the olfacts are gone. No condensation at all beads on the blackglass interior, but Buddy swabs it anyway. In the parching chill, Mei's caked lips catch on her dry teeth, and she finds she cannot speak when she tries to. Asleep or comatose, Grielle lies with one blind eye halflidded as if peeking out at the last dying stars, the planet's tiny

  lobe-shaped moons.

  The rovers and the dune climber chum onward mindlessly. A blustery wind licks powder from the nearby crater ridges, and a pouring haze of sand obscures vision. When the fog lifts, the fiery world is still there. The badland blazes under the space-cold pandemonium of heaven, its tortured pinnacles,

  crater-mutilated plains, and red dunes indifferent to human trespass.

  6

  Solis

  ON THE HORIZON OF THE BARREN PAN, SOMBER HEADLANDS appear out of the morning glare, the promontories of ancient impact craters. A city shines beyond the protective bulwark of these rouge bluffs. Lens towers burn fiercely, collecting their solar harvest, and the vaulting spans, shield hangars, derrick arcades, and rhombohedral rooftops with their gleaming gold-foil facets give light in fierce spikes like a field of stars.

  Solis is the human history of Mars. At the west end, some of the geodesics from the first Mars colony are preserved in a historical park. Surrounding it

  are the hydroponic grange sheds of the Anthropos Essentia, the oldest residents. Their bower-and-dome architecture dominates the flats of two intersecting

  craters whose rufous cliff walls have been sculpted into administrative offices. On the other side of them, in three nearly concentric craters, the clade cantonments spraddle in many levels of glass galleries, pyramids, and pavilions. The crofts of prism turrets and rhomboidal steppes at the east end are the

  latest edifices, the megastructure Hall of All constructed to house the millions of humans who want to live free of the Maat and their minions, the Commonality.

  As the pilgrims first spot the silver starpoints in the amber aureole of sunrise that are the solar foils of Solis, flyers already begin to loft out of the city and circle in-scout-class andrones programmed to evaluate all travelers who come
over the rim of the wasteland.

  The flyers find two dusty rovers and a dune climber grinding slowly over the reddish black badlands. A deep-space patrol-dass androne lies dormant atop the roof of the following rover. When they land, the vehicles stop and three pilgrims emerge, parched, shrunken with hunger, and glassy-eyed. The first one out, Grielle Aspect falls deliriously onto her knees, a worshipful smile on her salt-pale lips. Thinking she is collapsing from dehydration, several

  simple-minded andrones begin emergency procedures. Two of them wrap Grielle in a pressurized sling and, despite her protests, pack her face and arms in glucose infusers. Meanwhile, others approach Mei Nili and Buddy.

  Buddy leads an androne to the second rover, opening the hatch to reveal Shau

  Bandar's frozen body, furred in powder-blue carbon dioxide ice.

  "And this is Mr. Charlie." Mei presents the battered plasteel capsule to the androne before her. "Can you tell if he is all right? He took a heavy blow."

  The flesh-masked androne smiles and takes the capsule. "Solis welcomes you." "Please, can you tell if he's been damaged?" Mei repeats, dazed.

  "Please come with me," the androne requests. "You may enter SoIis and ask your questions to the people there."

  Grielle is hurriedly hammocked between two flyers, and the andrones who have treated her mount their wings, run a short distance, and lift her into the bright sky.

  Mei looks back at Buddy. "Buddy and I have to go together," she tells her escort.

  "I am sorry," the androne mutters quietly, sounding sincere and gesturing toward wings of opalescent gossamer standing on the pebbly plain. "Your companion is not admittable to Soils. He must remain outside."

  "What do you mean?" Mei breaks away from the androne who is leading her. "Buddy's coming with me. He's a human-an old one."

  "I am sorry."

  She approaches Buddy, who looks at her wistfully. "We part here," he says.

  Head tilted, she stares closely at him, searching for traits she could not have missed in their harrowing days in the wilds-the static blur of a semblor, the clade signs of pupil shape and finger count. He seems profoundly

  human-though he has always displayed the quiescent alertness of a human biot-an organic androne. "Who are you?" she insists.

  "Forgive me for telling you this way, but I am of the Maat," he confides. "We are not permitted to enter Solis."

  Mei blinks back her surprise. "You're joking!"

  "Go with Mr. Charlie," he counsels, pointing to the androne with the plasteel capsule in his arms. "And take Shau with you. I'll stay with Munk and see that he's revived."

  A dizzy astonishment shoves through her as she tries to remember anything at all exceptional about this man. From the time the water cycler broke down three days ago, he suffered too, and she scowls with disbelief. "I-I thought you had powers."

  "Not to strike water from rocks," he smiles. "At least, not without the right hardware. You'd better go now, or you'll get separated from Mr. Charlie."

  "Will I see you again?" she asks, backing away. He waves and smiles with a soft, languid sorrow.

  Munk wakes up on a ferric precipice overlooking the spangling starfire of Solis. Instantly he knows where he is and, by comparing the angle and inclination of the sun to his last reading, exactly how much time has elapsed since his power cells emptied. He sharp-focuses on Buddy, who is sitting on a flat boulder watching him quietly through the clear veil of his statskin. The scout-class andrones who recharged him retreat with their cables and clamps toward a silver balloon lashed to a utility gondola. The musical clangor of the winch retracting the chains, nets, and grapnel hooks that carried him here bong and clank dully in the thin atmosphere.

  Buddy relates all that has happened since Munk lost consciousness. He concludes by pointing to the harlequin fields of reflector domes and colorful pressure tents on the perimeter of the city, where those denied admission squat. The tent city looks squalid with its patchwork fabrics and its cheap solar mills glinting from atop ragged canopies like tinsel pinwheels. "We've been left out here with the rejects-you because you were never human and me because I am the wrong kind of human."

  Sudden fear tightens Munk's field of awareness. None of his sensors detect any sign that Buddy is other than a feral man, though he knows if he touches his cranium he will feel the slow benthic rhythms of a tranced consciousness. From the first, he knew Buddy was cortically augmented, but he has assumed the man

  was made less, not more. He decides to speak his fear. "You are Maat?"

  Buddy nods gently. "I'm on a mission. I'm supposed to deliver this man to here-to these camps."

  Munk scans the miserable clutter of storm-battered tents. "He may die here." "He may well," Buddy accedes. "Or he may flourish as our view of his future

  indicates. But the timelines are closed for him in Terra Tharsis." "Why?"

  With a comradely smile, Buddy rises and approaches the androne. "You like this person I am inhabiting, don't you?"

  "He is a human. My C-P program-"

  "For whatever reason," Buddy says kindly, a gloved hand touching the androne's alloy arm. "You like him. So you will not interfere with his development. When I leave him here, you will not muddle with his life. You will go your own way. As

  I must."

  Overhead, the repair andrones' gondola floats by, the silver balloon trawling into the morning breeze. Munk does not budge his attention from the forlorn man before him. "My sensors do not detect any foreign organism in this man. If you are what you say, where are you?"

  "I'm here as an energy pattern in his brain," Buddy replies. "When he attempted to kill himself with the night wings, I came into his body to save

  him." "Why?"

  Buddy barks a laugh. "Your C-P program is insatiable." He walks to the crumbly edge of the precipice where a vague track wends past the balesome camp and downward among vermilion boulders toward the sunny buildings. "Walk with me, Munk, and we will talk about freedom and destiny."

  Mei Nili sways gently in a pressure sling strung between two lux stanchions. While the pressure bags cocooning her left arm and thigh perfuse electrolytic fluid into her blood flow to remedy her dehydration, she gazes across the flagstone colonnade to where Charles Outis is being examined by several utilitarian scanner drones. She has yet to see a human being.

  The colonnade where the andrones have hung her is lushly green as any dream den, and she thinks it may actually be biotectured. Apart from the lux fixtures and maroon flagstones, the area looks genetically designed: The buttress roots of huge trees partition the colonnade into separate chambers. Fern curtains and

  moss veils hang from the high galleries, where flame-bright birds click and fret and occasionally screech. If she peers upward through the green levels and rocks her head, she believes she can see the texture of the filter dome she knows must be there.

  Mei turns her attention back to Charles, in the nave across from her. The scanner andrones have attached him to an elaborate weave of psyonic hardware.

  She wonders if this is the same equipment the caravan lugged. A camera array has been erected above the plasteel capsule in its chromatic mesh of filament bundles, and Mei takes this as a sign that Charles is okay and these will be his eyes.

  So intently does she watch the andrones' ministrations, she does not notice the figure who has stepped to the foot of her sling until he speaks: "Solis welcomes you."

  Mei startles and sits up on an elbow to see the effeminate face of the

  Commonality agent she had encountered at the Moot. "You're-"

  "Sitor Ananta." A corner of his mouth smiles, but his caramel eyes study her mirthlessly. "I arrived from our mother planet days ago. I've been waiting for you."

  "We're outside the Commonality and the Pashalik," Mei reminds him. "You have no authority here."

  "I need no authority here." His smile sharpens. "Solis makes much of being a free state. I am here as an individual, Jumper Nili, as are you. And we will both act as in
dividuals, won't we?"

  Mei forces herself to calmness by subvocalizing a panic-management chant. She must get free of the sling to defend herself, but when her hand moves to unstrap the pressure bags, Sitor Ananta lays a moist hand on hers.

  "That won't be necessary," he informs her, wetting his lips with his tongue, tasting the air around her. The avidity in his tawny eyes chills the pith of her. "I cannot stay long. The reception agents want to meet you-not andrones this time, but the free and simple people of Soils, free of olfacts and simpletons of the olfactual science that is my art."

  Mei unstraps her arm and leg and wipes the back of her hand on the sling. "You can't wipe it off," he says, shaking his head and pinching his chin

  ruefully. "It's already entered your blood."

  She rolls out of the sling and pushes pugnaciously close, ready to block or punch. "What've you put in me?" she asks hotly.

  His creamy smile does not flinch. "A mild euphoric-this time." He points a finger at her nose, and she hops backward.

  In midstep, the haptic drug swells into her brain, and the edge of her anger dulls. She hears the plash of rivulets and small waterfalls from somewhere among the giant trees, and the cedary cinnamon of the tree smoke expands her sinuses. This eases the thumping of her heart, and she regards the Commonality agent with calmness and dignity.

  He doesn't appear as threatening now that she is standing. He's slender,

  almost frail, a shimmery wraith in silken, flouncy green chemise and white baggy

  slacks cut at midshin to display crimson-trimmed black socks and slippers. When he moves, his terrene body drifts with balletic ease in the lighter gravity, and he seems nearly insubstantial.

  "What do you want from me?" she asks.

  "I want you to sit down." Sitor Ananta closes his eyes sleepily, and she does not retreat when he slides closer, his blue fragrance cool, bitingly sweet, the frosty spice of a rocky snowfield. The scent jumps through her blood, reminding her whole body of the last time she sensed this precise olfaction, among the runout rubble of the avalanche that buried her family. The stabbing exactitude of the scent punctures the strength in her knees, and she sags, almost falling backward. He steadies her arm, and she sits down on the mossy flagstone, her face jarred loose of all emotion.