Solis

by Attanasio, AA

  When the lovers eventually sprawl exhausted in each other's embrace and stare into space with a pained stupor, the agent has a handroid deliver a roll of nutripatches to the chamber. He modifies the pheromonol density of the room and adds just enough ergal for the two to get up and apply the nourishing patches.

  "You're sick," Shau groans. He is so enfeebled from the long hours of neurochemical manipulation, he barely has the strength to 'pull the starter strip on the nutripatches. He presses one to Mei's thigh and places the other over his scramming heart.

  "No, no," Sitor Ananta objects, adjusting his noseplug to admit more vasopressin to his inhalant, sharpening his verbal ability. "You're just not familiar with your bodies and their history. You know, in Mr. Charlie's time, there was no sublimol in the air supply to mitigate sexual desire. They couldn't turn off their sex glands. The hormones flooded their bloodstreams day and

  night, perpetually. What you're experiencing here is just natural human behavior woken from a long sleep."

  "This isn't natural," Shau mutters. "You're inflicting this on us."

  "It is true," the agent accedes, an amused smile glittering in the shadow of his face. "I am playing your bodies. But, I assure you, the olfacts I'm using are only activating neural arcs of natural behavior patterns."

  "Pornolfacts," Shau whispers wearily. "I've heard about them."

  "Yes, they're quite the rage on the homeworid," Sitor Ananta affirms. "Except in the feral reserves, there's been no human sexuality on Earth or in most of the colonies for centuries. It's absurd, really. When you think about it, this is the basic biological drive that propelled life for billions of years, and then, virtually overnight, we find the chemical switch and turn it off. That is unnatural."

  Shau's groggy eyes focus more keenly as he realizes, "You're a lewdist." "You're so bright," Sitor mocks. "Softcopy should never have let you go." "That's why you're intent on getting Mr. Charlie," Shau gloats in

  comprehension. He struggles to sit up on the sleep mat and untangle himself from Mei. "Lewdism is illegal in the Commonality. And Mr. Charlie is a witness, isn't he?" He jabs a wavery finger at the agent. "You took him from the archives yourself-for your own lewdist rituals. Look you're doing to us. And that's how

  he got stolen by the anarchists. They stole him from you." He flops back under the weight of his realization. "You had to get him back before someone found out how you had used him." He rolls his head to the side to face the agent. "What is the penalty in the Commonality for lewdist behavior? Or is it the penalty for theft from the archives that forces you to come all the way to Mars to make

  wetware of Mr. Charlie?" His face flexes angrily, but he has no strength to rise. "You got scared after the anarchists stole him from you. That called too much attention to him, didn't it? He wasn't your exclusive toy anymore. You were

  afraid someone else in the Commonality might access Mr. Charlie's brain and find out how you had stolen him from the archive and abused him for your illegal lewdism. So you shipped him out to Phoboi Twelve. You thought that would be the end of it. You thought your secret would be safe."

  "Activate your patch," Sitor Ananta says dryly. "You look like you're going to pass out." He turns his pugnosed, bat-faced profile to where Mei lies spraddled on her back, watching him with bright pins of malice in her eyes. "Your lover

  has reasoned out my motives," he admits and basks in her hatred. "Why are you silent?"

  "I'm thinking of ways to kill you," she murmurs.

  Sitor Ananta chuckles. "I'm sure your ideas are not nearly as clever as the way I've thought of killing you."

  Shau staggers upright, limp fists raised, and the agent stands, splays his hand across the angry man's face, and shoves him to the mat. The hypnolfact on Sitor Ananta's palm penetrates the mucosa of Shau's eyes and instantly renders him slumberous.

  "I have had days to think this through," he tells a passive, seething Mei.

  "And I have decided to kill you in such a way as to make everyone think you want to die. With an artful combination of ergal, dйgagй, and hypnolfacts, I can arrange for you and your lover to earnestly choose to make passage with Grielle Aspect. Now, isn't that truly clever?"

  Mei gropes out of bed, and Sitor Ananta smears her face with the hypnolfact. In minutes he has them lying side-by-side, head to foot. In turn, he whispers close to their slack faces the narratives that will make death irresistible.

  The journalist is easy. He has already been dead. His psyche knows the succor of emptiness, free of the hurtling world, free of the pretense of time and form. Sitor Ananta whisper-hums to him about the dreamless ease he once had and can have again. He reminds him of all the needless efforts of each day, all the predestined indignities he must endure just to go on. "Why take it the hard way? Forget the dream of reality. Let's go back to the reality of dreams, Shau

  Bandar. Return to the invisible source and destiny of all assembled things. Take the way out."

  Shau's eyelids twitch through a brief REM episode as the behavioral program sets in his brain, and Sitor Ananta stifles a snicker.

  The jumper is more difficult. First, Sitor Ananta must sing the song of the avalanche that killed her family. He describes how a river of rock roared down the snowy valley faster than a skim train, the massive stone slabs riding a

  layer of compressed air. He sings from above, where the mountainside looks as if it has suddenly turned into muddy water, spilling through the snowbound valley

  in a dark flood and then setting instantly in place. Under tons of broken slate, a whole village is entombed. He sings of their last moments, of the thundersong from the mountain. No one thought they were going to die. Most avalanches slide horizontally less than twice the distance they fall, and the village was over five kilometers from the cliffs. He sings of how safe they felt, how

  unsuspecting their last minutes were. Sadly, he sings of their ignorance of the trapped air layer and the acoustic energy of the thunder, powers strong enough to propel the giant rocks ten times as far as they fall. With thick dolor, he sings of the 630-meter fall of a whole mountainside and its smoking, screaming, unstoppable 6-kilometer runout.

  "Where were you?" Sitor Ananta trills. "Off on a ski safari with your friends. You will never forget your absence at the appointed hour. Why run from it? Death requires us, Mei Nili. Your family was not spared. The whole village left the future behind. Why are you here? You don't have to be apart from them. That is the hard way."

  Without a splotch of vegetation, the crushed crystal trod that is the Walk of Freedom wanders into terrain that has the appearance of pre-Adamic Mars. Rocks lie strewn in the russet sand like crockery shards, and the weatherworn vent of

  a lava tube rises at the end of the path with the fluted and sacrosanct shape of a dais on the floor of hell. Around it are scattered the sitting and sprawling mummies, sandwind-torn skeletons, and bone slurry of the passagers who have already completed the Walk of Freedom.

  Grielle Aspect stands with Mei Nili and Shau Bandar under the copper-green catafaique that frames the airlock in the transparent section of wall facing the ceremonial grounds. They are wearing the opaline smocks and head and neck wrappings traditional to passagers, but only Grielle looks enthusiastic. The jumper and the reporter stare with sterile expressions at the small gathering of observers in the viewing stands as though the world before them were indeed a vain illusion.

  Sitor Ananta, wearing minty colors for this festive occasion and standing close enough to the passagers to inspire them with more olfacts if necessary, admires the lithe crowd that has gathered to witness this old and increasingly rare ritual. He recognizes Exu and Hannas Bowan among the martian dyads, and there are members of the Solis trade council in their business kirtles. When the ceremony is over, he will approach them and see if he can work up some kind of deal for the Commonality to justify his trip here.

  "I have come to the Walk of Freedom to forget the dream of reality," Grielle says at the conclusion of her address, dee
pening the small smile in Sitor Ananta's face. By using the ceremonial parting, she is unwittingly reinforcing the hypnolfaction of his victims. "I take this walk now to return to the reality of dreams. Happily, I release the zero in the bone and return to the invisible source and the destiny of all assembled things. Proudly, I take the way out."

  Grielle lifts her palms to the filtered blue sky, turns, and strides through the airlock. In the sudden cold and reduced air pressure, her smock billows and the statskin film of her wimple fogs. But she can see well enough to follow gracefully the radiant crystal path through the bonefield. Among ricks of skeletons and mummified corpses sitting tilted and askew, she lowers herself and crosses her legs.

  With a florid gesture, her pink-gloved hands rip away the wimple and the protection of the statskin film. The out-rush of air and pressure flaps her cheeks, bulges her eyes, and squirts blood from their corners. The blood explodes into clouds of crimson glitter and blows away, and the look of ecstasy on Grielle's face goes stupid as her life vanishes through her snarling lips in a jetting gust of water vapor. The heat bleeds away instantly, and Grielle Aspect's blood-streaked grimace smuts over with blotches of ice crystal.

  Sitor Ananta watches Mei and Shau closely, but their mesmeric stares do not flinch at the blunt sight of Grielle's passing. They seem fervent believers that the waveform of her body's neural light has been liberated and, unimpeded by

  much of an atmosphere, flies free of all creation.

  "Light is action," Shau says, reciting the same programmed speech to the assembly that he used earlier to convince Grielle of his and Mei's sincerity. "The photon, the ultimate unit of light, is the quantum of action. Photons, like actions, come in wholes. We cannot have one and a half actions. We cannot decide to speak, to walk this path, or do anything one and a half times. Action is whole. And so is the photon. They are the same. All actions are acts of light."

  Sitor Ananta watches with evident satisfaction the behavior of his subjects. When Mei begins to talk, he indulges himself by stealing a congratulatory look at the spectators and is pleased to see them listening attentively.

  "Look how we are attached to the ends of things," the jumper says, her voice thin and dreamy. "Death is always a beginning. Yet, when I lost my family-when they died-I saw only the end of our time together. I could not let that go. But now and here among the broken stones, I know what to ask for from this uncharitable existence-and that is a new beginning, beyond where this body ends, beyond where all things end."

  From among the rubric stones of the rock garden beside the viewer stands, a bareheaded man in the green caftan of the vats waves gently, almost secretly, to Sitor Ananta. The agent does not recognize him, but the jolting thought occurs

  to him that this could well be Charles Outis. The vats are to conclude their bodyweave at any time. The agent casually mists himself with degage to calm himself down and edges toward the stranger.

  "Shau Bandar and I take this walk now to return to the reality of dreams," the jumper continues. "Happily, we release the zero in the bone..."

  "Who are you?" Sitor Ananta whispers to the stranger in the green caftan. "Who do you think I am?" the man asks. He wears a merry grin in a face with

  minor imperfections-a slightly offset nose, muted cheekbones, asymmetrical

  mouth-line-the tiny flaws common before gene manipulation homogenized beauty. He has an archaic face.

  "You're Mr. Charlie," the agent surmises.

  "I'm Mr. Charlie's body," the man answers gleefully. "But I'm Munk! I'm the androne who faced you in the Moot and stole Mr. Charlie's brain. I'm the same one who destroyed your semblor in the wilds-"

  "Munk?" Sitor Ananta's face clenches with incomprehension. "That's not possible; Munk is an androne."

  "Yes!" Munk grabs the pastel pleats of the agent's jacket as if to shake sense into him. "The Maat created me with an anthropic mind. And Buddy-the Maat-he coated my mechanical body with some kind of molecular code. It instructed the vats to transcribe my silicon mind into an organic brain-a human brain-this brain, in this body. I am Munk!"

  Sitor Ananta rips himself free of Munk and falls back a step, stunned.

  "We return to the invisible source and the destiny of all assembled things," Mei recites woodenly. "Proudly, we take the way out."

  Sitor Ananta stares avidly at the happy man before him, and his face blanches. "If you're Munk, where is Mr. Charlie's brain?"

  A triumphant smile further brightens Munk's giddy, human face. "Haven't you heard? A deep-space patrol-class androne has emerged from the vats and claims to be Mr. Charlie. The Maat code instructed the vats to put his brain in my old body."

  "No." Sitor Ananta's flesh tingles with fright at that thought, and he snorts a blast of degage. He pulls a viewsheet from his jacket, punches up current events, and the small hairs along his spine rise as the image of a giant,

  silver-cowled androne appears. In the background he recognizes the purple air plants and multiplex galleries of Solis's Fountain Court.

  "The Anthropos Essentia sent me ahead to tell you he's coming," Munk says, pressing closer with obvious delight. "They can't stop him. And neither can you."

  The degage withholds the agent's shock sufficiently for him to see clearly what he must do. He grabs Munk, douses him with hypnolfact, and leaves him slumped against a rubric stone. No one sees. They are all watching the passagers enter the airlock.

  "No!" Sitor Ananta shouts. He barges through a line of onlookers, well aware that if Mr. Charlie's friends die on the Walk of Freedom, tradition forbids

  their revival-and Mr. Charlie will have not only his torture at the hands of the Commonality agent to avenge but also the deaths of the only people he knows in this life.

  Mei and Shau pause at the sound of their inductor's voice, and to the amazed shouts of the viewers, Sitor Ananta is quickly upon them, misting the air with the invisible smoke of ergal. The stimulant disrupts the hypnolfaction, and the jumper and the reporter sag to their knees under the shock of their chemically assaulted brains.

  Sitor Ananta leaves them sitting on the crystal gravel inside the airlock and bolts through the scaffolding of the catafalque. No one in the perplexed gathering of witnesses tries to stop him, and he disappears into the rock garden.

  By the time Charles arrives at the Walk of Freedom, the agent has hurried across Solis to the jungle-fronded colonnade at the edge of the wilds. Though he is a day too late for the last caravan to Terra Tharsis, he uses his Commonality credit to rent a dune climber. He knows if he can get back to the Pashalik, he will be safe. The Common Archive has no record of a Mr. Charlie; that was why he deprived Charles Outis of his name when he first stole him, feigning a

  translator glitch. Now, if anyone comes forward, he can deny everything, and in the fullness of time he will find accidents for all of them. With much bravura, he starts the dune climber and departs the settlement in a cloud of rouge dust that follows his escape among the sentinel stones and balance rocks.

  On the other side of Solis, Mei, Shau, and Munk are sitting in the viewer stands telling Exu and Hannas Bowan what has happened. The excited crowd that spills about them parts at the approach of the androne. Charles kneels before his human friends so he can stare into their faces and sees himself sitting between Mei and Shau, his precisely familiar features staring at him with a bemused grin.

  In the vats, as the handroids lifted him from the green creative fluid, the molecular program that Buddy had installed in this mechanical body bloomed in him with understanding. He knew then that the Maat had arranged for the body switch between him and Munk. But only now, as he sees the joy in his own face, does he feel the rightness of what has happened.

  Before anyone can speak, he shifts his awareness to slow time. He takes in the martians, their dark eyes like the black-bolt orbs of sharks set in the tufty copper fur of their soft lineaments. He detects no sign of ears. Their slender blue throats, glossy, chitin-plated arms, and stalk legs bent the wrong way like a gra
sshopper's bespeak an alien adaptation he has a new lifetime to learn

  about.

  He shifts his attention and studies the startling likeness of himself-his own flesh, the lifelong face in the mirror, here younger than he remembers himself in his last days, yet him nonetheless, with the same dimple creases, the same

  long, slightly skewed nose, and those inquisitive eyes, luminous now, starflexed with happiness. He has never seen himself so happy.

  Beside his twin, Mei and Shau sit holding hands, looking wrung but mirthful. They are beautiful. Facing them, he feels beautiful. Their bone-strong, balanced features regard him with the openness of children; he wants to hug them and has to remember that his love fits a greater strength now.

  These people before him-the martians, too, and his. own body with someone else inside it-these people are the future that he has traversed a thousand years to meet In the next moment, he will speak to them and listen. But for now, for the duration of this one sturdy instant, his attention fixes on the smallest, momentary detail, the least noticeable ephemera of this far future afternoon-tiny, evanescent particles suspended in the mauve transparency of the

  wind-pollen, lint, microns of sand. He focuses on these diminutive bits of reality, these granulations that he has never paid any real attention to in his former life and that others in the rush of time would never notice either, and they are enough. Their simple actuality makes him inexplicably happy, these motes glittering with their charge of sunlight, the dust of time and worlds, golden and imperishable.

  Epilogue

  UNDER THE CREAKING STARS AND OVER THE BASALTIC KNOLLS AND fault trenches, a shreek slides through the air with minimal motion. Its swift, transparent bulk gleams in the moonlight, wild protruding eyes blackly visible, a brain glistening between the swiveling pupils like a sunstruck geode, golden pink and

  translucent. Through the clear flesh of its gutsack, behind the nearly invisible muzzle with its undershot jaw and pugnacious fangs, scissored chunks of prey