Solis

Without hesitation, Buddy walks across the lawn and past the guard toward the droplift. Munk stays in close lockstep, until they reach the security androne. He pauses, unable to move. No physical force holds him. It's his own deep-level fascination that's immobilized him.

He snaps out of simple motor programming and realizes that he has stopped because some part of him recognizes this androne. A swift search shows that Charles encountered andrones much like this one when he was first revived on Earth. Their masks carried watery reflections of faces.

A face now appears in the fiat pan of the mask-the soft, roguish features of Sitor Ananta. "You are in violation of Commonality law, Androne Munk. Return Mr. Charlie at once to the Commonality agent in Terra Tharsis."

"Munk!" Buddy calls. "Let's go."

Munk hurries to Buddy's side. "Sitor Ananta came through that androne." "Ignore him," Buddy says and strides over to the directory, a plastic cube

balanced on one point. Ice-green vapors spiral at its core, faster and brighter at the touch of his hand and the plasteel capsule. "The Commonality has no jurisdiction in Terra Tharsis, Solis, or the wilds between them."

Munk reads the code lights in the cube and sees that Buddy has ordered a short droplift, up and over the wall. Reassured by this simple route, he follows the

man into the indigo light of the cupola and hears no more the thriving, brittle music of the city's silicon mind.

Shau Bandar leaves his credit cuff on the lacquered table in the narrow house haunted by music. The cuff is useless outside the city. He looks around a last time at the faded walls with their pastel print of lobster pots and cacti. Someone else now will have to make sense of that or redecorate. No one is allowed to hold property in Terra Tharsis if they leave, even temporarily, and though he's unhappy about giving up this house, he's excited by his

decisiveness. He is finally making something grand of his life. He tells himself that when he returns he'll have enough credits for a house twice as large and each room replete with the most expensive shapeshift furniture.

He bounds down the cricketing steps of the skinny house without looking back and meets Mei Nili among the walnut trees, where she's been waiting while he spent his last moment with the house. "Are you sure you want to do this?" she asks gruffly. "I have nothing to lose, but I'm not so sure about you."

"Never more sure of anything," he answers and briskly leads the way along the sinuous flagstone path. He salutes the skewed sundial and clogged birdbath and barges through the crooked gate. On the walk down the stony lane beside the creek, he explains that Softcopy has arranged for a droplift to the Outlands where a skim car will take them to the caravansary. All expenses are covered. "There's always credit available for an insider willing to risk everything on the outside. Even a lazy, impoverished lichen like me will get a big run in the news clips."

"Especially if you die," Mei points out.

The journalist agrees with a fatalistic shrug. "It's the biggest thrill of all-the shadow of death."

On the walk through the oak cloisters down to the pave, Shau Bandar talks nervously about what lies ahead, recounting news clips of caravans eaten by sandstorms and shreeks, voracious, bristle-fanged biots created in the vats of Solis to scavenge the wilds and discourage pilgrims.

Mei only half listens, attentive to the supernatural beauty of the hills. She has had to relearn the future too often since she last felt beauty. She has no idea where or even if she will be tomorrow, but for now, the heavenward towers and the shafts of sunmist on the hazy, cluttered hillsides are enough.

Autumnal shimmers of wind sweep the pave with smoked brightness and a radiant chill. Mei is still staring up at the gusty heights of sparkling onyx when Shau leads her into a tight alley. In the dark, a boast of indigo light breathes.

The city's vallation is a four-kilometer-high rampart, twelve spans deep. It rims the caldera brink of Olympus Mons, enclosing the great skytowers of Terra Tharsis and their hillside purlieus. The barrier has the seamlessly smooth and black-green luster of jasper but is composed of a Maat alloy impervious to sensors. The mirror-vanes atop the encircling parapet serve as both detectors and signal scramblers so that from outside the vallation contact with the city is impossible.

Despite this isolation, an extensive community thrives outside the city under the stupendous wall. Sustained by the gravity shadow of Terra Tharsis, which provides near-terrestrial conditions, exurbs sprawl across the broad slopes of the extinct volcano in a coruscating expanse of solar mills and antennae. The mills amplify the weak sunlight that bleeds through the perpetual cloud banks churning in the penumbra of the city's magravity field. The Maat weather system stores heat and moisture in this surrounding area, and so, while there is no dearth of water for the Outlands, energy must be milled from the thermals and the wan sun.

Shau Bandar explains this and more to Mei Nili on the long drive through the skimways outside the city. Displacing his anxiety about the safety he has abandoned for this rich adventure, he points out the gigantic, androne-managed farms on the watery horizons. He has been out here on assignment before and knows the names of all the districts: Sky-Bowl with its power factories, the agrarian pastures and fish hatcheries of Willow, the congested thorpes of Britty, and the elegant estates in an opulent district called the Honor of

Giants.

"Where do all these people come from?" Mei wonders. Even in the cool interior of the rented car, the air smells of swamp and thunder. Mountainous blue clouds hang in eerie stillness above the chain of hills and their clusters of hamlets and silver-foil roofs. "They aren't protected here by the Maat, are they?"

"No. They live in jeopardy of their lives, all of them." The car drives itself, preprogrammed for their destination at the very fringe of the exurbs, and Shau stares disconsolately at the smoky hills and the heat ripples on the skimway. "Actually, two hundred years ago-over four hundred terrene years

ago-the exurbs were much larger. That was during the frantic Exodus of Light, when millions came here from all the colonies literally wanting to die in the rarefied air of Mars. Death passages were all the rage back then. The population here are remnants of that weird faith that got It, the idea that consciousness

is light liberated into a glorious and rapturous field state called the tesseract range when the physical organism dies. Bizarre, huh?"

"Lately, it's living that seems bizarre to me," Mei mutters, pressing her fingertips to the cool plastic dome. She touches the speed-blurred images of the low stone houses with their shiny roofs and asks, "Why do these people live

here? What do they want?"

"Most have come from the Commonality range towns on Luna," the journalist answers, stifling a yawn. "They believe the work is easier here. And they're probably right. You know how tight the labor strictures are in the Commonality. Also, work here affords each of them the chance of admittance to the Pashalik."

Among vegetable plots and sodden, sunken fields, roundhouses in unrendered concrete slip past. "Do many actually get in to Terra Tharsis?"

"If they accrue enough credits and an insider like myself leaves."

Mei hears the edginess in his voice. "Do you regret leaving? You know you can go back now. Just call Munk for me."

"Go back to what?" He crosses his lanky legs and clasps his hands over his knee. "You saw my elegant house that I'm about to lose unless I go to work for the Pashalik monitoring andrones. No. I want adventure-and credits. This is what I want." He puts his olfact ring to his nostrils, then presents it to her.

She declines by turning her attention from him to the pastel roundhouses with their foil roofs and red-dirt gardens. "How long have you lived in Terra Tharsis?"

"I'm forty-two." "Mars years?"

He nods, distracted by the electrical nearness of the purple clouds with their flutters of lightning. "You'd think with all these hopefuls teeming out here to get in the city, they'd shut down the vats."

"The Maat have a life-type agenda."

"Is that what they believe on the reservation? Ha." He looks at her naked face, smells her sweet-sour body odor, and feels once more his sorrowing astonishment at her rustic mien. "The Maat have no agenda. If the commune didn't insist on racial parities, the whole city would have gone plasmatic centuries ago. The Maat don't care."

With violet tremors in the piled clouds and trundling thunder, a dazzle of rain sizzles toward them on the skimway and pummels the clear top of the car. "Have you ever had an encounter?"

"Nope. And all the encounters I've followed up for Softcopy were bogus. The Maat are so far inside now they're not even bodies anymore. That's what I think. They have no more truck with us than we do with apes in the aboriginal forests."

Veils of rain smoke off the hot rooftops and steam along the empty road. For a long while, they ride in silence, Mei worried about Munk and Mr. Charlie, Shau still debating the merits and dangers of the impending trek. In the blue darkness, under the hammering rain, the world draws closer.

Buddy, holding Charles Outis in his arms, stands with Munk in a grassy verge under the giant vallation of Terra Tharsis. The droplift that carried them out of the city has deposited them on a hummock overlooking low, tinsel-roofed cities strewn brightly under toppling clouds. The androne glances up at the indigo blur of the vanishing droplift vortex, relieved that his creative

willingness to trust this stranger has indeed delivered him from the city of his makers. The noise of the city's silicon mind has vanished entirely, and he

senses no other andrones using Maat codes nearby.

"Where do we go from here?" he asks, scanning the cluttered plain. On the steep horizon, lizards of lightning squirm among the mauve thundetheads of an isolated storm.

"I think I know, Munk." Buddy hands Charles to the androne and removes his chamois strap-jacket. "If the jumper you came in with wants to make the trek, she'll have to start from the Avenue of Limits. We'll go there." He slings his jacket over his shoulder and wades through the tall grass.

Munk cradles Charles in the crook of one arm but does not budge. He senses waftings of ozone from the storm and the distant chatter of thunder. "You have kept your word, Buddy. Show me the direction to the Avenue of Limits, and we can part here."

Buddy stops among the feathery grass. "I'd like to come along," he says, almost apologetically. "The Avenue of Limits is at the fringe of the Outlands, on the edge of the wilds. It's a big place and a long walk from here. But

there's a skim station in Sky-Bowl, not far away. From there, we can ride to the Avenue of Limits and you can use the reponer's codes to contact him. What do you say?"

Munk regards the man for a full level second, playing various motives though his anthropic model again and again, until finally he must admit, "I don't understand why you should care at all about me."

"It's a new one for your anthropic model, isn't it?" Buddy's strong face with its imprint of sadness nods once. "Anomie."

"A psychic state of isolation and disorientation," the androne recites. "That is the unhappiness you confessed to me."

"Yes. That is my unhappiness." His strong face looks weak, and he says with a slow, aching solemnity, "I belong in the wilderness now. Can I go along with you?"

"To die?" Munk asks ingenuously.

Buddy gives a vigorous shake of his head that scatters his sweat-wrung hair over his eyes. "No. I don't want to kill myself. I want to test this life. To make it stronger."

Munk absorbs this, and it prints in his silicon brain as something heard before. He plays back words from Mr. Charlie's broadcast: "We all live by our fictions. We create stories in order to fill the emptiness that is ourselves.

And because we must create them with strength from nothing, they make us whole." "We will go together then," Munk decides, glad to participate in yet another

human being's story.

"Good." Buddy winks. "We'd better get going before the rain gets here." In the oblique light slanting through the storm clouds onto the immense

vallation of Terra Tharsis, the weather displays massive and strange contours, and the androne feels very small among the powers of the world. He follows Buddy through the feathery grass toward the wide, cluttered horizon of human life.

Mei Nili and Shau Bandar arrive at the Avenue of Limits with the rush of night. The oblate and gaseous sun shudders among the cindercones and black volcanic hills on the serrated horizon like demonland's burning portal. Sbau takes the yoke and slides the rental car onto a terminus bed along the shoulder of the skimway. The doors wing open on the sultry, incandescent dusk.

"Why are we stopping here?" Mei asks.

"I want to record the sunset over the Avenue of Limits. It's a good bridge shot for the first clip." He steps out into the simmering evening.

To one side, in the direction from where they have come, the citadel of Terra Tharsis dominates the highlands, the breadth of its vallation dark as a ruby in the long sun shafts, the skytowers silver-veiled and dazzling with laser points of gemlight. In streaks, flares, and fiery globes, the scarlet-plumed sky hoards the last of the day's sun, and the rooftops on the lava slopes shimmer with purple flames.

In the other direction, the wilds of Mars catch the twilight in gleams of

amber glass and crimson smears of slurry, a dim and barren badland that

stretches away into darkness. Shanty sheds crowded among behemoth warehouses and industrial barns front the wilderness. Lux wires and torch globes pour light

like magma through the tight lanes and burrows at the very brink of the hungry darkness.

"This is the Avenue of Limits," Shau announces, fortifying himself with a

sniff of ergal from a pinky ring. The stimulating olfact makes the stifling heat seem more bearable, even invigorating. With an expression of determination, he looks to Mei, who has gotten out of the car and strolls away from him. "From here, the journey to Solis really begins. Rabana's been in touch by cable phone to the local copy office in Britty, and they've relayed her messages on my

timpan-com. She says Softcopy has data on three caravans lading for departure from here to Solis. But two are sure losers, religious fanatics from the Outlands who expect divine help in crossing the wilds."

Mei listens absently. She stands at the edge of the terminus bed, staring down the slope of the skimway to where the concrete-block walls and derelict

buildings begin. No people are in sight. "it looks abandoned."

"It is," Shau says, stepping alongside her and pointing into the distance to where a devastated swatch of debris breaks the shoreline of packed-together sheds, ricks, storeyards, and longhouses. "A failback took seven whole blocks out a short while ago. The magravity border fluctuates. It usually extends into the wilds about a kilometer beyond here. But sometimes it falls back, and when that happens, whole sections of the Avenue are ripped apart by the abrupt gravitational shift. The clips I've seen are really spectacular-whole buildings launching into the sky and breaking apart. Some of the debris has been found a hundred kilometers away."

Shadow shapes stir within the crepuscular fields below, but when Mei looks closer they are only cane-grass stirring in the wind among piles of old scantlings. "What about the third caravan Rabana foundis that a more reliable group?"

The reporter juts his lower lip dubiously. "The trek captain is some kind of entrepreneur, but he's also an extraordinary mechanic. He's run a

wilderness-tour service out of Britty for years. A wealthy eccentric from the Honor of Giants has hired him to captain the trek and is putting up the credits for the equipment. She wants to donate all her energy and assets to Solis and is determined to get there in one piece. With her backing and his expertise, this caravan is our best shot. Softcopy will pay our passage in exchange for the exclusive news-clip and drama rights."

"Someone's down there," Mei says, pointing to the junkyard below them. "They've been watching us."

"I don't see anyone."

Mei fixes her focus on the ruddy yellow lux wires grid-ding the Avenue of Limits and with her sharper peripheral vision spies figures crouching, through the scrub of the eroded hills. "They're coming," she says, backing from the edge of the terminus bed. "Call Munk."

"I don't see anyone."

Mei slips into the car. But she has no credit codes to activate it and hops out again. "Come on, Bandar. Let's get out of here."

The reporter approaches the vehicle casually, orgulous with the olfact

sparking in him. "I've been here before. There's nothing to be afraid of. If you saw anyone, it's probably the traders who lurk around the storehouses, wanting

to barter."

"Just get us out of here."

Shau eases behind the yoke and taps his cuff onto the credit plate, but the car doesn't start. He adjusts the microswitch insets in his cuff and tries again. But the control panel remains dark. "I don't get it," he mumbles.

"Call Munk, dammit."

The reporter fidgets with his cuff switches and is shaking his head bewildered when the first figures shamble up the embankment. Against the sky's last opal cracks of light they are hunched, hooded silhouettes wielding pipes and clubs. Their sudden shrieks snap Shau's fixation with his cuff controls, and he rears

back in fright.

"Damn! They must have cut the power cables to the skimway."

Mei reaches across him and pulls down his door, slapping the lock into place. "Get Munk on the comlink, Bandar. Do it!"

Shau complies with trembling fingers. "Munk! Munk! Androne, are you reading?" Ten big mongrel morphs leap about the car, slamming their clubs on the plastic

dome. With the third blow it cracks, and with the next one it shatters into a splash of molecular dust. Whoops and hollers flap into the night, and large, splayed, four-fingered hands reach in and yank the passengers from the car.

Mei tucks her knees and kicks out with all her might, pushing free of her assailant. She twists to the ground and scuttles on all fours. But two other morphs seize her arms, and she's hoisted upright to see Shau flopped facedown on the hood of the car, the hulking bandits tearing off his jacket and his rings. His mouth is wide with pain and fear, his teeth black with blood. One of the morphs grabs the reporter's long braid of hair and jerks his head back. Another slides a curve of blade under Shau's straining throat.

"No!" Mei screams.

Delirious hollers carom shrilly into the night, warbling into howls at the sight of the slim jumper writhing between her captors.

Beads of dark blood appear under Shau Bandar's jaw, and his eyes swivel wildly in their sockets. He groans in thick guttural bursts, pleading for his life.

Up from the embankment where the morphs first appeared, a silver cowl rises, cloaking a darkness with no face. "S-ss-s-t!" the androne directs a hypercompressed packet of sound waves at the morph holding the knife, and the blade wrenches free and clatters into the car.

"Let them go," Munk commands in a thunderous voice.

The morphs drop Mei and release Shau, then rapidly scatter, dissolving into the darkness with tattered whines and aimless cries. A moment later, a pipe wings out of the dark, slashing toward where Mei has risen to one knee. The androne bounds forward in a chrome streak and plucks the projectile out of the air less than a meter from the jumper's head. With a deft wrist snap, the pipe whirls whistling back into the night and finds a mortal shriek.

"I came as quickly as I could," Munk says, helping Mei to her feet. "I heard your distress on the link."

"Help Bandar," she says. "He's been cut."

"I'm okay," Shau declares tartly. He holds a shred of his shirt to the superficial cut at his throat and glares wrathfully into the dark where the morphs retreated. "They slashed my dignity more than my flesh. Gruesome things! They're distorts, not people. They must be destroyed."

"Who are they?" Mei asks, rubbing feeling back into her wrists.

"I tell you, they're distorts," Shau croaks with anger. "There's no real law

in the Outlands. Rogues run their own vats out here and morph gangs of homicidal brutes-distorts--to protect their territories. Sometimes the distorts range wildly. The posses that hunt them down are always a popular run in the news clips."

Mei puts a hand on the plasteel capsule under the androne's arm. "Munk, where have you been? Why did you run away?"

"You know why I fled with Mr. Charlie."

"I know," she says, drearily. "Your C-P program."

"Yes. Since Phoboi Twelve, I can actually hear my imagination as loudly as my primary programming. I could not bear to imagine what Sitor Ananta wanted to do with Mr. Charlie. I know it would have been clearly inhumane."

Shau thumps his sandaled foot against the skim plate of the car, irate that he lost his jacket and recording mantle and with them his chance to report on an androne with a human spirit. "Now look! I have to get a new link. I lost everything!"

"Do you at least know where we're going?" Mei asks testily, approaching him. She peeks under his jaw to view the wound and sees only a gray smear of blood in the dark.

"Of course I do," he answers defensively and nudges her away with some

annoyance. "Raza's. It's just down the bluff. But we can't ride there The distorts cut the damn power cables. And even if they hadn't, we can't operate this car without the credit patch in my jacket."

"Buddy has a rental car," Munk suggests. "I met him in Terra Tharsis. He helped me to get out. But I had to leave him behind when your distress call came. He couldn't move fast enough."

"Where is he?" Mei asks.

"About sixty-three kilometers down the Avenue of Limits."

"You ran sixty kilos from the time I called you?" the reporter asks.

"I can move much faster than that," Munk replies modestly, "but there are structures to avoid on the Avenue. And it is warm here. My coolant system was nearly overtaxed."

"You must have spent a lot of power," Mei notes. Despite herself, she can't help admiring the androne's spunk, at the very least.

"Yes. I depleted fifty-two percent of my power cells to get here quickly. But the expenditure was required."

Shau heartily agrees. "I'll say! They were going to kill us."

"But how are we going to charge your cells?" Mei places a concerned hand on the androne's breastplate and feels the dew-chill of it. "We have no credits."

"Get me to a link," Shau says, "and we'll see what Softcopy can do."

"I have already contacted Buddy," Munk acknowledges. "He says he will meet us at Rey Raza's garage. It's only a few kilometers from here. I will carry the two of you."

"And me without my damn recorder!" Shau kicks the car's skim plate again. "This would have been the perfect lead-in!"

Munk spends a moment adding this behavior to his anthropic model. Mr. Charlie had declared that we all live by our fictions, and here is a bleeding man who grieves for the story he has lost. Mei Nili herself has an incredulous look on her face, as if she is convinced a life can be overremembered.

The androne regards them both with quiet satisfaction, proud that he has preserved two dewdrop lives from the void. Staring at these human creatures his strength has kept whole, he feels right. He knows this feeling is the cyberkinesis of his C-P program, his own subjectivity, but that doesn't seem to matter.

He feels a mutual kinship with Jumper Nili's cool detachment and the reporter's hot ambition. He yearns to see Mr. Charlie, the ancestor of his maker, whole before him. And yet-and yet, he is an androne. His yearning is the calm fury of his maker.

He remembers floating in the delicious cold of farside Saturn, tiny in the penumbra of the gas giant, knowing that he knew he was a programmed being. He experienced an echo of that humbling smallness under the immense vallation of Terra Tharsis. And now here, again, he knows he is becoming an accident, like everything else.

Jumper Nili has seen something become nothing when her family died, and he almost saw that tonight. He has never witnessed a human death. The very thought oozes with unhappiness and makes him recall that there are light-years of silence surrounding him. That fact mutes his sadness.

Once again, he determines that he will defend these frail residues of human life with all the strength in his power cells. That pleases him, or at least makes him less unhappy with his smallness under the tumultuous sky and the slowness of time.

Clutching Charles Outis between them, Mei Nili and Shau Bandar ride in the embrace of Munk's arms. They bound over the main artery past hip-roofed sheds, gaunt storage towers, oxide-stained corrugated fences, weathered warehouses, a graveyard of rust-gutted drums, and desolate crossroads grimly empty under the blazon of lux wires. At the reporter's command, they stop before a wide garage with a pyramid of latticed metal on the roof and a. circular sign hanging above the open port announcing:

RAZA'S TOURS OF THE WILDS.

Within the tall port of the garage are three big sand rovers, painted a glaring white with RAZA stenciled in red on the vent-ribbed runners. Slender

laser cannon mounted under the eaves of the garage swivel aggressively, and Munk turns his reflectant cowl toward them.

"State your business!" a gravelly voice exclaims over a speaker system. "Rey? This is Shau Bandar from Softcopy! We're here for the trek."

"Sorry," an unamplified voice says. "You can't be too careful on the Avenue of

Limits."

A wiry, falcon-faced man with a shaved head, tiny mustache-Ups at the corners of his wide grinning mouth, and green splashes of face paint under his eyes strides across the port. He's dressed in scarlet and gold clothes, a magnificent fullness of pleats and panels and intricate braiding, baggy as a bright, rackety kite. "I am Rey Raza," he proclaims boisterously, through a gleeful smile. Wrinkles of merriment seam his face, but his small, hooded eyes regard the world with a mean squint. "Softcopy said you were coming. Where are your recorders?"

"Distorts jumped us," Shau says, stepping out from behind the androne. "Munk here saved our lives. The distorts probably still have my jacket. If we act quickly, we can use it to help target a posse."

Rey Raza tosses a thick laugh at the reporter. "You've seen too many news clips, Bandar. There are no posses on the Avenue of Limits. Here we are ruled by the one and true law, the natural night of primacy itself."

"What about justice?" Bandar complains.

The tour guide shrugs. "Justice, moral right, equity, and due consideration to the weak have no value whatsoever here or in the great and terrible land beyond these limits. You'd better get that straight now, Mr. Journalist, for there will be no turning back once we are away."

"Sand rovers will take several days to make the crossing to Solis," Munk notes. "Are there no flyers available?"

"You are clearly from a far and distant system, Munk," Rey Raza observes chidingly. "You're a Jovian deep-space patrol-class androne, I'd judge from your looks. And those legs have been augmented, haven't they? Must be unbearably hot for you around here."

"I am from lapetus Gap in the Saturn system. My legs were fitted for me by Apollo Combine on Deimos. And, yes, I find this heat enervating. Most of my power is spent cooling my systems."

"Didn't you tell them anything, Bandar? Flyers-really." Rey Raza waves them inside. "It's not a good time of day for street talk. Will you join me for some refreshment? Munk, I don't think I have the right power amps for your kind of cold-body cells, but you're welcome to look over my equipment. As for

flyers-well, Terra Tharsis and Solis just don't permit flyers anywhere near them. Ah, here is the archaic brain." He presses his forehead to the plasteel capsule. "He's dreaming. Maybe of Earth. I'll bet he feels more awake now than when he wakes next among us, eh?"

The interior of the capacious garage smells acridly of lube oil and lathed metal. Behind the three sand rovers, a wire-mesh partition isolates a machinist's pit, engine hoist, and a tool-and-die shop. Raza admits Munk to the generator deck and leads Mei and Shau past the dimly lit work areas to the back of the garage.

A sheet metal door slides open on a radiant room with the clean redolence of woodwork. Blue straw mats cover the floor, and yellow paper screens, like vertical louvers, section the suite. Between the screens, strips of a kitchen and a sleep cubicle are visible, both with wooden furniture-floral-carved pantry, painted cupboard, swivel stools, a trestle cot, and lacquered side tables.

A blond wood table and fanback chairs in the front room squeeze Mei's heart, and a tear startles down her cheek. She lowers her face to smell the spray of wildflowers in the table's centerpiece, trying to hide her emotion.

Rey Raza places an airy hand on her shoulder. "You're exhausted. I can see the fray light around you."

Shau, surprised, starts to explain, "Rey's from a strong-eye clade. He sees some infra and ultra, bodylights-"

"It's the wood," Mei manages to get out, feels stronger for it, lifts her head

and wipes her eyes. "I haven't been close enough to smell and touch wood since I

left Earth. I didn't know how much I missed it."

Shau puts a fist to his forehead, regretting again the absence of his recorder. He's convinced that these are the moments that will make his clips run. "Rey, rye got to call in."

"Use the cable phone by the cot." Rey points the way, then says with mesmeric softness to Mei, "You must sleep. Tomorrow Grielle comes. She is the woman on the death passage. Like all passagers, she's eager and will want to leave at once. So we will skip the refreshments and let you rest now. You may have the cot, and Shau can sleep in the rover. I have more work to do in the shop and will stay there. Good night."

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."

"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 famous 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

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

the stone poverty of the land. All mind is but a tear in the fabric of nothingness, like a rip in water that quickly heals over.

Munk laughs. With his final thought, he understands why this is the laughing life. Life is the laugh of the actual in the face of nothing. There is so much to sense, think, and emote about, so much life to endure, such fullness of good and bad-and all of it, suddenly, nothing. Only laughter fits the gap. And he laughs luminously with the great swell of being nothing.

Androne Munk, you have satisfied the reviewer that you are validly fulfilling your contra-parameter programming. You are herewith released from all allegiance to the Commonality. Go in freedom and focus.

The sound of breaking glass stops. Immediately, his attention is flung into his anthropic model, and time lunges forward. Flailing the area with a siren scream, his body abruptly resumes spinning, jetting a rooster tail of sand into the sky. The distorts cringe. The semblor frantically jabs his signal device at Munk, while Rey scuttles backward beneath a ragged cry toward the caravan.

With a slashing blow, Munk strikes the semblor, and it explodes in a hissing thrash of lightning. Laser fire from the handguns of the crouching distorts kicks against his breastplate and heaves him backward. He sits down, and the sand around him turns to glass under the hacking laser light.

A sick feeling of power-cell depletion whims up in Munk, and he lurches to his feet, wrapping his reflectant cowl about him. With deft tilts of his shield, he mirrors the laser fire back, and one of the distorts erupts, the scarlet wings

of his ribs splaying apart like a cocoon bursting into a brilliant butterfly.

Munk attacks. Ignoring the widening exhaustion in his body, he lopes among the firing distorts, swiping at them with a blindingly swift but lethal economy of movement. In moments they are strewn among the rocks, slovenly rags in a greasy mess. And there is suddenly again only one moment left. The laser fire has exhausted his power cells.

Rey clambers toward the open wing-hatch of his rover and steals a terrified glance over his shoulder. Munk commits the last of his power to snatch a gun from the limp hand of a distort and levels it on the pilot in the hatchway.

Rey quails, and the console behind him shrieks with metal ripping. The androne missed! Disbelieving, he peers with dread and caution through the weave of his fingers.

Munk stands unmoving, shooting arm extended. A thick moment passes before Rey realizes that the androne has gone dormant. The lens bar in the featureless puzzle of his face is unlit. Rey's amazement distracts him from the fact that an androne could not miss at this range.

"Raza," Grielle croaks from inside the rover.

In rumpled, clumsily donned desert gear, the pilgrims stumble from the vehicles. Rey can see the heat leaking from their loose seams like blood. Then the self-seals kick in, and the faces behind the dear statskin veils flush warmer.

Rey recognizes their shock and acts with impulsive indignation. "Those creatures almost killed us! We have to disconnect the archaic head. It's tainted wetware."

Shau faces away from the mangled bodies of the dead but holds his recorder on the corpses a moment longer. "What is he talking about?" he asks, looking to the others.

Mei gazes in mute and revulsed candor at the dead distorts. Buddy walks over to Munk and stares down the length of the androne's aiming arm.

"The brain we're carrying is tainted," Rey insists. "The anarchists programmed it like a machine, and I stupidly installed it in the console. At the

anarchists' signal, it must have usurped your air supply and knocked you out. It would have gotten me, too, if I hadn't been in the latrine, near an emergency statskin. I saw it all. Munk killed them, but the heat from their laser fire sapped his power. I was in here fighting the console, trying to override the wetware's domination. I finally shut him down, but I couldn't clean the air.

Munk saw my problem, and with his last act, he blew open the console and freed you."

"It's true," Grielle gasps and steps groggily from the rover. "He was in the

latrine when it happened."

"Mr. Charlie is not tainted," Mei declares, shaking her head.

"He might be," Shau says. "I mean, his file says he was held on Earth for quite a while by lewdists and anarchists."

"What are you saying, Pilgrim Nili?" Rey asks with feigned anger. "I nearly got killed trying to save you!"

"If Mr. Charlie were tainted," Mei persists, "he would have detonated the explosives on Phoboi Twelve when he still had the codes. Anarchists destroy. He hasn't destroyed anything."

"He called those distorts down on us, I'm sure of it," Rey insists.

Grielle throws her hands up in dismay. "We don't need Mr. Charlie to go on. Let's leave him shut down and get away from here."

"But what about Munk?" Mei asks. "We can't leave him here."

Rey looks shocked. "We can't lug a deep-space patrol-class androne. He's made of supermassive alloy. It'll take a full rover moving at half speed to carry him anywhere."

"The dune climber could handle him," Buddy states.

Grielle, who is staring at Rey with a perplexed impatience, hands on her hips, says, "I'm the caravan director, and I will not dump a fortune in psyonic core units to haul a rundown androne."

"He just saved your life," Shau points out, catches the sudden wry cock of her head, and shrugs. "Though I guess for a passager that doesn't mean a whole lot."

Grielle passes an apologetic look to the others and says, "I am grateful that Munk saved our lives. For myself, I want to die on the Walk of Freedom in Solis, in the traditional way. But if I had died here, I would be as free. I say we

dump the androne and get on with our trek."

"Well, I'm not leaving Munk," Mei says, crossing her arms.

"Are any of us leaving?" Grielle asks with exasperation. "Do the rovers still run, Rey?"

"Yes, I'm sure of it," he says, glad to divert the conversation away from culpability. He pokes his head into the cabin and calls back, "The androne's shot was precise. It destroyed only the remote air controller."

"Then I say we go now," Grielle presses, "before any more distorts find us." Buddy steps past Grielle and peeks into the cabin. "Looks to me like Munk's

shot also burned out the laser cannon controls. That right, Rey?"

"Hmm, yes," Rey admits, having already vainly tried to activate those weapons to cauterize all witnesses. "I guess he figured the wetware could have used the cannon against us."

"His shot was precise," Buddy observes softly. His hard, dolorous stare seems an indictment, and Rey is about to protest when the man says, "We'll need your help mounting Munk to a rover."

"Okay," Rey concedes, not relenting his mean squint for an instant. "I'll have the handroids load him on the third rover. But Grielle and I are going ahead. We're not slowing down for the androne."

"Mei," Buddy asks, "can you pilot a desert rover?" "In my sleep."

"I'm the director of this caravan," Grielle protests. "My decision is what counts."

"I don't think so," Shau says and pans from Grielle in her outrage to the scattered skull shards and pink brain sludge glistening among the rocks. "We're in the wilds now. I don't think anything counts here except survival."

The handroids crab-swarm over Munk and within the hour have him securely strapped to the roof of the third rover. While they work, Rey Raza examines the vehicles, acting concerned about damage. A boiling mix of dread and anger seethe in him, and he's glad when the others go off to look over the distorts'

trundle-carrier. Enraged that his business deal with the Commonality has been undone by the androne, he is determined to destroy the pilgrims. They will join Grielle on her death-passage sooner than she expected. Under the engine manifold of the second rover, he loosens a critical deck plate.

"I think we should at least talk with Mr. Charlie," Mei Nili is saying as she

returns with the group from the trundle-carrier.

"He's an abomination." Grielle Aspect says with a revulsed sneer. "Think on him: a wad of brain tissue intent on only one thing-flesh. I told him, flesh is darkness. Though the flesh is in the light, the light is not in the flesh. It would be far better for him if we broke him open on the rocks."

Shau Bandar, walking a wide circle around the two, objects. "Doesn't it count that he's a thousand years old? He's a living piece of our history."

"What did you find in that rusty box?" Rey asks from where he is supervising the handroids' rock burial of the distorts.

"It's a dangerous piece of junk," Mel says. "It's corroded throughout. The compression ducts could blow anytime."

"We should get away from it soon," Rey concurs. "Others may be tracking it." "There was a semblor in the carrier." Buddy reports. "We found a plasma

booster pump that has just been used."

"Yes, yes, that's tight," Rey murmurs, rocking back on his heels, submerging his anxiety as he studies Buddy's face. There are none of the telltale

heat-blotches of anger, so Rey is convinced he knows nothing, though there is a furrow of suspicion in the man's blockbrow. "I saw a semblor emerge. Munk burst it right away. Then the laser fire began."

"The handroids are done," Grielle notices, standing with one hand on the jut of her hip as she assesses Munk. The androne's limbs have been loosened and his body mounted prone on the rover's roof in the shape of a humanoid swastika. "We can still fulfill most of our nycthemeral journey if we depart now."

"Leave those guns here," Rey warns Shau, who is hefting the laser pistol the handroids removed from Munk's grip. "It's probably tainted and could be used by other distorts to target us."

"I want to talk to Mr. Charlie," Mei says.

"You can ride with that wetware if you want," Rey responds sternly, "but I won't activate him on this caravan. Forget it." He turns on one toe and motions for Grielle to follow.

"We're all corpses-to-be," Grielle says blithely as she strolls past the burial mounds of orange rocks. "Better to give oneself to the light than be taken by the darkness."

Under the weight of the androne, the third rover crawls only half as fast as the others, and the crate-laded dune climber and the lead rover with Rey and Grielle in it ride far ahead. Mei, who pilots the second rover in full desert gear in the event of another accident, loses sight of them and slows down so as not to lose her rear view of Munk.

"I think Raza betrayed us," Buddy speaks sadly from the deck chair beside the jumper. Like the others, he too, wears a statskin cowl and sealed togs, his fabric ruddy and smudged on the side where he crawled under the trundle-carrier to find the plasma booster pump. "A semblor wouldn't come into the desert to stalk a signalcarrier. Distorts can do that. The semblor was here to meet with someone."

"If we could speak to Munk," Mei says, "we'd know for sure. But I think you're right. Raza probably cut a deal with the Commonality for Mr. Charlie."

Shau looks down from his perch in the observation bubble behind the forward cabin. "We don't know that. So Rabana says Raza's story is plausible." He holds a hand to his left ear, catching a message in his timpan-com. "When the Commonality found out Softcopy was covering Mr. Charlie's trek, they sent her some officious report warning that the archaic brain had been tampered with by the, ah, let's see-Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group. That's what Ananta charged in the Moot. But who are these Friends?"

"A clade on Earth," Mei answers. "My understanding is they branched into people with an emotional craving for a certain mathematics-"

"Right, here it is," the reporter indicates with an abstracted expression, calling up a file on his corneal display. "They branched a hundred and

fifty-eight terrene years ago-enjambed limbic and cortical plexes-blah blah blah-ah, here's what we want: They abide no authority at all, not even reservation strictures, and are general troublemakers for the Commonality. I don't see any record of violence, though. They seem to be more mischievous and

insubordinate than destructive."

"They would have the know-how to trigger wetware," Mei accedes, "but I can't believe that those number-dreamers would do that to an archaic brain. Maybe-"

"Hold up!" Shau shouts. His frantic face glares down between his knees from his sling in the bubble. "Stop the rover! The local office is hearing an ultrahigh pitch over my comlink. The androne dispatcher says it's a pressure whistle. It's coming from under us, in the drive-train. The rover's going to blow!"

Instantly, Mei Nili shuts down the engine, stops the third rover by cutting off the autopilot, throws open all the hatches, and exits through the port companionway, all with the fluid ease of her long training. Buddy barges out the starboard side, and Shau lifts himself through the popped-open bubble, leaps

from the top of the rover, and lands in a dust-splash among the cauterized rocks.

Running is swift and easy over the gravelly desert, and Mei and Buddy bound toward the shelter of talus rocks that have spilled from the scorched slopes of a crumbling crater rim. Awkward in his cumbersome desert gear, Shau trails behind. In a twinkling gust of static sparks and a thump of thunder, the second rover explodes. Chunks of white hull roll flashing into the sky, and a spray of flйchettes cut iridescent tracks in the pink atmosphere. One fragment strikes the back of the reporter's mantle as he bolts over the cold ancient ash, and he flops forward, his neck cleanly broken.

Mei rushes toward his fallen body but stops when she sees the queer angle of his head and the lifeless gape of his face.

Buddy passes Mei, kneels over Shau, and rips open the reporter's statskin cowl. "The cold will preserve him," he explains, gasping with exertion. "He's intact. If we get him to Solis soon, he can be revived."

"Mr. Charlie," Mei rasps, looking back at the twisted debris of the rover. She jogs to the wreck and finds the plasteel capsule nestled among tangles of shredded metal. Its surface is spalled and cloudy with scratches, but the case itself is whole. She picks it up and scrutinizes it, trying to see if the shock of the blast damaged the interior.

Buddy strides past, carrying Shau in his arms. The corpse's face is

powder-blue, the lips silvery white. "We'd better check Munk's rover carefully." Mei lifts her angry face to the pale rose sky and screams, "Raza!"

Nude sandstone walls and maroon monument rocks crown the cliff crest where the dune climber and the first desert rover have stopped. These are the ruins of

Sama Neve, a famous center of passage centuries ago, during the Exodus of Light, and Grielle believes Rey stopped to offer her this fabulous view. She speaks reverently, "'At last, I see the last.' That was first said here, Rey. Think on the freedom of-"

"Did you see that?" Rey asks, pointing down the long escarpment to the alkali basin where he spotted the sparkle of the exploding rover, "That flash?"

Grielle's dreamy gaze surveys the golden desert below and selects a glimmer from among the strewn boulders on the nearby slope. "Yes, what is it?"

Rey widens his eyes in mock surprise. "I think that was one of the rovers! It exploded!"

Grielle presses against the viewport, frowning to see what looks like a white blossom on the desert floor, it's a blast cloud of sand. "Those fools!"

"That damn jumper must have flooded the compression tanks," Rey says, doing

the same, reaching across the burned gash of the console and stroking the sensor pads that will flood the compression tanks. In the next few minutes the tanks will explode and Grielle will make her passage sooner than she expected. He's pleased with himself that he has at least arranged for her to do so in the presence of Sarna Neve. "I better take the dune climber down there and see if anyone can be saved. Stay here, and I'll call you if it's safe."

Grielle makes a feeble attempt to detain him, but he exits quickly and closes the wing-hatch after him. She is moved by his humane urgency and stands to watch him sprint up the salmon-colored rise of sandstone to the dune climber. He

bounds into the cab and starts rolling downslope, the big blue wheels scattering

gravel in fins behind him.

Less than halfway down the escarpment, the dune climber fishtails to an abrupt halt. The glimmer among the strewn boulders that Grielle had glimpsed earlier flickerflashes toward Rey. In the red dust kicked up by his hard stop, the disclike bodies, whirling fins, and raving mouth parts of the shreeks materialize.

The white tarpaulin, now peach-red with sand, pulls away under their biting frenzy, exposing the cumbrous crates in the carry bay. More rocks spit skyward as Rey swings the dune climber around and starts churning up the boulder-waned slope. The shreeks thrash among the crates with shuddering might and bang their

.pugnacious bodies against the spinning wheels. Splats of squashed shreek spin away in widening vectors, and Grielle, who is watching appalled, thinks Rey is going to elude them. She looks for the comlink to encourage him.

Then one of the shreeks slams into the cab of the dune climber, and the canopy roof wings into the air. Grielle's heart thumps, and she steadies herself with a bracing gust of degage. Only the olfact enables her to stand still and watch the dune climber weasel among the scarp boulders, scrambling back toward the ridge. She scans the burnt console before her, trying to recall how Rey drove this thing. She wants to go to him, to drive the shreeks off if she can. But the

array of sensor pads are just so many jeweled lights to her.

The dune climber disappears from Grielle's vantage. Four heartbeats later, her breath is snatched away when the climber shoots over the rim of the scarp and lofts into the air, wheels blurring. It smacks onto the road in front of the rover, toppling the crates from its carry bay under the shrill screams of its brakes.

Rey pulls himself from the cab, and Grielle opens the side hatch for him. Shreeks flap up from below, etched into the visible by veils of dust. And though they are thronging toward Rey, she stands in the doorway to help him, to sacrifice herself if necessary. Under the gaze of Sarna Neve and the hundreds of millions who passed here, she can do no less for so valiant a man.

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 individuals, 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.

Sitor Ananta squats beside her, his pug profile close to her ear. "Softcopy has refused to forward the credits for Shau Bandar's revival," he whispers.

"That's a lie." She leans away from him but cannot quite find the strength to stand. "I was with him when he spoke with Bo Rabana. Softcopy agreed to fund him."

"Think back." Sitor Ananta allows himself a gloating grin. "You left without any formal agreement. Bo Rabana has been overriden by executives who don't want to pay steep unauthorized expenses. Shau Bandar will be treated now like any other corpse in Soils. They will cremate him. Do you know what that is? It's the archaic practice of incinerating the body at temperatures hot enough to reduce the bones to powder."

Mei struggles to her feet and staggers backward from the agent, nearly tripping on a root coil. "Stay away from me," she mumbles, a numbing weariness soaking her. "I know what you're doing. You're poisoning me."

"Nonsense." He leans against a lux stanchion and crosses his arms. "I'm acquainting you with me. With my ways. I am very persuasive. I was created to be. With my skills I can pretty much have my way with the rubes of Solis. But I don't underestimate their rote stubbornness at defying the Commonality. Even with my olfacts, I cannot hope to just walk out of here with Mr. Charlie."

"Why do you want him so badly?" She draws a deep breath of the floral air, trying to flush her lungs.

"Perhaps I will tell you sometime." He shoots her a cunning look. "For now it is enough for you to know I want him, and you must do nothing to obstruct me from having him. If you help me, I will provide the credits for Shau Bandar's revival."

"Get away from me," Mei says, raising her voice. "I don't want to talk to you anymore."

"Fine." Sitor Ananta stands erect and shows his palms with mocking formality. "I'm sure we will find each other again in the courts and lanes. Soils is a small place."

Mei watches him retreat among the piers of buttress roots, and as his sapphire scent fades in the green, birdloud air, the helpless weariness she feels passes and anger thrums into place.

Through the sparkling morning of the Fountain Court, Exu and Hannas Bowan hurry. They are the dyad lot-selected to serve as the reception agents for today's foundlings, and they are late. Yet even in their haste, they are careful never to disrupt their synchronized grace. Exu strides in strict lockstep with Hannas as they bicker in their humclick speech: "My other concerns are just as vital as dealing with foundlings. Not more vital, Hannas. I said just as vital."

"You didn't review the file. That's what all this protesting is about, isn't it, Exu?"

"There wasn't time."

"Tsk, Exu. This one's interesting. It's a Maat approach. Closest in twelve years. And-you'll appreciate this even more-it's a big credit reception. Crates of psyonic core units to be sold off. Can't have them in here, right? And then there's an archaic brain that-"

"A brain, Hannas? I take it you mean a human brain?"

"Yes, an archaic human brain, my heartsong. You should have reviewed the file. It's fascinating."

"How was I to know this wasn't going to be the usual monkey troupe?"

"It is a monkey troupe, Exu. There they are." She directs his attention to three figures gawking at the rainbows among the electrostatically shaped veils of water in the Fountain Court. They are terrene humans, the stocky, long-armed

aboriginals that Exu derides as monkeys. Two women and a man or a morph. "He's a morph," Hannas says, reading the quizzical cant of her mate's head. "He's the Commonality agent who is going to purchase the psyonic core units for full

market value."

"What?" Exu looks at the slight and simian shape of the agent. "Why is he paying so much?"

"You should have viewed the file, dear. Just follow me." She climbs the polished chalcedony stairs to the fern-trellised estrade overlooking the rainbow crests of the Fountain Court.

Exu follows in precise shadowstep. Tiers of vine-hung galleries and arcades surround the court, and though this site has been chosen for its openness, Exu is unhappy being so close to the aboriginals. The musky density of their scent annoys him only slightly less than the vaguely disguised abhorrence with which they regard him and Hannas. To the terrenes, the three-meter-tall martians with their backward-bending heron legs and furry, kangaroo like features do not look human.

"Now, be tolerant, Exu. Remember, there's a strong credit inflow here. Think of it as a little monkey time for that romp studio in Highland Terraces we've always wanted."

"Let's just get it over with," he humclicks as they approach and simultaneously says in the glottal language of the aboriginals, "Solis welcomes you! I am Exu Bowan, and this is my lifebond, Hannas. We are the reception agents chosen at random from the resident population to serve you."

Hannas humclicks, "Stop with the facetious tone, Exu. Let's get down to business." She turns to face the terrenes and says in a precise aboriginal dialect, "In the spirit of Solis, our highest service of course is to leave you free to express your own lives. We will not take up much of your time, but as you know, freedom must be earned. Solis is an entirely self-sufficient community. As long as you are here, as visitors, residents, or passagers, you must contribute to the maintenance and general good of the whole. Now, let's review your credit status. Grielle Aspect?"

The slender woman who steps forward wears the wimpie and opaline smock of a passager. "The full credits of all my Outland holdings have already been transferred to an account in Solis. Upon my passing, it reverts to the city. Also, I have contributed twelve crates of psyonic core units. I came on them as an act of rebellion, my last act in the Outlands. I stole them from their manufacturer in Sky-Bowl the night that I left for here. I did it because I want to contribute more than just credit to Soils. I want to give you something tangible-a real piece of the silicon mind, of the world outside of here. Study these, children of the Iight. Know your enemy."

"Thank you, Grielle," Exu says with exaggerated gratitude and clicks to

Hannas, "What a rube!"

"Not at all," his mate disputes. "It's a fetish gift. People who want to die need a human place for that. This is her offering to Solis. Be tolerant, Exu. They're human, too." Hannas shows her teeth as she knows Grielle expects and says, "Solis welcomes your contribution, Passager Grielle."

"And we wish you swift passage," Exu cajoles.

"Show some dignity about this," Hannas scolds and recites the next name, "Sitor Ananta-"

The morph looks slender and slick as a newt to Exu, and the martian humclicks, "He looks as much a lizard as a monkey."

"Tsk! He's arranged to take the psyonics off our hands for full credit because he wants consideration. Ignore the fact that he's a Commonality agent, and remember his credit is as good as anyone's. Show some sense, Exu."

Hannas notes with a buzz of alarm the sullen humor in the Commonality agent's face, almost as if he understands their secret language. "Naturally," she says

to him, "your presence is funded in full by the Commonality, so you are welcome to come and go as you please. How long will you be with us?"

"Just long enough to conclude business," he answers with a knowing nod. "Then we wish you a satisfying visit. Mei Nili-"

The jumper shoulders past Sitor Ananta. "I've brought Mr. Charlie. I hope he's okay. There was an explosion-"

"Is she talking about the archaic brain?" Exu asks.

"Pay attention, dear." Hannas raises her palms to stop the slim, muscular woman in the matte-black flightsuit. "The archaic brain you've contributed to Solis certainly merits your admittance to our community, Mei Nili, but if you

are to stay among us, you know, you will have to earn credits. Please, listen to the counselors we've assigned to you from the terrene anthro commune. They'll help you make the transition."

"What about Shau Bandar and Munk?" Mei asks. "And what has happened to Buddy?" "Can we go now?" Exu complains.

"Shau Bandar is scheduled for cremation later this morning," Hannas reads from the display on her mate's shoulder pad. "His news-clip service claims he left without any protective authorization-"

"That's not true!" Mei interrupts. "I was at Softcopy with him when Bo Rabana gave him the go-ahead."

Hannas shakes her head. "That's not what we've been told. The offices in Terra Tharsis have agreed to fund the installation of the archaic brain in a body clone, and in return the anthro commune here will be sending news clips of the revived man to Softcopy. But they won't pay to revive this reporter. It's too expensive. i'm sorry."

A blue vein ticks at Mei's temple, and she begins to object. But Grielle cuts her off, saying, "I will pay for Shau Bandar's revival. Remove the necessary funds from my account at once."

The wry smile on the Commonality agent's face slips away, and the jumper shoots a surprised look at Grielle.

"Hey, that cuts into the share we get when she passes," Exu complains. "It is her credit, Exu. She can spend it as she pleases.

Control yourself." With a gracious nod, Hannas accepts

Grielle's offer. "Now, about the androne and the Maat:

You are aware you were traveling in the company of a Maat-possessed anthro?" "We had no idea," Grielle states. "He tagged on with the androne. He had

credits, and the more he paid into the caravan, the more I had left to contribute to Solis. So we accepted him, but we had no idea, dears. No idea at all."

"The Maat wouldn't confide in these monkeys," Exu sneers. "Let's go. We've played our role. I say we file for our share of the credits before she gives away any more."

Hannas accedes by showing her teeth to the terrenes. "This, I believe, concludes our business," Hannas says. "There is a large commune here of terrene humans who have emigrated from the Outlands, and I'm sure they will be helpful with any of your-"

"What about the androne Munk?" Mei presses.

"Come on, Hannas!" Exu trills. "These foundlings are unbearable." He modulates his voice to carry his ire, "Jumper Nili, Soils does not tolerate andrones more complex than scout-class. Munk belongs in deep space, not on Mars."

"Okay, dear, we're done here now." Hannas budges her mate to begin their retreat and says charitably as they backstep in tandem, "The androne Munk's power cells have been recharged. The Maat arranged payment for that from Terra Tharsis. Perhaps they have some use for him. They are his manufacturers, after all."

"But there won't be any use for him here in Soils," Exu admonishes. "If you go out to see him, Jumper Nili, I'm sorry to say you'll have to reapply for admission. One archaic brain won't get you into Solis twice. And this next time, you may be turned away. Be advised."

"Don't be too harsh, dear. She offers us no direct credit, but the archaic brain she delivered is already bringing in news-clip funds, and the agent would

pay dearly for possession-"

Exu glares angrily at his lifebond. "Is that the consideration that lizard wants? He can forget it. No deals with the Commonality. The archaic brain stays here."

As if one person, the martians slide fluidly backward down the stairs, and Hannas twitters in his ear, "All he asks is that the brain be given over to the Anthropos Essentia to be bodywoven in their vats. He probably has some arrangement with them. But if there is any trouble-say, a theft of the brain or an accident-it will not be with our people. Our hands are clean, and the credit remains with us. What do you say?"

Exu shows his teeth to the gaping terrenes. "I say, when the credit is good, consideration comes easily. Let's go."

Since waking from the void, Munk keeps drifting in and out of virtual reality. For long intervals, some episodes as much as half a second in duration, he reviews events from his recent past and has even begun modifying them, trying

out variations on what might have been. He daydreams.

While he and Buddy wander among the stony eskers on the perimeter of Soils, Munk wonders where he would be now if he had not detonated the explosives on Phoboi Twelve that killed Aparecida. Mei Nili and Mr. Charlie are gone-as they would have been on the path not taken. But there they would have been dead. On this path, he died, so to speak, and when he came back, the people he saved are gone and he can't stop hoping after them and pondering how events might have turned out differently.

Buddy is talking architecture, about the orange pyramids visible just beyond the lux towers and their lances of sunlight. "Those are the vats of the Anthropos Essentia," Buddy says. "Charles Outis will be taken there."

"Who?" Munk asks. He speculates about what might have happened if he had not acted impulsively in the Moot and stolen the plasteel capsule. Maybe the Moot would have found in their favor. He realizes now, he acted too precipitously...

"Charles Outis is Mr. Charlie," Buddy says and taps the comlink in his shoulder pad to hear whether it's sending. "Munk, are you all right?"

Munk drives quickly through an internal analysis and affirms, "I am fine. But-" He pauses, weighs whether this revelation is the right choice or if he should keep his own counsel about his enhanced subjectivity.

"But what?" Buddy presses. His face through the clear statskin cowl appears pallid, his eyes larger, holding the solar stars from the lux towers.

"Since I have been revived," the androne confesses, "I have been obsessed with my past."

An understanding smile touches Buddy's thin lips. "It's your C-P program. Your little taste of oblivion broke the program's seamless internal narrative. Now it's more obvious to the preconscious monitoring systems in you that there are other ways to tell your story-more human ways."

Munk feels his attention slipping toward the daylight silence of the rocky landscape and its brilliant oxides, but he restrains himself from thinking about what would have happened if he had ignored Mr. Charlie's initial broadcast and never left Apollo Combine. Instead he asks, "Why did you make me this way? I mean, why did you give me an anthrophilic contra-parameter program?"

"It's not anthrophilic," Buddy says, stepping closer, a compassionate crease between his luculent eyes. "Munk, don't you see? It's anthropic"

The androne scans Buddy's face and body profile time and again, searching for the signs of double entendre, metaphor, or just plain outright deception that must be there. "Human?" Munk queries. "Are you saying that my C-P program is designed to make me eventually experience reality as a human?"

"Yes."

"That's not possible!"

"What? You don't believe that humanity is nothing more than a pattern?" Buddy edges even closer, looking up at the faceless abstraction of the androne's head with an incredulous expression. "You've been around Mr. Charlie too long, Munk. Your thinking's become archaic."

"No," Munk says. "I understand that consciousness is emergent. I know it is

generated through pattern complexity, whether of dendrites or electron tunneling junctions. I understand that. But I can't believe that I am-that."

"Yes, Munk," Buddy asserts, staring earnestly into the ruby-bright depths of his lens bar. "You are human. We have made you that way."

"Why?"

"To be here with me right now," Buddy answers at once. "I need you to fulfill the aftermath of my passing."

Munk represses the trembling conflict in him between elation and blatant disbelief and acknowledges aloud, "My responsibility to Mr. Charlie is replete. He has been delivered to Solis. So has Mei Nili. Then, I guess, I am wholly free to serve you-my maker."

"Good." A frantic quiet plays across Buddy's thick features, as though he's just coming to a precarious realization. "Hold on. I'm having a prescient memory-"

Munk extends an arm to steady Buddy, who suddenly looks as if he is about to fall asleep. "I don't understand," the androne says.

Buddy snatches at Munk's arm and snaps out of it. He blinks, and a crisp alertness seizes his stare. "I remembered what's going to happen." He cocks his head and blinks again. "I'm going to leave now. Once I'm gone, Buddy won't remember anything about me or you. His last memory will be of falling out of the skies in Terra Tharsis. He will find his way back to the outsiders' camp behind us, and in time he will realize that he has been exiled from Terra Tharsis by

the Maat for his crime against himself: attempted suicide. And you-" A hot smile flashes across his face, and he almost bursts into laughter. "Ah, you have your work cut out for you."

"Again, I don't understand ..." Munk trails off, for Buddy has seized his faceplate and pulled himself up very close, lifting his legs off the ground and practically climbing up the androne's front.

"My time in time is done in time," Buddy chants, his face a white moon, his eyes lit from within. "Good-bye. Munk."

Buddy lets go, and as his body falls, Munk involuntarily enters suspended time. Briefly, a light like blue smoke phosphoresces in the space between them, an amethyst fire that blusters violently even in slow time. Then it is gone, leaving comet feathers dazzling on the path of its dwindling flight through the pink lens of the horizon.

In a splash of dust, Buddy falls at Munk's feet and gazes up at the androne with a bewildered look shading to fright. Munk moves to help him up, but the man pushes away in a startled crabwalk. He flips over and scamps up the path among the boulders and out of sight.

Munk moves to follow, then stops himself. Inside, in the imaginal space behind his lens bar, he can still see Buddy fleeing among large talons of rock. He is running through horizontal rays of fiery dust that cut time into strata. On the lowest level, he is running through the woven light of the desert. Slightly

above that view of him, he has already reached the camp of storm-battered pressure tents and reflector domes. A notch higher, the sky is full of the pink twigs of nightfall, and he is crouched with others beside a thermalux telling his story of life in Terra Tharsis as an old one, which no one believes. For many levels, he huddles at night in the thermal leaks of tents and works with others by day erecting a wind turbine, eventually earning his own tent...

Munk dizzies. A whole life unfurls before him. He skims ahead and sees Buddy in a caravan heading west into the pumice winds of the red desert, returning to Terra Tharsis. And above that, the opal-black heights of the Maat city where there is no death.

His vision dissolves in a blind roar of images a thousand years deep-and still there is Buddy, at this far-gone time under the anvil of a tree. The stony land is patch-quilted with lichen and sloping swards, and groves of strata-tiered trees bloom among the rocky outcrops under a flame-blue sky.

Munk startles alert to find himself gazing at lucent grains of dust glittering in the space where a moment before a craze-eyed Buddy stood. He can hear the crunching of the icy gravel as the man flees among the erratic boulders. The androne doesn't know what to do. The sounds fade away, and Buddy entirely

disappears into the silence of his future.

Solis dazzles under the minarets of sunfire that are capturing that day's power. Terraced on the ramparts of ancient impact craters, the settlement hoards light, from the prism-cut lofts at the craters' edges to the glass hangars and mirror panes of the huddled warrens on the desert floor. Among a jumble of red ivy bunkers and ginger stonework arbors, two small orange pyramids catch his attention, and he remembers Buddy saying, "Those are the vats of the Anthropos Essentia; Mr. Charlie will be taken there."

Only, the Maat had called Mr. Charlie by his untranslated name, and it had sounded like a rattle of wind over shale. Munk repeats it, "Charles Outis," and the noise goes off aimlessly across the gritty swells of land.

He telescopes in on the orange pyramids and says the name more softly. Then his vision pulls back with the thought that the Maat could have left Buddy anywhere they wanted and certainly closer to the tent camp. That the neo-sapiens would bring the androne to this precise place is significant, he assumes, and he scans more slowly the journey down the heather-choked gullies and ice-splotched cobble flats to the stone wall and a dolmen door with a niter beard. Hidden by fan boulders and a torpid mound of rocks, the door is visible only from this venue.

There are blisters of rime around the touch pad that will listen for the correct code signal to open the door. As Munk stares at the amplified image of the pad, giddy disbelief overtakes all his reservations. The touch pad is identical to the type used by lapetus Gap. and he is confident that his familiarity with this lock system will enable him to feel out the admittance code.

He starts forward, then stops and asks himself where he thinks he's going. To find Charles Outis he confirms to himself and continues on his way, leaving unspoken his expectation of confronting the people in the settlement and finding out if the Maat are right. Maybe there is a place for him among the last tribes at the end of the world.

He strides boldly across the desolation, and as he approaches the lithic entryway, he makes no effort to hide himself-for if he is indeed human, he belongs in Solis.

7

Zero in the Bone

MEL NILI HAS SEEN THE SOUS CLADES-THE MARTIANS-numerous times in news clips, but in person they seem much bigger. They stand bristle-headed and

narrow-shouldered above the counselors from the terrene anthro commune. The counselors, dressed in the sere-and-buff tunics and toque caps of the Solis autocracy, are tall and slender-muscled from their lives in the thin gravity of Mars. They crane their necks to look up at Exu and Hannas Bowans' marsupial faces, and watching them together, the jumper marvels again at the diversity of human life outside the reservation.

The martians flitter away across the Fountain Court in their eerie synchronized gait, and in moments they are lost among the hive bustle of numerous other martians crossing through the plaza's chords of sunlight and broken spectra.

"Clades," Grielle Aspect snickers from behind Mei. "I'm glad to be getting away from this genetic circus. You should come with me."

Mei tilts her head back and gives a sour look. "Maybe when I'm as old as you, I'll be ready to end it, too."

"Oh, I'm not ending it, Mei dear." Grielle smiles seraphically. "I'm becoming light-true freedom. No more of this shapeshifting---morphs, clades, and plasmatics-it's disgusting. The light is pure and timeless."

"If you believe that," Mei says, pointing with her eyes to Grielle's wimple and opaline apron, the traditional garments of a passager, "why are you paying

to revive Shau?"

"Rey Raza died trying to save him-to save all of you," Grielle says softly, her eyes unfocusing. "I saw him die. It was a terrible thing. I would bring him back if I could." Her gaze tightens. "But I can't. So, it's the journalist. Maybe he'll see the light and die properly. If we leave the flesh in the right way, we never have to come back, you know."

Sitor Ananta steps past them to greet the approaching counselors. A whiff of a cold fragrance tingles in his wake, and Mei experiences a discoloring in her soul. "That agent is using olfacts to sway the people around him."

Grielle winks slyly. "Don't you just envy him? Even I can't afford olfacts that effective. If I could, you'd all be passagers."

The three anthro counselors show their palms, introduce themselves, and conduct the pilgrims on a walking tour of Greater FreeSolis. The settlement is large, but the interface among the clade cantonments, the anthro commune, and

the Anthropos Essentia enclaves is a triangular plaza with the Fountain Court at the center. Strolling across the garnet flagstones, they have the opportunity to see all the human types in their bright and often outre garb: the martians with their back-bending stalk legs and bouffant manes, the whippet-thin wraiths of

the Anthropos Essentia in their orange frocks and headwraps, and the aboriginals looking so simian in their contour jackets and flexfabrics. A counselor points out that even some of the elaborate air plants hanging among the strati-form galleries under the blue-glass canopy are plasmatics, humans in wholly inhuman form. Another counselor explains how selective Solis has been about the numbers and types of human variants it has integrated within its biotecture.

Their patter is endless, and Mei interrupts to ask where Mr. Charlie is. In reply, the counselors talk about the vats and point out on a holoform map of the settlement two compact orange pyramids at the old end. Then Grielle wants to see the Walk of Freedom, and a section of the map expands to show the famous

crystal-gravel path leaving the ebony gate and curving under a skull-mounted catafaique into a field of human bones and mummified corpses.

At tour's end, on a balcony overlooking the Rainbow Court, there is a meal of vegetables and hatchery steaks. Sitor Ananta is magnificent with the counselors, amusing and charming them. Several times Mei tries to direct the conversation to the olfacts, but no one seems to care. The meal continues with amicable cheer, eventually even the jumper laughing with the others over Grielle's pantomime of

a martian.

"When will I see Mr. Charlie?" Mei asks the counselors after the meal. The counselors confer as they lead the way between two silvery walls of

electrostatically suspended water and up an automated rampway to a bunker of black, blockcut rock scribbled with ivy. This is the anthro lodge where the agent will be staying, and he lingers under the dragon-eye lintel for the counselors' reply.

They can't agree on whether the bodyweave will be complete in two or three days. The vats are busy designing clades for the cold new worlds beyond the Belt.

"Too late," Grielle decides. "I bad hoped to speak with him before my

passage-you know, dears, I really want to confront the poor man with the error

of his ways. But I don't think he's slept in his flesh a thousand years to argue with me. So I am gone. Tomorrow I commit my last act of light as a human."

Mei is left in the purple-tile vestibule of the hostel where she will reside until she earns enough credit for her own suite. Grielle and the counselors depart into the saffron afternoon, and the jumper uses the password the counselors have given her to enter a cloister of blackglass cubicles.

From inside her own chamber, the walls to the corridor and the outside are transparent, and she can see the serrated rooftops, a hint of the clustered rainbows from the Fountain Court, and the broken shoulders of the crater rim, rubescent in the long sunlight.

"Jumper Nili," a familiar voice calls from the doorway. Shau Bandar stands there wearing the green caftan of the vats and a thick grin. "Are you in there?"

Mei hurries to touch the entry pad, and he strides in, the door sliding shut behind him. He pivots, displaying his partly shaved scalp, the close-cropped

hair like red hackles. Without his face paint, he looks no different from any of the men in the hamlets of her reservation on Earth.

"I've been in the beverage stall across the way," he says, "waiting for you to return. So what do you think? How did the vat doctors do?"

"I think it's a tough way to get a haircut."

They laugh and skim palms, and he plops onto a flexform chair and grins at her. "They say I was dead for days. But it was like being asleep. I don't even remember what happened."

Mei sits in the window bay and tells him what happened. They talk excitedly about Softcopy's betrayal and how close he has come to the absolute edge of departure. From down the blackglass corridor, Sitor Ananta slinks into view. He flicks his palms at them. "Open the door. I know you're in there."

Shau moves to slap the door pad, and Mei stops him. An angry light flexes in her eyes, a twinkle of fear at its core. "Don't! He's dangerous. He uses psycholfacts to manipulate people."

Shau looks surprised. "That's the Commonality agent we saw in the Moot, the one who wants to reclaim Mr. Charlie. Those agents are rascals. That's why Mr. Charlie fears him. But they can't use psychokinetic substances. It's against the mandate, and you know how righteous those tightasses are about that."

"Open the door, you two," Sitar Ananta calls with a timbre surprisingly deep for his slender frame. "I want to speak to you about Mr. Charlie."

"Let's just ignore him," Mei advises.

"He knows we're here. Why must we hide?" "I think he's crazy."

Shau rolls his eyes in disbelief. "We're the crazy ones, Jumper Nili. That's what I found out in the vats. You left the reservation, I left Terra Tharsis-for what? To hide? I've been dead. What is there left to be afraid of?" He reaches for the entry pad. "Don't worry. I'll talk with him."

"Bandar, don't!" Mei calls.

The glass door parts, and Sitor Ananta, grinning coldly, enters in a cloud of dreams. Munk has no trouble figuring out the admittance codes to open the stone portal that enters Solis. His large frame is cramped in the lightless corridor, and he must proceed stooped and sideways. With infrascan he sees that the walls are composed of an unfamiliar alloy. He wants to pause and examine it, but a reverberant pulsing summons him from ahead, and he is eager to see where this entryway leads.

Farther. along, the walls begin to weep. The substance that dews on the slick surface is mostly water, yet at his touch he feels the helical waverings of molecular linkages. He identifies chains of methylated proteins before he realizes that the corridor ahead is smaller. He cannot hope to go forward and decides to retreat. But behind him the hall is also tighter than when he passed through, and in a gust of surprise, he sees that the passageway is soundlessly constricting.

The androne tentatively pits his strength against the contracting walls, but their force is too great even for him. Viscous sheets of organic fluid slicken all surfaces. The floor, too, is wet, and he has no purchase to apply any resistance. In moments, the ceiling is weighing heavily on his shoulders, and he is obliged to bend over, then forced to curl up. The dense liquid envelops him.

The contracting walls close around him, then stop. Nothing more happens, and Munk begins to think that he has been encased alive, maybe indefinitely He computes that with his fully charged power cells he could remain conscious in this immobilized state for centuries; he is too frightened to determine how

many. Then he senses movement. The corridor slowly shunts him inward, the strong peristaltic motion sweeping him in his liquid sac deeper into Solis.

Abruptly, space opens around him, and he is adrift in a thick fluid of inductor enzymes that sheathe him in a strong electromagnetic field. He senses that the field is being directed from an outside source, but already his

sensors, under the influence of the field, are shutting down. He cannot move his limbs, and his infraview goes blind.

Darkness and silence possess him. He is alert, but he has no referents. Time,

too, seems distorted. He searches for his internal anthropic model and finds nothing. Panic swirls in him, and then that, also, fades away. He floats in emptiness, outside and inside reduced to nothing. Only his consciousness persists, his ineffable and enclosing sense of I am.

The hallucinations begin with a mushroom cloud of billowing images. He's aware of this phenomenon from the archives: sensory-deprivation hallucinations. When external stimulation is deprived, the brain generates living images to fill the void. Always, before, when he turned his sensors off, he filled the emptiness with his anthropic model but never for intervals longer than a second.

Now, with no sensory or internal models, he thrives in a flux of images, memories folding into lucid dreams-the aqua-green ripples in a shallow marine pool rhyming with the glow of The Laughing Life's flight bubble as he overrides his primary programming and initiates the code sequence that ignites Phoboi Twelve into a blue-white fireball.

The blunt, leering snout of a moray eel shoves out of the crimson cloud of planet dust and swells into Aparecida's sleek visage. Choice and chance, she says with the voice of the musical dispatcher from Lapetus Gap, and suddenly he is flying above the agate clouds of Saturn listening to music. He never said farewell to the androne in the control pod on Titan who broadcast that music.

They never met, yet she laved him with her creativity for years until he woke to the choice to take a chance on himself.

All the experiences that followed from his choice to activate his

contra-parameter program sluice through him in a fiery plume of images, like the outbound incandesence of Phoboi Twelve's explosion. His life has been an explosion, he sees, cooling at the edges to the pixel dust of memories. The void that surrounds those memories is misty with the fractal diminutions of endless associations and augmentations-the magical zone of the imagination, its flowstreams of hallucinatory shapes shrinking ever farther into virtual space, like a tree whose madness of tiny roots tightens on nothing.

His consciousness slips free of all he can remember and imagine. Everything he has been in spacetime and in mind, everything he could be, all of his life goes off like fireworks and dwindles sparkling into darkness.

He is alert in the darkness, which is really not darkness or light but an isotropic dearth of sensation, a nothingness in which only his sense of awareness persists. He is the busy work of atoms, force lines of intersecting fields, a clear flame full of shapes, the quivery glistening in the lens of a startled eye.

A brown iris flexes around the black depth of a pupil. It blinks, and he pulls away to see two brown eyes staring shrilly from a submerged human face. Wavy

hair streams like shreds of brown sargassum, and the bloated, staring face is drowned before he realizes he is not seeing a face but a reflection.

Munk thrashes convulsively. Beset with chest cramps and a roaring in his head, he surges upward and breaks the mirror gloss of the surface. Chilled air scalds his sinus and lungs, and his loud sucking gasp drums echoes out of the brightness. Quaking with shock and oxygen hunger, he flops to his back in the saline buoyancy and sees that he is floating in a tank big as a pond.

Star-webbed rows of lights shine blindingly overhead, illuminating the slick green water and the ceramic lip of the tank.

He huffs laboriously, kicking his legs to keep his head up and holding his hands before his face-human hands, with trembling fingers and blue-pink fingernails and the palms etched with fine lines of destiny.

"What is your name?" a voice calls from beyond the tank's edge.

In the cold air above the steaming surface of the green fluid, his head and hands float, and a laugh breaks through his gasping. He gapes at the smoke of

his laughter in the cold air and laughs again, choking and gulping oxygen. He is respiring! The astounding truth of what has happened knocks him breathless

again, and he coughs jets of steam.

"What is your name, man?" the booming voice calls again:

He wrenches enough air into his lungs to shout, "Munk." A handroid slides onto the edge of the tank and extends a coiling arm. "Solis welcomes you, Munk."

Munk seizes the arm and pulls himself to the side of the tank, where he hangs

shivering, panting, trying to understand.

"Rise, Munk," the handroid beckons. "The people would have you among them." Munk stills his excitement enough to stare at his human nakedness and listen

inward. An effulgence of psychic energies churns within him, but the virtual reality of his C-P program is gone and with it his capacity to function mentally in suspended time. He listens for code signals and hears only his own rasping

and the slosh of the tank's edge.

Heart slamming, he pulls himself out of the mist-wreathed liquid and sits heavily on the rim of the vat. The handroid steadies him with a coil arm lashed around his torso, and Munk hangs there staring at men and women naked as he. They are smiling and laughing and rushing across the glaring white tiles waving to him with towels and blankets. A racket of triumphant music swells under the hard lights, and a splash of rose petals hits him between the eyes.

For a day and a night, Sitor Ananta uses his psycholfacts to make Mei Nili and Shau Bandar irresistible to each other. He sits in a flexform with his back to the luminous window, a motionless silhouette in the room watching the two naked, glistening bodies grappling with their irreparable passion. He can tell from the forgotten fear on their faces, from the startled pleasure of their weary features, that sensuality is a happy calamity for them.

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, deepening 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 grasshopper'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

hang in a smudgy shadow. Dune lemurs' round-eared silhouettes moil with the thicker pulp of bones and gouts of flesh-broken femurs; balled-up limbs with fingers and toes, and, pressed against the gelatinous side of the creature, an eyeless skull wearing the torn rags of Rey Raza's face.

The shreek digests the brain of its prey differently from the rest of its

food. It transforms the neural tissue that it devours into compressed nodules in its own brain. Rey Raza figures that this was intended by the gene engineers of this creature to help it learn the habits of its prey.

Gazing out on the night world through the shreek's infrasensitive eyes, Rey feels the alert, nocturnal need of the dune lemurs sharing the shreek's brain with him. This carnivore has eaten enough lemurs to infuse Rey with the twittery

music of their simple brains, mere cortical nodes full of reflex and no reflection. For days he has prowled thus, without pain yet feeling his own macerated body moving slowly and usefully through the shreek's entrails.

He wants the shreek to churn its pelvic and pectoral pinion-fins and climb higher, toward the untouchable veils of stars. The silver current of the Milky Way flows to the black horizon, and staring at it comforts him in his solitude. But the beast has spotted a flitting glimmer among the nested craters below, and it spurts in that direction, flashing downward between the cathedral boulders of an eroded rim wall. Zubu cacti herded along the slipface of dunes come into

view, quilled, gray-green shadowspheres in the shreek's night vision, wisping a thin lavender heat under the crinkly stars.

The shreek's dive pulls up sharply before an obelisk rock at the center of an ancient crater. A soft animal flame shines from around the boulder's edge. It is another shreek, its body heat ruffling with the wind in oily waves of scarlet

and vermilion. The creatures approach each other, lock muzzles, and display their gutsacks.

Rey startles to see the strange moon of a chewed human face bulging against the other shreek's flank. Even missing its lower jaw and nose, the head is recognizable to Rey as the Commonality agent to whom he had agreed to sell the archaic brain-the agent who had assured him there would be no bloodshed and then had sent his semblor with a gang of murderous distorts to retrieve Mr. Charlie from the caravan. So, choice has led to chance yet again, and here is the treacherous Sitor Ananta, gazing with stringy eye-sockets at the desert floor.

Rey knows that the agent's brain tissue is folded into the glittery nerve lobes of the shreek who ate him. No doubt the man is staring at him through the eyes of his shreek with the same shameful mix of horror and hopeless resignation he himself feels. But there is no way for devoured men to communicate.

The slither of syrups in the gutsacks shivers with the shreeks' mutual joy at their successful feeding. Both bellies are full, and there will be no need for them to fight. As a couple, they can better stalk their next meal and perhaps even join others on the endless hunt. They unclasp the fangmesh of their faces and swim away together under the starry sky and the night's two moons.