SoliS

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
file:///F|/rah/A.A.%20Attanasio/Attanasio,%20A.A.%20-%20SoliS.txt 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 bad-land 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?"