SoliS

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 shape-shifting-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 gall eries 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.