SoliS

"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 flex-form 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.