SoliS

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 wet-ware 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, degage, 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."