SoliS

"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.