limbless, boneless, virtually nonexistent.
An immeasurable longing displaces his fear. He wants to be whole again. Passionate courage rises from this longing, and he determines that he will not be afraid anymore.
Outside, through the rover's cameras, he sees welded boulders the color of whisky glide past. And the blighted landscape shimmers with untouchable veils.
At sunset the craterland blazes bloodred, and the rovers shift to infraview, their cooler engines running faster through the spectral landscape. The desert's vaporous plant life is easier to see in the long light. Ghostly blooms of
thermal shadows billow from the nooks and crevices of the crater outcrops, each species a different shade of fire.
"At night it becomes obvious why this track is called the Nebraska Trace," Rey announces. "Mr. Charlie, later you can tell us about Nebraska, the archaic land where the flora here originated. All these scrawny plants you're seeing shining in the dark are biots of terrene species and carry their names with their redesigned genes. That pink smoke in the graben to our left is prairie
cordgrass, and that skeletal shrub among the boulders is yarrow. Tansy and purple clover grow in abundance on the lee of dunes. And if you stare off there to the far right ahead of us where the tableland begins, you can see a whole mosaic of foxtail, gayfeather, and prairie sage."
In the sudden darkness the sky crackles with stars. Bioluminescent insects zag in the darkness. Rey, who sleeps less than twenty minutes a day, continues his colloquy with Charles Outis on the features of the two moons. He explains how
the smaller moon, Deimos, rising full in the east at dusk will still be a brilliant silver tuft in the eastern sky when the sun rises, because like someone walking down an up escalator, it travels against the planet's rotation.
The oblate moon, Phobos, on the other hand, ascends in the west on its eight-hour sprint across the sky, displaying all its waxing phases but never reaching fullness before it plunges into the planet's shadow. Rey begins relating a folktale about the frustrations of Phobos, until Grielle, who shares the front rover with him, feels compelled to tell him to shut up. Buddy and Mei Nili have already fallen asleep in their flexform recliners, wearied from a day spent getting acquainted with one-third gravity and talking about archaic times with Charles Outis.
Alone in the third rover, Shau Bandar records the night through infraview, tracking the undulant wraiths in the smoky light. Gradually, the sedative olfacts in the air supply put him to sleep too, and after a while the recorder in his mantle automatically shuts off.
A moment later the midstim begins, and the animal gods, full of their resolutions and silences, awake in a dream. Shau becomes a tree with quarrelsome branches. He lives underwater in a tide rip that is breaking him into pieces.
But instead of vital fluids spilling out of his broken parts, he bleeds music.
Lavender creases of dawn unfold as the caravan comes to a stop on a shelf rock above a vista of desolate craters. Munk's silver cowl glints below, where he stands on a sandstone anvil overlooking the couloir that cuts the most direct path through the rings within rings of cratered waste.
Rey tells the androne to wait down there, and Munk makes no objection, for the hike up the slope would cost a tenth of a percent of his remaining power. The temperature is a sultry minus fifty degrees centigrade, and he needs to conserve strength for the torrid hours to come. He climbs down the dark side of the
anvil, squats between two zubu cacti, and listens and watches through his comlink with the reporter.
The rovers have backed together, and crablike handroids from under the chassis
quickly erect a transparent pavilion. Protected by the warm air pressure of the tent, the pilgrims frolic in the fainter gravity. Shau Bandar whirls triple somersaults in the air, and Rey lifts the back end of the dune climber with his bare hands to check the wheel bearings. In the orange shine of the thermalux at the center of the pavilion, Grielle Aspect opens her long-sleeved arms and beckons the others.
"I am the Light," she chants. "Stranger to nothing. I stand against the ancient life of remembered darkness and summon all of you to yourselves. The body is a drug. It deforms consciousness with its hormones and secretions. I am here to tell you to drop the body. Let yourself go. Become the light you are."
Buddy sits on the runner guard, looking groggy. Mei Nili jumps from the back of the rover and with two practiced leaps crosses the enclosure and is standing at the clear wall gazing down toward Munk.
"Good to see you again, Munk," she whispers on her link line to the androne. She can't see me in the dark, Munk knows. She wonders what I make of this odd
human behavior.
"Are we supposed to be doing anything?" Charles asks over their link. "I mean, are we participants?"
A laugh bursts from Grielle. "Whether you know it or not, you are all participants." She swivels about, pointing fingers at each of them. "Rey Raza wants the credits and thrills. Shau Bandar wants credits and fame. Mei Nili wants escape. Buddy wants escape. People, you are all participants. Even you, Mr. Charlie, even you want a body and a future."
"What about Munk?" Mei asks. "Isn't he a participant?"
Grielle snuffs the thermalux. Sheets of fire hover in the sky over the dark, riven terrain. "All consciousness is light." She wheels around in the ebb shadows, her arms outstretched under the blazing sky. "But the body deforms us with its chemical powers. it addicts us to its hungers. The body is a drug. Let the body go."
She dances up close to Shau and says directly to his recorder, "Wanting is not the way. I invite each of you to become the Light that you are but do not know."
"What do we have to do?" Charles Outis asks.
Rey rolls his eyes, and Buddy rests his forehead in his hand.
"There is only one path to the absolute freedom of pure consciousness and light, dear Mr. Charlie," Grielle says, pointing her body toward the rover where he watches through the sensors. "One path-but not the path you've taken, Mr. Charlie. Not more wanting. Not more organic life. The one path is death."
"You really think there's consciousness after death?" the archaic man asks. "Let's get this ritual done," Rey almost whines. "We've got a long way to go." With a flourish of her robes, Grielle shifts her attention to the reporter,
who is still bounding among the rovers, flipping and twisting with clumsy vigor through the air. "Bandar, dear, educate our archaic guest, will you? Show him an infoclip or something on consciousness and light. Ignorance is such an ugly trait"
Grielle disappears into the back hatch of the lead rover, and Rey follows. Immediately, the flat, crablike handroids emerge and begin disassembling the tent. Shau back-flips into the rover and conks his head sharply enough so that he collapses to his knees and retreats with a sheepish grin. Mei waves to the residual darkness in the canyon below where Munk waits and then joins Buddy in the second rover.
"There may be consciousness after death," she tells Charles, plopping into a deck chair, "but no one who's died is talking."
"That woman Grielle is a fanatic," Charles mutters. "Religion doesn't seem to have gotten any less irrational in the millennium I've been gone."
"Actually," Munk comes in over the link, "the Acts of Light is not a religion. They don't postulate a supreme being, nor do they codify human behavior-apart from their willingness to terminate their lives. Most of their belief system is actually founded in science. Close empirical observation has shown that consciousness is not a state or function of the brain, nor does it interact with the brain."
"How can that be?" Charles asks.