wanted it, but he shoved me back. He saved me."
The dune climber remains functional, and Mei programs the rover's computer to autopilot it along with the rover lugging Munk's body. Slowly, the caravan departs Sama Neve and trundles into the night. Ghostly vegetative blooms ripple on the sandstone ridges in a nocturnal wind-foxtail, bitter dock, cordgrass, and yarrow-the profuse flora of the spores carried across the shoreless dark from
the blue star that is Earth.
A few hours later, the water cycler in the pilot rover emits a raspy groan and cuts out. By dawn the blackglass viewdomes are foggy with exhaled moisture,
which Buddy and Mei carefully sop up with their scarves and squeeze into empty nutripouches. Mei retreats to the rover that is carrying Munk, but the water cycler there is dormant, its power cells drained by disuse because the rover has been emptied of air to carry Shau Bandar's frozen body. When Mei tries to hook the cycler to the engine's power drive, the circuits, already straining from the supermassive weight of the androne, shut down. For most of that day, Mei and Buddy struggle to revive the engine.
"Abandon the androne," Grielle demands, "or we're all going to die out here. Is that what you want?"
"Go take a sniff, Grielle," Mel gripes from under the chassis. "Do you want to die out here, old one?" Grielle asks Buddy.
He looks up from where he is kneeling in the auburn sand, holding a lux torch for Mei and shrugs. "We're three days from Solis. We can make it without a water cycler if we don't panic:"
"Life is a panic," Grielle states derisively and turns her head to take another gust of dлgage. With all the olfact she's been doing since yesterday's tragedy, she's less talkative than before, yet she manages to add, "Our senses detect only the smallest fraction of what is. Why do you want to go on living in this poverty?"
Mei and Buddy ignore her, and she drifts back to the pilot rover. Inside, she seriously contemplates activating the engine and leaving them behind with their precious androne. But when she looks over the laser-gashed console, she can't figure out how to run the damn thing, and the possibility that she might blow herself up stymies her angry ambition. She wants her passing to be ritualized. Rey Raza died for her that she herself might die with ritual exactitude in Solis, and she will not squander that gift.
Instead, she stares admiringly at the dune climber parked in the shadow of a pinion rock, its burden of psyonic crates promising her a welcome reception in Solis. For that, she will have to wait. But she won't wait thirsty. She helps herself to one of the pouches of reclaimed water and sips it. The acrid taste makes her grimace, but she finishes the pouch anyway. She's the director. This is her caravan, and this her water.
Late in the afternoon the caravan is running again on autopilot, but all the reclaimed water is gone, consumed by Grielle. To conserve body moisture, the pilgrims keep their statskins on and don't talk. The dry martian air, which whirls in scarlet dust devils through the wake of the vehicles, seems to penetrate the rover's seals and even the statskins, but that is a
thirst-inspired hallucination. To counter it, Mei and Buddy accept doses of
Grielle's olfacts. and physical discomfort relents to a spongy ease.
Mesas appear along the horizon, scabrous and blood-colored, sacrificial altars in the setting sun. Embraced by their flexform deck chairs, the pilgrims each seep deeper into themselves as night comes on and the spectral smoke of the
alien plant life appears in the infraview. Sleep cuts through them sporadically, rips in the fabric of their drugged minds that thirst stitches whole again-until another dose of olfacts slashes them free.
When dawn arrives as an enormous apocalypse that ignites a landscape of ferrous peaks and reefs of blowing dust, the olfacts are gone. No condensation at all beads on the blackglass interior, but Buddy swabs it anyway. In the parching chill, Mei's caked lips catch on her dry teeth, and she finds she cannot speak when she tries to. Asleep or comatose, Grielle lies with one blind eye halflidded as if peeking out at the last dying stars, the planet's tiny
lobe-shaped moons.
The rovers and the dune climber chum onward mindlessly. A blustery wind licks powder from the nearby crater ridges, and a pouring haze of sand obscures vision. When the fog lifts, the fiery world is still there. The badland blazes under the space-cold pandemonium of heaven, its tortured pinnacles,
crater-mutilated plains, and red dunes indifferent to human trespass.
6
Solis
ON THE HORIZON OF THE BARREN PAN, SOMBER HEADLANDS appear out of the morning glare, the promontories of ancient impact craters. A city shines beyond the protective bulwark of these rouge bluffs. Lens towers burn fiercely, collecting their solar harvest, and the vaulting spans, shield hangars, derrick arcades, and rhombohedral rooftops with their gleaming gold-foil facets give light in fierce spikes like a field of stars.
Solis is the human history of Mars. At the west end, some of the geodesics from the first Mars colony are preserved in a historical park. Surrounding it
are the hydroponic grange sheds of the Anthropos Essentia, the oldest residents. Their bower-and-dome architecture dominates the flats of two intersecting
craters whose rufous cliff walls have been sculpted into administrative offices. On the other side of them, in three nearly concentric craters, the clade cantonments spraddle in many levels of glass galleries, pyramids, and pavilions. The crofts of prism turrets and rhomboidal steppes at the east end are the
latest edifices, the megastructure Hall of All constructed to house the millions of humans who want to live free of the Maat and their minions, the Commonality.
As the pilgrims first spot the silver starpoints in the amber aureole of sunrise that are the solar foils of Solis, flyers already begin to loft out of the city and circle in-scout-class andrones programmed to evaluate all travelers who come over the rim of the wasteland.
The flyers find two dusty rovers and a dune climber grinding slowly over the reddish black badlands. A deep-space patrol-dass androne lies dormant atop the roof of the following rover. When they land, the vehicles stop and three pilgrims emerge, parched, shrunken with hunger, and glassy-eyed. The first one out, Grielle Aspect falls deliriously onto her knees, a worshipful smile on her salt-pale lips. Thinking she is collapsing from dehydration, several
simple-minded andrones begin emergency procedures. Two of them wrap Grielle in a pressurized sling and, despite her protests, pack her face and arms in glucose infusers. Meanwhile, others approach Mei Nili and Buddy.
Buddy leads an androne to the second rover, opening the hatch to reveal Shau
Bandar's frozen body, furred in powder-blue carbon dioxide ice.
"And this is Mr. Charlie." Mei presents the battered plasteel capsule to the androne before her. "Can you tell if he is all right? He took a heavy blow."
The flesh-masked androne smiles and takes the capsule. "Solis welcomes you." "Please, can you tell if he's been damaged?" Mei repeats, dazed.
"Please come with me," the androne requests. "You may enter SoIis and ask your questions to the people there."
Grielle is hurriedly hammocked between two flyers, and the andrones who have treated her mount their wings, run a short distance, and lift her into the bright sky.
Mei looks back at Buddy. "Buddy and I have to go together," she tells her escort.
"I am sorry," the androne mutters quietly, sounding sincere and gesturing toward wings of opalescent gossamer standing on the pebbly plain. "Your companion is not admittable to Soils. He must remain outside."