Munk represses the trembling conflict in him between elation and blatant disbelief and acknowledges aloud, "My responsibility to Mr. Charlie is replete. He has been delivered to Solis. So has Mei Nili. Then, I guess, I am wholly free to serve you-my maker."
"Good." A frantic quiet plays across Buddy's thick features, as though he's just coming to a precarious realization. "Hold on. I'm having a prescient memory-"
Munk extends an arm to steady Buddy, who suddenly looks as if he is about to fall asleep. "I don't understand," the androne says.
Buddy snatches at Munk's arm and snaps out of it. He blinks, and a crisp alertness seizes his stare. "I remembered what's going to happen." He cocks his head and blinks again. "I'm going to leave now. Once I'm gone, Buddy won't remember anything about me or you. His last memory will be of falling out of the skies in Terra Tharsis. He will find his way back to the outsiders' camp behind us, and in time he will realize that he has been exiled from Terra Tharsis by
the Maat for his crime against himself: attempted suicide. And you-" A hot smile flashes across his face, and he almost bursts into laughter. "Ah, you have your work cut out for you."
"Again, I don't understand ..." Munk trails off, for Buddy has seized his faceplate and pulled himself up very close, lifting his legs off the ground and practically climbing up the androne's front.
"My time in time is done in time," Buddy chants, his face a white moon, his eyes lit from within. "Good-bye. Munk."
Buddy lets go, and as his body falls, Munk involuntarily enters suspended time. Briefly, a light like blue smoke phosphoresces in the space between them, an amethyst fire that blusters violently even in slow time. Then it is gone, leaving comet feathers dazzling on the path of its dwindling flight through the pink lens of the horizon.
In a splash of dust, Buddy falls at Munk's feet and gazes up at the androne with a bewildered look shading to fright. Munk moves to help him up, but the man pushes away in a startled crabwalk. He flips over and scamps up the path among the boulders and out of sight.
Munk moves to follow, then stops himself. Inside, in the imaginal space behind his lens bar, he can still see Buddy fleeing among large talons of rock. He is running through horizontal rays of fiery dust that cut time into strata. On the lowest level, he is running through the woven light of the desert. Slightly
above that view of him, he has already reached the camp of storm-battered pressure tents and reflector domes. A notch higher, the sky is full of the pink twigs of nightfall, and he is crouched with others beside a thermalux telling his story of life in Terra Tharsis as an old one, which no one believes. For many levels, he huddles at night in the thermal leaks of tents and works with others by day erecting a wind turbine, eventually earning his own tent...
Munk dizzies. A whole life unfurls before him. He skims ahead and sees Buddy in a caravan heading west into the pumice winds of the red desert, returning to Terra Tharsis. And above that, the opal-black heights of the Maat city where there is no death.
His vision dissolves in a blind roar of images a thousand years deep-and still there is Buddy, at this far-gone time under the anvil of a tree. The stony land is patch-quilted with lichen and sloping swards, and groves of strata-tiered trees bloom among the rocky outcrops under a flame-blue sky.
Munk startles alert to find himself gazing at lucent grains of dust glittering in the space where a moment before a craze-eyed Buddy stood. He can hear the crunching of the icy gravel as the man flees among the erratic boulders. The androne doesn't know what to do. The sounds fade away, and Buddy entirely
disappears into the silence of his future.
Solis dazzles under the minarets of sunfire that are capturing that day's power. Terraced on the ramparts of ancient impact craters, the settlement hoards light, from the prism-cut lofts at the craters' edges to the glass hangars and mirror panes of the huddled warrens on the desert floor. Among a jumble of red ivy bunkers and ginger stonework arbors, two small orange pyramids catch his attention, and he remembers Buddy saying, "Those are the vats of the Anthropos Essentia; Mr. Charlie will be taken there."
Only, the Maat had called Mr. Charlie by his untranslated name, and it had sounded like a rattle of wind over shale. Munk repeats it, "Charles Outis," and the noise goes off aimlessly across the gritty swells of land.
He telescopes in on the orange pyramids and says the name more softly. Then his vision pulls back with the thought that the Maat could have left Buddy anywhere they wanted and certainly closer to the tent camp. That the neo-sapiens would bring the androne to this precise place is significant, he assumes, and he scans more slowly the journey down the heather-choked gullies and ice-splotched cobble flats to the stone wall and a dolmen door with a niter beard. Hidden by fan boulders and a torpid mound of rocks, the door is visible only from this venue.
There are blisters of rime around the touch pad that will listen for the correct code signal to open the door. As Munk stares at the amplified image of the pad, giddy disbelief overtakes all his reservations. The touch pad is identical to the type used by lapetus Gap. and he is confident that his familiarity with this lock system will enable him to feel out the admittance code.
He starts forward, then stops and asks himself where he thinks he's going. To find Charles Outis he confirms to himself and continues on his way, leaving unspoken his expectation of confronting the people in the settlement and finding out if the Maat are right. Maybe there is a place for him among the last tribes at the end of the world.
He strides boldly across the desolation, and as he approaches the lithic entryway, he makes no effort to hide himself-for if he is indeed human, he belongs in Solis.
7
Zero in the Bone
MEL NILI HAS SEEN THE SOUS CLADES-THE MARTIANS-numerous times in news clips, but in person they seem much bigger. They stand bristle-headed and
narrow-shouldered above the counselors from the terrene anthro commune. The counselors, dressed in the sere-and-buff tunics and toque caps of the Solis autocracy, are tall and slender-muscled from their lives in the thin gravity of Mars. They crane their necks to look up at Exu and Hannas Bowans' marsupial faces, and watching them together, the jumper marvels again at the diversity of human life outside the reservation.
The martians flitter away across the Fountain Court in their eerie synchronized gait, and in moments they are lost among the hive bustle of numerous other martians crossing through the plaza's chords of sunlight and broken spectra.
"Clades," Grielle Aspect snickers from behind Mei. "I'm glad to be getting away from this genetic circus. You should come with me."
Mei tilts her head back and gives a sour look. "Maybe when I'm as old as you, I'll be ready to end it, too."
"Oh, I'm not ending it, Mei dear." Grielle smiles seraphically. "I'm becoming light-true freedom. No more of this shapeshifting---morphs, clades, and plasmatics-it's disgusting. The light is pure and timeless."
"If you believe that," Mei says, pointing with her eyes to Grielle's wimple and opaline apron, the traditional garments of a passager, "why are you paying
to revive Shau?"
"Rey Raza died trying to save him-to save all of you," Grielle says softly, her eyes unfocusing. "I saw him die. It was a terrible thing. I would bring him back if I could." Her gaze tightens. "But I can't. So, it's the journalist. Maybe he'll see the light and die properly. If we leave the flesh in the right way, we never have to come back, you know."
Sitor Ananta steps past them to greet the approaching counselors. A whiff of a cold fragrance tingles in his wake, and Mei experiences a discoloring in her soul. "That agent is using olfacts to sway the people around him."
Grielle winks slyly. "Don't you just envy him? Even I can't afford olfacts that effective. If I could, you'd all be passagers."