The three anthro counselors show their palms, introduce themselves, and conduct the pilgrims on a walking tour of Greater FreeSolis. The settlement is large, but the interface among the clade cantonments, the anthro commune, and
the Anthropos Essentia enclaves is a triangular plaza with the Fountain Court at the center. Strolling across the garnet flagstones, they have the opportunity to see all the human types in their bright and often outre garb: the martians with their back-bending stalk legs and bouffant manes, the whippet-thin wraiths of
the Anthropos Essentia in their orange frocks and headwraps, and the aboriginals looking so simian in their contour jackets and flexfabrics. A counselor points out that even some of the elaborate air plants hanging among the strati-form galleries under the blue-glass canopy are plasmatics, humans in wholly inhuman form. Another counselor explains how selective Solis has been about the numbers and types of human variants it has integrated within its biotecture.
Their patter is endless, and Mei interrupts to ask where Mr. Charlie is. In reply, the counselors talk about the vats and point out on a holoform map of the settlement two compact orange pyramids at the old end. Then Grielle wants to see the Walk of Freedom, and a section of the map expands to show the famous
crystal-gravel path leaving the ebony gate and curving under a skull-mounted catafaique into a field of human bones and mummified corpses.
At tour's end, on a balcony overlooking the Rainbow Court, there is a meal of vegetables and hatchery steaks. Sitor Ananta is magnificent with the counselors, amusing and charming them. Several times Mei tries to direct the conversation to the olfacts, but no one seems to care. The meal continues with amicable cheer, eventually even the jumper laughing with the others over Grielle's pantomime of
a martian.
"When will I see Mr. Charlie?" Mei asks the counselors after the meal. The counselors confer as they lead the way between two silvery walls of
electrostatically suspended water and up an automated rampway to a bunker of black, blockcut rock scribbled with ivy. This is the anthro lodge where the agent will be staying, and he lingers under the dragon-eye lintel for the counselors' reply.
They can't agree on whether the bodyweave will be complete in two or three days. The vats are busy designing clades for the cold new worlds beyond the Belt.
"Too late," Grielle decides. "I bad hoped to speak with him before my
passage-you know, dears, I really want to confront the poor man with the error
of his ways. But I don't think he's slept in his flesh a thousand years to argue with me. So I am gone. Tomorrow I commit my last act of light as a human."
Mei is left in the purple-tile vestibule of the hostel where she will reside until she earns enough credit for her own suite. Grielle and the counselors depart into the saffron afternoon, and the jumper uses the password the counselors have given her to enter a cloister of blackglass cubicles.
From inside her own chamber, the walls to the corridor and the outside are transparent, and she can see the serrated rooftops, a hint of the clustered rainbows from the Fountain Court, and the broken shoulders of the crater rim, rubescent in the long sunlight.
"Jumper Nili," a familiar voice calls from the doorway. Shau Bandar stands there wearing the green caftan of the vats and a thick grin. "Are you in there?"
Mei hurries to touch the entry pad, and he strides in, the door sliding shut behind him. He pivots, displaying his partly shaved scalp, the close-cropped
hair like red hackles. Without his face paint, he looks no different from any of the men in the hamlets of her reservation on Earth.
"I've been in the beverage stall across the way," he says, "waiting for you to return. So what do you think? How did the vat doctors do?"
"I think it's a tough way to get a haircut."
They laugh and skim palms, and he plops onto a flexform chair and grins at her. "They say I was dead for days. But it was like being asleep. I don't even remember what happened."
Mei sits in the window bay and tells him what happened. They talk excitedly about Softcopy's betrayal and how close he has come to the absolute edge of departure. From down the blackglass corridor, Sitor Ananta slinks into view. He flicks his palms at them. "Open the door. I know you're in there."
Shau moves to slap the door pad, and Mei stops him. An angry light flexes in her eyes, a twinkle of fear at its core. "Don't! He's dangerous. He uses psycholfacts to manipulate people."
Shau looks surprised. "That's the Commonality agent we saw in the Moot, the one who wants to reclaim Mr. Charlie. Those agents are rascals. That's why Mr. Charlie fears him. But they can't use psychokinetic substances. It's against the mandate, and you know how righteous those tightasses are about that."
"Open the door, you two," Sitar Ananta calls with a timbre surprisingly deep for his slender frame. "I want to speak to you about Mr. Charlie."
"Let's just ignore him," Mei advises.
"He knows we're here. Why must we hide?" "I think he's crazy."
Shau rolls his eyes in disbelief. "We're the crazy ones, Jumper Nili. That's what I found out in the vats. You left the reservation, I left Terra Tharsis-for what? To hide? I've been dead. What is there left to be afraid of?" He reaches for the entry pad. "Don't worry. I'll talk with him."
"Bandar, don't!" Mei calls.
The glass door parts, and Sitor Ananta, grinning coldly, enters in a cloud of dreams. Munk has no trouble figuring out the admittance codes to open the stone portal that enters Solis. His large frame is cramped in the lightless corridor, and he must proceed stooped and sideways. With infrascan he sees that the walls are composed of an unfamiliar alloy. He wants to pause and examine it, but a reverberant pulsing summons him from ahead, and he is eager to see where this entryway leads.
Farther. along, the walls begin to weep. The substance that dews on the slick surface is mostly water, yet at his touch he feels the helical waverings of molecular linkages. He identifies chains of methylated proteins before he realizes that the corridor ahead is smaller. He cannot hope to go forward and decides to retreat. But behind him the hall is also tighter than when he passed through, and in a gust of surprise, he sees that the passageway is soundlessly constricting.
The androne tentatively pits his strength against the contracting walls, but their force is too great even for him. Viscous sheets of organic fluid slicken all surfaces. The floor, too, is wet, and he has no purchase to apply any resistance. In moments, the ceiling is weighing heavily on his shoulders, and he is obliged to bend over, then forced to curl up. The dense liquid envelops him.
The contracting walls close around him, then stop. Nothing more happens, and Munk begins to think that he has been encased alive, maybe indefinitely He computes that with his fully charged power cells he could remain conscious in this immobilized state for centuries; he is too frightened to determine how
many. Then he senses movement. The corridor slowly shunts him inward, the strong peristaltic motion sweeping him in his liquid sac deeper into Solis.
Abruptly, space opens around him, and he is adrift in a thick fluid of inductor enzymes that sheathe him in a strong electromagnetic field. He senses that the field is being directed from an outside source, but already his
sensors, under the influence of the field, are shutting down. He cannot move his limbs, and his infraview goes blind.
Darkness and silence possess him. He is alert, but he has no referents. Time,
too, seems distorted. He searches for his internal anthropic model and finds nothing. Panic swirls in him, and then that, also, fades away. He floats in emptiness, outside and inside reduced to nothing. Only his consciousness persists, his ineffable and enclosing sense of I am.
The hallucinations begin with a mushroom cloud of billowing images. He's aware of this phenomenon from the archives: sensory-deprivation hallucinations. When external stimulation is deprived, the brain generates living images to fill the void. Always, before, when he turned his sensors off, he filled the emptiness with his anthropic model but never for intervals longer than a second.