afraid someone else in the Commonality might access Mr. Charlie's brain and find out how you had stolen him from the archive and abused him for your illegal lewdism. So you shipped him out to Phoboi Twelve. You thought that would be the end of it. You thought your secret would be safe."
"Activate your patch," Sitor Ananta says dryly. "You look like you're going to pass out." He turns his pugnosed, bat-faced profile to where Mei lies spraddled on her back, watching him with bright pins of malice in her eyes. "Your lover
has reasoned out my motives," he admits and basks in her hatred. "Why are you silent?"
"I'm thinking of ways to kill you," she murmurs.
Sitor Ananta chuckles. "I'm sure your ideas are not nearly as clever as the way I've thought of killing you."
Shau staggers upright, limp fists raised, and the agent stands, splays his hand across the angry man's face, and shoves him to the mat. The hypnolfact on Sitor Ananta's palm penetrates the mucosa of Shau's eyes and instantly renders him slumberous.
"I have had days to think this through," he tells a passive, seething Mei.
"And I have decided to kill you in such a way as to make everyone think you want to die. With an artful combination of ergal, dйgagй, and hypnolfacts, I can arrange for you and your lover to earnestly choose to make passage with Grielle Aspect. Now, isn't that truly clever?"
Mei gropes out of bed, and Sitor Ananta smears her face with the hypnolfact. In minutes he has them lying side-by-side, head to foot. In turn, he whispers close to their slack faces the narratives that will make death irresistible.
The journalist is easy. He has already been dead. His psyche knows the succor of emptiness, free of the hurtling world, free of the pretense of time and form. Sitor Ananta whisper-hums to him about the dreamless ease he once had and can have again. He reminds him of all the needless efforts of each day, all the predestined indignities he must endure just to go on. "Why take it the hard way? Forget the dream of reality. Let's go back to the reality of dreams, Shau
Bandar. Return to the invisible source and destiny of all assembled things. Take the way out."
Shau's eyelids twitch through a brief REM episode as the behavioral program sets in his brain, and Sitor Ananta stifles a snicker.
The jumper is more difficult. First, Sitor Ananta must sing the song of the avalanche that killed her family. He describes how a river of rock roared down the snowy valley faster than a skim train, the massive stone slabs riding a
layer of compressed air. He sings from above, where the mountainside looks as if it has suddenly turned into muddy water, spilling through the snowbound valley
in a dark flood and then setting instantly in place. Under tons of broken slate, a whole village is entombed. He sings of their last moments, of the thundersong from the mountain. No one thought they were going to die. Most avalanches slide horizontally less than twice the distance they fall, and the village was over five kilometers from the cliffs. He sings of how safe they felt, how
unsuspecting their last minutes were. Sadly, he sings of their ignorance of the trapped air layer and the acoustic energy of the thunder, powers strong enough to propel the giant rocks ten times as far as they fall. With thick dolor, he sings of the 630-meter fall of a whole mountainside and its smoking, screaming, unstoppable 6-kilometer runout.
"Where were you?" Sitor Ananta trills. "Off on a ski safari with your friends. You will never forget your absence at the appointed hour. Why run from it? Death requires us, Mei Nili. Your family was not spared. The whole village left the future behind. Why are you here? You don't have to be apart from them. That is the hard way."
Without a splotch of vegetation, the crushed crystal trod that is the Walk of Freedom wanders into terrain that has the appearance of pre-Adamic Mars. Rocks lie strewn in the russet sand like crockery shards, and the weatherworn vent of
a lava tube rises at the end of the path with the fluted and sacrosanct shape of a dais on the floor of hell. Around it are scattered the sitting and sprawling mummies, sandwind-torn skeletons, and bone slurry of the passagers who have already completed the Walk of Freedom.
Grielle Aspect stands with Mei Nili and Shau Bandar under the copper-green catafaique that frames the airlock in the transparent section of wall facing the ceremonial grounds. They are wearing the opaline smocks and head and neck wrappings traditional to passagers, but only Grielle looks enthusiastic. The jumper and the reporter stare with sterile expressions at the small gathering of observers in the viewing stands as though the world before them were indeed a vain illusion.
Sitor Ananta, wearing minty colors for this festive occasion and standing close enough to the passagers to inspire them with more olfacts if necessary, admires the lithe crowd that has gathered to witness this old and increasingly rare ritual. He recognizes Exu and Hannas Bowan among the martian dyads, and there are members of the Solis trade council in their business kirtles. When the ceremony is over, he will approach them and see if he can work up some kind of deal for the Commonality to justify his trip here.
"I have come to the Walk of Freedom to forget the dream of reality," Grielle says at the conclusion of her address, deepening the small smile in Sitor Ananta's face. By using the ceremonial parting, she is unwittingly reinforcing the hypnolfaction of his victims. "I take this walk now to return to the reality of dreams. Happily, I release the zero in the bone and return to the invisible source and the destiny of all assembled things. Proudly, I take the way out."
Grielle lifts her palms to the filtered blue sky, turns, and strides through the airlock. In the sudden cold and reduced air pressure, her smock billows and the statskin film of her wimple fogs. But she can see well enough to follow gracefully the radiant crystal path through the bonefield. Among ricks of skeletons and mummified corpses sitting tilted and askew, she lowers herself and crosses her legs.
With a florid gesture, her pink-gloved hands rip away the wimple and the protection of the statskin film. The out-rush of air and pressure flaps her cheeks, bulges her eyes, and squirts blood from their corners. The blood explodes into clouds of crimson glitter and blows away, and the look of ecstasy on Grielle's face goes stupid as her life vanishes through her snarling lips in a jetting gust of water vapor. The heat bleeds away instantly, and Grielle Aspect's blood-streaked grimace smuts over with blotches of ice crystal.
Sitor Ananta watches Mei and Shau closely, but their mesmeric stares do not flinch at the blunt sight of Grielle's passing. They seem fervent believers that the waveform of her body's neural light has been liberated and, unimpeded by
much of an atmosphere, flies free of all creation.
"Light is action," Shau says, reciting the same programmed speech to the assembly that he used earlier to convince Grielle of his and Mei's sincerity. "The photon, the ultimate unit of light, is the quantum of action. Photons, like actions, come in wholes. We cannot have one and a half actions. We cannot decide to speak, to walk this path, or do anything one and a half times. Action is whole. And so is the photon. They are the same. All actions are acts of light."
Sitor Ananta watches with evident satisfaction the behavior of his subjects. When Mei begins to talk, he indulges himself by stealing a congratulatory look at the spectators and is pleased to see them listening attentively.
"Look how we are attached to the ends of things," the jumper says, her voice thin and dreamy. "Death is always a beginning. Yet, when I lost my family-when they died-I saw only the end of our time together. I could not let that go. But now and here among the broken stones, I know what to ask for from this uncharitable existence-and that is a new beginning, beyond where this body ends, beyond where all things end."