A. Attanasio - SoliS

Mei Nili is hunched among the controller plates, gawking in horror with Charles as Aparecida casts aside the crumpled shape of the jetpak and springs toward them. Her prodigious head slung forward in a gaze of flame-cored mineral intensity, tentacles slithering ahead of her steely, clacking claws, she is death itself.
A searing flare of white fire bleaches the androne to a skeletal silhouette and consumes her in a wincing radiance blind as any darkness, and she vanishes like a tattered shadow into the wraith world of all nightmares.
The portal reflexively squeezes shut under the blast. The brunt of the shockwave tosses Mei against the far wall with a sickening thud, and she slumps lifelessly, a cast-adrift body in the reduced gravity.
"Mei Nili!" Charles bawls, and then, "Munk! Munk, are you there? Mei Nili's hurt! Hurry!"
Munk receives the distress signal from nearby, where he has watched the silent holocaust billow into fiery tatters. He steers The Laughing Life into the infrared haze to recover the scorched command pod. Resorting at once to his primary programming, he ignores the emotional valence in Charles's message and calmly guides, the cruiser through the debris of the explosion. The heavily damaged Wolf Star has swiftly retreated, dwindling to a bright star in the galactic haze, leaving behind pewter shards of fused blackglass, twisted finjets, mangled hull plates, and melted shapes of plasteel among the rapidly cooling dust cloud that is all that remains of Phoboi Twelve.
The command pod itself has separated into several heat-tarnished spheres whirling doomful and mute as absolute rock among the cosmic dust. Munk gently docks The Laughing Life against the sphere emitting Charles's signal. The controller plates recognize the company vessel, and the pod mates its portal to the cruiser's pressure hatch and accepts Munk with an inrush of heated air.
Charles, unprepared for the sight of the bulky humanoid with the chrome hood and featureless face-plate, utters a weak groan. "Munk?"
"Yes," the androne replies, hurrying to Mei's body.
"Have no fear. The danger for you is over, Mr. Charlie."
Munk checks the oxygen content and pressure of the air mix in the pod as well as the temperature to be certain that they are adequate to sustain human life, and assured of that, he unzips Mei's statskin cowl. His thick hand hovers a centimeter above her face, not only attempting to measure her rate of respiration but also at venture, daring for the first time to touch human flesh.
His sensors can detect no gas exchange at all. His first contact is to the side of her neck, trepidatiously feeling for her carotid pulse. None. "She is dead."
"No!" Charles cries. "She's not dead. Not yet. It's only been a few minutes. You've got to start her breathing. Do you understand?"
"How?" From his memory-allocation files, Munk filters cardiopulmonary therapies. He retrieves the first-aid-for-humans program that his makers installed in the earliest andrones and that persists in him at a low level of
his operating system as a kind of racial memory.
"Force air into her lungs," Charles calls desperately.
Swiftly, the androne positions her under him on the deck, his fist placed over her nose and mouth, his finger pistoning air into her lungs. A vigorous thoracic massage follows as he pumps her rib cage with his fingertips, feeling her bones stressing to their breaking point. He considers applying a small electric jolt, when her heart thumps back to life and she gasps for breath.
Mei shudders alert, peering up blearily at the crimson lens bar in the black faceplate, and she feels the bright magnetic touch of his living metal against her flesh. Alertness jams into place as he lifts his electric presence from her and she takes in the intersecting crystal plates and mirror-gold concavity of the pod.
And then, quite unexpectedly, she finds herself blinking at the kneeling androne with tears welling in her eyes. It is as if everything she had ever refused to reckon with, the sadness and loneliness, is trying to rise within her involuntarily and all at once, overflowing from her as much in release as in pain. Awareness of the blackness that has relinquished her under the androne's ministrations taps into the very source of her grief.
To Munk's amazement, she begins to sob. He finds it incredible that this molten grief could have churned inside her for so long without finding a way out, that she had to literally die before it found relief. In the formless nothing where she has just been, the androne realizes, everyone she had ever loved had gone. And now she has been there too-and come back.
"Welcome to the club," Mr. Charlie says with quiet exultation. "Welcome to the survivors' club."
In the wash of air from The Laughing Life, strands of fern and a white blossom have drifted. Munk sweeps them into his grasp and presents them to Mei. "To life."
She accepts the bouquet with a quavery smile. "To Solis."
Installed in the flight bubble of The Laughing Life, Charles sees and hears through the ship's sensors. While he scrutinizes the interior of the vessel, amazed to be alive inside a magjet cruiser, even more amazed at the ambit of his own hazardous destiny that has delivered him from the darkness of the machine, Mei and Munk talk. Vaguely, the thousand-year-old mind listens to the androne and the woman struggle with their relief and the joy of their success while they discuss what lies ahead-the brief flight to Mars and how it will be necessary to abandon The Laughing Life in a high orbit. The cruiser is the property of Apollo Combine, and the only way to avoid the company's legal claim on them is to leave it behind. They will all go down to Mars in the pod and will slow their entry with a jetpak rig they'll hook up from the ship's stores.
While they carefully plot the immediate future, Charles gazes at the macrame of vines and roistering ferns spilling from ceiling nooks. He is quietly astonished to see them dangling here among the mysterious alloys of the transparent hull, wavering with the vent breeze in the aqueous glow from the crystal devices of the console. To him, the plants are weary and beggared life-forms, sufficing on the merest offerings, yet noble in the poverty of radiation, thin air, and meager dirt that sustain them. Of course they would accompany humanity into space. From their cellular struggles, human life slowly and violently evolved and stands before him now as this beautifully pale and darkhaired woman chattering gratefully. By comparison, the androne beside her, holding her steady in the empty gravity, seems a divinity, silverly black and ceremonial, a faceless apparition of a higher order, a more ideal actuality, that has emerged from her even more distinctly than she emerged from the genetic turmoil of the plants' early lives.
The archaic human stares at them tirelessly, scrutinizing these three orders of reality arrayed before him– ancestral, human, and noetic-and as the fourth, the ghost witness of the past, an obscure soul without a body, he experiences for the first time in this calamitous and unreckonable future some emotion other than fear.
Charles stares ahead through the prow's sensors at the swelling vista of Mars.
The awe that had begun for him when he first woke from his long, cold sleep steepens at the view of the orange-red deserts and rows of dead volcanoes. As the cruiser glides closer to the rimlands of smeared lava flats and scoria, he sees the famous veins of dried riverbeds that he remembers from the Viking photographs of his former life a millennium ago. The rumor of floods chamfering the rusty plains, grooving the reddish black slurry floors with the toilings of water, fans out and melts away into the dark amber glass of alien mantle beds.
And suddenly, there it is, in the chancre of a crater surrounded by burned-out cinder cones-an immense and gleaming city! Astonishment expands to a worshipful feeling in his archaic brain, for here is the justification of his gamble and his suffering-the triumphant faith of the vision he had died and been reborn to see. Set like a strange jewel in the barren plains and stark promontories of the dead planet, the city is woven of radiance. Its gold and-onyx spires twinkle with sunfire and emerald spurs of laser light, its dazzling foundations sunk in the bedrock of the future's hewn and ancient-river altar of Mars.
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