Attanasio, AA - Solis

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.

3

Terra Tharsis

Charles Outis IS A BRAINSHADOW ENCASED AN AN EGG OF CLEAR plasteel. Psyonic pads designed to read and induce brain-waves cap both ends of the capsule and connect it by comlink to the console and the sensory array of The Laughing Life. Through the prow sensors, Charles watches Munk floating in space, the galaxy like mist behind him. The androne uses mag-lock clips to attach jetpaks to the mirror-gold hull of the pod.

"You only have four jetpaks," Charles notices. "Will they be strong enough to brake our descent?" Under ordinary circumstances, Charles prided himself on his observational abilities; now, survival has made him hyperalert. He notices the microchipping of the rover's hull and the thin feathers of electric fire around Munk as the androne aligns the jetpaks and magnetically locks them into place.

"These won't brake our entry," Munk answers frankly, indicating the circle of puny shoulder packs with their tapered jets that he's fixed to the hull. "But I'm not going to drop us to the surface. I'm aiming for Terra Tharsis, the city you saw on our last flyby. The jetpaks will help steer us to where scouts can pick us up as we go in."

"I still say there's enough lift on this cruiser to make a dunefleld landing," the jumper calls from the helm. "Terra Tharsis is too dangerous. Let's go directly to Solis. Put us down in the Planet, on one of the sandy verges near

the settlement. We'll hike in."

"The landing is too risky," Munk says. "The dunes veil rock reefs, and this pod isn't designed for an impact entry. We have no choice but to seek sanctuary with the Maat, unpredictable as they are. Which is better-to take a chance on incalculable physics or on an unguessable psyche?"

Inside the flight bubble of the ship, Mei is washed out by the pelagic glow of the console. Monitoring near space in the view scanner, she advises the androne, "We've got only a few minutes left. Two Bund ships and an Ap Com transport are closing fast."

"All right, then," Munk responds, "lock the helm and get into the pod."

Awe, fear, exultation at basking in the brown glow of Mars fuse inside Charles to a wide-staring intensity, so that he feels more alive now than he ever had in his former life. "What's going to happen to us in Terra Tharsis?" he asks.

"I don't know," Mei admits without much sympathy. "Terra Tharsis belongs to the Maat, not the Commonality. We'll have to find our way as we go."

Charles fixes his attention in the pod's external sensors and watches the planet view floating below, Mars rising splotched and enormous against the starsmoke. The winy mist of the atmosphere shimmers thinly against the black depths of space, and the blister-peeled and coagulate surface of the world shines with ectoplasmic wisps of dust and frost vapors.

The jetpaks fire soundlessly, the mute flares of blue exhaust standing before the stars like votive flames on the gold rim of the pod. Snug in his plasteel case, a husked brain devoid of even the primitive sense of vertigo, Charles does not feel the tug of acceleration. Instead, he surmises motion by the swelling vista.

Charcoal scrawls of shadow resolve to fault lines, nacre blotches expand to vast sandy verges, and the horizon becomes serrated. The barren vista of oxide deserts and crenulated mountain ridges swims closer, aslant in the yawing descent of the pod. Scalloped dunes spring from the mutant sands, warped and

quaking as the thin atmosphere buffets the plummeting vehicle, and Charles wants to blink, to shunt even for a moment the incoming vantage of wind-rowed buttes and stress-cracked rock.

The planet's rancid colors blur through the lens of the pod's thermal bowshock. Munk mutters some command that Charles is too distracted to catch. Below, a jagged shadowline of ifinit-faceted mountains looms as the pod's ultimate and calamitous destination, and a delirious howl whirls through Charles. before Mei disengages the plasteel capsule from the ship's console and steeps him in darkness, he sees the sharp peaks veer away, and through a rocky draw in the broken horizon, Terra Tharsis rears, her crystal towers swarmed in reefs of reflectant haze and star-barbs and carats of unearthly radiance.