Attanasio, AA - Solis

SoliS

A. A. ATTANASIO

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"Mr. Charlie has found a way to rig the bore drill to detonate on his command. He's threatening to blast apart the whole of Phoboi Twelve. He says he'd rather die than be locked into a machine again."

"Incredible. But why are you risking our lives? What do you care?"

"I am C-P programmed to care. I have been built to be fascinated by human beings. Naturally, when I received a distress signal from an archaic human, I had to go to him."

"And if we rescue him," Mei asked, "then what? Where can we go with him?" "There's only one place. The renegade colony on Mars. where the archaic humans

are holding out. Solis."

"Attanasio is a poet, a seer and a born storyteller, who writes with heart, authentic life wisdom, and staggering, world-class imagination. There are no limits to what he may accomplish."

-David Payne, author of Early From the Dance

By A. A. Attanaslo

SOLIS*

THE MOON'S WIFE* KINGDOM OF THE GRAIL* HUNTING THE GHOST DANCER* WYVERN*

RADIX

*available from HarperPaperbacks

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Contents

Prelude

1. The Laughing Life

2. Remains of Adam

3. Terra Tharsis

4. The Avenue of Limits

5. Nycthemeral Journeys

6. Solis

7. Zero in the Bone

Epilogue

Prelude

SWOLLEN WITH DREAMS, I AWOKE FROM THE DEAD. When I tried to speak, all I could utter were small animal sounds. So I just lay there in the dark, silent in the secret sea of images and memories that make our dreams. I saw a beautiful woman making love to me. Her face was porcelain, glossy with the sweat of her

exertion. Her breasts shivered like small rabbits. The tresses spilling over her shoulders were red as autumn leaves. The smell of cloves whispered from where

the clamp of her need gripped me-so hard my pleasure bleared to pain, then relaxed again to pleasure. Like tiny azure pearls, tears of rapture beaded in her lashes.

A blast of little bright birds, spooky as minnows, flared across my brain. And once more I was in the dark depths of the secret sea, another lewd dream beginning to shape itself around her lubricious sobs. The only way to stop it

was to remember I was dead. Long years before, so long ago now that almost all

of that past is forgotten, I met death. I remember little of that loneliness and intimacy.

What I recall most clearly is that my soul was in my mouth. A dim time ago, a jellyfish had snared my heart. Its nematocysts burned the cavity of my chest and seared the length of my left arm. With it came the stink of my own putrefaction, my bowels voiding as I thrashed to the ground, the lunatic ringing of cicadas in my head as the high D of blood whined in my constricting vessels. The woman with hair like dead ivy took me into her mouth, her lovely face rising and falling with my hips.

I'd read somewhere an aboriginal healer's explanation of why some patients die. "The spirit is a boomerang. It is not meant to come back. It returns only when it misses its target."

And then, after a maddeningly long time, I was pulled from the secret sea, and the dreaming stopped. I heard weird voices, genderless, childlike: "Mr. Charlie! Can you wit what we say? Be hearty, my Mr. Charlie."

"Medullary compression of the gibbus. Man, man! Be you hearty or be you gone!" I was blind, and apart from those eerie voices, I could hear nothing. Wherever

I was smelled like nightfall in a place where rain gathered. Wild thoughts spilled through me: Was I in a coma, hallucinating all this? Were the strange voices and erotic episodes prodromal of brain damage? Or was I, in fact, dead, as I had long before surmised, remembering too well the wreath of thorns about my heart, too painful for me to draw even the shallowest breath? And then the famous fluorescence that opened into fumes as I lay dying, my consciousness rending into radiant vapors, curling into a space the color of pepper, looking back and seeing my body curled like a seared insect, my eyes rolled up, dead moons, and the wind's big silence whistling louder. Oh, yes, I was dead-I think...

"Faith, love, and hope are all in the waiting," said one of the sexless voices. "Mr. Charlie, can you wit what we say? Blink, blink, blink."

A hot light hurt my face and refracted into spectral halos. "Behold-the sign!"

"Nay. The retinal tissue hurts. He squints. Let him be gone. Remove the electrode."

A dizzy darkness seized me, and I plunged again into the secret sea, where a woman with breasts like peaches was bending closer...

Only in sex do we do what we mean, do we give what we in actual fact are.

A thousand gaudy butterflies burst through my brain. And I was alone again in the secret sea, the spelled sound of her wrought breathing all that remained of her. Until, like a cloud blown from a sunset, she appeared under me this time, looking over her naked shoulder languorously, both hands splayed across the muscles of her raised hips...

The salacious dream burst into darkness, and a childlike voice spoke: "Pregestation rituals! Speak no more on them. Hear me! We would know no more

of that. Tell us not of the salt mine in the blood, the match-head clitoris, the cobra head of the penis, vixen and rakes, the gates of mine thighs-these lewd truths that kindle the beast. Speak no more on them, we say! Instead speak, Mr. Charlie, of the mind-do tell of the relations of psyche and physics."

I startled alert, out of a dreamless void. The sex-obsessed sequences that had gone on interminably were gone. The weird voices were back-different ones this time. I tried to speak and managed to say: "Who? Who are you?"

"Stink and wonders! He be witful. What profit him to cry?" "We be Friends."

"So be our calling, Mr. Charlie. We be Friends of the Measuring Class Not of

Niels Abel."

'What?" I didn't understand. "Where am I?"

"You be Mr. Charlie in the lock-hole, at the hinge-split of the world." "Huh?"

"Wold I, nold I."

I was utterly confused. "I can't see," I complained. "I'm blind. Who are you? Where am I?"

"Spark his eyes, say I."

Briefly, sight returned to me-though I wished it hadn't. I was lying on a mirror-polished floor, cinnabar red, and reflected in it was my face-or not my face, not the features I remembered, but something like a hog-nosed snake with lidless human eyes peering from sea-anemone stalks and the pink cauliflower of brain matter all encased in a gel pod and chrome net. That was me? A scream roiled within me but could find no way through the cage of my shock. What had happened to the gift of my face? Where were my limbs, my torso? I huddled in the hut of my heart, stared meekly upward and saw-among tufts of dandelion seed lifting into the green air, human figures in transparent armor and, beyond them, the polished floor running toward vermilion sandstone arches and the antlers of dusk. Suddenly, my mind felt fragile.

"He be hearty, all right, and wind in his whiskers, as well!"

One of the armored figures had said that and gestured at me. I peered more closely at-it: It had a face of black glass or gelatin, flexible, expressive, a teenager's face, boy or girl, I couldn't tell. The lake of its dark features was placid, clear enough that I could see the cumulus cloud of its brain enlarging with the thunder of a dangerous thought. "Wax me mind! He be witful for sure.

Ho-Mr. Charlie, hear me! We Friends of the Measuring Class Not of Niels Abel would know a thing: Tell us of the relations between psyche and physics," and then, leaning closer, not sure I understood: "mind and matter. Ken you that?"