Solis Read online

  Solis

  Attanasio, AA

  SoliS

  A. A. ATTANASIO

  HarperPrism

  An Imprint of HarperPaperbacks

  STAND OFF

  "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 enlargin
g 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?"

  "I don't understand," I whined, unnerved by all that was happening to me. "Please-help me."

  "He be witless in the ways," the figure closest to me said over it's glass-plated shoulder to the others. "I were wrong about him."

  "The electrode be the way. Use it."

  A four-fingered hand manipulated something above my line of sight, and a ticklish pain trilled through me. Abruptly, I saw shimmery blue words scrolling across my field of vision, and I heard a voice very like my own saying, "The expressions of energy, matter, forces, and fields are functions of an abstract

  geometry. That is the relation of matter and mind." "Stink and wonders!"

  "Wax me mind!"

  I couldn't stop myself. I went on to say, "The discipline of physics is pure geometry. Matter is pure mind. Of course, when we think of geometry, we presuppose the spatial configurations of form or the temporal harmonics of sound. Yet geometry in itself is neither spatial nor temporal. It loans itself only secondarily to such descriptions. Geometry is first of all a purely noetic system of rates, ratios, intervals, agreements, and alignments. Its components exist independent of things measured, an abstract typology, a strictly internal self-description."

  "Say more, Mr. Charlie! Wit us wise of matter and mind."

  And so I did. Just as before, when I was adrift in the secret sea of erotic images, now I hovered in an airy space of words and numbers, only this time what I was experiencing floated across my vision, outside my body. The figures in transparent armor had gathered around me, and I could see the thunderhead thoughts behind their rapt faces as the blue words vapored by: "Spin, interval, charge, and moment are discrete properties, defined in integer and half-integer values, rational functions and ratios, or nonconstructable numbers functioning

  as constants. Sure, we've been duped before by illusory geometries-like Pythagorean intervals, ideal Euclidean properties, and Kepler's harmonics of planetary orbits-so it's natural to be leery of physics as geometry. Nevertheless, mapped schematically, mass, coupling constant, spin, angular momentum, and charge generate polyhedra. Take, for example, the plotted relations of quarks and leptons on a horizontal plane-displaced vertically proportional to their respective charges, they polarize the angular coordinates of an ideal cube! Think on that."

  "As blood is the bride to iron-he be right! Pull the electrode, and we be hard thinking on that."

  "Aye, and the void bites its tusks!"

  The blue words vanished, and the air smelled all at once of boiled milk. I noticed that, beyond the drifting tufts of dandelion, the twilit sky was precise with stars. I felt the silence of the wind opening in me again, and then

  darkness came on.

  The fire-flower of numbers and words opened and closed around me time and again. And I found myself square-summing the real and imaginary parts of a field specifying spin states of particles, measuring angular momenta, and plotting straight lines in the Regge trajectory. "Abstract geometry defines matter," I heard myself say.

  Then I performed conceptual rotations on the doublevalued quality of fermions-"You know, matter particles"-in an abstract superspace with anticommutators and revealed deep angular identity with the class of

  bosons-"Force particles! Do you see what I'm saying? Geometry shows they are the self-same entity!"

  I babbled about heterotic string theory and the summary familial group designated E8xE8, reflecting a generalization of crystal symmetries, a strictly abstract pattern produced by categorical requirements applying directly to the macroscopic and observable order of structures. "Euclidean geometries are staring out from nature's apparent chaos. Salts, viruses, seashells, pinecones, honeycombs, galaxies, and galactic sheets hundreds of light-years huge!

  Man-oh-man, it's just like the hermetics said:

  As above, so below. Thetic geometries in purely abstract space informing real constituents of experience! Matter copulating with mind copulating with matter. It's obscene!"

  I am a blue animal that trembles softly. I am a mind without a body calling to you. Can you hear me? Do you see my smile in my words, sad and evil? Sad because I am utterly alone. Evil because I am dead and yet I live. My voice radiates through space. Past lives drift by. The damned descend into the darkness. Can

  you hear me? Listen. A dead man visits you. Listen to me-someone.

  Look, this sounds like ranting to you. I know. I want to speak calmly,

  rationally now. I want to say the truth as I've known it. I want to say a

  story-my story. Say a said. And more. Say a body. Say a way back. Say at least a place. Say something. But no one hears me. Do you hear me?

  "Mr. Charlie?" A youthful, genderless voice spoke. "Can you hear me?"

  A surge of darkness woke me. I felt the old, delusive joy that I was dreaming and I was about to wake to my former life. My wife would be asleep next to me, and I would wake her and ignore her grogginess to yammer about my nightmare.

  "Mr. Charlie, I know you're awake."

  The viscid barbs of the jellyfish's tentacles burned the length of my left

  arm, my heartvalves clogged with sili-cates, and my blood turned to coral. I was dead. Whereupon the stars drag their darkness into a future without me. .

  "I am going to activate your visual cortex now, Mr. Charlie. I need to talk with you."

  Rays pierced my blindness, cutting blackness into swatches of vision, and I

  saw that I was apparently suspended midair, for I could look down and see that I had no body. A spongy, circular floor was directly below me. Outside its perimeter, tiles of tessellated turquoise and black marble supported swerves of amber that, after a moment, I saw were chairs and a long table. An adolescent girl sat at the table with a gold stylus in her hand. Her hair was the color of

  a violin, slant-cut across her left eye, cropped high over her small right ear, and highlighted with a few tiny firepoints of gemdust.

  She touched the stylus to a moonpiece, a silver shadow-smudged disc compact as a watch face, and the clarity of my vision sharpened. I saw the vague line of

  her eyebrows, the topaz light in her tight stare, the carats of sweat on her forehead and upper lip, the cilia rimming her nostrils, the pulsebeat in her throat, the faceted lump of her Adam's apple-and realized that she could be a he.

  He touched the stylus again. My vision pulled back, and I saw him or her sitting in a swerve of amber, wearing black silk pajamas with red dragon-veins.

  I looked away, surveying where I was: Slabs of jasper circled us like dolmen rocks, the spaces between them paned with crystal sheets flecked with mica. I peered upward into a boiling light of dust motes towering into thermals of acid clouds. The warm air smelled of jasmine. "Where am I?"

  The hermaphrodite touched the stylus to the moonpiece on the amber table and told me, with lips not in synch with what was spoken: "You are dead."

  Blue words squiggled in the air before me:

  702-gram heart with a moderately dilated right atrium and a 0.3-0.5-cm hypertrophic right ventricle with focal fibrosis; the terminal episode originated in the left ventricle with its 1.5-cm hypertrophy and 5 x 4-cm anteroseptal and 9 x 7-cm posterolateral infarctions. Cause of death: arrhythmia. Subject: Outis, Charles.

  At the sight of my name, a strand of razor wire seemed to thrum in my gut, and

  I reflexively looked down and immediately snapped my gaze back up, brutally aware I had no gut. "What's happening to me?"

  "I think you already know, Mr. Charlie."

  "Who are you?" I was frightened by this being's manipulation of me. "I am Sitor Ananta."

  I stared hard at the creature, noted its fully human form, its five-fingered hands. "You're not like the others."


  "The others are the reason I am here," Sitor Ananta said. "But first tell me what you think you know."

  I intended to remain defiantly silent and stare down my tormentor, but Sitor Ananta touched the stylus to the moonpiece, and I spoke: "I am dead. But before I died I had arranged for my head to be cryonically stored upon my death. Now I believe I have been revived-by my future-by you."

  "Yes. What you surmise is true, Mr. Charlie."

  Shock occulted my vigor. I dizzied, felt my heart would simply burst-but I had no heart! Sitor Ananta used the stylus, and my horror dimmed to astonishment. "Why am I here? What are you going to do with me?"

  "I merely wish to question you. About the others. I prefer your cooperation. The information I seek can be gleaned directly from your brain, but that process

  is ternbly laborious and very expensive. You can, if you want to, simply tell me what I need to know and spare me all that."

  A hellswirl of panic seized me as I understood: In this new time, I was but an object, a thing, three pounds of electrified glutinous tissue teased with electrodes.

  The stylus moved once more, and I calmed down. The chamber filled with light, or seemed to. All that remained of my terror was a taste of loneliness. "Where am I?"

  A thug's smile creased Sitor Ananta's young face. "Your life is measured on a calendar made of dust, Mr. Charlie, yet you want to know everything-as if anything matters for you anymore. Have you seen yourself-what you look like now? Have you seen your final face?"

  My voice creaked like a pine: "I have."

  A laugh punched from Sitor Ananta. "The dead come back for laughs, Mr. Charlie. Or as wetware. The Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group used you the way you, in your time, would have used an electronic toy to inform neophytes. Shall we see what program they chose to store in you?"

  The stylus swizzled on the moonpiece, and I spoke in a voice orphaned from my will: "In order to locate an electron in a specified spin state at a given moment, measurement must give the differences in the phase fields-parallel and antiparallel components of spin, et cetera. There is no absolute phase. The real and imaginary parts of the wave amplitude are indistinguishable, that is, they can't be separated in some absolute way. Such constraints are functions of observer consciousness-what we humanists call mind. Adopted conventions specify the signs of complementary values, what physicists refer to as a deep-gauge symmetry. The observer perspective is what's important here. The relative ascription of plus and minus signs, used to define oscillations of wave amplitudes, requires the component of V-1, the imaginary value called i. It's