SoliS

The rovers have backed together, and crablike handroids from under the chassis
quickly erect a transparent pavilion. Protected by the warm air pressure of the tent, the pilgrims frolic in the fainter gravity. Shau Bandar whirls triple somersaults in the air, and Rey lifts the back end of the dune climber with his bare hands to check the wheel bearings. In the orange shine of the thermalux at the center of the pavilion, Grielle Aspect opens her long-sleeved arms and beckons the others.
"I am the Light," she chants. "Stranger to nothing. I stand against the ancient life of remembered darkness and summon all of you to yourselves. The body is a drug. It deforms consciousness with its hormones and secretions. I am here to tell you to drop the body. Let yourself go. Become the light you are."
Buddy sits on the runner guard, looking groggy. Mei Nili jumps from the back of the rover and with two practiced leaps crosses the enclosure and is standing at the clear wall gazing down toward Munk.
"Good to see you again, Munk," she whispers on her link line to the androne.
She can't see me in the dark, Munk knows. She wonders what I make of this odd human behavior.
"Are we supposed to be doing anything?" Charles asks over their link. "I mean, are we participants?"
A laugh bursts from Grielle. "Whether you know it or not, you are all participants." She swivels about, pointing fingers at each of them. "Rey Raza wants the credits and thrills. Shau Bandar wants credits and fame. Mei Nili wants escape. Buddy wants escape. People, you are all participants. Even you, Mr. Charlie, even you want a body and a future."
"What about Munk?" Mei asks. "Isn't he a participant?"
Grielle snuffs the thermalux. Sheets of fire hover in the sky over the dark, riven terrain. "All consciousness is light." She wheels around in the ebb shadows, her arms outstretched under the blazing sky. "But the body deforms us with its chemical powers, it addicts us to its hungers. The body is a drug. Let the body go."
She dances up close to Shau and says directly to his recorder, "Wanting is not the way. I invite each of you to become the Light that you are but do not know."
"What do we have to do?" Charles Outis asks.
Rey rolls his eyes, and Buddy rests his forehead in his hand.
"There is only one path to the absolute freedom of pure consciousness and light, dear Mr. Charlie," Grielle says, pointing her body toward the rover where he watches through the sensors. "One path-but not the path you've taken, Mr. Charlie. Not more wanting. Not more organic life. The one path is death."
"You really think there's consciousness after death?" the archaic man asks.
"Let's get this ritual done," Rey almost whines. "We've got a long way to go."
With a flourish of her robes, Grielle shifts her attention to the reporter, who is still bounding among the rovers, flipping and twisting with clumsy vigor through the air. "Bandar, dear, educate our archaic guest, will you? Show him an infoclip or something on consciousness and light. Ignorance is such an ugly trait"
Grielle disappears into the back hatch of the lead rover, and Rey follows. Immediately, the flat, crablike handroids emerge and begin disassembling the tent. Shau back-flips into the rover and conks his head sharply enough so that he collapses to his knees and retreats with a sheepish grin. Mei waves to the residual darkness in the canyon below where Munk waits and then joins Buddy in the second rover.
"There may be consciousness after death," she tells Charles, plopping into a deck chair, "but no one who's died is talking."
"That woman Grielle is a fanatic," Charles mutters. "Religion doesn't seem to have gotten any less irrational in the millennium I've been gone."
"Actually," Munk comes in over the link, "the Acts of Light is not a religion. They don't postulate a supreme being, nor do they codify human behavior-apart from their willingness to terminate their lives. Most of their belief system is actually founded in science. Close empirical observation has shown that consciousness is not a state or function of the brain, nor does it interact with the brain."
"How can that be?" Charles asks.
It's true," the androne asserts. "Memory, reflection, planning, learning, choice, and creativity all take place regularly in the brain without consciousness. Unconscious brain activity guides these functions. They're all automatic brain processes. Consciousness itself is nothing more than a witness."
"Where does Grielle's light' come in?" Charles inquires with an audible frown.
Shau snorts. "Even in your time, science knew that matter and energy had equivalence. That all matter had once been energy at the time of the Big Bang-"
"But there's more," Munk submits. "If consciousness is not a function of the brain, as science shows, then it may well be, as the Acts of Light decree, a standing wave pattern in a wider dimension, the tesseract range. When any neurology-carbon or silicon-gets complex enough, it receives the standing wave, which is there all along. In that way, consciousness enters life and suffers the indignities of physical limits until death liberates us."
"Then what?" Charles asks.
"Then the Guest is free!" Grielle Aspect announces over the link, "if you live long enough, Mr. Charlie, you will feel the rightness of this. Life is a physical phenomenon. Consciousness is not!"
Dust devils tilt over the red land. Sand blooms swell on a distant horizon like giant sorrel mushrooms. Ball light-fling bounces over cobbles and the solemnities of boulders under a perfectly clear, pink sky. Strewn over the gritty terrain at unexpected intervals are the remains of earlier caravans smitten by dust storms-flex-treads twisted in the sand like pocked snakeskin, crazed pieces of blackglass embedded in roan dune drifts, and bleached bones scattered like so much debris across the gravel under the blast of heaven.
Charles Outis is surprised to see human skulls among the shattered ribs and femur bones protruding from the coagulated red sandstone. He interrupts the lively discussion among the other pilgrims to ask, "Is there no respect for the dead anymore?"
"Not in the wilds," Shau Bandar replies nonchalantly. "What happens out here simply happens."
"It is my suspicion that the isolationists of Soils strew these bones to dissuade travelers," Grielle Aspect says, to which the others respond with grouchy mumbles.
Dune lemurs scurry along the gully of an ancient streambed. Suddenly, from behind them, a gleam of air shimmers like a pursuing will-o'-the-wisp.
"Shreek!" Rey Raza calls. "Shreek on the portside!"
Virtually invisible in the sunlight, the transparent predator appears at first as a blur. Then one of the bigeared, tufty-furred dune lemurs is plucked from the scattering bunch, and the carnal face of the thing reveals itself as the lemur is macerated in midair.
"It looks like a huge angelfish," Charles remarks, observing the airborne beast's thin protoplasmic body and whirring fins.
"But," Mei Nili adds, "with the face of a piranha."
With a jaw-thrust blur of teeth, the shreek swiftly bolts down the lemur, the prey's shredded flesh and crushed bones becoming a mere shadow in the clear bulk of the carnivore. And then, in a ripple of caught sunlight, the beast is gone.
"Good heavens, what was that creature it ate?" Charles asks.
"Dune lemur," Rey answers.
"A biot," Munk adds over the link from where he rides on the dune climber. "They were templated from a hybrid of the Gila monster and the mongoose."
"Weren't there wild animals in your time?" Shau inquires.
"Of course," Charles responds, "but nothing like that. Most predators in my time lived in game preserves."
"Not unlike the reserves the Maat have provided for anthros on Earth in our time," Grielle says, her sarcasm palpable even over the com-link. "We're wild animals to them. And we're on the loose."