SoliS

Mei ignores her and asks, "Mr. Charlie, what do you miss most about your old life-apart from your body, that is?"
alt was an avaricious and desperate time," Charles mutters, reminiscing. "I don't miss much. Just the people I knew then. My wife. My friends."
"Your wife," Shau's voice comes over the com-link. "What was she like?"
"She was a playwright. She wrote for children-and the child in adults. She kept getting younger the more she wrote."
"Was she frozen, too?" the reporter inquires.
"No," Charles replies sadly. "Everything she learned, she learned by heart. Even death."
"Shreek to starboard," Rey interrupts. "There must be a nest of them near here. They usually congregate along ejecta blankets."
Charles scans the starboard side and spots the mica-flash of a shreek high on the rampart of a nearby crater rim.
"Unlike the moon or Mercury," Rey lectures, "the craters on Mars have much larger ejecta blankets. Impacts here made a bigger mess. That's because the ground rock and soil on Mars contain subsurface water ice. On impact, the ice melted and the gooey ejects formed those characteristic smear contours that terrace the ground for kilometers around a crater. It makes roving difficult, but the biots love it because it provides a lot of shade surface."
The discussion veers into a description of martian flora and fauna, all biots genetically manufactured in earlier efforts to terraform the planet. While the com-link among the rovers is noisy with history and observations, Rey turns off Charles Outis and adjusts the olfact level of the following rovers' air supply, releasing narcolfact in the cabins. He sets a timer to do the same in the rover he is sharing with Grielle and excuses himself to go to the latrine. When he emerges, he is wearing a statskin cowl and gloves.
Grielle lies slumped in the deck chair where a moment earlier she had been vigorously denouncing the contamination of Mars's pristine sterility. Munk calls on the com-link, "Mr. Charlie? Jumper Nili?"
At the console, Rey brings the caravan to a stop. They are on a nacre flat of silica dust with the mesas of broken crater rims surrounding them. A sand cloud rises from a nearby scarp, and a trundle-carrier emerges from the shadow side of a ferruginous outcropping. The earner is pitted and rust-streaked and clanks across the rubble-strewn ground with a pulmonary wheezing.
"Marauders!" Munk cries out and jumps down from the dune climber. "Raza! Ready your laser cannon. Raza? Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Munk." The wing-hatch at the side of the lead rover opens, and Rey emerges. "Stay where you are."
"Where are the pilgrims?" the androne inquires.
"They are in the rovers, where I left them." Rey waves to the noisy trundle-carrier, and it smokes to a stop beside Munk with a viper whistle that stings the thin air. The side of the trundle-carrier lifts with a brutal bang, releasing eight big distorts in patched, remnant pressure suits and dented battle helmets. Just visible through their slit visors, burnt red eyes stare wildly from bone brows and angry faces of wet, twitching muscle.
As Munk whirls toward them across the sand bed, intent on ripping the marauders out of their suits, a figure appears. It has the full and exact appearance of a man, but because he steps out wearing only a gemdust shawl, slacks, and slippers, the androne assumes he is a semblor. Sure enough, infrascan reveals the figure is not human but a man-shaped volume of plasma, given shape and direction by remote control.
Munk instantly recognizes the effeminate and raffish features of Sitor Ananta in the face of the plasma being. The Commonality agent swaggers through the distort squad, unconcerned about the attacking androne. A cold smile touches his sharp lips.
The semblor points a small device at Munk, and a sound of shattering glass breaks across the androne's mind. Suddenly, he cannot move. He stands immobilized in the dust billow his attack stirred up.
Sitor Ananta approaches the paralyzed androne and taps a pseudofinger against Munk's breastplate. "You once worked for the Commonality," he says smugly. "lapetus Gap readily provided me with your signal codes. And now you are again what you always were-a puppet."
The semblor turns away abruptly and confronts Rey. "Where is the wetware?"
"I deactivated Mr. Charlie," Rey answers, "before I put the others to sleep.
I'll disengage him."
"Let the distorts do it," the semblor says. "Where?"
Rey gestures toward the second rover. "I patched him into the console. It's a delicate hookup. You'd better let me free him."
"Tear him loose," Sitor Ananta orders the distorts, and they lurch toward the rover. "He won't be needing to communicate anymore."
"And my credits?" Rey queries.
"Already in your account at your new house in the Honor of Giants," the semblor promises. "We'll bang up your rover so you can claim you struggled to get away. But the other equipment will have to be sacrificed with the bodies."
"Fine, fine," Rey agrees. "You're paying me enough to replace them ten times over."
Munk listens to this from far inside his locked body. The signal codes have shut down all his primary programming-his motor reflexes and proprioception-but his C-P program remains alert and stares helplessly through his sensory apparatus as the distorts swarm toward Charles's rover.
The androne shifts his focus internally, to where the shatterglass sounds of the interfering signals propagate. Outside, time seems to slow down as he accesses the virtual space of the signal that has invaded his body. A voice gels out of the static:
Androne Munk, this is lapetus Gap comptroller advising you that your signal codes have been released to Commonality agent Sitor Ananta through the Rogue And ronc Reclamation Decree. Recognition of your contra-parameter programming, however, now indicates that your rogue status may be self-justified Herewith, then, I am activating your conscience reviewer. You now have one point three seconds to justify your rogue behavior. If you cannot define your current
status to the satisfaction of the reviewer, this signal will permanently shut down your C-P program. Begin now.
Munk reviews all his behavior since activating his C-P program in the cold reaches off Saturn. "My actions speak for themselves," he says inwardly to the reviewer. But his body remains rigid.
Through his visor, he sees the array of distorts aiming toward Charles's rover. "I am the protector of an archaic human being," he announces. And still his body stays locked.
"My C-P program has guided my actions since lapetus Gap," he avers. "It guides me now. Respect it and release me."
Nothing.
"I have done no wrong! Allow me to fulfill my program."
Sitor Ananta is caught with a glint of amused malice in his sharp eyes, and Munk tries to amplify the rage that this malevolent expression makes him feel. But to no avail.
"What do you want from me, then?" Munk bawls.
No answer. He reviews his past actions again, looking for infractions. "I killed Aparecida by default," he asserts. "I had to save human lives."
The glass of the signal codes continues crashing inside him.
He pleads. He cajoles. He provides an eloquent colloquy on the nature of will and imagination, concluding with the Blake quote, "No Body save the Soul!"
The paralysis continues.
"There's nothing more I can do," he finally admits. "I have no other defense but that I am alive. Does that count for anything?"
The bursting glass resounds louder. One-tenth of a second remains. Satisfy the reviewer now, or you will be terminated.
Munk can think of nothing more to say; knowing it is useless to repeat himself, he says nothing. The light of the world is pellucid, flecked with glints of silica dust suspended in the air. This is the last he will see of anything, he accepts. One last giddy instant remains. Morning vapor clouds streak the sky like stretch marks. The rusty buttes and parapet rocks sink deeper into his sight. They will continue their billion-year journey into sand. And the sight of them, hard and real, hammers him free of all abstraction. And for that last instant of his being, the androne sees he is a mirage sparkle in