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
ATTENTION: ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATION
Most HarperPaperbacks are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, or fund-raising. For information, please call or write:
Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New
York, N.Y. 10022. Telephone: (212) 207-7528. Fax: (212) 207-7222.
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
