together, the jumper marvels again at the diversity of human life outside the reservation.
The martians flitter away across the Fountain Court in their eerie synchronized gait, and in moments they are lost among the hive bustle of numerous other martians crossing through the plaza's chords of sunlight and broken spectra.
'Clades,' Grielle Aspect snickers from behind Mei. 'I'm glad to be getting away from this genetic circus. You should come with me.'
Mei tilts her head back and gives a sour look. 'Maybe when I'm as old as you, I'll be ready to end it, too.'
'Oh, I'm not ending it, Mei dear.' Grielle smiles seraphically. 'I'm becoming light-true freedom. No more of this shapeshifting---morphs, clades, and plasmatics-it's disgusting. The light is pure and timeless.'
'If you believe that,' Mei says, pointing with her eyes to Grielle's wimple and opaline apron, the traditional garments of a passager, 'why are you paying
to revive Shau?'
'Rey Raza died trying to save him-to save all of you,' Grielle says softly, her eyes unfocusing. 'I saw him die. It was a terrible thing. I would bring him back if I could.' Her gaze tightens. 'But I can't. So, it's the journalist. Maybe he'll see the light and die properly. If we leave the flesh in the right way, we never have to come back, you know.'
Sitor Ananta steps past them to greet the approaching counselors. A whiff of a cold fragrance tingles in his wake, and Mei experiences a discoloring in her soul. 'That agent is using olfacts to sway the people around him.'
Grielle winks slyly. 'Don't you just envy him? Even I can't afford olfacts that effective. If I could, you'd all be passagers.'
The three anthro counselors show their palms, introduce themselves, and conduct the pilgrims on a walking tour of Greater FreeSolis. The settlement is large, but the interface among the clade cantonments, the anthro commune, and
the Anthropos Essentia enclaves is a triangular plaza with the Fountain Court at the center. Strolling across the garnet flagstones, they have the opportunity to see all the human types in their bright and often outre garb: the martians with their back-bending stalk legs and bouffant manes, the whippet-thin wraiths of
the Anthropos Essentia in their orange frocks and headwraps, and the aboriginals looking so simian in their contour jackets and flexfabrics. A counselor points out that even some of the elaborate air plants hanging among the strati-form galleries under the blue-glass canopy are plasmatics, humans in wholly inhuman form. Another counselor explains how selective Solis has been about the numbers and types of human variants it has integrated within its biotecture.
Their patter is endless, and Mei interrupts to ask where Mr. Charlie is. In reply, the counselors talk about the vats and point out on a holoform map of the settlement two compact orange pyramids at the old end. Then Grielle wants to see the Walk of Freedom, and a section of the map expands to show the famous
crystal-gravel path leaving the ebony gate and curving under a skull-mounted catafaique into a field of human bones and mummified corpses.
At tour's end, on a balcony overlooking the Rainbow Court, there is a meal of vegetables and hatchery steaks. Sitor Ananta is magnificent with the counselors, amusing and charming them. Several times Mei tries to direct the conversation to the olfacts, but no one seems to care. The meal continues with amicable cheer, eventually even the jumper laughing with the others over Grielle's pantomime of
a martian.
'When will I see Mr. Charlie?' Mei asks the counselors after the meal. The counselors confer as they lead the way between two silvery walls of
electrostatically suspended water and up an automated rampway to a bunker of black, blockcut rock scribbled with ivy. This is the anthro lodge where the agent will be staying, and he lingers under the dragon-eye lintel for the counselors' reply.
They can't agree on whether the bodyweave will be complete in two or three days. The vats are busy designing clades for the cold new worlds beyond the Belt.
'Too late,' Grielle decides. 'I bad hoped to speak with him before my
passage-you know, dears, I really want to confront the poor man with the error
of his ways. But I don't think he's slept in his flesh a thousand years to argue with me. So I am gone. Tomorrow I commit my last act of light as a human.'
Mei is left in the purple-tile vestibule of the hostel where she will reside until she earns enough credit for her own suite. Grielle and the counselors depart into the saffron afternoon, and the jumper uses the password the counselors have given her to enter a cloister of blackglass cubicles.
From inside her own chamber, the walls to the corridor and the outside are transparent, and she can see the serrated rooftops, a hint of the clustered rainbows from the Fountain Court, and the broken shoulders of the crater rim, rubescent in the long sunlight.
'Jumper Nili,' a familiar voice calls from the doorway. Shau Bandar stands there wearing the green caftan of the vats and a thick grin. 'Are you in there?'
Mei hurries to touch the entry pad, and he strides in, the door sliding shut behind him. He pivots, displaying his partly shaved scalp, the close-cropped
hair like red hackles. Without his face paint, he looks no different from any of the men in the hamlets of her reservation on Earth.
'I've been in the beverage stall across the way,' he says, 'waiting for you to return. So what do you think? How did the vat doctors do?'
'I think it's a tough way to get a haircut.'
They laugh and skim palms, and he plops onto a flexform chair and grins at her. 'They say I was dead for days.
