'Light is action,' Shau says, reciting the same programmed speech to the assembly that he used earlier to convince Grielle of his and Mei's sincerity. 'The photon, the ultimate unit of light, is the quantum of action. Photons, like actions, come in wholes. We cannot have one and a half actions. We cannot decide to speak, to walk this path, or do anything one and a half times. Action is whole. And so is the photon. They are the same. All actions are acts of light.'
Sitor Ananta watches with evident satisfaction the behavior of his subjects. When Mei begins to talk, he indulges himself by stealing a congratulatory look at the spectators and is pleased to see them listening attentively.
'Look how we are attached to the ends of things,' the jumper says, her voice thin and dreamy. 'Death is always a beginning. Yet, when I lost my family-when they died-I saw only the end of our time together. I could not let that go. But now and here among the broken stones, I know what to ask for from this uncharitable existence- and that is a new beginning, beyond where this body ends, beyond where all things end.'
From among the rubric stones of the rock garden beside the viewer stands, a bareheaded man in the green caftan of the vats waves gently, almost secretly, to Sitor Ananta. The agent does not recognize him, but the jolting thought occurs
to him that this could well be Charles Outis. The vats are to conclude their bodyweave at any time. The agent casually mists himself with degage to calm himself down and edges toward the stranger.
'Shau Bandar and I take this walk now to return to the reality of dreams,' the jumper continues. 'Happily, we release the zero in the bone...'
'Who are you?' Sitor Ananta whispers to the stranger in the green caftan. 'Who do you think I am?' the man asks. He wears a merry grin in a face with
minor imperfections-a slightly offset nose, muted cheekbones, asymmetrical
mouth-line-the tiny flaws common before gene manipulation homogenized beauty. He has an archaic face.
'You're Mr. Charlie,' the agent surmises.
'I'm Mr. Charlie's body,' the man answers gleefully. 'But I'm Munk! I'm the androne who faced you in the Moot and stole Mr. Charlie's brain. I'm the same one who destroyed your semblor in the wilds-'
'Munk?' Sitor Ananta's face clenches with incomprehension. 'That's not possible; Munk is an androne.'
'Yes!' Munk grabs the pastel pleats of the agent's jacket as if to shake sense into him. 'The Maat created me with an anthropic mind. And Buddy-the Maat-he coated my mechanical body with some kind of molecular code. It instructed the vats to transcribe my silicon mind into an organic brain-a human brain-this brain, in this body. I am Munk!'
Sitor Ananta rips himself free of Munk and falls back a step, stunned.
'We return to the invisible source and the destiny of all assembled things,' Mei recites woodenly. 'Proudly, we take the way out.'
Sitor Ananta stares avidly at the happy man before him, and his face blanches. 'If you're Munk, where is Mr. Charlie's brain?'
A triumphant smile further brightens Munk's giddy, human face. 'Haven't you heard? A deep-space patrol-class androne has emerged from the vats and claims to be Mr. Charlie. The Maat code instructed the vats to put his brain in my old body.'
'No.' Sitor Ananta's flesh tingles with fright at that thought, and he snorts a blast of degage. He pulls a viewsheet from his jacket, punches up current events, and the small hairs along his spine rise as the image of a giant,
silver-cowled androne appears. In the background he recognizes the purple air plants and multiplex galleries of Solis's Fountain Court.
'The Anthropos Essentia sent me ahead to tell you he's coming,' Munk says, pressing closer with obvious delight. 'They can't stop him. And neither can you.'
The degage withholds the agent's shock sufficiently for him to see clearly what he must do. He grabs Munk, douses him with hypnolfact, and leaves him slumped against a rubric stone. No one sees. They are all watching the passagers enter the airlock.
'No!' Sitor Ananta shouts. He barges through a line of onlookers, well aware that if Mr. Charlie's friends die on the Walk of Freedom, tradition forbids
their revival-and Mr. Charlie will have not only his torture at the hands of the Commonality agent to avenge but also the deaths of the only people he knows in this life.
Mei and Shau pause at the sound of their inductor's voice, and to the amazed shouts of the viewers, Sitor Ananta is quickly upon them, misting the air with the invisible smoke of ergal. The stimulant disrupts the hypnolfaction, and the jumper and the reporter sag to their knees under the shock of their chemically assaulted brains.
Sitor Ananta leaves them sitting on the crystal gravel inside the airlock and bolts through the scaffolding of the catafalque. No one in the perplexed gathering of witnesses tries to stop him, and he disappears into the rock garden.
By the time Charles arrives at the Walk of Freedom, the agent has hurried across Solis to the jungle-fronded colonnade at the edge of the wilds. Though he is a day too late for the last caravan to Terra Tharsis, he uses his Commonality credit to rent a dune climber. He knows if he can get back to the Pashalik, he will be safe. The Common Archive has no record of a Mr. Charlie; that was why he deprived Charles Outis of his name when he first stole him, feigning a
translator glitch. Now, if anyone comes forward, he can deny everything, and in the fullness of time he will find accidents for all of them. With much bravura, he starts the dune climber and departs the settlement in a cloud of rouge dust that follows his escape among the sentinel stones and balance rocks.
On the other side of Solis, Mei, Shau, and Munk are sitting in the viewer stands telling Exu and Hannas Bowan what has happened. The excited crowd that spills about them parts at the approach of the androne. Charles kneels before his human friends so he can stare into their faces and sees himself sitting between Mei and Shau, his
