“Make their problems your problem,” Fetya said at last. “Not other way around.”
“How do I do that?”
“Find out what humans need.”
“I’ve already tried that. They just weren’t buying any.”
“No, Roger. You made offer to sell what you had, not what they need. Is difference.”
“But I offered to sell myself, my innermost—”
“Still not what they need.”
“Yeah.”
Fetya was right, of course. But what the hell did the humans on Mars need? Something that only he, or one of the other Cyborgs, could supply. And, of course, something they weren’t already supplying, according to their “programming.”
That was the stumper.
The Russian Tearoom, Commercial Unit 2/0/1, June 11
Sometime during the previous afternoon as the conversation wandered from this to that, Ellen Sorbel had mentioned another Earth-based casual who was interested in hydrology and the workings of the Resources Department—a Mr. Sun from United Korea.
Demeter was resigned to finally having to meet the man in the flesh. So she had asked Sorbel to arrange an introduction. Demeter supposed she could always share her experiences at Harmonia Mundi as an ice-breaker.
The hydrologist met Demeter at the Golden Lotus and walked her up two levels and across the complex to brunch at Tharsis Montes’s most fashionable tearoom.
“They actually do serve tea there,” Sorbel explained. “Thick brown stuff they’ve been bubbling for a week or more in a genuine Russian samovar, imported from Petrograd, solid silver and heavy. Then they dilute it with vodka, whiskey, lemon juice, or whatever you want. It’s really disgusting.”
“Why does anyone go there?” Demeter asked, curious.
“Because it’s…” Ellen shrugged. “Where you can be seen, I guess. The tourists all love it.”
“I’ve never heard of the place.”
“Their little cakes are famous. Very crumbly, mostly sugar and butter—well, sorghum extract and some kind of saturated lipid, but you get the idea.” Ellen gave a wicked grin.
“You sure know how to whet my appetite.”
“That reminds me…If you’re getting tired of tooting around the Martian surface, you really ought to take a tour of the orbital power satellites. Especially the new one they’ve got under construction over Schiaparelli. Taking a V/R of microgravity can be a real kick. I can arrange a hookup for you, if you want.”
Demeter paused before replying. What would remind Ellen of such a thing? Had Demeter said something about it yesterday? Why should Sorbel be so interested in feeding her this new experience? Maybe…Demeter’s head whirled. It was culture-lag or time-shock or something. It was making her suspicious of the simplest friendly overtures. Or possibly she was just keyed up about meeting up her first foreign-national spy.
The Russian Tearoom’s decor was all white doth and porcelain, bright silver and chiming crystal. The walls had been whitewashed and then painted in stark black lines that were supposed to be barren trees in a Russian winter—from the perspective of an artist who had never seen a living tree. Somewhere in the background a recording of violins played Zigeunerweisen—Gypsy music for a Czarist setting. Oh, well, it could easily have been a chorus of Cossack voices. Next, Demeter expected to find waiters dressed in black jodhpurs, waist sashes, and red-silk blouses. Fortunately, however, the service was both automated and unobtrusive.
Ellen walked past the seating chart and into the main room, towing Demeter in her wake. She went right up to a center table where sat a fat young man in a conservative gray suit. Demeter recognized the face from her snooping in the directory of casuals three days ago. The eyes were more deeply buried in their folds of fat than the pixel dump of Sun Il Suk’s travel holo had suggested. His skin was much yellower, less healthy-looking. She glanced around surreptitiously for the servant, Chang Qwok-Do, but found no one fitting his image. Probably back in the kitchen, arranging to barbecue a dog or something.
“Sukie, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” Ellen was saying. “This is Demeter Coghlan, who’s also up from Earth. Demeter, Sun Il Suk is a distinguished visitor from United Korea.”
The young man shifted his bulk from its tight wedge against the table and flexed his knees. The movement passed for a polite effort to rise. He then raised his hand to her and tilted his head, the eyes narrowed in line with his outstretched fingers and cocked thumb, as if aiming a pistol.
Demeter grasped the hand—it was soft and damp—and pumped it.
“Won’t you ladies join me?” he wheezed.
Ellen Sorbel begged off with the claim of pressing duties and quickly departed the tearoom. That left Demeter and the grimly smiling Oriental. She accepted the chair opposite him.
“I understand, Miz Coghlan, that we are both interested in this planet’s natural resources. We two have visited many of the same places…Valles Marineris, for one.”
“Mine is a purely academic interest, I assure you.”
“Ah, yes. Academics. The databases tell me you have studied for your country’s foreign service. Perhaps you are planning to add exogeology to your curriculum vitae, then?”
“That’s a thought.”
“But you already have the credits required to take your degree,” Sun pointed out.
“Not quite enough,” she corrected.
“Sufficient, apparently, to know your business. That is, if you have accepted this assignment.”
“What ‘assignment’ would that be?”
“Why, to come here and investigate the Zealanders’ development in areas currently claimed by your own Texahoma…And by United Korea, of course.”
“You have an active imagination, sir.”
“Oh? Then Texahoma does not claim—?”
“No—about my being on assignment. I wish someone would pay me to take vacations and play the tourist. As it is…”
“As it is, Miz Coghlan, your grandfather pays you to do exactly that. And to ‘keep your eyes peeled.’ Or ‘get the wax out of your ears.’ Or whatever colorful Americanism the old man uses with his favorite granddaughter.”
“And why would he tell me that?” Demeter asked demurely.
“Come, my dear!” Sun Il Suk laid a confiding hand on her forearm. “Do not play the naive with me! Your august ‘Gee-dad,’ as you call him, is a political power in your country. Officially, at least, Alvin Bertrand Coghlan is next in line for the Big Chair in Austin. Unofficially, he already steers the party apparatus of the Inde-Goddam-Pendents, where the real authority exists.”
“Well…”
“Do I lie?” His smile was full of white teeth.
“No, but we Texahomans don’t like to talk so openly about a man’s prospects. It puts the kibosh on him, we say.”
“‘Puts the kai—?’”
“Another colorful Americanism.” Demeter showed her own teeth. Damn, but she was beginning to enjoy this! “For your collection.”
“Let’s be straight with each other, my dear. That’s the correct phrase, is it not? You and I are here for the same purpose—to find out what the Zealanders are up to and, if possible, throw a few logs in front of their wheels. Not—” He held up a hand before she could respond “—that it will matter in any practical way until long after both of us are mere dust blowing on the wind. No effort to terraform this planet will come to anything in less than a hundred years. Two hundred. But since we are all on Earth—or in Mars—for so dismally short a time, we two might as well make common cause and hay while the sun shines. Yes?”
“Are you telling me you are a paid spy, Mr. Sun?” Demeter made her eyes go wide.
“But of course! And United Korea pays well for my humble efforts. Does not yours?”
Coghlan was reminded of a quip by one of her professors, Simonson, who taught Industrial Espionage and Economic Theory: “Beware of geeks when baring grifts.” He must have had Sun Il Suk in mind.
“Now,” Sun con
tinued, “which of the current crop of North Zealand visitors do you favor? The farmers out at Elysium? The stargazer up on Phobos? Or the new one, the Cuneo woman?”
“Well, for my money—”
“Cuneo, of course. She does care for the future, especially in the Valles Marineris District. And yes, she knows all about the Texahomans’ secret plans for mutating the Martian atmosphere. If she were to discover our true purposes, yours and mine, she would do anything to inconvenience us. Probably even agitate to have us removed from this planet. Either back up the fountain or…out into the desert somewhere. That woman is capable of anything.”
“Aren’t you being a little dramatic? Even if she—”
“See for yourself! Tell me those aren’t the eyes of a fanatic!” Sun Il Suk gestured to a table just beyond the one next to them.
A lone woman sat there. The face might be the same one Demeter had scanned in her hotel room three days ago. In person the features were…blockier, somehow. The body was stockier than Demeter had imagined from the passport description. But the hair was entirely different: red and curly and cut full to the collar of her jacket, not the severe black helmet the grid had shown earlier. Of course, it could be a wig, one way or the other.
And Sun’s information was so good in other respects, why would he make a stupid mistake now?
“If that’s really her,” Demeter began, “and she really is the dangerous person you believe her to be, then is it safe to be talking about her so openly?”
The Korean pointed to a small white box sitting on the table linen, lost among the sugar and cream and the obligatory bud vase with a paper flower. It sat against the edge of the table between them and Cuneo. Demeter had noticed the box and thought it was a pillbox with some kind of medicine for Sun.
“Phase inverter,” he announced. “The device has the gift of turning any sound made within a circle of—oh, a meter and a half across—on its head. Feeds it right back into the air as pure gibberish. I’m surprised, Demeter, that your government hasn’t provided you with something similar.” He lifted one finger and raised his voice. “Personally, I think all North Zealanders smell like the breath of thousand-year-old eggs.”
Cuneo’s head shifted with a cup halfway to her lips. She looked over at Sun and Coghlan—but it was the distracted glance of a lone diner in a crowded place. There was no recognition, let alone sense of insult.
“See?” he said in a more normal voice. “Just white noise.”
Demeter noted in passing that any device so tiny yet powerful had to be cybernetically controlled—probably using sophisticated processing algorithms supplied through the local grid. And she would bet Texahoma dollars to the Russian Tearoom’s greasy little donuts that any conversation going into the white box got stuck somewhere in the grid’s capacious datastreams.
“You do like to live dangerously, Mr. Sun,” she said.
“No, my dear, I like to live. Period. Full stop. And you can put that on my gravestone…But please, do call me ‘Sukie.’ You’ll do that now, won’t you?”
Despite her every instinct, Demeter liked him.
Chapter 8
Hidden Meanings
Level 4, Tunnel 21, June 12
Jory waited nearly two hours in the corridor outside the Golden Lotus. To avoid questions, he busied himself with tools from his harness, a logic probe and beadlight, to take apart a motion sensor that nobody had actually reported broken. People didn’t make Creoles feel unwelcome or awkward inside the Tharsis Montes complex, but loiterers anywhere—human or modified—could arouse a certain level of apprehension. Jory didn’t want to answer questions from any of the Citizen’s Militia.
It was true he had no assigned tasks, not for the whole day. He was supposed to be resting and correcting an electrolyte imbalance specified by his renal filters. But that, like the wall sensor he was pretending to fix, was a polite fiction.
In reality, he wanted to see Demeter Coghlan again; yet he couldn’t appear to want to see her. So instead he waited outside her hotel room, busy with something important yet unobtrusive. That way, when she came out, he would happen to meet her accidentally. For Jory, it was a clever plan.
The door to Unit 9 opened behind him. The Creole, halfway up the wall and hanging by one hand from an open socket, turned with an eager look on his face.
“Why, Jory!” Demeter cried. “What are you doing here?”
He dropped to the floor on cat feet. “Uh…fixing a…uh…” He pointed back up the wall. “Sensor.”
“Right outside my door?” Demeter glanced up and down the corridor. “What a coincidence.”
“I…did want to see you again.” Jory stared at his toes.
It had never bothered him before that the impenetrable skin he wore was thickened and ridged across his soles, that his toes were both webbed and spring-tensioned for rebounding equally well off powdery sands and unyielding rock. Shoes were not only unnecessary but impossible for him. Now his feet seemed naked: wide and ugly—unlike hers, which leather pumps smoothed and tapered into delicate pieces of sculpture. Like a gazelle’s slender hoofs.
“That’s not a good idea, Jory.”
“But I thought—!”
What did he think? That he and this exotic creature from another planet could actually…be together? That her rich and important family back on Earth wouldn’t come hunting for her? That the two of them could set up housekeeping at Tharsis Montes on his stipend as a Grade 6 Maintenance Helper? That she would one day bear his children and then allow them, in their twelfth year, to be taken up, skinned and gutted, and transformed into Creoles like their father? Was that what he really thought?
“I thought you liked me,” he said simply.
“Oh, Jory!” Her face clouded up, “I do like you. You’ve been a good friend to me. But today I’ve got a schedule to keep and—”
“I have a surprise for you,” he blurted out.
Nothing was going as he’d planned.
“A surprise? But—”
“Come on!” He took her arm, gripping just above the wrist in a practiced lock, and pulled her forward, just enough to bring her off balance. “I’ll show you.”
“Couldn’t you just tell me?”
“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
She was already in motion, putting one foot out to catch her balance, when he steered her left down the corridor and started walking and talking—fast.
“I remember how you said you didn’t like the computers watching you when you—when you had personal functions to perform—so I tried to think of a place where they couldn’t see—and it came to me that there’s places like that all over the complex. You just have to think ahead and do a little preparation. So I decided to see if I couldn’t set something up for you—and me, too, if that’s how you like it.”
He was babbling badly, something his mother had always warned him against. “Better to be thought a fool,” she would say, “than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” But Jory sensed that Demeter Coghlan, a human addicted to words and explanations, would plaster her own interpretations over any unvarnished setting he presented her with. So Jory had to crowd her out with a flow of chatter, however feeble it might be.
As he talked, he took her down two levels and across the wide avenue, twice as broad and high as the average tunnel, that had been planned into the complex’s development. This strip would be called the Arcade when it was finished. It would feature commercial booths having their own walls and ceilings, erected under the arch of rock. Here Jory and Demeter were moving beyond the comfortable, pleasantly rounded-out districts of Tharsis Montes as it was, a pleasant village built around a transfer station. They were entering the harder geometric outlines of the larger Tharsis Montes that would eventually grow up under the volcanic slopes: a great trading center and perhaps even the hub of mercantile civilization on Mars.
Twenty paces farther, and the pair moved from orderly tunnels with finished floors and smooth walls, with electric
al and service connections, with light and air and fiberoptic, to a cold steel door anchored by four oblong steel dogs.
“Is that an airlock?” she asked.
“Not really.”
Bracing his fingers like the jaws of a wrench, Jory twisted the bolt caps in quarter turns until the dogs hung loose against the seal rim. Then he curled his fist around the vertical bar, levered his weight away from the door, and hauled it open against the pressure difference. A thin sighing, like the winds of Mars, sounded in the crack between door and frame.
Jory took her wrist again and stepped through.
“Wait a minute!” Demeter pulled back. “You may be able to breathe in there, but I can’t!”
“Sure you can! It’s good air, just not quite up to a full nine hundred millibars.”
Jory felt around at the base of the door behind the hinge, found the flashlight he’d left there, and clicked it on. The wide-angled beam showed up scarred walls of gray stone that still reflected occasional lines of scoring, parallel with the floor, where the drill jumbos had cut into the rock but the blasting mixture had failed to penetrate and completely cave the matrix. This tunnel was in a hand-drilled area, so near to the populated levels; there was no room to bring in a big borer—like the machine he and Demeter had watched working in the Valles—and make a clean sweep.
“It’s cold in here!” Her breath smoked.
“Sorry…You’ll warm up in a minute.”
He took her down twenty meters of openwork, around a left turn, and through another door, this one closed with a simple bar latch. Beyond it was a dead end, an irregular cavern with only a single entrance and not even a service duct cut into the walls yet.
“Here we are,” he announced with a grin.
“This is your surprise?” she asked cautiously.
Jory shone the light down on the roll of high-gee packing and the emergency blanket he’d laid over it. With a little imagination, it looked like a bed and was certainly just as soft.