“You really should go back and talk to the administrators about your fusion generator,” Dorrie’s silvery voice warned. “Time on fuel supply is growing short…Only eight hundred and thirty-two Martian days left! Do something about it!”
“All right, Dorrie, I’ll talk to them,” he agreed—if only to turn the warning image off.
“What?” Shtev asked, from his right side.
“I said I’ll see to it.”
“Good. Preserve us all.”
Roger nodded. After a few more paces, he glanced over to his left again but Dorrie was gone. She had not even left phantom footprints in the ochre sands.
Chapter 1
She’ll Be Coming Down the Fountain When She Comes
Tharsis Montes Space Fountain, June 7, 2043
Demeter Coghlan plunged toward Mars in a blaze of glory.
The tiny passenger pod attached to the space fountain fell at an acceleration of 3.72 meters per second squared, at a rate equal to the pull of Mars’s gravity. At this stage of her eight-hour descent from geosynchronous—or was that areosynchronous?—orbit down to the planet’s surface, the dynamic braking of the car’s magnetic couplings restrained her hardly at all. No more, really, than a shuttle rocket in reentry mode.
Coghlan’s understanding of the underlying physics of the Hyde Industries, Inc. fountain technology was sketchy at best. Somewhere along the equator near a place called Tharsis Montes, a linear accelerator stood upright at the bottom of a well dug deep under the Martian surface. The accelerator shot a series of ferrite hoops, each a meter in diameter and weighing almost a kilogram apiece, straight up into the sky. Moving at some tens of kilometers per second, this fountain of objects created a tremendous kinetic energy. At the upper end of their flight, the hoop-stream entered an electromagnetic torus that functioned like the pulley wheel in a sheave block: bending the stream back on itself to descend at gravitationally increasing speeds toward the planet’s surface. There the stream entered another torus which passed it across to the accelerator again, completing a closed loop of flying rings.
The system resembled a chainsaw held together by the forces of inertia and magnetism.
The impact of a gazillion of these iron rings against the magnetic field of the top block had originally boosted it—and the freight-transfer station built around it—high into the Martian sky. The top of the fountain extended from the well at Tharsis Montes almost up to synchronous orbit. As the top station had sailed aloft during the initial stages of construction, the engineers fabricated and attached a series of collapsible shells to its lower perimeter, enclosing the ever-lengthening stream against random winds at ground level and providing spaced magnetic deflectors that nudged the higher segments eastward to counteract the planet’s Coriolis forces.
In those early stages, bringing the hoop-stream up to speed had consumed nine-tenths of the system’s energy. The flying rings had consumed whole quads of electricity, enough to drive the industrial sector of a fair-sized moon. That initial input had come from a cloverleaf of solar farms and fission piles constructed on the planet’s surface for this purpose. Once the operation was balanced, however, it required only minor additions of maintenance energy to stabilize the stream and the structures it supported against the pull of Mars’s gravity. The power plants could then be diverted to serve other needs in the local economy.
The fountain only required small inputs to replace the minuscule amounts of kinetic energy that the freight handlers bled off in the form of electricity. They used this current to pass cargo and passenger pods to and from the interplanetary ships that crossed above the tower in intersecting orbits. The electricity also worked mass drivers, which pushed goods and people up and down the exterior tower shell between the top station and the surface.
Although the system had cost billions of Neumarks to build and power up, it now saved as much or more every year in the costs of rocket propellant and hull ablation—not to mention the occasional pyrotechnic tragedies—associated with orbital shuttles. Being wholly electric in operation, the Tharsis Montes Space Fountain was as quiet, non-polluting, and safe to ride as a trolley. In principle and structure this system copied the Earth-based fountains operated by the U.N. at Porto Santana, Brazil; Kismayu, Somalia; and Bukit-tingi, Indonesia. Like Tharsis Montes, these were all on the planet’s equator and served geostationary transit points, although the technology worked at all altitudes and at any latitude; the small fountain at Tsiolkovskii, for example, was nowhere near the Moon’s equator.
Although the Mars fountain’s supporting stream of flying rings was silent and vibrationless in operation, their iron composition did induce momentary currents in the tower’s metallic superstructure. These showed up as ionization along its outer surfaces. Against the star-filled blacks of space surrounding the tower’s upper segments, Demeter sensed an aura of plum-colored light at the periphery of her vision. But as she neared the planet s surface and entered what remained of Mars’s indigenous atmosphere, the blacks faded to salmon pink and the glow dimmed to a patina of lilac over the gray of finished steel.
Her mother’s colors.
Despite the massive energies involved in erecting and maintaining the space fountain, at this point in her trip Demeter Coghlan was still essentially in freefall, after seven months of microgravity on the transport ship coming up from Earth. Looking out the viewport past the purple mists of atmospheric ionization, she was barely conscious that she floated on her stomach with her heels higher than her head Demeter didn’t at all mind a few more hours of swimming weightlessness; she was just glad she could finally give up those mandatory three hours of osteopathic exercise per ship’s day. Demeter hated jogging on the wheel with her arms and legs strapped into spring-weights—even if the workout had taken off thirteen pounds of cellulite that she really could afford to lose.
Craning her neck, and pressing her cheek against the cold glass—or whatever clear laminate they used for pressure windows here—she tried to look down and see the base of the fountain. The column of violet light seemed to touch the ground in the wide caldera of a shallow lava cone. Coghlan thought this was Olympus Mons itself but decided to query that fact with her personal chrono, which tied into the local computer grid whenever it could. Certainly the fountain’s transit pod would have an RF antenna in the walls or something for the convenience of passengers and their cyber servants.
“Hey, Sugar!” Demeter whispered into the titanium bauble on her bracelet. “What’s that-there volcano I’m looking at?”
“Could y’all be a tad more specific, Dem?” came back the pearly voice with the Annie Oakley twang she’d programmed into its microchips.
“Well, I’m riding the space fountain on Mars, y’see, and we’re just about at the bottom. There’s this big crater right below us—I thought maybe Olympus Mons, you know? Looks like it could be, oh, sixty or eighty klicks in diameter, with an ash cone maybe five or six times that wide. So, is this an important piece of real estate or what?”
“Please wait.” The lag must have been mere microseconds, because Sugar spoke again almost at once. “Regretfully, I can establish no interconnect with network resources. Electromagnetic interference inherent to the operation of Hyde Industries’ space elevators must be blocking my radio signals. However, knowing that we were going to Mars, I did pack some general history and geography into spare memory. Want to hear it?”
“Go on ahead.”
“Olympus Mons—with a diameter of six hundred kilometers and an elevation of twenty-six, the Solar System’s largest volcano—is located at twenty degrees north latitude. That would be almost twelve hundred kilometers from your present position. I doubt even the southern shield of the Olympus traprock would be visible from your current elevation on the fountain’s lower structure. On the other hand, the transaction coil for the Mars elevator is based at one-hundred-twelve degrees west longitude, zero degrees latitude, adjacent to the population center known as Tharsis Montes. That is the second-larges
t tunnel complex built by Earth’s colonists to date.”
“I already know that, Sugar.”
“Ahh, right…So, the nearest natural feature of any prominence is Pavonis Mons, with a height of twenty-one kilometers. This is one of the largest calderas of the Tharsis Ridge. After accounting for variables like pod elevation, atmospheric density, and probable dust-storm activity, I deduce this to be the cone you-all are describing, Dem. Chance of error is less than twenty percent.”
Coghlan summed up. “Okay, so Tharsis Montes is the name for the colony—”
“And this whole volcanic plateau,” Sugar put in.
“—while Pavonis is the big crater. Got you. Thanks, Sugar.”
“No never mind, Dem.”
Ever since her accident, Demeter Coghlan had placed certain operating restrictions on her chrono. For one thing, she had voice-programmed it with a persistent courtesy, rendered in such null phrases as “please” and “never mind.” That didn’t make Sugar any more human, but Coghlan found it easier to relate to a machine that talked like one. For another, she had limited the unit’s on-line access to the planetwide computer grid. Consequently, Sugar had to announce where she was getting her data from and the probability for error in any calculation—something most cybers omitted in talking to humans these days. As a third precaution, whenever Coghlan went to bed she put Sugar and her charm bracelet in a drawer or under a water glass. That way, the device wouldn’t pick up anything she might say in her sleep and report it back to the grid. Probably paranoid behavior on her part, but all the same it made Coghlan feel better.
Demeter now had little to do but watch the crater rise out of the Martian plain, coming up like an ancient puckered mouth to kiss the descending pod. She had the vehicle practically to herself, having boarded it between the rush of docking transports. Aside from several containers marked FRAGILE, which could not withstand the forced drop of a freight pod, there were only two other passengers.
One was a dark-skinned gentleman in a sea-green turban and knotted beard who spoke no English, strapped himself tightly into one of the contour seats against the suspension of microgravity, and haughtily immersed himself in the shimmering holos of a news-board. Occasionally he grimaced and grunted over the stories. Looking across the pod and reading in reverse through the projected page, Demeter could make out the masthead as The New Delhi Deliverancer, with an angry lion worked into the Old English lettering. All the rest was in some cursive script she thought might be Hindi.
The other passenger was a woman, fair-skinned with streaky blond hair, who wore a slinky metallic sarong that reminded Demeter of the South Seas. It had an embroidered slit up the right side that bared one pale and pimply hip; the loose fabric fluttered in the weightlessness and drafts from the cabin’s ventilation system. The woman’s only ornaments were a round, garnet-colored scar above her sparse brows and a large blue tear tattooed at the outside corner of each eye. Early on, Demeter had tried to engage her in conversation, but none of the languages Coghlan had practiced at school—Diplomatic English, Universalniy Russkovo, Mex-Tecan Spanish, or Classical Arabic—seemed to work. The blonde just shrugged and smiled a lot, in between tucking her sarong tighter around her knees against the Sikhs covert glances.
Demeter kept on her solitary sightseeing with the crater growing larger below her all the time. Just when it seemed about to swallow the pod whole, the rim’s outside edge shot up past the viewport. Coghlan was left staring at a long slope of weathered, gray rocks.
A few seconds later the floor began rising under her. First her toes, then her knees dropped to the carpeted surface, then her outstretched hand settled in among the seat cushions. After months of free-floating ease, she suddenly had to support her own weight against gravity. The pressure grew heavier as the pods descent slowed—although even Demeter knew without Sugars telling her that the surface gravity would never reach much more than a third of Earth normal.
With a bump that threw her down on one elbow, the pod touched down on Mars.
The window showed a curved face of machine-smoothed rock, illuminated by work lights set at odd angles. Immediately she heard and felt the click! and clatter! of grapples locking onto and stabilizing the pod, of power leads connecting to its batteries, and the airlock mating with its exit port. After a few seconds, the door slid upward. Demeter’s ears popped with the difference in pressure, the tunnel complex being maintained at a slightly lower ambient.
Coghlan glanced at her two fellow passengers, but they were busy gathering themselves for departure. She straightened her one-piece, wine-colored jumper, draped her nysilk scarf artfully over her shoulders, and plucked her two pieces of luggage from under the restraining straps—noting how light the bulky soft-plastic carryalls felt in point-three-eight gee—and marched out ahead of them.
In the narrow, steel-paneled passageway outside there was no one to meet or direct her. Officially, Demeter was on vacation. Grandaddy Coghlan had thought she needed something new and exciting—certainly not more course work in dry subjects like Practical Negotiation, Boolean Economics, or Cultural Apperception and Assimilation—not after she had just finished nine months of physical and psychological therapy, learning to use her brand-new, vat-grown, rebuilt brains. “Go to Mars, why don’t you?” he had urged. “See the frontier, ride a proxy, shoot a wild thorax or whatever.” G’dad Coghlan could easily arrange the transit fees and residence permits, too, being Vice President of the Sovereign State of Texahoma. And so Demeter had done just that, taken a vacation…with a few strings attached.
It was because of those strings that she expected someone to meet her discreetly at the fountain stop and at least carry her bags.
Down at the far end of the corridor—where it teed into a wider tunnel, this one faced with white tiles—she saw someone moving away.
“Hey there! Y’all got any—”
She came up short and dropped her luggage. Her voice, even to her own ears as modulated by masses of throat muscle and cubic centimeters of sinus cavity, had come out high and squeaky. Something like “Hee thir! Y’eel get eeeny—” Minnie Mouse skyrocketing on amphetamines.
Demeter grabbed her left wrist and ducked her head to put the titanium bangle close to her lips. “Sugar! What’s happening to me?” she husked—and it still sounded like a screech. “I’m hyperventilating or something—”
“Wait one,” the cyber said impassively. “Pulse normal, considering your elevated stress level. Respiration normal, ditto. Blood sugar and electrolytes all check out. O-two content is slightly high, though. Why do you think you’re in trouble, Dem?”
“Listen to my voice!” Coghlan squealed.
“Wait one…The Mars grid informs me that the inhabited tunnels are normally pressurized with twenty percent diatomic oxygen, seventy-nine percent diatomic helium, and traces of carbon dioxide, water vapor, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde, and other organic compounds residual to human respiration and industrial pollution.”
“Why the high content of helium?” Demeter asked, curious.
“This inert gas replaces the proportion represented by nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere. Nitrogen is only marginally present on Mars, either in the atmosphere—two-point-seven percent—or bound up in the lithosphere. All recovered amounts are required to be introduced into the soil for improved crop yields. Consequently, the colonists supplement their habitat pressure with helium, which they draw off as a by-product of methane collection from deep wells…I have four-point-two megabytes of supplementary data on the planet’s gas industry and eight gigabytes of introductory material on tunnel ecology and the algorithms governing environmental balance. Do you want to hear them?”
“Some other time.”
“Never no mind, Dem.”
Demeter Coghlan drew a deep breath, calmed down, and decided that the air tasted like any of the canned stuff she’d been inhaling since she got up to low Earth orbit. It would pass for breathable, but it sure wasn’t a Texas alfalfa field on a June mo
rning.
By now the man at the end of the corridor was long gone. Demeter was vaguely aware that sometime during Sugar’s dissertation on atmosphere composition the Sikh and the South Seas girl had pushed past her. She would have to hurry and get herself processed before the next wave of tourists arrived down the fountain.
At the tee junction she found another Martian, several of them in fact, all striding purposefully about their business.
“Excuse me,” she wheezed. “Where do I check in?”…Cheek een?
One of them turned and pointed to a sign. “Anywhere,” the man whistled. Eeneeweer…
The sign said: ARRIVING CASUALS (NON-RESIDENT ALIENS) PLEASE ANNOUNCE YOURSELF TO THE GRID FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
Demeter raised the silvery patinaed bead to her lips again. “Sugar, get me in touch with the local grid, will you? It seems I need to clear my passport or something.”
“Sorry, Dem, no can do,” the chrono replied after a millisecond’s hesitation. “The grid wants you on one of its wired-in terminals. Something about giving them a thumbprint.”
“Okay…which way?”
“Should be a terminal in the wall to your left.”
Demeter looked, saw only a dozen meters of white tile. “Nothing there, Shoogs.”
“Oh, sorry! Thought we were facing south. Your other left, then.”
Coghlan turned around and found, about five meters down, a shelf with a keyboard and screen. The screen was blinking an empty moiré pattern. “Got it.”
Demeter went up to the public terminal and studied the layout. On the shelf to the right of the board was a trackball; to the left was a contact pad for taking and BlOSing neural patches; and below was a two-handed glovebox. Theoretically, she could control a limited virtual reality from this spot—if the cybers would let her. She stepped up to the shelf, evidently breaking a proximity line somewhere.