“Well, in love; in lust, into aggressive hand-holding…you know.”
“You mean, is he free?”
“Yeah…”
Sorbel considered. “Lole’s about the freest man on Mars—which isn’t to say he’s not expensive. We used to be real tight, working practically inside each other’s minds all day long. The mental just led to the physical ’n’ all that—and it was good. But now we’re more…Well, I don’t mind you making a move on him, because he is an upright piece of manhood. But if you hurt him, Dem, I will arrange to have you killed.”
“Uh, point taken.” Demeter tried to smile.
“Just so we understand each other…How much of Mars have you seen already?” Sorbel asked, changing the subject.
“Only what you can glimpse from a window, actually. Coming down the Fountain—that was great. And I did get out in a proxy.”
“Where did you go?” Lole asked brightly, rejoining the table.
“Just over the next valley or so. I helped Jory shuck crabs.”
“Von Neumanns.” Ellen nodded.
“That as far as he would take you?” from Lole.
“We did have a kind of excursion planned, out to the Valles area, but all the proxies on site there were taken. Maybe tomorrow…”
“Oh, the proxies are all right,” he conceded. “You get as much feel for the land as a well-done travel sim, I guess. But you really have to walk on the surface and wiggle your toes in the sand if you want to know Mars.”
“You put your toes—?”
“Your boots, anyway.”
“I was told about the safaris,” Demeter said. “They sound expensive.”
“They can be, sure. Unless you go as supercargo with a work party. Look, I’m checking out a walker tomorrow to go eyeball some new formations that Ellen likes. If you want to come along, I can sign you on to guard the sandwiches and such.”
“Sure!”
“Let me just confirm it with our department and get you assigned your own air bottle…Wyatt, do you copy?” he asked, turning his face to the nearest surveillance lens.
“Confirm,” said a neutral voice, emanating from an air duct overhead. “One to accompany your June-ten-slash-eleven-fifteen out time, person of Demeter Coghlan, tourist from Earth.”
“Who was that?” Demeter asked.
“Wyatt, the cyber that thinks it runs our department,” Ellen replied.
“Why do you call it ‘Wyatt’?”
“Short for ‘Y-4 Administrative Terminal.’”
“Is not!” Lole said flatly. “Short for Wyatt Earp, ’cause he kind of lays down the law around our office.”
“How did you get access without turning it on?” Demeter asked. She remembered having to key the terminal in her hotel room.
“‘Turn it on’? Why, Dem, the machines are always ‘on.’ All you have to do is get their attention, so the grid will access you correctly.”
“Always on?” Demeter was surprised. “What a novel concept!”
Of course, she silently corrected herself, Sugar was always on, but she was no bigger than a pumpkin seed, was usually discreet, and only tied into the local grid when Demeter told her to. The idea of having the whole machine network of the planet looking over your shoulder, waiting for you to crook a finger—as Lole had done—and listening for any word it might-could interpret as a command, doubtless recording everything else on the off-chance the communication might turn up something useful…She found the idea unsettling.
Of course, Demeter told herself the next minute, many of Earth’s cities were almost as interconnected. Between personal chronos and civic terminals, plus the ever-present Committees of Public Safety in some of the newer cultures, a human being might well feel monitored all the time. But on Earth you could always go outdoors, walk off into the middle of a field somewhere, hike into the mountains, row out into a lake. Then you could know that you were alone except for any little cyber you brought with you. Here on Mars, on the other hand, everything was indoors. You were always inside these tunnels, with the grid’s monitors everywhere. You couldn’t go outdoors unless you wore a pressure suit or traveled in a walker or visited through a proxy—and each of these tied into the grid for safety reasons. So you were never really out of touch.
Coghlan could feel her chest tightening at the thought of being always under surveillance. Supervised. Scrutinized…Watched.
“Yes, isn’t it convenient?” Ellen replied. The smile she gave Demeter certainly seemed sincere.
Chapter 5
Shadows Beneath the Surface
Valles Marineris, by Proxy, June 9
When Demeter Coghlan wired into the proxy that was waiting for her in the Valles Marineris District, she found herself looking at a pattern of horizontal lines.
What the goggles showed her were even layers of fine-grained material, brownish-red over reddish-brown, looking, more than anything else, like a Chocolate Decadence with raspberry sauce. Then Demeter noticed that the machines lenses were focused at the MACRO setting. She reset them for normal viewing and backed the proxy away from whatever it had pushed its nose into. The image resolved into the sidewall of a canyon, layers of iron-stained clays and sands deposited in strata, pressure-welded into hard stone, and then carved away by the force of wind and, perhaps, water.
“Humph,” Demeter grunted. She had teleported her head 2,600 kilometers to gaze at a rock wall.
Earlier that afternoon, Jory den Ostreicher had come to Demeter’s hotel room—although she didn’t remember giving him either the Golden Lotus’s name or her room number—and announced he had finally gotten that pair of proxies released. The machines were supposed to be some distance away from the actual Canyonlands development site; so he and Demeter would have to walk them back. He led her into the hotel’s simulation parlor to take over the proxies.
Demeter was about to pull the machine’s sensor head away from the canyon wall, to turn and get a wider view of the terrain, when something caught her eye. It was a lump of glassy material, half-buried in the strata.
She knew about the glass-capped plant life that the earliest human colony on Mars had discovered. Could this be a fossil of an earlier form, only now emerging from between the layers? Well…no. For one thing, these sedimentary rocks showed that Mars had once possessed abundant free water. That implied a thicker atmosphere, and the silica shell of the modem flora was generally agreed to be a late adaptation to thinner air that permitted lethal amounts of ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface. So, it was unlikely the glass cap had any counterpart in primitive forms.
Could this be an animal, then? Some kind of hard-shelled marine life?
Demeter cranked in the MACRO setting again. The object exhibited none of the symmetries—bilateral, radial, pentahedral—that one associated with life. It was a lump, nothing more. An almond of milky substance deposited in the layer-cake of the region’s geology. But before Coghlan turned away from the anomaly, she did a fast scan of the wall.
Other almonds leaped out at her. All of them lay in the same line of strata, more or less, as if deposited there but not above or below. As if, sometime in the distant past, a shotgun blast had peppered the surface of the mudflats with nuggets of…of whatever.
Demeter scratched the vertical surface of the outcropping with the clawed whip of her machine’s No. 1 right walking leg. This was a touring proxy, lacking either the handlike manipulators or saddle pouches of the working models. In six centimeters of downstroke, she covered a hundred thousand years of layered sediment. One of the stones popped loose.
“What are you doing?” Jory asked in her earphones.
“Looking for fossils…?” Demeter replied meekly.
“Right! Sure! Our people have been digging around in this valley for ten years, every one of them hoping to turn up a crustacean or a clamshell or something. And you think you’re going to walk up to a blank wall, kick it once, and make the discovery of the age! You’ve got balls, Demeter!”
“All right. It was just a notion.” And it was the perfect touristy thing to do, Coghlan thought, congratulating herself. Already she felt like a spy.
“Just like a little kid…” the Creole steamed.
Before Demeter turned away, she tried to memorize the shape and texture of the loose stone—it would be too conspicuous if she were to put the V/R helmet in RECORD mode just then. The object was translucent, almost clear, with a ridge of gray matrix still clinging to it. Bigger than her thumb, too. Coghlan was no geologist, but she knew something of a planet’s power to form deposits. This nugget was no part of an igneous vein, which was how quartz beds formed. The stone had been created by intense pressures, deep in the mantle, then shot out of a vertical well in a single gout of magma.
The word “kimberlite” crossed her mind and stuck.
But that was all the prospecting she had time for, although she vowed to remember the site and come back to it if she could. With a pang, she suddenly realized that the last person to use this proxy—the one who had abandoned it with his guide in this part of the Valles—must have been looking at this wall of amygdaloid nuggets. Had he also seen the anomaly and investigated? If so, did he understand the implications? She had no way of finding out.
Consumed by these thoughts, Demeter turned the proxy away from her find, raised its lenses, and clicked to ZOOM. The valley floor came into focus. Her and Jory’s machines stood on a slight elevation near the North Wall. The far side of the Valles rose up and up in an escarpment of runneled passages and sheer bluffs.
The Marineris system was deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon on Earth, which Demeter had visited through V/R simulation before taking on this assignment. But where the Grand Canyon was a network of tiny, narrow gorges twisting and recurving through a tableland of etched buttes, the Valles Marineris was a broad, flat-bottomed valley, like California’s Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy. Except, for their size, the bastions and knobs and domes here outranked even El Capitan.
“Which way to the development?” she asked Jory.
“To the left and down. It’s about two kilometers.”
“Have Lole and Ellen done any exploration out this way?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“There was water here once. That’s obvious.”
“Water was in a lot of places—once,” he said. “That doesn’t mean any of it stayed.”
“Oh Well, let’s go down and see the construction works.”
“Sure thing!” And they started walking their six-legged mechanical steeds downhill toward a glint of reflected light in the valley.
Canyonlands Complex, by Proxy, June 9
Jory led Demeter down toward the construction area in the center of the valley. For now, from this distance, it was just a jumble of brightly painted equipment, in colors of phosphorus yellow and neon green that had never before been seen in the Martian wilderness. The big machines were walking about and chewing up the soil among tumbled drifts of broken stone from the pits and rocks fallen from the canyon walls. An occasional flash of sunlight off a windshield or porthole told him that the crews were on shift and toiling away.
Jory den Ostreicher knew a couple of the people who had signed on with the Zealanders to build their new township. A few were Creoles like himself, the rest contract tunnelers and construction hands from Tharsis Montes and Solis Planum, the nearest large settlements. It wouldn’t do, of course, for Jory to butt in during shift, asking questions and showing off for Demeter. Not when he was traveling by tourist proxy and couldn’t lend a hand himself, as was proper.
Instead, they came up to the edge of the spill line and observed the closed rigs at work.
The walkers were megasize, bigger than anything except a full-blown excursion bus, self-contained as to atmosphere, with their own airlocks and carrying food, water, and breathable air for fourteen days. The operators even had beds and a pair of simulation hoods for passing their off-duty hours. The machines picked up shovels of red dirt and stone here, put them down over there, in a pattern that only made sense after a few minutes of watching. The dirtmovers were ladling the tunnel spoils over oblong bubbles of clear film, each about ten meters on its long axis. Another machine on the far side of the field was blowing the bubbles out of fast-setting epoxy and extruding them onto pads of leveled sand.
“Why are they burying those domes?” Demeter asked. Even though she was sitting right next to him in the gaming parlor of her hotel back in Tharsis Montes, her voice came to him over the dedicated radio frequency between their two proxies.
“Protection,” he explained, groping for a reason. “Sometimes we get meteors, you know? Or from the hard ultraviolet sunlight. Putting the Quonsets underground is easier than patching them up later.”
“I don’t understand. Are there going to be people living in them? And if so, why do you still have exposed domes at Tharsis Montes? Don’t meteors come down here, too? I’d think that, as an older settlement, and a more important one—”
“Hey, look! I don’t know!” Jory protested, unconsciously waving his proxy’s front legs in the air. “This Canyonlands deal isn’t a regular Martian project. The Zealanders are in charge, see, and they’ve got their own ideas about how to do things…Okay?”
“All right,” she said stiffly. “Anyway, I guess I could check it out in the project specs or something. I just thought you were an expert guide.”
“I’ve been out here a time or two, that’s all.”
“Can we get down inside the tunnels?”
“Not in these units. We’d be underfoot with the work crews.”
“Oh, poop!”
“Hey, that doesn’t mean we can’t see what’s going on! They must have the tunnel borer on a monitor channel. We can leach off its signal and watch along with the operator.”
“Isn’t that sort of thing—um—restricted?”
“What? Watching someone else work isn’t popular on Earth?”
“Sidewalk superintending,” she said cryptically. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“What’s a ‘sidewalk’?” Jory asked.
Golden Lotus, June 9
Jory showed Demeter how to switch her helmet over to the tunneling machine’s monitor signal. Before she did, however, he had her check out the proxy’s command circuits and then put the silver spider in standby mode so it wouldn’t wander off and get into trouble.
Taking virtual-reality sim-feed from the borer was an exhilarating experience. She didn’t have the controls to guide the equipment, and the channel was one-way only, but she still got a tactile response as the drill jumbos cut into the face of hard, dark stone. Through the neuro-inducer, it felt like her own teeth were twirling in their sockets while her shoulders and elbows pushed back against the tunnel walls. Then, when the blast holes had been cut and the tampers were pushing forward their package charges, it felt like her own fingers were thrusting into the rock channels. Relays clicked in her head as the machine checked out its firing circuits, and the bulk of the borer withdrew on articulated treads to the far end of the tunnel, around a protective corner.
Boom! The helmet seemed to rattle on Demeter’s skull and the inducer pushed an overpressure up against her diaphragm.
“Very impressive,” she commented, as the goggles showed her the formal plan of the underground complex, with another bite visibly extending one of the horizontal adits.
“Yeah!” Jory replied. She could hear him undoing his helmet’s chinstrap and peeling off the neural gloves.
“That’s about all there is to see.” He spoke, not over the earphones, but through the air from the terminal next to hers. His voice had a quaver in it. Clearly, all that neural stimulation was getting to him.
Truth to tell, she found it pretty exciting herself.
Demeter was not surprised to feel a delicate finger-touch brush against her shoulder, slide tippy-tap across her back. Something soft and warm caressed the short hairs at the nape of her exposed neck. She felt her body begin to stiffen, then r
emembered in a flash the sight of his hairless, glistening deltoids, his sculpted pectorals. Demeter wondered what the Creoles perfect, bronzed skin would look like, stretched over his gluteals.
“Is there someplace we can go?” he asked huskily.
“My room,” she answered, scrabbling at the strap under her chin.
Once there, she did a fast scan of the cubicle. The blank eye of the terminal caught her attention. “Always on,” Lole Mitsuno had said. Demeter went to the cupboard and retrieved her jacket, something she would have worn against the weather “outside” on Earth. On Mars, in the balanced environment of the tunnel complex, it was a useless garment—with one saving feature. It was thick-lined and opaque. She draped it over the video pickup and tucked a dragging sleeve around the audio. Then she shucked off the charm bracelet that held Sugar and upended a water glass over it.
Demeter turned and bent over to let down the bed. Suddenly she felt his hands snake around her from behind. They traveled up the length of her body, from knees to breasts, cupping and probing as they went. His lips were on her neck again, hot and slick. His weight—like a boy’s in the partial gravity—was bearing her down onto the bedspread. Too fast. Too fast.
She heard a rip! as Jory’s strong hands shredded the collar of her jumpsuit and began to pull its back seam apart.
Demeter gasped. “Unh, wait a minute!”
She bent her knees—first the right and then left—and reached down with a blind hand to slide out of the hotel’s courtesy slippers and her socks. Then she opened the front snaps of her coverall and pushed its remains off her shoulders, down to her ankles, and kicked them off, freeing her legs. She turned to face him in his loose embrace and rolled down her briefs, kicking them off, too.
Somewhere in all these contortions, Jory’s lederhosen and utility harness had disappeared. He was standing naked between her legs. His domed, pink member slid up toward her face as she sank back on the bed with the points of her shoulders against the padding that had rucked up against the wall. She spread her thighs and arched her spine—and stopped thinking.