Mars Plus

Chapter 9 Head Trips

Demeter woke up the next morning with a panicky rush that closed her throat and made her heart pound. The situation here on Mars was rapidly getting away from her. Weiss's message implied that the North Zealanders were about to make some kind of political move on the Valles Marineris District . . . and all Demeter had done so far was take a couple of sightseeing trips and introduce herself to a few of the locals.

Well, what else could she do?

Demeter was officially on planet as a simple tourist, with no diplomatic status. In fact, from what she'd observed so far, Mars didn't seem to have any formal government structure—nothing that she could apply to for accreditation, in any capacity. The upward limits of Martian organization appeared to be a series of local, municipal bureaucracies. The highest official Demeter had ever heard of was a mayor in Solis Planum. The business of government was communications, recordkeeping, taxation, commercial exchange, infrastructure maintenance—and all of it was carried on by an overlay of cyber functions in the ever-present grid.

How the party of Zealander bigshots proposed to establish diplomatic relations with that was beyond her.

There was one thing Demeter herself might try. She could use those informal contacts to make whatever government there was begin working for her.

That was the spark Demeter needed. She shot up from the bed, let it slam against the wall, and climbed into her metered, one-minute shower. With her hair wrapped in a turban and drying slowly, she ordered coffee and a yogurt for breakfast. The hotel offered its yogurt in just two flavors, Dutch chocolate or lemon. She had already found the lemon reminiscent of battery acid; now she discovered that the chocolate tasted like chalk and diesel fuel. It had to be something wrong with the mother culture.

As she brushed her hair, Demeter set out to find her friends. Like all searches on Earth or Mars, this one began with the grid. Demeter faced her room terminal, switched it to privacy mode, and said: "Um, let me speak to the entity known as 'Wyatt,' please."

"Yes, Miz Coghlan-Demeter-Cerise?" replied a cool voice. It was somehow a different inflection from the terminals usual tone: superior, more self-satisfied, less eager to please. In one move, she had reached Wyatt in the flesh—or the electron.

"I need to locate Ellen Sorbel. She's probably not at work yet, but—"

"Miz Sorbel is fully occupied."

"Where is she?"

"Hydrology Lab, Dome Two, but this is not a good time to—"

"Thanks, I'll be right there." Demeter was never one to take hints from a machine, especially one attached to a large bureaucracy. "Um, how do I find Dome Two?"

"Take Lift Four to the surface levels, follow Tube Y-Nine to the west, the rest is signed. But you really should—"

Demeter blanked the terminal, pulled on her coveralls, grabbed up a handful of pins for her hair, and went streaming out into the corridor.

Ellen Sorbel slid through the interstices of the matrix, following the line of least resistance. The granules she passed were rugged, globular shapes floating above or below her awareness. Each one represented a particle of fine sand, barely a millimeter in diameter, so tiny that in life it might disappear beneath one of her fingernails. Yet, at this scale, her mind swam and dove past the bits like a seal cresting the spires of a rocky headland.

She was a water droplet.

Ellen drifted lower, finding her own level. She was seeking a clay substrate reported to underlie the Desert of Agnus Dei, some two hundred kilometers southwest of Tharsis Montes. She slid forward across one crowning mass of glittering quartz and feldspar. Sorbel somersaulted down its leading edge and clung to the underside—clung not with her hands but with the adhesion of surface tension. There her back brushed against another jagged particle below it. She oozed away from the upper surface; her awareness flipped over, righting itself against the pull of gravity. She flowed onto the lower footing and began heading for its outer perimeter.

Another tumble, and Ellen found herself at some kind of boundary layer. No longer loose chunks with space between diem, but a hardpan of aluminum and magnesium silicates that formed lozenges only two or three microns in diameter. There was even less space between them. Her awareness flattened out, spreading and diffusing like pancake batter. There would be no more joyous tumbling. This certainly felt like the clay—

"What are you doing?"

The voice came from somewhere off to her left in the void.

Ellen turned with eyes that were not eyes and saw nothing.

"Who's there?"

"It's me! Demeter!"

"Oh, hello ..."

"Am I disturbing you?"

Yes! Ellen wanted to shout.

"Not really.... Um, how did you get here?"

"One of your technicians lent me a headset and gloves," Demeter replied. "He said you were here in the ... where is this place? It's like an asteroid field!"

"We're in a bit of desert, about fifty meters below the surface. Or, anyway, this is what the computer says should be below the surface."

"Wyatt says?"

"No, a much bigger boy."

"What are you looking for?'

"I'm trying to discover where the water would have gone ... if it ever existed here," Sorbel explained. "I think I've found a lens of clay which—"

"Where?" Demeter demanded.

"Somewhere below you, I guess. You're probably still up in the sandy layer."

"Is that so? How do I get down?'

"You don't—unless you know how to use your gloves to, well ,floiv."

"I can't," Demeter said after a minute. "Couldn't you come up to me? I can't see you."

"Eyesight isn't important down here. Why don't we just talk?" Ellen made herself limp and flattened out even more against the clay substrate. 'What do you want?"

"Well, unh, this is difficult.... Can anyone overhear us?"

"You mean, aside from the cyber that created this geological simulation and is now monitoring it?"

"Yeah."

"Not really Your headset is hushed."

"Then what I want is your help as a programmer. I need to hack a few terminals that're attached to the grid. I want a download of anything they send or receive over the next few days."

"Which terminals?" Ellen was merely curious.

"One is in the quarters of a North Zealand woman named Cuneo, first name Nancy. She's a casual on Mars like me. The others are wherever our Korean friend Sukie is staying—one terminal in his private room, the other with his manservant Chang Qwok-Do."

Sorbel considered the request for a passing moment. Then: "Lole was right about you, wasn't he? You're a spy"

"Ellen . . . we're all spies. Sun 11 Suk admitted as much as to me when you introduced us. He knows about the Cuneo woman, too, but I'd picked her out long before that. Either or both of them probably has a tap going on my room already. ... I just want some insurance to hold against payback time."

"And you thought I could—"

"You're the most computer-friendly person I know here. Hell, everyone on Mars practically lives in the machines' hip pocket. But you're the first person I've met who actually puts her head inside one for a living."

"We're not inside a computer, Dem. This is a geological simulation that's wired into a V/R sensory setup.

Its not all that different from the ones you use for role-playing or proxy touring."

"Whatever. I still figure if anyone has the smarts to help me, you do."

"I might have the smarts. Don't count on my willingness. Sukie is my friend. And I don't know what this Nancy Cuneo has done against me and mine... although I don't like the idea of anyone spying on Mars."

"We're not spying on you, Ellen. We're watching each other. It all goes back to the political situation on Earth. We three just happen to be on Mars right now. That's all."

One of the talents Sorbel's job had developed and strengthened in her was pattern analysis. She was adept at piecing together tiny clues to form an outline of what was really going on. From the nuances in Demeter's voice, Ellen understood one thing: she was lying. Demeter's story was too complicated and involved; the truth would be much simpler. This was unfortunate, because Ellen really liked the Earth woman. She was saddened to think they couldn't be honest with each other.

"You and your friends can play hide-and-seek all you want," Sorbel said finally, "but please don't ask me to do anything that will surely get us both in trouble with the Militia."

"You can't stay neutral forever, Ellen."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"The situation is going to change fast now. In a few days it's probably going to boil over. I can't give you details yet, because I don't have them. But this conflict is going to have a massive effect on the geol—no, the meteorol—the hydrology—shit! That's not right! I mean the envi-vi-ron-mental b-b-balance of this p-p-planet. It could change everything about the way you and everyone else on Mars lives."

"Change for the better?" Sorbel asked hopelessly.

"Clearly not."

"I see. And you're the only one who can keep this mysterious something from happening?"

"I think so."

Ellen Sorbel reflected for another long minute. "You're my friend, Demeter. But you are also telling me that other of my friends are not what they seem. In that case, I really don't know who to trust. You see my position?"

"Perfectly."

"Then I will... consider what you're asking me to do."

"Thank you."

Ellen didn't feel the loss of connection, but suddenly she knew Demeter Coghlan had withdrawn from the simulation.

The power satellite that provided the community of Tharsis Montes and its various machinery, including the space fountain, with 7,000 megawatts of electric energy rode in areosynchronous orbit some 500 kilometers east of the settlement. That was as close as it could get. As the simulation's artificially intelligent host explained, it was unsafe to position the satellite any closer because of the necessity of providing clearance with the elevator's upper transfer station. Neither object was ever likely to shift in orbit, to be sure. Still, the fountain required a broad fairway for the passage of ships entering and leaving its domain. The solar collector duly compensated for this eastward offset by angling its microwave beam westward; the rectenna field that was its target was somewhat closer to the tunnel complex.

Demeter Coghlan found herself nodding, closing her eyes briefly inside the goggles as she tried to absorb all these dry mechanics. They were an inescapable part of the simulations introductory narration. The visuals the AI presented during its speech were the builders original schematics, and not at all layman-friendly. They were littered with dotted lines to show the relevant angles and vectors of orbit, dimensions scaled in with arrows and numbers, and color coding that indicated energy flows, structural stresses, and thermal buildup—all quite overwhelming. The tour had obviously been set up for engineers.

After putting her proposition before Ellen Sorbel, Demeter had the rest of the morning free. She had decided to take the programmer up on her earlier suggestion to visit the offworld satellites. Ellen probably found all this technical stuff fascinating. Demeter didn't, but she listened gamely as, in the course of the next fifteen minutes, the machine's pedantic voice explained that, at Mars's greater distance from the sun, the solar cells had to be roughly twice the size of those circling Earth to provide the same energy output. To achieve Station Four's 7.58 gigawatts, average over the daily orbit, the station's area of exposed semiconductor totaled some 210 square kilometers. Magnetic thrusters kept this vast expanse of polymorphic silicon aligned on the sun with a deviance of only one-half second of arc. The diode net of the microwave-receiving station on the Martian surface spread over an area of one hundred and thirty kilometers, with power conditioners spaced every—

"Um, excuse me?" Demeter spoke up.

"Yes?" the AI replied after a pause.

"Could we slap the electronics lesson and go see this thing?"

"Your understanding of the scale of the station would not be complete without—"

"I know all that. But I'd really like to take in the sights before I have to put in another quarter."

'"Put in a... quarter?'" the machine repeated, mystified. "There is no such unit—"

"Just wire me into the nearest proxy and keep your database to yourself, hear?"

"As you wish."

The black background inside her goggles, representing the void surrounding the computerized construct of the station in abstract, suddenly glittered with stars. On the periphery of her vision, sand-colored Phobos tumbled slowly past.

Demeter looked down. Her hands were no longer bone-and-blood hands in the V/R gloves. They had become what passed for manipulators with diis proxy, and they were methodically walking up a ladder. Instead of fingers, the hands used parallel gripping surfaces which opened and closed with a barrel-screw drive, like an old-style Crescent wrench. These keyed into square holes bisected by a bar of sturdy metal. The holes—the rungs of the ladder—were aligned along the outside of a tube about two meters in diameter. Demeter let her gaze rise from this near view of continuous, repetitive motion up the tube . . . and up . . . and...

She almost lost her balance—at least, part of her did, the part that was sitting in the flesh on her chair in the Golden Lotus's simulation parlor. The prow never swerved from its obstinate, mechanical climb. The tube it climbed seemed to stretch to infinity, sloping away from her Eke the curve of the horizon, leaving her with an endless number of steps to negotiate, ascending forever.

Demeter took a stern hold on her stomach and looked away for some relief.

Off to her left, a field of gold blossomed in her goggles. The image flared with reflected light, then dimmed as the proxy's video chips bumped the signal down a few steps. When her goggles had stabilized, Demeter could see that the field was an array of solar cells, as blue as Earth's upper atmosphere. The glare came from their spiderwork of wire cathodes momentarily catching the distant sun.

The solar cells appeared to be massive hexagons, each perhaps a kilometer from point to point. It was hard to tell, exactly, because Demeter was seeing them almost edge on, from a totally flattened perspective. She could only approximate their outline from the angle of the various borders that stretched away from her single point of view, dark blue against the black of space. The AI narration would probably have something to say about hexagons being the simplest shape for tiling such a large area.

Demeter looked back up the tube: more infinity, with stars.

She looked off toward the right, and saw more flattened hexagons.

She tried looking down, toward wherever the proxy had come from in its climb, but the sensor head would not swivel that far.

After another fifty steps or so—each with its complicated slot-grip-and-pull gait—Demeter decided this was boring.

"Um, Narrator?"

"Yes, Miz Coghlan?"

"What is this proxy used for when it's not piggybacking tourists?"

"This unit is a maintenance robot. It is assigned to walk the satellites support spars and inspect for meteor damage to the cell's visible surfaces. It performs this function by interpolation of the—"

"Thank you. Now, do you have any proxies that, oh, fly around and fix things? Is there anything interesting like that for me to see?"

"Maintenance operations are carried out only in the event that actual damage is detected. Of course, we do have an interesting presentation, which—"

"No, thank you. Urn ... this is a completed and fully functioning power satellite, isn't it?"

"Solar Power Station Four went into pre-startup operation on December 19, 2039. It attained full power on—"

"All right, all right. But you've got a station still under construction, don't you?" Demeter remembered something else Sorbel had told her. "Over Schiaparelli, isn't it?"

"That would be Station Six."

"Do you have any proxies there I could look in on? It would be interesting to see your orbital construction techniques."

"No tourist proxies are currently installed on that project."

"Well, could you plug me into a worker robot? I'll accept visual signals only. I wouldn't want to mess up its routines."

"I will see what feeds are available," the AI said primly.

The image in her goggles clicked through a brief spurt of static, and Demeter found herself at the center of a bouquet of arms. They were all jointed in two or more places, waving up around her sensor head like the stamens of a flower. Some had gripper claws holding pieces of irregularly shaped metal and moving them into position; others ended in tools like arc-welding probes and pop-riveting rams, which sequentially zipped and hammered the panels into the wall two meters in front of Demeter's face.

This scene didn't look anything like the vast planes of the other power station, filled with darkly glimmering hexagonal cells crisscrossed by silvery wires. The metal pieces here were all bluntly curved and—from what she saw when one was being turned away from her— all several centimeters thick. Plate steel, Demeter guessed, but the color where the arc touched it was strange, purplish. Maybe some kind of alloy?

She wished she could see more. She had no control over the sensor head, of course; that was reserved for the program directing this machine's work. But from the views she snatched as the robot glanced here to gather one piece, there to align another, she figured out that this particular segment of the construction work was taking place inside a large, hollow cylinder some tens of meters in diameter. The space was already enclosed, the scene illuminated by high-intensity worklights. The robot seemed to be adding a second, interior wall to the one that defined the canister.

What land of a double-walled bottle would be needed on a solar power station? Demeter understood from the earlier narration that these satellites were fully automatic and so required no human habitations. And the nacelles for the transformers and microwave horns were small things, weren't they? Three or four meters in any dimension, tops.

Putting up two layers of thick metal might serve to protect critical components from asteroid strikes, especially this close to the Belt. But that didn't seem to be the pattern of Martian orbital construction, at least as far as she'd seen it. The solar satellites apparently relied on redundant function and constant, mobile maintenance. Building bunkers in the sky just didn't fit the established profile.

"Narrator? What am I looking at? Is this some kind of hybrid station, maybe, with a reactor pressure vessel supplementing the—?"

The goggles went dead black. No stars, no wire guides, no compass pattern. Demeter's head filled with nothing. Her gloves clenched once, spasmodically, and went limp. The phone beads in her ears generated a steady, low hum.

After thirty seconds—or perhaps thirty minutes, thirty hours—of this induced sensory deprivation, the voice of the AI narration returned.

"I am sorry. You were plugged into an incorrect data feed."

"Oh. Then that wasn't Solar Power Station Six?"

"It was . .. not. What do you think of the geology of Mars so far, Miz Coghlan?"

"The geol—?" For just a moment, her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. It took an act of will to unstick it. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Nothing. ... This concludes your simulated tour of the Mars power stations. Have a nice day."

The low humming in her ears stopped. The goggles clicked once and turned themselves off without going through the closing logos and date-time sequence she had come to expect with these things.

Shaking her head, Demeter pulled off the V/R helmet and stripped off the gloves. Suddenly, she didn't feel very well.

Dr. Wa Lixin was surprised when the grid warned that he would have to take an afternoon appointment out of rotation. It wasn't the disruption to his schedule that surprised him, but the fact that he could not identify the patient as one of his own.

"Coghlan? Demeter?" he asked, searching his memory. "Do I know him?"

"She is a transient casual," the disembodied voice replied. "You gave her a preliminary examination last week as part of your reimbursed civic practice. Now she claims to have symptoms and wants to see you again."

"Oh, all right." Wa Lixin sighed and closed the journal file he had been reading. He sat up straight in his office chair and sent the screen into a neutral moire pattern. "Send her in."

As the young woman stepped through the door, he recognized her. The plump Caucasian girl with the supposed cranial accident. "Hello, Miss Coghlan. Nice to see you again—I hope?"

"Hi, Dr. Lee. . . ." She perched on the edge of his examination table, rather than taking the chair facing him across the desk. "I wanted to ... um, that is ..."

"Yes?"

"When I was here last time did I mention, well, mental problems?"

"Let me see." Wa turned to the screen and pulled up her file from the archives. It was fragmentary but did include his comment about intermittent complaints of "inability to integrate," which she appeared to have fully compensated.

"You said you had occasional trouble concentrating."

"Yeah. I fall asleep at odd times, too. And, just since I got here, I've had the hardest time, well, sticking to things. Like, personal decisions I just made."

"Since you got here?" He picked up the verbal clue right away. "But not before?"

"I don't remember it coming up before. Maybe I'm all turned around by the cultural differences, meeting new people, that sort of thing. But I feel I've been acting, well, weird,"

"For example?"

"Well, twice now I've had sex with a man whom I find totally immature. Even a little repulsive. In an alien kind of way."

"Is he ... not of your race?" Wa Lixin had heard that most continental Americans, Texahomans especially, were closet xenophobes.

"He's a—what you call a Creole."

"Ah? Yes, I see. You would find such a person exotic."

"Well, at first. Now he's just crude and boring."

Dr. Lee smiled. "You are not the first person to be seduced by a foreigner, Miss Coghlan. Or by a Cyborg."

"All right, I guess I needed to hear that. But what about the other? The drowsiness—"

"We have a longer day here."

"—and the zoniness."

"Pardon?"

"My head's up in the clouds half the time," she said. "I say one thing and something else seems to come out—the wrong word, or sometimes even a completely different thought. It's like my head's stuffed with cotton wool."

The doctor tried to imagine such a substance and failed. "These are the same symptoms as before?" he asked. "Having to do with your concentration problems?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"And, after the accident, did your doctors or therapists prescribe anything for it?"

"Cocanol."

It was the brand name for a synthetic alkaloid, derivative of cocaine, that enhanced the action of neurotransmitters in the brain by delaying the enzymic breakdown of acetylcholine at the point of synapse. Cocanol was supposed to be nonaddictive, but Wa Lixin had his doubts. Any patient who came in complaining of vague symptoms but pronouncing a ready affinity for the drug aroused his suspicions.

"I see." He kept his face an unreadable blank.

"Cocanol seemed to help, back on Earth. At least, I could think of something for longer than ninety seconds at a time."

Patients who took Cocanol in clinical tests reported having "a mind like a laser" and being able to "see through a brick wall." Or that was their perception, anyway. Then Wa Lixin decided to relax and give the woman what she wanted—so long as a check with Earth's grid nexus confirmed her previous prescription. After all, Demeter Coghlan wasn't really his patient.

"As your locally assigned physician, I can prescribe for you," he told her. "I'll make sure the grid issues you a supply. It will be waiting at your hotel."

"Thank you, Dr. Lee." With a brief, reflex grin she jumped down from the table. "That's all?"

"Subject to the usual billing. I still have your account number."

'Ta, then." And, once again, she passed through his waiting room and out of his life.

The doctor was as good as his word: when Demeter put her thumbprint to the touchplate that protected entry to the Golden Lotus's suite, the doorkeeper announced that a package was waiting for her at the front desk.

She took the parcel back to her room and opened it. A month's supply of patches spilled out on the bed. Demeter peeled one and slapped it against the skin behind her left ear. The darkened flesh tone of the disk's outer covering blended with the short hairs at the nape of her neck, concealing her use of it.

Almost instantly, the familiar licorice flavor filled the back of her throat, the sign that her bloodstream was receiving the medication. In a minute or two, Demeter could feel her head clearing, her thoughts untangling, her brain coming alive.

"You have a visitor," the room announced.

"Oh? Who?"

"Lole Mitsuno, hydrologist with the—"

"Let him in."

The door slid back on the tall, blond man. He gave her a nice smile, but she could readjust a hint of worry at the edges. It was the way the corners of his lips turned down. That, and the slight defensive position of his hands, cupped at his thighs, as he stood there.

"Lole!" Demeter came forward with her hands outstretched, palms down, willing him to take her in his arms for a friendly hug. Or something more. Anything more would do.

He grasped her fingers, like a trapeze artist who had nearly missed a flying catch. He held her practically at arm's length, and the worry lines stayed with his smile.

"Glad I found you," he said. "Did you . . . have an interesting day?"

"Why, yes. Um—" Demeter glanced back into the room, which really had nowhere for them to sit but on the bed. "Lets go to the lounge where we can talk."

"Sure."

As she led him down the corridor to the hotel's public rooms, Demeter was sure he would grill her about that foolish request she'd made of Ellen Sorbel. Lole had once practically accused her of being an Earth spy when they had gone out hunting water; then this morning she had admitted as much to his closest coworker. Mitsuno would want to examine her motives—and the secret information she'd hinted at with Ellen—before either of them offered to help.

Not that Demeter particularly needed Sorbel's programming skills now. With the Cocanol at work, fluffing and combing her brains, Demeter could think of at least a dozen other ways of getting access to the messages sent by her opponents. Probably the simplest would be to turn Sugar loose on a badger hunt in the grid's databases to dig out the archivals of all interplanetary communications. Any quasi-governmental system would routinely keep offline copies, if only to indemnify itself against damage claims from garbles and lost transmissions.

So, all Demeter had to do now was convince Lole that Ellen must have misunderstood her. As a fallback, Demeter might even claim that she never entered the Agnus Dei geological data at all—that Ellen must have been hallucinating, or encountering a cybernetic hiccup, or something.

Hey! Demeter had finally said it—or thought it, anyway. "Geological," the word that had been playing on her mind and tangling her tongue for days now. She congratulated herself on finally going to the doctor and getting the medicine she needed.

In the lounge, Demeter steered him to one of the armchairs. Then she positioned herself on the settee next to it, curling one leg attractively underneath her and twisting her body to offer her best profile. "What did you do today?" she began brightly.

"The usual—walked the pipelines, looking for wind erosion around the support brackets and pebbling of the conduit surface."

"You went outside again?"

"No, we use satellite surveillance. I do my patrol through a pair of goggles and gloves."

"Seems like everyone works that way," Demeter commented.

"You went up to the power satellites, didn't you?"

"Ah .. . yes. How'd you know?"

"The system logs in all visitors. Ellen told me."

"She did."

"What do you think of our orbital construction program?"

"Well, I didn't see much of it. What there was looked pretty boring. Miles and miles of blue sheet silicon, all etched with little silver wires. After you get your mind around the sheer size of the thing, it seems fairly uncomplicated."

"Did you get to see the new station?"

"Which one's that?' Demeter had to think for a minute.

"The one that's still under construction."

"I don't believe so. Does the logbook say I did?"

"No."

"Then I guess not. The touring software showed me something. ..." Demeter tried to sort out her memories—they were still a little hazy—from the time before she took her medicine. "But it wasn't anything to do with solar power. I'm not even sure it was in orbit. The signals got crossed up somehow. Typical cyber foulup."

Lole Mitsuno was looking at her thoughtfully.

"What?" Demeter said after a long pause. Maybe twenty seconds.

"You really don't like computers, do you?"

"I use computers like everyone else. I don't have to like them. And I don't get sentimental about them."

He pointed to the charm bracelet on her wrist.

"She's just a machine, Lole. A tool."

"'She'? Does this person have a name?"

"Well, I call her 'Sugar.' But that's just easier to say than 'cellular activating wrist chronograph and transcribing stenographer.'" Demeter shrugged. -

"I see." Mitsuno was giving her that peculiar smile again.

Well, whatever for? Did he think she was hiding some kind of secret life as a cyber-witch? There were stories of humans who sold their souls to MFSTO: and then reaped unfair advantage in business and politics, love and war. Come to think of it, that was another way Demeter might try getting into Sun's or Cuneos message files. She could just go to a nearby keyboard and make a midnight deal with the grid's daemon. Sure! And then it would report her attempted invasion of privacy back to the referenced clients, just like the E-mail protocols specified. Not very smart!

Suddenly, Demeter wanted this handsome man to think well of her. He was fully human, integrated into his community, good at his work, admiring of her supposed cowboy origins. And he was currently unattached—she had that straight from the woman who ought to know.

"Look, I had a problem with a cybernetic device, once," Demeter explained, deciding to play the sympathy card. "I got punched in the head by one— malfunction in a hairdressing unit that burned out and cut me. So I don't expect our 'silicon friends' to always function perfectly. And... that's part of the reason I'm up here. I needed a little rest and relaxation while I recuperate."

"Oh! Does it—?" Lole looked properly compassionate.

"Hurt? No, I'm fine. Really"

"Good.... You hungry? How about some dinner?'

Demeter held her breath, to see if he would mention bringing Sorbel along.

He didn't. "The Hoplite grills up a mean steak and beans," Mitsuno offered.

"Real meat?' Her mouth was watering.

He shrugged with one shoulder. "Coloring's right."

"You're on." She unwound herself from the end of the couch. "Give me a minute to change."