Mars Plus

Chapter 10 End Games

After the engagements and excitements of her first week on Mars, Demeter rewarded herself with a day off to go shopping. The best place for that in Tharsis Montes was the Mars-U-Copia, a combination Moroccan bazaar and duty-free shop on the upper levels.

Most of the merchandise was junk: last years recycled fashions from Milan, but cobbled together out of chintzy, synthetic fabrics; evening-wear jumpers designed on a mock-spacesuit theme, with corrugated rubber inserts in all the wrong places; framed, amateur watercolors of the Martian landscape, two shades redder than the real thing; and a . .. wait a minute!

Demeter fingered the necklace that was lying out, unattended on the jewelry counter. It was either the real thing or an awfully good copy.

She picked it up. The necklace was strung with fleurs cle vitrine, the hardy Martian groundwort that grew a silicon shell for protection against ultraviolet radiation. The hollowed-out beads had been sorted by size from tiny, button-shaped, two-millimeter caps to the big, flattened, centimeter-wide lenses. The artist had assembled only the rare, red-tinged shells, so much more delicate than the common blues and grays.

With slightly trembling fingers, Demeter turned over the price chip. Glassflower jewelry was a rarity on Earth, outrageously expensive, even by Tiffany's standards. The numbers engraved on the chip came into focus. Demeter squinted away the phantom zeros that her fears and a momentary tearing of her eyes had added to the price.

Two thousand Neu.

It was a steal.

"Its a copy," said a voice at her elbow.

Coghlan glanced down. The woman was incredibly short, not much over 140 centimeters. She wore a plain suit of good, gray worsted wool and real leather hightop shoes. The woman's hair was a naturally curly blond, cut short and combed with a rake. Still, she had the same square, flat face of a farmer's wife, with wind-etched lines and a natural sunburn. It was the face Demeter had studied at odd moments in various settings over the past week. The hair must be a wig: nobody could bleach, dye, and rinse that often and get away with it.

"Why do you say?" Demeter asked, holding the necklace fractionally closer to her body.

Nancy Cuneo reached for it. Their fingers brushed as she took the artifact, and Demeter felt the hard edge of calluses. Probably from weapons practice. The Zealander turned the jewelry over, exposing the backs of the shells, where the tiny gold wires went through.

"See these radial creases?" A blunt, yellowed fingernail traced folds in the red-stained silicate. "That's where the glass was crimped when the blower was rolling it out. Instead of lines, a real shell has rings here, just like on a tree. They, too, are a sign of seasonal growth."

"I see."

"Its a pretty thing, but not worth the price." The woman smiled up at her. Those obsidian-black eyes were harder than the glass beads looped over her fingers.

"Thank you," Demeter said coldly, taking the necklace back and dropping it carelessly on the counter.

"You are Demeter Coghlan, aren't you? From Texahoma State?"

Demeter was too intelligent to consider denying it or evading notice for even a moment. Cuneo would have access to the same grid resources and had probably been studying her as assiduously as she had been studying Cuneo.

"Yes, I am. And you are ... ?" Demeter allowed herself a last, tiny bit of subterfuge.

"Nancy Cuneo ... but then, you knew that already" The woman gave her a knife-edged smile. "I thought it would be nice for us to meet on neutral ground, as it were." She waved a hand around at the hangings of the bazaar.

"Yes?" She couldn't think of much more to say.

"I know why you're here, of course," the older woman went on, still smiling. "Your people in Texahoma are nervous about what we may be planning to do with the Valles Marineris. They sent you to check us out."

"Why would you think that?'

"Then you are not concerned?"

"Well, sure, I'm concerned. What citizen wouldn't be? After all, we have territorial claims going back to the first time Captain William Schorer of Houston, Texas, set foot in the valley. He set up a flag and everything."

"You saw that in your schoolbooks, did you?"

"Yes, of course," Demeter said stoutly.

"The flag of the United States of America—which is hardly congruous with the current state of Texahoma."

"We cleave to the Texas part of the legend, ma'am."

"But, of course, your concern is in no way official, is it?"

"No, ma'am. I mean, how could it be?"

"You're very young, dear." Cuneo put out a hand, touching her wrist. Only later did Demeter guess this one touch might be as good as a polygraph.

"I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"What can Alvin Bertrand Coghlan have been thinking?" the older woman asked, mostly to herself. 'To send his granddaughter on a mission like this. . . . You are what we call an ingenue, dear, a dilettante in the great game. Let me give you a word of advice for the next time you choose to dabble. You do not have to answer every question, nor meet every sally with a riposte. It makes you seem far too eager to prove your story, which in itself is damning."

"I—!" Demeter wisely closed her mouth.

"Let's lay our cards on the table, shall we?"

Coghlan thought about this offer for an instant. "My G'dad used to say that's when all the aces get swept up somebody's sleeve."

Cuneo laughed at the joke. "A wise man, old Alvin Bertrand. But seriously, Demeter, we should join forces. All those historic claims are hopelessly tangled, and you know it. North Zealand traces its ownership through the Potanter Trek, when the party camped out in the Valles for six months."

"Before they perished in the mountains to the east of there," Demeter reminded her. "And they never filed a formal interest."

"Parry and riposte, again?"

Demeter Coghlan clamped her jaw shut on a response.

"Anyway, a piece of paper laid before the U.N. Commission on Mars is not the clincher you seem to believe. Our friend from United Korea would argue strenuously that they are entitled to the district for reasons of population pressure alone, regardless of the astronomical expense of relocating their people. Heavens, he does argue that point. Endlessly. And Korean claims are tied by the slender thread of a ten-percent interest in one unmanned Chinese rocket that made landfall on Mars, half a planet away from the Valles."

"Is there a point to this history lesson?" Demeter asked sweetly enough.

"Merely that it would be a mistake to treat any of this minuet too earnestly. Even with N-ZED providing full financial backing for development work in the Canyonlands—isn't that a charming name for the district, too?—we North Zealanders are hardly cementing our claim. And I'll tell you something even your Alvin Bertrand doesn't know: that our agency is behind the new power station a-building in orbit. That's part of the overall package. But what does it matter, in the end?'

Cuneo looked at Demeter, as if expecting a response. Demeter did not give her the satisfaction.

"Nothing. Nothing at all!" the woman went on. "We'll all be dead and dust before the Valles complex is worth more than a handful of paper credits. So why should we fight? There will be plenty of time to work out some kind of joint tenancy—if that's what your grandfather is angling for?'

The pause drew out in uncomfortable silence.

"I'm sure I don't know his mind," Demeter said at last.

"No, of course. But then, Texahoma has much better claims down south, near the polar cap. That area is much more hospitable—better supplied with water, for instance."

"But aren't the caps predominantly dry ice?"

"Well, of course, but I'm talking about the permanent frost layer, the undercoating to the CO2 crust." The woman waved the issue aside with one hand. "At any rate, a trade delegation is about to arrive from North Zealand. They're reasonable people. I'm sure you'll get along with them. There is no reason why our two nations should not cooperate—or at least agree to defer further dispute until we have something concrete to fight about."

"I'm sure your traders are lovely people," Demeter agreed. "But I still don't see what that has to do with me. I'm just a college girl on vacation, recovering from a terrible accident, taking in the sights—and about to buy some native artifacts." She touched the necklace once more, wistfully, then left it alone for good. "Until you offered to help me, that is."

"An accident, did you say?'

"Certainly You can check my records, if you want." Demeter shrugged, convinced the woman already had. "Deep cover" is what G'dad chucklingly called it. "I had a run-in with an autocoif during my senior year. Deep lacerations all along one side of my head. My hair covers the scar now. But it was like to kill me."

"You poor thing!"

Demeter preened in the satisfaction of having successfully defended her story.

"You want to take much better care of yourself, while you're on Mars," Cuneo went on pleasantly.

"There are so many more opportunities for getting yourself killed up here.... And maybe taking one of us along with you." The woman's saccharine smile did not extend to her eyes, which bored into Demeter like twin nine-millimeter gun barrels.

Demeter had to take an involuntary step backward.

"I won't," she promised.

Ellen Sorbel was running late on the morning's workload. She decided to take an early lunch break before the afternoon came around and crushed her. So she dashed into the Hoplite for a seafood handwich and mug of nonalcoholic ale—wet enough to wash down the krill cakes but with nothing to cloud her head. She found Demeter Coghlan at one of the tables near the back, picking at what looked like a salad but could have included some kind of farina noodles.

"Hey, Demeter!"

"Ellen! . . . Good to see you." The Earth woman looked pleased, set aside her fork, and pushed the plate away. Sorbel settled into the free chair.

"Look, uhh, about your request yesterday—"

"Oh, that! Forget it, please. It just never happened."

"I'm grateful because, you know, I could lose my job if anything happened. Especially if someone complained. And honest work is hard to come by if you're a cyber ghost."

"I said, forget it ever happened."

Ellen glanced over to see if Demeter was angry. The grin playing around the corners of her mouth said she wasn't. Sorbel was relieved.

"Are you still seeing Jory?" Ellen asked, to change the subject.

"Not if I can help it."

"Oh? I didn't know you had a problem there."

"Not really, he's just— I'm sorry, he's your friend and all."

"An acquaintance, actually. Lole and I kind of took him under our wing, once, when he had some trouble with the Department."

"All right then. You know what I'm talking about. He can be so immature and ... well, demanding. Like he's still fourteen years old."

"In many ways he is," Ellen said judiciously. "The process that makes a Creole does strange things to the hormones, not to mention the nervous system."

"Yeah, but he can be fairly sensitive, too. Do you know, when he found out I don't like doing it in front of the computers, he took me to this cave he had prepared. It's not even connected to power and water yet, let alone cyber services."

"Oh . . . !" Sorbel sagged against the chair's arms. She was thinking furiously. How had Jory found out about the . . . ? Or wait! Had he found out? "Where was all this?" she asked cautiously.

"I didn't really make a map."

"But in general terms—inside the complex? Outside? Up slope or down? Did you have to suit up?"

"Inside, and down a couple of levels. We crossed a big promenade that looked like a shopping mall."

"A...'mall'?"

"Sure, an indoor arcade, usually full of boutiques and eateries, with an anchor store or a hotel. Except this one was empty, still getting built."

"Okay, and his hideaway was nearby?"

"Fifty meters away, more or less. It was where some kind of expansion work had been closed off—temporarily, at least."

Then it wasn't the site Ellen was thinking of. Thank Heaven, or that other place, for small favors.

"But, Demeter, he actually told you the computers couldn't see or hear in there?" Suddenly the humor of it overtook her. Ellen tried to keep from laughing.

"Sure, no cables, no fiberoptic. The place was bare rock. Perfectly clean."

"Yeah, but Jory was in there with you."

"What do you mean?"

"He's hardwired for communications. The grid can monitor him on a private radio channel, twenty-four hours a day, waking and dreaming."

"So he could—!"

Ellen nodded. "He not only could, he does. Automatically. All the time, and with stereo sound and full-motion video—better than your charm bracelet there."

"That little creep! Does he know he does that?"

"He has to. It's part of the price of cyberhood."

"Damn him!"

"He only looks like a child, Demeter. Under that slick skin and elfin face, he's actually quite intelligent. Just not... socially adept, if you take my meaning."

"Perfectly." Demeter picked up her fork, made a halfhearted pass at the noodle salad, then flung both fork and food at the far wall. The utensil went ting! against cold rock.

Boy, was she mad! Ellen made a private note against ever getting on this woman's bad side.

Kemil Ergun always returned home at the middle of the day. He had done this every working day of his life, as his father had before him, his father and his fathers father, too, going back to the Old Country. Ergun's routine was always the same: a light meal, maybe a spinach salad and shashlik—or, within the culinary limits of this strange new world, hydroponic cress and braised lizard strips; one glass of homemade retsina; one hand-rolled, black-sobranie cigarette—and be damned to the air-filtration edicts; followed by a brief and feverish encounter with his wife Gloria; and finally a short nap. Only then could he go back to his work as a ballistics engineer with the space fountain, refreshed and relaxed. In civilized places, they called this ritual the "siesta."

This day, however, Kemil Ergun found nothing relaxing at home.

The hummus salad his wife served was lumpy, with bits of bean husk still floating on unabsorbed oil. The retsina was a new batch and sour. And, crowning indignity, she had let the household supply of sobranie run out and made no effort to tell him so he could acquire more through his special sources.

When Ergun questioned her on this, all she would say was: "Its contraband." Meaning: "I don't want it in the house."

Gloria Chan was not a proper wife. Respectful enough, yes, when his face was toward her. Compliant in bed, to be sure. But like all Chinese she had a willful streak. Deep down, she thought she was better than her husband. Better than any non-Chinese.

Actually, she was quite ignorant. She knew very little about the proper seasoning of his food. Nearly nothing about winemaking. And nothing at all about the secondary businesses in which Kemil Ergun engaged, with contacts on the space fountains cargo dock, that allowed them a houseful of little luxuries. Her family was huge and raucous. They seemed to spread over half this level of the complex and had a finger in every other pie, none of which they would trust with a Turk. They thought he could afford everything the two of them had on an engineers salary. More fool they!

"The smoking is my pleasure," he said today. Quite reasonably, he thought.

"Its dirty. You stink up the house."

"What good is it to have a house," he said with a shrug, "if a man cannot stink it up occasionally?"

"I have to live here too!"

"One cigarette? It never bothered you before."

"It bothered me. I just never said anything."

"Well. . . there then!" Kemil struggled for advantage on this slippery rhetorical slope. "This is no time to start complaining."

"I can complain if I want to. My hair and clothing always smelling like burning tar. Every day the Citizen's Militia come sniffing around, making rude eyes at me. My food tastes bad—"

"Your food always tastes bad!"

"You pig! You filthy Turkish pig!"

The encounter, no longer likely to be brief, quickly passed through the feverish stage as Gloria hefted the unfinished plate of hummus and slung it at his head.

Ergun ducked and heard the crockery smash against the wall behind him.

"You'll just have to clean that up." He shrugged again.

"I'll clean you up!" She snatched a knife, holding it pointed toward his midsection, a meter and a half away with the table between them.

It was a dull blade, the one he used for spreading the garbanzo bean paste. It could do him no conceivable harm. Not in her hands, anyway. Ergun grinned at her.

"Eeee-yi-heeee!" she shrieked. In frustration, he thought.

Gloria Chan made a feint around the table. Then, in one smooth move, she flipped the knife expertly in her fingers, drew her hand back, and threw. Aiming low.

Ergun ducked again, but the blade caught him between the shoulder and chest. It could not penetrate very deeply, but it made him pause and blink in surprise. He felt a cold wetness against his skin. The residue of oily, yellow-brown paste on the blade would surely stain his shirt. Now he would have to change it before going back to work. His eyes squinted in fury, Ergun came around the table fast, charging at his wife.

Gloria turned and fled down the hall, headed for the outer door, the public corridor beyond, and a total scandal.

She was still shrieking. "Help! Murder!"

That was exactly what Kemil Ergun had in mind.

Demeter Coghlan was crossing between one ramp and another on Tharsis Montes s second level, heading back down to her hotel after lunch, when the shouting caught her attention.

"Help! Murder!"

Demeter was still so steamed over Jory's two-faced treatment of her that she wasn't thinking straight. Prudence, in a 21st-century urban setting, said you moved away from a cry of murder. Instead, Demeter was drawn to it: the voice was a woman's.

The corridors were narrower here than elsewhere in the complex—one sign, she had come to understand, of a private residential zone. The hex cubes were laid out with their connecting tunnels branching off at opposing angles, so that the eye was not oppressed by long vistas of drab, dull rock. Demeter threaded her way from one cut chamber to the next, seeking the origin of that shout.

On either side of the corridor, doors were opening and heads popping out. Martians might value their privacy above all else, Demeter reflected, but that didn't mean they couldn't enjoy a ruckus when one presented itself. Most of the faces seemed to be some blend of Earth's Asian populations.

Demeter had gone perhaps fifty paces down the tunnel when a young woman came around a corner and ran full-tilt into her. Demeter held on to the other's arms as the two of them went down.

"Let me go!" The young woman struggled. From her severely styled hair, Demeter guessed she was ethnic Chinese. "He's going to kill me!"

By the time Demeter had untangled herself and risen to one knee, other people were around to keep the woman from flying off.

"What's happening?"

"Who's been killed?"

"Isn't that Gloria Chan?"

"Help! Murder!" the Chinese woman shrieked again and pushed her way through the crowd.

The source of her terror appeared one second later. A man stumbled out of the cube she had just left. He wore dark slacks and a white shirt, blotched with blood. The handle of a knife stuck out of the shirt at a high angle. His dark face, crossed with a black and bristling mustache, was purple with rage. His eyes certainly sparked murder.

"Stop him!"

"It's the Turk!"

"He'll kill her!"

"Killer!"

The man passed by Demeter at a stiff-legged run, going after the woman, whose name appeared to be Gloria Chan. The people on all sides tried to grapple with him, but the sight of the knife handle put them off. One man fell, shrieking, and pulled down another. In two seconds more, neighbor had struck neighbor and a brawl was under way, everyone screaming in high-pitched gabble that bore no relation to English.

Demeter, still down on one knee, shrank against the tunnel wall and tried to keep out of the flight path of fists and feet. She raised the charm bracelet to the vicinity of her mouth.

"Sugar, call the police or whoever."

"Never no mi-ii—"

A hand reached down and clawed at Demeter's arm. The bangle was torn away and flew across the corridor. A silvery wink among dark and bobbling heads was the last Coghlan saw of her personal chrono.

She pressed into the one of the hex corners, made herself small in the junction between walls and floor, and waited for a break in the action so she might crawl into a doorway.

Demeter was still waiting when the corridor flooded with gas. Even with a fold of sleeve pressed over her nose and mouth, she felt its effects after a moment. Then she felt nothing at all.

Ellen Sorbel's head had been deep in the geological strata, feeling her way across a layer of broken schist, when Wyatt's voice came for her.

"You are wanted in jail," he said smugly.

"What? Now?" Ellen never brought her senses out of the datastream, just spoke as one disembodied voice to another. "Why?"

"A casual has been picked up in a public disturbance. She gives your name as a reference. Shall I say you are otherwise occupied?"

"Who is it? Oh, let me guess. Demeter Coghlan, right?"

'The woman can give no clear account of herself. She seems to have lost both her identity cards and her chrono. But Coghlan is the name she used."

'Tell them I'll be down directly."

Wyatt paused before responding. "Really, Miz Sorbel, your work for this department is much more important than looking after a... a firefly."

"Where did you get a term like that?" Ellen wondered aloud. "Demeter is a friend. Now unhook me ... and pass my message, will you?"

"Very well," the machine said stiffly.

Ellen had to appear at the cells in person to make the identification, now that Demeter had lost her electronic persona. When Sorbel arrived at the secure area, obvious from its uniform gray paint and its location down at the complex's lowest finished level, she found a dozen pallets laid out in the open corridors. Each one held a sleeping body, covered to the chin by a white sheet. Some of the sheets were spotted with blood. Here and there a medic attempted to bind a scalp wound or pressure-cuff a broken bone. It looked like the aftermath of a tong war; every exposed face was Chinese or Central Asian. This disturbed Ellen, because the Pacific Rim community was one of Tharsis Montes's most peaceful enclaves.

"Where is the Earth casual?" Sorbel asked the first militiaman she encountered.

"That way." He inclined his head down the tunnel.

She passed five cells, all large communal blocks three meters on a side. They were filled with drooping, listless people of mixed race, again with Chinese predominant. Some of the prisoners stared back; one or two smiled at Sorbel's own Pacific Rim face and coloring. None of these looked at all like Demeter. But from the sixth cell she heard: "Ellen! Over here!"

Demeter s Anglo features shone out like a beacon.

"Demeter, how did you get in there?"

"Some kind of riot. I just walked into it, minding my own business."

Ellen sensed this was not the entire truth. "I'll see if I can get you out," she promised.

Sorbel went back and found the militiaman. She offered her chips for verification and got Demeter released into her custody. Before he would let the Earth woman go, however, the man outlined Ellen's responsibilities in detail.

"I have to accompany you in court, personally, if there's to be a hearing," she explained to Coghlan as the two walked past the gray-painted walls, through a door made up of steel bars, and into the public corridors.

"Will they call me as a witness?"

"No, as a defendant. In cases like this, the presumption is that you went out of your zone and gave someone cause to take insult."

Demeter gasped. "But... I was trying to help! This woman was crying out in terror, so I went over to help her."

"And sparked a racial incident."

"No, that was the man with the mustache. And the knife. He was a Turk, they said."

"You saw such a man?"

"He went right past me, close enough to touch. He was trying to kill the woman."

"Kill her with the knife?"

"No, it was sticking out of him. Here." Demeter jabbed fingertips at an angle above her own left breast.

"Sounds like a family dispute that got out of hand. Then there probably won't be a court of inquiry. Not if enough people tell the same story."

"Does this sort of thing happen every day?" Demeter asked.

"Well. . . more often than we'd like. Living so close together, and underground most of the time, people get tense. Tempers flare up."

"What will happen to the couple that started it?"

"They will be counseled, then each made to wear homing bracelets for a while."

"Homing—?"

"Don't you have them on Earth? They allow the grid to track your whereabouts at all times. You can go to your place of employment during your normal work hours, then you go straight home. Show up anywhere else and you provoke an armed response from the Citizen's Militia."

"Charming. How long does this leper treatment usually last?"

"Some weeks. Long enough to make an impression and achieve a measure of behavior modification. If drugs or alcohol are found to be contributing factors, they will be forbidden for the duration of the homing period."

"How do you achieve that?" Demeter smiled. "A stiff warning?"

"Slivers of Antabuse, surgically inserted along with the bracelet. Take a drink or pop a lid with that under your skin, and you'll think you died. You'll certainly puke enough to die, though the homer helps by monitoring your vital signs. Nobody's actually gone out while under therapy—not in the last ten years or so, anyway."

"You people know a thing or two about crowd control, don't you?"

"We have to." Ellen shrugged. "Think what would happen if a full-scale riot boiled over to the surface levels and somebody punched out a door. That is not a docile climate out there, like you have in Texas."

"I suppose not." Demeter didn't sound happy. "This place isn't a thing like Texas."

Demeter Coghlan missed Sugar—even if the titanium bangle was just a machine. She missed the routine of putting her to bed under a water glass, pretending that the chrono might hear Demeter talk in her sleep and report the details to someone, something, somewhere.

That way, at least, Demeter could imagine that somebody cared about her. As it was, she had to make her report to Gregor Weiss alone that night, just her and the room's dumb terminal. It was not a happy report.

"I'm blown, Greg. That's the long and short of it."

Demeter leaned back against the pillows, keeping her head turned toward the microphone. Although, in this small room, how much could directionals matter?

"The Korean agent knows all about me. Even a lightweight like him spotted me within five minutes. And the Zealander woman blew my cover even before that. Today she was actually giving me pointers on how to be a better spy, for future reference. This place is just a sieve. Every time you turn around, someone's poking you in the shoulder, telling you how to mind your own business. Half the time, they aren't even human. Just some mechanical presence, always pushing you around."

Demeter thought about that for a moment. She decided to let the sentiment go out as spoken.

"Paragraph. I've tried to get out to the Valles Marin-eris for evaluation. That's a bust, too. I've seen about as much as you can by walking over the ground inside an animated tripod with a three-dee sensor head. I've also taken feed from the dirtmovers on site. But getting there in the flesh ... well, it's just not going to happen. Not unless I mount a full-blown overland safari, with native bearers and elephants—or their mechanical equivalent. You got a budget of a million Neu for this gig? I thought not.

"Paragraph. The bottom line, Greg, is I want to come home. Mars is not a happy place. Too many people living in too small a cubbyhole. Even the air is stale. I can't breathe most of the time. So, book passage for me, will you? Next available transport. I'll take anything you can arrange. Ore boat on a long traverse to the Kirkwood Gap, if you can get it. Just remove me from this sufferin' anthill!"

Demeter tried to think of anything else to say. There was nothing.

"Endit. Code and send.... And, Terminal?"

"Yes, Miz Coghlan?'

"Turn off the lights, please."

She was too tired to move, and her eyes were too wet and blurry to find the wall switch.

"Of course, Miz Coghlan." After a moments pause, long enough for her to punch up the pillows behind her head, the room went dark.