Mars Plus

Chapter 11 A Visit with the Elders

The new day brought Demeter Coghlan out of bed with a much better mental attitude. With luck, this was going to be her last day on Mars. Or, anyway, the last before she got a positive commitment to bring her home, which was almost as good.

That being the case, she wanted one final stab at reconnoitering the Valles Marineris District, pulling out all the stops and giving it her very best effort. To do this, Demeter decided, she had to overcome a load of cultural taboos and talk direcdy to Roger Torraway, Mars s unofficial first citizen and Guinness Guide title-holder as eldest Cyborg. He ought to know something about the Valles, if anyone did.

Demeter walked into the hotel's simulation parlor, plugged herself into the nearest booth, and called up the resident menu. There was no entry for people, even famous ones, just the usual packaged tours.

"Terminal..."

"Yes, Miz Coghlan?"

"Patch me through to Roger Torraway."

"Colonel Torraway is not a token holder on this network."

"Huh? I thought all Cyborgs were hard-wired into the grid."

"That is true: packet radio communications are not optional for recent human-Cyborg conversions. However, Colonel Torraways processors precede the fabrication of this nexus."

"All right, then," Demeter said reasonably. "Find out his present location, and slot me into the nearest proxy."

"There are no tourist proxies within one hundred kilometers of Colonel Torraways present location."

"Then I'll take a working machine and pay the surcharge."

"There are no proxies of any kind within that radius."

"Well, hell, then I'll walk. Put me inside the nearest device at any distance. Supply it with a detailed map and a good-guess ETA."

"Colonel Torraway will not allow an uninvited mechanism to approach him. This is his expressed desire, and his speed over the ground permits him to enforce the prohibition by running away."

"Damn, damn, damn it," Demeter said without particular emphasis. "Put an emergency override on his comm system," she directed.

"That is not the routine procedure. Does your situation constitute an emergency?"

"Mephisto ... I order you to connect me with Colonel Roger Torraways communications module."

"Coming right up, Miz Coghlan."

Roger Torraway and Fetya Mikhailovna Shtev were kneeling side by side, staring down a gopher hole. It was an unusual formation in the desert's reddish laterite soil: an oval depression with no visible bottom.

Its origin might almost be volcanic, except that the Heliopolis Basin was more than a thousand kilometers from any recently active lava fields.

The sides of the tube or passageway were smooth and compacted, just the sort of finish a burrowing animal would leave in moist, slightly clayey dirt along an Earthly riverbank. Except, of course, that the Martian soil was bone dry. And it had never, to Rogers knowledge, seen an animal so big, burrowing or otherwise. Viruses by the handful, and now and then a microbe, but nothing as large as an ant, let alone a gopher.

"Is mystery, yes?" Shtev said.

"Could be the wind," he proposed.

"Just here? So deep?" The Russian raised her head to scan the shattered landscape. "And just this once?"

"Is mystery," Roger agreed.

He was about to say more, just empty speculation on the feature, when the horizon lit up the color of blood. It was like a flash of heat lightning, but deep into the infrared. Roger might have thought it was a trick of meteorology—forty years ago. Time and experience had taught him it was nothing to do with the weather.

Dorrie Torraway stepped out of the locus of the flash.

"Roger, connect with the grid, please," she said inside his head.

"Tell them it's not convenient." He formed the words without moving his lips or vocal chords: electronic signals raced away through his backpack computer and found the nearest relay link.

She shook her head. "They really do have to talk to you."

He groaned aloud—or made a mechanical grating sound like a groan—and Shtev looked around.

"What is it?"

"Excuse me, Fetya Mikhailovna," he replied. "The on-line busybodies want a conference."

"Maybe they need something. Something only you can give." The Cyborgs right eyelid, a fleshy membrane abraded by years of sandstorms, flicked down and up. A wink for him alone.

"Maybe. All right, Dorrie—" His voice sank into subvocal mode. "—go ahead with the message."

Dorrie Torraway's image melted, shifted, and resolidified. Her shorts and halter became a pair of purple coveralls with metal snaps down the front. Her hips and waist thickened perceptibly as she lost five inches in height. Dome's severely beautiful face grew more rounded, her cheekbones disappearing as her cheeks chubbed out, shedding a few years and a lot of sophistication in the process. Her chin developed dimples Dorrie never had. Her hair went from short black to a long and wavy light brown, finally tying itself into a braid.

"Colonel Torraway?"

The woman's features were three-dimensional but somehow static, like a doll's head that was only partially animated. Her lips and the focus of her bright green eyes moved, but nothing else. Her jaw and throat muscles did not keep in synch with the words.

Roger understood the phenomenon now: the signals fed into his backpack's imaging system were based on a two-dimensional, bit-mapped icon. The grid—or whichever node attached to it had felt compelled to violate his privacy—was projecting a simulation drawn from a passport file or some other ungenerous source of data.

That didn't help, though. He still didn't recognize the face and figure.

"Who is it?" he asked. Torraway stayed where he had been when the red flash caught him, half-levered off the ground with his knees and elbows sticking out, his head turned at an angle to the horizon. Let the backpack project whatever body language it wanted to his interlocutor: Roger standing heroically on the red sands, Roger seated regally on a camp stool, Roger stripped of his black-winged bat suit and smiling like a recruiting poster out of a pink, human face. Whatever.

"My name is Demeter Coghlan. We haven't actually met, sir. Although I saw you a few days ago, out at Harmonia Mundi."

Roger remembered the place perfectly He could remember anything and everything, every meter of ground from fifty years of wandering, perfectly. Or his backpack computer did. He did not remember any human woman at Harmonia Mundi, though. It was the professional hydrologist, Lole Mitsuno, working out of Tharsis Montes, who had been there five days ago. Mitsuno briefly interrupted the forum of fellow Cyborgs that Roger and Fetya had convened. That indecisive forum, which had accomplished nothing. His interruption had been about—what else?—water.

"I do not remember you."

Already Roger was becoming bored with this conversation. If the grid was going to pester him with Dorries emergency signal, that was one thing. But Torraway could put his mind in compressed time and just let this woman ... fade away.

"As I said, we never really met. But I was collecting data with Lole Mitsuno, about a week ago, when ..."

Roger's mind came out of its high-speed blur, teased into trying to remember whether a second person had actually been working alongside the hydrologist. If none of Torraway s senses recorded her, then he had nothing to remember. That was simple enough. Indeed, he might have ignored a second human figure, so far away and insignificant.

"Is this introduction at all meaningful?" he asked, overriding whatever the woman had been saying in the space of his thoughts.

"No, of course not." The doll's head smiled woodenly.

At least she was honest.

"What can I do for you?" Roger asked, resigned. "I need to find out about the Valles Marineris. Specifically, if we were to raise the water-vapor content of the Martian atmosphere by, say, twenty percent somehow, then, with dissociation into elemental hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and a corresponding pressure increase, would ambient conditions at the lower elevations of the Valles be able to support approximately Earth-normal conditions? I know you can't answer that, per se. Only a computer model could give the answer, but—"

"I am a computer model," Roger began. The woman rode right over him.

"—what I need to know is, will the geology of the Valles be competent to handle the accumulated precipitation? There are no lowlands for the district to drain into—at six and a half kilometers deep, the Valles is the nearest lowland. But would the substructure be able to support free water without catastrophic caving? Or is there an aquifer underneath it that will just reabsorb the runoff, leaving us in a net condition of—" "Whoa! Miss Coghlan!" Roger raised his hand. The doll's face suspended. The mobile eyes and mouth froze and hung in midair, appliqued against the landscape, while her body and most of the head faded out. The image rebuilt only gradually.

"Yes?" the lips asked in a whisper.

"I spent more than an Earth year in the Valles. That was back in the middle twenties," he explained. "I could describe the area for you in minute detail because, of course, all my memories are machine-stored. But what I cannot figure out is why you want to have me describe anything? Instead, you should refer to the download of my survey impressions, which were long ago converted to a V/R program you can check out of any library. Better yet, why don't you rent a tourist proxy and explore the area at first hand?'

"I already tried that," the woman said, her image strengthening with a kind of conviction. "I don't know what I'm looking at. And your survey data are just that, undirected impressions. What I need, Colonel, is your expert knowledge, your judgment, your experience with the Martian surface."

Roger ran a hand lightly around the rim of his mysterious gopher hole. He didn't know if the image she was getting would show the motion. He didn't care, either.

"Yeah, expert knowledge and experience . . ." he said gloomily.

A heavy hand thumped his shoulder, practically knocking him off balance.

"Ask who she represents," Fetya hissed in his ear. "And what will she pay? Cost her plenty already to get override on you, I think."

Roger turned his head. "How do you—?'

The Cyborg grinned at him, showing steel teeth. "Your signals are not so tight-beam as once, Tovarich."

"Um . . . Miss Coghlan, you speak of changing the water content of the Martian atmosphere. That would obviously be a major operation, requiring significant backing. Do you mind if I ask who you represent?"

"I... uh ..." The woman faded completely.

"Never mind," he said quickly into the carrier. With his access to grid resources, Torraway could probably discover her origins and purposes faster than any nonadapted human. "But may I take it as given that you are prepared to pay for the special information you require?"

The face reappeared, hanging against the sky. The smile from her lips actually touched and dimpled the doll-like cheeks. "Of course. For usable information, we are prepared to pay a reasonable price. I just didn't know you Cyborgs, um, needed money."

"Money? No." Roger wondered what the value of 1,500 kilograms of deuterium-tritium fuel, delivered F.O.B. to the Tharsis Montes fountainhead, was in real money. "But we may be able to work out a satisfactory trade."

"All right then!" The woman's grin increased by half an angular degree—then narrowed perceptibly. "But how do I contact you? I mean, regularly, for the purposes of consultation?"

"How did you get to me this time?"

She hesitated, growing dim. "That's ... all..."

"Never mind. I will put the name of Demeter Coghlan among my special friends, always to have access."

"Thank you!" The woman's face came back in full force. Her cheeks reddened slightly, with what Roger used to think of as a blush.

"Think nothing of it," he assured her.

Coghlan started to say something more, reconsidered, and merely nodded gratefully. Then her features blinked out as the signal was cut at the source. In Roger's brain, however, her smile lingered in afterimage.

After the connection broke, Demeter Coghlan sat in the simulation booth, still wearing her helmet and gloves. Under the helmet's laminations of styrene, silicon, and fiberoptic, her face wore a long and thoughtful expression. Curiously sober.

Demeter wasn't sure exactly what kind of hookup she had been taking part in. Even without a whole lot of movement on her side, it had felt like a full-body simulation. What she couldn't figure out was, where did the pickup relaying Roger Torraway's image reside? Out in the middle of the desert like that, she would have expected the grid to need a remote or a rover to cover him. Clearly that huge, green Cyborg who seemed to accompany Torraway everywhere wasn't part of the linkage; he had stayed in the background or off to one side, always behind the Colonel.

Both of the Cyborgs had unnerving presences. Impassive faces, with no human interplay of the folds of flesh—lip and cheek muscles, eyelids and brows— that normally accompanied a conversation. The words just came out in complete and finished sentences, digitized somewhere in Torraway's electronic sensorium, not even passing over human vocal chords.

Squatting there, studying her with his faceted jewel eyes, Torraway reminded her of some kind of insect. A patient mantis, perhaps, waiting to ... snap! and clip her head off—if she had actually been present on the scene, that is.

After her experience with Jory den Ostreicher, Coghlan had thought she was ready to deal with the Cyborgs. After all, they would be like him, wouldn't they? Only more complete, more perfected. Instead, she found the Cyborgs quite different. Their inflexible, waiting gaze told her they had no interest in her—not in Demeter Coghlan or any human being. Her needs and desires, her plans and promises were all ephemera to them. Passing whimsy, dust on the wind. She sensed that any human, on Earth or in Mars, was just so much excess protoplasm to them. Not worth noticing.

This state of detachment would have something to do with their extreme age. True, the Cyborgs were relatively new beings, contemporaries of her grandfather s generation, in fact. Torraway himself could not be older than about ninety, probably. But all the same, he had found a way to cheat death. He could not grow old, weaken, and eventually die, as G'dad would. Torraway could only break down, and the broken parts could be replaced indefinitely. The new components would have better materials, faster chips, lighter metals, harder surfaces. The Colonel was virtually immortal.

That, more than the lack of eyebrows to wiggle at her, was what made him so spooky.

And yet. And yet, he had agreed to become her consultant, to "work out a trade." That in itself implied there was something he wanted. So Torraway had a lever she could push—if only she could find it. And if the price was within the budget of the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation. He wasn't on retainer yet, but she felt positive she could discover his weakness, his need, and arrange to scratch it. If only—

"Hi, Demeter!"

The goggles before her eyes lit up with the gargoyle face of Nancy Cuneo. It was a flat image, piped into Coghlan's simulation gear from a standard terminal.

"Hello, Nancy," she replied, wondering what her own image looked like on Cuneo s screen. Probably just a video not available notice, as if Demeter had stepped out of the shower. "What can I do for you?"

"Our delegation's come in, as I told you. I'm hosting a little reception on behalf of the Canyonlands people, drinks at six. I so want you to come. Everyone will be there."

"Everyone?" Demeter asked with a smile. Did that mean Roger Torraway and his big green friend, perhaps?

"The cream of the complex. So, you will come?"

"I'd love it."

"Good... and, Demeter?"

"Ye-ess?"

"Could you find something to wear other than those coveralls? Oh, they're practical, I'm sure, but a little too proletarian for this kind of affair. Surely, with the whole afternoon to shop, you can find something more off-the-shoulder. Something that shows a bit of leg?"

"Do you want me to come as a guest, or a party favor?' Demeter tried to keep her voice sweet.

"I just don't want you to feel out of place, dear."

"No, I'm sure you don't." This was more fun than the shark pool at the Dallas National Aquarium.

"At six, then?"

"Ta!" Demeter broke the connection.

Before her surroundings had gone quite black, Demeter s goggles lit up again.

"Hello?" It was Lole Mitsuno, peering anxiously out of the near focus as if he had suddenly lost sight of her. "Demeter?"

"Hi, Lole. We're cross-wired, I'm afraid. The grids tapped you into a simulation I just turned off. I don't know what reception is like on your end."

"You look, uh, like a ventriloquist's dummy. I mean, molded out of thick plastic, with your eyes kind of fixed and your face painted in bright primary colors."

"You really know how to compliment a girl."

"I'm sorry!"

"Hush, they're using my passport photo, I think. I didn't know the grid could do this."

"It can't, technically."

An awkward pause developed.

"It's your nickel, Lole," she offered.

"What's that?"

"You called me, remember?"

"Oh, right! Yes, I wanted to know if you'd like to have dinner with me tonight."

"Hey, that's nice. I'd like it a lot, except..."

"You have other plans?"

Demeter shook her head inside the helmet, then wondered if he could see. "A political thing. If you'd only called one minute earlier, then I could say yes with a clear conscience. But, as it is, I'm committed. My job, you know."

"What job is that?"

"Being a spy, remember?"

"Oh." Mitsuno's face wavered between good humor and naked hurt, just like a little boy's. It was a side of men that Demeter could do without.

"Hey! I do want to see you," she said. "Dinner. Tomorrow night. Six o'clock. My place."

"Okay"

"You're buying."

"I'll be glad to—"

"Something expensive, like lobster."

"Lob—?"

"Marine crustacean, boiled with butter sauce. You'd love it. Great with champagne cocktails. But since Mars doesn't grow lobsters, and nobody's probably thought of importing them, I'll leave expensive' to your imagination."

"That's a deal." He grinned.

"Tomorrow then, for sure?"

"See you!"

Demeter Coghlan broke the connection and pulled the helmet off her head before she could get into any more trouble. She started to check the time with Sugar, remembered her loss, and called up the grid itself.

"Thirteen hundred hours, forty-six minutes," the dispassionate voice told her.

Yikes! She had a dress to buy, and only four hours to do it in.

At seventy-nine, Harry Orthis began to think he was getting a little old for planet hopping. Harry didn't feel old—or hadn't until about a year ago. But his attention span was growing shorter, and he had little patience anymore for cocktail blab.

The reception for his negotiating team, when it finally touched down on the Martian surface, was made up mostly of small merchants and petit bourgeoisie. The settlement at Tharsis Montes seemed mostly to run itself, with no sign of an active government structure. So far, Orthis had met only minor functionaries, each of whom was all too quick to point out that he or she handled just a tiny department devoted to air circulation, tunnel development, water procurement, or waste reclamation. The biggest bureaucracy seemed to run the space fountain: he'd met all of three people attached to it.

Of course, there were other population complexes on the planet, and they might have a more formal government framework. Orthis remembered something Nancy Cuneo had said about a meeting with the mayor of Solis Planum. That one had a big red star beside his name on the hospitality roster. Probably a spokesperson of some kind for the whole Southern Region.

Still, this nights affair seemed to be mostly shopkeepers and hoteliers. These people either had no interest in the Canyonlands project or viewed it with mild distrust, as a source of commercial competition. As if they felt the need to fight over pennies with a new township almost three thousand kilometers away. Sad, small-minded people.

Orthis sipped his gin and tonic and watched the crowd dynamics. That's what he enjoyed most at these diplomatic functions: seeing how people paired up and guessing who would end up in whose bed tonight. Tight groups of three that stayed together, joined at the elbow, from one platter of canapes to another always intrigued him—in an academic way, of course.

He gradually, over the course of a heartbeat or so, became aware of general movement within the group. Flashes of pale color as faces were exposed by the abrupt turning of heads, white gleams from the sudden widening of eyes, marked a passage of some kind across the room. This reaction reminded him of the dew track a flying electron precipitated inside a cloud chamber: Orthis could see the effect but not the particle causing it.

Then the knot of bodies standing in his foreground parted to reveal Nancy Cuneo bringing a young woman toward him. She was the electron. Definitely.

It wasn't so much her face, which was nothing really special, as her overall packaging. The woman was barely more than a girl to begin with, and she covered the flower of her youth with a tube dress of sheer nylon the color of a raspberry Popsicle. It hung from her nipples to a mere four centimeters below her crotch. As she walked toward him Orthis could see beneath her arms that, in back, it plunged along the curve of her hips to barely drape her buttocks. It might conceal the cleft between them but would also emphasize that line as she moved. Apparently the only thing holding the dress in place was a strong static charge, for if she was wearing undergarments, or even flesh-colored tights, it wasn't obvious. He made a quick bet with himself that the woman wouldn't be able to sit down all evening— not and remain a lady.

That one quick, practiced glance told Harry Orthis the garment must have cost her about a thousand Neu per gram. It was worth it. He had seen lingerie in sealed catalogs that was less arousing. Even at his age, he could feel the juices begin to flow.

Nancy Cuneo was virtually invisible at the young woman's side. The North Zealand agent suddenly looked her age, which Orthis knew to be considerable. It didn't help that for the evening Nancy had chosen a frizzy wig of red curls. Why did everyone who went bald after that unfortunate wind shift following the Raoul Island test pattern have such awful taste in hair? In Cuneo's case, she matched the disaster with a party dress that had cuffs and padding in all the wrong places. She would look like a garden gnome, if she didn't fade to black entirely in the glare thrown by the girl in the raspberry dress.

"Harry! I have someone for you to meet," Cuneo greeted him.

"Nancy."

"This is Demeter Coghlan, from the Sovereign State of Texahoma. She's Alvin Bertrand Coghlan's granddaughter."

"Oh, yes? I know old A.B. well. We've jousted many a time at the General Assembly meetings."

"And this, Demeter, is Harry Orthis. Harry is a senior analyst with the North Zealand Economic Development Agency."

"Really?" the young woman asked. With her Southwestern cowpoke accent, the word came out "rally." And the partial pressure of helium that the Martians filled their burrows with transmuted it to "reilly." But Orthis caught her drift.

"What is it you analyze?" she went on.

"Oh, economic factors, cash flows, political advantage, anything you'd normally put through a computer."

"You and Demeter have something in common," Cuneo offered, smirking. And with that lead-in, she just walked away.

Orthis and the Coghlan woman stared at her retreating back, then glanced at each other. Harry couldn't imagine what they might have in common, other than a desire to throw off their clothes, drop to the floor, and couple there on the spot. And he wasn't sure Demeter shared that with him, either.

"Well, judging from her timing," Demeter ventured, "I'd say it has something to do with computers."

He cocked his head at her.

"I mean, you work with diem, don't you?"

"I never said that, actually," Orthis replied. "I do things in my head other people do with them. Personally, I hate the machines."

"Oh, that's it then! I dislike them myself."

"That's rare enough these days to be remarkable— two people passing through the same city who don't happen to think of our silicon friends as . . . well, friends."

"I guess I wasn't always like that," she said slowly. "Not until after the accident."

"What happened?" He put the right amount of concern in his voice.

"I was having my hair done in an autocoif—you know what that is?"

Sure.

"And the machine all of a sudden froze up. The scissors unit punched a hole in my skull you could pass a dime through—"

Orthis looked past her face at the braid of luxuriant brown hair, hanging at least twelve vertebrae down her naked back.

Some doubt must have shown in his face, because she quickly amended: "This was more than a year ago—closer to two now, what with the recuperation period, and then travel time getting up here. I haven't let anyone touch my hair since the accident. I always wash it myself and won't let a machine so much as put a comb to it.

"Anyway, those scissors did some brain damage, or so they tell me. Mostly motor function and some hearing loss, although that's all fixed now. You know the techniques they have these days for lattice matricing and tissue transplants? I've got so many wires in my head, I gotta take cover whenever it thunderstorms."

"Really!" And he was conscious of saying "reilly," too. "I was scubaing off Little Barrier Island in Hauraki Gulf—"

"Excuse me? 'Scoobang'? What's that?"

"Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus— it's a recycler that generates oxygen from the carbon dioxide and water vapor in your breath. So I'm down about forty meters, and the damned monitor chip suddenly goes haywire. The unit starts reconstituting carbon monoxide instead—although nobody can figure out just how. I had about blacked out, gone to dreamland, when the whole box shut down. I suddenly had to make a free ascent, blowing bubbles all the way."

"Golly!" she said in admiration. Or, as it came out, "gelly."

"Fortunately, my mates saw me go up and sent a sonogram to the surface. When the boat finally picked me up, I was doubled over from decompression, had my head wrapped down around my knees, and was blue all over. I had effectively drowned."

"But you're alive now."

"Yes, but most of my brain, or at least the cerebral cortex, was killed off by the combination of carbon monoxide poisoning and then oxygen deprivation. Like you, I've got a head full of gadgetry"

"And you solve computer problems with it?"

"Well..." Orthis hesitated. "The knack still seems to be there. I really don't like computers, though."

"Me neither."

"It's not just having the damn thing inside your skull—"

"—it's knowing they caused the trouble in the first place."

"Exactly!" he said. "They're just not infallible."

"I don't think they ever were." And she grinned at him.

So they did have something in common after all. Orthis was amazed at Cuneos insight. Like any good agent, she had the hard intelligence on everyone at her fingertips. He suddenly wondered what else Cuneo had been able to ferret out about Alvin Bertrand's prettiest granddaughter. Or maybe Harry would find out for himself.

"Buy you a drink?" he asked.

"Sure, whatever you're having."

That night, when Demeter finally got back to her hotel, she found a message from Gregor Weiss waiting for her on the room terminal. Luckily the text was in clear language, because she no longer had Sugar to break his fancy codes. Her bangle was squashed somewhere in the residential corridors up on the second level; by now someone had probably picked it up for the value of the metal.

"Sorry, Demeter, we just can't comply with your request to have a change of scene." He was using publicly acceptable terminology to refuse her application for immediate removal and reassignment. "G'dad says he can't get you on anything coming back to Earth sooner than your scheduled return flight. So why don't you just relax, do some sightseeing" —another euphemism— "and enjoy it."

That was all. No commiseration. No chucks under the chin. Just "do your job"—with a slight edge to his voice as Gregor conveyed it. That tone implied he was tired of her whining about having to complete a plum assignment with a gold-leaf expense account while other agents, better than her by far, had to sweat it out in places like New York or Mexico City.

Anyway, Demeter didn't care now. She was well over the blues from the day before. In the past twenty-four hours, in fact, she had recruited a living legend as her new agent, snared a dinner date with the most attractive unattached man in Tharsis Montes, and made a solid conquest of the head of the North Zealand trade delegation.

Things were definitely looking up.