Mars Plus

Chapter 12 Valhalla

Demeter Coghlan debated wearing her new party dress for the dinner date with Lole.

On the one hand, the garment was not all that new, after its one wearing. She might have acquired a stain on it somewhere. Not to mention wrinkles.

On the other hand, she could wash it easily in the sink. That would take all of two minutes, with three more for it to dry.

On the other hand, the dress was a hard thing to wear. Every moment inside it—or as much inside as she could get—Demeter had to be careful of how she moved and sat, had to keep her legs together and hold her stomach in.

On the other hand, her usual coveralls were a whole lot more comfortable, as well as easier on the mind.

On the other hand, Lole Mitsuno had already seen those, several times, in fact. He had seen the jumpers in all the colors of her wardrobe—which were violet, lavender, and gray—both with and without her warpaint. It was time to give him something new. And it would be a shame to wear that cute little dress just the once and then forget it.

The bottom line, however, was that Demeter just wasn't sure she wanted the reaction the garment was likely to provoke.

Or maybe she did.

In the end, she wore the dress.

Lole Mitsuno had felt a palpable weakness in his stomach and through the knees from the first moment he saw Demeter that evening. He had known all along that she was an attractive young woman, smart and bouncy in a rough, up-country sort of way Demeter had none of the poise, the reserved grace that had originally drawn him to Ellen Sorbel. Demeter was all candor and wisecracks, practically one of the boys. So he had thought of her as a friend, more like a sister— until she stepped out into the golden light of the hotel foyer.

She had been wearing next to nothing in shiny silk or satin or whatever they called it. The pinkish-purplish material brought up the color of her lips, which were a stunning red, and contrasted them with her white skin. Berry colored, that was what they were. And her green eyes were like the delicate little leaves attached to a berry's stem.

Hell, she was making Mitsuno feel like a poet already!

He had taken her to the best restaurant Tharsis Montes, or Mars itself, had to offer. The tables had white cloths on them that were pressed to resemble linen. The utensils were real silver, shipped from Earth at forty Alt-marks per gram. The wineglasses, although a polymer, were cut and polished just like crystal. The cuisine was Hispano-French: the sauces were smeared on the plate under the food—that was the French part; and they were spiced with vat-grown chilies and cilantro—that was the Spanish contribution. The rest of the menu was just regular commissary foods, dolled up to look foreign.

Mitsuno couldn't taste any of it, even though the bill would make a big dent against his weekly stipend. His brain only had room for Demeter Coghlan. Her face and creamy, bare shoulders filled his eyes and dimmed the gleams of silver and crystal from the table's finery. She entirely eclipsed the hand-painted, eighteenth-century miniatures reproduced on the white stucco wall next to her head. The one whiff of her exotic perfume that reached Lole had chased away all scents of food and wine. Her voice and laugh so filled his ears that, if other women had been dancing naked across the room, he would hardly have noticed.

She ate sparingly but praised everything, bite for bite. She sipped at her red wine, and the drop that stayed on her lower lip added to its color. She laughed at the right places in his fumbling conversation, and her teeth sparkled in the glow from the amber bulb sprouting from a slim, white-plastic tube on the table.

When she had spooned up the last of the dessert— sweet cheese paste inside a crackling, hollow shell of pastry—and pushed her plate away, Demeter turned her smile on him again.

"Well... it's been a lovely evening."

"It... doesn't have to end, does it?"

"No."

Just the one word. Spoken in quiet, reasonable agreement. Accompanied by a gentle smile and a knowing look. No. Meaning yes.

Lole decided in that instant to violate a trust and take her—an offworlder and a self-proclaimed spy, someone over whom he had no hold, no power for retribution—to a place reserved for the select few.

"Come on." He stood up and gently took her hand.

Demeter turned in her chair but made no motion to rise.

"Where are we going?"

"Someplace you'll like."

He walked east with her, up a ramp to the surface facilities, through a pressure door, and down into the old equipment bays. From there they followed a utility corridor out to the site of the complex's first water storage and aeration facility, 4,000 megaliters of open tankage, dug into bedrock and roofed over against explosive evaporation and the blowing sand.

Mitsuno and Coghlan crossed the pool on a catwalk of perforated steel plate. The dank air around them was lit only by the widely spaced safelights in the dome above, and by swimming dots of silver reflected off the quiet water. Algal-green slime, the persistent echo of protozoic life that had followed humanity's colonization of the Solar System, dripped from the tube railing beside them. As the two of them passed, Lole could hear Demeter's high heels clicking wetly against the metal. He expected her to protest about the environment, but she came along quietly, even expectantly.

On the other side of the tanks, the pair came to a gallery of unfinished tunnels, two levels that extended forty' and eighty meters below the surface. Mitsuno knew that the ground here was not competent; the rust-red, iron-rich rock was too friable and unstable for development, and so the complex's expansion in this direction had stopped. Instead, Tharsis Montes had dug in deeper under itself. But these old workings had not been backfilled or formally abandoned, just never finished.

Mitsuno hesitated before the door made of sheet-metal that closed off the refuge.

"Normally, we require a strip-search before bringing someone here," he said. "But..."

Demeter Coghlan flashed him a grin, held her hands away from her hips, and turned full circle on one toe. Her limbs seemed to glow in the vague and shifting light reflected down the tunnel from the waterworks. A fold of the dress glimmered as it snaked across her stomach and then pulled taut as she completed the turn.

"No need," he agreed. He looked at her wrist for the first time that evening. "Are you wearing that chrono of yours? Sugar?"

Demeter shook her head. "I lost her a few days ago."

Mitsuno also decided that she couldn't possibly be wearing any prosthetics that might harbor an active cyber circuit. If she was, then the technology for generating pseudoskin was too advanced for his detection. And, anyway, Wa Lixin had already scanned her and pronounced her clean.

Mitsuno opened the door on hinges that creaked with rust. Beyond it was a long room, with hangings of rough cloth to muffle echoes from the bare rock and hold back the ever-sifting dust. He groped for the switch—he actually had to light the chamber manually. The breaker was wired into the illicit circuit they had run long ago from the pool's emergency lighting.

Three caged bulbs came on to show the furniture inside. The pieces were old and mismatched, taken as first-generation castoffs before the municipal recyclers had gotten to them. Still, the space was comfortable enough. In addition to several padded chairs, a settee, and a low table, there was an old bed with the stuffing worn down in all the right places.

"My!" Demeter said, moving past him. "This is homey. Much nicer than the hole Jory took me—" She paused awkwardly. "Oops!"

"Don't worry." Lole smiled. "I heard all about that. . . . This place is just as quiet. No cybers, no fiberoptic, no one to see us."

She nodded. "Do you have someplace I could, ah, wash up?"

They were just within spitting distance of a couple million liters of fresh water, but the tunnel had no plumbing, either. Lole led her past a fold in the wall's cloth that hung out at right angles; in the alcove behind it was a chemical toilet and a steel bucket. He picked up the bucket.

"Pardon me while I go draw you a basin." And Mitsuno went back to the pool.

When he returned, Demeter was standing in the middle of the chamber, equidistant from the three lights. She stood tall in her stiletto heels, her feet apart at shoulder width, hands on her hips. The shadows played across her body as she faced him almost defiantly.

As he came nearer, Lole saw that she was trembling. The wine-colored dress seemed somehow looser, more bunched on her figure. He paused, smiling uncertainly.

Demeter took a deep breath, and the cloth slid off her breasts, exposing nipples that were erect and staring at him as boldly as her two eyes. He understood now that she had taken the dress off while he was gone and had merely been holding the fabric in front of her, pinched at the waist. She lifted the fingers of her left hand, and the cloth swung away, to hang against her right thigh like a limp flag against its pole. She lifted the fingers of her right hand, and it fluttered down between her feet.

Except for her shoes and a touch of lipstick, she was nude. And still trembling.

"Well."

Mitsuno came out of his trance, walked up to her, and cupped his palms over her hips, pressing his fingertips into the silky skin in the hollow of her buttocks. She lifted her fingers again and pinned him at the wrists, pulling his arms back around her. She wedged her body tightly against his.

He locked his fingers under her and took her weight as she lifted her legs and wrapped them around him. Instantly she started rubbing herself slowly against his groin. They never made it to the bed—or not on the first try.

Demeter Coghlan lolled on the bed while Mitsuno went behind the screen. Even though she tried not to listen, the sound of his peeing into the thundermug came to her quite clearly. This would be a good occasion for using a sonic phase inverter—except, of course, that such a piece of equipment would reintroduce the grid into this fine and private place of Lole's.

"You said you have to strip-search people before bringing them here," she said over the tinkling. "Do you bring many girls here?"

He grunted but waited until he was finished making water before replying. "This isn't just a place for women who are shy about their lovemaking."

"I guessed as much," she said... and waited.

Mitsuno came around the screen, still naked and swinging, and resettled on the bed. Immediately he was lying on his side and pressing against her, touching knee to knee, hip to hip, with his flaccid organ nuzzling her lower belly and one hand massaging her near breast in small, sensuous circles. His lips brushed her ear.

"Well... ?'

"Well, what?" he replied sleepily.

"You people seem to have little rooms like this set aside all over Tharsis Montes."

"Its a reaction to the . . . the public nature of our lives, I guess. What's the opposite of privacy? Publicity? We all want to find our own quiet place, even if it means stealing a cubic meter here and there."

"And you think none of them are known to the cybers," she said with disbelief.

"Oh, the computers know all about this place. The excavators that dug it were machine-controlled. The ground's unstable, so the grid even left a string of monitors in here to watch for cave-ins. We just put a few recording loops around them, so the grid hears only what it expects to hear."

"So you do come here to get away from the machines?'

"Sure. There are some things we don't want the computer grid being privy to. Affairs that're none of their business. So we set up this place as a haven for private discussions ... things of that nature."

"And Creoles like Jory never visit it?" Demeter pressed.

"Of course they do. They're a curious bunch, so we bring them in for little parties. The Creoles are partial to human girls, as you found out. We also bring the Cyborgs in, just to bore the socks off them. Everybody thinks this is just a sack shack, and we don't disabuse them. Anyway, the grid doesn't care about human needs like privacy."

"Isn't it dangerous, bringing hard-wired creatures like the Creoles in here? Especially if you want to keep this place a secret."

"Depends on your point of view." He shrugged one shoulder—the one that wasn't pushed into the pillow. His eyes were already closing again. "When the machine symbiotes get too inquisitive, it's easier and neater, we find, to charm them than to take more . . . um ... direct action."

Demeter's training in espionage gave her a full range of meanings for a phrase like "direct action." She wondered with some amusement what amateurs like Lole and his friends might be prepared to do in protecting their secret place. Instead, she asked a more pressing question. "Who, exactly, is we'?"

"Some people who basically think like you do, that computers are not to be trusted. Not completely."

"I never said that!" Demeter protested. "I just don't like them very much."

"Is there a difference?" Lole asked with a yawn.

"Not a lot. .. maybe," she conceded. "But all the same—"

Before she could finish the thought, he was snoring in her ear. It didn't surprise Demeter, after the exercise she'd been giving him.

All the same, she was going to say, the way this room was set up implied more than just parties and fun. People came here to plot. Maybe to hide out. That much was evident from the boxes of canned food, the survival gear, and the emergency pressure suits she had found right off, stashed beyond one of the wall hangings. Demeter had a lot to learn about Lole Mitsuno and his friends.

And they had almost nothing more to discover about her. She'd already told them everything.

Now, was that a good thing? Or bad?

Demeter was still trying to decide in her own head when sleep overtook her.