Mars Plus

Chapter 2 We ll All Go Out to Meet Her When She Comes

Demeter Coghlan's accommodations at the Golden Lotus were best described as a closet within a closet. Once she had dropped her bags on the floor she found herself walking in half-circles to keep from stepping on them. The bed swung down sideways on straps, just like in a Houston Judiciary Department detention cell—except the straps were clean and not too frayed. The screen and keyboard of the room's terminal wedged into a recess in the native rock, which had been dusted with gold flecks to make it look like the Mother Lode back on Earth. The communal bathroom was down the hall and metered.

But the room was a place to cache her change of clothing unwrinkled. It also gave her a sense, at least, of privacy.

Coghlan eyed the terminal. If she pulled down the bed, after hanging up her clothes, she could sit almost facing the screen. She tapped a key and waited for the screen to come up. It printed: how may i help you, ms. Coghlan? do you take vio? she entered, two-fingered.

"Yes, this terminal is so equipped," a neutral male voice, still three octaves too high, answered from a speaker somewhere in the rig.

"I could have told you that," Sugar piped up. "Just ask, Dem."

"Thanks, but I'll handle this," Demeter told her. "Um, Grid... How do I get out to Valles Marineris?"

"The Canyonlands Development Limited Pty. of North Zealand has this area currently under development for a residential and food-processing complex expected to accommodate fifteen hundred people in the first phase," the terminal replied, sounding like a canned spiel. "Named for the nineteen-hundred-kilometer-long gorge system and its many tributaries, which were apparently shaped by streamflows at an unknown previous time when Mars is presumed to have possessed quantities of free-flowing surface water, this district includes some of the lowest elevations yet charted in the planet's surface."

As the grid talked, still photos of the project came and went on the screen in almost random order.

"Construction activity on the tunnel complex is continuously monitored by my Library Function, Channel Thirty-nine, for the interest and entertainment of guests of the Golden Lotus. A virtual-reality tour of the finished complex model is available on Channel Forty-three, for those terminals equipped with interactive V/R capability. Applications to be considered for future residential or commercial status wall be accepted through this unit by requesting—"

"Maybe later, guy," Demeter interrupted. "Look, I just want to get out there and see the place. How do I get hold of a U-Drive-It, or something? And which direction do I head out in?"

The terminal paused for what seemed like a whole bunch of nanoseconds. "Personal transport on the Martian surface must be requisitioned from the Dockmaster, Tharsis Montes. Accommodation is usually assigned on a priority basis. As the Canyonlands Complex in the Valles Marineris District is some two thousand six hundred fifty-two kilometers from this location, you should plan on at least fourteen days of travel time." The screen showed her something like a silver-and-red Travelways bus galumphing along on eight articulated stilts. "The approximate cost of mounting such an expedition is—"

"Skip it. You're telling me at least three reasons— but in the nicest way possible—why I can't get that from here, aren't you?"

Another excruciating pause. "Personal travel on the Martian surface is extremely difficult for nonadapted humans," the grid admitted.

"Well then, how do we 'nonadapted' types get around?"

"By proxy."

"How so?"

"Proxy... a person or device equipped with recording and telemetry functions to act on the request of, or in place of, another person."

The screen displayed, first, a human person under a helmet that was ringed with lenses and antennae. The person was also wearing what looked like a manplifier suit with detachable waldos. Next the terminal showed a metal ball of indeterminate size knobbed with similar pickups. The ball walked on feathery spider legs and sported two nearly human arms—which gave Demeter a queasy feeling.

"Right." Coghlan bit her lip. Something was not getting said here; she sensed she needed badly to know what that something was.

"Um, how do I get in touch with a proxy?' she asked.

"Through an interactive V/R terminal."

"Are you that kind of terminal?"

"This unit is not so equipped."

"Then how do I access?"

"Many public terminals, and those for short-term lease in some private establishments, are equipped with full sight-sound-touch reality interaction. Some of these units also provide patches for the inner ear, thereby stimulating the sense of balance, and to the rhinal cortex, stimulating the senses of smell and taste. Such features are usually provided at additional charge—"

"Thanks, I already know what Mars smells like." Burned rock and used gym socks, she guessed, with the sting of a vodka martini heavy on the vermouth. "How do I find a terminal that can handle virtual reality?"

"The Golden Lotus provides a full-feature simulation parlor for your relaxation and entertainment. In the public corridors, look for any device marked with the red V-slash-R symbol." And the screen showed her a picture of one.

"Thanks, I'll go out now and—"

"It is strongly recommended," the grid interrupted her, which was something new, "that first-time visitors be accompanied by an experienced guide. This is for your protection, so that you do not become spatially disoriented, and to protect the colony's equipment, which in the case of your incapacitation might become damaged or lost."

"I see. And where do I get a guide?"

"Many citizens will agree to escort casuals for a small fee, which may be paid directly—"

"Right. Now find me one, will you?"

"We will arrange for an appropriate person to contact you," the grid presence said stiffly. Then it went silent. As if to make its point, the screen pattern blinked off. End of conversation.

"How about that?" Demeter said to herself. "I finally managed to insult a machine."

You do it all the time, Dem," Sugar observed from her wrist. "Why, the things you say to me—"

"Shut up, Shoogs."

"Never no mind, Dem."

Suddenly the gold-flecked walls seemed to be pressing in on her. The air in her room felt all used up. Demeter stood, letting the bed swing back into its recess. After making sure that the doorlock was properly keyed to her thumbprint, she went out into the hallway, turned left for the main tunnel, and went on an unsupervised meander.

Jory den Ostreicher pulled the plastic sheet tight over the seedbed and tacked it with a nailgun. To avoid ripping the material, he put his spike through a grommet molded into the rolled seam.

Tending the new crops—this one was low-hydro carrots, by the tag stitched into the seam—was just part of his outside duties. Every citizen of Mars had three or four jobs, all assigned according to his or her skills and adaptations. Putting in carrots, or any other plantform, was a communal effort.

To begin with, an injection crew shot a perimeter wall all around the plot, going down to bedrock or permafrost, whichever came first; this formed an impermeable barrier against the Martian atmosphere. Next, someone with a rototiller had to prepare the soil, which meant breaking it up and raking it smooth. Then someone else spread the necessary mix of chemicals, including a healthy dose of nitrogen-fixers. Finally, Jory came around with his rolls of film and tacked them across the top of the harrier dike.

The double-layer film was made by someone else, probably a home-factory cooperative working with methane feedstocks from the gas wells. They sealed the edges, adding the anchoring grommets and inlet tubes for pumped air and water. Another cooperative sprouted the seedlings under blotting paper and studded the film with them. They left the finished rolls in a compartment lock for Jory to pick up and spread. It was a real community effort in the best Martian tradition, and everybody got a share of the harvest.

Jory's special skill wasn't any green thumb—he personally couldn't make hair grow. Instead it was his adaptation for working outside in the natural Martian atmosphere. Jory was a Creole, halfway between the old-line Cyborgs and the nonadapted humans. In the cold and partial pressure, the average colonist would last about fifteen seconds before his feet would freeze and his lungs collapse; with the ultraviolet bombardment his skin would go melanomic and flay off within days of his return to a protected environment—if he ever got that far. The Cyborgs, on the other hand, were an import. They had to be gutted out and retrofitted 011 Earth because of the complex surgeries that adapted them to indefinite, self-contained, and unprotected living on the surface. But after that, they were more machine than human.

Creoles were the perfect compromise. The surgery that it took to make a Jory, brutal and vast in scale as it was, was well within the capabilities of the Martian medical system. A Creole had the best of both worlds.

Unlike the Cyborgs, the Creole looked quite human. He could move easily, almost inconspicuously, among his nonadapted friends and relatives. Yet he could also work and play out on the surface, unprotected, for up to three hours at a time without distress. If there was one thing you wanted to be on Mars, it was Creole. Not the least of the advantages was the bonus pay he got for light-duty, bonehead jobs like tacking down a sheet of carrots.

"Jory den Ostreicher ..." the grid said in his ear. Among his other adaptations was a neural implant that put Jory in continuous contact with the colony's main cyber network, both sight and sound.

"Yes, what is it?" he replied, more thinking the words than saying them with his throat.

"We have an escort assignment for you. It is a newly landed casual from the Earthly state of Texahoma."

"Well, yeah, but you can see I'm busy right now."

"The contract is flexible. You may finish your outside duties first."

"Does this casual have a name?"

"Demeter Coghlan." His visual cortex flashed a sixteen-bit sketch of a chubby little face and dark hair drawn back into a ponytail.

"A girl! Aww-right!"

"Ms. Coghlan is twenty-eight years old and is well connected to the Texahoma political establishment," the grid droned, tipping a data dump from a file somewhere. It often did that of its own volition. "Ms. Coghlan studied three-and-a-half years at the University of Texas, Austin, in the School of Diplomatic Relations, but failed to take a degree. Other than her family resources, she has no visible means of support, yet her expense account is reckoned at . . . data-not-available. Ms. Coghlan's stated purpose for visiting Mars is personal tourism, but we suspect other reasons and are presently researching this with our contacts on Earth."

"A rich girl." Jory whistled under his breath. "I'm liking this better all the time."

"We advise caution in your dealings with this person, Jory den Ostreicher."

"Oh, sure! I'll be careful. ... Did she say how much she would pay for my services?"

"You may ask any reasonable figure. The Government of Mars will supplement to meet your price."

"Great! Where can I find her?"

"Ms. Coghlan has been assigned space at the Golden Lotus, but she is now moving about the complex in a pattern that has not yet been analyzed. When you have completed your tasks at. . . Agricultural Lot 39, you will be given directions to her current location."

"Great!"

"We thought you would be pleased." In a blink, the voice was gone from his head and Jory was alone.

The quality of Joiy den Ostreicher s work in tacking down the remainder of the seedling sheet was even more boneheaded than usual.

Looking for some human company, Demeter Coghlan wandered into a bar called the Red Queen on the second level. It was hardly more than a largish cube off the corridor hex, crammed with half a dozen stand-up tables, no stools or chairs, and no human bartender, either.

Instead, there was a Mr. Mixology™ wall unit, ubiquitous throughout the human-occupied Solar System. Demeter wondered if she ordered a Texahoma-style margarita, would the machine do a better job of salting the glass than the last one she'd tangled with? Better, she decided, to simply order a beer and discover what new definition the Mixology Corporations R&D Department had come up with for "draft."

Most of the tables were full, but a discreet peek showed her that only about half the room's occupants had legs and feet. The rest were holograms from a swing-out projector mounted under the table's scalloped edge. So, the humans who were actually here were enjoying a quiet drink and a chat with a friend or loved one who was somewhere else—on another level or in another colony half the planet away. And vice versa, of course.

None of the humans was unengaged and thus likely to want to meet a "casual"—for that's what the grid kept calling her—fresh up from Earth. And it didn't look like anyone would stay around long enough to begin a friendship, either. From the size of the room to the chest-high configuration of the tables, the Red Queen was saying, "Take your drink, enjoy it, and then get on with whatever you were doing." Even with the low gravity, you didn't want to stand around hanging by your elbows for long. This was a real worker's culture.

Demeter stood off, watching the quiet action, sipping her beer with progressively larger sips, and decided she really didn't want to interface with a hologram as soon as a table came free, aside from the fact that she didn't know anyone on Mars, except that Dr. Lee.... When the suds were gone, she tossed her mug into the cycler and went out cruising.

One level up, she came to a sign directing her still higher, to "Dome City." She decided that might be interesting. Demeter wasn't at all sleepy, despite the fact she had been awake for going on twenty-three hours now. The problem was the time difference: moving from the interplanetary transport's Zulu or Universal Time, in synch with every other ship and orbiting station, to Mars's own rotational time—which included a day thirty-seven minutes longer than Earth's. Add in the fact that the tunnels here were evenly lighted at all hours, and Coghlan quickly felt like she was floating in a bubble of unalloyed frenetic energy. Maybe going up to the surface and seeing what the sun was doing would help her adjust.

The first indication that she was leaving the underground corridor system was a landing in the upward-slanting ramp where it went through an airlock. Both sets of lock doors were open at the time, but she noticed that each was poised to swing closed at the first sign of pressure loss. Swing, that is, with the encouragement of explosive bolts whose arming sequence carried three warning signs pasted on the tunnel wall on either side of the door. From what she could see of them, the doors looked to be made of plate armor.

Evidently, the Tharsis Monteans—Tharsisians? Tharsissies? Monties? Montaignards?—suspected that explosive decompression might well be accompanied by a nuclear attack.

Above the airlock, the quality of the ambient pressure changed. Coghlan's ears popped, and she was suddenly aware of a . . . well, surging quality to the atmosphere. It was like being in a suit, where each beat of the induction pumps thudded against your ears and rebounded from the fabric of your neckseal.

Layers of fiberglass and steel sheathing concealed the actual juncture between Martian rock and the human-constructed domes. After a dozen steps, Demeter was conscious of translucent plastic over her head. The material billowed gently: not enough to flap, but just enough to say that internal air pressure was the only thing holding its shape—and that there was a steady wind on the other side. She was positive the designers would have included more than one layer of ripstop between her breathable air and the attenuated carbon dioxide whistling across the Martian surface, but Demeter was suddenly aware that those fast-acting lock doors had a real purpose.

Judging from the quality of light coming through the UV-yellowed plastic, the sun had gone considerably nearer the horizon than it had been when she came down the space fountain. She started looking around for a window to check this.

The first dome was about fifty meters across and twenty meters high at the center. The space was walled off with head-high partitions. A second and even third level extended into the upper reaches of the enclosed space with pipework scaffolding that looked none too steady. Demeter noted that the cubicles directly under the platforms were tented over for modesty. Otherwise, the living or working units—or whatever else they were—enjoyed the bland sky of the dome's fabric.

Coghlan wandered around this collection of split-level huts, looking for the perimeter wall and a view of the planets actual surface at ground level. During her search, she glanced through the doorway of one cubicle, which was incompletely covered with a hanging cloth. Inside, she saw a modularized office: a half-desk, V/R terminal, string chair, disk rack, and what looked like an old-style drafters board—but with a couple of mice and an interactive surface. The sign outside the door said, civil engineering, d2, water resources.

Clearly, whatever passed for government services in Tharsis Montes got second pick of the available office space. If there was ever a meteor strike against this bubbles fabric that didn't at once seal itself, it would be a bunch of low-level Civil Service bureaucrats who would be the first to go toes up. That thought did not surprise Demeter, who knew from experience that that was how governments usually worked.

This dome didn't seem to have any outside windows. She strolled through the igloo tunnel into the next one, which seemed to be some kind of garage. A large fiberglass pressure lock was set into the far side of the wall area. Under the bubble were a collection of walkers, sized according to the number of pairs of legs they had, like insects. Demeter had read somewhere that articulated footpads were the preferred method of travel on light-gravity planets such as Mars. It wasn't just because of the rough terrain, where practically every journey was offroad, since there were no roads. Wheels themselves were not Mars-friendly. They relied too much on traction to work. When the load to be hauled massed the same as on Earth, but actually weighed less than the coefficient of friction between the wheel and the underlying sand, then you could sit and spin for a long time without going anywhere. Left foot, right foot was the only sure way to get around.

The walkers inside the garage all had their hatches open and their access panels up. People and autonomous machines till had their heads under the panels, working on the innards. So, Demeter guessed, this wasn't just a storage area but a repair shop of some kind.

Not until the third dome did Demeter Coghlan find a window on the world.

This turned out to he some kind of low-gravity gymnasium area, with vaults, bungees, trampolines, and a pool of blue water for swimming and diving. The height of the fabric overhead made most of these activities practical, where they wouldn't have been in an underground tunnel. As soon as she walked through the strip door, Demeter felt her jumpsuit begin to wilt with dampness from the pool. Chlorine stung her nose. The room was almost deserted; she guessed everyone else was at work somewhere, looking forward to playtime.

Broad patches of the far wall had been left clear with a view to the east and south, and blowing dust hadn't yet scratched the window's outside surface too badly. Demeter walked up to the opening and looked for the nest of peaks guarding the Valles Marineris District— where she so longed to go. They were not visible over the curve of the horizon.

She turned and walked across the dome to the west side, to look at the sunset. On Earth, a heavier atmosphere buffered the sun at dawn and dusk, so that a person might stare directly at the swollen, reddened orb. Mars's minimal blanket of air could not create that effect, but the plastic window had a fader circuit— something she hadn't expected to find—and Demeter tuned it to the darkest setting. With that protection she could look directly at the silver expanse of the photosphere, which was about half the diameter of the apparent disk as seen from Earth.

It was descending more slowly than the minute hand of an old-fashioned analog clock, right into the shoulder of the large crater she had seen during her descent, Pavonis Mons. The sun's low-angle rays picked orange and red flashes out of the cone's dark lava and cinders. In the foreground was the lower superstructure of the space fountain, already bathing the shadows with its own spectral violet light.

"Miz Coghlan?" a male voice said behind her. It was a high-pitched voice, even after accounting for the helium atmosphere.

"Yes?" She turned and saw a young man with bronzed skin stretched over a very handsome set of pectorals and a flat stomach ridged with smooth lines of muscle. His thighs were bunched and corded like Michelangelo's David, with that cute inward cant to the left knee. Demeter guessed he had a nice, tight set of buns, too.

"I'm Jory den Ostreicher. They told me you needed a guide?" He was naked except for a pair of gray leather shorts and a utility belt or harness that buttoned to them like a pair of lederhosen. His feet, she saw, wore only a pair of light slippers, also of the same gray material. The boy, this Jory, was hairless, with a head as smooth as the bottom of a copper pot, except at the back. There some kind of dark, braided tassels hung down his neck and dangled between his shoulder blades, like a Chinese mandarins queue in an old-time woodcut. When he turned his head, she saw they were cables tipped with jumper plugs.

"Yes, they did. ... I mean, I do," she replied falteringly.

He had some kind of beard, too, she thought at first, or at least a mustache and a little goatee. But a closer look showed this was not hair. There was some sort of dark pouching of his skin. The folds on either side of his mouth concealed Velcro tabs for hooking up a breathing mask.

His ears were long and cupped, like a German shepherd's or a bat's, and stood away from the side of his head. The focus of the lobes' curves was not ear canals but small buttons of transparent skin, like miniature timpani. They were perfect for hearing in a fractional atmosphere yet could function under normal pressure as well.

"Unh ... what are you?" she asked after an awkward pause.

"I'm a Creole." He grinned. "Adapted for work on the surface."

"Oh, a Cyborg, you mean."

"Nah, they're nothing but wires and pistons, with a computer where their brains used to be. But I'm fully human, except for some enhancements."

"I see. So, you'd be my . . . proxy? I'd look through your eyes to—"

"No, I don't prox for nobody. Underneath this skin I'm a person, just like you. But I'll go along with you when you take out a unit. With my knowledge of the territory around here, you won't get lost."

"Do you know the Valles Marineris District?"

"Sure, been there a thousand times."

"Can we go now?"

Jory's face froze. His eyes took on a faraway look and his head tilted slowly to one side. The seizure, if that's what it was, lasted for about ten seconds. Demeter started toward the boy, afraid he would fall and hurt himself.

"Not today," he said finally, his eyes coming back into focus. "All the proxies within walking distance of the Valles are currently booked. But I've reserved a pair for us tomorrow."

"A pair?" Demeter said, stepping back into her usual conversational space. "Do you use virtual reality, then?'

"Hell yes, lady! I mean, I could walk there, hut its a hell of ... a long ways to go. Mars gets real cold at night, too, if you know what I mean."

With that last comment he gave Demeter a look that—despite the nictitating membrane that involuntarily wiped across his eyeball in the moist, chemical-laden air—could only be described as a leer.

"I understand, Mr. den Ostreicher," Demeter said coolly. And she hoped he would understand, too.

From the rattling and gurgling that assaulted her audio pickup, Sugar deduced that Demeter Coghlan had once again worn her comm bead in the shower. Yes, the focused roar of the hot-air jets, along with a marked rise in internal temperature, proved it. Oh well, Sugar was guaranteed waterproof.

From the readout of her inertial guidance system, Sugar estimated that they had returned to Demeter's room at the Golden Lotus, and from there to the bathroom. Now, from the aural imaging of doors opening and closing, and from the clank! as the charm bracelet to which she was attached hit some flat surface—with, by the sound of it, one-point-two cubic meters of storage space underlying a layer of compressed fibers that might or might not be plaited polystyrene—Sugar knew her mistress was bedding down for the night. Time for Sugar herself to suspend function and recharge her batteries from the grid's broadcast wave.

Then the chrono heard a distinctive rattle: the keys depressing on the room's terminal board.

"Communications!" Demeter's voice spoke softly.

"Yes, Dem?" Sugar replied instantly.

"Not you, Shoogs. I want the room's terminal."

"Never no mind, Dem.''

"Yes, Ms. Coghlan?" the terminal said—in what Sugar judged to be a slowed and octave-adjusted synthetic female voice trying to pass for nonaggressive male.

"Take a letter," Coghlan directed. "Digitize and compress for Earth transmission with the next signal alignment...."

Sugar countermanded her own suspend order. Any correspondence the boss initiated, she would probably want to call up and discuss later. Sugar decided to listen in and at least find out the file number for grid reference.

"Recording," said that fakey voice.

"To Gregor Weiss, Survey Director, Texahoma Martian Development Corporation, Dallas—and look the rest up in your Earth directory—Dear Greg..."

Demeter's voice paused for many nanoseconds.

"Umm, I've arrived on Mars, place called Tharsis Montes, where the elevator is, without incident—ah, Terminal?"

"Yes, miss?"

"You might put a few prepositions in there for me— whatever sounds good—and a few less commas. You don't need to register every breath I take, hey?"

"Very good."

"Text resumes. I'm passing the cover story you and Gee-dad worked up, about my needing a long vacation, and so far nobody's interested. Nobody even knows I'm here, except maybe the computer system, and it doesn't seem to care, either. They made me get a physical, looking out for contagious diseases, they say, and that's about all.

"Paragraph. I've already established that the Zea-landers are pushing ahead with the Valles Marineris area. Them or their agents here on Mars, that is. I didn't get any maps, yet, but from the pix the grid was showing me, the site of their development seems to be right in the area we're claiming. At least, the erosion layers look enough like the aerial survey analysis you made me memorize.

"Paragraph. The development, which they call quote Canyonlands unquote—Terminal, use punctuation marks there, will you, not the words themselves—claims to be for residential and food processing. And it looks as if they're digging in, just like every other colony complex on this dustball. So, Greg, I would guess they haven't figured out yet that the Marineris District is at a deep enough elevation for air pressure to build up faster than anywhere else on the surface. And open water, if and when, will collect there soonest, too. I don't know if the Zealanders can be brought around to our terraforming scheme. And you might get me a care package of better intelligence a sap—no, Terminal, that's one word, all caps . . . Jesus! you're a dumb machine!—but, anyway, I guess they'd be almighty unhappy if they were to finish digging out a honeycomb of tunnels below bedrock just about the time we flood, out the area with a lake or inland sea or something.

"Paragraph. Anyway, I've got a date tomorrow with one of the locals to go vee-are with a piece of the construction equipment or something. That'll get me a sight of the area, and we can begin figuring how big an ouch the Zealanders will start registering when we file our project. I'll have more when I get back.

"Paragraph. On other topics—yee-ee-hew!—no, that was a yawn, so don't print it—I said, back up and erase that—no, not the whole—shit!

"Paragraph. On other topics, tell Gee-dad I'm in great shape and think I'm fully recovered from the accident. And no, there are no the third-generation Coghlans on the horizon. This is a working trip, not some kind of shipboard romance. Though, I tell you, Greg, if I were tempted to rattle the old fuddys chain, there's this sexy little bunch I met today with the slickest skin, about medium chocolate, if you know what I—" Think!

Sugar knew that sound, too. It was some kind of cap or cover coming down over the charm bracelet, blocking out all distinct sounds.

Demeter had this thing about even talking sex in front of computers, let alone doing it. But, of course, what did she think was taking her dictation right then? Anyway, Sugar's eavesdropping was over for the evening. Time to get some juice. suspend. ...