Mars Plus

Chapter 5 Shadows Beneath the Surface

When Demeter Coghlan wired into the proxy that was waiting for her in the Valles Marineris District, she found herself looking at a pattern of horizontal lines.

What the goggles showed her were even layers of fine-grained material, brownish-red over reddish-brown, looking, more than anything else, like a Chocolate Decadence with raspberry sauce. Then Demeter noticed that the machine's lenses were focused at the macro setting. She reset them for normal viewing and backed the proxy away from whatever it had pushed its nose into. The image resolved into the sidewall of a canyon, layers of iron-stained clays and sands deposited in strata, pressure-welded into hard stone, and then carved away by the force of wind and, perhaps, water.

"Humph," Demeter grunted. She had teleported her head 2,600 kilometers to gaze at a rock wall.

Earlier that afternoon, Jory den Ostreicher had come to Demeter's hotel room—although she didn't remember giving him either the Golden Lotus's name or her room number—and announced he had finally gotten that pair of proxies released. The machines were supposed to be some distance away from the actual Canyonlands development site; so he and Demeter would have to walk them back. He led her into the hotels simulation parlor to take over the proxies.

Demeter was about to pull the machines sensor head away from the canyon wall, to turn and get a wider view of the terrain, when something caught her eye. It was a lump of glassy material, half-buried in the strata.

She knew about the glass-capped plant life that the earliest human colony on Mars had discovered. Could this be a fossil of an earlier form, only now emerging from between the layers? Well. . . no. For one thing, these sedimentary rocks showed that Mars had once possessed abundant free water. That implied a thicker atmosphere, and the silica shell of the modern flora was generally agreed to be a late adaptation to thinner air that permitted lethal amounts of ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface. So, it was unlikely the glass cap had any counterpart in primitive forms.

Could this be an animal, then? Some kind of hard-shelled marine life?

Demeter cranked in the macro setting again. The object exhibited none of the symmetries—bilateral, radial, pentahedral—that one associated with life. It was a lump, nothing more. An almond of milky substance deposited in the layer-cake of the region's geology. But before Coghlan turned away from the anomaly, she did a fast scan of the wall.

Other almonds leaped out at her. All of them lay in the same line of strata, more or less, as if deposited there but not above or below. As if, sometime in the distant past, a shotgun blast had peppered the surface of the mudflats with nuggets of... of whatever.

Demeter scratched the vertical surface of the outcropping with the clawed whip of her machine's No. 1 right walking leg. This was a touring proxy, lacking either the handlike manipulators or saddle pouches of the working models. In six centimeters of downstroke, she covered a hundred thousand years of layered sediment. One of the stones popped loose.

"What are you doing?" Jory asked in her earphones.

"Looking for fossils ... ?" Demeter replied meekly.

"Right! Sure! Our people have been digging around in this valley for ten years, every one of them hoping to turn up a crustacean or a clamshell or something. And you think you're going to walk up to a blank wall, kick it once, and make the discovery of the age! You've got balls, Demeter!"

"All right. It was just a notion." And it was the perfect touristy thing to do, Coghlan thought, congratulating herself. Already she felt like a spy.

"Just like a little kid..." the Creole steamed.

Before Demeter turned away, she tried to memorize the shape and texture of the loose stone—it would be too conspicuous if she were to put the V/R helmet in record mode just then. The object was translucent, almost clear, with a ridge of gray matrix still clinging to it. Bigger than her thumb, too. Coghlan was no geologist, but she knew something of a planet's power to form deposits. This nugget was no part of an igneous vein, which was how quartz beds formed. The stone had been created by intense pressures, deep in the mantie, then shot out of a vertical well in a single gout of magma.

The word "kimberlite" crossed her mind and stuck.

But that was all the prospecting she had time for, although she vowed to remember the site and come back to it if she could. With a pang, she suddejily realized that the last person to use this proxy—the one who had abandoned it with his guide in this part of the Valles—must have been looking at this wall of amygdaloid nuggets. Had he also seen the anomaly and investigated? If so, did he understand the implications? She had no way of finding out.

Consumed by these thoughts, Demeter turned the proxy away from her find, raised its lenses, and clicked to zoom. The valley floor came into focus. Her and Jory's machines stood on a slight elevation near the North Wall. The far side of the Valles rose up and up in an escarpment of tunneled passages and sheer bluffs.

The Marineris system was deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon on Earth, which Demeter had visited through V/R simulation before taking on this assignment. But where the Grand Canyon was a network of tiny, narrow gorges twisting and recurving through a tableland of etched buttes, the Valles Marineris was a broad, flat-bottomed valley, like California's Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy. Except, for their size, the bastions and knobs and domes here outranked even El Capitan.

"Which way to the development?" she asked Joiy.

"To the left and down. It's about two kilometers."

"Have Lole and Ellen done any exploration out this way?"

"I don't think so. Why?'

"There was water here once. That's obvious."

"Water was in a lot of places—once," he said. "That doesn't mean any of it stayed."

"Oh.... Well, let's go down and see the construction works."

"Sure thing!" And they started walking their six-legged mechanical steeds downhill toward a glint of reflected light in the valley.

Jory led Demeter down toward the construction area in the center of the valley. For now, from this distance, it was just a jumble of brightly painted equipment, in colors of phosphorus yellow and neon green that had never before been seen in the Martian wilderness. The big machines were walking about and chewing up the soil among tumbled drifts of broken stone from the pits and rocks fallen from the canyon walls. An occasional flash of sunlight off a windshield or porthole told him that the crews were on shift and toiling away.

Jory den Ostreicher knew a couple of the people who had signed on with the Zealanders to build their new township. A few were Creoles like himself, the rest contract tunnelers and construction hands from Tharsis Montes and Solis Planum, the nearest large settlements. It wouldn't do, of course, for Jory to butt in during shift, asking questions and showing off for Demeter. Not when he was traveling by tourist proxy and couldn't lend a hand himself , as was proper.

Instead, they came up to the edge of the spill line and observed the closed rigs at work.

The walkers were megasize, bigger than anything except a full-blown excursion bus, self-contained as to atmosphere, with their own airlocks and carrying food, water, and breathable air for fourteen days. The operators even had beds and a pair of simulation hoods for passing their off-duty hours. The machines picked up shovels of red dirt and stone here, put them down over there, in a pattern that only made sense after a few minutes of watching. The dirtmovers were ladling the tunnel spoils over oblong bubbles of clear film, each about ten meters on its long axis. Another machine on the far side of the field was blowing the bubbles out of fast-setting epoxy and extruding them onto pads of leveled sand.

"Why are they burying those domes?" Demeter asked. Even though she was sitting right next to him in the gaming parlor of her hotel back in Tharsis Montes, her voice came to him over the dedicated radio frequency between their two proxies.

"Protection," he explained, groping for a reason. "Sometimes we get meteors, you know? Or from the hard ultraviolet sunlight. Putting the Quonsets underground is easier than patching them up later."

"I don't understand. Are there going to be people living in them? And if so, why do you still have exposed domes at Tharsis Montes? Don't meteors come down here, too? I'd think that, as an older settlement, and a more important one—"

"Hey, look! I don't know!" Jory protested, unconsciously waving his proxy's front legs in the air. "This Canyonlands deal isn't a regular Martian project. The Zealanders are in charge, see, and they've got their own ideas about how to do things.... Okay?"

"All right," she said stiffly. "Anyway, I guess I could check it out in the project specs or something. I just thought you were an expert guide."

"I've been out here a time or two, that's all."

"Can we get down inside the tunnels?"

"Not in these units. We'd be underfoot with the work crews."

"Oh, poop!"

"Hey, that doesn't mean we can't see what's going on! They must have the tunnel borer on a monitor channel. We can leach off its signal and watch along with the operator."

"Isn't that sort of tiling—urn—restricted?"

"What? Watching someone else work isn't popular on Earth?"

"Sidewalk superintending," she said cryptically. "Yeah, I guess so."

"What's a 'sidewalk'?" Jory asked.

Jory showed Demeter how to switch her helmet over to the tunneling machine's monitor signal. Before she did, however, he had her check out the proxy's command circuits and then put the silver spider in standby mode so it wouldn't wander off and get into trouble.

Taking virtual-reality sim-feed from the borer was an exhilarating experience. She didn't have the controls to guide the equipment, and the channel was one-way only, but she still got a tactile response as the drill jumbos cut into the face of hard, dark stone. Through the neuro-inducer, it felt like her own teeth were twirling in their sockets while her shoulders and elbows pushed back against the tunnel walls. Then, when the blast holes had been cut and the tampers were pushing forward their package charges, it felt like her own fingers were thrusting into the rock channels. Relays clicked in her head as the machine checked out its firing circuits, and the bulk of the borer withdrew on articulated treads to the far end of the tunnel, around a protective corner.

Boom! The helmet seemed to rattle on Demeter's skull and the inducer pushed an overpressure up against her diaphragm.

"Very impressive," she commented, as the goggles showed her the formal plan of the underground complex, with another bite visibly extending one of the horizontal adits.

"Yeah!" Jory replied. She could hear him undoing his helmets chinstrap and peeling off the neural gloves.

"That's about all there is to see." He spoke, not over the earphones, but through the air from the terminal next to hers. His voice had a quaver in it. Clearly, all that neural stimulation was getting to him.

Truth to tell, she found it pretty exciting herself.

Demeter was not surprised to feel a delicate finger-touch brush against her shoulder, slide tippy-tap across her back. Something soft and warm caressed the short hairs at the nape of her exposed neck. She felt her body begin to stiffen, then remembered in a flash the sight of his hairless, glistening deltoids, his sculpted pectorals. Demeter wondered what the Creole's perfect, bronzed skin would look like, stretched over his gluteals.

"Is there someplace we can go?" he asked huskily.

"My room," she answered, scrabbling at the strap under her chin.

Once there, she did a fast scan of the cubicle. The blank eye of the terminal caught her attention. "Always on," Lole Mitsuno had said. Demeter went to the cupboard and retrieved her jacket, something she would have worn against the weather "outside" on Earth. On Mars, in the balanced environment of the tunnel complex, it was a useless garment—with one saving feature. It was thick-lined and opaque. She draped it over the video pickup and tucked a dragging sleeve around the audio. Then she shucked off the charm bracelet that held Sugar and upended a water glass over it.

Demeter turned and bent over to let down the bed. Suddenly she felt his hands snake around her from behind. They traveled up the length of her body, from knees to breasts, cupping and probing as they went. His lips were on her neck again, hot and slick. His weight—like a boys in the partial gravity—was bearing her down onto the bedspread. Too fast. Too fast.

She heard a rip! as Jory s strong hands shredded the collar of her jumpsuit and began to pull its back seam apart.

Demeter gasped. "Unh, wait a minute!"

She bent her knees—first the right and then left— and reached down with a blind hand to slide out of the hotel's courtesy slippers and her socks. Then she opened the front snaps of her coverall and pushed its remains off her shoulders, down to her ankles, and kicked them off, freeing her legs. She turned to face him in his loose embrace and rolled down her briefs, kicking them off, too.

Somewhere in all these contortions, Jory's lecler-hosen and utility harness had disappeared. He was standing naked between her legs. His domed, pink member slid up toward her face as she sank back on the bed with the points of her shoulders against the padding that had rucked up against the wall. She spread her thighs and arched her spine—and stopped thinking.

She stopped feeling with her head. She just let her skin take over, let the muscles deep in her gut go to work with the thrust, thrust. .. thrust that became the geometric center of her universe. She rode wave after wave of the heat that flooded her. She closed her eyes and... absorbed.

After a time she could not count, Jory's hips stopped pumping. The arch of his pelvis stopped thudding into hers. His shoulders sagged, and the skin of his abdomen relaxed slickly against hers. He was not heavy at all, more like a child who had crept into her arms for a motherly cuddle.

They hung like that, suspended from her shoulders and neck wedged up against the wall, supported by her hips where they jammed into the beds thin mattress. His breathing eased to a gentle, damp puff against her skin. After a few moments, he lifted his head and began to nuzzle her slackened breasts again.

"Hey! No more," she protested, but her voice came out a whisper.

"Didn't you like it?"

"Of course I did. But once is enough."

"Once is never enough," he murmured. His lips began to snail-walk toward her right nipple.

"I mean it." She struggled up on one elbow, rolling him gently off on his side.

Jory curled into a loose fetal position. His hand casually passed down between his legs and . . . Demeter stared. His glans and testicles had disappeared. His lower belly was as smooth as a girls. She could see daylight through his crotch. He had not simply pushed his male equipment back between his legs. It had completely disappeared.

"How did you do that?"

"Do what?" He roused, seeming perplexed.

"That thing with your cock and..."

"Oh, that!" He laughed. "One of the advantages of being a Creole. We can put the jewels out of harm's way." He slid a finger down there, and she heard a sound like parting Velcro. A tip of pink skin peeked out of a slit that was placed far too low on his body for a fly. It looked disturbingly like a vagina's lips.

"Airtight seal, too," he commented idly.

Demeter fought off a wave of otherness that threatened to change him from a simple, carefree young male to something alien and lizardlike.

"Why did you put a—a shirt, is it?—over the computer terminal?" he asked suddenly.

"I don't like anybody watching when I... do it. That kind of breaks the mood for me."

"Who would be watching?"

'Well, the computer link was on, wasn't it? It's on all the time."

"So? Who would be watching?" he insisted.

"The grid. The machines."

"Yeah, but no body is watching. They're computers, Demeter. Don't you have them in Texas?"

"Not in our bedrooms. And we can turn them off if we want."

Jory chuckled. "Maybe you think you turn them off ... Anyway, they don't care about things like that."

"How do you know they don't?"

"They don't have any reason to. Why would they?"

"I don't know what reasons a computer might have. Neither do you," she added.

"All right," he agreed. "So, next time, I'll tell them to blank the optics in this room."

"You're taking a lot for granted, aren't you?" Demeter was thinking about his casual use of "next time," but decided not to make an issue of it. After all, the sex really had been good. "I mean, you're dealing with an intelligent system," she pointed out.

"That's still to be proven."

"Okay then, a 'self-programming system that exhibits a high degree of volition.' Either way, could you trust it to do what you told it? And how could you prove it had obeyed you? I mean, it might just switch off the ready light and go on watching."

"Well, you wouldn't know, I guess." He had a thoughtful look, which seemed strange on him. "But, again, what difference does it make? The grid won't go whispering to your friends about it. You'll never know the difference."

"I'll know."

He sighed. "You're a complicated person, Demeter. More complicated than anybody else I know."

"We're like that, we—" She paused. Coghlan had been about to say "we humans," which would have been a direct insult. That sense of other overwhelmed her again. "—Earth people," she finished lamely.

"Must be your culture," he said. "Older and more, um ... devious."

Demeter let the word slide.

"Say, that reminds me." Jory brightened. "Do you want to go back to the Valles tomorrow? If so, we'd better get another reservation in. The men who were using those proxies will probably be wanting them again. They're supposed to be traveling—I mean, in the flesh this time—but the grid shows them due back in Tharsis Montes tomorrow."

"Oh, Jory! I can't! I've got a date—an appointment with your friend Lole. We're going out to hunt some water. ... But who are they, these people?" Demeter asked casually. Beneath her surface composure, her senses were coming alert. She remembered those strange pebbles she had found in the Valles geologic formation when she first wired into the touring machine.

"It's a Mr. Suk, up here from United Korea. He took a proxy for himself and one for his servant, too.... Very big of him."

Coghlan's flesh went suddenly cold. She could feel little nervous bumps rise along the skin of her arms.

"You mean 'Sun,'" she corrected him without any particular emphasis. "The man's name is Sun." "Oh. You know him?"

"No, no. But, like most New Asians, the Koreans put the family name first. That's all."

"I didn't know that," Jory said. "Kinda neat. . . Mister Sun. Lucky ol' Sun."

In a moment, the boy was asleep.