Mars Plus

Chapter 6 Shadows on the Horizon

Unlike the inflated plastic domes that Demeter Coghlan had walked through on her last visit to the colony's surface structures, the lock complex was a solid building. It was erected out of composite panels that keyed into I-beam frames with lattice buttressing from the outside. The raised floor felt solid underfoot. The walls looked as if they would even stand up under a pressure loss.

Demeter was not feeling particularly good about herself this morning. Her tryst with Jory the afternoon before—and she had not asked him to stay the night— had left a surprisingly sour taste in her mouth. Sure, she liked sex. It was one of the great pastimes, especially good for making new friends and influencing people. But not with children. Not even with muscular man-boys like the Creole. What the two of them had shared, struggled through . . . endured . . . had not been love. It was not even good, healthy sex. More like a fumbling rape that had gone uncontested.

It was not clear to Demeter which of them was the rapist. The trouble with playing among the chronologically challenged, like Jory, was all that groping, grasping, hurry-hurry-or-I'll-wet-my-pants stuff. Aside from being over too soon for Demeter's taste, it lacked the necessary control and self-discipline that kept the . . . encounter from becoming demanding and potentially turning violent. Grasping could too easily become hitting if she didn't rise fast enough.

Demeter liked a firm hand with her sex—not a whip hand.

Still, at the defining moment, she herself had been eager enough. Demeter supposed it was because both of them had been taking neural induction from that tunnel-boring machine. All those concrete sensations pouring into nervous systems that were not quite ready for them. The operators who guided those machines must be either eunuchs or brain cases. Or maybe both.

The previous afternoon had left her physically and emotionally drained. So much so, that Demeter had fallen asleep in the middle of filing her evening report with the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation. Not that she had too much to report. She remembered discussing the expedition she would be taking this morning and her excitement about actually getting out on the surface. Not that she would learn much about the Valles Marineris today ...

There was something else she was supposed to report, or had reported . . . or at least had thought might be important. Something about geology—or did she merely dream that? Oh, well.. . The key item was that today she would get some valuable local experience by going out in a walker with Lole Mitsuno.

Coghlan looked around the airlock terminal. It reminded her of the elevator lobby of a Dallas mega-highrise. A long, open corridor slanted up from the underground complex and ended in this six-sided bay with a sealed door in each wall. They were very impressive doors, each operated by either servomotor or handcrank, with a readout panel to the right having both needle gauges and a digital display. There was a painted, red-bordered sign in seven languages across each set of paired panels. In the floor before the threshold was a steel trip plate. Each door was numbered, beginning clockwise from the left-hand side of the entry ramp. The lighting there in the lobby was day-bright, even though the tubes were baffled and recessed. Somebody was trying to prepare tunnel-sensitized eyes for the glare of sunlight on sand.

People came and went while she waited for Mitsuno. Whenever one of the doors opened, Demeter tried to peek past it into whatever lay beyond. Trouble was, that involved staring directly at whoever was coming out, which was the worst possible manners. Instead, she watched the backs of the people going in, and that gave her mixed clues. Sometimes the space on the other side of the door was a simple lock, no bigger than a commercial elevator, fitted with pressure suits and survival gear. But once or twice Demeter glimpsed whole rooms that were furnished with chairs upholstered in luxurious fabrics and the glow of electronics with LEDs and colorfully patterned screens.

She wondered about those pressure suits. Demeter had never worn one, although she'd traveled almost 280 million kilometers through interplanetary vacuum to breathe Mars's particular species of canned air. So she had questions. For instance, could she wear the suit over her own street—or tunnel—clothes? Demeter fingered the lapel of her jumper. If not, would she have to strip down in Mitsuno's presence? And if so, how far would she have to go? To the skin? Or was underwear allowed? . . . What was the etiquette of nudity in a strange society?

In the groups of strange faces coming and going on the ramp from the lower levels, she suddenly glimpsed the hydrologist. The outline of his golden hair, rugged jawline, and squinting eyes rode above the foreshortened tangle of heads as he strode up the corridor. Suddenly Lole was standing beside Demeter and she had to crook her neck to look up at him.

"Just how tall are you?"

"Two hundred ten cents," he answered. "About. . . eighty-three inches. Is 'inches' the correct unit for cowboy talk?"

"Feet," Demeter supplied. "You stand six foot ten, partner."

"All, so many foot."

Demeter shook her head. "You must have had skyscrapers for parents."

"Sky—? Oh, buildings. No, I'm just first generation. My parents were both emigres, no taller than you," he said appraisingly. Demeter stood five-nine in her stockings and, as a teenager, had been considered gawky. "It's the lower gravity, you see," he explained. "We Mars-born just shoot up, or so my mother always said."

"Then what happened to Jory?" Demeter burst out. It was an unfortunate personal remark, and she hoped Mitsuno wouldn't take offense for his friend.

"Jory is Creole. He was Mars-born, too, and of course fully human. But soon after puberty they did things to his body. Some you can see, like the impermeable skin. A lot you can't, like his entire endocrine system."

"Oh, right." She hurried to change the subject: "Where ate we going today?"

"Headed for a place called Harmonia Mundi, Mars Survey Reference CQ-6981. Wyatt's reserved a medium-sized walker for us. Door number five."

Mitsuno led her over to the airlock as he talked, where Demeter read the digital display: reserved t.m. resources department official business. Her guide spoke into the recessed mike: "Okay, Wyatt. Let s get this show on the road."

"May I have your thumbprint, please?" the panel replied coolly. A small square lit up white.

"Voiceprint me and open."

Without further comment, the doors servo-operated dogs unsealed themselves and the panel split and slid apart.

Beyond it was one of the elevator-sized varieties of interior space. When Mitsuno stepped aside for her, Demeter walked in and reached for the neck ring of the first pressure suit that came to hand.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Isn't this an airlock? Don't we have to get dre—?"

Mitsuno keyed a wallpad, and an internal door folded back. Demeter was looking into a truck cockpit, but one finished in steel and plastic instead of nice fabrics and simulated woods. Closest to the door was a utility space with facing benches and a pull-down table. Farther along was a driver's console with a minimum of instrumentation. Windows on either side and across the front showed red desert with various of the complex's buildings in the foreground.

"We'll use suits when we get to the worksite," he explained. "Until then, we travel in style."

Mitsuno secured the door behind them, waved her to a seat on one of the benches, and sat down at the console. He studied the board for a second, hit three keys, then swiveled around, away from the windshield.

"What do you think of Mars so far?" he asked casually.

"Big on the outside, small on the inside," she replied, thinking of lives that seemed to be lived mostly underground.

"Yeah, people up here go in for virtual simulations. Gives our brains room to breathe, anyway."

Demeter noticed that scenery was passing the window ahead of the driver's console without him paying the slightest attention. "Shouldn't you look where you're driving?" She gestured toward the front—bow? nose?—of the vehicle.

"No need. Wyatt knows the coordinates of the Mundi reserve better than I do, and this car's pattern buffers do a better job of keeping out of collisions than either of us."

The ground out in front did look hilly, with tall projections of gray rock that floated on past the side ports. Demeter craned her neck forward: the machine was following no road she could see. She sat back and sensed the ride with her butt. It felt like pneumatic tires on laser-aligned ferrocrete. Better even. Although the terrain outside was definitely shaping up into foothills, the vehicle's floor remained dead level.

"This buggy sure rolls along smoothly."

"Inertial compensators," Mitsuno replied, "built into the leg circuitry. From the outside, this thing moves like a spider doing ballet."

"You've actually seen a spider?" Demeter wondered. "I mean, they somehow got past your quarantine rules?"

"No, we raise 'em. It's the only way to keep down the flies."

The floor took a reeling step—a sudden lurch forward and a long circle back, like a camel with the staggers.

"Whoops!" Mitsuno grinned. "Spoke too soon. Wyatt, what the hell was that?"

"Sorry, Lole." The machine voice didn't sound at all contrite. "That was a chuckhole."

"Don't tell me you have gophers here on Mars!" Demeter broke in.

"No, Miz Coghlan-Demeter-Cerise," Wyatt replied with her full name. "'Chuckhole' is a colloquial human reference. The correct term is 'nonventing paleo-geological fumarole.'"

"Chuckhole will do," she said evenly. There it was again: geology... something to do with ... whatever.

"Next time we'll take a blimp," Mitsuno grumbled.

"Department funding does not permit excursions by lighter-than-air transportation over distances less than four thousand klicks," the computer node said primly.

"I'm kidding, Wyatt."

Silence. Demeter fancied the machine was sulking.

"What do you do when you're at home?" Lole asked after they had gone a few more kilometers.

"I was a student, studying for foreign service."

"Is that some kind of military outfit?"

"Oh, not at all! We help to maintain peaceful relations all across the planet. You see," she explained, "Earth has so many nations and regional trading alliances and ecological defense blocs and economic shield treaties that maintaining the world's diplomatic balance is a full-time business. Foreign service is a good career, too. If I complete my coursework, and with the pull my grandfather can generate, I'll have my pick of an embassy or consulate job in just about any country Texahoma exchanges relations with."

"If you complete your courses." Mitsuno accurately picked up her inflection. "Why did you stop?"

"I... Well, I had an accident."

"Oh. And where would you like to be assigned?" He politely declined to follow up on her personal difficulties.

"Haven't decided yet. I might like to get away from all these machines for a while. That would mean taking a post in some society that's gone Professed Primitive—like Seychelles, Montana, or the Republic of Hawaii—but sometimes the Pee-Pees can be a little too orthodox about their stature. As an alternative, I might just go to some developmentally challenged state like Dakota or del Fuego. Life there can be pretty desperate, of course, but I'd draw diplomatic privileges such as immunity and escort service. I'd id so get to buy in special stores, go to the head of any queues, and park in reserved spaces."

"Park?" the Martian asked.

"Uh ... temporarily store my car?"

"Ah! I've heard about cars. Do you actually own one?"

"G'dad does—he's my grandfather. And when I make ambassador rank, I'll be entitled to one, too."

'You could come to Mars," Lole offered. "We're about as foreign as you can get. And not nearly so primitive. Or desperate."

"You're a little too foreign. None of the Mars colonies has established diplomatic relations with Earth yet. In fact, your governments—or what I can see of them, at least—actively resent intrusions from the mother planet."

"Yeah, you got that right," he agreed. "Besides, we don't have much room for embassies here on Mars. How many nations do you people have now?"

"Thirteen hundred and some. The count changes every couple of days."

"That's a lot of tunnel space. And most Martians would get ornery about giving special privileges to social parasites. . . . No offense intended," he added quickly. "I'm sure your Earth governments really value what you diplomats can do."

"Most of the Martians I've met have been downright friendly."

"That's because you're a paying guest."

"Oh, right." Demeter had almost forgotten her nominal role on this visit.

"Although . . ." Mitsuno went on slowly, "when somebody says 'diplomat,' I usually hear 'spy.'"

Demeter saw him grin to take the sting out of his words.

"Why, whatever would there be worth spying on up here?" she asked innocently. The real answer, of course, was other Earth spies. Everyone came to Mars to scope out the territory and defend the old claims. "A million square miles of blasted rock, is all," she concluded aloud.

"And water," he pointed out. "Mineral rights, too."

Minerals . . . geology . . . something. The thought went out of her head immediately.

Demeter noticed that the walker had stopped moving. The vista out the front window had stabilized on a valley floor of lemon-colored sand littered with black rocks. She started to gesture when the robot voice cut in.

"You have arrived, Lole."

"Let's stretch our legs," Mitsuno said to Demeter, heading for the airlock at the back of the vehicle.

He showed her how to put on the pressure suits. They were sensible garments, cut on the one-size-fits-most pattern. On Demeter, that left plenty of room for her street clothes as well as freedom of movement. The suit offered no plumbing. It would keep her alive on the Martian surface, or even in low orbit, but not for longer than her bladder could hold out. The helmet was big and rested on a well-padded neck ring, which she appreciated. She did not have to carry its weight on her skull and push the bobby pins into her scalp.

Before Demeter pulled on the gauntlets, she took off her charm bracelet and tucked Sugar into an inside zippered pocket. No sense in letting delicate electronics get caught in the snapseals.

Then she and Lole crowded into the airlock, and he flushed its atmosphere back into the vehicles holding tanks. When the outside door opened, Coghlan expected they'd have to climb down a ladder. After all, the view from the windows had shown the walker carrying itself a good three meters off the ground. But the lock rim was a gentle step off the valley's sandy floor. Demeter glanced back and saw that the machine had assumed a low crouch, with its knee joints flexed above the cabin roof.

"What's on the program for today?" she asked, once she'd figured out the suit's radio channels.

"I'm prospecting for water or ice, and you're helping me."

Mitsuno went over to the side of the walker's belly and opened a compartment hatch in the smooth space between two leg swivels. He took out various aluminum cases, laid them on the sand, and unsealed their lids. Inside, inset into foam cutouts, were gray melon-shapes with little black bracing feet on either side and a data panel on top.

"What're those?"

"Transponders."

"What are you going to do with them?"

"You're going to take one and walk about three hundred meters out that way." Mitsuno pointed to the east. "Then you take another and go the same distance in the opposite direction. And when that's done, you'll put out two more, going north and south this time."

"And what will you be doing?"

"Watching you." Lole grinned up through his helmet bubble and handed her the first of the recording devices. It was solid-feeling, but not all that heavy.

She moved around the walker's outstretched footpads and started off toward the horizon. None of the stones that lay on top of the desert floor was big enough to make her alter course. She just stepped over them, keeping to as straight a line as possible. Soon Demeter had crossed a small rise and walked into a shallow pit. She looked over her shoulder and noticed that the walker had all but disappeared.

"Lole?"

"Yeah?"

"I can't see you," she said. "Does line of sight matter to these widgets?"

"Naw, they read ground motion and compare with their own inertials."

"Okay"

When she had counted off something like three hundred paces—each one close enough to a meter for this kind of work—Demeter set the transponder down, cocked its legs as Lole had shown her, and turned it on. When she straightened up, she noticed a group of silhouettes on the far horizon. They were dancing figures in inky leotards, with what looked like fluttering capes or demon wings on their shoulders. All except one. It was bright green. It looked, more than anything else, like a jade carving of the Laughing Buddha. It was holding up an aerialists parasol.

Coghlan wished the helmet visor was fitted with zoom optics. As it was, she could get no more definition than naked-eye. The entities looked like mirages or possibly dust devils, and she might have dismissed them as such—except for that lone, green figure.

When she got back to the walker, she mentioned the apparition to Mitsuno.

"How many were there, would you say?"

"Three or four. All alike enough to be some kind of heat distortion. Oh, but one was larger than the rest and green—looked like the Michelin Man with a sunshade."

"Wait a minute." Mitsuno clicked off her frequency. Demeter could see his mouth moving inside the bubble, carrying on an extended conversation.

"Okay, we're done for the day here. Go and bring back that transponder, would you?"

"What's wrong? Aren't we hunting water?"

"No need. They say this is a dry valley."

"They? Who?" Demeter felt her neck hairs rise with the finality in his voice.

"The Cyborgs you saw."

"Those were Cyborgs? I didn't know there were any of 'em left."

"Why not? Each one is essentially immortal."

"And omniscient?" she asked.

"When it comes to things Martian—yes, usually."

"So we're just going to pack up and go home? How about we walk over and meet them?"

"That's . . . not a good idea. Old hands find it smart to give Cyborgs a wide berth, unless they ask for your company. And this bunch sounded real short."

"Are they dangerous? They looked pretty skinny to me. Most of them did, anyway."

"Those guys don't have meat for muscles, Dem. They're all servos and solenoids, with tempers to match. You catch them wrong, they could pop your suit before you got turned around to run. Remember, they can breathe out here and you can't."

"I see. So we make like shadows."

"Damn straight."

"Don't know if I want to go back for that transponder now."

"Just keep your head down and mind your business."

"You go," she insisted.

"I wouldn't recognize the spot where you left it," Mitsuno said reasonably.

So Demeter trudged back over the rise. When she got to where the sensor was and retrieved it, she glanced up at the horizon.

The dancing shadows were gone.

When Ellen Sorbel arrived at the Hoplite, it was clear from the rackup of empties on their table that Lole and Demeter had been there for an hour or two. Probably since they docked.

Of course Ellen had heard about the bust at Harmo-nia Mundi. Wyatt had informed her even before Lole locked back inside the walker and turned it for home. The administrative cyber was too pleased with his big chance to say "I told you so." All along, as Ellen had struggled to analyze the new orbital survey data, Wyatt kept mentioning some old ground report—no, he couldn't cite a reference—which he thought showed a total lack of any anomalies hydrologic, seismic, or otherwise under the Mundi area. Ellen wondered if the Cyborgs had known about that report; they were usually were even worse at recordkeeping than Wyatt.

"Hey, guys!" Ellen said cheerfully as Mitsuno looked up.

"Ellen!" Demeter turned and seemed genuinely glad to see her.

"Sorry about the site—" Lole began.

"No need. We all strike rocks once in a while. But why were your Cyborgs so sure there was no water? Have they been digging—?"

"Roger says its the wrong kind of formation."

"And he would know, I suppose," Ellen grumped. She had spent most of her life plugging her head into geological core samples, infrared survey data, and acoustic interferometry matrices—and she still didn't know half as much about Martian substructures as Roger Torraway had squirreled away in that cybernetic backpack of his. "What was he doing out there?"

"'Cyborg business,' he told me," Lole replied. "As in 'Please kindly butt out.' Torraway seemed to be holding some sort of caucus with his friends—including the Russian girl, Shtev."

"One of those Cyborgs was Torraway?" Demeter asked, suddenly looking up. "Colonel Roger Torraway?"

"Sure," Lole said. "Why?"

"He came from Texahoma. I've been to the place where he was made. I should have gone over today and said hello, greet a fellow countryman."

"Demeter is a diplomat-in-training," Lole explained to Ellen. "Thinks she's got to make contact with the local nationals." He turned to Coghlan. "Torraway is not Texahoman, Demeter. He's one hundred percent Martian. And anyway, when they made him, your country—the Oklahoma part, that is—-was still joined to the United States of America. Torraway was an official in its Air Force, which I guess means he ran a blimp or something. But he became the first true Martian when they brought him here."

"Now you're telling me Earth's history?" Demeter had a smile on her face.

"Our history, too," Ellen put in. "Every Martian schoolchild learns about the age of colonization."

"What I never understood," Lole went on, "is why, if those scientists in the United States and Russia wanted to create a race of native Martians, they didn't let them breed. Why make them surgical eunuchs?"

"That's obvious, Lole." Coghlan shrugged. "The human parts could breed, sure, but they couldn't adapt their babies with all the hardware needed to survive."

"Why not? The von Neumanns do it."

"But those're machines! They were designed to—"

"So are the Cyborgs, machines," he said reasonably.

"It's different," Demeter insisted.

"What I never could figure out," Ellen interrupted, "is why your country—the old country, whatever— went to the expense of building Cyborgs in the first place. The cost just about broke your economy. And it certainly helped sink the Russians."

"Why, so they could explore Mars," Demeter explained.

"Ordinary people can explore Mars," Lole pointed out. "You did this morning."

"Well, I guess, it was before they had settlements like this for growing food and stockpiling tanked air and such. It was just easier getting around as a self-contained Cyborg."

"But they brought up nonadapted humans on that first mission to accompany Torraway One of them was his doctor, along to make repairs. They managed just fine, growing food in domes and compressing the air."

"I'm sure there was a good reason for the Cyborg programs. The scientists must have checked it out, made computer models—"

Lole was grinning now. "They made computer models."

"What you mean," Ellen said, "is the computers made computer models."

"And the computers made them the way they wanted them, to achieve the goals they had in mind," Lole finished up.

"Are we talking fairy tales here?" Demeter asked with a stiffly superior air. "I've heard all those stories, too, you know. The grid is self-aware. The grid is God. The grid is the next stage in human-machine evolution. . . . Right, guys! Look, the good Lord knows I have reason enough to distrust the machines. But I don't anthropomorphize them. I don't clemonize them. Sure, I talk to my charm bracelet. And you two talk to thin air and think of it as this Wyatt' character. But it's still all just a machine. Just a bunch of really most silicon platelets running self-branching response loops."

The woman stopped, her chest heaving now, and glared from Lole to Ellen.

"Are you so sure?" Sorbel said quietly, after a pause. "Jory tells me you don't even like to talk about sex if they're listening."

"Jory has a big mouth," Demeter said dryly. "And yes, he's right. But I also don't like doing it in front of my cat. That doesn't make Bitsy part of a feline cabal that's supposed to dominate human affairs."

"Still, you have to admit," Lole said, "the Earth scientists went and did something really stupid—on the advice of all those computer projections."

"But it came out all right in the long run, didn't it?" Demeter insisted. "Look at yourself today. All geared up to run your seismic tests, and then this ghost voice from out of the wilderness says, 'Don't bother.' So you tug your forelock and back out of there quick enough. Those so-called biased computer projections have given you a council of elders, the voice of tribal wisdom, and a free-floating resource of inherited knowledge. The Cyborgs help make this planet a little more approachable, a little more friendly. That's what those computer projections from the last century knew you'd need to survive here."

"Maybe you're right," Lole agreed, but he looked uncertain.

"Of course I'm right. I never said the grid and its nodes weren't smart, or subtle. Devious, even. But they just aren't... human."

"Is anybody else thirsty?" Ellen asked, to change the subject. "I sure am."

When Demeter was really tired, or had a few drinks in her—or both, as now—she couldn't focus enough to compose an intelligible report. So, instead of trying to gather her own thoughts, she put the hotel room's terminal in interrogation mode. The machine would ask her what she had seen and done during the day's safari, then it would prepare a draft report taking cues from her previous conversational style. In the morning she could review and edit the final version before sending it off.

Concept-processing was a function Coghlan had long ago installed in Sugar. Hell, Sugar could probably write up the day from her own aural recordings— except for the time she'd spent tucked in a pocket. Relying on machines like this would eventually turn Demeter into a moron, she knew, unable to think sequentially or remember more than two ideas at one sitting. But tonight the program was a godsend.

"Where did you go?" the terminal asked.

"Some place called Har-something Monday, map reference . . . well, look it up yourself. We were going to do geolog—no, hydrological exploration, looking for possible subsurface water." Demeter's jaw quivered as she stifled a yawn.

"What did you find?"

"Nothing. We met—or rather, saw in the distance— some Cyborgs who warned us off. Lole says they were having a coffee klatsch of some kind. I didn't talk to them.... Yee-hetviv!" She yawned again, opening her mouth until the top of her head was like to fall off.

"What did Lole Mitsuno say about the Cyborgs?"

"That they were dangerous . . . difficult, short-tempered. Strong, too."

"We know all that. But later, when he was talking about their origins—?"

"Oh ... that making them was some kind of mistake, that the computers on Earth had screwed up the projections." Demeter could hardly keep her eyes open. This was going to be one garbled report, despite the terminal's best efforts. "A lot of old wives' stuff . . . actually."

She yawed again. Rather than try to sit up, Demeter lay down on the bed and crawled toward her pillow

"Now listen very closely..." the machine suggested.

Demeter was already asleep and snoring.

That didn't matter.