Mars Plus

Chapter 8 Hidden Meanings

Jory waited nearly two hours in the corridor outside the Golden Lotus. To avoid questions, he busied himself with tools from his harness, a logic probe and headlight, to take apart a motion sensor that nobody had actually reported broken. People didn't make Creoles feel unwelcome or awkward inside the Tharsis Montes complex, but loiterers anywhere—human or modified—could arouse a certain level of apprehension. Jory didn't want to answer questions from any of the Citizen's Militia.

It was true he had no assigned tasks, not for the whole day. He was supposed to be resting and correcting an electrolyte imbalance specified by his renal filters. But that, like the wall sensor he was pretending to fix, was a polite fiction.

In reality, he wanted to see Demeter Coghlan again; yet he couldn't appear to want to see her. So instead he waited outside her hotel room, busy with something important yet unobtrusive. That way, when she came out, he would happen to meet her accidentally. For Jory, it was a clever plan.

The door to Unit 9 opened behind him. The Creole, halfway up the wall and hanging by one hand from an open socket, turned with an eager look on his face.

"Why, Jory!" Demeter cried. "What are you doing here?"

He dropped to the floor on cat feet. "Uh . . . fixing a... uh ..He pointed back up the wall. "Sensor."

"Right outside my door?" Demeter glanced up and down the corridor. "What a coincidence."

"I. . . did want to see you again." Jory stared at his toes.

It had never bothered him before that the impenetrable skin he wore was thickened and ridged across his soles, that his toes were both webbed and spring-tensioned for rebounding equally well off powdery sands and unyielding rock. Shoes were not only unnecessary but impossible for him. Now his feet seemed naked: wide and ugly—unlike hers, which leather pumps smoothed and tapered into delicate pieces of sculpture. Like a gazelle s slender hoofs.

"That's not a good idea, Jory."

"But I thought—!"

What did he think? That he and this exotic creature from another planet could actually . . . be together? That her rich and important family back on Earth wouldn't come hunting for her? That the two of them could set up housekeeping at Tharsis Montes on his stipend as a Grade 6 Maintenance Helper? That she would one day bear his children and then allow them, in their twelfth year, to be taken up, skinned and gutted, and transformed into Creoles like their father? Was that what he really thought?

"I thought you liked me," he said simply.

"Oh, Jory!" Her face clouded up. "I do like you. You've been a good friend to me. But today I've got a schedule to keep and—"

"I have a surprise for you," he blurted out.

Nothing was going as he'd planned.

"A surprise? But—"

"Come on!" He took her arm, gripping just above the wrist in a practiced lock, and pulled her forward, just enough to bring her off balance. "I'll show you."

"Couldn't you just tell me?"

"Then it wouldn't be a surprise."

She was already in motion, putting one foot out to catch her balance, when he steered her left down the corridor and started walking and talking—-fast.

"I remember how you said you didn't like the computers watching you when you—when you had personal functions to perform—so I tried to think of a place where they couldn't see—and it came to me that there's places like that all over the complex. You just have to think ahead and do a little preparation. So I decided to see if I couldn't set something up for you— and me, too, if that's how you like it."

He was babbling badly, something his mother had always warned him against. "Better to be thought a fool," she would say, "than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." But Jory sensed that Demeter Coghlan, a human addicted to words and explanations, would plaster her own interpretations over any unvarnished setting he presented her with. So Jory had to crowd her out with a flow of chatter, however feeble it might be.

As he talked, he took her down two levels and across the wide avenue, twice as broad and high as the average tunnel, that had been planned into the complex's development. This strip would be called the Arcade when it was finished. It would feature commercial booths having their own walls and ceilings, erected under the arch of* rock. Here Jory and Demeter were moving beyond the comfortable, pleasantly rounded-out districts of Tharsis Montes as it was, a pleasant village built around a transfer station. They were entering the harder geometric outlines of the larger Tharsis Montes that would eventually grow up under the volcanic slopes: a great trading center and perhaps even the hub of mercantile civilization on Mars.

Twenty paces farther, and the pair moved from orderly tunnels with finished floors and smooth walls, with electrical and service connections, with light and air and fiberoptic, to a cold steel door anchored by four oblong steel dogs.

"Is that an airlock?" she asked.

"Not really."

Bracing his fingers like the jaws of a wrench, Jory twisted the bolt caps in quarter turns until the dogs hung loose against the seal rim. Then he curled his fist around the vertical bar, levered his weight away from the door, and hauled it open against the pressure difference. A thin sighing, like the winds of Mars, sounded in the crack between door and frame.

Jory took her wrist again and stepped through.

"Wait a minute!" Demeter pulled back. "You may be able to breathe in there, but I can't!"

"Sure you can! It's good air, just not quite up to a full nine hundred millibars."

Jory felt around at the base of the door behind the hinge, found the flashlight he'd left there, and clicked it on. The wide-angled beam showed up scarred walls of gray stone that still reflected occasional lines of scoring, parallel with the floor, where the drill jumbos had cut into the rock but the blasting mixture had failed to penetrate and completely cave the matrix. This tunnel was in a hand-drilled area, so near to the populated levels; there was no room to bring in a big borer—like the machine he and Demeter had watched working in the Valles—and make a clean sweep.

"Its cold in here!" Her breath smoked.

"Sorry.... You'll warm up in a minute."

He took her down twenty meters of openwork, around a left turn, and through another door, this one closed with a simple bar latch. Beyond it was a dead end, an irregular cavern with only a single entrance and not even a service duct cut into the walls yet.

"Here we are," he announced with a grin.

"This is your surprise?" she asked cautiously.

Jory shone the light down on the roll of high-gee packing and the emergency blanket he'd laid over it. With a little imagination, it looked like a bed and was certainly just as soft.

"See? No video or aural pickups installed yet." He swung the beam up one wall and across the low ceiling. "Not even motion sensors or sniffers—nothing to move in here, and no gas pockets to seep in."

"All right... why?"

"Well, you said the computer grid listening and watching all the time bothered you. So, here's a place they can't see or hear."

"A love nest?"

She said the words with no particular enthusiasm, but it didn't stop Jory He took them as a signal to make his move. He slid his left hand forward, touching her hip, finger-walking around her waist, drawing her body toward him, until the curve of her belly was brushing the front of his shorts.

Jory ...

His mouth pressed over hers. The mask flaps that grew from his cheeks like a leathery beard tenderly brushed the lower part of her face.

His left hand dropped to her buttock, pulling forward so that her groin dug into his. When her weight shifted, he lifted her right leg up around his hip, and his right hand moved between them, working on the snaps that closed the front seam of her clothing. Where his nails— composed of a fused aramid fiber and periodically replaceable—were too thick to insert between the snap s baseplate and gripper, he just pinched the whole mechanism free of the surrounding cloth.

"No . . . wait!" she said breathlessly, trying to talk around the pressure of his lips and tongue. "I'm not in the moo—"

Jory released his grip a fraction and raised his head.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot," he said, taking up her left hand. The silver charm bracelet swayed around her wrist. Jory pulled it off, bunched it in his palm, tugged open the hook-and-eye closure on her jumpers breast pocket with a brrrip!, and poured the bracelet in. He sealed the tab with a circular motion of his thumb that widened until it took in the firmness of her nipple.

Then Jory pulled Demeter's body even closer, working his hips up and down, pressing the bony arch of his pelvis into her convenient hollowness. Something let go inside her. She began moaning at the back of her throat as Jory reached down to the pouch between his legs and released his expanding member.

Demeter pulled back. But she only meant to peer down at it, rising between them in the dim light.

"This time don't tear my clothing," she warned.

Demeter Coghlan was still bemused by the time she returned to her room at the hotel. Her plans for the day had gotten sidetracked in the cavern somewhere under the city.

That morning she had decided not to see the smooth-skinned little Creole again, hut after five minutes with him, she could think only of rutting until her brains exploded.

Demeter decided she really had to take a firm hand in calling off this—dalliance? This whatever-it-was. Nothing could come of the two of them—and if anything did happen to come of the affair, then G'dad would be purely furious.

Which, come to think of it, might not be all bad.

Even though Demeter had spent most of the afternoon on a mattress, all she wanted to do was climb into bed, pull the covers over her head, and sleep for a week. She made a minimal toilet, set out a water glass, and started to unfasten the bracelet at her wrist.

Oh, right.

She fumbled in her top pocket for the silver bead.

"Now what was that all about?" Sugar asked as Demeter brought her out into the light. "I heard some mighty interesting rustling going on there. Lasted quite a while, too."

"Shut up, Sugar," Demeter said tonelessly as she laid the charm on the shelf and began to turn the glass over.

"Never no mi—yi... ah, wait one, Dem."

"What is it?"

"Message coming in for you. From Earth. Code red."

"Coming on this terminal?"

"Yes," the chrono said. "But Dum-Dum there can't interpret the code. I can. Shall I divert? It's just text."

"Go ahead." Demeter sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Weiss to Coghlan, eyes only,'" Sugar began dictating. "I guess that doesn't include me, huh?'

"Just read."

"Reliable agents in Oakland report and said dispatch of commercial contingent with full consular status sometime late October stop. Given orbital transit times should be coming down on your head any day now stop. Sorry for late warning but this departure held extreme hush and defended most violently endit.'... What's that all supposed to mean, Dem?'

"Shut up and let me think."

"Never no mind."

Where in the hell was "Oakland"? And why would Gregor Weiss have agents there? And if he did, why should it matter to her? Demeter Coghlan was puzzled. "Violently defended" hinted at terrible things: maybe some people dying to get this message back to Dallas and so forwarded on to her. But she didn't know how to interpret it!

Then something occurred to Demeter.

"Sugar, spell 'Oakland.'"

"A-U-C-K-L-A-N-D, Dem. Just like it sounds."

Now that was beginning to make sense. Auckland was the North Zealand capital. So the delegation might be something to do with the Valles Marineris project, which was under the auspices of the North Zealand Economic Development Agency. If so, granting the newcomers diplomatic status could give them the negotiating clout to pull the disputed territory right out from under her.

Still, Weiss's message did not confirm this interpretation.

"Read the whole thing again, Sugar."

The chrono did so, with exactly the same inflections.

The message was, of course, in Weiss s nineteenth-century, secret-agent telegraph slang. But for all that, Gregor was still a meticulous bureaucrat. That grammatical fault in the first code group—"report and said"—simply did not sound like him.

Report and said.

Report and said.

Report... N-ZED!

"Sugar, does the character group N-hyphen-Z-E-D appear anywhere in the text?"

"Of course, Dem. In the first sentence. Just like I read it."

"I've got to get your speech chip fixed, dear."

"Ain't no flies on me, Dem. You're the one ought to get her ears fixed."