The screen showed her two sallow Asian faces, one fat, one thin, both in their twenties, both with the sort of eyes that were used to squinting down the sights of a rifle when the game went on two legs instead of four. Either or both of these might well be agents of the U.K. Ministry for Foreign Investments.
As Demeter was snooping around in the visitors’ database, a new entry fitting her search parameters came up on the screen: Nancy Cuneo, nationality North Zealand, registered for casual status within the past twenty-four hours and due to arrive on the transport Spacewinds during the next thirty-six. Her bio showed her leaving Earth from the Sumatra Space Fountain, which might or might not be the most direct route from her home in Auckland. Traveling in a hurry, was she? Cuneo’s destination was listed as Tharsis Montes, which was as far as Demeter herself had gotten. The woman’s reason for visiting Mars was listed as “commercial representative,” but with the company affiliation left blank.
Demeter’s senses screamed, “Spy!”
The only trouble was the passport photo, which showed a woman in her late middle life, with an official age of forty-two. The hair—straight and black in a modish helmet cut—showed no gray at all. The eyes were lively and young. But the raster scan had picked up a webwork of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and scallops of hard smile-lines around her mouth. Even a good basecoat of pancake and a dusting of powder couldn’t hide the loss of skin elasticity worked by gravity and time. Cuneo was sixty-two if she was a day—that was Demeter’s professional opinion.
Well, not all spies had to be young and beautiful.
Coghlan memorized the face and hair and the sketchy details from Nancy Cuneo’s biography…one old dame she would watch out for!
By the time she was through with the terminal, Demeter was already ten minutes late for her tourist session with Jory.
Ingot Collection Point 4, East of Tharsis Montes, June 8
Jory den Ostreicher walked down the trail into the lowlands valley and approached the squirming pile of von Neumann processors. A good crop had come in, better than last time he did this job. About twenty-five percent better.
“That is according to yield projections,” the grid told him.
“Yeah, but it always amazes me when the real world fits its curve,” Jory explained.
He reached for the nearest processor. It was still moving, trying to climb the pile to reach the exact center of the homing ground. With his pincers clamp and striker bar—tools adapted for this particular job—he cracked its top shell along the bifurcation line. Instantly, the von Neumann stopped moving, just like it had been programmed to.
“Connect me to the public terminal outside the Red Queen Bar,” he said to the grid.
“Do you have the link number?” that disembodied voice asked.
“No, just trace it, will you?” And subvocally, as barely a conscious afterthought, he added, “Earn your keep, why don’t you?”
“We heard that!…Connection is made, you may proceed, voice only.”
Red Queen Bar, June 8
When Demeter got to their agreed-upon rendezvous, the Red Queen, there was no Jory. She could have asked him to pick her up at the hotel, but that situation had implications she was not ready to explore. It just felt safer to establish a neutral territory.
Except, he hadn’t shown. Demeter consulted Sugar and learned it was only eleven minutes after their appointed meeting time. She thought the boy was being unreasonable, not to wait that long. After all, she was paying him, wasn’t she?
Coghlan walked over to the nearby wall terminal, about to register a formal complaint with the computer grid that seemed to run visitor functions here on Mars. As she put out her hand, the screen lit up with a picture of Jory den Ostreicher, smiling carelessly into the lens. From the quality of the image, and the raw state of the surgery around his mouth and eyes, she guessed this was an identity pic of the newly created Creole, drawn from some disk archive.
“Hello, Demeter?” the speaker said, loud enough to be heard across the corridor.
“Jory? Where are you?”
“At work. Look, I didn’t forget we had a date, but we’ll have to call it off. I couldn’t get any proxies for the Valles area. The two guys who had the tourist models have extended their booking, and all the utility machines are scheduled out. Maybe we can go tomorrow.”
“Oh, damn, that blows the whole morning.”
“Hey! Hey! Not really. You have to get checked out on the controls anyway, so why not take a spin around this area? And while you’re at it, you can watch me as I do a job necessary for colony maintenance.”
“Well…all right. How do I get into the V/R circuits?”
“That terminal is enabled,” Jory said as if he knew. “Under the keyboard shelf is a closed cabinet.”
Demeter checked. “It’s locked!”
Click! “Not anymore…Now take out the helmet and gloves. Put them on.”
Coghlan did so, adjusting the bone-induction microphone against the mastoid behind her ear. “Now what?”
“Now I link you into the nearest proxy…which is about four kilometers away.”
The pupil-focus of her goggles went from that bland image of Jory’s bruised face to a flaring, full-color display of some black rocks lying on pink sand under an Arctic pale blue sky. Demeter jerked at the transition, and the motion sensor inside her helmet transmitted the move to the proxy, whose sensor head immediately jerked upward. That left the binocular cameras looking directly at the faraway sun, and a pair of polarizing filters stopped the scene down to nighttime lumen levels. Demeter slowly dropped her gaze; the proxy lowered its viewpoint to match; and the display went to daylight normal.
It had been six or seven months since Demeter Coghlan had worked with virtual reality. This system seemed less responsive, more telemetry-delayed, than she expected. The rig would take getting used to.
“You got some place to sit here?” she asked.
A stool-arm swung out of the wall and bumped gently at the back of her knees. Demeter squatted, now totally absorbed in the proxy’s mechanical processes.
“How do I make it walk?” she asked Jory, or the grid…whoever.
“With your elbows. The manipulators attached to your gloves don’t have any that you’d recognize. So, if you just do a one-two, forward crawl, like infantry going under barbed wire—the gauntlets will pick up the motion—you’ll set the proxy to walking. Dig in with your left elbow or right to turn the machine. Its internal controls will take care of details like traction, braking, slant angle, inertial balance, and all that.”
Demeter made the requisite swimming motions, and the proxy began striding forward over the stony ground. She glanced down and got a shock to see a pair of human hands—well, human in the same way that Frankenstein’s monster was human—jutting out before her. Beyond them, churning softly in the dust, were the front pairs of the machine’s spidery legs. These were long, curved whips of steel, furred with sensory hairs. Very…buglike.
“How do I tell it to find you, Jory? I don’t even have a map!”
“It’s all set. I’ve given your proxy a homing point. See you in about ten minutes. Enjoy the ride.”
“But what about—?”
From the sudden curious deadness in her earphones, she knew he had gone offline, back to whatever task he had been doing. Demeter wanted to know what would happen if she stalled the machine, or walked it off a cliff, or something.
A few minutes later, she got a short demonstration. The machine approached the top of a steep slope. The angle would be enough to put the proxy’s center of gravity ahead of and outside the circle of balance defined by its leg radius. If it tried walking down, either forward or backward, or sideways for that matter, it would tumble head over—over whatever bulbous body part was following its sensory apparatus.
Instead of proceeding, the proxy stiffened in place. Demeter glanced down to see the legs folding into a springy, six-sided cage of bowed steel. With one limb, the mac
hine pushed off, going over the edge.
Demeter’s viewpoint spun end-for-end and side-for-side. Her breakfast made a quick surge in her throat and then settled down. The proxy glanced off a boulder and was briefly airborne, bouncing farther down the slope. The background sound in her ears was like a shopping cart rolling over rocks. The rollover slowed finally and stopped most of the way to upside down.
With methodical slowness, the legs unfolded and righted the body, taking Demeter’s perceptions along with it. The machine seemed to shake itself, the arms came away from their reflexive clutch against the belly, and the proxy continued on its way.
After another few minutes of fast walking, it brought her to a shallow valley among the ridges somewhere east of the tunnel complex.
Demeter drew in her breath.
The valley was crawling with horseshoe crabs. Dark, humped-over bodies—that blind forward curve, the articulated back section, the wicked spike of a tail—stumbled over the nearby hills and clawed their way into a pulsing pile. Demeter was reminded of an arachnid mating ritual. A gang-bang out of the Paleozoic Era. Trilobite City!
Demeter had heard that Mars had some native life-forms, mostly one-celled colonies under mushroom caps of silicate. And there were reports of certain hardy Earth forms that had gone feral—one was a kind of gerbil that had been bioengineered for minimal respiration and cold-adaptation, locally known as the “pack rat.” But she never expected these living marine fossils to come crawling out of the desert landscape.
“What are those things?” she asked. Demeter had spotted the Creole standing at the edge of the slowly pulsating pile. He was actually doing something to one of the little horrors, taking its eggs or something. With Jory for scale, she guessed each crab’s carapace was about a meter across.
“Johnnies,” he replied, turning around to spot her proxy. “That’s what we call them, anyway. ‘Von Neumann processor’ is the formal name.”
“It’s an animal?” she asked.
“Of course not. It’s just a machine, but a pretty clever one.”
He explained their function, which was part exploration, part minerals processing. Powered by photovoltaic circuits imprinted in the pattern of its shell, the mechanical trilobite crept along. Aside from chip-coordinated navigation and recording gear, and a roving command structure similar to that animating her proxy, the von Neumann consisted mostly of mouth and guts.
The mouth was a chemical analysis unit—based on the same kind of nanotech gas chromatography circuits that Dr. Lee had shot into her bloodstream—attached to a grinder and shovel. The guts were a series of tiny separators and smelters. As the machine walked over the Martian surface, its mouth sampled the soil and any likely outcroppings of rock that the cluster eyes noticed. When the parameters matched variables inscribed on its microprocessor brain, the von Neumann sat down and began to feed.
The first crop of alloys, silicates, and organic strings was passed to a third system inside the shell. This was the hatchery, where two—count ’em, two—new and full-sized von Neumanns were cast in pieces. The parent extruded them under a leveraged lift with its tail and then assembled them with a pair of micromanipulators folded under the front edge of its shell.
Once these replicas were launched and walked away to a life of wandering, sampling, recording, and eating, the mother machine settled down to really stuffing itself. Its taste and diet shifted to pure metals and crystals, stored in the half-domes under the carapace and eventually loaded into spaces formerly occupied by the replication equipment, which was similarly digested.
As soon as every spare cubic centimeter under the shell was packed with refined mineral products, the machine turned around and homed on a designated spot—this valley was one of them. “Send out one von Neumann, and eventually it comes back,” Jory finished his lecture. “Then two more. Then four. Then eight. And so on, practically forever.”
He picked up one of the machines, broke its back open with a wrench-thing in his hands, and extracted two copper-colored disks, a sausage that looked to be made of pure glass, and several loops of spaghetti-like fiber. These he put in bags hung around his utility harness.
“Each one is bursting with usable stuff,” he explained. “Not to mention the shell itself, which is mostly soft iron with some strengthening fibers.”
“Why put a shell on them at all?” Demeter asked, curious.
“Sandstorms. We get some really fast winds here, without any heat sinks like Earth’s oceans, to modify the thermal absorption. The poles regulate the temperature, mostly, and they’re a long way away.”
“The shell keeps out blowing sand?”
“Well, no. It keeps the beast upright and moving. Aerodynamics, really.” Jory spoke offhandedly, while his fingers dug and probed. “The harder the wind blows, the more stable the von Neumann becomes. Wind actually helps it dig into the ground. Otherwise it would blow around and lose its sense of direction. Then these things might never come back for collection.”
“What about the proxies?” Demeter described the way her apparatus had balled up and rolled down that rocky slope. “These things stay outside all the time, right? So how come they don’t blow around like tumbleweeds and get lost in the process?”
Jory shrugged. “They’re smarter than a von Neumann, even without a human driver. They know how to report into the grid, which tracks them with RF beacons—most of the time. But, hell, losing the proxies occasionally is the only excitement we get around here. You’d be surprised the new territory you find that way.”
Demeter seemed to remember the grid’s being a little less cavalier about the prospect of abandoned equipment. But the thought passed.
Jory examined the most recently gutted machine’s curved shell for, apparently, breaks and scrapes. He worked its legs back and forth, and noted a broken tip on one claw. Finally, he fingered a notch in the spiked tail. With a shake of his head, Jory dismembered the von Neumann into other collection bags about his person. Then his fingers popped a tiny slab out of the last piece of shell he was holding. This item he dropped carefully into a pocket of his shorts.
“What’s that?”
“Its brain. Carries an imprint of where the von Neumann went and what it saw. We’ll feed that into the grid, and some cyber somewhere will add its data to our topographic mapping program. Little by little we’re coming up with a really detailed survey of Mars.”
After watching him tear apart three of the critters, Demeter finally asked, “Can I help?”
“Sure! It’s easy!”
He showed her how to snap open the carapace, which parts were product and which process, and how to spot a damaged machine. Her manipulators worked just like normal hands, although she needed some getting used to their odd spatial orientation and the nonhuman range from eye to fingertip. Jory gave her a set of the shell-cracking tools and the sorting bags, which he hung from the knee-joints of her proxy within easy reach of her hands.
“What do I do with a carcass that isn’t damaged?” she asked, finally finding one. No cuts, no nicks, and all joints working with soft clicks.
“Give it here.”
From a case on the ground at his feet, Jory took a mechanism that seemed to be made of crystal and steel. Demeter glanced into the case and saw a dozen more just like it, nestled in foam cutouts. His deft fingers snapped the gadget into the embrasure under the shell where the defunct smelter had been. The new unit had the same kind of grinding mouth and chemical sensors as the old one. When he was done, Jory set the machine down.
It lay there for a moment, absorbing sunlight. Then the legs began to chum, the shovel curve of the carapace pushed forward against the sand, and the von Neumann wandered off—away from the pile of its fellows.
“What is it?” Demeter asked.
“Second generation. It has the same basic command structure of its earlier form: go forth and multiply, twice. Except, this one will never return. This Johnny’s now a Johnny Appleseed.”
She must h
ave looked perplexed; he grinned. “From the old Earth story,” he explained. “You don’t know it? Doesn’t matter; anyway, it’s got a biological package it didn’t have before, and a new program. After it has reproduced itself, new biological package and all, that Johnny is now programmed to wander at random over the planet’s surface until something actually kills it. And as it goes, the thing will eat sand and manufacture glass capsules that it will fill with its payload of tailored protozoans.”
“And what are they? What do they do?”
Jory looked around, as if he had been saying too much. But if that were the case, he should never have brought her out here.
“There are two cultures, basically. One a kind of blue-green algae, the other a bacteria. Both have been genetically altered until they practically can’t die. The bacteria are supposed to be from a strain that microbiologists found in Antarctica, which gets almost as cold as Mars and can be just as dry.
“Together, these cultures will form something similar to a lichen, which the von Neumann encapsulates and seeds in protected areas on the surface. The algae use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon compounds, while the bacteria extract latent moisture from the air and the permafrost layer. This creature also helps prepare the ground with its waste products, turning it into organic soil.”
“And you’ll eat this stuff?” Demeter asked.
“Oh, no! Not even if it tasted good!” The Creole appeared profoundly shocked. “This is work for the future. We’re trying to change the planet. By adding to the atmosphere’s reserves of free oxygen, we hope one day to grow our plants out in the open. And by darkening the soil with organics, we not only raise its yield potential but also increase the amount of solar heat it will retain.
“Our calculations show that if we can get the average ground temperature at the equator—here, that is—up to about 270° Kelvin, we can have liquid water.”
“You’re going to bring back rivers? On Mars?”
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