“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 jumper’s 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.
Golden Lotus, June 12
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, but 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.”
Chapter 9
Head Trips
Golden Lotus, June 13
Demeter woke up the next morning with a panicky rush that closed her throat and made her heart pound. The situation here on Mars was rapidly getting away from her. Weiss’s message implied that the North Zealanders were about to make some kind of political move on the Valles Marineris District…and all Demeter had done so far was take a couple of sightseeing trips and introduce herself to a few of the locals.
Well, what else could she do?
Demeter was officially on planet as a simple tourist, with no diplomatic status. In fact, from what she’d observed so far, Mars didn’t seem to have any formal government structure—nothing that she could apply to for accreditation, in any capacity. The upward limits of Martian organization appeared to be a series of local, municipal bureaucracies. The highest official Demeter had ever heard of was a mayor in Solis Planum. The business of government was communications, record-keeping, taxation, commercial exchange, infrastructure maintenance—and all of it was carried on by an overlay of cyber functions in the ever-present grid.
How the party of Zealander bigshots proposed to establish diplomatic relations with that was beyond her.
There was one thing Demeter herself might try. She could use those informal contacts to make whatever government there was begin working for her.
That was the spark Demeter needed. She shot up from the bed, let it slam against the wall, and climbed into her metered, one-minute shower. With her hair wrapped in a turban and drying slowly, she ordered coffee and a yogurt for breakfast. The hotel offered its yogurt in just two flavors, Dutch chocolate or lemon. She had already found the lemon reminiscent of battery acid; now she discovered that the chocolate tasted like ch
alk and diesel fuel. It had to be something wrong with the mother culture.
As she brushed her hair, Demeter set out to find her friends. Like all searches on Earth or Mars, this one began with the grid. Demeter faced her room terminal, switched it to PRIVACY mode, and said: “Um, let me speak to the entity known as ‘Wyatt,’ please.”
“Yes, Miz Coghlan-Demeter-Cerise?” replied a cool voice. It was somehow a different inflection from the terminals usual tone: superior, more self-satisfied, less eager to please. In one move, she had reached Wyatt in the flesh—or the electron.
“I need to locate Ellen Sorbel. She’s probably not at work yet, but—”
“Miz Sorbel is fully occupied.”
“Where is she?”
“Hydrology Lab, Dome Two, but this is not a good time to—”
“Thanks, I’ll be right there.” Demeter was never one to take hints from a machine, especially one attached to a large bureaucracy. “Um, how do I find Dome Two?”
“Take Lift Four to the surface levels, follow Tube Y-Nine to the west, the rest is signed. But you really should—”
Demeter blanked the terminal, pulled on her coveralls, grabbed up a handful of pins for her hair, and went streaming out into the corridor.
Hydrology Lab, June 13
Ellen Sorbel slid through the interstices of the matrix, following the line of least resistance. The granules she passed were rugged, globular shapes floating above or below her awareness. Each one represented a particle of fine sand, barely a millimeter in diameter, so tiny that in life it might disappear beneath one of her fingernails. Yet, at this scale, her mind swam and dove past the bits like a seal cresting the spires of a rocky headland.
She was a water droplet.
Ellen drifted lower, finding her own level. She was seeking a clay substrate reported to underlie the Desert of Agnus Dei, some two hundred kilometers southwest of Tharsis Montes. She slid forward across one crowning mass of glittering quartz and feldspar. Sorbel somersaulted down its leading edge and clung to the underside—clung not with her hands but with the adhesion of surface tension. There her back brushed against another jagged particle below it. She oozed away from the upper surface; her awareness flipped over, righting itself against the pull of gravity. She flowed onto the lower footing and began heading for its outer perimeter.
Another tumble, and Ellen found herself at some kind of boundary layer. No longer loose chunks with space between them, but a hardpan of aluminum and magnesium silicates that formed lozenges only two or three microns in diameter. There was even less space between them. Her awareness flattened out, spreading and diffusing like pancake batter. There would be no more joyous tumbling. This certainly felt like the clay—
“What are you doing?”
The voice came from somewhere off to her left in the void.
Ellen turned with eyes that were not eyes and saw nothing.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me! Demeter!”
“Oh, hello…”
“Am I disturbing you?”
Yes! Ellen wanted to shout.
“Not really…Um, how did you get here?”
“One of your technicians lent me a headset and gloves,” Demeter replied. “He said you were here in the…where is this place? It’s like an asteroid field!”
“We’re in a bit of desert, about fifty meters below the surface. Or, anyway, this is what the computer says should be below the surface.”
“Wyatt says?”
“No, a much bigger boy.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I’m trying to discover where the water would have gone…if it ever existed here,” Sorbel explained. “I think I’ve found a lens of clay which—”
“Where?” Demeter demanded.
“Somewhere below you, I guess. You’re probably still up in the sandy layer.”
“Is that so? How do I get down?”
“You don’t—unless you know how to use your gloves to, well, flow.”
“I can’t,” Demeter said after a minute. “Couldn’t you come up to me? I can’t see you.”
“Eyesight isn’t important down here. Why don’t we just talk?” Ellen made herself limp and flattened out even more against the clay substrate. “What do you want?”
“Well, unh, this is difficult…Can anyone overhear us?”
“You mean, aside from the cyber that created this geological simulation and is now monitoring it?”
“Yeah.”
“Not really. Your headset is hushed.”
“Then what I want is your help as a programmer. I need to hack a few terminals that’re attached to the grid. I want a download of anything they send or receive over the next few days.”
“Which terminals?” Ellen was merely curious.
“One is in the quarters of a North Zealand woman named Cuneo, first name Nancy. She’s a casual on Mars like me. The others are wherever our Korean friend Sukie is staying—one terminal in his private room, the other with his manservant Chang Qwok-Do.”
Sorbel considered the request for a passing moment. Then: “Lole was right about you, wasn’t he? You’re a spy.”
“Ellen…we’re all spies. Sun Il Suk admitted as much as to me when you introduced us. He knows about the Cuneo woman, too, but I’d picked her out long before that. Either or both of them probably has a tap going on my room already…I just want some insurance to hold against payback time.”
“And you thought I could—”
“You’re the most computer-friendly person I know here. Hell, everyone on Mars practically lives in the machines’ hip pocket. But you’re the first person I’ve met who actually puts her head inside one for a living.”
“We’re not inside a computer, Dem. This is a geological simulation that’s wired into a V/R sensory setup. It’s not all that different from the ones you use for role-playing or proxy touring.”
“Whatever. I still figure if anyone has the smarts to help me, you do.”
“I might have the smarts. Don’t count on my willingness. Sukie is my friend. And I don’t know what this Nancy Cuneo has done against me and mine…although I don’t like the idea of anyone spying on Mars.”
“We’re not spying on you, Ellen. We’re watching each other. It all goes back to the political situation on Earth. We three just happen to be on Mars right now. That’s all.”
One of the talents Sorbel’s job had developed and strengthened in her was pattern analysis. She was adept at piecing together tiny clues to form an outline of what was really going on. From the nuances in Demeter’s voice, Ellen understood one thing: she was lying. Demeter’s story was too complicated and involved; the truth would be much simpler. This was unfortunate, because Ellen really liked the Earth woman. She was saddened to think they couldn’t be honest with each other.
“You and your friends can play hide-and-seek all you want,” Sorbel said finally, “but please don’t ask me to do anything that will surely get us both in trouble with the Militia.”
“You can’t stay neutral forever, Ellen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The situation is going to change fast now. In a few days it’s probably going to boil over. I can’t give you details yet, because I don’t have them. But this conflict is going to have a massive effect on the geol—no, the meteorol—the hydrology—shit! That’s not right! I mean the envi-vi-ron-mental b-b-balance of this p-p-planet. It could change everything about the way you and everyone else on Mars lives.”
“Change for the better?” Sorbel asked hopelessly.
“Clearly not.”
“I see. And you’re the only one who can keep this mysterious something from happening?”
“I think so.”
Ellen Sorbel reflected for another long minute. “You’re my friend, Demeter. But you are also telling me that other of my friends are not what they seem. In that case, I really don’t know who to trust. You see my position?”
“Perfectly
.”
“Then I will…consider what you’re asking me to do.”
“Thank you.”
Ellen didn’t feel the loss of connection, but suddenly she knew Demeter Coghlan had withdrawn from the simulation.
Solar Power Station Four, by Proxy, June 13
The power satellite that provided the community of Tharsis Montes and its various machinery, including the space fountain, with 7,000 megawatts of electric energy rode in areosynchronous orbit some 500 kilometers east of the settlement. That was as close as it could get. As the simulation’s artificially intelligent host explained, it was unsafe to position the satellite any closer because of the necessity of providing clearance with the elevator’s upper transfer station. Neither object was ever likely to shift in orbit, to be sure. Still, the fountain required a broad fairway for the passage of ships entering and leaving its domain. The solar collector duly compensated for this eastward offset by angling its microwave beam westward; the rectenna field that was its target was somewhat closer to the tunnel complex.
Demeter Coghlan found herself nodding, closing her eyes briefly inside the goggles as she tried to absorb all these dry mechanics. They were an inescapable part of the simulation’s introductory narration. The visuals the AI presented during its speech were the builder’s original schematics, and not at all layman-friendly. They were littered with dotted lines to show the relevant angles and vectors of orbit, dimensions scaled in with arrows and numbers, and color coding that indicated energy flows, structural stresses, and thermal buildup—all quite overwhelming. The tour had obviously been set up for engineers.
After putting her proposition before Ellen Sorbel, Demeter had the rest of the morning free. She had decided to take the programmer up on her earlier suggestion to visit the offworld satellites. Ellen probably found all this technical stuff fascinating. Demeter didn’t, but she listened gamely as, in the course of the next fifteen minutes, the machine’s pedantic voice explained that, at Mars’s greater distance from the sun, the solar cells had to be roughly twice the size of those circling Earth to provide the same energy output. To achieve Station Four’s 7.58 gigawatts, average over the daily orbit, the station’s area of exposed semiconductor totaled some 210 square kilometers. Magnetic thrusters kept this vast expanse of polymorphic silicon aligned on the sun with a deviance of only one-half second of arc. The diode net of the microwave-receiving station on the Martian surface spread over an area of one hundred and thirty kilometers, with power conditioners spaced every—
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