Hide and Seek

by Paul Preuss

  Shortly after he’d come to Mars, years back, Chin, like a lot of other tenderfeet, had managed to get himself cheated on a work contract. Lab City had been a smaller and rougher place then, hardly more than a construction camp–not that the same kind of thing didn’t still happen today–and a cheap shuttleport lawyer had given him some advice.

  “Don’t bother to convince me you’re in the right. I’ll grant you that without argument,” said the lawyer, “but getting a settlement, and especially collecting on it, is something else again. So how far are you willing to go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To make them think you’re crazy?”

  “Crazy!”

  “Crazy enough to beat somebody up. Burn something down. Zero some expensive equipment. Catch my drift?”

  To Dare Chin’s eventual amusement and edification, it had proved unnecessary either to sue or to carry through on his threats–so apparently he’d been willing to go far enough. As an administrator he had learned to think of this sort of paralegal strategy as the “personal approach.”

  The time had come to use the personal approach on Dewdney Morland. Chin left his office and descended the stairs to the ground floor.

  Morland was standing in the middle of the floor under the dome, hunched over his instruments. His back was to Chin; work lights on tripods joined with the overhead spots to pinpoint the Martian plaque and Morland himself in a circle of brilliant white light. Dewdney Morland, Ph.D., had arrived on Mars a week ago, preceded by clearances from the Council of Worlds Cultural Commission. The past two evenings, starting when Town Hall closed for the night, Morland had set up his kit and worked until dawn. He had to work at night because his optical instruments were sensitive to minor vibrations, like footsteps–

  “What the hell?”

  –the tremor of which now caused Morland to look up and whirl around angrily.

  “You! Look what you’ve done, Chin! Twenty minutes’ recording ruined.”

  Chin’s only reply was a look of distaste bordering on contempt.

  Morland was a disheveled fellow with a pasty complexion, a patchy beard, and sticky blond hair that hadn’t been cut in recent months; split ends curled over the collar of his expensive tweed jacket, which had long ago sagged into shapelessness. Those bulging pockets, Chin knew, contained a pipe and a bag of shredded tobacco, the paraphernalia of a habit that people who live in controlled environments regarded as not only offensive but extraordinarily quaint.

  “First that cow tromping through here and now you,” Morland screeched. “What does it take to get it through your provincial skulls? I need absolute stillness.”

  On the floor beside Morland’s chair, Chin noted an open briefcase; from what Chin could see, it contained a few fax copies and the remains of a portable dinner. “Would you step aside, Dr. Morland?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Please move to one side.”

  “Listen, do you want me to get an order barring you from these premises while I’m working? It can be swiftly arranged, I assure you. The Council of Worlds executive building is only a few steps away.”

  Chin leaned forward and his features darkened. “Move, fat man,” he bellowed, “before I break your stupid face!”

  It was a convincing display of homicidal rage; Morland recoiled. “That’s . . . This . . . I’m reporting this to the commission tomorrow,” he choked, meanwhile dancing rapidly away from the display case. “You’ll rue this, Chin. . . .”

  Chin ignored him as he stepped forward to examine the plaque. It rested on a cushion of red velvet, glittering in the converging beams of light. The silvery fragment had been broken from some larger piece by a blow of unimaginable force, but nothing that had happened to it in the billion years since had left so much as a hair’s-width scratch upon it. The perfect surface in which Chin now observed his own features proved that this was not a copy of metal or plastic, and when he breathed upon it and saw his cloudy breath obscure his reflection, he knew without touching it that this was no hologram. It was the real thing.

  Morland was still yammering at him. “You must realize, of course,” he said with all the venom he could muster, “that even the condensation of your foul breath on that surface renders everything I have done tonight utterly useless. I shall have to wait hours before . . .”

  Chin straightened. “Shut up.”

  “I most certainly will not shut . . .”

  “I’ve been talking to people about you, Morland. Yesterday, to the Musée de l’Homme,” Chin said over Morland’s breathless monologue. “The University of Arizona this morning. An hour ago, the Museum of Surviving Antiquities in New Beirut.” He held the yellow faxgrams up in front of Morland’s face.

  Morland, for the first time since Chin had entered the hall, stopped talking and eyed the faxes warily. He did not ask to read them. “All right, Chin. I despise your primitive behavior but now at least I comprehend your pathetic excuse,” he said more quietly. “I should like to remind you that penalties for libel are spelled out quite specifically in the Uniform Code of . . .”

  “I’m not going to bother to tell anyone anything about you, Morland,” Chin said coldly. “You’re on Mars.” He nodded to the nearest wall of glass. “There’s not enough oxygen outside that wall worth mentioning. The temperature tonight is minus fifty cees. Our pressure tubes require constant maintenance, and every once in a while we still get failures. If that happened in your neighborhood you’d have to grab your pressure suit–you’ve got it with you, haven’t you?” Chin had already noted that he didn’t. “No? A lot of visitors make that mistake–sometimes their last. And even when you do have your suit with you, you can’t always be sure it hasn’t sprung a leak. You might want to look yours over pretty carefully when you get back to it.” Chin nudged Morland’s open briefcase with his foot, not bothering to look at it. The briefcase was big enough to hold the plaque, big enough to conceal a copy, easily big enough to hide a miniature holo projector and who knew what other clever submicro gizmos. “I hope you hear me. I don’t have any interest in libeling you. I only want to give you some expert advice.”

  Chin turned his back on Morland and walked out of the hall. He waited to hear if Morland would shout after him, in threat or protest. But Morland said nothing. Perhaps the man really had gotten the message.

  Lydia Zeromski needed to be alone for what she was facing, so she’d sealed her helmet and gone directly outside, into the freezing night.

  Labyrinth City sprawled around her, a jumble of glass. But for the glowing pile of the Mars Interplanetary Hotel to her left, perched on the edge of the cliff, the only illumination came from dim lamps inside the pressure tubes and the night lights of darkened buildings, hundreds of little spheres of light that glowed like jellyfish behind the rippling green glass.

  She paused and turned. She could see Morland clearly, inside Town Hall’s central dome, lit up like a patient in an operating theater. He was bent over the plaque, apparently deep in study. High above the dome, the glow from his lights reflected from the arching sandstone that sheltered the upper town. She looked for Dare in his office; his office light was on, but she could see no movement on the second floor.

  She turned away and walked until she came to the edge of the cliff. She waited there, peering into the darkness. The lower city fell away like a handful of crystals down the cliffside below her. Moving among its steep stairs and huddled houses and the ruby glow of the late-night wine houses was a single bobbing yellow lantern–Old Nutting hurrying along her rounds.

  Lydia’s mind was so full that she hardly saw the familiar starlit vista beyond, the huge cliffs of Noctis Labyrinthus–the Labyrinth of Night. Banded strata of red and yellow sandstone were reduced in the half light to stripes of black and gray with, occasionally, a thin edge-on layer of bright white. The white was ice, permafrost, the buried water which filled the Labyrinth with wispy sublimated clouds on the warmest of mornings, the water which made Mars habitable, upo
n which all its life and commerce depended.

  Spires and spectacular arches of rock outlined themselves against a sky filled with hard blue stars–hundreds of spires, arrayed in ragged ranks, marching stiff-shouldered toward a horizon that should have been near but was lost in a soft haze like a Chinese ink painting, a haze of hanging microscopic dust. Lydia stood quietly, hardly moving, as the comforting wind stirred the fine sand around her.

  Gradually she became aware of another figure standing and watching the sky, silhouetted against the glow of the Interplanetary.

  Lydia knew the man; even masked in a pressure suit, Khalid Sayeed’s tall, graceful figure was easily recognizable. He was gazing at the distant horizon, where among the stars two brighter lights gleamed. One of the two was moving toward the eastern horizon, inching along against the fixed backdrop: that was Mars Station, swinging high enough above the planet to catch the light of the sun. The other was a wanderer too, but it moved too slowly for its movement to be obvious within a single night: that was the planet Jupiter.

  Lydia thought she knew what Khalid was looking at–not at Jupiter but something far beyond that planet, far and dark and invisible but coming closer to Mars every day.

  Movement caught her eye. The main lock at the entrance of the hotel opened, and for a moment a group of tourists was silhouetted against the lobby, laughing soundlessly inside the pressure tube. They milled about briefly in drunken confusion and then found an intersection that led toward the lower town. She turned away, but not before she saw the hotel manager follow them out.

  Wolfgang Prott was a man Lydia loathed, an unctuous charmer who had the good sense to stay away from the local women but was rarely without a tourist lady on his arm. His romances lasted about the length of the average tour package.

  It was a small town, Labyrinth City, and the people who lived here knew each other too well. They tried to laugh it off, but sometimes it was hard to do what you wanted to do or had to do, with the whole planet looking over your shoulder.

  Dare Chin regained his office and keyed his commlink for patrol headquarters. He intended to take no chances–his first priority had been to let Morland know he was under surveillance, but that was only partially true; now Chin was going to try to bully or cajole the local patrollers into actually providing decent protection for the plaque until Morland was safely off the planet.

  He’d tapped in two digits of the three-digit code when he heard something downstairs.

  Chin left the patrol code unkeyed and walked quickly back down the hall toward the stairs. He went down the steps slowly, as silently as he could, hoping to catch Morland off guard.

  Stepping into the hall from the bottom of the stairwell, he brought himself up short, surprised by what he saw. He opened his mouth to speak–

  –but Dare Chin had already spoken his last words.

  An hour passed. The sleepy town grew quiet. Jupiter was still bright, but Mars Station had set beyond the eastern horizon. No one was looking out over the Labyrinth when the moon Phobos crept over the rim of the town’s sheltering arch, following Mars Station in its track across the sky. No one was there to see the streak of white fire that leaped from the clifftop above.

  PART ONE

  ENTERING THE LABYRINTH

  I

  In the night country there are no sure identities, no trustworthy coordinates, no breakable codes. . . .

  The woman’s dream was the same dream of swirling that had overcome her so often before, but she had never dreamed it in this form. Black wings were beating, beating, inches over her head; they went around like spokes in a wheel; they bore down upon her and simultaneously threatened to suck her into the center point of their turning.

  In the darkness at that turning center, eyes were staring, hands were reaching, mouths were calling: “Linda, Linda . . .”

  She thrashed and struck out, but she was mired in some viscid invisible fluid, some ethereal muck that rendered her strongest efforts feeble, her quickest motions slow.

  “Linda!”

  She knew that she was losing the struggle, going under–and she cried out.

  The sound of her cry awakened her.

  She found herself naked in hot darkness, wrapped in a clinging shroud. A man was pressing himself against her, pinning her arms against the bed, crushing her, lying across her with his own nakedness. She bucked and squirmed and cried out again.

  “Linda, wake up. Please wake up.” His words battered her. “It’s a dream. It’s only a dream.”

  All at once she fell limp and silent. She knew him.

  And a moment later she remembered approximately where she was, on the still-accelerating ship.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered hoarsely.

  He released her wrists, lifted himself, moved his weight to crouch beside her on the bed. “Can you tell me what . . . ?”

  “Don’t call me Linda.” Her voice was empty, drained of strength and emotion.

  “I’m sorry. I was asleep. You started hitting . . .”

  “Linda is dead.”

  In his silence, his refusal to reply, she read contradiction: no, Linda was not dead–

  –but she was lost, and until she was found again she was better considered dead.

  The woman peered at the man’s face in the darkness, seeing him better than he could see her. To him, in the blackness, she was an immediate construct of memory, a familiar form, a warm smell, sweet textures under his hands, but to her the pinprick light on the cabin wall, gleaming red beside the commlink, was enough to lacquer his smooth-muscled skin with a faint ruddy glow. She saw his eyes gleaming in the night. The smell of him was like spiced bread, rich and comforting–

  –and arousing. With the involuntary return of heat to her body came, in a rush, the full memory of the night.

  They were two days out from Earth on the speeding ship, en route to Mars. They had played just-friends at first, but once they had gotten to know the ship and its crew they no longer felt awkward about being by themselves–though it took her longer than it took him to relax her innate shyness–or about taking time to be alone together. After dinner in the wardroom that evening, after the ship’s clock had turned the corridor lights low, they had disappeared into her narrow cabin. The crew had taken care to pay no attention.

  They had begun to pick up the fallen threads of their renewed acquaintance where they had been forced to drop them more than a week before. Here, they were alone, unrushed, unreachable, with no obligations, and with all the momentous events that hung over them held in suspension until the day, almost two weeks away, when the ship would reach its destination.

  She thought she might love him. He already claimed he loved her. She loved his kind of loving: sensitive, understanding beyond even his intimate knowledge of the facts–after all, he had known her since they were children–at once intelligent and sympathetic. But his loving, his desire for love, was insistent too, and physical.

  At first it had seemed as if their lovemaking would be as easy and natural as if they had never stopped being with each other, as if they had always lived together. A few minutes after they had closed the cabin door behind them, all her clothes were fallen to the floor, and all his had fallen on top of hers, and they had stretched their slim hard bodies beside each other on her narrow bunk, unmindful of the crowding.

  Something she could not define was wrong. She hesitated. Responding, he paused. She felt the effort it required of him, as intensely as if she were him–what it required to restrain the hot urgency that so easily slides into mindless need. His love was before his need, but the need was strongly there. And she wanted him, too; her body had wanted his, especially and only his. . . .

  When she tried to move toward him again she was seized with sudden pain. Its cause was not apparently physical; it had nothing to do with him. But it had manifested itself below the pit of her stomach–a cramping, seizing abnegation.

  “I . . . I can’t . . .�
�

  “Can’t?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If this isn’t . . . I mean, just tell me . . .”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “Are you all right? Should I call someone?”

  “No. No, stay here. Stay with me. It’s better now.”

  He had stayed with her, eventually curving his arms and legs and the length of his body around her as she faced away from him, nestling into her as she rested in his embrace–

  –while she wept silent tears. And when finally she fell asleep he stayed awake, surrounding her in her sleep.

  For an hour or more black unconsciousness settled over her. He slept too, relaxing his hold on her. Then the dream started. . . .

  Now she was awake again, awake and full of fear and desire. “I don’t think I want you here,” she said to him. “I can’t be myself with you here.”

  He was still for a moment, unmoving. Then he swung his legs over the side of the canvas bunk and stood. “As you say–Ellen.” He stooped to pick up his shirt and trousers from where they lay discarded on the floor.

  “No, I . . .” Her head was spinning. “I didn’t mean it that way. . . .”

  “What did you mean?”

  “Something . . . in me . . .” Fragments of speech fell from her lips, unconnected. She pushed herself to say what she resisted acknowledging, even to herself. “I’m afraid. . . .”

  “Of them?”

  “No. Yes, of course.” She hesitated. “Yes, I’m afraid of them, but that’s not what I meant, I meant that . . .” She forced the truth out. “I’m not human. I’m afraid I’m not human anymore. That’s what I think.”

  He sat on the bed and reached a hand to touch her shoulder. At his electric touch she began to cry. She leaned into his chest and let his arms go around her shoulders, and she cried with sudden apprehension of the depth of her loss–the loss of her parents so long ago, the loss of herself, the loss of everyone who had tried to love her.