She shook her head. “They really do have to talk to you.”
He groaned aloud—or made a mechanical grating sound like a groan—and Shtev looked around.
“What is it?”
“Excuse me, Fetya Mikhailovna,” he replied. “The on-line busybodies want a conference.”
“Maybe they need something. Something only you can give.” The Cyborgs right eyelid, a fleshy membrane abraded by years of sandstorms, flicked down and up. A wink for him alone.
“Maybe. All right, Dorrie—” His voice sank into subvocal mode. “—go ahead with the message.”
Dorrie Torraway’s image melted, shifted, and resolidified. Her shorts and halter became a pair of purple coveralls with metal snaps down the front. Her hips and waist thickened perceptibly as she lost five inches in height. Dorrie’s severely beautiful face grew more rounded, her cheekbones disappearing as her cheeks chubbed out, shedding a few years and a lot of sophistication in the process. Her chin developed dimples Dorrie never had. Her hair went from short black to a long and wavy light brown, finally tying itself into a braid.
“Colonel Torraway?”
The woman’s features were three-dimensional but somehow static, like a doll’s head that was only partially animated. Her lips and the focus of her bright green eyes moved, but nothing else. Her jaw and throat muscles did not keep in synch with the words.
Roger understood the phenomenon now: the signals fed into his backpack’s imaging system were based on a two-dimensional, bit-mapped icon. The grid—or whichever node attached to it had felt compelled to violate his privacy—was projecting a simulation drawn from a passport file or some other ungenerous source of data.
That didn’t help, though. He still didn’t recognize the face and figure.
“Who is it?” he asked. Torraway stayed where he had been when the red flash caught him, half-levered off the ground with his knees and elbows sticking out, his head turned at an angle to the horizon. Let the backpack project whatever body language it wanted to his interlocutor: Roger standing heroically on the red sands, Roger seated regally on a camp stool, Roger stripped of his black-winged bat suit and smiling like a recruiting poster out of a pink, human face. Whatever.
“My name is Demeter Coghlan. We haven’t actually met, sir. Although I saw you a few days ago, out at Harmonia Mundi.”
Roger remembered the place perfectly. He could remember anything and everything, every meter of ground from fifty years of wandering, perfectly. Or his backpack computer did. He did not remember any human woman at Harmonia Mundi, though. It was the professional hydrologist, Lole Mitsuno, working out of Tharsis Montes, who had been there five days ago. Mitsuno briefly interrupted the forum of fellow Cyborgs that Roger and Fetya had convened. That indecisive forum, which had accomplished nothing. His interruption had been about—what else?—water.
“I do not remember you.”
Already Roger was becoming bored with this conversation. If the grid was going to pester him with Dorrie’s emergency signal, that was one thing. But Torraway could put his mind in compressed time and just let this woman…fade away.
“As I said, we never really met. But I was collecting data with Lole Mitsuno, about a week ago, when…”
Roger’s mind came out of its high-speed blur, teased into trying to remember whether a second person had actually been working alongside the hydrologist. If none of Torraway’s senses recorded her, then he had nothing to remember. That was simple enough. Indeed, he might have ignored a second human figure, so far away and insignificant.
“Is this introduction at all meaningful?” he asked, overriding whatever the woman had been saying in the space of his thoughts.
“No, of course not.” The doll’s head smiled woodenly.
At least she was honest.
“What can I do for you?” Roger asked, resigned.
“I need to find out about the Valles Marineris. Specifically, if we were to raise the water-vapor content of the Martian atmosphere by, say, twenty percent somehow, then, with dissociation into elemental hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and a corresponding pressure increase, would ambient conditions at the lower elevations of the Valles be able to support approximately Earth-normal conditions? I know you can’t answer that, per se. Only a computer model could give the answer, but—”
“I am a computer model,” Roger began. The woman rode right over him.
“—what I need to know is, will the geology of the Valles be competent to handle the accumulated precipitation? There are no lowlands for the district to drain into—at six and a half kilometers deep, the Valles is the nearest lowland. But would the substructure be able to support free water without catastrophic caving? Or is there an aquifer underneath it that will just reabsorb the runoff, leaving us in a net condition of—”
“Whoa! Miss Coghlan!” Roger raised his hand.
The doll’s face suspended. The mobile eyes and mouth froze and hung in midair, appliquéd against the landscape, while her body and most of the head faded out. The image rebuilt only gradually.
“Yes?” the lips asked in a whisper.
“I spent more than an Earth year in the Valles. That was back in the middle twenties,” he explained. “I could describe the area for you in minute detail because, of course, all my memories are machine-stored. But what I cannot figure out is why you want to have me describe anything? Instead, you should refer to the download of my survey impressions, which were long ago converted to a V/R program you can check out of any library. Better yet, why don’t you rent a tourist proxy and explore the area at first hand?”
“I already tried that,” the woman said, her image strengthening with a kind of conviction. “I don’t know what I’m looking at. And your survey data are just that, undirected impressions. What I need, Colonel, is your expert knowledge, your judgment, your experience with the Martian surface.”
Roger ran a hand lightly around the rim of his mysterious gopher hole. He didn’t know if the image she was getting would show the motion. He didn’t care, either.
“Yeah, expert knowledge and experience…” he said gloomily.
A heavy hand thumped his shoulder, practically knocking him off balance.
“Ask who she represents,” Fetya hissed in his ear. “And what will she pay? Cost her plenty already to get override on you, I think.”
Roger turned his head. “How do you—?”
The Cyborg grinned at him, showing steel teeth. “Your signals are not so tight-beam as once, Tovarich.”
“Um…Miss Coghlan, you speak of changing the water content of the Martian atmosphere. That would obviously be a major operation, requiring significant backing. Do you mind if I ask who you represent?”
“I…uh…” The woman faded completely.
“Never mind,” he said quickly into the carrier. With his access to grid resources, Torraway could probably discover her origins and purposes faster than any nonadapted human. “But may I take it as given that you are prepared to pay for the special information you require?”
The face reappeared, hanging against the sky. The smile from her lips actually touched and dimpled the doll-like cheeks. “Of course. For usable information, we are prepared to pay a reasonable price. I just didn’t know you Cyborgs, um, needed money.”
“Money? No.” Roger wondered what the value of 1,500 kilograms of deuterium-tritium fuel, delivered F.O.B. to the Tharsis Montes fountainhead, was in real money. “But we may be able to work out a satisfactory trade.”
“All right then!” The woman’s grin increased by half an angular degree—then narrowed perceptibly. “But how do I contact you? I mean, regularly, for the purposes of consultation?”
“How did you get to me this time?”
She hesitated, growing dim. “That’s…ah…”
“Never mind. I will put the name of Demeter Coghlan among my special friends, always to have access.”
“Thank you!” The woman’s face came back in full force. Her che
eks reddened slightly, with what Roger used to think of as a blush.
“Think nothing of it,” he assured her.
Coghlan started to say something more, reconsidered, and merely nodded gratefully. Then her features blinked out as the signal was cut at the source. In Roger’s brain, however, her smile lingered in afterimage.
Golden Lotus, June 15
After the connection broke, Demeter Coghlan sat in the simulation booth, still wearing her helmet and gloves. Under the helmets laminations of styrene, silicon, and fiberoptic, her face wore a long and thoughtful expression. Curiously sober.
Demeter wasn’t sure exactly what kind of hookup she had been taking part in. Even without a whole lot of movement on her side, it had felt like a full-body simulation. What she couldn’t figure out was, where did the pickup relaying Roger Torraway’s image reside? Out in the middle of the desert like that, she would have expected the grid to need a remote or a rover to cover him. Clearly that huge, green Cyborg who seemed to accompany Torraway everywhere wasn’t part of the linkage; he had stayed in the background or off to one side, always behind the Colonel.
Both of the Cyborgs had unnerving presences. Impassive faces, with no human interplay of the folds of flesh—lip and cheek muscles, eyelids and brows—that normally accompanied a conversation. The words just came out in complete and finished sentences, digitized somewhere in Torraway’s electronic sensorium, not even passing over human vocal chords.
Squatting there, studying her with his faceted jewel eyes, Torraway reminded her of some kind of insect. A patient mantis, perhaps, waiting to…snap! and clip her head off—if she had actually been present on the scene, that is.
After her experience with Jory den Ostreicher, Coghlan had thought she was ready to deal with the Cyborgs. After all, they would be like him, wouldn’t they? Only more complete, more perfected. Instead, she found the Cyborgs quite different. Their inflexible, waiting gaze told her they had no interest in her—not in Demeter Coghlan or any human being. Her needs and desires, her plans and promises were all ephemera to them. Passing whimsy, dust on the wind. She sensed that any human, on Earth or in Mars, was just so much excess protoplasm to them. Not worth noticing.
This state of detachment would have something to do with their extreme age. True, the Cyborgs were relatively new beings, contemporaries of her grandfather’s generation, in fact. Torraway himself could not be older than about ninety, probably. But all the same, he had found a way to cheat death. He could not grow old, weaken, and eventually die, as G’dad would. Torraway could only break down, and the broken parts could be replaced indefinitely. The new components would have better materials, faster chips, fighter metals, harder surfaces. The Colonel was virtually immortal.
That, more than the lack of eyebrows to wiggle at her, was what made him so spooky.
And yet. And yet, he had agreed to become her consultant, to “work out a trade.” That in itself implied there was something he wanted. So Torraway had a lever she could push—if only she could find it. And if the price was within the budget of the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation. He wasn’t on retainer yet, but she felt positive she could discover his weakness, his need, and arrange to scratch it. If only—
“Hi, Demeter!”
The goggles before her eyes lit up with the gargoyle face of Nancy Cuneo. It was a flat image, piped into Coghlan’s simulation gear from a standard terminal.
“Hello, Nancy,” she replied, wondering what her own image looked like on Cuneo’s screen. Probably just a VIDEO NOT AVAILABLE notice, as if Demeter had stepped out of the shower. “What can I do for you?”
“Our delegation’s come in, as I told you. I’m hosting a little reception on behalf of the Canyonlands people, drinks at six. I so want you to come. Everyone will be there.”
“Everyone?” Demeter asked with a smile. Did that mean Roger Torraway and his big green friend, perhaps?
“The cream of the complex. So, you will come?”
“I’d love it.”
“Good…and, Demeter?”
“Ye-ess?”
“Could you find something to wear other than those coveralls? Oh, they’re practical, I’m sure, but a little too proletarian for this kind of affair. Surely, with the whole afternoon to shop, you can find something more off-the-shoulder. Something that shows a bit of leg?”
“Do you want me to come as a guest, or a party favor?” Demeter tried to keep her voice sweet.
“I just don’t want you to feel out of place, dear.”
“No, I’m sure you don’t.” This was more fun than the shark pool at the Dallas National Aquarium.
“At six, then?”
“Ta!” Demeter broke the connection.
Before her surroundings had gone quite black, Demeter’s goggles lit up again.
“Hello?” It was Lole Mitsuno, peering anxiously out of the near focus as if he had suddenly lost sight of her. “Demeter?”
“Hi, Lole. We’re cross-wired, I’m afraid. The grid’s tapped you into a simulation I just turned off. I don’t know what reception is like on your end.”
“You look, uh, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I mean, molded out of thick plastic, with your eyes kind of fixed and your face painted in bright primary colors.”
“You really know how to compliment a girl.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Hush, they’re using my passport photo, I think. I didn’t know the grid could do this.”
“It can’t, technically.”
An awkward pause developed.
“It’s your nickel, Lole,” she offered.
“What’s that?”
“You called me, remember?”
“Oh, right! Yes, I wanted to know if you’d like to have dinner with me tonight.”
“Hey, that’s nice. I’d like it a lot, except…”
“You have other plans?”
Demeter shook her head inside the helmet, then wondered if he could see. “A political thing. If you’d only called one minute earlier, then I could say yes with a clear conscience. But, as it is, I’m committed. My job, you know.”
“What job is that?”
“Being a spy, remember?”
“Oh.” Mitsuno’s face wavered between good humor and naked hurt, just like a little boy’s. It was a side of men that Demeter could do without.
“Hey! I do want to see you,” she said. “Dinner. Tomorrow night. Six o’clock. My place.”
“Okay.”
“You’re buying.”
“I’ll be glad to—”
“Something expensive, like lobster.”
“Lob—?”
“Marine crustacean, boiled with butter sauce. You’d love it. Great with champagne cocktails. But since Mars doesn’t grow lobsters, and nobody’s probably thought of importing them, I’ll leave ‘expensive’ to your imagination.”
“That’s a deal.” He grinned.
“Tomorrow then, for sure?”
“See you!”
Demeter Coghlan broke the connection and pulled the helmet off her head before she could get into any more trouble. She started to check the time with Sugar, remembered her loss, and called up the grid itself.
“Thirteen hundred hours, forty-six minutes,” the dispassionate voice told her.
Yikes! She had a dress to buy, and only four hours to do it in.
Red Sands Hotel, Commercial Unit 3/9/15, June 15
At seventy-nine, Harry Orthis began to think he was getting a little old for planet hopping. Harry didn’t feel old—or hadn’t until about a year ago. But his attention span was growing shorter, and he had little patience anymore for cocktail blab.
The reception for his negotiating team, when it finally touched down on the Martian surface, was made up mostly of small merchants and petit bourgeoisie. The settlement at Tharsis Montes seemed mostly to run itself, with no sign of an active government structure. So far, Orthis had met only minor functionaries, each of whom was all too quick to point out that h
e or she handled just a tiny department devoted to air circulation, tunnel development, water procurement, or waste reclamation. The biggest bureaucracy seemed to run the space fountain: he’d met all of three people attached to it.
Of course, there were other population complexes on the planet, and they might have a more formal government framework. Orthis remembered something Nancy Cuneo had said about a meeting with the mayor of Solis Planum. That one had a big red star beside his name on the hospitality roster. Probably a spokesperson of some kind for the whole Southern Region.
Still, this night’s affair seemed to be mostly shopkeepers and hoteliers. These people either had no interest in the Canyonlands project or viewed it with mild distrust, as a source of commercial competition. As if they felt the need to fight over pennies with a new township almost three thousand kilometers away. Sad, small-minded people.
Orthis sipped his gin and tonic and watched the crowd dynamics. That’s what he enjoyed most at these diplomatic functions: seeing how people paired up and guessing who would end up in whose bed tonight. Tight groups of three that stayed together, joined at the elbow, from one platter of canapés to another always intrigued him—in an academic way, of course.
He gradually, over the course of a heartbeat or so, became aware of general movement within the group. Flashes of pale color as faces were exposed by the abrupt turning of heads, white gleams from the sudden widening of eyes, marked a passage of some kind across the room. This reaction reminded him of the dew track a flying electron precipitated inside a cloud chamber: Orthis could see the effect but not the particle causing it.
Then the knot of bodies standing in his foreground parted to reveal Nancy Cuneo bringing a young woman toward him. She was the electron. Definitely.
It wasn’t so much her face, which was nothing really special, as her overall packaging. The woman was barely more than a girl to begin with, and she covered the flower of her youth with a tube dress of sheer nylon the color of a raspberry Popsicle. It hung from her nipples to a mere four centimeters below her crotch. As she walked toward him Orthis could see beneath her arms that, in back, it plunged along the curve of her hips to barely drape her buttocks. It might conceal the cleft between them but would also emphasize that line as she moved. Apparently the only thing holding the dress in place was a strong static charge, for if she was wearing undergarments, or even flesh-colored tights, it wasn’t obvious. He made a quick bet with himself that the woman wouldn’t be able to sit down all evening—not and remain a lady.