That one quick, practiced glance told Harry Orthis the garment must have cost her about a thousand Neu per gram. It was worth it. He had seen lingerie in sealed catalogs that was less arousing. Even at his age, he could feel the juices begin to flow.
Nancy Cuneo was virtually invisible at the young woman’s side. The North Zealand agent suddenly looked her age, which Orthis knew to be considerable. It didn’t help that for the evening Nancy had chosen a frizzy wig of red curls. Why did everyone who went bald after that unfortunate wind shift following the Raoul Island test pattern have such awful taste in hair? In Cuneo’s case, she matched the disaster with a party dress that had cuffs and padding in all the wrong places. She would look like a garden gnome, if she didn’t fade to black entirely in the glare thrown by the girl in the raspberry dress.
“Harry! I have someone for you to meet,” Cuneo greeted him.
“Nancy.”
“This is Demeter Coghlan, from the Sovereign State of Texahoma. She’s Alvin Bertrand Coghlan’s granddaughter.”
“Oh, yes? I know old A.B. well. We’ve jousted many a time at the General Assembly meetings.”
“And this, Demeter, is Harry Orthis. Harry is a senior analyst with the North Zealand Economic Development Agency.”
“Really?” the young woman asked. With her Southwestern cowpoke accent, the word came out “rally.” And the partial pressure of helium that the Martians filled their burrows with transmuted it to “reilly.” But Orthis caught her drift.
“What is it you analyze?” she went on.
“Oh, economic factors, cash flows, political advantage, anything you’d normally put through a computer.”
“You and Demeter have something in common,” Cuneo offered, smirking. And with that lead-in, she just walked away.
Orthis and the Coghlan woman stared at her retreating back, then glanced at each other. Harry couldn’t imagine what they might have in common, other than a desire to throw off their clothes, drop to the floor, and couple there on the spot. And he wasn’t sure Demeter shared that with him, either.
“Well, judging from her timing,” Demeter ventured, “I’d say it has something to do with computers.”
He cocked his head at her.
“I mean, you work with them, don’t you?”
“I never said that, actually,” Orthis replied. “I do things in my head other people do with them. Personally, I hate the machines.”
“Oh, that’s it then! I dislike them myself.”
“That’s rare enough these days to be remarkable—two people passing through the same city who don’t happen to think of our silicon friends as…well, friends.”
“I guess I wasn’t always like that,” she said slowly. “Not until after the accident.”
“What happened?” He put the right amount of concern in his voice.
“I was having my hair done in an autocoif—you know what that is?”
“Sure.”
“And the machine all of a sudden froze up. The scissors unit punched a hole in my skull you could pass a dime through—”
Orthis looked past her face at the braid of luxuriant brown hair, hanging at least twelve vertebrae down her naked back.
Some doubt must have shown in his face, because she quickly amended: “This was more than a year ago—closer to two now, what with the recuperation period, and then travel time getting up here. I haven’t let anyone touch my hair since the accident. I always wash it myself and won’t let a machine so much as put a comb to it.
“Anyway, those scissors did some brain damage, or so they tell me. Mostly motor function and some hearing loss, although that’s all fixed now. You know the techniques they have these days for lattice matricing and tissue transplants? I’ve got so many wires in my head, I gotta take cover whenever it thunderstorms.”
“Really!” And he was conscious of saying “reilly,” too. “I was scuba-ing off Little Barrier Island in Hauraki Gulf—”
“Excuse me? ‘Scoobang’? What’s that?”
“Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus—it’s a recycler that generates oxygen from the carbon dioxide and water vapor in your breath. So I’m down about forty meters, and the damned monitor chip suddenly goes haywire. The unit starts reconstituting carbon monoxide instead—although nobody can figure out just how. I had about blacked out, gone to dreamland, when the whole box shut down. I suddenly had to make a free ascent, blowing bubbles all the way.”
“Golly!” she said in admiration. Or, as it came out, “gelly.”
“Fortunately, my mates saw me go up and sent a sonogram to the surface. When the boat finally picked me up, I was doubled over from decompression, had my head wrapped down around my knees, and was blue all over. I had effectively drowned.”
“But you’re alive now.”
“Yes, but most of my brain, or at least the cerebral cortex, was killed off by the combination of carbon monoxide poisoning and then oxygen deprivation. Like you, I’ve got a head full of gadgetry.”
“And you solve computer problems with it?”
“Well…” Orthis hesitated. “The knack still seems to be there. I really don’t like computers, though.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s not just having the damn thing inside your skull—”
“—it’s knowing they caused the trouble in the first place.”
“Exactly!” he said. “They’re just not infallible.”
“I don’t think they ever were.” And she grinned at him.
So they did have something in common after all. Orthis was amazed at Cuneo’s insight. Like any good agent, she had the hard intelligence on everyone at her fingertips. He suddenly wondered what else Cuneo had been able to ferret out about Alvin Bertrand’s prettiest granddaughter. Or maybe Harry would find out for himself.
“Buy you a drink?” he asked.
“Sure, whatever you’re having.”
Golden Lotus, June 16
That night, when Demeter finally got back to her hotel, she found a message from Gregor Weiss waiting for her on the room terminal. Luckily the text was in clear language, because she no longer had Sugar to break his fancy codes. Her bangle was squashed somewhere in the residential corridors up on the second level; by now someone had probably picked it up for the value of the metal.
“Sorry, Demeter, we just can’t comply with your request to have a change of scene.” He was using publicly acceptable terminology to refuse her application for immediate removal and reassignment. “G’dad says he can’t get you on anything coming back to Earth sooner than your scheduled return flight. So why don’t you just relax, do some sightseeing”—another euphemism—“and enjoy it.”
That was all. No commiseration. No chucks under the chin. Just “do your job”—with a slight edge to his voice as Gregor conveyed it. That tone implied he was tired of her whining about having to complete a plum assignment with a gold-leaf expense account while other agents, better than her by far, had to sweat it out in places like New York or Mexico City.
Anyway, Demeter didn’t care now. She was well over the blues from the day before. In the past twenty-four hours, in fact, she had recruited a living legend as her new agent, snared a dinner date with the most attractive unattached man in Tharsis Montes, and made a solid conquest of the head of the North Zealand trade delegation.
Things were definitely looking up.
Chapter 12
Valhalla
Golden Lotus, June 16
Demeter Coghlan debated wearing her new party dress for the dinner date with Lole.
On the one hand, the garment was not all that new, after its one wearing. She might have acquired a stain on it somewhere. Not to mention wrinkles.
On the other hand, she could wash it easily in the sink. That would take all of two minutes, with three more for it to dry.
On the other hand, the dress was a hard thing to wear. Every moment inside it—or as much inside as she could get—Demeter had to be careful of how she moved
and sat, had to keep her legs together and hold her stomach in.
On the other hand, her usual coveralls were a whole lot more comfortable, as well as easier on the mind.
On the other hand, Lole Mitsuno had already seen those, several times, in fact. He had seen the jumpers in all the colors of her wardrobe—which were violet, lavender, and gray—both with and without her warpaint. It was time to give him something new. And it would be a shame to wear that cute little dress just the once and then forget it.
The bottom line, however, was that Demeter just wasn’t sure she wanted the reaction the garment was likely to provoke.
Or maybe she did.
In the end, she wore the dress.
Chez Guerrero, Commercial Unit 1/16/2, June 16
Lole Mitsuno had felt a palpable weakness in his stomach and through the knees from the first moment he saw Demeter that evening. He had known all along that she was an attractive young woman, smart and bouncy in a rough, up-country sort of way. Demeter had none of the poise, the reserved grace that had originally drawn him to Ellen Sorbel. Demeter was all candor and wisecracks, practically one of the boys. So he had thought of her as a friend, more like a sister—until she stepped out into the golden light of the hotel foyer.
She had been wearing next to nothing in shiny silk or satin or whatever they called it. The pinkish-purplish material brought up the color of her lips, which were a stunning red, and contrasted them with her white skin. Berry colored, that was what they were. And her green eyes were like the delicate little leaves attached to a berry’s stem.
Hell, she was making Mitsuno feel like a poet already!
He had taken her to the best restaurant Tharsis Montes, or Mars itself, had to offer. The tables had white cloths on them that were pressed to resemble linen. The utensils were real silver, shipped from Earth at forty Alt-marks per gram. The wineglasses, although a polymer, were cut and polished just like crystal. The cuisine was Hispano-French: the sauces were smeared on the plate under the food—that was the French part; and they were spiced with vat-grown chilies and cilantro—that was the Spanish contribution. The rest of the menu was just regular commissary foods, dolled up to look foreign.
Mitsuno couldn’t taste any of it, even though the bill would make a big dent against his weekly stipend. His brain only had room for Demeter Coghlan. Her face and creamy, bare shoulders filled his eyes and dimmed the gleams of silver and crystal from the table’s finery. She entirely eclipsed the hand-painted, eighteenth-century miniatures reproduced on the white stucco wall next to her head. The one whiff of her exotic perfume that reached Lole had chased away all scents of food and wine. Her voice and laugh so filled his ears that, if other women had been dancing naked across the room, he would hardly have noticed.
She ate sparingly but praised everything, bite for bite. She sipped at her red wine, and the drop that stayed on her lower lip added to its color. She laughed at the right places in his fumbling conversation, and her teeth sparkled in the glow from the amber bulb sprouting from a slim, white-plastic tube on the table.
When she had spooned up the last of the dessert—sweet cheese paste inside a crackling, hollow shell of pastry—and pushed her plate away, Demeter turned her smile on him again.
“Well…it’s been a lovely evening.”
“It…doesn’t have to end, does it?”
“No.”
Just the one word. Spoken in quiet, reasonable agreement. Accompanied by a gentle smile and a knowing look. No. Meaning yes.
Lole decided in that instant to violate a trust and take her—an offworlder and a self-proclaimed spy, someone over whom he had no hold, no power for retribution—to a place reserved for the select few.
“Come on.” He stood up and gently took her hand.
Demeter turned in her chair but made no motion to rise.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace you’ll like.”
He walked east with her, up a ramp to the surface facilities, through a pressure door, and down into the old equipment bays. From there they followed a utility corridor out to the site of the complex’s first water storage and aeration facility, 4,000 megaliters of open tankage, dug into bedrock and roofed over against explosive evaporation and the blowing sand.
Mitsuno and Coghlan crossed the pool on a catwalk of perforated steel plate. The dank air around them was lit only by the widely spaced safelights in the dome above, and by swimming dots of silver reflected off the quiet water. Algal-green slime, the persistent echo of protozoic life that had followed humanity’s colonization of the Solar System, dripped from the tube railing beside them. As the two of them passed, Lole could hear Demeter’s high heels clicking wetly against the metal. He expected her to protest about the environment, but she came along quietly, even expectantly.
On the other side of the tanks, the pair came to a gallery of unfinished tunnels, two levels that extended forty and eighty meters below the surface. Mitsuno knew that the ground here was not competent; the rust-red, iron-rich rock was too friable and unstable for development, and so the complex’s expansion in this direction had stopped. Instead, Tharsis Montes had dug in deeper under itself. But these old workings had not been back-filled or formally abandoned, just never finished.
Mitsuno hesitated before the door made of sheet-metal that closed off the refuge.
“Normally, we require a strip-search before bringing someone here,” he said. “But…”
Demeter Coghlan flashed him a grin, held her hands away from her hips, and turned full circle on one toe. Her limbs seemed to glow in the vague and shifting light reflected down the tunnel from the waterworks. A fold of the dress glimmered as it snaked across her stomach and then pulled taut as she completed the turn.
“No need,” he agreed. He looked at her wrist for the first time that evening. “Are you wearing that chrono of yours? Sugar?”
Demeter shook her head. “I lost her a few days ago.”
Mitsuno also decided that she couldn’t possibly be wearing any prosthetics that might harbor an active cyber circuit. If she was, then the technology for generating pseudoskin was too advanced for his detection. And, anyway, Wa Lixin had already scanned her and pronounced her clean.
Mitsuno opened the door on hinges that creaked with rust. Beyond it was a long room, with hangings of rough cloth to muffle echoes from the bare rock and hold back the ever-sifting dust. He groped for the switch—he actually had to light the chamber manually. The breaker was wired into the illicit circuit they had run long ago from the pool’s emergency lighting.
Three caged bulbs came on to show the furniture inside. The pieces were old and mismatched, taken as first-generation castoffs before the municipal recyclers had gotten to them. Still, the space was comfortable enough. In addition to several padded chairs, a settee, and a low table, there was an old bed with the stuffing worn down in all the right places.
“My!” Demeter said, moving past him. “This is homey. Much nicer than the hole Jory took me—” She paused awkwardly. “Oops!”
“Don’t worry.” Lole smiled. “I heard all about that…This place is just as quiet. No cybers, no fiberoptic, no one to see us.”
She nodded. “Do you have someplace I could, ah, wash up?”
They were just within spitting distance of a couple million liters of fresh water, but the tunnel had no plumbing, either. Lole led her past a fold in the wall’s cloth that hung out at right angles; in the alcove behind it was a chemical toilet and a steel bucket. He picked up the bucket.
“Pardon me while I go draw you a basin.” And Mitsuno went back to the pool.
When he returned, Demeter was standing in the middle of the chamber, equidistant from the three lights. She stood tall in her stiletto heels, her feet apart at shoulder width, hands on her hips. The shadows played across her body as she faced him almost defiantly.
As he came nearer, Lole saw that she was trembling. The wine-colored dress seemed somehow looser, more bunched on her figure. He pa
used, smiling uncertainly.
Demeter took a deep breath, and the cloth slid off her breasts, exposing nipples that were erect and staring at him as boldly as her two eyes. He understood now that she had taken the dress off while he was gone and had merely been holding the fabric in front of her, pinched at the waist. She lifted the fingers of her left hand, and the cloth swung away, to hang against her right thigh like a limp flag against its pole. She lifted the fingers of her right hand, and it fluttered down between her feet.
Except for her shoes and a touch of lipstick, she was nude. And still trembling.
“Well…?”
Mitsuno came out of his trance, walked up to her, and cupped his palms over her hips, pressing his fingertips into the silky skin in the hollow of her buttocks. She lifted her fingers again and pinned him at the wrists, pulling his arms back around her. She wedged her body tightly against his.
He locked his fingers under her and took her weight as she lifted her legs and wrapped them around him. Instantly she started rubbing herself slowly against his groin. They never made it to the bed—or not on the first try.
Somewhere Underground East of Tharsis Montes, June 16
Demeter Coghlan lolled on the bed while Mitsuno went behind the screen. Even though she tried not to listen, the sound of his peeing into the thundermug came to her quite clearly. This would be a good occasion for using a sonic phase inverter—except, of course, that such a piece of equipment would reintroduce the grid into this fine and private place of Lole’s.
“You said you have to strip-search people before bringing them here,” she said over the tinkling. “Do you bring many girls here?”
He grunted but waited until he was finished making water before replying. “This isn’t just a place for women who are shy about their lovemaking.”