Clearly, whatever passed for government services in Tharsis Montes got second pick of the available office space. If there was ever a meteor strike against this bubbles fabric that didn't at once seal itself, it would be a bunch of low-level Civil Service bureaucrats who would be the first to go toes up. That thought did not surprise Demeter, who knew from experience that that was how governments usually worked.
This dome didn't seem to have any outside windows. She strolled through the igloo tunnel into the next one, which seemed to be some kind of garage. A large fiberglass pressure lock was set into the far side of the wall area. Under the bubble were a collection of walkers, sized according to the number of pairs of legs they had, like insects. Demeter had read somewhere that articulated footpads were the preferred method of travel on light-gravity planets such as Mars. It wasn't just because of the rough terrain, where practically every journey was offroad, since there were no roads. Wheels themselves were not Mars-friendly. They relied too much on traction to work. When the load to be hauled massed the same as on Earth, but actually weighed less than the coefficient of friction between the wheel and the underlying sand, then you could sit and spin for a long time without going anywhere. Left foot, right foot was the only sure way to get around.
The walkers inside the garage all had their hatches open and their access panels up. People and autonomous machines till had their heads under the panels, working on the innards. So, Demeter guessed, this wasn't just a storage area but a repair shop of some kind.
Not until the third dome did Demeter Coghlan find a window on the world.
This turned out to he some kind of low-gravity gymnasium area, with vaults, bungees, trampolines, and a pool of blue water for swimming and diving. The height of the fabric overhead made most of these activities practical, where they wouldn't have been in an underground tunnel. As soon as she walked through the strip door, Demeter felt her jumpsuit begin to wilt with dampness from the pool. Chlorine stung her nose. The room was almost deserted; she guessed everyone else was at work somewhere, looking forward to playtime.
Broad patches of the far wall had been left clear with a view to the east and south, and blowing dust hadn't yet scratched the window's outside surface too badly. Demeter walked up to the opening and looked for the nest of peaks guarding the Valles Marineris District— where she so longed to go. They were not visible over the curve of the horizon.
She turned and walked across the dome to the west side, to look at the sunset. On Earth, a heavier atmosphere buffered the sun at dawn and dusk, so that a person might stare directly at the swollen, reddened orb. Mars's minimal blanket of air could not create that effect, but the plastic window had a fader circuit— something she hadn't expected to find—and Demeter tuned it to the darkest setting. With that protection she could look directly at the silver expanse of the photosphere, which was about half the diameter of the apparent disk as seen from Earth.
It was descending more slowly than the minute hand of an old-fashioned analog clock, right into the shoulder of the large crater she had seen during her descent, Pavonis Mons. The sun's low-angle rays picked orange and red flashes out of the cone's dark lava and cinders. In the foreground was the lower superstructure of the space fountain, already bathing the shadows with its own spectral violet light.
"Miz Coghlan?" a male voice said behind her. It was a high-pitched voice, even after accounting for the helium atmosphere.
"Yes?" She turned and saw a young man with bronzed skin stretched over a very handsome set of pectorals and a flat stomach ridged with smooth lines of muscle. His thighs were bunched and corded like Michelangelo's David, with that cute inward cant to the left knee. Demeter guessed he had a nice, tight set of buns, too.
"I'm Jory den Ostreicher. They told me you needed a guide?" He was naked except for a pair of gray leather shorts and a utility belt or harness that buttoned to them like a pair of lederhosen. His feet, she saw, wore only a pair of light slippers, also of the same gray material. The boy, this Jory, was hairless, with a head as smooth as the bottom of a copper pot, except at the back. There some kind of dark, braided tassels hung down his neck and dangled between his shoulder blades, like a Chinese mandarins queue in an old-time woodcut. When he turned his head, she saw they were cables tipped with jumper plugs.
"Yes, they did. ... I mean, I do," she replied falteringly.
He had some kind of beard, too, she thought at first, or at least a mustache and a little goatee. But a closer look showed this was not hair. There was some sort of dark pouching of his skin. The folds on either side of his mouth concealed Velcro tabs for hooking up a breathing mask.
His ears were long and cupped, like a German shepherd's or a bat's, and stood away from the side of his head. The focus of the lobes' curves was not ear canals but small buttons of transparent skin, like miniature timpani. They were perfect for hearing in a fractional atmosphere yet could function under normal pressure as well.
"Unh ... what are you?" she asked after an awkward pause.
"I'm a Creole." He grinned. "Adapted for work on the surface."
"Oh, a Cyborg, you mean."
"Nah, they're nothing but wires and pistons, with a computer where their brains used to be. But I'm fully human, except for some enhancements."
"I see. So, you'd be my . . . proxy? I'd look through your eyes to—"
"No, I don't prox for nobody. Underneath this skin I'm a person, just like you. But I'll go along with you when you take out a unit. With my knowledge of the territory around here, you won't get lost."
"Do you know the Valles Marineris District?"
"Sure, been there a thousand times."
"Can we go now?"
Jory's face froze. His eyes took on a faraway look and his head tilted slowly to one side. The seizure, if that's what it was, lasted for about ten seconds. Demeter started toward the boy, afraid he would fall and hurt himself.
"Not today," he said finally, his eyes coming back into focus. "All the proxies within walking distance of the Valles are currently booked. But I've reserved a pair for us tomorrow."
"A pair?" Demeter said, stepping back into her usual conversational space. "Do you use virtual reality, then?'
"Hell yes, lady! I mean, I could walk there, hut its a hell of ... a long ways to go. Mars gets real cold at night, too, if you know what I mean."
With that last comment he gave Demeter a look that—despite the nictitating membrane that involuntarily wiped across his eyeball in the moist, chemical-laden air—could only be described as a leer.
"I understand, Mr. den Ostreicher," Demeter said coolly. And she hoped he would understand, too.
From the rattling and gurgling that assaulted her audio pickup, Sugar deduced that Demeter Coghlan had once again worn her comm bead in the shower. Yes, the focused roar of the hot-air jets, along with a marked rise in internal temperature, proved it. Oh well, Sugar was guaranteed waterproof.
From the readout of her inertial guidance system, Sugar estimated that they had returned to Demeter's room at the Golden Lotus, and from there to the bathroom. Now, from the aural imaging of doors opening and closing, and from the clank! as the charm bracelet to which she was attached hit some flat surface—with, by the sound of it, one-point-two cubic meters of storage space underlying a layer of compressed fibers that might or might not be plaited polystyrene—Sugar knew her mistress was bedding down for the night. Time for Sugar herself to suspend function and recharge her batteries from the grid's broadcast wave.