The two Koreans caught her eye. They were traveling together, officially as master and servant—an odd listing for functionaries from one of Asia's nominally most democratic nations. Although, actually, United Korea controlled just the enclave around Seoul, from Kaesong in the north to Inchon in the south, hardly a nation in itself. More like a city-state.
The dominant member of this pair was one Sun II Suk, whose profession was simply "playboy." That meant some kind of family money, withdrawn from one of the chaebols. The servant was a Chang Qwok-Do, whose employment status was shown as "retainer to the Sun family."
The screen showed her two sallow Asian faces, one fat, one thin, both in their twenties, both with the sort of eyes that were used to squinting down the sights of a rifle when the game went on two legs instead of four. Either or both of these might well be agents of the U.K. Ministry for Foreign Investments.
As Demeter was snooping around in the visitors' database, a new entry fitting her search parameters came up on the screen: Nancy Cuneo, nationality North Zealand, registered for casual status within the past twenty-four hours and due to arrive on the transport Spacewinds during the next thirty-six. Her bio showed her leaving Earth from the Sumatra Space Fountain, which might or might not be the most direct route from her home in Auckland. Traveling in a hurry, was she? Cuneos destination was listed as Tharsis Montes, which was as far as Demeter herself had gotten. The woman's reason for visiting Mars was listed as "commercial representative," but with the company affiliation left blank.
Demeter's senses screamed, "Spy!"
The only trouble was the passport photo, which showed a woman in her late middle life, with an official age of forty-two. The hair—straight and black in a modish helmet cut—showed 110 gray at all. The eyes were lively and young. But the raster scan had picked up a webwork of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and scallops of hard smile-lines around her mouth. Even a good basecoat of pancake and a dusting of powder couldn't hide the loss of skin elasticity worked by gravity and time. Cuneo was sixty-two if she was a day —that was Demeter's professional opinion.
Well, not all spies had to be young and beautiful.
Coghlan memorized the face and hair and the sketchy details from Nancy Cuneos biography. . . one old dame she would watch out for!
By the time she was through with the terminal, Demeter was already ten minutes late for her tourist session with Jory.
Jory den Ostreicher walked down the trail into the lowlands valley and approached the squirming pile of von Neumann processors. A good crop had come in, better than last time he did this job. About twenty-five percent better.
"That is according to yield projections," the grid told him.
"Yeah, but it always amazes me when the real world fits its curve," Jory explained.
He reached for the nearest processor. It was still moving, trying to climb the pile to reach the exact center of the homing ground. With his pincers clamp and striker bar—tools adapted for this particular job—he cracked its top shell along the bifurcation line. Instantly, the von Neumann stopped moving, just like it had been programmed to.
"Connect me to the public terminal outside the Red Queen Bar," he said to the grid.
"Do you have the link number?" that disembodied voice asked.
"No, just trace it, will you?" And subvocally, as barely a conscious afterthought, he added, "Earn your keep, why don't you?"
"We heard that! . . . Connection is made, you may proceed voice only."
When Demeter got to their agreed-upon rendezvous, the Red Queen, there was no Jory. She could have asked him to pick her up at the hotel, but that situation had implications she was not ready to explore. It just felt safer to establish a neutral territory.
Except, he hadn't shown. Demeter consulted Sugar and learned it was only eleven minutes after their appointed meeting time. She thought the boy was being unreasonable, not to wait that long. After all, she was paying him, wasn't she?
Coghlan walked over to the nearby wall terminal, about to register a formal complaint with the computer grid that seemed to run visitor functions here on Mars. As she put out her hand, the screen lit up with a picture of Jory den Ostreicher, smiling carelessly into the lens. From the quality of the image, and the raw state of the surgeiy around his mouth and eyes, she guessed this was an identity pic of the newly created Creole, drawn from some disk archive.
"Hello, Demeter?" the speaker said, loud enough to be heard across the corridor.
"Jory? Where are you?"
"At work. Look, I didn't forget we had a date, but we'll have to call it off. I couldn't get any proxies for the Valles area. The two guys who had the tourist models have extended their booking, and all the utility machines are scheduled out. Maybe we can go tomorrow."
"Oh, damn, that blows the whole morning."
"Hey! Hey! Not really. You have to get checked out on the controls anyway, so why not take a spin around this area? And while you're at it, you can watch me as I do a job necessary for colony maintenance."
"Well... all right. How do I get into the V/R circuits?"
"That terminal is enabled," Jory said as if he knew. "Under the keyboard shelf is a closed cabinet."
Demeter checked. "It's locked!"
Click! "Not anymore. . . . Now take out the helmet and gloves. Put them on."
Coghlan did so, adjusting the bone-induction microphone against the mastoid behind her ear. "Now what?"
"Now I link you into the nearest proxy . . . which is about four kilometers away."
The pupil-focus of her goggles went from that bland image of Jory's bruised face to a flaring, full-color display of some black rocks lying on pink sand under an Arctic-pale blue sky. Demeter jerked at the transition, and the motion sensor inside her helmet transmitted the move to the proxy, whose sensor head immediately jerked upward. That left the binocular cameras looking directly at the faraway sun, and a pair of polarizing filters stopped the scene down to nighttime lumen levels. Demeter slowly dropped her gaze; the proxy lowered its viewpoint to match; and the display went to daylight normal.
It had been six or seven months since Demeter Coghlan had worked with virtual reality. This system seemed less responsive, more telemetry-delayed, than she expected. The rig would take getting used to.
"You got some place to sit here?" she asked.
A stool-arm swung out of the wall and bumped gently at the back of her knees. Demeter squatted, now totally absorbed in the proxy's mechanical processes.
"How do I make it walk?" she asked Jory, or the grid... whoever.
"With your elbows. The manipulators attached to your gloves don't have any that you'd recognize. So, if you just do a one-two forward crawl, like infantry going under barbed wire—the gauntlets will pick up the motion—you'll set the proxy to walking. Dig in with your left elbow or right to turn the machine. Its internal controls will take care of details like traction, braking, slant angle, inertial balance, and all that."
Demeter made the requisite swimming motions, and the proxy began striding forward over the stony ground. She glanced down and got a shock to see a pair of human hands—well, human in the same way that Frankenstein's monster was human—jutting out before her. Beyond them, churning softly in the dust, were the front pairs of the machine's spidery legs. These were long, curved whips of steel, furred with sensory hairs. Very... buglike.