"What do I do with a carcass that isn't damaged?" she asked, finally finding one. No cuts, no nicks, and till joints working with soft clicks.
"Give it here."
From a case on the ground at his feet, Jory' took a mechanism that seemed to be made of crystal and steel. Demeter glanced into the case and saw a dozen more just like it, nestled in foam cutouts. His deft fingers snapped the gadget into the embrasure under the shell where the defunct smelter had been. The new unit had the same kind of grinding mouth and chemical sensors as the old one. When he was done, Jory set the machine down.
It lay there for a moment, absorbing sunlight. Then the legs began to churn, the shovel curve of the carapace pushed forward against the sand, and the von Neumann wandered off—away from the pile of its fellows.
"What is it?" Demeter asked.
"Second generation. It has the same basic command structure of its earlier form: go forth and multiply, twice. Except, this one will never return. This Johnny's now a Johnny Appleseed."
She must have looked perplexed; he grinned. "From the old Earth story," he explained. "You don't know it? Doesn't matter; anyway, it's got a biological package it didn't have before, and a new program. After it has reproduced itself, new biological package and all, that Johnny is now programmed to wander at random over the planet's surface until something actually kills it. And as it goes, the thing will eat sand and manufacture glass capsules that it will fill with its payload of tailored protozoans."
"And what are they? What do they do?"
Jory looked around, as if he had been saying too much. But if that were the case, he should never have brought her out here.
"There are two cultures, basically. One a kind of blue-green algae, the other a bacteria. Both have been genetically altered until they practically can't die. The bacteria are supposed to be from a strain that microbiologists found in Antarctica, which gets almost as cold as Mars and can be just as dry.
"Together, these cultures will form something similar to a lichen, which the von Neumann encapsulates and seeds in protected areas on the surface. The algae use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon compounds, while the bacteria extract latent moisture from the air and the permafrost layer. This creature also helps prepare the ground with its waste products, turning it into organic soil."
"And you'll eat this stuff?" Demeter asked.
"Oh, no! Not even if it tasted good!" The Creole appeared profoundly shocked. "This is work for the future. We're trying to change the planet. By adding to the atmosphere's reserves of free oxygen, we hope one day to grow our plants out in the open. And by darkening the soil with organics, we not only raise its yield potential but also increase the amount of solar heat it will retain.
"Our calculations show that if we can get the average ground temperature at the equator—here, that is—up to about 270° Kelvin, we can have liquid water."
"You're going to bring back rivers? On Mars?"
"Why not? After all, parts of this planet get as warm as that for about one-eighth part of the year. It's not an impossible goal."
"And what about atmospheric pressure?" Demeter objected. "Won't your free oxygen and water vapor just leak off into space?"
"Sure, some of it will," Jory said with a frown. "Still, the lower elevations will build up a favorable balance eventually. It's going to take a long time; these von Neumanns work real slowly. But our calculations show it can happen."
"Ayuh!" Demeter said aloud.
She went back to the work of stripping out the Stage 1 von Neumanns and looking for Stage 2 candidates.
Jory obviously believed what he was saying, although Demeter's briefing with the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation had stressed that most Martian colonists were skeptical of terraforming in principle. Just another Earth-crazy boondoggle, they said, designed to let the politicians back home claim they were actually making something of this new frontier that had taken big chunks of taxpayer money to open up.
The average Martian, G'dad Coghlan had told her, was a lazy sort. The colonials were content to plant their paltry crops under plastic bubblepack, hack out a few more cubic meters of rock for themselves each year, and play V/R games all the livelong day. Long-term planning, coordinated action, and perseverance were not in their foolish natures.
But here was evidence—out in plain sight and openly shared with a casual from Earth—that the Martians had their own plan for making over the surface of their world. It wasn't going to be as quick or impressive as the Texahoman strategy, which included crashing a few stony asteroids and carbonaceous chondrites into the southern highlands to create a global dust cloud that would heat up the atmosphere. That in turn would encourage massive outgassing of water vapor from the permafrost layer. The computers in Dallas estimated it would rain for half a year—half a Martian year, that is—after just two such episodes....
Demeter wondered who was this "we" that Jory spoke about. "Our calculations," indeed! She hadn't seen enough government here on Mars—aside from the busy-bodies who ran around tagging you for wearing perfume and stole from your bank account doing a medical exam you really didn't need—to pack a decent-sized church social, let alone plan for long-term weather modification and soil transformation on a planetary scale.
After the two of them had shucked seventy or so of the von Neumanns, reducing the pile by about a third, and released maybe a dozen of the Stage 2 s, Jory put aside his collection bags, stretched, and sank down on the sand, sitting cross-legged. Demeter consulted the clock function built into her V/R gear and found that the morning had gone.
"Ever tried V/R sex?" the Creole asked with elaborate casualness.
"Huh? With you?" Demeter tried to maintain her composure. "Are we talking hump-the-terminal here? Or something with electronic bodysuits? Just what are you suggesting?"
"It's done with skin electrodes—there should be a pair back in your hotel room," he explained. "Everything happens inside your head, of course. Just like in real sex. Except you can be anything you want, do it any way you fancy. You can even be the guy, if that suits you. I'm flexible...."
"Are you making a pass at me?"
"Not—well—just—with electrodes ... you know?"
"Jory, are you blushing?" Demeter cranked the head of her proxy around to get a tight focus on his face. The ultraviolet-barrier in the boy's artificial skin made sensitivity analysis almost impossible. That didn't stop Demeter Coghlan, though. "I believe you are\"
"Forget I said anything," he grated.
"No, Jory, that's one thing I won't do.... Well, three things I won't do, actually. First, I don't do it with machines. Second, I definitely want to play the girl's part. And third—you started it!"
The Creole glanced up at her proxy's lenses from under his bony, slick-skinned eyebrow ridges. He was grinning at her. Suddenly, Demeter was glad that, physically, Jory was several kilometers away and on the wrong side of an airlock; he looked randy enough to mount the proxy itself. She had places to go and things to do today. But Demeter was going to have a lot to tell her diary tonight.
Chapter 4
Making New Friends and Influencing People
The room had upholstered chairs, finished with a brown organic plastic that was molded and stitched to look like real leather. Somebody had paid good money to import the dyes that could work this effect on vat-grown fibers. The two-square-meter desktop was cast out of a yellowish resin grained with coal-black stripes. The grain appeared to go remarkably deep into the surface....