'Why do you call it 'Wyatt'?"
"Short for 'Y-4 Administrative Terminal.'"
"Is not!" Lole said flatly "Short for Wyatt Earp, 'cause he kind of lays down the law around our office."
"How did you get access without turning it on?" Demeter asked. She remembered having to key the terminal in her hotel room.
" 'Turn it on'? Why, Dem, the machines are always 'on.' All you have to do is get their attention, so the grid will access you correctly."
"Always on?" Demeter was surprised. "What a novel concept!"
Of course, she silently corrected herself , Sugar was always on, but she was no bigger than a pumpkin seed, was usually discreet, and only tied into the local grid when Demeter told her to. The idea of having the whole machine network of the planet looking over your shoulder, waiting for you to crook a finger—as Lole had done—and listening for any word it might-could interpret as a command, doubtless recording everything else on the off-chance the communication might turn up something useful... She found the idea unsettling.
Of course, Demeter told herself the next minute, many of Earth's cities were almost as interconnected. Between personal chronos and civic terminals, plus the ever-present Committees of Public Safety' in some of the newer cultures, a human being might well feel monitored all the time. But on Earth you could always go outdoors, walk off into the middle of a field somewhere, hike into the mountains, row out into a lake. Then you could know that you were alone except for any little cyber you brought with you. Here on Mars, on the other hand, everything was indoors. You were always inside these tunnels, with the grid's monitors everywhere. You couldn't go outdoors unless you wore a pressure suit or traveled in a walker or visited through a proxy—and each of these tied into the grid for safety reasons. So you were never really out of touch.
Coghlan could feel her chest tightening at the thought of being always under surveillance. Supervised. Scrutinized ... Watched.
"Yes, isn't it convenient?" Ellen replied. The smile she gave Demeter certainly seemed sincere.
Chapter 5
Shadows Beneath the Surface
When Demeter Coghlan wired into the proxy that was waiting for her in the Valles Marineris District, she found herself looking at a pattern of horizontal lines.
What the goggles showed her were even layers of fine-grained material, brownish-red over reddish-brown, looking, more than anything else, like a Chocolate Decadence with raspberry sauce. Then Demeter noticed that the machine's lenses were focused at the macro setting. She reset them for normal viewing and backed the proxy away from whatever it had pushed its nose into. The image resolved into the sidewall of a canyon, layers of iron-stained clays and sands deposited in strata, pressure-welded into hard stone, and then carved away by the force of wind and, perhaps, water.
"Humph," Demeter grunted. She had teleported her head 2,600 kilometers to gaze at a rock wall.
Earlier that afternoon, Jory den Ostreicher had come to Demeter's hotel room—although she didn't remember giving him either the Golden Lotus's name or her room number—and announced he had finally gotten that pair of proxies released. The machines were supposed to be some distance away from the actual Canyonlands development site; so he and Demeter would have to walk them back. He led her into the hotels simulation parlor to take over the proxies.
Demeter was about to pull the machines sensor head away from the canyon wall, to turn and get a wider view of the terrain, when something caught her eye. It was a lump of glassy material, half-buried in the strata.
She knew about the glass-capped plant life that the earliest human colony on Mars had discovered. Could this be a fossil of an earlier form, only now emerging from between the layers? Well. . . no. For one thing, these sedimentary rocks showed that Mars had once possessed abundant free water. That implied a thicker atmosphere, and the silica shell of the modern flora was generally agreed to be a late adaptation to thinner air that permitted lethal amounts of ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface. So, it was unlikely the glass cap had any counterpart in primitive forms.
Could this be an animal, then? Some kind of hard-shelled marine life?
Demeter cranked in the macro setting again. The object exhibited none of the symmetries—bilateral, radial, pentahedral—that one associated with life. It was a lump, nothing more. An almond of milky substance deposited in the layer-cake of the region's geology. But before Coghlan turned away from the anomaly, she did a fast scan of the wall.
Other almonds leaped out at her. All of them lay in the same line of strata, more or less, as if deposited there but not above or below. As if, sometime in the distant past, a shotgun blast had peppered the surface of the mudflats with nuggets of... of whatever.
Demeter scratched the vertical surface of the outcropping with the clawed whip of her machine's No. 1 right walking leg. This was a touring proxy, lacking either the handlike manipulators or saddle pouches of the working models. In six centimeters of downstroke, she covered a hundred thousand years of layered sediment. One of the stones popped loose.
"What are you doing?" Jory asked in her earphones.
"Looking for fossils ... ?" Demeter replied meekly.
"Right! Sure! Our people have been digging around in this valley for ten years, every one of them hoping to turn up a crustacean or a clamshell or something. And you think you're going to walk up to a blank wall, kick it once, and make the discovery of the age! You've got balls, Demeter!"
"All right. It was just a notion." And it was the perfect touristy thing to do, Coghlan thought, congratulating herself. Already she felt like a spy.
"Just like a little kid..." the Creole steamed.
Before Demeter turned away, she tried to memorize the shape and texture of the loose stone—it would be too conspicuous if she were to put the V/R helmet in record mode just then. The object was translucent, almost clear, with a ridge of gray matrix still clinging to it. Bigger than her thumb, too. Coghlan was no geologist, but she knew something of a planet's power to form deposits. This nugget was no part of an igneous vein, which was how quartz beds formed. The stone had been created by intense pressures, deep in the mantie, then shot out of a vertical well in a single gout of magma.
The word "kimberlite" crossed her mind and stuck.
But that was all the prospecting she had time for, although she vowed to remember the site and come back to it if she could. With a pang, she suddejily realized that the last person to use this proxy—the one who had abandoned it with his guide in this part of the Valles—must have been looking at this wall of amygdaloid nuggets. Had he also seen the anomaly and investigated? If so, did he understand the implications? She had no way of finding out.
Consumed by these thoughts, Demeter turned the proxy away from her find, raised its lenses, and clicked to zoom. The valley floor came into focus. Her and Jory's machines stood on a slight elevation near the North Wall. The far side of the Valles rose up and up in an escarpment of tunneled passages and sheer bluffs.
The Marineris system was deeper and longer than the Grand Canyon on Earth, which Demeter had visited through V/R simulation before taking on this assignment. But where the Grand Canyon was a network of tiny, narrow gorges twisting and recurving through a tableland of etched buttes, the Valles Marineris was a broad, flat-bottomed valley, like California's Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy. Except, for their size, the bastions and knobs and domes here outranked even El Capitan.
"Which way to the development?" she asked Joiy.