"To the left and down. It's about two kilometers."
"Have Lole and Ellen done any exploration out this way?"
"I don't think so. Why?'
"There was water here once. That's obvious."
"Water was in a lot of places—once," he said. "That doesn't mean any of it stayed."
"Oh.... Well, let's go down and see the construction works."
"Sure thing!" And they started walking their six-legged mechanical steeds downhill toward a glint of reflected light in the valley.
Jory led Demeter down toward the construction area in the center of the valley. For now, from this distance, it was just a jumble of brightly painted equipment, in colors of phosphorus yellow and neon green that had never before been seen in the Martian wilderness. The big machines were walking about and chewing up the soil among tumbled drifts of broken stone from the pits and rocks fallen from the canyon walls. An occasional flash of sunlight off a windshield or porthole told him that the crews were on shift and toiling away.
Jory den Ostreicher knew a couple of the people who had signed on with the Zealanders to build their new township. A few were Creoles like himself, the rest contract tunnelers and construction hands from Tharsis Montes and Solis Planum, the nearest large settlements. It wouldn't do, of course, for Jory to butt in during shift, asking questions and showing off for Demeter. Not when he was traveling by tourist proxy and couldn't lend a hand himself , as was proper.
Instead, they came up to the edge of the spill line and observed the closed rigs at work.
The walkers were megasize, bigger than anything except a full-blown excursion bus, self-contained as to atmosphere, with their own airlocks and carrying food, water, and breathable air for fourteen days. The operators even had beds and a pair of simulation hoods for passing their off-duty hours. The machines picked up shovels of red dirt and stone here, put them down over there, in a pattern that only made sense after a few minutes of watching. The dirtmovers were ladling the tunnel spoils over oblong bubbles of clear film, each about ten meters on its long axis. Another machine on the far side of the field was blowing the bubbles out of fast-setting epoxy and extruding them onto pads of leveled sand.
"Why are they burying those domes?" Demeter asked. Even though she was sitting right next to him in the gaming parlor of her hotel back in Tharsis Montes, her voice came to him over the dedicated radio frequency between their two proxies.
"Protection," he explained, groping for a reason. "Sometimes we get meteors, you know? Or from the hard ultraviolet sunlight. Putting the Quonsets underground is easier than patching them up later."
"I don't understand. Are there going to be people living in them? And if so, why do you still have exposed domes at Tharsis Montes? Don't meteors come down here, too? I'd think that, as an older settlement, and a more important one—"
"Hey, look! I don't know!" Jory protested, unconsciously waving his proxy's front legs in the air. "This Canyonlands deal isn't a regular Martian project. The Zealanders are in charge, see, and they've got their own ideas about how to do things.... Okay?"
"All right," she said stiffly. "Anyway, I guess I could check it out in the project specs or something. I just thought you were an expert guide."
"I've been out here a time or two, that's all."
"Can we get down inside the tunnels?"
"Not in these units. We'd be underfoot with the work crews."
"Oh, poop!"
"Hey, that doesn't mean we can't see what's going on! They must have the tunnel borer on a monitor channel. We can leach off its signal and watch along with the operator."
"Isn't that sort of tiling—urn—restricted?"
"What? Watching someone else work isn't popular on Earth?"
"Sidewalk superintending," she said cryptically. "Yeah, I guess so."
"What's a 'sidewalk'?" Jory asked.
Jory showed Demeter how to switch her helmet over to the tunneling machine's monitor signal. Before she did, however, he had her check out the proxy's command circuits and then put the silver spider in standby mode so it wouldn't wander off and get into trouble.
Taking virtual-reality sim-feed from the borer was an exhilarating experience. She didn't have the controls to guide the equipment, and the channel was one-way only, but she still got a tactile response as the drill jumbos cut into the face of hard, dark stone. Through the neuro-inducer, it felt like her own teeth were twirling in their sockets while her shoulders and elbows pushed back against the tunnel walls. Then, when the blast holes had been cut and the tampers were pushing forward their package charges, it felt like her own fingers were thrusting into the rock channels. Relays clicked in her head as the machine checked out its firing circuits, and the bulk of the borer withdrew on articulated treads to the far end of the tunnel, around a protective corner.
Boom! The helmet seemed to rattle on Demeter's skull and the inducer pushed an overpressure up against her diaphragm.
"Very impressive," she commented, as the goggles showed her the formal plan of the underground complex, with another bite visibly extending one of the horizontal adits.
"Yeah!" Jory replied. She could hear him undoing his helmets chinstrap and peeling off the neural gloves.
"That's about all there is to see." He spoke, not over the earphones, but through the air from the terminal next to hers. His voice had a quaver in it. Clearly, all that neural stimulation was getting to him.
Truth to tell, she found it pretty exciting herself.
Demeter was not surprised to feel a delicate finger-touch brush against her shoulder, slide tippy-tap across her back. Something soft and warm caressed the short hairs at the nape of her exposed neck. She felt her body begin to stiffen, then remembered in a flash the sight of his hairless, glistening deltoids, his sculpted pectorals. Demeter wondered what the Creole's perfect, bronzed skin would look like, stretched over his gluteals.
"Is there someplace we can go?" he asked huskily.
"My room," she answered, scrabbling at the strap under her chin.
Once there, she did a fast scan of the cubicle. The blank eye of the terminal caught her attention. "Always on," Lole Mitsuno had said. Demeter went to the cupboard and retrieved her jacket, something she would have worn against the weather "outside" on Earth. On Mars, in the balanced environment of the tunnel complex, it was a useless garment—with one saving feature. It was thick-lined and opaque. She draped it over the video pickup and tucked a dragging sleeve around the audio. Then she shucked off the charm bracelet that held Sugar and upended a water glass over it.
Demeter turned and bent over to let down the bed. Suddenly she felt his hands snake around her from behind. They traveled up the length of her body, from knees to breasts, cupping and probing as they went. His lips were on her neck again, hot and slick. His weight—like a boys in the partial gravity—was bearing her down onto the bedspread. Too fast. Too fast.
She heard a rip! as Jory s strong hands shredded the collar of her jumpsuit and began to pull its back seam apart.
Demeter gasped. "Unh, wait a minute!"
She bent her knees—first the right and then left— and reached down with a blind hand to slide out of the hotel's courtesy slippers and her socks. Then she opened the front snaps of her coverall and pushed its remains off her shoulders, down to her ankles, and kicked them off, freeing her legs. She turned to face him in his loose embrace and rolled down her briefs, kicking them off, too.
Somewhere in all these contortions, Jory's lecler-hosen and utility harness had disappeared. He was standing naked between her legs. His domed, pink member slid up toward her face as she sank back on the bed with the points of her shoulders against the padding that had rucked up against the wall. She spread her thighs and arched her spine—and stopped thinking.