"Three or four. All alike enough to be some kind of heat distortion. Oh, but one was larger than the rest and green—looked like the Michelin Man with a sunshade."
"Wait a minute." Mitsuno clicked off her frequency. Demeter could see his mouth moving inside the bubble, carrying on an extended conversation.
"Okay, we're done for the day here. Go and bring back that transponder, would you?"
"What's wrong? Aren't we hunting water?"
"No need. They say this is a dry valley."
"They? Who?" Demeter felt her neck hairs rise with the finality in his voice.
"The Cyborgs you saw."
"Those were Cyborgs? I didn't know there were any of 'em left."
"Why not? Each one is essentially immortal."
"And omniscient?" she asked.
"When it comes to things Martian—yes, usually."
"So we're just going to pack up and go home? How about we walk over and meet them?"
"That's . . . not a good idea. Old hands find it smart to give Cyborgs a wide berth, unless they ask for your company. And this bunch sounded real short."
"Are they dangerous? They looked pretty skinny to me. Most of them did, anyway."
"Those guys don't have meat for muscles, Dem. They're all servos and solenoids, with tempers to match. You catch them wrong, they could pop your suit before you got turned around to run. Remember, they can breathe out here and you can't."
"I see. So we make like shadows."
"Damn straight."
"Don't know if I want to go back for that transponder now."
"Just keep your head down and mind your business."
"You go," she insisted.
"I wouldn't recognize the spot where you left it," Mitsuno said reasonably.
So Demeter trudged back over the rise. When she got to where the sensor was and retrieved it, she glanced up at the horizon.
The dancing shadows were gone.
When Ellen Sorbel arrived at the Hoplite, it was clear from the rackup of empties on their table that Lole and Demeter had been there for an hour or two. Probably since they docked.
Of course Ellen had heard about the bust at Harmo-nia Mundi. Wyatt had informed her even before Lole locked back inside the walker and turned it for home. The administrative cyber was too pleased with his big chance to say "I told you so." All along, as Ellen had struggled to analyze the new orbital survey data, Wyatt kept mentioning some old ground report—no, he couldn't cite a reference—which he thought showed a total lack of any anomalies hydrologic, seismic, or otherwise under the Mundi area. Ellen wondered if the Cyborgs had known about that report; they were usually were even worse at recordkeeping than Wyatt.
"Hey, guys!" Ellen said cheerfully as Mitsuno looked up.
"Ellen!" Demeter turned and seemed genuinely glad to see her.
"Sorry about the site—" Lole began.
"No need. We all strike rocks once in a while. But why were your Cyborgs so sure there was no water? Have they been digging—?"
"Roger says its the wrong kind of formation."
"And he would know, I suppose," Ellen grumped. She had spent most of her life plugging her head into geological core samples, infrared survey data, and acoustic interferometry matrices—and she still didn't know half as much about Martian substructures as Roger Torraway had squirreled away in that cybernetic backpack of his. "What was he doing out there?"
"'Cyborg business,' he told me," Lole replied. "As in 'Please kindly butt out.' Torraway seemed to be holding some sort of caucus with his friends—including the Russian girl, Shtev."
"One of those Cyborgs was Torraway?" Demeter asked, suddenly looking up. "Colonel Roger Torraway?"
"Sure," Lole said. "Why?"
"He came from Texahoma. I've been to the place where he was made. I should have gone over today and said hello, greet a fellow countryman."
"Demeter is a diplomat-in-training," Lole explained to Ellen. "Thinks she's got to make contact with the local nationals." He turned to Coghlan. "Torraway is not Texahoman, Demeter. He's one hundred percent Martian. And anyway, when they made him, your country—the Oklahoma part, that is—-was still joined to the United States of America. Torraway was an official in its Air Force, which I guess means he ran a blimp or something. But he became the first true Martian when they brought him here."
"Now you're telling me Earth's history?" Demeter had a smile on her face.
"Our history, too," Ellen put in. "Every Martian schoolchild learns about the age of colonization."
"What I never understood," Lole went on, "is why, if those scientists in the United States and Russia wanted to create a race of native Martians, they didn't let them breed. Why make them surgical eunuchs?"
"That's obvious, Lole." Coghlan shrugged. "The human parts could breed, sure, but they couldn't adapt their babies with all the hardware needed to survive."
"Why not? The von Neumanns do it."
"But those're machines! They were designed to—"
"So are the Cyborgs, machines," he said reasonably.
"It's different," Demeter insisted.
"What I never could figure out," Ellen interrupted, "is why your country—the old country, whatever— went to the expense of building Cyborgs in the first place. The cost just about broke your economy. And it certainly helped sink the Russians."
"Why, so they could explore Mars," Demeter explained.
"Ordinary people can explore Mars," Lole pointed out. "You did this morning."
"Well, I guess, it was before they had settlements like this for growing food and stockpiling tanked air and such. It was just easier getting around as a self-contained Cyborg."
"But they brought up nonadapted humans on that first mission to accompany Torraway One of them was his doctor, along to make repairs. They managed just fine, growing food in domes and compressing the air."
"I'm sure there was a good reason for the Cyborg programs. The scientists must have checked it out, made computer models—"
Lole was grinning now. "They made computer models."
"What you mean," Ellen said, "is the computers made computer models."
"And the computers made them the way they wanted them, to achieve the goals they had in mind," Lole finished up.
"Are we talking fairy tales here?" Demeter asked with a stiffly superior air. "I've heard all those stories, too, you know. The grid is self-aware. The grid is God. The grid is the next stage in human-machine evolution. . . . Right, guys! Look, the good Lord knows I have reason enough to distrust the machines. But I don't anthropomorphize them. I don't clemonize them. Sure, I talk to my charm bracelet. And you two talk to thin air and think of it as this Wyatt' character. But it's still all just a machine. Just a bunch of really most silicon platelets running self-branching response loops."
The woman stopped, her chest heaving now, and glared from Lole to Ellen.
"Are you so sure?" Sorbel said quietly, after a pause. "Jory tells me you don't even like to talk about sex if they're listening."
"Jory has a big mouth," Demeter said dryly. "And yes, he's right. But I also don't like doing it in front of my cat. That doesn't make Bitsy part of a feline cabal that's supposed to dominate human affairs."
"Still, you have to admit," Lole said, "the Earth scientists went and did something really stupid—on the advice of all those computer projections."
"But it came out all right in the long run, didn't it?" Demeter insisted. "Look at yourself today. All geared up to run your seismic tests, and then this ghost voice from out of the wilderness says, 'Don't bother.' So you tug your forelock and back out of there quick enough. Those so-called biased computer projections have given you a council of elders, the voice of tribal wisdom, and a free-floating resource of inherited knowledge. The Cyborgs help make this planet a little more approachable, a little more friendly. That's what those computer projections from the last century knew you'd need to survive here."