"You have a visitor," the room announced.
"Oh? Who?"
"Lole Mitsuno, hydrologist with the—"
"Let him in."
The door slid back on the tall, blond man. He gave her a nice smile, but she could readjust a hint of worry at the edges. It was the way the corners of his lips turned down. That, and the slight defensive position of his hands, cupped at his thighs, as he stood there.
"Lole!" Demeter came forward with her hands outstretched, palms down, willing him to take her in his arms for a friendly hug. Or something more. Anything more would do.
He grasped her fingers, like a trapeze artist who had nearly missed a flying catch. He held her practically at arm's length, and the worry lines stayed with his smile.
"Glad I found you," he said. "Did you . . . have an interesting day?"
"Why, yes. Um—" Demeter glanced back into the room, which really had nowhere for them to sit but on the bed. "Lets go to the lounge where we can talk."
"Sure."
As she led him down the corridor to the hotel's public rooms, Demeter was sure he would grill her about that foolish request she'd made of Ellen Sorbel. Lole had once practically accused her of being an Earth spy when they had gone out hunting water; then this morning she had admitted as much to his closest coworker. Mitsuno would want to examine her motives—and the secret information she'd hinted at with Ellen—before either of them offered to help.
Not that Demeter particularly needed Sorbel's programming skills now. With the Cocanol at work, fluffing and combing her brains, Demeter could think of at least a dozen other ways of getting access to the messages sent by her opponents. Probably the simplest would be to turn Sugar loose on a badger hunt in the grid's databases to dig out the archivals of all interplanetary communications. Any quasi-governmental system would routinely keep offline copies, if only to indemnify itself against damage claims from garbles and lost transmissions.
So, all Demeter had to do now was convince Lole that Ellen must have misunderstood her. As a fallback, Demeter might even claim that she never entered the Agnus Dei geological data at all—that Ellen must have been hallucinating, or encountering a cybernetic hiccup, or something.
Hey! Demeter had finally said it—or thought it, anyway. "Geological," the word that had been playing on her mind and tangling her tongue for days now. She congratulated herself on finally going to the doctor and getting the medicine she needed.
In the lounge, Demeter steered him to one of the armchairs. Then she positioned herself on the settee next to it, curling one leg attractively underneath her and twisting her body to offer her best profile. "What did you do today?" she began brightly.
"The usual—walked the pipelines, looking for wind erosion around the support brackets and pebbling of the conduit surface."
"You went outside again?"
"No, we use satellite surveillance. I do my patrol through a pair of goggles and gloves."
"Seems like everyone works that way," Demeter commented.
"You went up to the power satellites, didn't you?"
"Ah .. . yes. How'd you know?"
"The system logs in all visitors. Ellen told me."
"She did."
"What do you think of our orbital construction program?"
"Well, I didn't see much of it. What there was looked pretty boring. Miles and miles of blue sheet silicon, all etched with little silver wires. After you get your mind around the sheer size of the thing, it seems fairly uncomplicated."
"Did you get to see the new station?"
"Which one's that?' Demeter had to think for a minute.
"The one that's still under construction."
"I don't believe so. Does the logbook say I did?"
"No."
"Then I guess not. The touring software showed me something. ..." Demeter tried to sort out her memories—they were still a little hazy—from the time before she took her medicine. "But it wasn't anything to do with solar power. I'm not even sure it was in orbit. The signals got crossed up somehow. Typical cyber foulup."
Lole Mitsuno was looking at her thoughtfully.
"What?" Demeter said after a long pause. Maybe twenty seconds.
"You really don't like computers, do you?"
"I use computers like everyone else. I don't have to like them. And I don't get sentimental about them."
He pointed to the charm bracelet on her wrist.
"She's just a machine, Lole. A tool."
"'She'? Does this person have a name?"
"Well, I call her 'Sugar.' But that's just easier to say than 'cellular activating wrist chronograph and transcribing stenographer.'" Demeter shrugged. -
"I see." Mitsuno was giving her that peculiar smile again.
Well, whatever for? Did he think she was hiding some kind of secret life as a cyber-witch? There were stories of humans who sold their souls to MFSTO: and then reaped unfair advantage in business and politics, love and war. Come to think of it, that was another way Demeter might try getting into Sun's or Cuneos message files. She could just go to a nearby keyboard and make a midnight deal with the grid's daemon. Sure! And then it would report her attempted invasion of privacy back to the referenced clients, just like the E-mail protocols specified. Not very smart!
Suddenly, Demeter wanted this handsome man to think well of her. He was fully human, integrated into his community, good at his work, admiring of her supposed cowboy origins. And he was currently unattached—she had that straight from the woman who ought to know.
"Look, I had a problem with a cybernetic device, once," Demeter explained, deciding to play the sympathy card. "I got punched in the head by one— malfunction in a hairdressing unit that burned out and cut me. So I don't expect our 'silicon friends' to always function perfectly. And... that's part of the reason I'm up here. I needed a little rest and relaxation while I recuperate."
"Oh! Does it—?" Lole looked properly compassionate.
"Hurt? No, I'm fine. Really"
"Good.... You hungry? How about some dinner?'
Demeter held her breath, to see if he would mention bringing Sorbel along.
He didn't. "The Hoplite grills up a mean steak and beans," Mitsuno offered.
"Real meat?' Her mouth was watering.
He shrugged with one shoulder. "Coloring's right."
"You're on." She unwound herself from the end of the couch. "Give me a minute to change."
Chapter 10
End Games
After the engagements and excitements of her first week on Mars, Demeter rewarded herself with a day off to go shopping. The best place for that in Tharsis Montes was the Mars-U-Copia, a combination Moroccan bazaar and duty-free shop on the upper levels.
Most of the merchandise was junk: last years recycled fashions from Milan, but cobbled together out of chintzy, synthetic fabrics; evening-wear jumpers designed on a mock-spacesuit theme, with corrugated rubber inserts in all the wrong places; framed, amateur watercolors of the Martian landscape, two shades redder than the real thing; and a . .. wait a minute!
Demeter fingered the necklace that was lying out, unattended on the jewelry counter. It was either the real thing or an awfully good copy.
She picked it up. The necklace was strung with fleurs cle vitrine, the hardy Martian groundwort that grew a silicon shell for protection against ultraviolet radiation. The hollowed-out beads had been sorted by size from tiny, button-shaped, two-millimeter caps to the big, flattened, centimeter-wide lenses. The artist had assembled only the rare, red-tinged shells, so much more delicate than the common blues and grays.