The sides of the tube or passageway were smooth and compacted, just the sort of finish a burrowing animal would leave in moist, slightly clayey dirt along an Earthly riverbank. Except, of course, that the Martian soil was bone dry. And it had never, to Rogers knowledge, seen an animal so big, burrowing or otherwise. Viruses by the handful, and now and then a microbe, but nothing as large as an ant, let alone a gopher.
"Is mystery, yes?" Shtev said.
"Could be the wind," he proposed.
"Just here? So deep?" The Russian raised her head to scan the shattered landscape. "And just this once?"
"Is mystery," Roger agreed.
He was about to say more, just empty speculation on the feature, when the horizon lit up the color of blood. It was like a flash of heat lightning, but deep into the infrared. Roger might have thought it was a trick of meteorology—forty years ago. Time and experience had taught him it was nothing to do with the weather.
Dorrie Torraway stepped out of the locus of the flash.
"Roger, connect with the grid, please," she said inside his head.
"Tell them it's not convenient." He formed the words without moving his lips or vocal chords: electronic signals raced away through his backpack computer and found the nearest relay link.
She shook her head. "They really do have to talk to you."
He groaned aloud—or made a mechanical grating sound like a groan—and Shtev looked around.
"What is it?"
"Excuse me, Fetya Mikhailovna," he replied. "The on-line busybodies want a conference."
"Maybe they need something. Something only you can give." The Cyborgs right eyelid, a fleshy membrane abraded by years of sandstorms, flicked down and up. A wink for him alone.
"Maybe. All right, Dorrie—" His voice sank into subvocal mode. "—go ahead with the message."
Dorrie Torraway's image melted, shifted, and resolidified. Her shorts and halter became a pair of purple coveralls with metal snaps down the front. Her hips and waist thickened perceptibly as she lost five inches in height. Dome's severely beautiful face grew more rounded, her cheekbones disappearing as her cheeks chubbed out, shedding a few years and a lot of sophistication in the process. Her chin developed dimples Dorrie never had. Her hair went from short black to a long and wavy light brown, finally tying itself into a braid.
"Colonel Torraway?"
The woman's features were three-dimensional but somehow static, like a doll's head that was only partially animated. Her lips and the focus of her bright green eyes moved, but nothing else. Her jaw and throat muscles did not keep in synch with the words.
Roger understood the phenomenon now: the signals fed into his backpack's imaging system were based on a two-dimensional, bit-mapped icon. The grid—or whichever node attached to it had felt compelled to violate his privacy—was projecting a simulation drawn from a passport file or some other ungenerous source of data.
That didn't help, though. He still didn't recognize the face and figure.
"Who is it?" he asked. Torraway stayed where he had been when the red flash caught him, half-levered off the ground with his knees and elbows sticking out, his head turned at an angle to the horizon. Let the backpack project whatever body language it wanted to his interlocutor: Roger standing heroically on the red sands, Roger seated regally on a camp stool, Roger stripped of his black-winged bat suit and smiling like a recruiting poster out of a pink, human face. Whatever.
"My name is Demeter Coghlan. We haven't actually met, sir. Although I saw you a few days ago, out at Harmonia Mundi."
Roger remembered the place perfectly He could remember anything and everything, every meter of ground from fifty years of wandering, perfectly. Or his backpack computer did. He did not remember any human woman at Harmonia Mundi, though. It was the professional hydrologist, Lole Mitsuno, working out of Tharsis Montes, who had been there five days ago. Mitsuno briefly interrupted the forum of fellow Cyborgs that Roger and Fetya had convened. That indecisive forum, which had accomplished nothing. His interruption had been about—what else?—water.
"I do not remember you."
Already Roger was becoming bored with this conversation. If the grid was going to pester him with Dorries emergency signal, that was one thing. But Torraway could put his mind in compressed time and just let this woman ... fade away.
"As I said, we never really met. But I was collecting data with Lole Mitsuno, about a week ago, when ..."
Roger's mind came out of its high-speed blur, teased into trying to remember whether a second person had actually been working alongside the hydrologist. If none of Torraway s senses recorded her, then he had nothing to remember. That was simple enough. Indeed, he might have ignored a second human figure, so far away and insignificant.
"Is this introduction at all meaningful?" he asked, overriding whatever the woman had been saying in the space of his thoughts.
"No, of course not." The doll's head smiled woodenly.
At least she was honest.
"What can I do for you?" Roger asked, resigned. "I need to find out about the Valles Marineris. Specifically, if we were to raise the water-vapor content of the Martian atmosphere by, say, twenty percent somehow, then, with dissociation into elemental hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and a corresponding pressure increase, would ambient conditions at the lower elevations of the Valles be able to support approximately Earth-normal conditions? I know you can't answer that, per se. Only a computer model could give the answer, but—"
"I am a computer model," Roger began. The woman rode right over him.
"—what I need to know is, will the geology of the Valles be competent to handle the accumulated precipitation? There are no lowlands for the district to drain into—at six and a half kilometers deep, the Valles is the nearest lowland. But would the substructure be able to support free water without catastrophic caving? Or is there an aquifer underneath it that will just reabsorb the runoff, leaving us in a net condition of—" "Whoa! Miss Coghlan!" Roger raised his hand. The doll's face suspended. The mobile eyes and mouth froze and hung in midair, appliqued against the landscape, while her body and most of the head faded out. The image rebuilt only gradually.
"Yes?" the lips asked in a whisper.
"I spent more than an Earth year in the Valles. That was back in the middle twenties," he explained. "I could describe the area for you in minute detail because, of course, all my memories are machine-stored. But what I cannot figure out is why you want to have me describe anything? Instead, you should refer to the download of my survey impressions, which were long ago converted to a V/R program you can check out of any library. Better yet, why don't you rent a tourist proxy and explore the area at first hand?'
"I already tried that," the woman said, her image strengthening with a kind of conviction. "I don't know what I'm looking at. And your survey data are just that, undirected impressions. What I need, Colonel, is your expert knowledge, your judgment, your experience with the Martian surface."
Roger ran a hand lightly around the rim of his mysterious gopher hole. He didn't know if the image she was getting would show the motion. He didn't care, either.
"Yeah, expert knowledge and experience . . ." he said gloomily.
A heavy hand thumped his shoulder, practically knocking him off balance.
"Ask who she represents," Fetya hissed in his ear. "And what will she pay? Cost her plenty already to get override on you, I think."
Roger turned his head. "How do you—?'
The Cyborg grinned at him, showing steel teeth. "Your signals are not so tight-beam as once, Tovarich."
"Um . . . Miss Coghlan, you speak of changing the water content of the Martian atmosphere. That would obviously be a major operation, requiring significant backing. Do you mind if I ask who you represent?"