"I... uh ..." The woman faded completely.
"Never mind," he said quickly into the carrier. With his access to grid resources, Torraway could probably discover her origins and purposes faster than any nonadapted human. "But may I take it as given that you are prepared to pay for the special information you require?"
The face reappeared, hanging against the sky. The smile from her lips actually touched and dimpled the doll-like cheeks. "Of course. For usable information, we are prepared to pay a reasonable price. I just didn't know you Cyborgs, um, needed money."
"Money? No." Roger wondered what the value of 1,500 kilograms of deuterium-tritium fuel, delivered F.O.B. to the Tharsis Montes fountainhead, was in real money. "But we may be able to work out a satisfactory trade."
"All right then!" The woman's grin increased by half an angular degree—then narrowed perceptibly. "But how do I contact you? I mean, regularly, for the purposes of consultation?"
"How did you get to me this time?"
She hesitated, growing dim. "That's ... all..."
"Never mind. I will put the name of Demeter Coghlan among my special friends, always to have access."
"Thank you!" The woman's face came back in full force. Her cheeks reddened slightly, with what Roger used to think of as a blush.
"Think nothing of it," he assured her.
Coghlan started to say something more, reconsidered, and merely nodded gratefully. Then her features blinked out as the signal was cut at the source. In Roger's brain, however, her smile lingered in afterimage.
After the connection broke, Demeter Coghlan sat in the simulation booth, still wearing her helmet and gloves. Under the helmet's laminations of styrene, silicon, and fiberoptic, her face wore a long and thoughtful expression. Curiously sober.
Demeter wasn't sure exactly what kind of hookup she had been taking part in. Even without a whole lot of movement on her side, it had felt like a full-body simulation. What she couldn't figure out was, where did the pickup relaying Roger Torraway's image reside? Out in the middle of the desert like that, she would have expected the grid to need a remote or a rover to cover him. Clearly that huge, green Cyborg who seemed to accompany Torraway everywhere wasn't part of the linkage; he had stayed in the background or off to one side, always behind the Colonel.
Both of the Cyborgs had unnerving presences. Impassive faces, with no human interplay of the folds of flesh—lip and cheek muscles, eyelids and brows— that normally accompanied a conversation. The words just came out in complete and finished sentences, digitized somewhere in Torraway's electronic sensorium, not even passing over human vocal chords.
Squatting there, studying her with his faceted jewel eyes, Torraway reminded her of some kind of insect. A patient mantis, perhaps, waiting to ... snap! and clip her head off—if she had actually been present on the scene, that is.
After her experience with Jory den Ostreicher, Coghlan had thought she was ready to deal with the Cyborgs. After all, they would be like him, wouldn't they? Only more complete, more perfected. Instead, she found the Cyborgs quite different. Their inflexible, waiting gaze told her they had no interest in her—not in Demeter Coghlan or any human being. Her needs and desires, her plans and promises were all ephemera to them. Passing whimsy, dust on the wind. She sensed that any human, on Earth or in Mars, was just so much excess protoplasm to them. Not worth noticing.
This state of detachment would have something to do with their extreme age. True, the Cyborgs were relatively new beings, contemporaries of her grandfather s generation, in fact. Torraway himself could not be older than about ninety, probably. But all the same, he had found a way to cheat death. He could not grow old, weaken, and eventually die, as G'dad would. Torraway could only break down, and the broken parts could be replaced indefinitely. The new components would have better materials, faster chips, lighter metals, harder surfaces. The Colonel was virtually immortal.
That, more than the lack of eyebrows to wiggle at her, was what made him so spooky.
And yet. And yet, he had agreed to become her consultant, to "work out a trade." That in itself implied there was something he wanted. So Torraway had a lever she could push—if only she could find it. And if the price was within the budget of the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation. He wasn't on retainer yet, but she felt positive she could discover his weakness, his need, and arrange to scratch it. If only—
"Hi, Demeter!"
The goggles before her eyes lit up with the gargoyle face of Nancy Cuneo. It was a flat image, piped into Coghlan's simulation gear from a standard terminal.
"Hello, Nancy," she replied, wondering what her own image looked like on Cuneo s screen. Probably just a video not available notice, as if Demeter had stepped out of the shower. "What can I do for you?"
"Our delegation's come in, as I told you. I'm hosting a little reception on behalf of the Canyonlands people, drinks at six. I so want you to come. Everyone will be there."
"Everyone?" Demeter asked with a smile. Did that mean Roger Torraway and his big green friend, perhaps?
"The cream of the complex. So, you will come?"
"I'd love it."
"Good... and, Demeter?"
"Ye-ess?"
"Could you find something to wear other than those coveralls? Oh, they're practical, I'm sure, but a little too proletarian for this kind of affair. Surely, with the whole afternoon to shop, you can find something more off-the-shoulder. Something that shows a bit of leg?"
"Do you want me to come as a guest, or a party favor?' Demeter tried to keep her voice sweet.
"I just don't want you to feel out of place, dear."
"No, I'm sure you don't." This was more fun than the shark pool at the Dallas National Aquarium.
"At six, then?"
"Ta!" Demeter broke the connection.
Before her surroundings had gone quite black, Demeter s goggles lit up again.
"Hello?" It was Lole Mitsuno, peering anxiously out of the near focus as if he had suddenly lost sight of her. "Demeter?"
"Hi, Lole. We're cross-wired, I'm afraid. The grids tapped you into a simulation I just turned off. I don't know what reception is like on your end."
"You look, uh, like a ventriloquist's dummy. I mean, molded out of thick plastic, with your eyes kind of fixed and your face painted in bright primary colors."
"You really know how to compliment a girl."
"I'm sorry!"
"Hush, they're using my passport photo, I think. I didn't know the grid could do this."
"It can't, technically."
An awkward pause developed.
"It's your nickel, Lole," she offered.
"What's that?"
"You called me, remember?"
"Oh, right! Yes, I wanted to know if you'd like to have dinner with me tonight."
"Hey, that's nice. I'd like it a lot, except..."
"You have other plans?"
Demeter shook her head inside the helmet, then wondered if he could see. "A political thing. If you'd only called one minute earlier, then I could say yes with a clear conscience. But, as it is, I'm committed. My job, you know."
"What job is that?"
"Being a spy, remember?"
"Oh." Mitsuno's face wavered between good humor and naked hurt, just like a little boy's. It was a side of men that Demeter could do without.
"Hey! I do want to see you," she said. "Dinner. Tomorrow night. Six o'clock. My place."
"Okay"
"You're buying."
"I'll be glad to—"
"Something expensive, like lobster."
"Lob—?"
"Marine crustacean, boiled with butter sauce. You'd love it. Great with champagne cocktails. But since Mars doesn't grow lobsters, and nobody's probably thought of importing them, I'll leave expensive' to your imagination."