"That's a deal." He grinned.
"Tomorrow then, for sure?"
"See you!"
Demeter Coghlan broke the connection and pulled the helmet off her head before she could get into any more trouble. She started to check the time with Sugar, remembered her loss, and called up the grid itself.
"Thirteen hundred hours, forty-six minutes," the dispassionate voice told her.
Yikes! She had a dress to buy, and only four hours to do it in.
At seventy-nine, Harry Orthis began to think he was getting a little old for planet hopping. Harry didn't feel old—or hadn't until about a year ago. But his attention span was growing shorter, and he had little patience anymore for cocktail blab.
The reception for his negotiating team, when it finally touched down on the Martian surface, was made up mostly of small merchants and petit bourgeoisie. The settlement at Tharsis Montes seemed mostly to run itself, with no sign of an active government structure. So far, Orthis had met only minor functionaries, each of whom was all too quick to point out that he or she handled just a tiny department devoted to air circulation, tunnel development, water procurement, or waste reclamation. The biggest bureaucracy seemed to run the space fountain: he'd met all of three people attached to it.
Of course, there were other population complexes on the planet, and they might have a more formal government framework. Orthis remembered something Nancy Cuneo had said about a meeting with the mayor of Solis Planum. That one had a big red star beside his name on the hospitality roster. Probably a spokesperson of some kind for the whole Southern Region.
Still, this nights affair seemed to be mostly shopkeepers and hoteliers. These people either had no interest in the Canyonlands project or viewed it with mild distrust, as a source of commercial competition. As if they felt the need to fight over pennies with a new township almost three thousand kilometers away. Sad, small-minded people.
Orthis sipped his gin and tonic and watched the crowd dynamics. That's what he enjoyed most at these diplomatic functions: seeing how people paired up and guessing who would end up in whose bed tonight. Tight groups of three that stayed together, joined at the elbow, from one platter of canapes to another always intrigued him—in an academic way, of course.
He gradually, over the course of a heartbeat or so, became aware of general movement within the group. Flashes of pale color as faces were exposed by the abrupt turning of heads, white gleams from the sudden widening of eyes, marked a passage of some kind across the room. This reaction reminded him of the dew track a flying electron precipitated inside a cloud chamber: Orthis could see the effect but not the particle causing it.
Then the knot of bodies standing in his foreground parted to reveal Nancy Cuneo bringing a young woman toward him. She was the electron. Definitely.
It wasn't so much her face, which was nothing really special, as her overall packaging. The woman was barely more than a girl to begin with, and she covered the flower of her youth with a tube dress of sheer nylon the color of a raspberry Popsicle. It hung from her nipples to a mere four centimeters below her crotch. As she walked toward him Orthis could see beneath her arms that, in back, it plunged along the curve of her hips to barely drape her buttocks. It might conceal the cleft between them but would also emphasize that line as she moved. Apparently the only thing holding the dress in place was a strong static charge, for if she was wearing undergarments, or even flesh-colored tights, it wasn't obvious. He made a quick bet with himself that the woman wouldn't be able to sit down all evening— not and remain a lady.
That one quick, practiced glance told Harry Orthis the garment must have cost her about a thousand Neu per gram. It was worth it. He had seen lingerie in sealed catalogs that was less arousing. Even at his age, he could feel the juices begin to flow.
Nancy Cuneo was virtually invisible at the young woman's side. The North Zealand agent suddenly looked her age, which Orthis knew to be considerable. It didn't help that for the evening Nancy had chosen a frizzy wig of red curls. Why did everyone who went bald after that unfortunate wind shift following the Raoul Island test pattern have such awful taste in hair? In Cuneo's case, she matched the disaster with a party dress that had cuffs and padding in all the wrong places. She would look like a garden gnome, if she didn't fade to black entirely in the glare thrown by the girl in the raspberry dress.
"Harry! I have someone for you to meet," Cuneo greeted him.
"Nancy."
"This is Demeter Coghlan, from the Sovereign State of Texahoma. She's Alvin Bertrand Coghlan's granddaughter."
"Oh, yes? I know old A.B. well. We've jousted many a time at the General Assembly meetings."
"And this, Demeter, is Harry Orthis. Harry is a senior analyst with the North Zealand Economic Development Agency."
"Really?" the young woman asked. With her Southwestern cowpoke accent, the word came out "rally." And the partial pressure of helium that the Martians filled their burrows with transmuted it to "reilly." But Orthis caught her drift.
"What is it you analyze?" she went on.
"Oh, economic factors, cash flows, political advantage, anything you'd normally put through a computer."
"You and Demeter have something in common," Cuneo offered, smirking. And with that lead-in, she just walked away.
Orthis and the Coghlan woman stared at her retreating back, then glanced at each other. Harry couldn't imagine what they might have in common, other than a desire to throw off their clothes, drop to the floor, and couple there on the spot. And he wasn't sure Demeter shared that with him, either.
"Well, judging from her timing," Demeter ventured, "I'd say it has something to do with computers."
He cocked his head at her.
"I mean, you work with diem, don't you?"
"I never said that, actually," Orthis replied. "I do things in my head other people do with them. Personally, I hate the machines."
"Oh, that's it then! I dislike them myself."
"That's rare enough these days to be remarkable— two people passing through the same city who don't happen to think of our silicon friends as . . . well, friends."
"I guess I wasn't always like that," she said slowly. "Not until after the accident."
"What happened?" He put the right amount of concern in his voice.
"I was having my hair done in an autocoif—you know what that is?"
Sure.
"And the machine all of a sudden froze up. The scissors unit punched a hole in my skull you could pass a dime through—"
Orthis looked past her face at the braid of luxuriant brown hair, hanging at least twelve vertebrae down her naked back.
Some doubt must have shown in his face, because she quickly amended: "This was more than a year ago—closer to two now, what with the recuperation period, and then travel time getting up here. I haven't let anyone touch my hair since the accident. I always wash it myself and won't let a machine so much as put a comb to it.
"Anyway, those scissors did some brain damage, or so they tell me. Mostly motor function and some hearing loss, although that's all fixed now. You know the techniques they have these days for lattice matricing and tissue transplants? I've got so many wires in my head, I gotta take cover whenever it thunderstorms."
"Really!" And he was conscious of saying "reilly," too. "I was scubaing off Little Barrier Island in Hauraki Gulf—"
"Excuse me? 'Scoobang'? What's that?"
"Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus— it's a recycler that generates oxygen from the carbon dioxide and water vapor in your breath. So I'm down about forty meters, and the damned monitor chip suddenly goes haywire. The unit starts reconstituting carbon monoxide instead—although nobody can figure out just how. I had about blacked out, gone to dreamland, when the whole box shut down. I suddenly had to make a free ascent, blowing bubbles all the way."