He walked east with her, up a ramp to the surface facilities, through a pressure door, and down into the old equipment bays. From there they followed a utility corridor out to the site of the complex's first water storage and aeration facility, 4,000 megaliters of open tankage, dug into bedrock and roofed over against explosive evaporation and the blowing sand.
Mitsuno and Coghlan crossed the pool on a catwalk of perforated steel plate. The dank air around them was lit only by the widely spaced safelights in the dome above, and by swimming dots of silver reflected off the quiet water. Algal-green slime, the persistent echo of protozoic life that had followed humanity's colonization of the Solar System, dripped from the tube railing beside them. As the two of them passed, Lole could hear Demeter's high heels clicking wetly against the metal. He expected her to protest about the environment, but she came along quietly, even expectantly.
On the other side of the tanks, the pair came to a gallery of unfinished tunnels, two levels that extended forty' and eighty meters below the surface. Mitsuno knew that the ground here was not competent; the rust-red, iron-rich rock was too friable and unstable for development, and so the complex's expansion in this direction had stopped. Instead, Tharsis Montes had dug in deeper under itself. But these old workings had not been backfilled or formally abandoned, just never finished.
Mitsuno hesitated before the door made of sheet-metal that closed off the refuge.
"Normally, we require a strip-search before bringing someone here," he said. "But..."
Demeter Coghlan flashed him a grin, held her hands away from her hips, and turned full circle on one toe. Her limbs seemed to glow in the vague and shifting light reflected down the tunnel from the waterworks. A fold of the dress glimmered as it snaked across her stomach and then pulled taut as she completed the turn.
"No need," he agreed. He looked at her wrist for the first time that evening. "Are you wearing that chrono of yours? Sugar?"
Demeter shook her head. "I lost her a few days ago."
Mitsuno also decided that she couldn't possibly be wearing any prosthetics that might harbor an active cyber circuit. If she was, then the technology for generating pseudoskin was too advanced for his detection. And, anyway, Wa Lixin had already scanned her and pronounced her clean.
Mitsuno opened the door on hinges that creaked with rust. Beyond it was a long room, with hangings of rough cloth to muffle echoes from the bare rock and hold back the ever-sifting dust. He groped for the switch—he actually had to light the chamber manually. The breaker was wired into the illicit circuit they had run long ago from the pool's emergency lighting.
Three caged bulbs came on to show the furniture inside. The pieces were old and mismatched, taken as first-generation castoffs before the municipal recyclers had gotten to them. Still, the space was comfortable enough. In addition to several padded chairs, a settee, and a low table, there was an old bed with the stuffing worn down in all the right places.
"My!" Demeter said, moving past him. "This is homey. Much nicer than the hole Jory took me—" She paused awkwardly. "Oops!"
"Don't worry." Lole smiled. "I heard all about that. . . . This place is just as quiet. No cybers, no fiberoptic, no one to see us."
She nodded. "Do you have someplace I could, ah, wash up?"
They were just within spitting distance of a couple million liters of fresh water, but the tunnel had no plumbing, either. Lole led her past a fold in the wall's cloth that hung out at right angles; in the alcove behind it was a chemical toilet and a steel bucket. He picked up the bucket.
"Pardon me while I go draw you a basin." And Mitsuno went back to the pool.
When he returned, Demeter was standing in the middle of the chamber, equidistant from the three lights. She stood tall in her stiletto heels, her feet apart at shoulder width, hands on her hips. The shadows played across her body as she faced him almost defiantly.
As he came nearer, Lole saw that she was trembling. The wine-colored dress seemed somehow looser, more bunched on her figure. He paused, smiling uncertainly.
Demeter took a deep breath, and the cloth slid off her breasts, exposing nipples that were erect and staring at him as boldly as her two eyes. He understood now that she had taken the dress off while he was gone and had merely been holding the fabric in front of her, pinched at the waist. She lifted the fingers of her left hand, and the cloth swung away, to hang against her right thigh like a limp flag against its pole. She lifted the fingers of her right hand, and it fluttered down between her feet.
Except for her shoes and a touch of lipstick, she was nude. And still trembling.
"Well."
Mitsuno came out of his trance, walked up to her, and cupped his palms over her hips, pressing his fingertips into the silky skin in the hollow of her buttocks. She lifted her fingers again and pinned him at the wrists, pulling his arms back around her. She wedged her body tightly against his.
He locked his fingers under her and took her weight as she lifted her legs and wrapped them around him. Instantly she started rubbing herself slowly against his groin. They never made it to the bed—or not on the first try.
Demeter Coghlan lolled on the bed while Mitsuno went behind the screen. Even though she tried not to listen, the sound of his peeing into the thundermug came to her quite clearly. This would be a good occasion for using a sonic phase inverter—except, of course, that such a piece of equipment would reintroduce the grid into this fine and private place of Lole's.
"You said you have to strip-search people before bringing them here," she said over the tinkling. "Do you bring many girls here?"
He grunted but waited until he was finished making water before replying. "This isn't just a place for women who are shy about their lovemaking."
"I guessed as much," she said... and waited.
Mitsuno came around the screen, still naked and swinging, and resettled on the bed. Immediately he was lying on his side and pressing against her, touching knee to knee, hip to hip, with his flaccid organ nuzzling her lower belly and one hand massaging her near breast in small, sensuous circles. His lips brushed her ear.
"Well... ?'
"Well, what?" he replied sleepily.
"You people seem to have little rooms like this set aside all over Tharsis Montes."
"Its a reaction to the . . . the public nature of our lives, I guess. What's the opposite of privacy? Publicity? We all want to find our own quiet place, even if it means stealing a cubic meter here and there."
"And you think none of them are known to the cybers," she said with disbelief.
"Oh, the computers know all about this place. The excavators that dug it were machine-controlled. The ground's unstable, so the grid even left a string of monitors in here to watch for cave-ins. We just put a few recording loops around them, so the grid hears only what it expects to hear."
"So you do come here to get away from the machines?'
"Sure. There are some things we don't want the computer grid being privy to. Affairs that're none of their business. So we set up this place as a haven for private discussions ... things of that nature."
"And Creoles like Jory never visit it?" Demeter pressed.
"Of course they do. They're a curious bunch, so we bring them in for little parties. The Creoles are partial to human girls, as you found out. We also bring the Cyborgs in, just to bore the socks off them. Everybody thinks this is just a sack shack, and we don't disabuse them. Anyway, the grid doesn't care about human needs like privacy."
"Isn't it dangerous, bringing hard-wired creatures like the Creoles in here? Especially if you want to keep this place a secret."