"Depends on your point of view." He shrugged one shoulder—the one that wasn't pushed into the pillow. His eyes were already closing again. "When the machine symbiotes get too inquisitive, it's easier and neater, we find, to charm them than to take more . . . um ... direct action."
Demeter's training in espionage gave her a full range of meanings for a phrase like "direct action." She wondered with some amusement what amateurs like Lole and his friends might be prepared to do in protecting their secret place. Instead, she asked a more pressing question. "Who, exactly, is we'?"
"Some people who basically think like you do, that computers are not to be trusted. Not completely."
"I never said that!" Demeter protested. "I just don't like them very much."
"Is there a difference?" Lole asked with a yawn.
"Not a lot. .. maybe," she conceded. "But all the same—"
Before she could finish the thought, he was snoring in her ear. It didn't surprise Demeter, after the exercise she'd been giving him.
All the same, she was going to say, the way this room was set up implied more than just parties and fun. People came here to plot. Maybe to hide out. That much was evident from the boxes of canned food, the survival gear, and the emergency pressure suits she had found right off, stashed beyond one of the wall hangings. Demeter had a lot to learn about Lole Mitsuno and his friends.
And they had almost nothing more to discover about her. She'd already told them everything.
Now, was that a good thing? Or bad?
Demeter was still trying to decide in her own head when sleep overtook her.
Chapter 13
Shots in the Dark
Harry Orthis came bolt upright out of a sound sleep. He looked around in the utter darkness of his hotel room, trying to determine what had awakened him.
Nothing.
If the intrusion had been some kind of noise, it wasn't repeated. He listened for a minute or more—counting out his suddenly accelerated heartbeats and dividing by two for good measure—but still he heard nothing.
Orthis stared into black space with perfectly sleep-adapted eyes, seeking shadows. After a moment's concentration, he could sense the room's terminal screen by the faintest of residual glows from its phosphors. A lighted diode, buried in its keyboard circuitry and still active, pebbled the ceiling with oblong shadows: the edges of key blocks and plunger switches matrixed above the underlit board. The room's outer door, for all the brush-stripping at its edges, oudined itself in golden slivers leaking in from the hallway. The charge light on his battery-powered shaver flooded the bathroom with a green blaze.
But none of it moved. None of it would have brought him awake.
'Time?" Orthis asked his personal chrono, lying on the nightstand.
"One twenty-seven, ayem," replied its neutral voice. On a whim, Orthis had once programmed the chrono to be perfectly indeterminate as either male or female, alive or mechanical. It offered him no comfort now.
Harry Orthis knew his own sleep cycles. Based on the time he had turned out his reading light and rolled over, he could expect to wake up twice, briefly, at around two-fifteen and four-thirty. And then he would barely open his eyes, not even raise his head—let alone come upright on the bed like this.
He wiped his palms on the bare skin of his chest. There they picked up an even heavier slick of sweat. He scrubbed his fingers against the outside of the blanket, matting its curried fuzz.
The room wasn't all that hot.
So this had to be a cold sweat.
He pushed back the covers and, without turning on the light, walked over to the terminal, seated himself before it.
"System."
"Yes, Counselor Orthis?" the local machine replied, voice only.
"Connect me with Demeter Coghlan. She's at the Golden Lotus."
"Miss Coghlan is not in her assigned room," a new voice, higher level, informed him.
"Find her for me, will you?"
"That function is not offered as part of regular programming." To aid him, the screen lit up with a menu of the system's interpersonal contact routines. It was a short list.
"Mephisto ... locate the girl."
A pause. Harry Orthis could imagine the grid checking the trace images collected from hundreds or possibly thousands of video monitors, the scent indices from just as many gas sniffers, the compressed echoes from a like number of public earjacks. The machines would be frantically coordinating their raw data, searching for a clue, a trail, a present position.
"Miss Coghlan is not currently in the Tharsis Montes complex," the grid announced finally. The screen went a neutral gray.
"How did she leave? And when?"
"There is no record of her leaving."
"Catalog the sales of intercolony transit vouchers during the past twenty-four hours," he instructed. "Also, rentals of pressure suits at all the public locks."
"We repeat, there is no record of her leaving, by any exit."
"Interesting.... Give her last-known position."
"The restaurant Chez Guerrero, Commercial Unit 1/16/2." The screen offered standard tourist photos of the inside of a two-star eatery. It had tables too close together, a hard tile floor, and lots of white plaster on the walls, with reproductions of old paintings reflecting a Mexican flavor, maybe American Southwest.
"When was she there?"
"Yesterday, between eighteen-thirty hours and twenty hundred hours."
"And after that?" Orthis prompted.
"After that, Miss Coghlan was not in the complex."
"With no record at all of her leaving. Yes, I get it." He sat with his chin on his chest, thinking. The montage of restaurant views clicked off, showing a blank screen again. "Did she eat dinner alone? Was anyone with her?"
"Lole Mitsuno." The screen displayed a golden head with level, gray eyes. The man had a good chin and reeked of hormones.
"Don't know him."
"Mitsuno is a Mars citizen, born on planet, and is currently employed as a Grade Two Hydrologist with the Tharsis Montes Resources Department. He and Miss Coghlan have been tallied together on several occasions during the past eight days. Our module Y-4 Administrative Terminal in his department is now reviewing the relationship."
"Prepare a summary for me," Orthis instructed. Then, as an afterthought: "Does he have a record?"
"Please specify." The screen showed a kaleidoscopic moire pattern in pinks and greens—emblematic of confusion.
"Like, a criminal record? Perhaps for psychopathic sexual deviancy, child molestation, abduction, rape, that sort of thing?"
"No such charges have been filed against him," the grid replied primly.
"No, I guess not.... Interesting."
"Further instructions?" the machine asked.
"Not at this time. If I think of anything, I will let you know."
"As will we...."
With a sudden blip the screen went dark. Not just blank, but completely turned off, with only the flush of its dying phosphors to light him to bed.
"Ah! There you are!"
Demeter Coghlan was crossing the foyer outside the door of her hotel room. It was her first step out into the open, it seemed, after more than a kilometer of creeping warily from apex to apex around three long walls of every public hexcube on Level Four. The reason for her caution was simple: here it was the near side of morning, going on six o'clock and breakfast time, and she was still dressed in her raspberry microdress, a pair of black heels eighty-five millimeters high, and nothing much else. Except for a contented smile and a rat's nest of brown hair that clawed at her neck and draggled down her bare back. Not a very wholesome picture.
So the jolly call stabbed at her, like a thief on the end of a policeman's shockrod.