Demeter turned to find Sun II Suk seated on the little banquette that jutted from one side of the foyer hexcube. He sat like a chubby schoolboy, hands folded in his broad lap, legs crossed at the ankle and tucked back under his bulk. A Schoolboy Buddha, she thought to herself.
"Oh! Hello, Sukie." She could feel his eyes inch-worming over every centimeter of her exposed skin. Looking for what? Sucker marks?
"You were out late." He made a statement, not a question.
"Yes."
"I tried to call you. I got no answer, anywhere. I looked all over for you. No one could find you."
"I was visiting a friend."
"Doesn't he have a terminal?"
"We... didn't have it hooked up."
'That was most inconsiderate. I really wanted to talk with you."
"Oh? What about?"
Sun's face instantly went blank: the Schoolboy Buddha caught out in a lie. His lower lip briefly sagged, his eyelids drooped, his shoulders slumped. Although Suns confusion lasted less than half a second, Demeter definitely saw it. Within the space of a wink, however, he brightened and pulled himself together.
"To talk with you about the new team from N-ZED."
"I've met them," she replied. "What about it?"
Pause. "Do you think they represent a danger to either of our positions?"
"You called me at—what? the middle of the night?—to ask me that?"
"It was two o'clock. I had trouble sleeping."
"Bad conscience?"
"No. Concern for you, my dear."
"I can take care of myself."
"These North Zealanders are not what they seem. Their development project, Canyonlands, is not what it pretends to be."
"This is supposed to be news?"
"I only want to help you. For example, study their new orbiting power station. You will see that it is far larger—three times the capacity—than their proposed energy consumption. That is not a fact you can check with any public source, but I offer it to you in order to cement our alliance."
Sun's face was turned partly away from her, chin up, brow relaxed, like a moon at three quarters, concerned elsewhere. For a long moment he displayed the truthful schoolboy, the benevolent Buddha, with no spells to cast, nothing to urge. The bubbling spy of their previous encounter was nowhere to be seen in him.
"Well, I appreciate your help." It sounded lame in her own ears.
Then she noticed that, with every other breath, Sun's eyes flickered to betray him. They winked sideways, crawling over her white flesh, measuring, tasting, gauging clefts and indentations that they could not reach from whatever they could see exposed. So even now he remained the adventitious lecher.
"I have to go," she said suddenly, walking to her door. Demeter brushed her fingertips together, to remove any grunge from her print pattern, and pushed her thumb against the lockplate.
The Korean stood up, moved toward her.
"I can open it myself." Demeter turned her shoulders protectively.
Halfway across the foyer, Sun 11 Suk stopped. His palms came forward in a half-shrug. Something of the old smile showed on his face.
"Really, I do not fancy European women," he lied.
"Well then, good morning. And, um, thanks for the advice."
He nodded, turned, and lumbered off down the corridor.
Demeter slipped into her room and slammed the door behind her. She wondered how long she'd have to wait, to make sure he was truly gone, before she dared head down to the hotel's common bathroom for a long, hot shower. And be damned to the meter rate!
Demeter picked up a toasted bagel—it was one of the few breads that the Martians prepared really well—and spread it with unsaturated oil that had been emulsified and was even vaguely yellow. What she really wanted, of course, was a big gob of cream cheese and a slab of smoked fish, salmon if they could get it, with maybe some onions and capers. Yum!
Trouble was, Mars didn't have any fish, except for a pair of experimental carp in the hydroponics lab, and they were completely off limits until the gene pool expanded. No capers, either. And the onions the colonists did grow were of the long, green shallot variety—not the big, purple slabs of Bermuda she craved.
No poppyseeds on her bagel, for that matter.
"There you are, Demeter!"
She looked up and spilled her tea. Thick liquid, stiff with sugar, ran out from the cup and over the tablecloth in a puddle held together by surface tension until absorption by the cloth's fibers overcame its front edge. Then the tea soaked into the white material, flattening into a muddy, brown delta.
"Damn it!" she cried, bringing up her napkin and fluttering it over the mess.
"I'm terribly sorry," Harry Orthis, the North Zealand analyst, said. He tried to help, pulling out his handkerchief, but she waved him away. "I guess I startled you," he added, as an apology.
"I guess you did."
"Didn't mean to, of course. But, you see, I've been looking all over for you, Demeter. So it was a shock to find—"
"Jesus, you too?" Demeter growled.
"Excuse me?"
"I spend one night on the town without a chaperon, and everyone calls out the dogs." Demeter wondered what was going on, and whether this meeting with Orthis was as accidental as it seemed. "Why didn't you leave a message in my room?"
"You weren't in your room. Nowhere near your hotel, in fact. I checked." He took the liberty of seating himself in the empty chair across from her, avoiding the sopping edge of the tablecloth. Orthis lifted the white porcelain teapot, righted her cup and saucer, gestured with the spout. "More tea?"
"Yes, please. . . . You know, I do return calls, Harry. What was so urgent it couldn't wait?"
Orthis s face went blank. Tea dribbled out of the upended pot until it threatened to overflow the cup.
"Harry?" she prompted.
"Yes, sonny, just thinking..."
"You wanted to see me? Last night? Hey?"
"Of course, it was about your plan—or the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation's plan, actually—for terraforming this planet. It will destroy the atmosphere, you know"
"Not to mention flooding out some of the lowland valleys," she said distinctly. "Like your Canyonlands project?"
"That's the least of it, Demeter. Crashing asteroids around is sheer lunacy. Abrupt, changes like that would be deadly to more than just the fragile, indigenous life on Mars. The instabilities would destroy the human colonies here now"
Demeter decided to let herself be drawn into speculation. "Why? They're all dug in below ground level and locked up tight. They should withstand a gradual change in atmospheric pressure and composition, happening over some months. More dust in the air—if that's possible—and some added water vapor. Their seals should hold."
"Then consider the winds," Orthis said. "Increasing the moisture and particulate content of the present global pattern will increase its kinetic energy many-fold. And consider the proportion of the Martian economy that takes place out on the surface, or under bubbles of light plastic. Gas drilling, crop planting, minerals exploration, to name just a few. All of that will vanish with your asteroid scheme."
"Well, its just in the talking stages, anyway," Demeter grumped. "It was just an idea."
"A bad one. Terraforming Mars would be a massive boondoggle, lots of effort for very little positive result, plus much danger and alarm. You and I both know that."
"It might get the people back home interested in Mars again."
"At the risk of one hundred percent of the goodwill we've built with the people here."
"Is that why your team was sent up in such a hurry? To defend your project in the Valles against us crazy, asteroid-flinging Texahomans ?"