"Hmm . . ." Demeter stood, looking down at the inert cyber on the table. It was an ugly thing, made of dented metal and twisted wire. It had none of the compactness and spherical elegance of her lost Sugar.
"What do you know about friend Sun?" she asked finally.
'That's why I wanted to search you. Sun II Suk's been a busy little bee, fluttering all over Tharsis Montes, from the moment he arrived. And he asks questions like—"
"I know." Demeter rolled her eyes.
"He showed a keen interest in Ellen and me. He kept dropping hints, asking leading questions. I think he was angling to get invited here."
"But you didn't bring him, did you?'
"No. During the quarantine examination, Dr. Lee found an implant in his skull. Sun said it was a hormone-triggering device, to aid in his diet. But the ultrasonics in Dr. Lee's examining table showed it was self-powered and had a lot of circuitry inside. More than a hormone pump would need. We think it might have been subverted to other uses."
"Such as?"
"Monitoring and recording whatever Sun sees and hears. Then reporting back to some control device— attached to the grid, of course, either here on Mars or somewhere on Earth. Not that it makes much difference." Mitsuno shrugged. "Lagtime in the signal processing, is all."
"Golly."
"We thought you might have an intelligent prosthesis, too. But you're clean."
"Thank you."
Mitsuno led her back out through the low tunnel, into the first room where they could sit on the comfortable, castoff chairs.
"So, what does it all mean?" she asked.
"I wish I could give you a hard answer, but all we've got is guesswork. We don't know for certain that anything is really wrong with the computers. But the, um, rather artful lack of certainty worries us."
"It's like the old argument about the intelligence of dolphins," Demeter said. "No one's ever seen them attack a human being. So, either they are secredy hostile to humans and hiding their attacks, or they're positively friendly because they sense a comparable intellect despite the whale hunting and other predatory things humans have done. Both answers would tend to prove their intelligence. Similarly, the grid either is producing systematic errors, or it's operating secretly and hiding its intentions."
"A perfectly circular argument," Lole pointed out.
"Yeah—except that both answers are a sign of bad things for us humans."
"We've considered turning all the computers off, you know. That would be very difficult, of course, because the grid controls our air and water supplies. In fact, the whole environmental balance of the tunnel complexes up here is under cyber control."
"Not to mention a lot of your social dynamics," Demeter pointed out. She was thinking of the system of electronic monitoring, gas sniffers, food additives, and homing bracelets that maintained the heterogeneous population of Tharsis Montes somewhere below the boiling point.
"Of course," she went on, "if you try to shut down the machines and fail, you might precipitate the very thing you're afraid of."
"Right," he said with a nod. "Retaliation. That's why I have to ask you—as a friend, as someone who cares what happens to Ellen and me and all the other people you've met—not to talk about anything you've seen or heard here."
"I won't."
"Not even among ourselves, unless it's in the confines of this room."
"I said I wouldn't."
"It's not that we're afraid the grid is going to send the Citizen's Militia to round us up. It's just that, when we're ready to take action, we have to catch the machines completely off guard, with something they're not ready for. We have to succeed on the first try"
"I know." Demeter nodded. "They're very quick, like nanoseconds."
"And they'll never give us a second chance."
Chapter 15
I've Got a Secret
Roger Torraway did not sleep—not like other humans who curled into a warm nest of linen sheets and woolen blankets, or nylon sacking and hollow fiberfill, or dried grass and a buffalo robe. He had no need to rest the mechanical parts of his body, and his mind functioned at peak efficiency twenty-four hours a day, supported by his computerized sensorium. But at regular intervals the meat portion of his brain did become tired. Then fatigue poisons built up in his remaining cells and had to be washed out again.
His makers' solution, Alexander Bradley's solution, was to let Torraway continue whatever he had been doing—walking, digging, sampling, surveying—under instructions from the backpack computer while his mind went into slowdown mode. Then his feet raced over the sand, his fingers flew about their business, and the world streamed past his faceted eyes, all beyond the reach of his own synapses. If something attracted his wandering attention, it was gone before Roger himself could frame a response. He effectively slept while his Cyborg body toiled onward.
Day or night did not shape these periods of brain rest; Roger Torraway was not a diurnal creature. But sometimes it happened that he went into slowdown when the stars came out and the majority of nonadapted humans on that side of the planet were also at rest, asleep. This night was one of those times.
Roger s feet plodded rhythmically up the face of a volcanic ridge. The ground rushed before his eyes, like the view from a low-flying jet. Largish, upright stones seemed to graze his cheeks and then vanish into shadows under the feeble light reflected from farther Deimos. At some point his internal sensors determined that the angle of ascent was too steep for Rogers gyros. Rather than bring the hands into play in a four-part monkey-climb, the feet turned to trace switchbacks up the hillside. So now his jet-driven view wobbled back and forth across the terrain, like a rattlesnake s triangular head seeking the thermal whisper of mouse.
With a jumble of motion, the scene came apart. The headlong beauty of the night dissolved into a sudden focus on this loose rock, on that gap in the footing. Roger Torraway was instantly awake and back in real time. His human brain tried to take over the effort of walking, and the world reeled. He found himself teetering on the edge of a thirty-meter sheer drop. It was not deep enough for the fall to kill him outright, in Mars s shallow gravity, but with the impact he might sustain embarrassing damage to his mechanical frame.
"What the hell?"
Roger swung his arms sharply inward, toward the slope, and bent his knees. He collapsed in an awkward, loosely jointed judo roll into the hillside, clattering his elbows and shins against the wind-smoothed obsidian. But he kept himself from sliding off the edge.
His brain was attempting to reconstruct the malfunction's origins before he noticed a pair of slender, pale feet in open-toed sandals. The toenails were trimmed into perfect arcs and painted with pink gloss, Roger noted.
"Dorrie!" he gasped internally.
"Roger, there is a communication for you from Demeter Coghlan," the silvery voice informed him. "As she is now on your list of—"
"I know. What does she want at this ungodly hour?"
Before Dorrie could process an answer, her image faded. A new voice came through his head, followed by a construct at approximately the same locus in the volcanic rubble: the plump form of Demeter Coghlan.
"I couldn't sleep, Colonel. There's a technical question that's been bugging me, and I figured you were the one who could answer quickest."
"Is this on our retainer?" Torraway asked, remembering his bargain with this offworld person.
"Uh ... sure."
"So go ahead," he growled.
"Can you communicate through solid rock?"
He waited for her to amplify on that. Maybe she was having reception problems on her end. Maybe she was worried about the signal quality from his present position on a mountain of volcanic glass. But no, she just stood there, expecting an answer.