Chapter 18
Animals in a Trap
"Roger ..." The vision of Dorrie appeared before him, in shorts and halter, with her dark hair blowing long streamers against the prevailing direction of the ever-present wind. It was nighttime in the bowl of sand, but that made no difference to his first wife's image. She glowed with unseen sunlight, a little bubble of silver and gold that cloaked her torso and flowed like St. Elmo's fire out along the arm that she pointed toward the horizon.
"What do you want?" he asked tiredly. These visions of her had been coming more often lately. Originally devised by Alexander Bradley and Don Kayman, they were supposed to push buttons of recognition and desire that he no longer had. If Roger could reprogram her out of the backpack computer, he would. But Dome's face and voice were ingrained in his survival mechanisms at the deepest levels. He would probably make himself blind and deaf if he tried to eradicate her now.
"Go to Tharsis Montes," she ordered in that same sweet voice.
"Why?"
"Go to Tharsis Montes."
"I do need a reason, Dorrie. After all, you're not real."
"Go, Roger."
"Is something wrong with my—?"
"Run, Roger."
Before he could frame any more questions, his feet had stopped plodding across the uneven surface. They were poised for flight, his knees bent. What the hell was going on? He felt his body turning, aligning with an internal radio-imaging compass that had already picked out Tharsis Montes. It lay over the horizon, at the end of Dorries arm.
"Run, Roger!"
And before he could stop himself, his feet were churning, his legs scissoring, his body hurdling over the valley's scattered rocks, his toes touching the ground only at ten-meter intervals, and then leaving only the shallowest of pockmarks in the sand. His mechanical legs and body were moving of their own accord. Dorrie had vanished. And Roger Torraway, a mere wisp of program operating within a program, was suddenly very much alone.
Demeter ran through the tunnels of Tharsis Montes, knowing secretly that she had nowhere to go. If she went down, going deeper into the complex, then eventually she would come to dead ends and cul-de-sacs, dark places where she could be cornered, captured, and killed. While, if she went up, climbing toward the domes and airlocks on the surface, her only choices were to surrender or don a pressure suit and escape to the planet's surface outside. That would merely be a delaying tactic, she knew, circumscribed by the air supply in the suit's tanks. In the end, she would have to surrender or suffocate.
But as Demeter ran, these thoughts formed only a background patina, a web of possible futures, to a brain that coiled and snared itself on blossoming waves of understanding about the past. Demeter was reliving the last two years in a kaleidoscope of new interpretations.
Fiction: Demeter had decided to visit Mars for a change of scene, in order to recuperate from a bizarre accident in the beauty parlor.
Fact: It was never any kind of accident. The grid's nexus on Earth had arranged for those scissors to slip as surely—she understood it all now!—as the grid had jimmied those early computer projections calling for the Cyborg program that had created Roger Torraway.
And since her "accident," with the introduction of a bunch of neurochips and biologicals into her skull, how many of Demeter's personal decisions had been made for her? Certainly she had never in the past two years been conscious of a wee, small voice whispering "Eat your vegetables," "Study covert diplomacy," "Learn martial arts," and finally "Go to Mars." But that didn't mean a chip-sized artificial intelligence hadn't been monitoring her speech and visual inputs, hitting this neuron or that with near-random jolts of electricity, creating its own little compulsions.
The scenario suddenly explained why she so consistently used the hotel's terminal in interrogation mode—and why she so often fell asleep doing it. Of course, the machine could sieve her memories for anything she had seen and heard during the day; whatever the implanted intelligence hadn't understood, she herself would articulate for the grid's waiting ear.
Fiction: The Texahoma Martian Development Corporation, learning about her planned vacation, had recruited her for a little on-site survey work, a spy mission against the Nordi Zealanders, because she was Alvin Bertrand Coghlan s granddaughter and therefore politically reliable.
Fact: The North Zealanders weren't pursuing any development on Mars that couldn't be studied better from Earth. So why would the TMDC have paid to send her up here in the first place? Because a computer had told them the trip was necessary, of course. And after the name of Demeter Coghlan—whose brains were all nicely fixed up and ready to roll— popped out of the corporation's strategic projections, somebody had remembered that she was Alvin Ber-trand's nearest and dearest. That didn't hurt matters in the slightest, of course. And Demeter had always evaluated well in computerized aptitude tests, of course.
But then, since the North Zealanders weren't doing anything really worth observing up here, why had they sent an entire delegation to negotiate with a putative Martian government about it? The answer to that one was easy, too: Harry Orthis, the N-ZED chief counselor, had suffered a scuba-lung accident in order to have his own brains fixed. He was the grid's backup for Demeter. Sun II Suk, with his electronic hormone pump, was another standby in case she failed.
Failed at what, though?
Well, wasn't it obvious?
Fiction: Demeter had met Lole Mitsuno and Ellen Sorbel by accident, because they just happened to be friends of Jorys.
Fact: Jory was another of the grid's tools, under some kind of direct telepathic control. Anyone could figure that out, and apparently Ellen and Lole already had.
The computer network had been using Jory to get close to them because it suspected whatever they were doing in that secret room would harm the grid and its long-range plans. When Jory struck out—because the rebel group would naturally suspect a Creole and put buffers around him—the computers had created a totally plausible person to meet and fall in with the rebel leaders. She would be an Earth casual, a socially acceptable rich girl, a junior-grade spy who was already launched at a false target, the Valles development. Maybe, the grid must have thought, Ellen and Lole could be lulled into showing her what they were doing.
Demeter s proof for this scenario was in the way she had met Jory. She had asked for—or been under compulsion to seek?—a guide to the Valles Marineris workings, and the grid had sent her that particular Creole.
A second proof was the in the way the machines had covered for her at Wa Lixin s office, during her mandatory physical examination on arrival. The grid knew the rebels were already suspicious of anyone with biomechanical aids, so it had created a phony image of her head on the examining table.
Oh, it was so neat!
The deviousness of the plan took Demeters breath away. With two whole worlds, their entire human populations, and every voice-and-data channel to play with, the grid could write almost any script it wanted. It might have a hundred, a thousand, a million human puppets simultaneously in development, to fit every conceivable consequence of its past and future actions. The Earth nexus probably didn't actually monkey with the cyber in the Travis County Clerk's office that had matched her mother's genotype against her father's during the state-required blood tests, but it must certainly have picked up a few ideas from the exchange. Then the rest of Demeter s life could have easily been redirected through a sequence of file adjustments and crossed wires in various data transfers. Like that course in conversational Russian she took in the eighth grade, because of a computer glitch ...