"I... I can't wear that stuff," he said lamely. "The pickups don't match any of my... systems."
"Well, fly on in here anyway," she insisted. "If the grid means you to join the party, it'll beam you a presentation or something."
Torraway nodded once and pushed off. As he drifted up to the room's focal point, he cupped his good wing and made a sporadic flutter with the bad one to brake himself.
Demeter had already pressed the numbered sticky pads against her right temple, throat, left armpit, solar plexus, and groin—opening her jumper to make the last three connections. She shed her walking boots and tugged on the tight feedback footwear. She pulled her long braid of hair to one side and slid the full-face helmet over her head, then slipped on the wired gloves.
There was a flash of static as the program began, and Demeter found herself floating in a gray, spherical room with a ring of twelve lights orbiting her at elbow level.
Lole Mitsuno and Roger Torraway had disappeared.
Lole Mitsuno was walking on the surface of Mars in his shirtsleeves. The toes of his corridor slippers kicked up dust that drifted in the same familiar, lacy blooms as when he tramped along in sealed boots. The same steady winds pushed against his legs and torso, but now they were flapping his loose-weave slacks instead of dimpling the heavy fabric of a pressure suit. The air in his nose was sharp and cold, but still breathable.
He hop-stepped over the black rocks scattered across lemon-colored sand. Lole was sure he had visited this place recently. It was . . . Harmonia Mundi, where he had last seen Roger Torraway. The last time outside, that is.
After a thousand meters of this broken-field walking Mitsuno came upon an anomaly: a patch of sand perhaps ten meters square that had been cleared of rocks and raked smooth. A circle two meters in diameter had been scratched in this surface.
A boy of about eleven years squatted outside the circle. He was completely naked, with a thatch of straight black hair that came down into his almond-shaped eyes. Mitsuno guessed he was of Eurasian extraction.
The skin was pale, though. When he glanced up at Lole, the boy's canine teeth showed in a familiar grin. This boy was ... Jory den Ostreicher, as he once was. Before the surgeries that made him Creole, that is.
After the briefest glance of recognition, Jory returned his attention to the game he was playing. His right hand balled into a fist, with the thumb tucked under the index finger. Something glowed inside that fist. He flicked his thumb, and a bright bead, a comet—no, a tiny sun— streaked forward into the circle.
Lole followed its path with his eyes, and for the first time Mitsuno noticed that the circle enclosed other suns, which orbited lazily in a whirlpool pattern. Jory's white dwarf collided with one of them, splashing a rainbow from its corona and drawing out a flare of burning hydrogen. The newcomer upset the established pattern, perturbing the orbit of two nearby red giants and spinning a white dwarf out of the cluster, across the line in the sand.
The boy hopped up and skipped to the other side of the circle. He gathered up the errant dwarf and put it in a bag that suddenly was sitting beside him on the sand. The brown leather of its outer surface bulged and seethed faintly. Mitsuno imagined other tiny suns in there, squirming with the increased pressure and gravity.
Jory looked up at Lole again. That toothful grin was back. "Wanna play?"
Lole smiled. "I didn't bring any... marbles."
"S'okay, you can use some of mine." The boy hefted the bag. "We'll just play for funsies."
Roger Torraway was walking down the center of the street in a pleasant suburban neighborhood. On either side were broad green lawns that came down to the poured- cement curbs. Driveways two cars wide, of sealed blacktop bordered with low hedges, divided the lawns. White frame houses with either green or blue trim, including shutters that were too narrow to cover their windows and anyway were nailed onto the clapboards, presided over these quarter-acre domains. Most of the houses were ranch style, but here and there was a two-story Dutch colonial looking vaguely out of place on the remodeled prairie. The sun was out, much brighter and stronger here than it was on Mars. Its rays felt strong and nourishing on Roger's solar wings. It felt good.
This street was certainly familiar, although the last time he'd seen it was in the winter, near midnight. It was . . . Tonka, in the residential development where he and Dorrie had lived. The house on the right was his. Had been his, that is.
He walked the ten meters up the flagstone path from the driveway to the front entrance. The white-painted oak door, with six recessed panels and a gleaming brass pull and latch, stood ajar. He pushed on it with a black-skinned hand.
"Hi, honey!" The female voice was light and familiar but stretching to call over some distance. "I'm in the game room."
That was an anomaly, because Torraway couldn't remember the Tonka house having a "game room." A den, yes, where Roger did his reading, kept his checkbook, and wrote his infrequent correspondence. But nothing like a game room. Knowing that he was in some kind of waking dream, he walked left down the hall in any case, toward the den.
The room was dark, with the curtains drawn. The desk, easy chair, and end table with the ceramic lamp had all been cleared out. In their place was a pool table, and all the light came from two hanging lamps with opaque, conical shades. Their white light reflected greenly off the tables felt surface.
Dorrie was at the table, her back to him, a cue stick in her hand. That was odd because, to his knowledge, she had never played pool and detested all stuffy indoor games on general principles. She was a volleyball-at-the-lake sort of person. Especially if she could dance around and show off her new bikini.
She turned and smiled at him. It wasn't Dorrie, after all. The face and figure were hers, but the muddy blond hair and lively brown eyes identified her as Sulie Carpenter, Roger's second wife. She was someone whom the backpack computer and its allied systems had never, ever imaged for Torraway. He would not allow it.
Roger suddenly felt himself get angry.
"Hold that thought, dear," Sulie said. "I've got to make this shot."
She turned and bent over the table, stretching the fabric of her French-cut jeans in interesting ways. The red silk shirt that she'd tied calypso-fashion under her breasts rode up in back, exposing a palm's width of white skin and several knobs of her spine. The fingers of her left hand made a spider-shape on the green felt. She cocked her right elbow in pulling back on the cue.
Despite himself, Roger leaned to one side, looking past her to watch what she was doing. The table that he'd thought was for pool had straight sides and square corners, with no pockets. Instead of fifteen solid and multi-colored balls, there were only three: one white and two red. They spun strangely, of their own accord, before she had even hit the white one. The red balls turned either one-half or two full turns for every rotation of the white ball.
He recognized the game now—billiards. The object was to hit the white cue ball so that it made contact with each of the red ones. Or, failing that, to leave all three in a pattern from which your opponent could not complete such a shot. Sulie would have trouble with the uneven English on the variously spinning balls.
She thrust expertly with the stick, hitting the cue ball a glancing blow that sent it skittering sideways. It rebounded off one red, then the other, altering the spin on each but always maintaining the parity of one-half, one, and two.
Sulie straightened up and smiled at him. "Sometimes its really hard, you know?"
Demeter Coghlan was walking up a narrow trail through the mesquite brush. The sun was hot on her back, and faint wind stirred the small, loose hairs around her ears. The sweatband of her old felt hat was getting soggy. A trickle of moisture ran down the back of her neck and under the collar of her red flannel shirt. It was a summers day and high noon, a bad time to be out and about. Something caught her attention in the middle distance: a hawk skimming the ridge, riding the heat shimmers with its primary feathers splayed like long fingers. For an instant, she thought it was a buzzard, looking for something dead and bloated.