Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  She stopped feeling with her head. She just let her skin take over, let the muscles deep in her gut go to work with the thrust, thrust…thrust that became the geometric center of her universe. She rode wave after wave of the heat that flooded her. She closed her eyes and…absorbed.

  After a time she could not count, Jory’s hips stopped pumping. The arch of his pelvis stopped thudding into hers. His shoulders sagged, and the skin of his abdomen relaxed slickly against hers. He was not heavy at all, more like a child who had crept into her arms for a motherly cuddle.

  They hung like that, suspended from her shoulders and neck wedged up against the wall, supported by her hips where they jammed into the bed’s thin mattress. His breathing eased to a gentle, damp puff against her skin. After a few moments, he lifted his head and began to nuzzle her slackened breasts again.

  “Hey! No more,” she protested, but her voice came out a whisper.

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “Of course I did. But once is enough.”

  “Once is never enough,” he murmured. His lips began to snail-walk toward her right nipple.

  “I mean it.” She struggled up on one elbow, rolling him gently off on his side.

  Jory curled into a loose fetal position. His hand casually passed down between his legs and…Demeter stared. His glans and testicles had disappeared. His lower belly was as smooth as a girl’s. She could see daylight through his crotch. He had not simply pushed his male equipment back between his legs. It had completely disappeared.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?” He roused, seeming perplexed.

  “That thing with your cock and…”

  “Oh, that!” He laughed. “One of the advantages of being a Creole. We can put the jewels out of harm’s way.” He slid a finger down there, and she heard a sound like parting Velcro. A tip of pink skin peeked out of a slit that was placed far too low on his body for a fly. It looked disturbingly like a vagina’s lips.

  “Airtight seal, too,” he commented idly.

  Demeter fought off a wave of otherness that threatened to change him from a simple, carefree young male to something alien and lizardlike.

  “Why did you put a—a shirt, is it?—over the computer terminal?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t like anybody watching when I…do it. That kind of breaks the mood for me.”

  “Who would be watching?”

  “Well, the computer link was on, wasn’t it? It’s on all the time.”

  “So? Who would be watching?” he insisted.

  “The grid. The machines.”

  “Yeah, but nobody is watching. They’re computers, Demeter. Don’t you have them in Texas?”

  “Not in our bedrooms. And we can turn them off if we want.”

  Jory chuckled. “Maybe you think you turn them off…Anyway, they don’t care about things like that.”

  “How do you know they don’t?”

  “They don’t have any reason to. Why would they?”

  “I don’t know what reasons a computer might have. Neither do you,” she added.

  “All right,” he agreed. “So, next time, I’ll tell them to blank the optics in this room.”

  “You’re taking a lot for granted, aren’t you?” Demeter was thinking about his casual use of “next time,” but decided not to make an issue of it. After all, the sex really had been good. “I mean, you’re dealing with an intelligent system,” she pointed out.

  “That’s still to be proven.”

  “Okay then, a ‘self-programming system that exhibits a high degree of volition.’ Either way, could you trust it to do what you told it? And how could you prove it had obeyed you? I mean, it might just switch off the ready light and go on watching.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t know, I guess.” He had a thoughtful look, which seemed strange on him. “But, again, what difference does it make? The grid won’t go whispering to your friends about it. You’ll never know the difference.”

  “I’ll know.”

  He sighed. “You’re a complicated person, Demeter. More complicated than anybody else I know.”

  “We’re like that, we—” She paused. Coghlan had been about to say “we humans,” which would have been a direct insult. That sense of other overwhelmed her again. “—Earth people,” she finished lamely.

  “Must be your culture,” he said. “Older and more, um…devious.”

  Demeter let the word slide.

  “Say, that reminds me.” Jory brightened. “Do you want to go back to the Valles tomorrow? If so, we’d better get another reservation in. The men who were using those proxies will probably be wanting them again. They’re supposed to be traveling—I mean, in the flesh this time—but the grid shows them due back in Tharsis Montes tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Jory! I can’t! I’ve got a date—an appointment with your friend Lole. We’re going out to hunt some water…But who are they, these people?” Demeter asked casually. Beneath her surface composure, her senses were coming alert. She remembered those strange pebbles she had found in the Valles geologic formation when she first wired into the touring machine.

  “It’s a Mr. Suk, up here from United Korea. He took a proxy for himself and one for his servant, too…Very big of him.”

  Coghlan’s flesh went suddenly cold. She could feel little nervous bumps rise along the skin of her arms.

  “You mean ‘Sun,’” she corrected him without any particular emphasis. “The man’s name is Sun.”

  “Oh. You know him?”

  “No, no. But, like most New Asians, the Koreans put the family name first. That’s all.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jory said. “Kinda neat…Mister Sun. Lucky ol’ Sun.”

  In a moment, the boy was asleep.

  Chapter 6

  Shadows on the Horizon

  Airlock Control, Tharsis Montes, June 10

  Unlike the inflated plastic domes that Demeter Coghlan had walked through on her last visit to the colony’s surface structures, the lock complex was a solid building. It was erected out of composite panels that keyed into I-beam frames with lattice buttressing from the outside. The raised floor felt solid underfoot. The walls looked as if they would even stand up under a pressure loss.

  Demeter was not feeling particularly good about herself this morning. Her tryst with Jory the afternoon before—and she had not asked him to stay the night—had left a surprisingly sour taste in her mouth. Sure, she liked sex. It was one of the great pastimes, especially good for making new friends and influencing people. But not with children. Not even with muscular man-boys like the Creole. What the two of them had shared, struggled through…endured…had not been love. It was not even good, healthy sex. More like a fumbling rape that had gone uncontested.

  It was not clear to Demeter which of them was the rapist. The trouble with playing among the chronologically challenged, like Jory, was all that groping, grasping, hurry-hurry-or-I’ll-wet-my-pants stuff. Aside from being over too soon for Demeter’s taste, it lacked the necessary control and self-discipline that kept the…encounter from becoming demanding and potentially turning violent. Grasping could too easily become hitting if she didn’t rise fast enough.

  Demeter liked a firm hand with her sex—not a whip hand.

  Still, at the defining moment, she herself had been eager enough. Demeter supposed it was because both of them had been taking neural induction from that tunnel-boring machine. All those concrete sensations pouring into nervous systems that were not quite ready for them. The operators who guided those machines must be either eunuchs or brain cases. Or maybe both.

  The previous afternoon had left her physically and emotionally drained. So much so, that Demeter had fallen asleep in the middle of filing her evening report with the Texahoma Martian Development Corporation. Not that she had too much to report. She remembered discussing the expedition she would be taking this morning and her excitement about actually getting out on the surface. Not that she would learn much ab
out the Valles Marineris today…

  There was something else she was supposed to report, or had reported…or at least had thought might be important. Something about geology—or did she merely dream that? Oh, well…The key item was that today she would get some valuable local experience by going out in a walker with Lole Mitsuno.

  Coghlan looked around the airlock terminal. It reminded her of the elevator lobby of a Dallas mega-highrise. A long, open corridor slanted up from the underground complex and ended in this six-sided bay with a sealed door in each wall. They were very impressive doors, each operated by either servomotor or handcrank, with a readout panel to the right having both needle gauges and a digital display. There was a painted, red-bordered sign in seven languages across each set of paired panels. In the floor before the threshold was a steel trip plate. Each door was numbered, beginning clockwise from the left-hand side of the entry ramp. The lighting there in the lobby was day-bright, even though the tubes were baffled and recessed. Somebody was trying to prepare tunnel-sensitized eyes for the glare of sunlight on sand.

  People came and went while she waited for Mitsuno. Whenever one of the doors opened, Demeter tried to peek past it into whatever lay beyond. Trouble was, that involved staring directly at whoever was coming out, which was the worst possible manners. Instead, she watched the backs of the people going in, and that gave her mixed clues. Sometimes the space on the other side of the door was a simple lock, no bigger than a commercial elevator, fitted with pressure suits and survival gear. But once or twice Demeter glimpsed whole rooms that were furnished with chairs upholstered in luxurious fabrics and the glow of electronics with LEDs and colorfully patterned screens.

  She wondered about those pressure suits. Demeter had never worn one, although she’d traveled almost 280 million kilometers through interplanetary vacuum to breathe Mars’s particular species of canned air. So she had questions. For instance, could she wear the suit over her own street—or tunnel—clothes? Demeter fingered the lapel of her jumper. If not, would she have to strip down in Mitsuno’s presence? And if so, how far would she have to go? To the skin? Or was underwear allowed?…What was the etiquette of nudity in a strange society?

  In the groups of strange faces coming and going on the ramp from the lower levels, she suddenly glimpsed the hydrologist. The outline of his golden hair, rugged jawline, and squinting eyes rode above the foreshortened tangle of heads as he strode up the corridor. Suddenly Lole was standing beside Demeter and she had to crook her neck to look up at him.

  “Just how tall are you?”

  “Two hundred ten cents,” he answered. “About…eighty-three inches. Is ‘inches’ the correct unit for cowboy talk?”

  “Feet,” Demeter supplied. “You stand six foot ten, pardner.”

  “Ah, so many foot.”

  Demeter shook her head. “You must have had skyscrapers for parents.”

  “Sky—? Oh, buildings. No, I’m just first generation. My parents were both émigrés, no taller than you,” he said appraisingly. Demeter stood five-nine in her stockings and, as a teenager, had been considered gawky. “It’s the lower gravity, you see,” he explained. “We Mars-born just shoot up, or so my mother always said.”

  “Then what happened to Jory?” Demeter burst out. It was an unfortunate personal remark, and she hoped Mitsuno wouldn’t take offense for his friend.

  “Jory is Creole. He was Mars-born, too, and of course fully human. But soon after puberty they did things to his body. Some you can see, like the impermeable skin. A lot you can’t, like his entire endocrine system.”

  “Oh, right.” She hurried to change the subject: “Where are we going today?”

  “Headed for a place called Harmonia Mundi, Mars Survey Reference CQ-6981. Wyatt’s reserved a medium-sized walker for us. Door number five.”

  Mitsuno led her over to the airlock as he talked, where Demeter read the digital display: RESERVED T.M. RESOURCES DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL BUSINESS. Her guide spoke into the recessed mike: “Okay, Wyatt. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  “May I have your thumbprint, please?” the panel replied coolly. A small square lit up white.

  “Voiceprint me and open.”

  Without further comment, the door’s servo-operated dogs unsealed themselves and the panel split and slid apart.

  Beyond it was one of the elevator-sized varieties of interior space. When Mitsuno stepped aside for her, Demeter walked in and reached for the neck ring of the first pressure suit that came to hand.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Isn’t this an airlock? Don’t we have to get dre—?”

  Mitsuno keyed a wallpad, and an internal door folded back. Demeter was looking into a truck cockpit, but one finished in steel and plastic instead of nice fabrics and simulated woods. Closest to the door was a utility space with facing benches and a pull-down table. Farther along was a driver’s console with a minimum of instrumentation. Windows on either side and across the front showed red desert with various of the complex’s buildings in the foreground.

  “We’ll use suits when we get to the worksite,” he explained. “Until then, we travel in style.”

  Mitsuno secured the door behind them, waved her to a seat on one of the benches, and sat down at the console. He studied the board for a second, hit three keys, then swiveled around, away from the windshield.

  “What do you think of Mars so far?” he asked casually.

  “Big on the outside, small on the inside,” she replied, thinking of lives that seemed to be lived mostly underground.

  “Yeah, people up here go in for virtual simulations. Gives our brains room to breathe, anyway.”

  Demeter noticed that scenery was passing the window ahead of the driver’s console without him paying the slightest attention. “Shouldn’t you look where you’re driving?” She gestured toward the front—bow? nose?—of the vehicle.

  “No need. Wyatt knows the coordinates of the Mundi reserve better than I do, and this car’s pattern buffers do a better job of keeping out of collisions than either of us.”

  The ground out in front did look hilly, with tall projections of gray rock that floated on past the side ports. Demeter craned her neck forward: the machine was following no road she could see. She sat back and sensed the ride with her butt. It felt like pneumatic tires on laser-aligned ferrocrete. Better even. Although the terrain outside was definitely shaping up into foothills, the vehicle’s floor remained dead level.

  “This buggy sure rolls along smoothly.”

  “Inertial compensators,” Mitsuno replied, “built into the leg circuitry. From the outside, this thing moves like a spider doing ballet.”

  “You’ve actually seen a spider?” Demeter wondered. “I mean, they somehow got past your quarantine rules?”

  “No, we raise ’em. It’s the only way to keep down the flies.”

  The floor took a reeling step—a sudden lurch forward and a long circle back, like a camel with the staggers.

  “Whoops!” Mitsuno grinned. “Spoke too soon. Wyatt, what the hell was that?”

  “Sorry, Lole.” The machine voice didn’t sound at all contrite. “That was a chuckhole.”

  “Don’t tell me you have gophers here on Mars!” Demeter broke in.

  “No, Miz Coghlan-Demeter-Cerise,” Wyatt replied with her full name. “‘Chuckhole’ is a colloquial human reference. The correct term is ‘nonventing paleogeological fumarole.’”

  “Chuckhole will do,” she said evenly. There it was again: geology…something to do with…whatever.

  “Next time we’ll take a blimp,” Mitsuno grumbled.

  “Department funding does not permit excursions by lighter-than-air transportation over distances less than four thousand klicks,” the computer node said primly.

  “I’m kidding, Wyatt.”

  Silence. Demeter fancied the machine was sulking.

  “What do you do when you’re at home?” Lole asked after they had gone a few more kilometers.
r />   “I was a student, studying for foreign service.”

  “Is that some kind of military outfit?”

  “Oh, not at all! We help to maintain peaceful relations all across the planet. You see,” she explained, “Earth has so many nations and regional trading alliances and ecological defense blocs and economic shield treaties that maintaining the world’s diplomatic balance is a full-time business. Foreign service is a good career, too. If I complete my coursework, and with the pull my grandfather can generate, I’ll have my pick of an embassy or consulate job in just about any country Texahoma exchanges relations with.”

  “If you complete your courses.” Mitsuno accurately picked up her inflection. “Why did you stop?”

  “I…Well, I had an accident.”

  “Oh. And where would you like to be assigned?” He politely declined to follow up on her personal difficulties.

  “Haven’t decided yet. I might like to get away from all these machines for a while. That would mean taking a post in some society that’s gone Professed Primitive—like Seychelles, Montana, or the Republic of Hawaii—but sometimes the Pee-Pees can be a little too orthodox about their stature. As an alternative, I might just go to some developmentally challenged state like Dakota or del Fuego. Life there can be pretty desperate, of course, but I’d draw diplomatic privileges such as immunity and escort service. I’d also get to buy in special stores, go to the head of any queues, and park in reserved spaces.”

  “Park?” the Martian asked.

  “Uh…temporarily store my car?”

  “Ah! I’ve heard about cars. Do you actually own one?”

  “G’dad does—he’s my grandfather. And when I make ambassador rank, I’ll be entitled to one, too.”

  “You could come to Mars,” Lole offered. “We’re about as foreign as you can get. And not nearly so primitive. Or desperate.”

  “You’re a little too foreign. None of the Mars colonies has established diplomatic relations with Earth yet. In fact, your governments—or what I can see of them, at least—actively resent intrusions from the mother planet.”