Mars Plus by Frederik Pohl Thomas T. Thomas

Author:Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

A Visit with the Elders

Golden Lotus, June 15

The new day brought Demeter Coghlan out of bed with a much better mental attitude. With luck, this was going to be her last day on Mars. Or, anyway, the last before she got a positive commitment to bring her home, which was almost as good.

That being the case, she wanted one final stab at reconnoitering the Valles Marineris District, pulling out all the stops and giving it her very best effort. To do this, Demeter decided, she had to overcome a load of cultural taboos and talk directly to Roger Torraway, Mars’s unofficial first citizen and Guinness Guide title-holder as eldest Cyborg. He ought to know something about the Valles, if anyone did.

Demeter walked into the hotel’s simulation parlor, plugged herself into the nearest booth, and called up the resident menu. There was no entry for people, even famous ones, just the usual packaged tours.

“Terminal…”

“Yes, Miz Coghlan?”

“Patch me through to Roger Torraway.”

“Colonel Torraway is not a token holder on this network.”

“Huh? I thought all Cyborgs were hard-wired into the grid.”

“That is true: packet radio communications are not optional for recent human-Cyborg conversions. However, Colonel Torraway’s processors precede the fabrication of this nexus.”

“All right, then,” Demeter said reasonably. “Find out his present location, and slot me into the nearest proxy.”

“There are no tourist proxies within one hundred kilometers of Colonel Torraway’s present location.”

“Then I’ll take a working machine and pay the surcharge.”

“There are no proxies of any kind within that radius.”

“Well, hell, then I’ll walk. Put me inside the nearest device at any distance. Supply it with a detailed map and a good-guess ETA.”

“Colonel Torraway will not allow an uninvited mechanism to approach him. This is his expressed desire, and his speed over the ground permits him to enforce the prohibition by running away.”

“Damn, damn, damn it,” Demeter said without particular emphasis. “Put an emergency override on his comm system,” she directed.

“That is not the routine procedure. Does your situation constitute an emergency?”

“Mephisto…I order you to connect me with Colonel Roger Torraway’s communications module.”

“Coming right up, Miz Coghlan.”

Heliopolis Basin, June 15

Roger Torraway and Fetya Mikhailovna Shtev were kneeling side by side, staring down a gopher hole. It was an unusual formation in the desert’s reddish laterite soil: an oval depression with no visible bottom. Its origin might almost be volcanic, except that the Heliopolis Basin was more than a thousand kilometers from any recently active lava fields.

The sides of the tube or passageway were smooth and compacted, just the sort of finish a burrowing animal would leave in moist, slightly clayey dirt along an Earthly riverbank. Except, of course, that the Martian soil was bone dry. And it had never, to Roger’s knowledge, seen an animal so big, burrowing or otherwise. Viruses by the handful, and now and then a microbe, but nothing as large as an ant, let alone a gopher.

“Is mystery, yes?” Shtev said.

“Could be the wind,” he proposed.

“Just here? So deep?” The Russian raised her head to scan the shattered landscape.

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