Demeter now had little to do but watch the crater rise out of the Martian plain, coming up like an ancient puckered mouth to kiss the descending pod. She had the vehicle practically to herself, having boarded it between the rush of docking transports. Aside from several containers marked fragile, which could not withstand the forced drop of a freight pod, there were only two other passengers.
One was a dark-skinned gentleman in a sea-green turban and knotted beard who spoke no English, strapped himself tightly into one of the contour seats against the suspension of microgravity, and haughtily immersed himself in the shimmering holos of a news-board. Occasionally he grimaced and grunted over the stories. Looking across the pod and reading in reverse through the projected page, Demeter could make out the masthead as The New Delhi Deliverancer, with an angry lion worked into the Old English lettering. All the rest was in some cursive script she thought might be Hindi.
The other passenger was a woman, fair-skinned with streaky blond hair, who wore a slinky metallic sarong that reminded Demeter of the South Seas. It had an embroidered slit up the right side that bared one pale and pimply hip; the loose fabric fluttered in the weightlessness and drafts from the cabin's ventilation system. The woman's only ornaments were a round, garnet-colored scar above her sparse brows and a large blue tear tattooed at the outside corner of each eve.
Early on, Demeter had tried to engage her in conversation, but none of the languages Coghlan had practiced at school—Diplomatic English, Universalniy Russkovo, Mex-Tecan Spanish, or Classical Arabic— seemed to work. The blonde just shrugged and smiled a lot, in between tucking her sarong tighter around her knees against the Sikh's covert glances.
Demeter kept on her solitary sightseeing with the crater growing larger below her all the time. Just when it seemed about to swallow the pod whole, the rim's outside edge shot up past the viewport. Coghlan was left staring at a long slope of weathered, gray rocks.
A few seconds later the floor began rising under her. First her toes, then her knees dropped to the carpeted surface, then her outstretched hand settled in among the seat cushions. After months of free-floating ease, she suddenly had to support her own weight against gravity. The pressure grew heavier as the pod's descent slowed—although even Demeter knew without Sugar's telling her that the surface gravity would never reach much more than a third of Earth normal.
With a bump that threw her down on one elbow, the pod touched down on Mars.
The window showed a curved face of machine-smoothed rock, illuminated by work lights set at odd angles. Immediately she heard and felt the click! and clatter! of grapples locking onto and stabilizing the pod, of power leads connecting to its batteries, and the airlock mating with its exit port. After a few seconds, the door slid upward. Demeter s ears popped with the difference in pressure, the tunnel complex being maintained at a slightly lower ambient.
Coghlan glanced at her two fellow passengers, but they were busy gathering themselves for departure. She straightened her one-piece, wine-colored jumper, draped her nysilk scarf artfully over her shoulders, and plucked her two pieces of luggage from under the restraining straps—noting how light the bulky, soft-plastic carryalls felt in point-three-eight gee—and marched out ahead of them.
In the narrow, steel-paneled passageway outside there was no one to meet or direct her. Officially, Demeter was on vacation. Grandaddy Coghlan had thought she needed something new and exciting— certainly not more course work in dry subjects like Practical Negotiation, Boolean Economics, or Cultural Apperception and Assimilation—not after she had just finished nine months of physical and psychological therapy, learning to use her brand-new, vat-grown, rebuilt brains. "Go to Mars, why don't you?" he had urged. "See the frontier, ride a proxy, shoot a wild thorax or whatever." G'dad Coghlan could easily arrange the transit fees and residence permits, too, being Vice President of the Sovereign State of Texahoma. And so Demeter had done just that, taken a vacation ... with a few strings attached.
It was because of those strings that she expected someone to meet her discreetly at the fountain stop and at least carry her bags.
Down at the far end of the corridor—where it teed into a wider tunnel, this one faced with white tiles— she saw someone moving away.
"Hey there! Y'all got any—"
She came up short and dropped her luggage. Her voice, even to her own ears as modulated by masses of throat muscle and cubic centimeters of sinus cavity, had come out high and squeaky. Something like "Hee thir! Y'eel get eeeny—" Minnie Mouse skyrocketing on amphetamines.
Demeter grabbed her left wrist and ducked her head to put the titanium bangle close to her lips. "Sugar! What's happening to me?" she husked—and it still sounded like a screech. "I'm hyperventilating or something—"
"Wait one," the cyber said impassively. "Pulse normal, considering your elevated stress level. Respiration normal, ditto. Blood sugar and electrolytes all check out. O-two content is slightly high, though. Why do you think you're in trouble, Dem?"
"Listen to my voice!" Coghlan squealed.
"Wait one. . . . The Mars grid informs me that the inhabited tunnels are normally pressurized with twenty percent diatomic oxygen, seventy-nine percent diatomic helium, and traces of carbon dioxide, water vapor, hydrogen sulfide, formaldehyde, and other organic compounds residual to human respiration and industrial pollution."
"Why the high content of helium?" Demeter asked, curious.
"This inert gas replaces the proportion represented by nitrogen in Earths atmosphere. Nitrogen is only marginally present on Mars, either in the atmosphere—two-point-seven percent—or bound up in the lithosphere. All recovered amounts are required to be introduced into the soil for improved crop yields. Consequently, the colonists supplement their habitat pressure with helium, which they draw off as a by-product of methane collection from deep wells. . . . I have four-point-two megabytes of supplementary data on the planets gas industry and eight gigabytes of introductory material on tunnel ecology and the algorithms governing environmental balance. Do you want to hear them?"
"Some other time."
"Never no mind, Dem."
Demeter Coghlan drew a deep breath, calmed down, and decided that the air tasted like any of the canned stuff she'd been inhaling since she got up to low Earth orbit. It would pass for breathable, but it sure wasn't a Texas alfalfa field on a June morning.
By now the man at the end of the corridor was long gone. Demeter was vaguely aware that sometime during Sugar's dissertation on atmosphere composition the Sikh and the South Seas girl had pushed past her. She would have to hurry and get herself processed before the next wave of tourists arrived down the fountain.
At the tee junction she found another Martian, several of them in fact, all striding purposefully about their business.
"Excuse me," she wheezed. "Where do I check in?" ... Cheek een?
One of them turned and pointed to a sign. "Anywhere," the man whistled. Eeneeiveer....
The sign said: arriving casuals (non-resident aliens) please announce yourself to the grid for further instructions.
Demeter raised the silvery patinaed bead to her lips again. "Sugar, get me in touch with the local grid, will you? It seems I need to clear my passport or something."
"Sorry, Dem, no can do," the chrono replied after a milliseconds hesitation. "The grid wants you on one of its wired-in terminals. Something about giving them a thumbprint."