"Okay... which way?"
"Should be a terminal in the wall to your left."
Demeter looked, saw only a dozen meters of white tile. "Nothing there, Shoogs."
"Oh, sorry! Thought we were facing south. Your other left, then."
Coghlan turned around and found, about five meters down, a shelf with a keyboard and screen. The screen was blinking an empty moire pattern. "Got it."
Demeter went up to the public terminal and studied the layout. On the shelf to the right of the board was a trackball; to the left was a contact pad for taking and BlOSing neural patches; and below was a two-handed glovebox. Theoretically, she could control a limited virtual reality from this spot—if the cybers would let her. She stepped up to the shelf, evidently breaking a proximity line somewhere.
The screen changed to: please enter your full name or citizen code, and thumrprint in six different languages. The top line, she noted, was in Diplomatic English.
She typed in her name and laid her thumb on the pad.
"Welcome to Mars, Ms. Coghlan," the cyber said in colloquial Texahoman English—but pitched to the high squeak of a human voice on helium. Meanwhile the screen displayed tourist stills of the Martian landscape and tunnel habitat that vaguely matched the ensuing monologue. "Your visa is approved for a four-week residency. Accommodations for your use have been reserved at the Golden Lotus, Level Four, Tunnel Twenty-One, Bays Seven through Eighteen. Please regard this as your home away from ... Austin, Texas.
"An account with credit in the amount of forty thousand Neumarks has been established in your name with Marsbank Pty. Limited. Statements will be sent on a six-month delay at the then-current exchange rate to your home bank... the Double Eagle Bank N.A. of Austin.
"While your tourist visa includes no travel restrictions among Mars s various complexes, please be aware that many communities enforce multicultural sensitivity awareness. Also, you may not engage in any form of employment for either salary or wages, actual or deferred, while you are a registered guest of Mars.
"Mars quarantine laws require you submit to examination by a registered medical practitioner to ensure against the spread of communicable diseases. An appointment for this purpose has been made in your name with Dr. Wally Shin, Level Two, Tunnel Nine, Bay Six, at fourteen hundred hours today. Please be prompt and do limit your contact with others until after this examination.
"Thank you and have a good day," the voice concluded.
"Excuse me, but—"
The screen flashed its original message, in six languages.
Demeter checked her chrono. "Hey, Sugar! What's local time?"
"Thirteen hours, forty-seven minutes, Dem."
"Yikes. I'm going to be late to this Dr. Shin's!"
Coghlan gathered her two bags and headed down to the end of the corridor—the only end that seemed to make connection with the rest of the complex. She hoped to find, real soon, some tunnel numbers and maybe a static wall map with a big you-are-here sticker. Going back and asking directions of the computer grid sounded like a jackass idea, and Sugar's inertial compass was getting too easily turned around in this maze.
Demeter had made about seven left turns, all the time moving into wider and more crowded corridors as she went. Around her the air was filled with the treble whistlings of people in casual conversation.
Most of the tunnels in the Tharsis Montes complex were raw rock cut in smoothly arched tubes between tiny, hexagonal chambers. Side entrances from these little foyers led into the residential or commercial suites that made up the community. The rock surface, gray with red and sometimes black streaks, was sealed off inside with clear epoxy. The residents could never forget they were living underground—and under strange ground, too—instead of wandering through sterile internal corridors of white or beige tile.
As Demeter passed from one hexcube to the next, someone came up fast behind her and caught at her elbow.
"Excuse me, ma'am?"
She turned. A young man, curly brown hair and an Oriental cast to his eyes, was wearing a determined frown. He didn't let go of her elbow. She noticed he had a blue armband stamped with citizen's militia in white letters, both in English and in some kanji characters.
"Yes?" Despite the rough handling, she tried to keep her voice level in John Law's presence.
He leaned in close to her ear and took a hearty sniff of her trademark perfume, Odalisque.
"Like it?" Demeter asked as coldly as possible.
"I'm going to have to cite you for a scent violation, ma'am. Mars's privacy code is very strict when it comes to infringing the sensory space of other citizens." He handed her a pink card with exposed gold contact pins across one end.
"What do I do with this?"
"You redeem it for the amount of the fine within five days' time. Any local terminal will handle the transaction for you."
"And if I don't?"
"Then the card will emit an RF alert that locks you out of your place of residence, forfeits your transport rights, and forestalls any commercial transactions—such as food purchases—until you pay up."
"I see. And suppose I just throw the card away?"
"It's now keyed to your body temperature, ma'am.
The minute you discard it, the circuits will emit a siren that usually draws an immediate—and armed— response. . .. You'll notice the surface already has your fingerprints?"
Demeter looked at the citation more closely. Where her fingers had first touched it, her whorls were now outlined in purple and green. They didn't fade when she held the card by its edges.
"I suggest you pay the fine quickly," the militiaman said pleasantly. "Have a nice day . . . and, ma'am? Please wash off that stink as soon as you can."
Coghlan nodded blankly and hunted off down the corridor, clutching the card between the knuckles of the hand that held the shoulder straps from her bags. An arrow in the wall directed her to a broad ramp for Level 2. She walked down it, tripping occasionally in the weak gravity.
In a few more minutes Demeter found Tunnel 9 and Bay 6, but no Dr. Shin. There was a doctor's office on the right-hand side of the hexcube, but it belonged to a Dr. Wa. The scrolling light sign—in three languages, only one of which used the Roman alphabet—proclaimed: Dr. Wa Lixin, MD, PsyD, DDS ... Internist and General Practice for All Family Ailments ... Psychotherapy, Deep Regression, and Layered Syndrome Counseling ... Herbalist and Acupuncturist, Specializing in the Harmonious Wah. ...
Surely, that last word was a typo. "Way," Demeter corrected to herself.
Teeth Extracted While You Wait. The sign flickered and went through its loop again.
"And a humorist, too," Coghlan said. Well, if nothing else, this Dr. Wa could give her directions to the absent Dr. Shin. Probably a screwup in the physician's directory, or the Chamber of Commerce's referral service, or something.
Demeter pressed the button next to the door.
Dr. Wa Lixin was playing go against his desktop medical diagnostic computer—and winning. That bothered him because Dr. Lee, as everyone in the colony knew him, was simply a terrible strategist. So, when the grid let him win, he could only conclude it was buttering him up for something.
Everyone understood that the Autochthonous Grid—both the network here on Mars and the parent system back on Earth—was full of bugs and prone to error. Sometimes the cyber you were working on crashed its system through no traceable fault in the coding. Sometimes the system worked but your application crashed. Sometimes the application worked flawlessly but skewed your data with obvious—and unreproducible—results. Sometimes a Tenth Dan-level program dribbled away its stones in nonstrategic ataris and lost to a go-playing fool.