"But I thought Mars would be a bit less... supervised."
"If you're looking for wide-open spaces, Miss Coghlan, go on to Europa. They're still chipping out the first public dome up there. But here on Mars we've got hot water already, plus a five-star hotel, a sushi bar— though I'd stay away from the fungus under glass—and a whole library of virtual-interactive entertainments. We even, sometimes, have the rule of law."
"I get you," she said with an answering grin. "I just thought maybe I'd for once gotten away from the more oppressive aspects of society."
"Not likely. Not with three thousand people crammed into less than twenty thousand cubic meters of holding pressure. That's only in Tharsis Montes, of course. Some of the outlying tunnel complexes are even more crowded.... So, are you here on business?"
"No, just playing the tourist."
"This is a long way to come for a vacation."
"It was an early graduation present from my grandfather."
"I see. Well, hop up on the table." Dr. Lee tapped the lightly padded surface.
The woman hesitated again. "Do you want me to take my clothes off?"
"My, you really do think we hunt buffaloes out here. No, just lie back and center your head, hands, and feet along the yellow lines." Dr. Lee helped adjust her arms. "This will only take a minute or two."
As she sank into the tables depressions, he reached into the lower cabinet and took out the transdermal air gun. He chafed her right forearm and then shot her with a full spectrum of telemites. While the diagnostic terminal probed her bones and soft tissues with ultrasonics, the beads would spread out in her bloodstream to examine her body chemistry, inventory her antibodies, and report on a dozen other organic functions. Each bead contained an array of technologies for medical analysis: gas chromatography and barometry, carbohydrate reagency, ion streaming, DNA combing—along with the telemetry to broadcast their findings back to the tables receptors. Each of these nanomachines was inscribed on a friable silicon wafer held together by a soluble substrate. Twenty-four hours after Dr. Lee had finished examining Miss Coghlan, her kidneys would sweep up and dispose of the shards of his most sophisticated diagnostic equipment, which he bought by the thousand from an off-planet catalog service.
"Ow!" she said, rubbing her arm.
"Too late." He grinned. "Now, just lie still for one more minute." He studied the terminal's screen as it built up the template display of a small female skeleton in three-dimensional outlines, coded beige. The bones enclosed various pulsing, squirming sacks—her organs and connective tissues—that were shown in standardized colors, mostly in the pastel range. The small gold ring on her third finger right hand, the silver bracelet with the communications charm on her left wrist, the metal snaps down the front of her garment— all came up as hard, white gleams on the screen, as would any other foreign objects or prostheses about or within her person.
"I don't see why you-all have to put me through this," Coghlan declared, her jaw and throat muscles blurring oil the screen as she spoke.
"You must hold still," he chided. Then Dr. Lee quickly brought his cursors up to the routine query points.
"But I've been in the equivalent of quarantine on that transport ship, for months and months," she said. "Surely any bug in my body would have died out by now."
"Of course," Wa Lixin agreed. "Still, we don't know what you might have picked up from the crew or other passengers, do we? Martian society cannot regulate interplanetary travel, you see, but we can prescribe for the citizens and casuals who actually touch down on our planet. So it's the law that everyone coming under our pressure be surveyed for communicable diseases, as well as for preexisting conditions that could create a liability situation." "Oh."
"Now, don't move!"
He rushed to complete the examination, taking the telemetered data and making his reference comparisons.
"You're clear," he said finally. "No abnormalities whatsoever. And quite healthy." Perhaps a little too healthy, considering the way she was stretching that jumpsuit.
"Hows that?" the woman asked, turning her head quickly, so that the upper part of the screen blurred again. "You got no traces of my accident?"
"Umm." It was Dr. Lee's turn to hesitate. "What exactly should I be looking for?"
"Well, 'head trauma' is the term they used back in Austin. You see, about a year ago I was having my hair done in an autocoif—that's an automated shampoo-curl-and-cut contraption?" she explained when he gave her a blank look. "Anyway, the machine kind of seized up. Seems the solenoids all burned out along one side of the helmet, or so the techs said later. It drove the point of the scissors right through the side of my head. Did it with such force that—"
Wa Lixin put up a restraining hand and stared hard at the scan on his screen. He zoomed and rotated the image to the approximate site of the injury she described. As he did so, curls and ridges of scar tissue—bone that had healed from an indented star fracture—built up around the outside of her skull. A smooth plastic insert gleamed whitely in the triangular hole that pierced her parietal plate just above the lower suture. The distorted tissue completed forming as he watched.
"Must be a lag in the processing," Dr. Lee murmured to himself. "All right, Miss Coghlan, I can see it now. Um ... do you have any recurring symptoms?"
"No, nothing serious. Just sometimes, off and on, I have trouble concentrating."
"Enough to bother you?"
"I cope," his patient said bravely—perhaps even defiantly. "Look, this has all been fun, but can I go now?"
"By all means. And welcome to Mars."
The woman nodded curtly, slid off the table, and moved quickly out into the waiting room. She gathered up her bags and approached the outer door, which opened for her automatically. Only then did she half-turn and give him a wave of farewell before stepping into the corridor. Then she was gone.
Dr. Lee tapped keys that stored her somatic image and biomedical history in the grids archives. That done, he settled in for another quick go game, before his next patient arrived.
Chapter 2
We ll All Go Out to Meet Her When She Comes
Demeter Coghlan's accommodations at the Golden Lotus were best described as a closet within a closet. Once she had dropped her bags on the floor she found herself walking in half-circles to keep from stepping on them. The bed swung down sideways on straps, just like in a Houston Judiciary Department detention cell—except the straps were clean and not too frayed. The screen and keyboard of the room's terminal wedged into a recess in the native rock, which had been dusted with gold flecks to make it look like the Mother Lode back on Earth. The communal bathroom was down the hall and metered.
But the room was a place to cache her change of clothing unwrinkled. It also gave her a sense, at least, of privacy.
Coghlan eyed the terminal. If she pulled down the bed, after hanging up her clothes, she could sit almost facing the screen. She tapped a key and waited for the screen to come up. It printed: how may i help you, ms. Coghlan? do you take vio? she entered, two-fingered.
"Yes, this terminal is so equipped," a neutral male voice, still three octaves too high, answered from a speaker somewhere in the rig.
"I could have told you that," Sugar piped up. "Just ask, Dem."
"Thanks, but I'll handle this," Demeter told her. "Um, Grid... How do I get out to Valles Marineris?"
"The Canyonlands Development Limited Pty. of North Zealand has this area currently under development for a residential and food-processing complex expected to accommodate fifteen hundred people in the first phase," the terminal replied, sounding like a canned spiel. "Named for the nineteen-hundred-kilometer-long gorge system and its many tributaries, which were apparently shaped by streamflows at an unknown previous time when Mars is presumed to have possessed quantities of free-flowing surface water, this district includes some of the lowest elevations yet charted in the planet's surface."