we surround him and we're the only ones he'll talk to." She
smiled. "It's not a matriarchy. We're not mothers. We're the
police."
Lindsay looked out the window. A drip fell and rippled. It was
liquid ethane. Just beyond the insulated metaglass the sluggish
pond was at an instantly lethal 180 degrees below zero Celsius.
A man in that reddish pool would freeze in seconds into a
bloated mass of rock. The grayish stones of the shores, Lindsay
realized suddenly, were water ice.
Something was emerging onto the shoreline. In the dim bluish
light, the ethane's surface was pierced by what appeared to be a
rack of broken twigs. Even in the feeble gravity the creature's
movements were glacial. Lindsay pointed.
"A sea scorpion," Greta said. "Eurypteroid, to give it its for-
mal name. It's attacking that lump on the shoreline. That black
slime is vegetation." More of the predator slid with paralytic
slowness from the thin liquid. The twigs were now revealed as
interlocking basketlike foreclaws that meshed together like
saberteeth. "Its prey is gathering energy to leap. That will take a
while. By the standards of this ecosystem, this is a lightning
attack. Look at the size of its cephalothorax, Bela."
The sea scorpion had heaved its broad, platelike prosoma out
of the water; this crablike head-body was half a meter across.
Behind the lozenge-shaped compound eyes was the creature's
long, tapering abdomen, plated in overlapping horizontal ridges.
"It's three meters long," Greta said as a servo delivered the first
course. "Longer if you count the tailspike. A nice size for an invertebrate. Have some soup."
"I'm watching this." The extended claws were closing on the
prey with the slow deliberation of a hydraulic door. Suddenly
the prey-creature flopped wobblingly into the air and landed in
the pool with a splash.
"It jumps fast!" Lindsay said.
"There's only one speed for jumping." Greta Beatty smiled.
"That's physics. Eat something. Have a breadstick." Lindsay
could not tear his eyes from the eurypteroid, which lay with its
claw-teeth intermeshed, inert and apparently exhausted. "I pity
it," he said.
Greta was patient. "It came here as an egg, Bela. It didn't get
that large eating breadsticks. Carnassus takes good care of them.
He was the embassy's exobiologist."
Lindsay tried some soup with the sliding trap-bowl of his
low-gravity spoon. "You seem to share his expertise."
"Everyone in Dembowska takes an interest. in the
Extraterrarium. Local pride. Of course, the tourist trade isn't
what it was, since the Investor Peace collapsed. We make up for
it with refugees."
Lindsay stared moodily into the pool. The food was excellent,
but his appetite was off. The eurypteroid stirred feebly. He
thought of the sculpture the Investors had given him and wondered what its droppings looked like.
A burst of laughter came from Wells's table. "I want a word
with Wells," Lindsay said.
"Leave it to me," she said. "Wells has Shaper contacts. Word
might leak back to the Ring Council." She looked grave. "You
wouldn't want to risk your cover before it's well established."
"You don't trust Wells?"
She shrugged. "That's not your worry." A new course arrived,
borne by a squeaking, velcro-footed robot. "I love the antique
servos here, don't you?" She squirted heavy cream sauce over a
meat pastry and gave him the plate. "You're under stress, Bela.
You need food. Sleep. A sauna. The good things in life. You
look edgy. Relax."
"I live on the edge," Lindsay said.
"Not now. You live with me. Eat something so I'll know you
feel safe."
To please her, Lindsay bit reluctantly into the pastry. It was
delicious. Appetite flooded back into him. "I have things to do," he said, stifling the urge to wolf it down.
"Think you'll do them better without food and sleep?"
"I suppose you have a point." He looked up; she handed him
the sauce bulb. As he squeezed on more sauce she passed him a
slotted wineglass. "Try the local claret." He sampled it. It was as
good as vintage Synchronis, from the Rings. "Someone stole this
technology," he said.
"You aren't the first defector. Things are calmer here." She
pointed out the window. "Look at that xiphosuran." A lumpy
crab was sculling across the pool with intolerable sluggish calm.
"It has a lesson for you."
Lindsay stared quietly, thinking.
Greta's domicile was seven levels down. A silver-plated house-
hold servo took Lindsay's wardrobe bag. Greta's parlor had a
baroque furred couch with sliding stirrups and two anchored
chairs upholstered in burgundy velvet. An adhesive coffee table
held a flip-top inhaler case and a rack of cassettes.
The bathroom had a sauna compartment and a fold-out suction toilet with a heated elastic rim. The overhead light glowed
pink with infrared heat. Standing on the icy tiles, Lindsay
dropped his glove. It fell slowly, at a pronounced slant. The
room's verticals didn't match the local gravity. This keen touch
of avant-garde interior design filled Lindsay with sudden nausea.
He leaped up and clung to the ceiling, closing his eyes until the
dizziness passed.
Greta called through the door. "You want a sauna?"
"Anything to get warm."
"The controls are on the left."
Lindsay stripped, gasping as the freezing metal of his artificial
arm brushed his bare ribs. He held the arm well away as he
stepped into the blizzard of steam. In the low gravity the air was
thick with flying water. Coughing, he groped for the breathing
mask. It was pure oxygen; in moments he felt like a hero. He
twisted the controls recklessly, biting back a scream as he was
pelted with a sudden sandblast of powdered snow. He twisted
back and let himself cook in wet heat, then stepped out. The
sauna cycled through the boiling point, sterilizing itself.
He turbaned his damp hair, absently knotting the towel's ends
in a Goldreich-Tremaine flourish. He found pajamas his size in
the cabinet; royal blue with matching fur-lined mukluks.
Outside, Greta had changed from her fur jacket and tights into
a quilted nightrobe with a flaring collar. For the first time he
noticed her forearms, both heavily overlayed with Mechanist
implants. The right one held some kind of weapon: a series of
short parallel tubes mounted above the wrist. There was no sign
of a trigger; it probably worked by nerve interaction. From
inside the other sleeve he caught a red flicker of readouts from
a biomonitor.
Mechs cherished a fanatic interest in biofeedback. It was part
of most Mech programs for longevity. He hadn't thought of
Greta as a Mechanist. Despite himself, the sight shocked him.
"You're not sleepy?"
He yawned. "A little."
She raised her right arm above her head, absently. A remote
control unit leaped across the room into her hand, and she
turned on the videowall. It showed an overhead view of the
Extralerrarium, taken through one of the monitors in the
Carnassus Palace.
Lindsay joined her on the couch, tucking his mukluks into the
healed stirrups. "Not that," he said, shivering. She touched a
button; the videowall blurred and resolved into the Saturnian
surface, crawling in red and amber. Nostalgia flooded him. He
turned his face away.
She switched scenes. A craggy landscape appeared; enormous
pits next to a blasted, flaking area cut by two huge crevasses.
"This is erotica," she said. "Skin at twenty thousand times life