Hide and seek (2 page)

Take the case in his wait file right now, a three-way marriage between a geologist and two hydrologists: they were breaking up because the geologist’s hitch with the Terraforming Project was over, her contract hadn’t been renewed, and she wanted to ship for Earth taking their daughter with her. . . . She’d borne the child, who was the product of gamete fusion between her and the other woman; the husband and legal “father” had contributed nothing genetically, but he was siding with his hydrologist colleague in the custody fight–they both had two years to run on their work contracts. Chin wished they could all go back to Strasbourg where they came from and fight it out there.

But contracts were involved, so he had to make an administrative ruling before the case could go up to the civil court on Mars Station. Meanwhile four unhappy people were spending another night together in the green-glass maze of Labyrinth City. He hoped they’d all get out of it alive. Right now there were more pressing things on his mind.

The tall blonde who was glaring at him across his desk wasn’t making any of it easier. She had the thin, tough build of a Martian long timer and a net of fine lines around her eyes that indicated she spent a lot of time squinting into the distance. She was wearing the standard brown polycanvas pressure suit, its helmet slung casually from her belt. “You can’t put me off tonight, Dare,” she was saying, at a volume just short of a yell.

“
Any
night but tonight.” He and Lydia Zeromski had been lovers for most of the last three years; that, in his experience, was about as long as a woman’s patience lasted.

 

“Tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow I’m starting a run. Do I head for your place when I get back? Or do I write you off before I leave?”

He stood up and moved toward her, his hands opening in supplication. “Lydia, nothing has changed between us. But don’t try to pressure me right now. I’ve got a ton of work. Plus the guy downstairs to worry about.”

“That fat jerk?”

 

“He’s got our most revered piece of scrap metal out of its case . . .”

 

“And you’re afraid he’s going to drop it and make a dent.”

“Yeah, sure.” Chin breathed an exasperated sigh. The Martian plaque was harder than diamond, harder than any material humans knew how to make, as everybody well knew; denting it was a nonproblem. “Get out of here. I’ll talk to you before you leave.”

“Forget it.” She pulled her helmet over her head, a movement so practiced it was like putting on sunglasses. She paused in the doorway and gave him one last incendiary glare, but said nothing. As she turned and walked rapidly away she sealed her faceplate.

Chin could hear her footsteps rapping lightly down the hall and then going down the stairs to the ground floor. He stared into the dim, greenly lit hallway outside his office, trying to collect his thoughts.

Chin’s narrow face was handsome; he had straight black hair and black eyes and a wide firm mouth, now down-turned. He was a tall man, with a naturally slender build kept slim–like Lydia’s–by twenty years of life at a third of a gee. It was a typical build for Martians because, while it was easy to carry extra mass at low gees, it was unnecessary and could even be dangerous to sling around a lot of extra fat and muscle.

Through the glass outer wall he noticed a lantern outside in the windswept street; the yellow glow of a patroller’s hand torch wavered through the green glass like the phosphorescent organs of some benthic fish. As he watched, the light resumed its slow movement. He glanced at his watch: 20:08. Old Nutting was as regular as a cesium clock.

He went back to his desk and sat down. He leaned back in his chair, staring up through the glass ceiling at the vast shadow of the sandstone vault that arched overhead. Beyond the edge of the natural stone roof shone ten thousand stars, unblinking–hard bright points in the Martian night.

What was to be done about Lydia? The question had plagued him for most of the three years they’d been intimate. She was younger than he was, a passionate, demanding woman. He was a man who felt older than he looked–people age slowly on Mars, because of the low gravity, provided they stay out of the ultraviolet–but for all his apparent maturity, a man still uncertain of his wants and needs. . . .

He mentally pinched himself. He had to put the personal stuff out of his mind tonight. He had to decide what to do with the information he’d recently acquired.
He pulled the yellow fax sheets from beneath the pile of other papers, where he’d hidden them when he’d heard Lydia’s unexpected footsteps on the stairs. The data stared up at him. The facts were bald enough, but crucial connections were missing; Chin knew enough about evidence to know what was needed in court and what was needed to make an administrative ruling, and in the communications before him he didn’t have enough of either. But there were other routes to justice.

Shortly after he’d come to Mars, years back, Chin, like a lot of other tenderfeet, had managed to get himself cheated on a work contract. Lab City had been a smaller and rougher place then, hardly more than a construction camp–not that the same kind of thing didn’t still happen today–and a cheap shuttleport lawyer had given him some advice.

“Don’t bother to convince me you’re in the right. I’ll grant you that without argument,” said the lawyer, “but getting a settlement, and especially collecting on it, is something else again. So how far are you willing to go?”

“What do you mean?”

 

“To make them think you’re crazy?”

 

“Crazy!”

 

“Crazy enough to beat somebody up. Burn something down. Zero some expensive equipment. Catch my drift?”

To Dare Chin’s eventual amusement and edification, it had proved unnecessary either to sue or to carry through on his threats–so apparently he’d been willing to go far enough. As an administrator he had learned to think of this sort of paralegal strategy as the “personal approach.”

The time had come to use the personal approach on Dewdney Morland. Chin left his office and descended the stairs to the ground floor.

Morland was standing in the middle of the floor under the dome, hunched over his instruments. His back was to Chin; work lights on tripods joined with the overhead spots to pinpoint the Martian plaque and Morland himself in a circle of brilliant white light. Dewdney Morland, Ph.D., had arrived on Mars a week ago, preceded by clearances from the Council of Worlds Cultural Commission. The past two evenings, starting when Town Hall closed for the night, Morland had set up his kit and worked until dawn. He had to work at night because his optical instruments were sensitive to minor vibrations, like footsteps–

“What the hell?” –the tremor of which now caused Morland to look up and whirl around angrily.

 

“You! Look what you’ve done, Chin! Twenty minutes’ recording
ruined.”

 

Chin’s only reply was a look of distaste bordering on contempt.

Morland was a disheveled fellow with a pasty complexion, a patchy beard, and sticky blond hair that hadn’t been cut in recent months; split ends curled over the collar of his expensive tweed jacket, which had long ago sagged into shapelessness. Those bulging pockets, Chin knew, contained a pipe and a bag of shredded tobacco, the paraphernalia of a habit that people who live in controlled environments regarded as not only offensive but extraordinarily quaint.

“First that cow tromping through here and now
you
,” Morland screeched. “What does it take to get it through your provincial skulls? I need absolute
stillness.”

 

On the floor beside Morland’s chair, Chin noted an open briefcase; from what Chin could see, it contained a few fax copies and the remains of a portable dinner. “Would you step aside, Dr. Morland?”

 

“What did you say?”

 

“Please move to one side.”

 

“Listen, do you want me to get an order barring you from these premises while I’m working? It can be swiftly arranged, I assure you. The Council of Worlds executive building is only a few steps away.”

 

Chin leaned forward and his features darkened. “
Move
, fat man,” he bellowed, “before I break your stupid face!”

It was a convincing display of homicidal rage; Morland recoiled. “That’s . . . This . . . I’m reporting this to the commission tomorrow,” he choked, meanwhile dancing rapidly away from the display case. “You’ll rue this, Chin. . . .”

Chin ignored him as he stepped forward to examine the plaque. It rested on a cushion of red velvet, glittering in the converging beams of light. The silvery fragment had been broken from some larger piece by a blow of unimaginable force, but nothing that had happened to it in the billion years since had left so much as a hair’s-width scratch upon it. The perfect surface in which Chin now observed his own features proved that this was not a copy of metal or plastic, and when he breathed upon it and saw his cloudy breath obscure his reflection, he knew without touching it that this was no hologram. It was the real thing.

Morland was still yammering at him. “You must realize, of course,” he said with all the venom he could muster, “that even the condensation of your foul breath on that surface renders everything I have done tonight utterly useless. I shall have to wait hours before . . .”

Chin straightened. “Shut up.”

 

“I most certainly will not shut . . .”

“I’ve been talking to people about you, Morland. Yesterday, to the Musée de l’Homme,” Chin said over Morland’s breathless monologue. “The University of Arizona this morning. An hour ago, the Museum of Surviving Antiquities in New Beirut.” He held the yellow faxgrams up in front of Morland’s face.

Morland, for the first time since Chin had entered the hall, stopped talking and eyed the faxes warily. He did not ask to read them. “All right, Chin. I despise your primitive behavior but now at least I comprehend your pathetic excuse,” he said more quietly. “I should like to remind you that penalties for libel are spelled out quite specifically in the Uniform Code of . . .”

“I’m not going to bother to tell anyone anything about you, Morland,” Chin said coldly. “You’re on Mars.” He nodded to the nearest wall of glass. “There’s not enough oxygen outside that wall worth mentioning. The temperature tonight is minus fifty cees. Our pressure tubes require constant maintenance, and every once in a while we still get failures. If that happened in your neighborhood you’d have to grab your pressure suit–you’ve got it with you, haven’t you?” Chin had already noted that he didn’t. “No? A lot of visitors make that mistake–sometimes their last. And even when you do have your suit with you, you can’t always be sure it hasn’t sprung a leak. You might want to look yours over pretty carefully when you get back to it.” Chin nudged Morland’s open briefcase with his foot, not bothering to look at it. The briefcase was big enough to hold the plaque, big enough to conceal a copy, easily big enough to hide a miniature holo projector and who knew what other clever submicro gizmos. “I hope you hear me. I don’t have any interest in libeling you. I only want to give you some expert advice.”

Chin turned his back on Morland and walked out of the hall. He waited to hear if Morland would shout after him, in threat or protest. But Morland said nothing. Perhaps the man really had gotten the message.

 

Lydia Zeromski needed to be alone for what she was facing, so she’d sealed her helmet and gone directly outside, into the freezing night.

Labyrinth City sprawled around her, a jumble of glass. But for the glowing pile of the Mars Interplanetary Hotel to her left, perched on the edge of the cliff, the only illumination came from dim lamps inside the pressure tubes and the night lights of darkened buildings, hundreds of little spheres of light that glowed like jellyfish behind the rippling green glass.

She paused and turned. She could see Morland clearly, inside Town Hall’s central dome, lit up like a patient in an operating theater. He was bent over the plaque, apparently deep in study. High above the dome, the glow from his lights reflected from the arching sandstone that sheltered the upper town. She looked for Dare in his office; his office light was on, but she could see no movement on the second floor.

She turned away and walked until she came to the edge of the cliff. She waited there, peering into the darkness. The lower city fell away like a handful of crystals down the cliffside below her. Moving among its steep stairs and huddled houses and the ruby glow of the late-night wine houses was a single bobbing yellow lantern–Old Nutting hurrying along her rounds.

Lydia’s mind was so full that she hardly saw the familiar starlit vista beyond, the huge cliffs of Noctis Labyrinthus–the Labyrinth of Night. Banded strata of red and yellow sandstone were reduced in the half light to stripes of black and gray with, occasionally, a thin edge-on layer of bright white. The white was ice, permafrost, the buried water which filled the Labyrinth with wispy sublimated clouds on the warmest of mornings, the water which made Mars habitable, upon which all its life and commerce depended.

Spires and spectacular arches of rock outlined themselves against a sky filled with hard blue stars– hundreds of spires, arrayed in ragged ranks, marching stiff-shouldered toward a horizon that should have been near but was lost in a soft haze like a Chinese ink painting, a haze of hanging microscopic dust. Lydia stood quietly, hardly moving, as the comforting wind stirred the fine sand around her.

Gradually she became aware of another figure standing and watching the sky, silhouetted against the glow of the Interplanetary.

Lydia knew the man; even masked in a pressure suit, Khalid Sayeed’s tall, graceful figure was easily recognizable. He was gazing at the distant horizon, where among the stars two brighter lights gleamed. One of the two was moving toward the eastern horizon, inching along against the fixed backdrop: that was Mars Station, swinging high enough above the planet to catch the light of the sun. The other was a wanderer too, but it moved too slowly for its movement to be obvious within a single night: that was the planet Jupiter.

Lydia thought she knew what Khalid was looking at–not at Jupiter but something far beyond that planet, far and dark and invisible but coming closer to Mars every day.