A road climbing a series of hairpin bends through one of the side canyons, then upward between crumbling buttes of wind-worn rock and sandy hills, led out onto the more open plain. The air was hazy, the sky above, a curious pale pink that seemed faintly luminescent. For the first ten miles or so, the landscape was being submerged by a rising tide of interconnecting living complexes, bubble towns, industrial buildings, and farm canopies, all tied together with a thickening web of roadways, tracks, power grids and pipelines—the ground-level testimony to the spreading of humanity that Kieran had seen in his descent from orbit. Farther out, the desert reasserted itself to preside over a scattering of domes and isolated structures. Kieran remembered scenes he had seen in Japan, where cities flowed away into the distance until the details of individual houses merged and were lost in continuous ribbons that looked like glaciers filling the valleys between the mountains. He wondered if it would be like that here one day.
Stony Flats was the new, hardly-more-inspired name for what had once been designated Marineris Central 2, one of the original bases from the first phase of manned landings and consolidation on Mars. Since then, the early huddle of domes and dugouts had grown to become a collection of transport depots, maintenance hangars and freight buildings clustered beside an airfield that had a rail link to the Cherbourg spaceport. This was where off-planet shipments through Cherbourg connected to the surface air, road, and rail network. Kieran called ahead and was directed along a ravine to one of several truck-size airlock doors built into the base of the escarpment on one side. Above the locks, the slope was cut into terraces of building frontages with windows looking toward the airfield, where long-winged, gooneybird-like soarers and thrust-assisted STOL/VTOL transports came and went, stirring up flustered clouds of pink Martian dust.
After negotiating the double-lock doors, Kieran drove into a brightly lit, concrete-walled cavern containing a number of ground vehicles with people working around them in the main floor space, a workshop area to one side, and a row of enclosed offices on the other. Large double doors opened through from the center of the wall at the rear. He identified the gray-headed figure of Walter Trevany, wearing dirt-stained olive coveralls, standing with a man and a woman, both younger, in front of a large, square-built truck suggesting a military version of a miniature mobile home or RV. Its side doors were open, and a litter of boxes and equipment lay around outside. Trevany watched the Kodiak draw to a halt and came over as Kieran got out to be greeted by the noise of riveting from the far side and the intermittent flashes of welding in a screened-off corner of the workshop area.
"Dr. Thane . . . ? Ah, yes. I remember your face now."
"Hi."
"You found us all right, then?"
"No problem. Your directions were fine."
"Oh . . . You're not alone." There was uneasiness on Trevany's face as he stooped to peer into the car.
"Stay," Kieran told Guinness, who was watching him inquiringly, ready to get out. Guinness emitted a resigned snort, shook his head, and settled back down. Trevany looked relieved. "Not keen on dogs?" Kieran said.
"Oh, I don't mind them. In fact, I've had a few. But in here . . ." Trevany swept an arm to indicate the surroundings. "Machines and things. People would get nervous."
"I understand." Kieran stood looking over the vehicle with interest. Trevany had described it over the phone as a mobile lab. There were a lot of electronics inside, a desk extending from one wall with chairs facing on either side, a work area with bench space, closets, tool and instrument racks.
"I'm only recently in from Earth," Trevany said, following Kieran's gaze. "Which is why I've been staying at the Oasis. I'm joining some colleagues who have been setting up a base camp out in the highlands at Tharsis, as I think I said. This lab will be leaving for there in the next few days."
Kieran nodded. The region lay about nine hundred miles to the west of Lowell City, a little north of the equator. "What are you up to out there?" he asked curiously.
"Are you much into Martian geology?"
"Some."
"Basically, we're part of a revisionist school that's challenging the orthodox thinking about Mars and its history. It all got bogged down in the same dogma that held everything up on Earth for a couple of centuries: the conviction of slow, uniform change—that everything can be explained by the same processes we see going on today, at the same rates, if you extrapolate them back far enough."
"So I take it that you and others in the business don't think so," Kieran said.
Trevany shook his head. "Everywhere you look, the evidence is staring you in the face that the whole planet was torn up by violent upheaval in the recent past—tens of thousands of years, thousands maybe; not billions. It used to have oceans and a denser atmosphere. What happened to them? Even by the orthodox establishment's own figures for meteorite infall, wind erosion, and dust transport, the water channels and most of the craters should have been erased long ago. They're new, not even begun to be worn down in a lot of places. Even the place we're in right now is part of a floodplain. And look at the systems of crustal cracks and fissures. Something jolted the whole planet, maybe wrenched it into a different orbit."
"Do you think that could be connected with the catastrophe that some scientists say hit Earth around twelve thousand years back . . . whatever it was?" Kieran asked.
Trevany looked surprised, as if he hadn't expected such a question. "Nothing's proved yet. But what do I think?" He bunched his mouth and nodded. "If I had to bet, I'd say they were both part of the same thing."
"So, what about the advanced culture that existed before then?" Kieran asked.
"The Technolithic."
"Yes. Where do you think it originated?" Besides the form that the cataclysm had taken and exactly when it had happened, that was another aspect that different schools of opinion clashed and debated over. Some accepted this early culture as having been native to Earth; others, less inhibited and more iconoclastic, believed that it had come from elsewhere.
"I'd say the jury is still out on that one," Trevany said. "But you never know. Things that turn up in places like this, for instance, could throw more light on it." Kieran got the feeling that the geologist could have said more. Suddenly, he was curious to know what the expedition to the Tharsis region was hoping to achieve and what was going on at the base camp that Trevany had mentioned. But Trevany halted things there with a shrug. "Anyway, that's not what you came here to talk about. Do you want to come inside, out of the noise? Maybe you could use a cup of coffee or something?"
"Sounds good."
They began walking toward the row of offices. "So what kind of a problem has Leo been having?" Trevany asked. "Sarda, you said his name was over the phone, right?"
"That's right. How much did he tell you about what he does?"
"Not a lot. It sounded like some kind of biological research."
They came into the office. There was an empty desk, a table strewn with folders, drawings, and papers. Maps and charts filled the walls between shelves full of oddments and boxes. A girl working at a screen shifted her eyes to nod at them perfunctorily. Trevany led Kieran across to a side table with a coffee maker, fixings, and some snack offerings.
"He's with a sunsider outfit," Kieran said as Trevany poured two cups. "They're into a line of neurological work—figuring out how memory, behavior, and things like that are coded. It involves probing around in the brain with fields and imagers, seeing what you can extract and change." Not quite accurate, but it sounded like the kind of thing a doctor would be into. Trevany nodded in the way of someone who had heard about such things but couldn't contribute much, and offered one of the cups. Kieran took it, declining cream or sweetener. "It seems that some of Sarda's memories have been affected. We're trying to map the damage and see what can be done to fix it."
"What a strange situation to be in," Trevany commented.
"It's a strange kind of work," Kieran said.
"Very well. So how can I help?"
"By answering a few questions, if you can. They may sound odd, but we have our reasons for asking them."
"Okay."
Kieran paused, indicating with a movement of his eyes the girl working at the screen. Trevany nodded that he understood and led the way into a smaller, empty office at the end, closing the door.
"You said you met Sarda there before?" Kieran resumed.
"Yes, in the bar at the Oasis, right outside the restaurant. I'd seen them at breakfast too, although we hadn't spoken then."
" `Them'? You mean him and this woman he was with? You said her name was Elaine."
"Elaine, right. We were at close tables in the bar one evening. I recognized them as guests too, and started talking. You know how it is—new here; it's natural to want to get to know people."
"Sure. How did they seem? Sociable? Friendly enough?"
"He did—as much as you'd expect. But the woman seemed reluctant to talk. Kept drawing him away. That was why I was surprised when he acted the way he did in the restaurant."
"Hmm." Kieran pondered on the information. "Did they say what they were doing there?" he asked finally.
"Just that they stayed there sometimes. It's not exactly the kind of situation you quiz people about when you don't know them."
Kieran paused for a moment, then said in the tone of someone finally deciding to share a confidence, "We're trying to find this Elaine. Sarda has blanked out completely, and we think she can provide us with important information. Can you describe her as best you can remember?"
Trevany thought hard but couldn't add much to what he had said previously. "She was tall and slim-looking, black hair, curly—up high, off her neck, not long. Kind of a pointy-nosed face."
"What was she wearing?"
"Seemed to like black. Shiny pants, tight. A black top with it. It could have been a shirt, coat, or sweater. I can't really remember."
"Anything else?"
"Nope. I don't think so. That's about it. Sorry . . . I don't think I can have been a lot of help."
"I appreciate it anyhow. . . ." Kieran paused to think back over what had been said. "Actually, you have helped—quite a lot. What date was it when you talked to them in the bar? Can you remember?"
Trevany frowned. "Can't recall the exact day. But it was during the second week I was there. So it would have been between the thirteenth and seventeenth . . . somewhere in there."
Kieran produced a calling card and handed it across. It bore just his name with the initials KT emboldened, a General Net personal code, and a cartoonlike figure bearing a sword and shield. "Would you let me know if you think of anything else?"
"Sure." Trevany studied the card curiously. "What kind of a doctor is this?"
"It's an old symbolic representation of the hospitaler Knights of St. John. The tradition goes all the way back to the crusades. Very prestigious."
"Oh yes. I think I might have heard something about that."
"Very possibly," Kieran agreed, smiling enigmatically.
What Trevany had said that Kieran found interesting was that Sarda and Elaine had been hotel guests. That implied they were more than just casual acquaintances. Yet that afternoon, at Kieran's urging, Sarda had gone through his records and belongings but could find no trace of any Elaine in his life: not a picture, address, phone number, memento. But then again, if his original self had been part of the conspiracy, he would have removed all such traces, Kieran supposed.
However, hotel guests have to pay the bills. If Sarda was keeping a low profile at the time, as Kieran guessed would have been the case, then in order not to leave any paper trail that could point to him, there was a good chance that Elaine would have covered the charges. So even if evidence of her existence had been removed from Sarda's personal environment, it might still be in the hotel's records. "Worth a try," he told Guinness as they drove back through darkening shadows down the twisting canyon road into Lowell. "If you don't buy a ticket, you don't get a prize. Isn't that right, now?" Guinness blinked, yawned, and returned his attention to watching the landscape outside.
Once inside the pressured zone, Kieran followed the highway along Gorky and turned off at the Cherbourg tunnel exit leading beneath the plateau to the underground levels of the spaceport, its service facilities, and the Oasis hotel.