“What about the princess who owns the place?”
“Throwing a fit and hurling death threats, preparing to defend the last bastion of her realm at the bedroom door.”
“Oh dear. Well, she’ll get over it. . . .” There was a pause as June seemed to take an interruption from elsewhere. “Look, Kieran, I have to go. Maybe you could use some time resting up. I should get away, I’d say, between six and six-thirty. Maybe we could meet for dinner out somewhere?”
“How about the restaurant of that new hotel that they’ve added to the spaceport—the Oasis? Have you tried it yet?”
“No, I haven’t. It’s only recently opened. Sounds good.”
“How about seven?”
“Seven, it is. I’ve got some quick meals and a few snacks in the apartment if you need them. Or there’s some salad, cheese, and a bit of leftover pasta that’s not bad. Help yourself. I got some dog food in too—under the counter left of the sink.”
“Fine. So I’ll see you later.”
Kieran put the phone back in its slot, the comset back in his jacket pocket, and looked down to find Guinness watching attentively. “Yes, that was Aunt June. You know she was talking about you, don’t you?” Guinness wagged his tail, then looked toward the closet below the counter. “You’re right. I could use a bite too. Come on, then. Let’s see what she’s got for us.”
3
The Oasis restaurant turned out to be pleasantly relaxing, with niches opening off a central area and imaginative use of floral partitions among the tables providing a secluded atmosphere conducive to talk. Kieran and June both settled for the seafood buffet—an odd-sounding offering to be encountered on Mars, which was actually fresh, not frozen imported. “Fish-farm-food buffet would be terminologically more exact,” Kieran remarked as they collected their plates and sampled the offerings.
June had long, midnight-black hair that fell in a sweep to her shoulders, where it broke in an upturned wave, and a finely formed, angular face with a straight nose and full mouth, which in its natural state hovered just short of an impish pout. Her dark, alive eyes had always given Kieran the feeling that anything short of outright candor with her would be pointless, since they could read his thoughts as they formed in his mind. At the same time, whatever went on in her own remained impenetrable unless she chose otherwise. The dark blue, sleeveless dress she was wearing, along with her black hair, accentuated the paler hue of her face and arms in the subdued lighting above the booth they had found.
She and Kieran were kindred free spirits thriving in the environment of diversity and opportunity being created in the expansion outward from Earth, following orbits that recrossed periodically like those of other errant and adventurous bodies inhabiting the Solar System. June worked for herself as a scientific news explorer and information broker, which she sometimes combined with special commissions as a publicist.
After they had devoted aperitifs and the appetizer course to the required preliminaries of updating each other on old friends and reliving choice snippets of past adventures, Kieran finally came around to the point. “So everything went okay yesterday at Quantonix?” June had said as much over the phone earlier, but it broached the subject.
“Perfectly,” she replied.
Kieran looked at her expectantly, but she tantalized him by taking more from her plate and glancing at him challengingly every few seconds while she carried on chewing. “Is it what I think it is?” Kieran asked finally.
June stopped playing with him and nodded. “They did it with a human: Sarda himself—from a lab in the basement to another upstairs. It was practically his technology. He wouldn’t let the first subject be anyone else.”
“And everything went okay? He’s walking around and talking normally? Knows everything that the original did?”
“Absolutely, so far,” June said. “And if there were anything amiss, I think it would have shown by now. They’ve been running him through every kind of test imaginable all day. He registers the same scores on everything: physical, mental, motor; language, numeric, spatial; long-term memory, short-term memory. . . .” She shook her head. “It was astounding. I had trouble believing what I was seeing.”