Free Hide and seek by Paul Preuss Page A

were a few businessmen and engineers, but most were gaudily coiffed and coutured tourists of the type who could afford the money and time required for a grand tour of the planets. Sparta followed the pack past the exchange desk to the luggage chutes. “Direct transportation to Mars Interplanetary Hotel! Premier accommodations on Mars! Visit Phoenix Lounge! Best view of spectacular natural wonders and en tertainment nightly . . . !”
    A robot trolley squatted in the mouth of the main corridor, a jolly pink light revolving on the mast above its open seats, its voicer squeaking: “Visit Ophir Room! Lavish gourmet fare! Swim in largest expanse of open water on Mars! Only three thousand dollars per night, per person, double occupancy! World Express and major bank slivers accepted! Limited number of rooms available to late registrants . . .” by which the trolley meant that the hotel wasn’t full.
    The trolley repeated its spiel in Russian, Japanese, and Arabic while fumbling tourists climbed aboard. Sparta was in no hurry to arrive at the hotel. She stood by watching as the loaded robot vehicle trundled off down the slanting corridor on its rubber tires. She shouldered her duffle bag and began walking slowly along the underground corridor.
    She went through two pressure locks and arrived at a curving slab of dark glass in the wall. Overhead, the shuttleport runway ended in a cliff. The corridor through which she was walking had brought her through a short tunnel to the side of that cliff–and what she saw through the clear glass of the vista point was so beautiful it brought tears to her eyes.
    What she saw was the standard holocard picture of Labyrinth City, set in a tiny corner of the Labyrinth. Like any famous view, the local residents took it for granted and, in fairness, anyone no matter how aesthetically responsive would sooner or later have filed the view with the familiar–that was human nature. But at this moment it was new to Sparta.
    She wiped her eyes, angry at the stab of emotion that left her feeling vulnerable. Why does a person cry, confronted with unexpected beauty? Because sudden beauty is a reminder of what we believe we have lost, whether or not we ever really had it. At least we had–before our lives got too far down the line–the potential. Here Sparta was presented with a glimpse of paradise, a perfect world that once was or might have been, but now never would be.
    Overhead, Phobos was moving against the stars as slowly as if in a processional. That close dark moon was no wider than a fourth the width of Earth’s moon seen from Earth, but for all its inherent blackness it was a beacon in the Martian sky. And even at its slow pace Phobos was a hustler, orbiting Mars once every seven and a half hours, rising twice each day in the west and setting in the east.
    Beneath Phobos the Labyrinth’s great mesas stood up steeply out of canyons so deep their bottoms were lost in shadow. On the far western rimrock, beyond a thousand baroque spires, a dust storm raged; spikes of lightning stabbed out of its rolling black clouds.
    Natural spectacle was not the only thing that had arrested Sparta. Against the shoulder of the nearest mesa a frozen torrent of softly glowing green glass spilled toward the canyon’s gathering shadows: Labyrinth City itself. At the head of the glass cascade were the principal buildings–the Town Hall, the local Council of Worlds executive building, the sprawling Mars Interplanetary Hotel–wind sheltered by a soaring arch of sandstone that would have swallowed all the Anasazi cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. Below the great stone arch, arranged in precipitous terraces, were the town’s shops and houses, trailing off somewhere below in hydroponic farms and livestock barns. Bottommost, glowing brighter than the town above it, was the sewage processing plant.
    Sparta lingered long enough to match the sight of the Labyrinth and the city to the maps she had stored in her memory, and then