Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Then who booby-trapped the Alpha?”

  “Ah! That’s the question, isn’t it? O’Reilly and Weingarten were killed at the end of their third voyage. They’d gone on their first voyage alone—just the two of them, two crazy adventurers thumbing their noses at all the moribund government space agencies by coming here on their own. It was on that first voyage that they’d stumbled on the Alpha. But working a dig is hard; it takes a lot of effort. And so on their second voyage, they brought an extra man with them, Willem Van Dyke. But once the second expedition got back to Earth, Weingarten and O’Reilly ripped Van Dyke off, giving him only a fraction of the proceeds from selling the fossils they’d collected.”

  “What about the third expedition?”

  “The relationship with Willem Van Dyke was irreparably soured. Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t take anyone else along on the third.”

  “Ah,” I said. “But obviously this Van Dyke knew where the Alpha was. You think he returned at some later point and placed land mines around the site?”

  “He must have. After Weingarten and O’Reilly were killed, he was the only one left alive who knew the location of the Alpha. But the trail on him goes cold thirty-six years ago. He’s had no public presence in all that time.”

  I went to fix myself a drink at the small wet bar on the wall opposite my tiny window. I didn’t bother to offer Pickover one, although if I’d had an oil can, I might have told him to help himself to a squirt. “And so you want me to find Willem Van Dyke?”

  “Exactly. Van Dyke may well know what happened to the specimens from the second expedition—which private collectors they were sold to. And when he later came back to Mars on his own, he might have worked the Alpha Deposit, at least some, and shipped more specimens back to collectors on Earth. I want to find those collectors and convince them to let me properly describe their specimens in the scientific literature. I’ll never get the fossils from them; I understand that. They belong in public museums, but I know that’s a lost cause. But perhaps I can at least do science on them, if I can find whoever the fossils were sold to. And the path to them begins with Willem Van Dyke.”

  “But you say he dropped out of sight thirty-six years ago? Hard to pick up the scent at this late date.”

  “True,” said Pickover. “But the land mines provide a new clue, no?” He looked at me: two very human eyes set in that ravaged face. “Still, I guess it is what people in your profession call a cold case.”

  I thought about quipping, “They’re all cold cases on Mars,” but that wasn’t up to my usual standard of repartee so I kept my yap shut. Still, it wasn’t like I had any other work, and a cold case was win-win: if I didn’t solve it, no one could blame me, and if I did, well, even better. “As you know, my fee is three hundred solars an hour, plus expenses.” That was the same as I’d charged him the last time; it was a hundred more than what I’d quoted the transfer I’d thought was Cassandra Wilkins, but I have a soft spot for damsels in distress.

  Pickover didn’t look happy. Then again, with his current face, he probably couldn’t look happy. “Deal,” he said. “When can you begin?”

  “Not so fast. There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I need to examine the evidence, as you paleontologists would say, in situ.”

  “You want to see the Alpha Deposit?”

  “Can’t do the job otherwise.”

  Pickover looked at me the way Gollum would have if you’d asked to try on his ring. “But I have to protect those fossils.”

  “Don’t you trust me?” I said, batting my baby blues.

  “I was going to say—and you’ll forgive me—‘about as far as I can throw you,’ but given how low Martian gravity is and how strong I am now, that’s pretty darn far.” He was quiet for a time, and I let him be so. “But, yes, I suppose I do trust you.”

  To which my inner voice said, “Idiot”—but my outer voice said, “Thanks.”

  “You do understand how precious the fossils out there are?” he asked. “To science, I mean?”

  “Oh, yes,” I replied. “They’re invaluable.” And I, at least, could still flash a killer smile. “To science, I mean.”

  TWELVE

  After Dr. Pickover left my office, I settled in for some research. I started by confirming what he’d told me. He was right about the land-mine model, and that it had been made in Malaysia. I’d been to a lot of places on good old Mother Earth before I—ahem—had to leave, but that wasn’t one of them.

  I found a useful site that gave instructions for disarming Caldera-7 mines, and I took note of the procedure. In the exact center of each circular disk, there was a hole three centimeters in diameter. Pushing a probe into that would depress the disarm switch; pressure anywhere else on the surface would blow the mine up.

  I had been hoping to somehow gain access to Brisance’s customer database; I thought maybe Juan Santos could hack into it for me. One could access Earth computer networks from Mars, but the time lag varied from three minutes to twenty-two when we had line of sight to Earth, and was even longer at conjunction, when the signal had to be relayed behind the sun. Hacking that way would have driven Juan crazy, so he’d have probably farmed the work out to some Earthside black hat. But Brisance had gone out of business eleven years ago, and, given the kind of equipment it had made, I suspected all its customer records had been wiped back then.

  And, anyway, they might not have sold direct to consumer. Indeed, the land mines might have been purchased here on Mars. Judging by the dilapidated condition of the mine Rory had brought to my office, it’d been in the ground a long time. So many Martian businesses had gone bankrupt, though, that I didn’t hold out much hope for finding out who might have bought anything decades ago. But it was the best lead I had, and so I headed into the center of the dome and dropped in on New Klondike’s Finest to see if they had any records of busting someone for selling land mines here.

  Sergeant Huxley was behind his long red counter when I came in, and I did the tip-of-the-hat thing in his general direction. “Well, well, well, Hux, fancy meeting you here!”

  “Ain’t my lucky day,” Hux said. “Seeing you.”

  “No sirree,” I replied. “Your lucky day would be one on which flabby came back into style.”

  “And yours,” said Hux, for once rising to the occasion, “would be one on which people decided that beady eyes look good on anything other than a weasel.”

  “Hey,” I said, “my eyes are private. Says so right on my business card.”

  “You’re a dick,” Huxley said.

  “In the nonvulgar sense. But you’re one in the other sense.”

  I’d literally seen gears move in Pickover’s head earlier today; here, I only got to figuratively watch them as Huxley tried to process this. Finally, he came back with, “Gumshoe.”

  “Flatfoot.”

  “Shamus.”

  “Pig.”

  “Gunsel.”

  I was surprised he knew that one—and I wondered if he knew both its meanings. If he did, my next jab would have to be even harsher. While I was phrasing my reply, Mac came in the front door of the station. I turned to him. “Why, Mac! You actually went outside?”

  He smiled. “Well, no. I’m arriving at work for the first time today. My daughter had an appointment with the pediatrician.”

  “P.D. attrition?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “You mean the police department might actually lose old Huxley here at some point?” This one played better in my head than spoken aloud, and they both just looked at me. Crickets were one of the few Earth bugs that hadn’t made it to Mars, which was probably the only reason I didn’t hear any chirping just then. I cleared my throat. “Anyway, Mac, can I talk with you?”

  “Surrrre,” he said, his brogue rolling the R. He nodded at Hux, and the sergeant pushed the button that slid the black inner door open. Mac and I walked down the narrow corridor to his office, and we took chairs on opposite sides of his desk; the desktop
looked like polished wood, but was fake, of course—either that, or Mac was even more corrupt than Pickover thought.

  “What can I do for you, Alex?”

  I fished out my tab and showed him a picture I’d taken of the Caldera-7 Pickover had brought in. “A client of mine came across one of these on the claim he was working. It’s a land mine.”

  Mac squinted at the image. “Looks more like it was a land mine. How old is that thing?”

  “Might date right back to near the beginning of the Great Martian Fossil Rush. Anybody ever sell devices like this here on Mars? It was officially marketed as a mining explosive.”

  “Well, not openly, that’s for sure. But let me check.” He spoke to his computer, asking it to display all records in the police database about land mines or mining explosives. “Bunch of accident reports involving explosives,” he said, reading from his monitor, “but nothing of—no, wait a sec. This one’s sorta interesting. Copy to wall.” The wall opposite the door, which had been showing the green Scottish countryside, changed to a blowup of the report Mac had on his own monitor.

  “Thirty years ago, just after the dome went up,” said Mac. “Ship arrived here bringing a load of stampeders in hibernation, plus their supplies. Cargo was being offloaded, but one of the carrying cases had become damaged in transit—wasn’t anchored properly in the hold, I guess. The worker who’d been unloading the ship could see inside, and recognized the objects within as land mines.” Mac pointed at the wall, and a portion of an image expanded, showing a flat disk like the one Pickover had brought to my office, but in pristine condition. “Same kind of device, right?”

  I nodded.

  “It was in one of the last cases offloaded from the ship,” Mac said. “All of the other cargo had been collected by that point. Could well have been more of the same kind of mines in other cases, but no way to tell—and no record of who collected them. And, of course, no one ever claimed the three mines that had been found.”

  I nodded. “What’s the status of that ship?”

  He made motions in the air, and the wall changed to show the answer. “The B. Traven,” he said. “Decommissioned in—no, check that. It’s still in service, but under a new name, the Kathryn Denning. Owned and operated by InnerSystem Lines, a division of Slapcoff Interplanetary.”

  The ship’s original name rang a faint bell, but I couldn’t place it. “Can I get a list of who was on it when it arrived with the land mines?”

  I expected Mac to want his palm greased, but he was in a generous mood; I guess his daughter’s appointment had gone well. “Sure.” He gestured at the wall some more, and a passenger manifest appeared.

  I scanned the names, checking under V and D, and even W, for a Willem Van Dyke, but none was listed. Well, this clown hardly would have been the first person to come to Mars under an alias. “How many names are there?” I asked.

  “One hundred and thirty-two,” Mac’s computer said helpfully; it always amused me that it had a brogue as thick as Mac’s own.

  “How many males?”

  “Seventy-one.”

  “Can you download the full list into my tab—males and females?” I said to Mac.

  He spoke a command to his computer, and it was done.

  A gender change was possible, of course, but Rory himself would doubtless tell me that the simplest hypothesis was preferable, so I’d start by assuming there were only seventy-one suspects—if one could apply the word “only” to so many. I had my work cut out for me.

  THIRTEEN

  I’d returned to my office and was leaning back in my chair, feet once more up on my desk. Since I wasn’t expecting anyone, I had my shoes and socks off, letting the dogs air out. I’d copied the seventy-one male names from the B. Traven’s passenger manifest onto my wall monitor, replacing my usual wallpaper, which looked like, well, wallpaper—alternating forest green and caramel stripes, like in the house Wanda and I had lived in all those years ago back in Detroit. It’d be too much to have a picture of her on display, but the pattern subtly reminded me of her, and I liked having it in my peripheral vision.

  No distinction was made between biologicals and transfers on the passenger manifest, but the B. Traven had completed this voyage back when uploading into an artificial body cost, as the saying goes, the Earth. Anyone who could afford to transfer back then wouldn’t have been rushing to Mars to try to make a fortune; he or she already had one. So it was a safe bet that all these men had been flesh and blood.

  In the intervening years, thirty-two had gone back to Earth, and thirteen others had died; neither condition exonerated them from really being Willem Van Dyke, but it did make it hard to question them in the former case and impossible in the latter. And so I started with the twenty-six who were still here. One name immediately leapt out at me: Stuart Berling; I’d interviewed him during the Wilkins case. He was the full-time fossil hunter who had transferred the same day Joshua Wilkins supposedly had—the guy who’d opted to have his new face look like holovid star Krikor Ajemian. I’d told him I worked for NewYou’s head office when I’d questioned him then; he’d been the first transfer to pass my patented where-do-you-keep-your-screwdrivers game—the Turning Test, if you will.

  I decided to start by speaking to him, so I put my footwear back on. When I’d been a kid, I’d thought “gumshoe” referred to getting chewing gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe because you’d been skulking in unsavory neighborhoods; it actually refers to the soft-soled shoes favored by those in my line of work, because they make it easier to follow people without being heard. My pair was taupe, a color name I’d learned from the box the shoes had come in.

  I opened my office door, hoofed it to the hovertram stop, rode over to Third Avenue and Seventh Circle, went over to Berling’s redstone, pressed the illuminated door buzzer, and—

  And wow.

  “Why, it’s—it’s Mr. Lomax, isn’t it?” said the voice from the perfect bee-stung lips on the flawless heart-shaped face.

  I blinked. “Lacie, is—is that you?”

  She smiled, showing teeth as white as the polar caps. “Guilty.”

  Berling’s wife had been a plain Jane who’d looked every one of her sixty-odd years when I’d last seen her. But, well, if he was going to upload into a beefcake holo star’s likeness, it did make sense that she’d opt for this. My fondness for old 2D movies made me think first of Vivien Leigh, but I’d be surprised if there were more than three people under the dome who knew who she had been. It came to me that Lacie’s new face—and her supernova-hot body—had been patterned after that of Kayla Filina, who had starred as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in last year’s horrid remake of The Maltese Falcon.

  “You look stunning,” I said.

  Lacie spun around, a perfect gyroscopically balanced pirouette. “Don’t I, though?” she replied, flashing her pearly whites again. “Won’t you come in?”

  She stepped aside, I crossed into the townhouse, and the door slid shut behind me. “Is your husband home?” I asked. As before, the living room was filled with worktables covered with hunks of reddish rock.

  “No. He’s outside the dome, working his claim.” She smiled broadly. “He won’t be back for hours.”

  “Ah. I was hoping to ask him some questions.”

  She was wearing a light blue dress that could have been painted on—and perhaps was. Its plunging neckline revealed the tops of two large perfect breasts. “What about me?” she said, placing exquisite hands on rounded hips. “You work for NewYou, right? Quality assurance? Well, I just transferred. Don’t you have some questions for me?”

  I had thought I’d have to come clean with Berling to get answers about his trip out from Earth on the B. Traven all those mears ago, but one doesn’t blow a good cover unnecessarily. “I can see,” I said, “that we did a magnificent job.”

  She tipped her head down, appraising her own body. “Oh, it looks great. Exactly what I was hoping for. But I do want to be sure that everything is functioning properly.” Sh
e looked back up at me, aquamarine eyes beneath long dark lashes. “You know, while the work is still under warranty.”

  “Surely you and Mr. Berling have, um, tested things out.”

  “Yes, yes, of course—but he transferred first. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to, ah, put this new body through its paces with a biological.” She lifted her perfect eyebrows, and her forehead didn’t crease at all as she did so. “It’s like I’m a virgin again.”

  It’s at moments like this that a man’s morals are truly tested, and I asked myself the question that needed asking: could I actually bill Pickover for the time I spent making love with Lacie?

  She took my hand, and I let her lead me to the bedroom. If you keep in good shape, sex on Mars is amazing, thanks to the low gravity. Zero-g, I’m told, is no fun: it’s too easy to send your partner spinning across the room. But a third of a gee—well, that’s just perfect. You can do acrobatics that put Earth-based porn stars to shame. And it’s even better if, as Berling and his wife did, you have some handles mounted on the ceiling above the bed.

  This wasn’t my first time with a transfer, but Lacie was the best-looking one I’d ever been with, and she was a very generous lover. I’d heard it said that among biologicals, beautiful women got cheated on more often than plain ones, because the plain ones did all the things to keep their partners happy that the beauties wouldn’t. Lacie still had the mind of someone who had had to work to interest men—and the body of someone who could have anyone she wanted. It was a very appealing combination.

  When we were done—and it was a good thing that Berling was gone for hours—I had a sonic shower, and she buffed her plastic skin with a chamois.

  I couldn’t question her about Berling’s arrival on Mars without telling her I wasn’t with NewYou. I doubted she’d really be upset, but given that she might be able to pull my head off, I didn’t want to risk it. Instead, I simply asked her to have him give me a call when he got home. But just as I was leaving, he called her. I stood out of view and listened. He’d had a good day out by the Reinhardt dunes, he said, and was heading to Ernie Gargalian’s fossil dealership to sell his finds. I hadn’t seen Gargantuan Gargalian for a few weeks, and so I made my way over there to intercept Berling; it was more seemly, I thought, to question him somewhere other than where I’d just banged his wife.