Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The sun was setting over Syrtis Major way, and the sky was growing dim. But Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe stayed open after dark every night: that’s when the prospectors came back inside with their booty, and many wanted to sell immediately rather than storing fossils overnight in their homes and inviting thieves to come get them.

  The walk over was pleasant—and not just because I was still grinning from my encounter with the now-lovely Lacie. Walking on Mars was virtually effortless, as long as you didn’t have to wear a surface suit.

  Ernie’s shop was in the center of town near NKPD headquarters, which said a lot about who was really in charge here. “Mr. Double-X!” he proclaimed with his usual precise enunciation as I entered. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Ernie Gargalian was sixty-five and hugely fat, with man boobs that were only perky thanks to Mars’s low gravity. His thinning silver hair was slicked straight back from his forehead, and his pale face had been puffed out enough to fill in most of the wrinkles. His brown eyes were close together and deeply set.

  “Hey, Ernie,” I said. “Has Stuart Berling been in yet?”

  “Today? No. I haven’t seen him all week.”

  “Well, he’s on his way here. Mind if I wait?”

  Gargantuan spread his giant arms, encompassing his showroom. “Fossils are fragile things, Alex. I don’t want any rough stuff in the shop.”

  “Never fear, Ernie, never fear. Besides, Berling has transferred—and I’m not fool enough to get into a fistfight with someone who’s presumably had mods for surface work.”

  “Oh, right,” said Gargalian. “He’s got that actor’s face now, doesn’t he? I don’t hold with that.” He made a circular motion in front of his own round visage. “If I were ever to transfer, I’d want to go on looking exactly as I always have. You aren’t the same person if you change your appearance.”

  Ernie liked to call me “Mr. Double-X” because both my names ended in that letter, but he’d need an artificial body in Triple-X at least, and I doubted such things were stock items. But I didn’t say that aloud; some jokes are best kept to yourself, I’d learned—after two broken noses.

  A prospector came in, a woman in her thirties, biological, pulling a surface wagon with big springy wheels. Little wagons on Earth were traditionally red—I’d had one such myself as a kid—but they tended to get lost outside here if they were painted that color. This one was fluorescent green, and it was overflowing with gray and pink hunks of rock, including one on top that I recognized, thanks to Pickover’s little lesson, as a counter slab.

  Our town’s name harked back to the Great Klondike Gold Rush, but at the end of a good day those stampeders had carried their bounty of dust in small pokes. Fossil matrix was bulky; extracting and preparing the specimens was part of what Ernie and his staff did for their thirty-five percent of every transaction they brokered for prospectors with Earth-based collectors. It was much too expensive to ship rock to Earth that was going to be thrown away there. The tailings were discarded outside our dome; there was a small mountain of them to the east.

  Ernie went to tend to the female prospector, and I looked around the shop. The fossils on display were worth millions, but they were being watched by ubiquitous cameras, and, besides, no one would try to steal from Gargantuan Gargalian, if they knew what was good for them. Ernie was one of the richest men on Mars, and he had on retainer lots of muscle to help guard that wealth. On Earth, a multimillionaire might own a mansion, a yacht, and a private jet. There was no point in owning a yacht on Mars, but Ernie certainly had the big house—I’d seen it from the outside, and the damn thing had turrets, for God’s sake—and he had the airplane, too, with an impossibly wide wingspan; it was one of only four planes I knew of here on the Red Planet.

  There was a chart on one of Ernie’s walls: side-by-side geologic timelines for Earth and Mars. Both planets were 4.5 billion Earth years old, of course, but their stories had been very different. Earth’s prehistory was broadly divided into Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras—and I knew a few were pushing for a new era, the Transzoic, to have begun the year Howard Slapcoff had perfected the uploading of consciousness. But on a meter-high chart, that slice wouldn’t have been thick enough to see without one of the microscopes that dotted Ernie’s shop.

  Martian prehistory, meanwhile, was divided into the Noachian, Hesperian, and Amazonian eras, each named, the chart helpfully explained, for a locale on Mars where rocks characteristic of it were found (and yes, ironically for a time scale that stretched back billions of years, the place that gave us the term Noachian had been named by Schiaparelli in honor of Noah’s flood).

  Both worlds developed life as soon as they’d cooled enough to allow it—some four billion Earth years ago. But Earth life just twiddled its—well, its nothings—for the next three and a half billion years; it was mostly unicellular and microscopic until the dawn of the Paleozoic, 570 million years ago.

  But Mars produced complex, macroscopic invertebrates with exoskeletons within only a hundred million years. All of the fossils collected here dated from the Noachian, which covered the first billion years. By the time multicellular creatures appeared on Earth, life on Mars had been extinct for hundreds of millions of years: two ships that didn’t quite pass in the cosmic night . . .

  Ernie and the woman were exchanging words. “Surely these are worth more than that!” she declared.

  “My sincerest apologies, dear lady,” he replied, “but Longipes bedrossiani is the most common of finds; they were everywhere. And see here? The glabella is missing. And on this one, there are only three intact limbs—not much of a pentapod!”

  They went back and forth like that a while longer, but she eventually agreed to the price he was offering. He gave her a receipt, and she left, muttering to herself.

  Since Berling hadn’t yet shown up, I took the opportunity to ask Ernie a question. “So,” I said, doing my best to sound nonchalant, “do you think anyone will ever rediscover the Alpha Deposit?”

  Ernie’s eyes, already mostly lost in his fleshy face, narrowed even further. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just idle curiosity.”

  “You, Mr. Double-X, are curious about women. You are curious about liquor. You are curious about sports. You are not curious about fossils.”

  “But I am intrigued by money.”

  “True. And, to answer your question, I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon. In an unguarded moment many years ago, after perhaps one too many glasses of port, Denny O’Reilly said to me that the Alpha was only the size of a football field—an Earth one, that is.”

  “But why hasn’t anyone else found it yet? I mean, it has been twenty mears.”

  “All we know is that it’s somewhere here in Isidis Planitia—and Isidis Planitia is the flat bottom of the remains of a giant impact crater fifteen hundred kilometers in diameter. It’s as big as Hudson Bay on Earth; you could fit over three hundred million football fields in it. Even with all the stampeders who’ve come here, there are still huge tracts of the plain that no one has ever set foot upon, my boy. Hell, no one’s even found Beagle 2, and that presumably isn’t even buried.”

  “Beagle 2?” I said.

  “A British Mars probe. It was supposed to touch down on Isidis Planitia in 2003, but no signal was ever picked up from it.”

  “Is it worth something?”

  “Sure, to a space buff, assuming it’s not smashed to bits. I’d be glad to find a buyer for the wreckage, if someone brought it in.”

  “Maybe I should look for it. I was never any good at spotting fossils, but wreckage—that’s something I understand.”

  “By Gad, you might make a decent sideline of it, at that,” said Ernie. “There’s even bigger salvage out there.”

  “Oh?”

  “Tons of it. Denny and Simon landed on Mars in two-stage ships, like the old Apollo lunar modules, but much bigger. Each had a lower descent stage and an upper ascent stage. Unlike the old lunar modules, though,
both stages were habitable. Anyway, the ascent stages are gone, of course—they all flew back to Earth. Two of them did indeed sell to collectors—the first crewed ships that had gone to Mars, after all! The third burned up on re-entry, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yeah. What happened to the descent stages?”

  “Two of three have been accounted for. You may have seen the original one. It’s still out there on the planitia, where they first landed—although it’s just a skeleton now; looters have taken all the good parts. The fact that it’s here in Isidis is how we know the Alpha must be somewhere around here—Denny and Simon, of course, never said where it was. But it could be—and probably is—many hundreds of kilometers from that original landing site. They had Mars buggies on that mission that had a thousand-kilometer range.”

  “And the descent stage from the second expedition?” I asked.

  “They crashed it in Aeolis Mensae.”

  “That’s a long way from here.”

  “Exactly. See, Denny and Simon used in situ fuel production; they made their rocket propellant here from local material. Not only did they fill the ascent stage’s fuel tanks here, but they reloaded the descent stage’s tanks, at least in part, as well. After the ascent stage took off to bring them home—it had been perched atop the descent stage—they had the computer in the descent stage fire its engine and fly horizontally as far as the fuel would take it, just to disguise the location of where it had originally touched down. As I said, the first lander didn’t necessarily touch down near where the Alpha was located. But the second lander had presumably been set down right by the Alpha, to serve as a base station while they mined it.”

  I nodded. “So they had to move it.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And the descent stage from the third mission?”

  “God only knows what they did with it. But if it’s intact, it would definitely be worth something.”

  Just then, Stuart Berling entered the shop. He had a memorable face now, but I guess I didn’t, at least to him, because although his wife had recognized me at once, he didn’t seem to know me at all. Oh, he looked at me suspiciously, but it seemed just typical prospector paranoia. The woman who’d been here earlier had glared at me the same way; no fossil hunter wanted another to know where his or her bounty had been found.

  “Mr. Berling,” I said, extending a hand that had recently been touching his wife’s perfect new body. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Alexander Lomax. I visited you at your home and asked you about your satisfaction with your transference.”

  Ernie was looking on in quiet amusement but said nothing.

  “Oh,” said Berling. “Right.”

  “I’d like to ask you some questions on another topic, if I may?”

  “I told you I was happy with the work NewYou did. We really don’t have anything else to discuss—and I’ve got business with Mr. Gargalian here.”

  “I’ll gladly wait.”

  His brows drew together. “There’s something fishy about you, Lomax.”

  This from a guy who was wearing somebody else’s face. “Not at all,” I said. “I’m just a contract researcher. I did some work for NewYou, and now I’m doing some for the New Klondike Historical Society.” I didn’t actually know if such a thing existed, but I figured it sounded plausible.

  “About what?”

  “I understand you came here early on, aboard a ship that was called the B. Traven, and—”

  He lunged at me. I deked sideways, and he went sailing past, crashing into one of Ernie’s worktables and tilting it backward a bit. A slab of rock slid toward the edge and started falling in Martian slo-mo. But Gargantuan Gargalian, moving with surprising speed for a man of his bulk, caught it before it hit the floor. “Stop it!” he demanded as he placed the fossil back on the table, which had now righted itself.

  It wouldn’t be much use, but I whipped out my gun anyway and pointed it at Berling—who, in turn, was pointing an artificial arm at me. “He started it!” Berling barked.

  “What?” I said. “What did I do?”

  Berling glared at me with the best approximation of rage his movie-star mask could muster. “How dare you bring that up? Damn you, how dare you?” His fists were balled, but they were rock-steady as he held them down by his hips; I guess transfers didn’t quake when they were furious.

  Even Ernie was on his side now. “You should know better than to mention the Traven to a survivor, Alex. I think you should leave.”

  I looked at them: the dashingly handsome transfer and the old fat biological. They both had expressions normally reserved for those who’d caught someone farting in an airlock. I holstered my gun and headed outside.

  FOURTEEN

  During the day, all sorts of people walked New Klondike’s streets, although even more took hovertrams. But at night, decent folk mostly stayed indoors, especially as you got farther out toward the rim. Of course, I wasn’t decent folk. There were hookers plying their trade and teenage hoods—the kids of failed stampeders who had nothing much to live for—hanging around, looking for anything to relieve their boredom, and if that happened to be rolling a drunk or breaking into a shop, so much the better.

  Still, I didn’t expect any trouble as I headed along Fourth Avenue toward my 11:00 p.m. date with Diana. After all, a good percentage of the lowlifes in town knew me on sight—and knew to avoid me. And even those who didn’t know me could hardly assume I’d be an easy mark: I was muscular in the way most Martians weren’t. But as I crossed the Third Circle, I was accosted by a tough-looking punk: biological, male, maybe eighteen years old, wearing a black T-shirt, with an animated tattoo of a snake with a rattling tail on his left cheek. “Gimme your money,” he said.

  “And if I don’t?” I replied, my hand finding the Smith & Wesson.

  “I cut you,” he said, and a switchblade unfolded.

  “Try it,” I said, drawing the gun—for the second time in an hour; not a record, but close—“and I shoot you.”

  “Fine,” said the punk. “Do me a favor.” And he astonished me by spreading his arms and dropping the knife, which fell with typical Red Planet indolence to the fused regolith of the sidewalk.

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my gun trained on him, “I’ll bite. How would that be doing you a favor?”

  “I got nothing, man. Nothing.”

  “Been on Mars long?”

  “Six weeks. Spent everything to get here.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Chicago.”

  That was a place I had been to back on Earth; I could see why he’d wanted to get out. Keeping him covered, I bent over and picked up the knife. It was a beautiful piece, with a nicely carved wine-colored handle—I’d been admiring one like it a while ago in a shop Diana and I had visited over on Tenth. I retracted the blade and slipped it into my pocket.

  “Man, that’s mine,” the punk said.

  “Was yours,” I corrected.

  “But I need it. I need to get money. I gotta eat.”

  “Try your hand at fossil hunting. People get rich every day here.”

  “Tried. No luck.”

  I could sympathize with that. I reached into my other pocket, found a twenty-solar coin, and flipped it into the air. Anyone who had been on Mars long could have caught it as it fell, but he really was new here: he snatched at air way below the coin.

  “Get yourself something to eat,” I said and started walking.

  “Hey, man,” he said from behind me. “You’re all right.”

  Without turning around, I gave him a hat tip and continued along my way.

  * * *

  As I’d said, Diana and I weren’t exclusive—and I was detective enough to pick up the signs that she’d been routinely seeing someone else for well over a month now, although I had no idea who. But that was fine.

  My encounter with the punk had delayed me a bit, and by the time I got to The Bent Chisel, she’d alrea
dy put her top on. “Hey,” I said, leaning in to give her a quick kiss.

  “Hey, Alex.”

  “All set to go?”

  “Yup.”

  We walked back to her place, which was four blocks away. There was no sign of the kid who’d accosted me, so I didn’t feel any need to mention it, but when we got into Diana’s little apartment—it was even smaller than mine—and I’d pulled her into an embrace, she said, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

  I wondered if she knew she was paraphrasing Mae West. “Actually,” I said, smiling, “it’s a switchblade.” I brought it out and told her the story of how I’d acquired it.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s nice.”

  “Yeah. My lucky day, I guess.”

  It was her turn to smile. “And now it’s going to be your lucky night.”

  We headed into her little bedroom. My earlier encounter with Lacie had been athletic indeed, but Diana and I always had gentle, playful sex. She’d been here on Mars for a dozen years, and that had taken its toll; she had the typically weak musculature of the long-term inhabitants of this world. I couldn’t go back to Earth for legal reasons; Diana was stuck here because she’d never be able to hack a full gee again. But, still, we made do; we always did. And I was happy to see her.

  * * *

  Turned out there wasn’t any New Klondike Historical Society, but I guess things like that are never created while the history is being made. In the morning I headed over to the shipyard. I started by checking in at the yard office, which was little more than a shack between two dead hulks. The yardmaster was Bertha, a husky old broad with a platinum blonde buzz cut.