Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Hey, gorgeous,” I said as I entered the shack. I wondered briefly why whenever you said, “Hey, gorgeous,” people thought you were being serious, but if you said, “Hey, genius,” they thought you were being sarcastic.

  “Hi, Alex. What’s up.”

  “Just some research.”

  “No rough stuff, okay?”

  “Why does everyone say that to me?”

  “I’ve got two words for you: Skookum and Jim.”

  “Okay; true enough. But it’s a different ship I’m interested in this time.”

  She gestured at her computer screen. “Which one?”

  “Something called the B. Traven.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “The Traven.”

  “What about it?”

  “It was a death ship.”

  I looked at her funny. “What?”

  “How’d you get to Mars?”

  “Me? Low-end liner. I forget what it was called. Saget, Saginaw—something like that.”

  “Sagan?”

  “That’s it, yeah.”

  “Good ship. Made eight round trips to date.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And how long was the journey?”

  “Christ, I don’t remember.”

  “Right. You literally don’t—because the Sagan, like most of the ships that come here, uses hibernation. They freeze you when you leave Earth and thaw you out when you arrive here. That kind of ship employs a Hohmann transfer orbit, which takes very little power but a whole lot of time to get here. Transit time if you leave at the optimum moment is 258 Earth days, but it all passed in a blink of an eye for you. The Traven was supposed to do the same thing—all of the passengers in deep sleep, with just a bowman to keep things running.”

  “Bowman?”

  “That’s what they call the person who stays awake during a voyage when everyone else is hibernating. After a guy named Bowman in some old movie, apparently.”

  “Ah, right,” I said; I knew which one. “But something went wrong?”

  “Crap, yeah. The bowman went crazy. He thawed out passengers one at a time and terrorized them—abused them sexually. By the time one of the people he’d awoken managed to get word out—a radio message to Lunaport—there was nothing anyone could do. Orbital mechanics make it really hard to intercept a ship that’s several months into its interplanetary journey. The whole thing was quite a sensation at the time, but—how old are you?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “You’d have been just a kid.”

  “The name of the ship didn’t seem to ring a bell with Dougal McCrae at the NKPD, either.” I said it to defend my ignorance; I probably should have known about this. But maybe we’d studied it in school on a Friday. Memo to all boards of education everywhere: never schedule crucial lessons for a Friday.

  “Yeah, well, Mac’s about your age,” Bertha said, exonerating him, too.

  “Anyway, that explains why a guy lunged at me when I brought it up. He’d been on that ship.”

  “Ah,” said Bertha. “But what’s your interest? I mean, if this is news to you, you can’t be like the other person who was asking about it.”

  Needless to say, my ears perked up. “What other person?”

  “A couple of weeks ago. The writer-in-residence.”

  I blinked. “We have a writer-in-residence?”

  “Hey, there’s more to New Klondike culture than The Bent Chisel and Diamond Tooth Gertie’s.”

  “And Gully’s Gym,” I said. “Don’t forget Gully’s Gym.”

  Bertha made a harrumphing sound, then: “You know who Stavros Shopatsky is?”

  “One of the first guys to make a fortune from fossils here. After Weingarten and O’Reilly, I mean.”

  “Exactly. He bought a ton of land under the dome from Howard Slapcoff. But he was also a writer—adventure novels; my dad used to read him. And so he donated one of the homes he built here to be a writer’s retreat. Authors from Earth apply to get an all-expenses-paid round trip to Mars, so they can come and write whatever they want. They usually stay six months or so, then head back.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And the current writer is doing a book about the B. Traven.”

  “I understand it’s still in service, but under a different name,” I said.

  “Really?” replied Bertha. “What name?”

  “The Kathryn Denning.”

  “Oh, is that the Traven? Interesting. Yeah, she’s still active.” Bertha looked at a monitor. “In fact, she’s on her way here. She’s due to arrive on Friday.”

  “Can you let me know when she touches down? I’d like to give her a once-over.”

  “You didn’t tell me why you were interested in this.”

  She said it in a way that conveyed if I expected her to help satisfy my curiosity, I had to satisfy hers. And so I did: “I’m tracking down what became of some cargo she brought here, back when she was called the Traven.”

  “It’s been thirty years since she last sailed under that name. Surely you don’t expect to find a clue aboard her at this late date?”

  I smiled. “Can’t hurt to have a look.”

  * * *

  My office was on the second of two floors. Instead of the rickety elevator, I always took the two half flights of stairs up. As I came out of the stairwell, I spotted a man at the end of the corridor. He could have been there to see anyone on this floor, but—

  Jesus.

  Well, not exactly. This guy was better-looking than Jesus. But he had the same longish hair, short beard, and lean face you saw in stained-glass windows.

  It was Stuart Berling—unless the real Krikor Ajemian had come to Mars for some reason. I figured he was either here to beat the crap out of me for bringing up the B. Traven, or to beat the crap out of me for sleeping with his wife. Either way, discretion seemed the better part of valor, and I turned around and headed back to the stairwell. But—damn it!—he’d spotted me. I heard a shout of “Lomax!” coming from down the corridor.

  I leapt, going down the whole flight at once. The thud of my landing echoed in the stairwell. I turned around and took the second set of stairs in a single go, too—but Berling could run like the wind, his transfer legs pumping up and down. Looking up the open stairwell from the ground floor, I saw him appear at the second-floor doorway. I hightailed it through the dingy lobby, almost colliding with an elderly woman who tossed a “Watch it, sonny!” at me.

  The automatic door wasn’t used to people approaching it at the speed I was managing, and it hadn’t finished sliding out of the way by the time I reached it; my right shoulder smashed into it, hurting like a son of a bitch, but I made it out onto the street. I could head either left or right, chose left, and continued along.

  Running on Mars isn’t like doing it on Earth: if you’ve got decent legs, you propel yourself several meters with each stride, and you spend most of your time airborne. The street wasn’t particularly crowded, and I did my best to bob and weave around people, but once you’re aloft you can’t easily change your course, and I finally did collide with someone. Fortunately, it was a transfer; the impact knocked him on his metal ass, but probably did him no harm—although he threw something a lot less polite than “Watch it, sonny!” after me as I scrambled to my feet. While getting up, I’d had an opportunity to look backward. Berling was still in hot pursuit.

  I’d chosen left because it led to a hovertram stop. My lungs were bound to give out before Berling’s excimer pack did; if I could hop a tram that pulled away before he could get on it, I’d be safe but—

  —but there’s never a hovertram handy when you need one. The stop was up ahead, and no one was waiting at it, meaning I’d probably just missed the damn thing.

  I continued along. There was a seedy tavern on my right called the Bar Soom—a name somebody must have thought clever at some point—and who s
hould be coming out of it but that kid who’d tried to rob me last night. I was breathing too hard to make chitchat as I passed, but he clearly recognized me. He looked behind me, no doubt saw Berling coming after me like a bat out of Chicago, and—

  And the kid must have tripped Berling as he passed, because I heard a big thud and the kind of swearing that could have made a sailor blush, if there had been any sailors on Mars.

  I halted, turned around, and saw Berling trying to get up. “Damn it, Lomax!” he called, without a trace of breathing hard. “I just want to talk to you!”

  Even though it seemed I now had an ally in this alley, I still didn’t like my chances in a fight with a high-end transfer. Of course, maybe he’d spent all his money on that handsome face—I wondered if Krikor Ajemian got a royalty? But when in doubt it was safest to assume that a transfer had super strength, too. “About . . . what?” I called back, the two words separated by a gasp.

  “The—that ship,” he replied, apparently aborting giving voice to the cursed name.

  I had my hands on my knees, still trying to catch my breath. Doesn’t anyone phone for appointments anymore? “Okay,” I managed. “All right.” I walked back toward him, several people gawking at us. I nodded thanks at the punk as I approached. Berling’s clothes were dusty—Martian red dust—from having skidded on the sidewalk when he’d been tripped, but otherwise he looked great, with not a hair out of place; I wondered how they did that. “What do you want to say?”

  He turned his head as he looked left and right, noting the people around us, then moved his head side to side again, signaling “No.” “Somewhere private,” he said. And then, a little miffed: “I had been hoping for your office.”

  The number of my colleagues back on Earth who had been shot dead in their own offices was pretty high. “No,” I said. “The Bent Chisel—you know it?”

  “That rat hole?” said Berling. He did know it. But he nodded. “All right.”

  I figured we both needed some time to cool off figuratively, and I needed to do so literally, too. “Twenty minutes,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  He nodded, turned, and departed. I looked at the kid.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dirk,” he said.

  “Huh,” I said. “Your name is Dirk, and you came at me with a knife.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  I shook my head. “Forget it. You still need money?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m a private detective. I could use some backup for this meeting with Berling at The Bent Chisel in case things get ugly. Twenty solars for an hour’s work, tops.”

  The snake’s rattle shook on his face. “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

  FIFTEEN

  Buttrick looked up suspiciously as Dirk and I entered the bar. He opened his mouth, as if to issue an automatic complaint about me needing to pay off my tab, but closed it, presumably realizing I was uncharacteristically up-to-date.

  “A pretty-boy transfer is gonna come in here in a few minutes,” I said. “Long hair, short beard. Send him to the booth in the back, would you?”

  “All right,” Buttrick said as he polished a glass in classic bartender mode. “But no rough stuff.”

  I threw up my hands. “You wreck a joint one time . . . !”

  Dirk and I headed to the back. I chose this booth because it was near the door to the kitchen, which had its own exit into an alleyway; it was always good to have an escape route in mind. This booth also had my favorite bit of graffiti carved into the tabletop: “Back in ten minutes—Godot.”

  Shortly after we sat—side by side, both of us facing the rest of the bar, Dirk on the inside of the booth and me on the outside—Diana appeared, and I got up and gave her a hug. She stretched up to kiss me on the cheek. “Hey, baby,” I said.

  Dirk, I noticed, was content to look at Diana’s killer rack while she and I spoke. “Hi, honey,” she replied, smiling warmly at me; she had a great smile. I brushed some of her brown hair away from her brown eyes. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to see you, too,” I replied, and I kissed her briefly on the mouth. Diana stole a look over her shoulder to see if Buttrick was watching. He was. She turned back to me, flashed her smile again, and said, “The usual?”

  I nodded, and she tipped her head down to look at seated Dirk. “And for you, tiger?”

  Dirk hesitated. I’d been there before: the moment when you’re supposed to order something but can’t really afford to.

  “On me,” I said, returning to the booth.

  “Beer,” he replied.

  “Domestic or imported?”

  “Domestic,” I responded. No need to go crazy.

  There were only three domestic choices, all synthetic. Diana rattled them off in what I realized was descending order of crappiness. Dirk hesitated again; he clearly hadn’t been on Mars long enough to know the brands. “Bring him a Wilhelm,” I said—which was a cute name for a beer, if you knew Mars history; Wilhelm Beer and his partner produced the first globe of the Red Planet back in 1830.

  Diana headed off, hips swaying. I watched, and I imagined Dirk did, too. Blues was playing over the speakers—I think it was Muddy Waters. “When Berling gets here,” I said to the kid, “watch him like a hawk. I don’t know what his game is, but he’s one angry man.”

  “Here he comes,” Dirk replied.

  It hadn’t been twenty minutes, and that made me even more alert; Berling might have been getting here early to plan his own escape after an altercation. Buttrick pointed in our direction; Berling nodded and headed this way. He passed Diana, but he didn’t spare her a glance; well, he was sleeping with Vivien Leigh. When he reached us, he sat down. I liked having the wide table between us; he couldn’t grab my neck or punch me across it.

  “Who’s this?” he said, indicating Dirk with a movement of Krikor Ajemian’s head.

  “My assistant,” I said, and before Berling could object to his presence, I pressed on. “You wanted to talk about—that ship.”

  He nodded. “You just startled me, is all, when you brought it up at Gargalian’s.” He looked past me, more or less at the door to the kitchen, which I knew had a round window in it. “You know, when I went to NewYou, I asked them if there was any way to edit out portions of my memories as they did the transfer, but they said that’s not possible. I’d trade all my fossils to get rid of those memories, those flashbacks.”

  At that moment, Diana reappeared, depositing my gin and Dirk’s beer. “And for you?” she said to Berling.

  He looked at her with a blank expression. Alcohol was wasted on transfers, and most of them soon gave up paying for it; they could get a buzz or deaden their pain in other ways. Buttrick could rightly say, “We don’t serve their kind in here”—but only because they almost never came in.

  “Nothing,” he said. Diana headed off. This time I didn’t watch her depart; I didn’t take my eyes off Berling.

  “I didn’t know the history of that ship when I brought it up,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Berling scowled. “What happened aboard the Traven”—here in the darkened back corner, he was willing to utter part of the name—“was horrific.”

  I took a sip of my gin.

  “You’ve got to understand,” Berling continued. “We were young kids, most of us.” He glanced at Dirk. “Kids like you. Some looking to make a fortune, some looking for adventure, some just looking to get away from Earth. We knew it’d be harsh, but we assumed it would be harsh after we got here.” He shook his head. “You know why I’m still here? After all these mears? Because I’m terrified of spaceships—couldn’t ever bring myself to fly on one again. Not after what happened on the Traven.”

  I tried to make light of it. “Turned out okay,” I said. “You must have finally struck it big to buy new bodies for you and your wife.”

  “Yeah, I’ve had some luck at last. A couple of new species of rhizomorphs; previously unknown taxons always fetch top coin.”


  “Good for you. Never had much luck hunting fossils myself.”

  He placed his perfect hands on the scratched tabletop, palms down. “So, what exactly is it that you’re investigating?”

  “Some cargo that had been brought here aboard the Traven has turned up.”

  Berling narrowed his eyes. “Cargo?” But then he nodded. “You mean the land mines.”

  I kept an impassive expression. “What do you know about them?”

  “I first heard about them after we landed—somebody discovered some in the cargo hold, or something like that, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Christ, if I’d known about them while we were still in transit, I’d have set them off. Anything to put an end to it all.”

  I’d wondered if it had been Berling himself who had brought them on that voyage. After all, he clearly had access to high-quality fossils—which might mean the Alpha. But, judging by the deteriorated state of the unexploded mine Pickover had brought to my office, I’d assumed they’d been planted many years ago, and Berling had apparently only recently come into wealth. “Do you know who smuggled them aboard?” I asked.

  “I didn’t at the time. Like I said, I didn’t even know they were there. But after we got to Mars, yeah, I figured it out. It was . . .” He trailed off.

  “Yes?” I prodded, lifting my eyebrows.

  Berling tilted his head. “How did you know my wife had transferred, too?”

  Oh, crap. “I do quality-assurance follow-ups for NewYou,” I said. “You know that. She’s on the list the franchise here gave me to interview next week.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Berling. “I was at NewYou a few days ago, getting a couple of minor adjustments made. I asked the new owner there, Fernandez, about you. He said, sure, he knows you, but he doesn’t employ you. Said when you’d talked to me before you were investigating the disappearance of the previous owner, Joshua Wilkins, who I guess had transferred the same day I had. But when you came to see me about that, Lacie hadn’t transferred yet.”