Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  I made another phone call. Juan Santos looked like he’d gotten even less sleep than I had. “Hey,” I said, “you’re a hacker. You must have a way to shut off your Mars buggy by remote control, no?”

  He yawned, then, “Sorry. Yeah. I was thinking about that. You left it running at Shopatsky House, right? I figured I should go collect it this morning. The excimer battery should last for weeks, but—”

  “Lakshmi has taken it outside the dome.”

  “Hell, Alex. I can’t afford to lose that vehicle.”

  “I know, I know. I’ll get it back for you. What’s the remote shutoff code?”

  He told me, and my phone recorded it. “But if you’re using your phone to send it, you’ll have to be within a hundred meters or so for it to be picked up,” he added.

  “Right, okay. And the code to turn it back on?”

  He told me that, too.

  “Thanks.”

  “Alex, I need—”

  But I shook the phone off, grabbed my gun, and ran out my apartment door.

  * * *

  It would eat up half a day getting to the Alpha by Mars buggy; that would never do. And although O’Reilly and Weingarten’s descent stage could fly there quickly, assuming it had enough fuel left, I’d have to get the damn thing hauled onto the planitia first, and that would take forever. And so I went to see the one person I knew who had every luxury item, including an airplane: Ernie Gargalian of Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.

  “Mr. Double-X!” Gargantuan exclaimed as I came into the empty store.

  “Hey, Ernie.”

  “I hear you’ve had some adventures of late, my boy.”

  “Oh?”

  “They say you’ve recovered Simon and Denny’s third lander.”

  “Who would ‘they’ be?”

  “I keep my ear to the ground, my boy.”

  I suspected if Ernie ever actually adopted that posture, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. “Well, yeah,” I said.

  “There might be a market for it.”

  “For the ship?”

  “There’s a collector for everything,” he said. “Would you like me to see what I can arrange?”

  “I guess, sure. So, listen, can I borrow your airplane?”

  Ernie had a hearty laugh, I’ll give him that. “By Gad, my dear boy! You do have gumption.”

  “You can’t spell gumption without P-I.” Actually, maybe you could—but you’d have to do it phonetically.

  “And just where might you take my plane, Alex?”

  “To the Alpha Deposit.”

  Ernie’s demeanor changed instantly. “You know where it is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well. When do we leave?”

  I’d expected this to be the price I’d have to pay. Rory wouldn’t have liked it—but Rory was dead. Reiko, on the other hand, was probably still alive, but quite likely wouldn’t be for much longer. “Right now,” I said.

  Just then a customer tried to enter. “No, no,” said Ernie, hurrying to the door. “We’re closed.”

  The customer—a woman in her forties—pointed at the laser-etched sign. “But the sign says . . .”

  “A typo!” declared Ernie. “I’ll get it fixed.”

  Crossing the room had been enough to set Ernie to huffing and puffing; there was no way he could walk all the way out to the edge of the dome; his plane, I knew, was parked outside the north airlock, coincidentally the same one Lakshmi and Reiko had exited through. But a man of Gargalian’s stature—literal and figurative—did not trifle with public transit. He went into his back room and emerged floating on a hoverchair—and I saw that he’d also fetched a rifle.

  It was a tight fit to get the hoverchair out through the shop’s doorway, but he did it. I followed, and he spoke a command that locked up his store.

  The chair zipped along so quickly that I was huffing and puffing myself by the time we got to the north exit. Ernie had a surface suit stored there that looked like the bag Phobos had come in. It was a struggle for him to get into it—it was a struggle for him to do pretty much anything—but he eventually managed it.

  I had to rent a suit yet again. This time, it was the shade of green people used to associate with money. Ernie’s was deep purple; he resembled an enormous eggplant in it.

  Ernie’s plane was one of three currently parked here. It was dark gray and had a gigantic wingspan—close to forty meters, I’d say. The front part of the cockpit looked like it had originally been designed to hold two side-by-side seats but had been modified for a single double-wide chair. I was relegated to the back; the habitat was teardrop-shaped, tapering toward the rear, so there’d only ever been one chair there. Once we were inside, Ernie set about powering up the plane.

  Not only did you need big wings to fly on Mars, you needed a long runway to take off. The one here was a solid kilometer of Isidis Planitia that had been cleared of rocks. We made it almost to the end before I felt us rising.

  I’d flown in small planes on Earth but never before on Mars, and I’d been in hibernation when I’d come here, so this was my first aerial view of New Klondike and environs. I craned my neck to see the city as we sped away from it: a large, shallow dome, glistening in the sun—looking for all the world like God had dropped a contact lens. Then there was nothing but Martian landscape stretching to the horizon below and the yellow-brown sky above. I pulled my tab out of my suit’s equipment pouch and dictated the directions I’d gotten from Mudge to the back of Ernie’s great loaf of a head.

  The plane moved quickly but silently. I kept looking down, hoping to spot the white Mars buggy. Of course, it was always possible that Lakshmi had headed somewhere else, in which case I’d kick myself for letting Ernie know where the Alpha was, and—

  —and there it was, up ahead, tooling along. We were arriving just in the nick of time; they were now just a few kilometers shy of the Alpha Deposit.

  Airplanes on Mars need clear open stretches to touch down, just as they did to take off, and although Isidis Planitia was a plain, it wasn’t a plain plain, and landing our plane was going to be a pain. Ernie was circling, looking for a place to set down. Not much sound carried in the thin Martian air, but our giant wingspan would make us impossible to miss if Lakshmi or Reiko happened to look up.

  Ernie swore in Armenian, and his massive head swung left and right as he continued to search. Finally, he muttered, “Here goes nothing!” and we started to descend.

  The patch of ground he’d picked didn’t have any boulders, at least, but there were still plenty of rocks up to and including basketball size. The plane had the same sort of adaptive wheels that buggies had, although larger in diameter. Still, when we hit, we bounced several times as the wheels encountered rocks they couldn’t negotiate. My breakfast gave an encore performance at the back of my throat.

  We skidded a considerable distance, with Gargantuan yelling “Yeehaw!” When we at last came to a stop, Ernie and I dogged down our helmets, and he made the canopy swing open. He needed both hands to climb down, and so he dropped his rifle overboard, then used the rungs built into the side of the plane to lower his bulk to the surface. Once he was down, he bent over—with great difficulty—and picked his rifle back up.

  I followed him down, then looked out at the wide expanse of Martian terrain in front of me. Ennio Morricone’s “The Ecstasy of the Gold” was running through my head. It was, after all, greed that had driven the Great Martian Fossil Rush, the Great Klondike Gold Rush, and the Great California Gold Rush, and Morricone’s haunting theme captured that madness well.

  Juan’s Mars buggy was on the horizon, coming toward us; the plane had landed in a kilometer-wide strip between it and the eastern edge of the Alpha—the edge that was salted with land mines.

  I walked out past the wing tip and told my phone to transmit the OFF code Juan had given me.

  The white buggy continued to barrel in. At this distance, I couldn’t see if it had green pinstriping; I suppose it was always possible that t
his was a different Mars buggy.

  I told the phone to transmit again . . . and again . . . and again.

  The damn thing was still closing, and Lakshmi must have had the accelerator right down to the floor. She was veering to the south a bit, clearly intending to go around our airplane. I had the phone send the OFF sequence once more, wondering if somehow Juan had made a mistake when he gave it to me; he had looked like he’d just woken up, after all, and—

  —and, at last, the buggy was slowing. It skittered to a stop about seventy meters ahead of me. I could see movement within the canopy; of course, when the power went off, the life-support shut off, too. I imagine Lakshmi and Reiko were hustling to get their surface-suit helmets on. I had briefed Ernie on the way here, so he understood what was going down. He had his rifle butt against his shoulder and the barrel aimed at the buggy.

  I’d put my holster on the outside of my suit. I pulled out my gun and ran toward the stalled vehicle—and the sight of me charging in with weapon drawn had the effect I wanted. Lakshmi popped the canopy on Juan’s car—it opened mechanically rather than electrically, for safety reasons—and she and Reiko scrambled out.

  My legs were longer than theirs, and I soon overtook them. We stood facing each other with just five meters of rusty, dusty plain between us. Reiko was in a suit of a darker green than my own and Lakshmi again had on a red one. All of us still had our fishbowls polarized, meaning the women might not have yet identified me; I, of course, could tell which of them was which by their heights.

  Behind me, as a glance over my shoulder confirmed, Gargantuan Gargalian was waddling in, and he was now raising his rifle. It looked like Lakshmi Chatterjee’s stint as Shopatsky House writer-in-residence was about to end with a bang.

  FORTY

  Ilooked down at my wrist controls to see what frequency my radio was using, then held up my left hand with three fingers raised, then changed it to four fingers.

  Lakshmi dipped her opaque helmet slightly in a nod. Both she and Reiko touched their own wrist controls, presumably punching in frequency thirty-four. But neither of them said anything, instead waiting for me to speak. And so I did: “All right. The jig is up. Let her go.”

  I glanced over my shoulder again, just to get a sense of where Ernie now was, and—

  Oh. He’d never met either of them, and their helmets were polarized. He’d had to choose which woman to take a bead on, and he’d mistakenly chosen Reiko. I opened my mouth to say something, but stopped when a pair of hands reached for the butterscotch sky. One of the raised hands, I saw now, was holding a tiny pistol. But the person raising her hands in surrender wasn’t Lakshmi Chatterjee—it was Reiko Takahashi.

  Lakshmi reacted instantly, her right arm lashing out to seize the gun, which she promptly pressed into Reiko’s side. In the second it took for that to happen, it hit me: it hadn’t been Lakshmi who had kidnapped Reiko; it had been Reiko who had kidnapped Lakshmi, so that she could force Lakshmi to show her where the Alpha was. Reiko must have broken her own door lock before going to get Lakshmi—preparing an alibi for when she returned home alone; no one would blame her if she’d had to off her captor to get away.

  “Back off, Lomax,” Lakshmi said, “or the little bitch gets it.” She must have recognized my voice, since all four of us still had polarized fishbowls—which was half the reason I hadn’t figured out the dynamic between Lakshmi and Reiko; I hadn’t been able to see their expressions.

  I kept my gun aimed at Lakshmi. “You won’t shoot me. I’m the only one who knows the code to turn your buggy back on.”

  “If I shoot you,” Lakshmi said, “a seat opens up on that airplane—so I don’t need the code.”

  I chinned the control that depolarized my helmet; the sun was high enough now that it wouldn’t be in my eyes facing this way. Lakshmi must have decided it was indeed better that we see each other, because her fishbowl grew transparent, too.

  Ernie was on the same radio frequency as me, of course. He spoke for the first time. “My dear lady,” he said, “we’re all after the same thing. But the Alpha Deposit has wealth galore, enough to satiate the desires of each of us. There’s no call for anything disagreeable to happen here.”

  “Who are you?” Lakshmi said.

  “Ernest Gargalian,” he replied, with a portly, courtly bow. “Proprietor of Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.” He depolarized his own helmet, revealing his round face and slicked-back hair.

  Judging by her expression, Lakshmi recognized neither his name nor that of his establishment, which was too bad because no one who did know Ernie would ever threaten him. His operatives would avenge his death—and some of them were transfers. “Just so you know,” I said to Lakshmi, “if this godforsaken planet has a Mister Big, he’s it.”

  Reiko must have chinned her polarization control, too, because her helmet also grew clear. Her voice was filled with wonder. “You’re Ernie Gargalian?”

  “At your service.”

  “I—I didn’t know you were on Mars. I didn’t know you were even still alive.”

  Ernie scowled. “Yes?”

  “You . . . you knew my grandfather,” said Reiko.

  “Ah, yes, indeed,” replied Ernie. “Alex here told me that you’re Denny’s granddaughter. I was just a pup when I first met him and Simon at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. I was one of the first dealers to do business with them.”

  “What . . . what was he like?”

  “An astute businessperson. As it appears, if I may be so bold, you yourself are. Why did you kidnap the lovely lady here?”

  “She double-crossed me,” Reiko replied. “She told me she was going to write a book about my grandfather. I gave her access to my grandfather’s diary. I’d hoped she’d find a clue in there that would help us locate the Alpha Deposit, but when she did—”

  “She didn’t figure out where the Alpha was from the diary,” I said. “Did you, Lakshmi? You had that punk, that kid—Dirk—you had him plant a tracking chip on me. And then you followed me here.”

  Lakshmi nodded. “That’s right. The diary was useless. I found the Alpha without it.” She looked at Reiko. “So why should I cut you in?”

  “Because it’s mine,” Reiko said. “My grandfather found it, so it belongs to me.”

  Reiko still had her hands in the air. Lakshmi still had a gun pressed into her side. Ernie still had his rifle aimed at the two women. Ennio Morricone was still playing in my head.

  There was movement in the distance. It might have been a dust devil; they were common on Mars. I wasn’t sure, though, and I knew better than to give away that I’d noticed anything. I kept my eyeline toward Lakshmi. Whatever I’d seen was still far away, so I sought to stall: “All right, then; okay. We have a little misunderstanding here, that’s all. But there’s no reason we can’t all just walk away from this.”

  Lakshmi shook her head, brown hair brushing first one then the other side of her fishbowl. “Reiko told me on the way here that you’ve recovered her grandfather’s body, isn’t that right?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s the way that had to go down,” Lakshmi continued. “Even back then, when only three people knew where the Alpha was. First Denny O’Reilly and Simon Weingarten decided to cut Willem Van Dyke out of the picture. Then Weingarten decided to get rid of O’Reilly. It’s the only way something like this can go down—with one person taking everything. That’s human nature.”

  “My dear woman,” said Ernie, “there are riches enough over yonder”—I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone say “yonder” before in real life, but something about being out here, at the edge of the frontier, seemed to lend itself to using that word—“to satisfy even my appetite, and yours as well. We can all profit here. You’ll need a sales agent, after all.”

  I didn’t often wish I was a transfer, but I did just then, if only for the telescopic eyes. The thing—whatever it was—was still indistinct, but I thought for sure that it was getting closer. Still, maybe it was just a dust devil or—<
br />
  —or maybe it was something moving so quickly that it was kicking up a plume of dust behind it.

  Ernie’s conciliatory comments had been directed toward Lakshmi—after all, she was the lady holding a gun—but it was Reiko who answered. Not many women could still look pretty while sneering, but Denny’s granddaughter pulled it off. “She double-crossed me,” Reiko said. “No way she walks out of this with anything.”

  The Martian landscape was infuriatingly fractal: that crater there might be a meter across or a hundred; that rock might be man-sized or mountainous. It really was hard to gauge the size of the thing that was approaching—or how far away it still was. But it was getting nearer, I was sure of that, and it now filled enough of my vision that I could assign it a color: turquoise, a thoroughly un-Martian hue.

  “Double-crosses happen all the time on Mars,” I said to Reiko. “Ernie here calls me Mr. Double-X. Shrug it off.”

  “Really?” said Lakshmi. “I thought he called you that because you don’t have any balls.”

  By now the turquoise object was even closer. It was still beyond my ability to resolve in detail—maybe I needed to see an optometrist, or maybe no one with biological eyes could have made it out—but it had moving parts, of that much I was certain.

  I still wanted Lakshmi to go down for killing Diana, but with Huxley having presumably removed the body, I didn’t see how to make that stick, at least not yet. I’d figure a way, though, if—when—I made it back to New Klondike. And getting there meant getting the writer-in-residence to lower her gun. “Lakshmi,” I said, “what happens on the planitia stays on the planitia. Let Reiko go, then head back to Shopatsky House and work on your book—whatever it really is about.”

  The turquoise object was getting ever closer. It was . . . yes, yes! It was a person. But a biological couldn’t run that fast; it had to be a transfer. I stole a glance at Ernie. His expression gave no hint that he’d seen anything, and, indeed, he seemed intent solely on the women in front of him.