by James Wilks
Templeton navigated this bustle with the determination of a man on a mission. He passed the barkers, the more subtle offers of companionship, and looked for a relatively honest and hungry looking rickshaw driver. The majority of main tubes that connected the various parts of Tranquility were pedestrian only, and while most citizens could afford the hydrogen cell trikes that were street legal on the few tubeways large enough to allow for motorized transport, few bothered. Parking was outrageously expensive, and movement from one quadrant of the city to another was easily achieved through a small underground light rail system.
Finally, Templeton found a young man who struck him the right way. He was not yelling for a fare, only standing quietly by his rickshaw. When he approached, the youth, probably only fifteen or sixteen, simply said, “Take you somewhere, mister?” He was thin and well muscled, short for his age, but he looked as if he could run for hours without becoming winded. He had dirty brown hair reaching to the collar of his ratty white tee shirt and running shorts covering half of his skinny legs. His sneakers, however, looked brand new. His features were sharp, and a slight fuzz shaded his upper lip and chin.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Templeton inquired.
“It’s Sunday, mister,” the youth replied.
Templeton realized the boy was right. “Well, then. I need to go to Beeftown. How much?”
“Fifty dollars,” he replied instantly. Evidently the request was not out of the ordinary.
“Deal.” The older man produced his wallet, pulled out a creased fifty-dollar note, and handed it over. Then he climbed into the back of the rickshaw, the young man climbed onto the bicycle seat in front, and they were off, the bike moving easily in the light Martian gravity.
The rickshaw took him on a familiar route, though there were more tubes branching off the main thoroughfares than Templeton remembered from his previous visit several years earlier. People strolled here and there through the tubing near the walls, the human forms punctuated by the occasional automaton on some errand for its owner, and the rickshaws used the middle, always keeping to the right. Several similar carriages passed him going the other way, a few drawn by two people and seating larger numbers of passengers with luggage. Twice the tubing let out into cavernous rooms with high ceilings that accommodated shops on either side, the Martian version of strip malls, and then the ceilings came back down and they were in the tubes again, always headed vaguely left as they circled near the outside rim of Tranquility. As they travelled away from the spaceport, Templeton noticed that the roads, such as they were, became dirtier and the shops seedier. After roughly ten minutes of steady travel, they entered Beeftown.
Public works on Mars were a different animal. Because every house, every building, every street needed to be protected from the lifeless Martian atmosphere, it became necessary for the government body of each city to keep a steady stream of revenue in order to expand. This revenue came in part from income taxes, property taxes, and tourism, but it also came from import taxes. Vast covered hydroponics bays and even soil farms surrounded most cities, but livestock was still a problematic industry on a planet with no arable soil to provide sustenance. Thus, most meat was imported from Earth, which drove up the prices considerably. Any city, even one on Mars, produces both grey and black markets, and Tranquility’s permissive laws and lax enforcement only encouraged them. The section of town that Templeton was now entering had a mirror in most every major city throughout history. It was the place one could go to get things. One of those things was lower-priced beef, often of questionable quality. It was this industry that had given Beeftown its appellation, though the industries it housed had become far more varied over the years.
Templeton’s driver applied the brakes and looked over his shoulder. “This good?” he asked. Templeton nodded and climbed out of the vehicle, handing over another five as a tip.
“Thanks kid,” he said, and strode off, enjoying the ease of walking when he weighed thirty-five kilos or so. As he began his peregrination, he transferred his wallet to the inside pocket of his grey flight jacket and zipped it up. The ceiling rose perhaps seven meters above him, and fans, strategically placed in the ductwork that latticed the roof to provide fresh air to the denizens below, rotated slowly. The room was large, nearly a hundred yards in length, and there were people everywhere. Some stood and spoke, but most walked on some errand or another. There were fewer of the expensive privately owned automatons here; they tended to disappear, victims of the Martian equivalent of chop shops. On his right, a line of butchers hocked their meat, either attempting to accost passers-by or haggling with buyers in front of them. On his left, a vivid holographic neon sign advertised live girls and boys, available for dancing and, Templeton suspected, other rhythm-based activities. He strolled down the center of the room, eyeing the stores, turning sideways here and there to slide by some individual or a group of people.
The store coming up on his left was called Imagina, and it was one of several shops in Tranquility to offer quasi-legal or, for the right price, illegal body modifications. Plastic surgery was of course legal, and one could alter one’s appearance as one chose quite legally on Mars or anywhere else in the solar system. There were some modifications, however, that remained illegal and were frowned upon by most of polite society. Most of these concerned turning the human body into a weapon. Templeton had known someone who had known someone, allegedly, who had poison sacs surgically installed in his cheeks. The man could, if Templeton’s source could be believed, spit corrosive acid that would blind and paralyze another person, possibly worse, at a range of ten feet. Other examples included brain implants that secreted outlawed mind altering drugs and retractable sub dermal blades or projectiles. The blades or projectiles themselves weren’t the problem; those were ordinarily legal, but if the person in question had them attached surgically, they could never be effectively disarmed without invasive surgery. The police unions had done their best to ensure that modifications of that kind remained illegal.
On his right, past another thinly veiled brothel, was a shop purporting to sell real, Turing Compliant AIs. This Templeton seriously doubted. The programmers ensconced in the shop no doubt created impressive simulacra, perhaps even halfway decent robotic servants, but not true sentience. Artificial Intelligence research had come a long way since electronic computers had eclipsed their analog antecedents nearly two hundred years before, but there was currently a system-wide ban on Turing Compliant machines. That law even Tranquility upheld. Ever since Mary Shelley’s magnum opus of 1823, literature had been filled with tales of man’s inventions coming back to haunt him. The genre had done its work well, and though it was still a hotly contested issue, the majority of people believed that the benefits of truly sentient AIs were not worth the risks involved. He walked on.
Near the end of the street, Gringolet’s first mate found the shop he wanted right where it had been on his last visit. It was called Ping’s Garage. The storefront showed any number of electrical and mechanical parts in its windows. The bell over the door rang as Templeton entered, and the man behind the far desk looked up. Everywhere around him hung metal racking supporting lengths of wire, machine parts, tools, and other assorted mechanical parts. The store was close, dark, and smelled of grease and metal. The man was of medium build and wore a greasy blue Hawaiian shirt that was in the process of moving from a deep ultramarine to a lighter sky blue patterned with similarly faded flowers. A small pot-belly pushed against the counter in front of him. He had sharp Asiatic features and laugh lines were scored deep into his tanned skin. His short hair was graying, and he was clean shaven.
For a moment he squinted at the new arrival, and then his face brightened. “Don! How are you?” He came around the corner, holding his arms out for an embrace and waving Templeton towards it with his hands.
“Fine, fine. Good to see you!” Templeton strode forward as he answered and embraced the man. They withdrew and looked at each other. “How’s your wife?”
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“Mm. The same. Hates me, loves our grandkids.” He smiled good-naturedly and shrugged.
“I sure hope so,” he replied, “seems a shame to move to another planet for grandkids you hate.”
“Oh, she loves them. Spoils them rotten, I say.” He moved back around the counter and Templeton approached from the other side. “Wait until they become teenagers and turn into little demons, I say. Hah! We’ll see then.”
“Oh, those are fun years, let me tell ya,” Templeton said, nodding gravely.
“Yeah, how are your kids? Talk to them much?” the man inquired, putting away some open notebooks and pushing an unidentified engine piece off to the side.
He smiled grimly. “Not too much, I’m afraid. I don’t think they really blame me for leaving Karen, but she’s still angry, and that makes it hard for them. She’s just so involved in their lives, and I’m not around much, you know, so I think it’s just easier for them to keep me at arm’s length. They’re good though, they’re real good. Roger’s working at the bank still. Up for a promotion, I think. And Martin is teaching fifth and sixth grade science. Yeah, they’re good.”
“Good, good,” Ping offered. After the exchange ended, an awkward moment passed, and then Ping added, “You just in town for a few days, or…”
“Yeah, just for a few days.” Templeton sighed, pushing through the moment and examining some of the hardware hanging on a rack beside him. “Listen, I came across something out past the green line and I stopped to pick it up.” He deliberately used the first person to avoid implicating any of his crew. “It’s a satellite, a damaged Yoo-lin mark VII. The coms suite has been stripped, but the rest of it is more or less intact, and I’m looking to unload it. Never found a better man for giving me a fair deal on salvage than you, Ping.”
The potential for profit gave the other man’s eyes a glassy sheen, and he wrung his hands together unconsciously for a moment. “Oh, yes, yes. Yoo-lins are good. Lots of copper and gold in there. Are the lenses intact? You have specs?”
Templeton produced his surface, typed in his pass code, and pulled up all of the data and pictures he had on the recovered satellite. Ping queued up his own surface, and Templeton flicked the file over to him with a gesture on the screen.
“Yes, yes, I think this will be good. You have it with you?”
“Nah, it’s on the ship. I didn’t want to bring it out here if you didn’t want it, and no use declaring it if I can’t get a good price for it.”
“I think we can work something out,” the man replied. “Just let me run up some numbers. Can you bring it by tomorrow?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem.”
Several minutes later, after their business was concluded and they had exchanged a few more pleasantries, Templeton left Ping’s Garage and walked back the way he had come. After twenty paces or so, he turned and walked into one of the shops he had previously passed.
John and Charis walked through an entirely different part of Tranquility, and Gwen walked between them. She held her father’s hand, her other hand pointing at various sights and shops around them. The Martian Mall, as it was called, was a decidedly family friendly space for tourists, though the dimensions were roughly analogous to those of Beeftown. Gwen had been asking for a Martian tee shirt and a new pair of sneakers, and so they had decided to do some family shopping. Now they strolled from storefront to storefront, and the people milled about them, passing, entering, and leaving, punctuated by automatons that drew the young girl’s attention without fail.
“What about that one?” Gwen pointed, not for the first time, at a child’s shirt on a mannequin in the front window of a small shop.
“I thought you wanted a purple shirt, honey,” her father replied. Gwen had been obsessive about purple lately, and there was scant little of it on the ship.
“I do, but that one’s really pretty. Maybe we can get that one and a purple one?”
“Gwen, we talked about this.” Charis buttressed her husband’s defense. “If you want that one, then we can’t get shoes too, and you’ve nearly outgrown your sneakers.”
“I know.” The girl was momentarily downcast, but then she spied another clothing shop two doors down, and she was dragging them both by the hands to go inside. The shop was cramped, like most of the stores on the planet, space being at a premium, but the clothing was well made. Gwen eventually settled on a purple tee shirt a half a size too large that said “The Red Planet” in orange lettering. The letters were surrounded by glitter that Charis could already picture on her pants after a load of laundry. She couldn’t decide whether the fact that there was no actual red on the shirt was ironic or simply inaccurate.
Gwen was jumping up and down in excitement and enjoyment of the light Martian gravity as they approached the counter to pay. Before they could reach it, John turned to Charis. “Hey, can you handle the shoe shopping? Dinah asked me to pick up a few parts for the ship.”
“Why can’t Dinah pick those up herself?” she asked inquisitively.
John chuckled a bit. “You know her. I’m not even sure she plans to leave the ship while we’re here. Something about overhauling the reactor gauges.”
Charis nodded, perhaps a bit reluctantly. “Yes, sure. I’ll meet you back on the ship?”
“Sure, babe.” He kissed her quickly, and when they had paid and walked out, he gave his daughter a kiss on the cheek and strode away quickly.
Clea Staples walked into a bar. It was one of the older watering holes in Tranquility, called The God of War, and it did its very best to imitate the hole-in-the-wall run down biker bars that wheezed through life in every small town in North America. In truth, there were very few bikers on Mars. The planet’s vehicle restrictions made the pastime impractical at best, but the throwback decor made for a familiar place for locals looking to spend some of their paycheck, people hoping to forget their lives for a time, and tourists on a budget. Grungy guitar music from some prior decade invaded the street outside, reminding passers-by that some things never change, regardless of the planet. Inside was a sparsely lit collection of garish beer-sign neon, cheap furniture, and video entertainment. Some wall-mounted surfaces displayed various broadcasts, and a holo-stage at the back was tuned to some sports match transmission from Earth.
As her eyes adjusted to the light, Staples surveyed the room. It was just past noon, and only a few regulars sat on stools near the bar watching the game. A group of young men and women, probably tourists, were eating pub lunches and drinking overpriced imported beer. Some bars on the red planet purported to brew their own beers from grains grown on-planet, but The God of War was certainly not one of them. After another few seconds of scanning the room, she found the person she was looking for.
The woman looked different than she had the last time Staples had seen her. Her eyes were blue now, her nose smaller and wider, and her mouth was more puckered. The hair was almost blue-black, now standing in short spikes on her head. There was an unmistakable look in the woman’s expression, however, that Staples felt she would have recognized anywhere. The woman raised a hand in greeting, and the captain walked over and took a seat opposite her at the remote table.
“Clea.” Her voice was husky, deeper than her build and face would have suggested. “Long time.”
“I almost didn’t recognize you.”
The other woman smiled politely. “That is precisely the point, my friend. It’s Jordan now, by the way. Jordan Fecks. How long has it been?”
Staples had no doubts that the other woman knew exactly how long it had been, but she answered anyway. “Nearly a year now. How are you adjusting to Mars? Keeping yourself busy?”
The woman waved her hand airily. “Oh, the details of my personal life would bore you to tears, I’m sure, but I’m just peachy.” Staples expected that the details of “Jordan’s” personal life would actually terrify her, and she was glad that she hadn’t answered honestly, but she had expected as much. “How is that ship of yours? What brings you to Mars?�
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“Gringolet’s holding together quite nicely. Work brings us here. A transport job. I’m not supposed to talk about it. I signed a waiver and everything.” Her tone was ironically self-important. The waitress lazily made way over to the table and took their orders. Staples ordered a mid-range import beer. Jordan asked for a refresh of her water. Once she had sauntered away, Jordan spoke.
“Let me guess. You’re transporting two engineers to Saturn.” She studied her nails as she said it.
Staples shook her head. “Should I even ask how you know that?”
The woman called Jordan laughed a bit. “No, I don’t think so. No.” After another moment passed, she added, “I assume there is a reason you wanted to meet? I do love seeing you, darling, but I had to take two trains halfway around the planet to get to Tranquility. I do hope that this is more than a social visit.”
“I’d like to hire you. You are still a Private Investigator?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Was I ever? You know, if I remember correctly, the last time you hired a Private Eye, it cost you your job.” Jordan continued to regard her nails with her blue eyes, picking lightly at her thumb with her index finger.
“True,” Staples assented, “but it bought me my ship. I think I came out ahead.”
Jordan shrugged. “If you say so. What’s the job?”
Staples sighed and looked around the room. The regulars hadn’t moved, the score hadn’t changed, and the vacationers were just ordering another round. With the music playing, no one was in earshot of them. “I’ve got two new crew members that I’d like more information on.” She produced a manila envelope from her flight jacket and set it on the table. “There’s something off about them. I don’t trust them.”