Identity Theft and Other Stories

by Robert J. Sawyer

  It wasn’t just in looks that Greg was older; back before I’d gone away, his self-censorship mechanism had been much better. He would have kept that last comment to himself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and then, just so there was no possibility of his misconstruing the comment, I added, “About your other wife dying, I mean.”

  He nodded a bit, accepting my words. Or maybe he was just old and his head moved of its own accord. “I’m alone now,” he said.

  I wanted to ask him about his second wife—about whether she’d been younger than him. If she’d been one of those grad students that went over to South Africa with him, the age difference could have been as great as that which now stretched between us. But I refrained. “We’ll need time,” I said. “Time to figure out what we want to do.”

  “Time,” repeated Greg, as if I’d asked for the impossible, asked for something he could no longer give.

  So here I am, back on Earth. My ex-husband—he did divorce me, after all—is old enough to be my father. But we’re taking it one day at a time—equal-length days, days that are synchronized, days in lockstep.

  My children are older than I am. And I’ve got grandchildren. And great-grandchildren, and all of them are wonderful.

  And I’ve been to another world…although I think I prefer this one.

  Yes, it seems you can have it all.

  Just not all at once.

  But, then again, as Einstein would have said, there’s no such thing as “all at once.”

  Everything is relative. Old Albert knew that cold. But I know something better.

  Relatives are everything.

  And I was back home with mine.

  Biding

  Time

  After winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year late in 2003 (for my novel Hominids, first volume of my “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy), I found myself much in demand for public speaking, teaching, scriptwriting, and so on, plus I was also busy editing my own science-fiction line, the Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside.

  I very much enjoyed doing all those things, but the net effect was that by the summer of 2004, I was way behind on my seventeenth novel, which was under contract to Tor Books. And so I made a resolution, after finishing the novella “Identity Theft” on July 14, 2004: I was going to give up writing short fiction. After all, I find writing short stories enormously hard work; I’m much more at home at novel-length. Also, the sad reality is that short fiction pays an order of magnitude less well per word than do my novels.

  I dutifully turned down various commissions for the next four months, but in November 2004, I was Guest of Honor at Windy Con 31, a large science-fiction convention in Chicago. Two things happened there that at least temporarily broke my resolve. First, a limited-edition hardcover collection by me called Relativity was published by Windy Cons sponsoring organization, ISFiC, and I was enormously pleased with how that book turned out. It contained eight short stories (four of which appeared in my previous collection, Iterations, and four more of which also appear here in Identity Theft), plus almost 60,000 words of my nonfiction: essays, articles, and speeches by me about SF. I decided I liked having collections to put on my brag shelf—but I didn’t quite have enough words yet for a third one.

  Second, on the Saturday night of the convention, Carolyn and I had dinner with editor John Helfers, who works for Martin Harry Greenberg’s company Tekno-Books, and John’s wife Kerrie, plus editor Bill Fawcett and writer Jody-Lynn Nye. We had a terrific time, and a fabulous meal, at Harry Caray’s steakhouse, a Chicago institution. I was in a mellow mood, and when John asked me to contribute to an anthology of cross-genre SF stories—tales that combined science fiction and any other category—I found myself saying yes.

  Of course, saying yes is the easy part. Coming up with the story is the hard part—normally. But not this time. I had already built a cross-genre world for my novella “Identity Theft,” and I had a motive for a murder already in mind. I’d devised it originally for my novel Mindscan, but then cut the subplot that used it from the final version of the book. I married that salvaged idea to the world of Martian private eye Alex Lomax, and this story was born. I’m now back on my “no more short fiction” kick, and so “Biding Time” may in fact be the last short story I will ever write.

  But I’m pleased to be going out with a bang: just as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I got word that renowned mystery writer Peter Robinson had selected “Biding Time” for The Penguin Book of Crime Stories (and for a bigger reprint fee than I got for writing the story in the first place!). And on top of that, as I was proofreading the galleys for this collection, “Biding Time” won the Aurora Award for best English-language short story of the year.

  Like its prequel, “Identity Theft,” this story is set in New Klondike on Mars. And on the day after I sent this book manuscript off to the publisher, I headed off for the old Klondike, here on Earth, for a three-month-long writing retreat at the childhood home in Dawson City of famed Canadian nonfiction writer Pierre Berton. And although I have a specific novel to be working on there—the first volume of my upcoming WWW trilogy—I’m sure the surroundings will keep me thinking about the Great Martian Fossil Rush.

  Ernie Gargalian was fat—“Gargantuan Gargalian,” some called him. Fortunately, like me, he lived on Mars; it was a lot easier to carry extra weight here. He must have massed a hundred and fifty kilos, but it felt like a third of what it would have on Earth.

  Ironically, Gargalian was one of the few people on Mars wealthy enough to fly back to Earth as often as he wanted to, but he never did; I don’t think he planned to ever set foot on the mother planet again, even though it was where all his rich clients were. Gargalian was a dealer in Martian fossils: he brokered the transactions between those lucky prospectors who found good specimens and wealthy collectors back on Earth, taking the same oversize slice of the financial pie as he would have of a real one.

  His shop was in the innermost circle—appropriately; he knew everyone. The main door was transparent alloquartz with his business name and trading hours laser-etched into it; not quite carved in stone, but still a degree of permanence suitable to a dealer in prehistoric relics. The business’s name was Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe—as if there were any other kind.

  The shoppe’s ye olde door slid aside as I approached—somewhat noisily, I thought. Well, Martian dust gets everywhere, even inside our protective dome; some of it was probably gumming up the works.

  Gargalian, seated by a long worktable covered with hunks of rock, was in the middle of a transaction. A prospector—grizzled, with a deeply lined face; he could have been sent over from Central Casting—was standing next to Gargantuan (okay, I was one of those who called him that, too). Both of them were looking at a monitor, showing a close-up of a rhizomorph fossil. “Aresthera weingartenii,” Gargalian said, with satisfaction; he had a clipped Lebanese accent and a deep, booming voice. “A juvenile, too—we don’t see many at this particular stage of development. And see that rainbow sheen? Lovely. It’s been permineralized with silicates. This will fetch a nice price—a nice price indeed.”

  The prospector’s voice was rough. Those of us who passed most of our time under the dome had enough troubles with dry air; those who spent half their lives in surface suits, breathing bottled atmosphere, sounded particularly raspy. “How nice?” he said, his eyes narrowing.

  Gargantuan frowned while he considered. “I can sell this quickly for perhaps eleven million…or, if you give me longer, I can probably get thirteen. I have some clients who specialize in A. weingartenii who will pay top coin, but they are slow in making up their minds.”

  “I want the money fast,” said the prospector. “This old body of mine might not hold out much longer.”

  Gargalian turned his gaze from the monitor to appraise the prospector, and he caught sight of me as he did so. He nodded in my direction, and raised a single finger—the finger that indicated “one minute,�
�� not the other finger, although I got that often enough when I entered places, too. He nodded at the prospector, apparently agreeing that the guy wasn’t long for this or any other world, and said, “A speedy resolution, then. Let me give you a receipt for the fossil…”

  I waited for Gargalian to finish his business, and then he came over to where I was standing. “Hey, Ernie,” I said.

  “Mr. Double-X himself!” declared Gargalian, bushy eyebrows rising above his round, flabby face. He liked to call me that because both my first and last names—Alex Lomax—ended in that letter.

  I pulled my datapad out of my pocket and showed him a picture of a seventy-year-old woman, with gray hair cut in sensible bangs above a crabapple visage. “Recognize her?”

  Gargantuan nodded, and his jowls shook as he did so. “Sure. Megan Delacourt, Delany, something like that, right?”

  “Delahunt,” I said.

  “Right. What’s up? She your client?”

  “She’s nobody’s client,” I said. “The old dear is pushing up daisies.”

  I saw Gargalian narrow his eyes for a second. Knowing him, he was trying to calculate whether he’d owed her money or she’d owed him money. “Sorry to hear that,” he said with the kind of regret that was merely polite, presumably meaning that at least he hadn’t lost anything. “She was pretty old.”

  “‘Was’ is the operative word,” I said. “She’d transferred.”

  He nodded, not surprised. “Just like that old guy wants to.” He indicated the door the prospector had now exited through. It was a common-enough scenario. People come to Mars in their youth, looking to make their fortunes by finding fossils here. The lucky ones stumble across a valuable specimen early on; the unlucky ones keep on searching and searching, getting older in the process. If they ever do find a decent specimen, first thing they do is transfer before it’s too late. “So, what is it?” asked Gargalian. “A product-liability case? Next of kin suing NewYou?”

  I shook my head. “Nah, the transfer went fine. But somebody killed the uploaded version shortly after the transfer was completed.”

  Gargalian’s bushy eyebrows went up. “Can you do that? I thought transfers were immortal.”

  I knew from bitter recent experience that a transfer could be killed with equipment specifically designed for that purpose, but the only broadband disrupter here on Mars was safely in the hands of the New Klondike constabulary. Still, I’d seen the most amazing suicide a while ago, committed by a transfer.

  But this time the death had been simple. “She was lured down to the shipyards, or so it appears, and ended up standing between the engine cone of a big rocketship, which was lying on its belly, and a brick wall. Someone fired the engine, and she did a Margaret Hamilton.”

  Gargalian shared my fondness for old films; he got the reference and winced. “Still, there’s your answer, no? It must have been one of the rocket’s crew—someone who had access to the engine controls.”

  I shook my head. “No. The cockpit was broken into.”

  Ernie frowned. “Well, maybe it was one of the crew, trying to make it look like it wasn’t one of the crew.”

  God save me from amateur detectives. “I checked. They all had alibis—and none of them had a motive, of course.”

  Gargantuan made a harrumphing sound. “What about the original version of Megan?” he asked.

  “Already gone. They normally euthanize the biological original immediately after making the copy; can’t have two versions of the same person running around, after all.”

  “Why would anyone kill someone after they transferred?” asked Gargalian. “I mean, if you wanted the person dead, it’s got to be easier to off them when they’re still biological, no?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “And it’s still murder, killing a transfer, right? I mean, I can’t recall it ever happening, but that’s the way the law reads, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s still murder,” I said. “The penalty is life imprisonment—down on Earth, of course.” With any sentence longer than two mears—two Mars years—it was cheaper to ship the criminal down to Earth, where air is free, than to incarcerate him or her here.

  Gargantuan shook his head, and his jowls, again. “She seemed a nice old lady,” he said. “Can’t imagine why someone would want her dead.”

  “The ‘why’ is bugging me, too,” I said. “I know she came in here a couple of weeks ago with some fossil specimens to sell; I found a receipt recorded in her datapad.”

  Gargalian motioned toward his desktop computer, and we walked over to it. He spoke to the machine, and some pictures of fossils appeared on the same monitor he’d been looking at earlier. “She brought me three pentapeds. One was junk, but the other two were very nice specimens.”

  “You sold them?”

  “That’s what I do.”

  “And gave her her share of the proceeds?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much did it come to?”

  He spoke to the computer again, and pointed at the displayed figure. “Total, nine million solars.”

  I frowned. “NewYou charges 7.5 million for their basic service. There can’t have been enough cash left over after she transferred to be worth killing her for, unless…” I peered at the images of the fossils she’d brought in, but I was hardly a great judge of quality. “You said two of the specimens were really nice.” ‘Nice’ was Gargantuan’s favorite adjective; he’d apparently never taken a creative-writing course.

  He nodded.

  “How nice?”

  He laughed, getting my point at once. “You think she’d found the alpha?”

  I lifted my shoulders a bit. “Why not? If she knew where it was, that’d be worth killing her for.”

  The alpha deposit was where Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly—the two private explorers who first found fossils on Mars—had collected their original specimens. That discovery had brought all the other fortune-seekers from Earth. Weingarten and O’Reilly had died twenty mears ago—their heat shield had torn off while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere after their third trip here—and the location of the alpha died with them. All anyone knew was that it was somewhere here in the Isidis Planitia basin; whoever found it would be rich beyond even Gargantuan Gargalian’s dreams.

  “I told you, one of the specimens was junk,” said Ernie. “No way it came from the alpha. The rocks of the alpha are extremely fine-grained—the preservation quality is as good as that from Earths Burgess Shale.”

  “And the other two?” I said.

  He frowned, then replied almost grudgingly, “They were good.”

  “Alpha good?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Maybe.”

  “She could have thrown in the junk piece just to disguise where the others had come from,” I said.

  “Well, even junk fossils are hard to come by.”

  That much was true. In my own desultory collecting days, I’d never found so much as a fragment. Still, there had to be a reason why someone would kill an old woman just after she’d transferred her consciousness into an artificial body.

  And if I could find that reason, I’d be able to find her killer.

  My client was Megan Delahunt’s ex-husband—and he’d been ex for a dozen mears, not just since Megan had died. Jersey Delahunt had come into my little office at about half-past ten that morning. He was shrunken with age, but looked as though he’d been broad-shouldered in his day. A few wisps of white hair were all that was left on his liver-spotted head. “Megan struck it rich,” he’d told me.

  I’d regarded him from my swivel chair, hands interlocked behind my head, feet up on my battered desk. “And you couldn’t be happier for her.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, Mr. Lomax,” he said, but his tone wasn’t bitter. “I don’t blame you. Sure, I’d been hunting fossils for thirty-six Earth years, too. Megan and me, we’d come here to Mars together, right at the beginning of the rush, hoping to make our fortunes. It hadn’t lasted though—our marri
age, I mean; the dream of getting rich lasted, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Are you still named in her will?”

  Jersey’s old, rheumy eyes regarded me. “Suspicious, too, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what they pay me the medium-sized bucks for.”

  He had a small mouth, surrounded by wrinkles; it did the best it could to work up a smile. “The answer is no, I’m not in her will. She left everything to our son Ralph. Not that there was much left over after she spent the money to upload, but whatever there was, he got—or will get, once her will is probated.”

  “And how old is Ralph?”

  “Thirty-four.” Age was always expressed in Earth years.

  “So he was born after you came to Mars? Does he still live here?”

  “Yes. Always has.”

  “Is he a prospector, too?”

  “No. He’s an engineer. Works for the water-recycling authority.”

  I nodded. Not rich, then. “And Megan’s money is still there, in her bank account?”

  “So says the lawyer, yes.”

  “If all the money is going to Ralph, what’s your interest in the matter?”

  “My interest, Mr. Lomax, is that I once loved this woman very much. I left Earth to come here to Mars because it’s what she wanted to do. We lived together for ten mears, had children together, and—”

  “Children,” I repeated. “But you said all the money was left to your child, singular, this Ralph.”

  “My daughter is dead,” Jersey said, his voice soft.

  It was hard to sound contrite in my current posture—I was still leaning back with feet up on the desk. But I tried. “Oh. Um. I’m…ah…”

  “You’re sorry, Mr. Lomax. Everybody is. I’ve heard it a million times. But it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, although…”

  “Yes?”