“A problem?” I repeated.
“Yes, my boy, yes. You’ve led me to the promised land; you’ve shown me Denny and Simon’s mother lode. Riches beyond imagining, one might think.”
“And that’s a problem how?”
“Back on Earth,” Ernie said, pointing vaguely at the sky, “they synthesize gold, they manufacture diamonds, they replicate rubies. Those things have no value—virtually no material object does. But actual fossils of extraterrestrial life—ah, those collectors will pay dearly for! And why, my dear Alex, why?”
“Their provenance,” I said.
Ernie’s fat face exploded in laughter. He looked at Pickover. “Did you hear him, my good professor? ‘Provenance,’ he said. Such a highfalutin word for him to know!” He turned his attention back to me. “Yes, absolutely—the fact that they’re demonstrably genuine, that they haven’t been synthesized or replicated, yes, indeed, my boy, that’s one reason they’re so valuable. But there’s another criterion. After all, you can’t make any money selling genuine moon rocks anymore, even though their provenance is easy to establish; it’s hard to even give them away. But in days of yore, they used to be the most valuable stones on Earth. And do you know why that was?”
I had an idea, but you learn more by letting people tell stories their way rather than trying to beat them to the punch. “No.”
“Because between 1972, when the last Apollo astronaut walked on the moon, until humans finally returned there, there were only 382 kilograms of moon rocks on Earth. Scarcity, my boy! Supply and demand! There were tons of diamonds then, but—well, my lad, I’ll say it because I know you’re thinking it! You know that surface suit of mine? The purple one? You could fit all the Apollo booty into it. And so of course those stones were highly valued.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay.”
“But it’s not okay, dear Alex. Not at all. I now know where a huge cache of wonderfully preserved Martian fossils is located—the best of the best, and not just quality, but quantity! I simply can’t reveal that fact to the public. Oh, if I started selling a lot of material from there, yes, for a short time, I might realize spectacular prices, but soon Alpha fossils would be ubiquitous, and not just directly via me but on the secondary market, too. Alphas will be a drug on the market—everybody selling alphas; there will be alphas everywhere.”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked.
Ernie smiled, his grapefruit cheeks moving up as he did so. “That’s the question! And the answer is this, my boy: we’re going to curate the Alpha. Dr. Pickover here will get to select the specimens to work on, studying them, scanning them, learning from them, describing them for science. He works at a slow pace; I know that, and that’s fine. And when he’s finally done with each specimen, he’ll release it to me, and I will bring it to market; we’ll find an appreciative buyer. And Miss Takahashi, here, the descendant of my dear old friend Denny, will share in the profits; I will send her a cut from every sale.”
“But . . . but that could take years.”
“By Gad, Alex, yes, it might! But so what? We not only live in an age of material abundance, my boy, we live in an age of immortality! Dr. Pickover has already made the transition, and surely none of the rest of us intend to ultimately join his fossils in the ground! I’m the oldest one in this room by a good piece, but I’ve just barely begun my life! And, as any good businessperson knows, an asset that pays steady dividends over time is far more valuable than one consumed quickly.”
I looked up at Pickover. “And you’re okay with this, Rory?”
Rory shrugged a bit. “It’s not ideal; not even close. But I’ve got the site map that Weingarten and O’Reilly made, and Ernie here has been plugged into the black market for fossils since the very beginning; he’s going to help me locate the collectors who have those old specimens. Now that Willem Van Dyke is gone, Ernie is just about the only lead I have for ever getting access to those fossils and describing them in the scientific literature. And I do get to scan and describe every new specimen that’s excavated.”
I turned to Reiko Takahashi. “And what about you? This works for you?”
She nodded her lovely head. “It’ll do.”
“But what about Lakshmi?” I said. “She knows where the Alpha is, too.”
“My dear boy, please don’t worry about that. She’s no longer a problem.”
“She’s going back to Earth?” I asked.
Ernie’s eyebrows climbed toward his slicked-back hair. “So unfortunate. She really shouldn’t have resisted arrest.”
I frowned; she hadn’t.
“Of course, the body will be shipped back,” he said. He tilted his fat head. “I hear our next writer-in-residence will be a playwright.”
I looked over at Pickover, but it was hard to read a transfer’s expression.
“And so that just leaves you, Mr. Double-X.” Ernie shook his massive head. “I knew Stuart Berling, as you know—he was selling his fossils through me. Found some fabulous specimens not that long ago, and they made him a rich man, but he couldn’t bring himself to return to Earth—that nasty business aboard the B. Traven had scarred him for life. And you’re in much the same situation, aren’t you, my boy? Berling couldn’t return to Earth and neither can you; his reasons were psychological and yours are legal, but the effect is the same, isn’t it?”
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “And your point is?”
“My point is that for all this to work, the Alpha will still need protection—and nothing so clumsy as land mines. It will need someone to look after it. And that someone can be you. Insane wealth will do you no good, not here, not on Mars, but you’ll make enough to have your life-support tax always paid, and your tab at The Bent Chisel always settled, and, when the time comes, you’ll be able to afford to have yourself transferred into the finest of bodies.” He raised a beefy hand. “It won’t be full-time work, of course; you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to ply your usual trade. But it will keep you nicely in the black for many mears to come.”
“And you think that’ll be enough for me?” I asked.
“My dear Mr. Double-X, I would not presume to speak for you. But it strikes me as win-win all around. What do you say?”
I thought about the four fossil slabs I’d jackhammered out of the Alpha and then hidden outside the dome. But my own little pieces of the stuff that dreams are made of had waited billions of years—they could wait a while longer . . . perhaps, even, until the day when I might be able to go back home.
And so I looked at each of the faces in turn: at the broad countenance of Gargantuan Gargalian, who had always known how to get what he wanted; at the exquisite, delicate features of Reiko Takahashi, who had perhaps gotten what I had wanted; and at the inquisitive visage of Rory Pickover, who would walk naked into a live volcano if he thought he could learn something that no other man knew.
I turned back to Ernie. “I want my own Mars buggy. My own surface suit.”
“Of course,” said Ernie. “Consider it done.”
“And I need a new gun.”
“Naturally.”
“And my own broadband disruptor.”
Ernie laughed heartily. “Alex, my boy, that’s thinking ahead, by Gad, it is. Yes, certainly, we’ll get you one of those, too.”
“All right,” I said, nodding slowly. “We’ll drink on it. Get that Scotch.”
* * *
Because of speed-of-light delays, it’s impossible to interact in real time with people on Earth. You can’t chat with them by video; you can’t speak with them on the phone; you can’t swap instant messages. And so I hadn’t spoken to Wanda—really spoken to her—in the ten years I’d been on Mars.
I didn’t regret my choice, I didn’t regret it at all. Wanda had done the only thing she could do. That abusing bastard had to be stopped, and she had stopped him, simply, cleanly, and for all time. But when you love someone, you look after them—and I looked after her. I took the rap for her, and, r
ather than face decades in jail, I escaped to a sealed dome on a red, barren rock; sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference.
Despite everything that had gone down these last few days, a man needs routines in his life, he needs order, he needs something to hold on to. Every week—every seven Earth days—I would record a video message for Wanda and pay to have it transmitted to Earth: Howard Slapcoff got his fee whether you were coming or going, whether you were living or dying, or whether you were just one of the living dead. I always found it awkward making the videos; it wasn’t like me to talk about what was going on in my life. But a few days after she received mine, she’d send one of her own in reply, and when I got those, when I saw how happy she was, how at peace, how full of joy, it made everything worthwhile; it made me, at least for a time, feel alive.
And so I sat in the chair in my office, the wallpaper displaying the alternating green and caramel stripes of our house from all those years ago, and I straightened my collar, patted down my hair, cleared my throat, activated my camera, and spoke to it. “Hello, sis . . .”
FORTY-SEVEN
Diana, with her gorgeous new body, drove by my place to pick me up in Juan’s buggy.
“How’d seeing Juan go?” I asked.
She smiled, and although it wasn’t the smile of hers I was used to, it was still very pleasant. “He’s such a sweetheart,” she said. “He was so relieved that I was still alive.”
“I bet.”
“But—funny. I knew he liked me; I mean—come on—it was painfully obvious. But he didn’t look at me the same way this time. I know I’m ten times better-looking now than I was before, but . . .” She shrugged a little. “Maybe there is something to be said for people who like you just the way you are . . . or were.”
“Maybe,” I said softly.
We drove to NewYou and collected the dead transfer body that had housed the bootleg Rory. Horatio Fernandez, per my instructions, had put the fried brain of the legitimate Pickover into the empty skull. In good mobster fashion, Diana and I stuffed the cybercorpse into the trunk. We then headed to the western airlock and drove through the tunnel there and out onto the surface.
I’d said before that newcomers to Mars sometimes hurt themselves because they feel invincible in the low gravity. I imagined something similar could happen with transfers: the combination of enhanced strength and feeble gravity makes them feel like comic-book superheroes. And Joshua Wilkins—poor, grieving Joshua Wilkins, who had recently lost his doting wife Cassandra—would quite plausibly have felt more reckless than most.
There were amazing places on Mars, and if a tourist industry ever develops here, I’m sure the brochures will feature Valles Marineris and Olympus Mons—respectively, the solar system’s longest canyon and its largest volcano. Either of those would have done well for our purpose, but unfortunately they were both clear around the globe from Isidis Planitia. But Rory—who, of course, knew his geology—suggested a suitable spot closer to home. There was a dried lava flow extending thirteen kilometers from a mountain peak in Nili Patera. The sides of the flow were steep, and in some places featured an eighty-meter sheer drop.
Diana and I had brought along some climbing gear—carbon-fiber rope, a piton gun, and so forth—to make it look like old Joshua-never-Josh had decided to try his luck rappelling down the lava flow. We found the steepest edge we could along its length, opened the trunk, and carried the body to the precipice. I took one leg, Diana took the other, and we dangled it headfirst over the edge. “Count of three,” I said. “One, two, three.”
We let it go and watched it fall in that wonderful Martian slow motion, down, down, down, descending a height equal to that of a twenty-seven-story office tower. Mars, being Mars, served up a Wile E. Coyote falling-off-the-cliff-style puff of dust when the body hit.
It might be years or mears, or decades or mecades, until the body was found, but, when it was, I’m sure the coroner’s report will read “death by misadventure.” If my time ever comes, I’d like the same thing, I think—beats all hell out of being gunned down by an ex-wife, strangled by a creditor, or knifed by a disgruntled client.
The trip back to the dome took the better part of a day, and that gave Diana and me plenty of time to talk. And, after several hours, with the sun low behind us and the sky ahead purpling, I decided to pop the question—the one that had been swirling at the back of my mind ever since I discovered that she was still alive. But getting to it required some setup, so, as we continued east, I said, “I think it’s time to change things around a little.”
“Oh?” replied Diana, turning her lovely head to look at me.
“Yeah. I’m tired of being the only private detective on Mars.”
“What would you do instead?”
“No, no, no. I’m not talking about quitting. I love my work; to quote one of my predecessors, this is my métier. But I’m thinking about taking on a partner.”
“Maybe Dougal McCrae would like to join you,” Diana offered. “I imagine he gets tired of all the paperwork that goes with being a cop.”
“No, not him.” I took one hand off the steering wheel and swept it back and forth in front of me, as if indicating lines of text. “Can’t you just see it? Light streaming through a window with two names painted on it, and the names visible as shadows on the floor: ‘Lomax and Connally, Private Investigators.’”
She looked surprised, but whether at the vocational suggestion or at the discovery that I knew her last name, I wasn’t sure.
“Well?” I said. “You certainly can’t keep working at The Bent Chisel. No one wants to be served booze by a transfer; it’s like having a Mormon bartender—the vibe is all wrong. And, sure, I know you don’t need to pay the life-support tax anymore, but surely you still want to make some money.”
She looked at me with lustrous acrylic eyes, and her voice was soft. “Oh, Alex . . .”
“Yes?”
“Alex, baby, don’t you get it? I transferred for a reason.”
“Of course. Immortality. Eternal youth.”
“Not that; none of that matters to me. But, honey, I’ve been here twelve years, and, unlike you, I haven’t been going to the gym. I wanted strength.”
“You’ve certainly got that,” I said. “That’s one of the reasons you’d make a great partner.”
She shook her head gently, the blonde hair glistening as she did so. “Stop for a second.”
I did, and she turned around in her seat and pointed through the clear canopy. At first I thought she was referring to the body we’d disposed of—as if that was an impediment to being a private eye—but then I realized she was indicating the evening star, a sapphire glowing low in the western sky.
“Earth?” I said.
“Earth. I’m going home, and I’ll weigh three times there what I weighed here. I could never have managed it in my old body. But in this body, I’ll do just fine.”
“But what’s Earth got that Mars doesn’t?”
The question was facetious, of course; the list was almost endless. But, still, her answer surprised me. “Reiko.”
“She’s here.”
“For now. But she wants to go home; she never intended to settle here permanently—and, frankly, neither did I; it just sort of happened. Reiko and I are booked on the return flight of the Kathryn Denning.”
“But Reiko’s still biological, no? And she’ll weigh three times as much there, too.”
“Sure. But she’s only been on Mars for a couple of months, and she’s been working out. She’ll have no trouble readjusting to a full gee.”
“I’ve never seen her at Gully’s.”
“That dump? Alex, she works out at the Amsterdam.”
“I’m going to miss you,” I said.
“Come see me. Surely that’s why you’ve been working out, right? So you could go home someday?”
“Someday,” I said quietly. “Maybe.” I looked again at the blue planet, slowly setting behind us, then turned and started the buggy up
. We drove in silence for the next hour or more, and when we did start talking again, it was about nothing of consequence.
Finally, we made it back to the New Klondike dome. We parked Juan’s buggy, and I returned my rented surface suit, and, of course, I escorted Diana back to her place; it was, after all, almost 4:00 a.m.—although, realistically, she was in a better position now to protect me than I was to protect her. I wondered if she was going to invite me to spend what little was left of the night, but, as we headed up the rickety stairs to her apartment, she said, “Reiko’s staying over, although I’m sure she’s sound asleep by now.”
I nodded, accepting that.
“But if you can wait for just a minute . . .” She unlocked her door and went in without turning on the lights; perhaps she was using infrared vision to do whatever she wanted to do. She came out again carrying a plain white bag, and she moved in and gave me a hug—a gentle one, as if she still wasn’t sure of her own strength. “It’s been fun, Alex.”
She then reached into the white bag and pulled out another bag, one with a shiny rainbow-sheen finish and U-shaped handles secured by a red satiny ribbon. “I got you a little gift,” she said. “Something to remember me by.” She handed it to me. “Go ahead. Open it.”
I was no better with the knot in the ribbon than Dr. Pickover had been with the knot in Lakshmi’s lasso. Diana, who had longer fingernails, laughed a little and took the package back briefly to undo the bow. She then handed it to me, and I opened up the bag and pulled out its contents—a crisp gray fedora.
“Now you’ve got a real hat to tip at people,” she said.
I picked it up by the crown and positioned it carefully on the top of my head. The fit was perfect. I lifted it and gave its inaugural tip to Diana.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” I said, and I leaned in and kissed her on the lips one last time.
“My pleasure,” Diana replied. “Take care of yourself, won’t you, Alex?”