Red Planet Blues

FOURTEEN





During the day, all sorts of people walked New Klondike’s streets, although even more took hovertrams. But at night, decent folk mostly stayed indoors, especially as you got farther out toward the rim. Of course, I wasn’t decent folk. There were hookers plying their trade and teenage hoods—the kids of failed stampeders who had nothing much to live for—hanging around, looking for anything to relieve their boredom, and if that happened to be rolling a drunk or breaking into a shop, so much the better.

Still, I didn’t expect any trouble as I headed along Fourth Avenue toward my 11:00 p.m. date with Diana. After all, a good percentage of the lowlifes in town knew me on sight—and knew to avoid me. And even those who didn’t know me could hardly assume I’d be an easy mark: I was muscular in the way most Martians weren’t. But as I crossed the Third Circle, I was accosted by a tough-looking punk: biological, male, maybe eighteen years old, wearing a black T-shirt, with an animated tattoo of a snake with a rattling tail on his left cheek. “Gimme your money,” he said.

“And if I don’t?” I replied, my hand finding the Smith & Wesson.

“I cut you,” he said, and a switchblade unfolded.

“Try it,” I said, drawing the gun—for the second time in an hour; not a record, but close—“and I shoot you.”

“Fine,” said the punk. “Do me a favor.” And he astonished me by spreading his arms and dropping the knife, which fell with typical Red Planet indolence to the fused regolith of the sidewalk.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my gun trained on him, “I’ll bite. How would that be doing you a favor?”

“I got nothing, man. Nothing.”

“Been on Mars long?”

“Six weeks. Spent everything to get here.”

“Where you from?”

“Chicago.”

That was a place I had been to back on Earth; I could see why he’d wanted to get out. Keeping him covered, I bent over and picked up the knife. It was a beautiful piece, with a nicely carved wine-colored handle—I’d been admiring one like it a while ago in a shop Diana and I had visited over on Tenth. I retracted the blade and slipped it into my pocket.

“Man, that’s mine,” the punk said.

“Was yours,” I corrected.

“But I need it. I need to get money. I gotta eat.”

“Try your hand at fossil hunting. People get rich every day here.”

“Tried. No luck.”

I could sympathize with that. I reached into my other pocket, found a twenty-solar coin, and flipped it into the air. Anyone who had been on Mars long could have caught it as it fell, but he really was new here: he snatched at air way below the coin.

“Get yourself something to eat,” I said and started walking.

“Hey, man,” he said from behind me. “You’re all right.”

Without turning around, I gave him a hat tip and continued along my way.



* * *



As I’d said, Diana and I weren’t exclusive—and I was detective enough to pick up the signs that she’d been routinely seeing someone else for well over a month now, although I had no idea who. But that was fine.

My encounter with the punk had delayed me a bit, and by the time I got to The Bent Chisel, she’d already put her top on. “Hey,” I said, leaning in to give her a quick kiss.

“Hey, Alex.”

“All set to go?”

“Yup.”

We walked back to her place, which was four blocks away. There was no sign of the kid who’d accosted me, so I didn’t feel any need to mention it, but when we got into Diana’s little apartment—it was even smaller than mine—and I’d pulled her into an embrace, she said, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

I wondered if she knew she was paraphrasing Mae West. “Actually,” I said, smiling, “it’s a switchblade.” I brought it out and told her the story of how I’d acquired it.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s nice.”

“Yeah. My lucky day, I guess.”

It was her turn to smile. “And now it’s going to be your lucky night.”

We headed into her little bedroom. My earlier encounter with Lacie had been athletic indeed, but Diana and I always had gentle, playful sex. She’d been here on Mars for a dozen years, and that had taken its toll; she had the typically weak musculature of the long-term inhabitants of this world. I couldn’t go back to Earth for legal reasons; Diana was stuck here because she’d never be able to hack a full gee again. But, still, we made do; we always did. And I was happy to see her.



* * *



Turned out there wasn’t any New Klondike Historical Society, but I guess things like that are never created while the history is being made. In the morning I headed over to the shipyard. I started by checking in at the yard office, which was little more than a shack between two dead hulks. The yardmaster was Bertha, a husky old broad with a platinum blonde buzz cut.

“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 should 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.”