Red Planet Blues

TWO





Actually, of course, Joshua Wilkins could perhaps have gone quite far—so my first order of business was to eliminate that possibility.

No spaceships had left Mars in the last twenty days, so he couldn’t be off-planet. There was a giant airlock in the south through which large spaceships could be brought inside for dry-dock work, but it hadn’t been cracked open in weeks. And, although a transfer could exist freely on the Martian surface, there were only four airlock stations leading out of the dome, and they all had security guards. I visited each of those and checked, just to be sure, but the only people who had gone out in the past three days were the usual crowds of hapless fossil hunters, and every one of them had returned when the dust storm began.

I’d read about the early days of this town: “The Great Martian Fossil Rush,” they called it. Weingarten and O’Reilly, the two private explorers who had come here at their own expense, had found the first fossils on Mars and had made a fortune selling them back on Earth. They were more valuable than any precious metal and rarer than anything else in the solar system—actual evidence of extraterrestrial life! Good fist-sized specimens went for tens of thousands; excellent football-sized ones for millions. In a world in which almost anything, including diamonds and gold, could be synthesized, there was no greater status symbol than to own the genuine petrified remains of a Martian pentapod or rhizomorph.

Weingarten and O’Reilly never said precisely where they’d found their specimens, but it had been easy enough to prove that their first spaceship had landed here, in the Isidis Planitia basin. Other treasure hunters started coming, and Howard Slapcoff—the billionaire founder of the company that pioneered the process by which minds could be scanned and uploaded—had used a hunk of his fortune to create our domed city. Many of those who’d found good specimens in the early days had bought property in New Klondike from him. It had been a wonderful investment for Slapcoff: the land sales brought him more than triple what he’d spent erecting the dome, and he’d been collecting a life-support tax from residents ever since. Well, from the biological residents, at least, but Slappy got a fat royalty from NewYou each time his transfer process was used, so he lined his pockets either way.

Native life was never widely dispersed on Mars; the single ecosystem that had existed here seemed to have been confined to this basin. Some of the other prospectors—excuse me, fossil hunters—who came shortly after W&O’s first expedition found a few excellent specimens, although most of the finds had been in poor shape.

Somewhere, though, was the mother lode: a bed known as the “Alpha Deposit” that produced fossils more finely preserved than even those from Earth’s Burgess Shale. Weingarten and O’Reilly had known where it was—they’d stumbled on it by pure dumb luck, apparently. But they’d both been killed when their heat shield separated from their ship upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere after their third expedition—and, in the twenty mears since, no one had yet rediscovered it. But people were still looking.

There’d always been a market for transferring consciousness; the potentially infinite lifespan was hugely appealing. But here on Mars, the demand was particularly brisk, since artificial bodies could spend weeks or even months on the surface, searching for paleontological gold.

Anyway, Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins was clearly not outside the habitat and he hadn’t taken off in a spaceship. Wherever he was hiding, it was somewhere under the New Klondike dome. I can’t say he was breathing the same air I was, because he wasn’t breathing at all. But he was here, somewhere. All I had to do was find him.

I didn’t want to duplicate the efforts of the police, although “efforts” was usually too generous a term to apply to the work of the local constabulary; “cursory attempts” probably was closer to the truth, if I knew Mac.

New Klondike had twelve radial roadways, cutting across the nine concentric rings of buildings under the dome. The rings were evenly spaced, except for the giant gap between the seventh and eighth, which accommodated agricultural fields, the shipyard, warehouses, water-treatment and air-processing facilities, and more. My office was at dome’s edge, on the outside of the Ninth Circle; I could have taken a hovertram into the center but I preferred to walk. A good detective knew what was happening on the streets, and the hovertrams, dilapidated though they were, sped by too fast for that.

When I’d first come here, I’d quipped that New Klondike wasn’t a hellhole—it wasn’t far enough gone for that. “More of a heckhole,” I’d said. But that had been ten years ago, just after what had happened with Wanda, and if something in the middle of a vast plain could be said to be going downhill, New Klondike was it. The fused-regolith streets were cracked, buildings—and not just the ones in the old shantytown—were in disrepair, and the seedy bars and brothels were full of thugs and con artists, the destitute and the dejected. As a character in one of the old movies I like had said of a town, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” New Klondike should have a sign by one of the airlocks that proclaims, “Twinned with Mos Eisley, Tatooine.”

I didn’t make any bones about staring at the transfers I saw along the way. They ranged in style from really sophisticated models, like Cassandra Wilkins, to things only a step up from the Tin Woodman of Oz. The latter were easy to identify as transfers, but the former could sometimes pass for biologicals, although you develop a knack for identifying them, too, almost subconsciously noting an odd sheen to the plastiskin or an unnatural smoothness in the movement of the limbs; paydar, it was called: the ability to spot a bought body.

Of course, those who’d contented themselves with second-rate synthetic forms doubtless believed they’d trade up when they eventually happened upon some decent specimens. Poor saps; no one had found truly spectacular remains for mears, and lots of people were giving up and going back to Earth, if they could afford the passage, or were settling in to lives of, as Thoreau would have it, quiet desperation, their dreams as dead as the fossils they’d never found.

I continued walking easily along; Mars gravity is just thirty-eight percent of Earth’s. Some people were stuck here because they’d let their muscles atrophy; they’d never be able to hack a full gee again. Me, I was stuck here for other reasons—thank God Mars has no real government and so no extradition treaties. But I worked out more than most people did—at Gully’s Gym, over by the shipyard—and so still had strong legs; I could walk comfortably all day if I had to.

I passed a few spindly or squat robots—most of whom were dumb as posts, and none of whom were brighter than a four-year-old—running errands or engaged in the Sisyphean tasks of road and building repair.

The cop shop was a lopsided five-story structure—it could be that tall, this near the center of the dome—with chipped and cracked walls that had once been white but were now a grimy grayish pink. The front doors were clear alloquartz, same as the overhead dome, and they slid aside as I walked up to them. On the lobby’s right was a long red desk—as if we don’t see enough red on Mars—with a map showing the Isidis Planitia basin behind it; New Klondike was a big circle off to one side.

The NKPD consisted of eight cops, the junior ones of whom took turns playing desk sergeant. Today it was a flabby lowbrow named Huxley, whose blue uniform always seemed a size too small for him. “Hey, Hux,” I said, walking over. “Is Mac in?”

Huxley consulted a monitor then nodded. “Yeah, he’s in, but he don’t see just anyone.”

“I’m not just anyone, Hux. I’m the guy who picks up the pieces after you clowns bungle things.”

Huxley frowned, trying to think of a rejoinder. “Yeah, well . . .” he said, at last.

“Oooh,” I said. “Good one, Hux! Way to put me in my place.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You ain’t as funny as you think you are, Lomax.”

“Of course I’m not. Nobody could be that funny.” I nodded at the secured inner door. “Going to buzz me through?”

“Only to be rid of you,” said Huxley. So pleased was he with the wit of this remark that he repeated it: “Only to be rid of you.” He reached below the counter, and the inner door—an unmarked black panel—slid aside. I pantomimed tipping a hat at Hux and headed into the station proper. I then walked down the corridor to McCrae’s office; the door was open, so I rapped my knuckles against the steel jamb.

“Lomax!” he said, looking up. “Decided to turn yourself in?”

“Very funny, Mac. You and Hux should go on the road together.”

He snorted. “What can I do for you, Alex?”

Mac was a skinny biological with shaggy orange eyebrows shielding his blue eyes. On the credenza behind his desk were holograms of his wife and his baby daughter; the girl had been born just a couple of months ago. “I’m looking for a guy named Joshua Wilkins.”

Mac had a strong Scottish brogue—so strong, I figured it must be an affectation. “Ah, yes. Who’s your client? The wife?”

I nodded.

“Quite the looker,” he said.

“That she is. Anyway, you tried to find her husband, this Wilkins . . .”

“We looked around, yeah,” said Mac. “He’s a transfer, you knew that?”

I nodded.

“Well,” Mac said, “she gave us the plans for his new face—precise measurements and all that. We’ve been feeding all the videos from public security cameras through facial-recognition software. So far, no luck.”

I smiled. That’s about as far as Mac’s detective work normally went: things he could do without hauling his bony ass out from behind his desk. “How much of New Klondike do they cover now?” I asked.

“It’s down to forty percent of the public areas.”

People kept smashing, stealing, or jamming the cameras faster than Mac and his staff could replace them; this was a frontier town, after all, and there were lots of things going on folks didn’t want observed. “You’ll let me know if you find anything?”

Mac drew his shaggy eyebrows together. “Even Mars has to abide by Earth’s privacy laws, Alex—or, at least, our parent corporation does. I can’t divulge what the security cameras see.”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out a fifty-solar coin, and flipped it. It went up rapidly but came down in what still seemed like slow motion to me, even after a decade on Mars; Mac didn’t require a transfer’s reflexes to catch it in midair. “Of course,” he said, “I suppose we could make an exception . . .”

“Thanks. You’re a credit to law-enforcement officials everywhere.”

He smiled, then: “Say, what kind of heat you packing these days? You still carrying that old Smith & Wesson?”

“It’s registered,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“Oh, I know, I know. But be careful, eh? The times, they are a-changin’. Bullets aren’t much use against a transfer, and there are getting to be more of those each day, since the cost of the procedure is finally coming down.”

“So I’ve heard. Do you happen to know the best place to plug a transfer, if you had to take one out?”

Mac shook his head. “It varies from model to model, and NewYou does its best to retrofit any physical vulnerabilities that are uncovered.”

“So how do you guys handle them?”

“Until recently, as little as possible,” said Mac. “Turning a blind eye, and all that.”

“Saves getting up.”

Mac didn’t take offense. “Exactly. But let me show you something.” We left his office, went farther down the corridor, and entered another room. He pointed to a device on the table. “Just arrived from Earth. The latest thing.”

It was a wide, flat disk, maybe half a meter in diameter and five centimeters thick. There were a pair of U-shaped handgrips attached to the edge, opposite each other. “What is it?”

“A broadband disruptor,” Mac said. He picked it up and held it in front of himself, like a gladiator’s shield. “It discharges an oscillating multifrequency electromagnetic pulse. From a distance of four meters or less, it will completely fry the artificial brain of a transfer—killing it as effectively as a bullet kills a human.”

“I don’t plan on killing anyone,” I said.

“That’s what you said the last time.”

Ouch. Still, maybe he had a point. “I don’t suppose you have a spare I can borrow?”

Mac laughed. “Are you kidding? This is the only one we’ve got so far, and it’s just a prototype.”

“Well, then,” I said, heading for the door, “I guess I’d better be careful.”