Biding Time Read online

  Biding Time

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Biding Time

  Robert J. Sawyer

  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 Earth’s 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 marriage, 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?”

  “Although Megan blamed herself, of course. What mother wouldn’t?”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Our daughter JoBeth died thirty years ago, when she was two months old.” Jersey was staring out my office’s single window, at one of the arches supporting the habitat dome. “She smothered in her sleep.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes were red as Martian sand. “The doctor said that sort of thing happens sometimes—not often, but from time to time.” His face was almost unbearably sad. “Right up till the end, Megan would cry whenever she thought of JoBeth. It was heartbreaking. She couldn’t get over it.”

  I nodded, because that was all I could think of to do. Jersey didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, so, after a moment, I went on. “Surely the police have investigated your ex-wife’s death.”

  “Yes, of course,” Jersey replied. “But I’m not satisfied that they tried hard enough.”

  This was a story I’d heard often. I nodded again, and he continued to speak: “I mean, the detective I talked to said the killer was probably off-planet now, headed to Earth.”

  “That is possible, you know,” I replied. “Well, at least it is if a ship has left here in the interim.”

  “Two have,” said Jersey, “or so the detective told me.”

  “Including the one whose firing engine, ah, did the deed?”

  “No, that one’s still there. Lennick’s Folly, it’s called. It was supposed to head back to Earth, but it’s been impounded.”

  “Because of Megan’s death?”

  “No. Something to do with unpaid taxes.”

  I nodded. With NewYou’s consciousness-uploading technology, not even death was certain anymore—but taxes were. “Which detective were you dealing with?”

  “Some Scottish guy.”

  “Dougal McCrae,” I said. Mac wasn’t the laziest man I’d ever met—and he’d saved my life recently when another case had gone bad, so I tried not to think uncharitable thoughts about him. But if there was a poster boy for complacent policing, well, Mac wouldn’t be it; he wouldn’t bother to get out from behind his desk to show up for the photo shoot. “All right,” I said. “I’ll take the case.”

  “Thank you,” said Jersey. “I brought along Megan’s datapad; the police gave it back to me after copying its contents.” He handed me the little tablet. “It’s got her appointment schedule and her address book. I thought maybe it would help you find the killer.”

  I motioned for him to put the device on my desk. “It probably will, at that. Now, about my fee…”

  * * *

  Since Mars no longer had seas, it was all one landmass: you could literally walk anywhere on the planet. Still, on this whole rotten globe, there was only one settlement—our domed city of New Klondike, three kilometers in diameter. The city had a circular layout: nine concentric rings of buildings, cut into blocks by twelve radial roadways. The NewYou franchise—the only place you could go for uploading on Mars—was just off Third Avenue in the Fifth
Ring. According to her datapad, Megan Delahunt’s last appointment at NewYou had been three days ago, when her transfer had actually been done. I headed there after leaving Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.

  The NewYou franchise was under new management since the last time I’d visited. The rather tacky showroom was at ground level; the brain-scanning equipment was on the second floor. The basement—quite rare on Mars, since the permafrost was so hard to dig through—was mostly used for storage.

  “Mr. Lomax!” declared Horatio Fernandez, an employee held over from the previous ownership. Fernandez was a beefy guy—arms as big around as Gargalian’s, but his bulk was all muscle.

  “Hello,” I said. “Sorry to bother you, but—”

  “Let me guess,” said Fernandez. “The Megan Delahunt murder.”

  “Bingo.”

  He shook his head. “She was really pleasant.”

  “So people keep telling me.”

  “It’s true. She was a real lady, that one. Cultured, you know? Lots of people here, spending their lives splitting rocks, they get a rough edge. But not her; she was all ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’ Of course, she was pretty long in the tooth…”

  “Did she have any special transfer requests?” I asked.

  “Nah. Just wanted her new body to look the way she had fifty Earth years ago, when she was twenty—which was easy enough.”

  “What about mods for outside work?” Lots of transfers had special equipment installed in their new bodies so that they could operate more easily on the surface of Mars.

  “Nah, nothing. She said her fossil-hunting days were over. She was looking forward to a nice long future, reading all the great books she’s never had time for before.”

  If she’d found the alpha, she’d probably have wanted to work it herself, at least for a while—if you’re planning on living forever, and you had a way to become super-rich, you’d take advantage of it. “Hmmph,” I said. “Did she mention any titles?”

  “Yeah,” said Fernandez. “She said she was going to start with The Remembrance of Things Past.”