Identity Theft and Other Stories Read online

  Books by Robert J. Sawyer

  NOVELS

  Golden Fleece

  End of an Era

  The Terminal Experiment

  Starplex

  Frameshift

  Illegal Alien

  Factoring Humanity

  Flashforward

  Calculating God

  Mindscan

  Rollback

  The Neanderthal Parallax

  Hominids

  Humans

  Hybrids

  The Quintaglio Ascension

  Far-Seer

  Fossil Hunter

  Foreigner

  COLLECTIONS

  Iterations (introduction by James Alan Gardner)

  Relativity (introduction by Mike Resnick)

  Identity Theft (introduction by Robert Charles Wilson)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Tesseracts 6 (with Carolyn Clink)

  Crossing the Line (with David Skene-Melvin)

  Over the Edge (with Peter Sellers)

  Boarding the Enterprise (with David Gerrold)

  Copyright © 2008 Robert J. Sawyer

  Introduction © 2008 Robert Charles Wilson

  Copyright for individual stories featured here

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of Red Deer Press or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5, fax (416) 868-1621.

  Published by Red Deer Press

  A Fitzhenry & Whiteside Company

  1512, 1800-4 Street S.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada t2s 2s5

  www.reddeerpress.com

  Copyedited by Fiona Kelleghan

  Cover and text design by Karen Thomas, Intuitive Design International Ltd.

  Cover image courtesy NASA, EAS, D. Bennett (University of Notre Dame), and J. Anderson (Rice University)

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens for Red Deer Press

  Financial support provided by the Canada Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Sawyer, Robert J

  Identity theft and other stories / Robert J. Sawyer; introduction by Robert Charles Wilson.

  ISBN 978-0-88995-411-3 (bound).—ISBN 978-0-88995-412-0 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8587.A389835I34 2008 C8I3'.54 C2007-905117-0

  United States Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  Sawyer, Robert J.

  Identity theft and other stories / introduction by Robert Charles Wilson; Robert J. Sawyer.

  [240] p.: cm.

  ISBN: 9780889954120 (pbk.)

  1. Short stories, Canadian—20th century. I. Wilson, Robert Charles. II. Title.

  813.0108971 dc22 PR9l99.3S248Id 2008

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  Kirstin Morrell

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  Sincere thanks to the editors who originally published these stories: Lou Anders, Gregory Benford, Kristen Pederson Chew, Douglas Cudmore, Julie E. Czerneda, Martin H. Greenberg, John Heifers, Janis Ian, Mike Resnick, Stanley Schmidt, Larry Segriff, Mark Tier, Carol Toller, and Edo van Belkom. Thanks, too, to Bob Hilderley and Dennis Johnson for introducing me to the wonders of working with Canadian publishers; to Fitzhenry & Whiteside for buying this collection; and to Amy Hingston and Karen Petherick Thomas for shepherding it through production and publication.

  Many thanks, also, to my agent, Ralph Vicinanza; to Robert Charles Wilson for the wonderful introduction; and to the friends who stood by me while I was writing these pieces, especially Carolyn Clink, David Livingstone Clink, Marcel Gagné, Terence M. Green, Kirstin Morrell, Sally Tomasevic, and Andrew Weiner.

  Finally, thanks to the 1,200 members of my online discussion group. Feel free to join us at:

  www.groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer/

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  Introduction by Robert Charles Wilson

  Identity Theft

  Come All Ye Faithful

  Immortality

  Shed Skin

  The Stanley Cup Caper

  On The Surface

  The Eagle Has Landed

  Mikeys

  The Good Doctor

  Ineluctable

  The Right’s Tough

  Kata Bindu

  Driving a Bargain

  Flashes

  Relativity

  Biding Time

  Postscript: E-Mails from the Future

  Bonus Short Stories

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  Rob Sawyer: Ignore Him

  BY ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  Let me explain.

  I was asked to introduce Robert J. Sawyer to readers of this collection of his stories—but biographical information about Rob is easy to come by. See, for instance, the About the Author at the end of this book (but don’t skip the intervening stuff: you won’t be disappointed). Or check out his website, sfwriter.com. Rob has even been the subject of an hour-long Canadian TV profile, Inside the Mind of Robert J. Sawyer. You can fairly readily discover that he’s won any number of awards—the Hugo, the Nebula, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award, Canada’s Aurora, Japan’s Seiun, China’s Galaxy Award, France’s Le Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, Spain’s Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, some of these more than once. All this is well-known.

  And his literary career is easy enough to chart, from his first novel in 1990, Golden Fleece, through the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids), to his latest, Rollback, with stops for short fiction and nonfiction along the way.

  But I want you to ignore all that.

  Ignore it, because the avalanche of honors and achievements can begin to seem intimidating. And that is precisely what Rob is not: intimidating. In fact he’s one of the most approachable SF writers around.

  Like many readers who came to SF at an impressionable age, I once believed that a published author must be an Olympian being—a wise or at least worldly philosopher-god who rises at noon, feeds his muse a diet of scotch/rocks, and debauches his soul into the keys of a rusty Underwood Noiseless while the rest of the world sleeps. Great, but how would you actually talk to such a creature?

  Rob exists to defy these misconceptions. Wise he may be; but he’s more earthy than Olympian, prefers chocolate milk to scotch, and writes from the comfort of a La-Z-Boy recliner. (I don’t know what time he gets out of bed.) He’ll talk to you about paleoanthropology, if you like, but he’s equally at home reminiscing about Thunderbirds or Josie and the Pussycats. (He probably has a favorite Pussycat.) He possesses a well-developed sense of humor, but it’s more generous than cutting. He enjoys meeting people and will usually give you the benefit of the doubt in a c
onflict; you can get on the wrong side of Robert J. Sawyer, but it takes work.

  He’s also conspicuously Canadian, in a way those of us who wander the tenebrous nightland between nationalities (I’m an expat American, myself) can never be. I think this makes some Americans uneasy—the unspoken belief that Canada really is, as the beer ads say, the best part of North America. It’s hard to miss it in his work. But Rob also practices that most Canadian of virtues, Looking at Both Sides of the Question, which means that his love for his native country never comes off as jingoistic or anti-American. And for those of us who do know Canada there’s a pleasing resonance in Rob’s writing—he’s privy to the secret handshakes; he can tell the difference between Wendy Mesley and Peter Mansbridge, Uncle Bobby and Jerome the Giraffe, Jean Chrétien and the Honourable Member from Kicking Horse Pass.

  But again I have to emphasize, don’t let any of this intimidate you. Rob grew up in suburban Toronto, went to school there, picked up some public-appearance skills at Ryerson University (which is why he’s more at home at a podium than some of us reclusive schlubs and stammering poets), dabbled in journalism before turning to fiction full-time, married a wonderful woman named Carolyn Clink, and currently lives with her, his books, and a collection of hominid skulls in a penthouse condo in Mississauga.

  Want to know more? Ask Rob, if you see him at a science-fiction convention or writer’s conference (he goes to lots of them). As I said, he’s approachable. And so is his fiction—it’s among the most accessible SF being produced today, enjoyed with equal pleasure by hard-core fans and those who normally disdain the genre. Ignore his laurels and plaudits, which is what I meant by the smartass title of this introduction. But please don’t ignore this collection of his recent short stories: the work of one of the most interesting, outgoing, and thoughtful SF writers walking the earth today.

  Identity

  Theft

  Doubleday’s venerable Science Fiction Book Club, which normally only publishes reprint editions of books, recently experimented with doing its own original anthologies—special collections of brand-new stories that would only be available through them. One of the first such collections was an anthology edited by Mike Resnick called Down These Dark Spaceways. It contains six SF hard-boiled detective novellas by award-winning authors (Mike, me, Catherine Asaro, David Gerrold, Jack McDevitt, and Robert Reed).

  Why did Mike ask me to contribute? Well, my science fiction often has crime or mystery overtones; indeed, I won the Crime Writers of Canadas Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story of 1993 for my time-travel tale “Just Like Old Times,” and The Globe and Mail: Canada’s National Newspaper called my SF courtroom drama Illegal Alien “the best Canadian mystery of 1997.” My other SF/crime crossovers include the novels Golden Fleece, Fossil Hunter, The Terminal Experiment, Frameshift, Flashforward, Hominids, and Mindscan.

  My story for Down These Dark Spaceways follows. At 25,000 words, it’s by far the longest piece in this collection, so I’m leading off with it—but I’ll note up front that the last story in this book, “Biding Time,” is a sequel to it.

  To my delight, “Identity Theft” won Spain’s Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, which, at 6,000 euros, is the world’s largest cash prize for science-fiction writing. It was also a finalist for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora”), as well as for the top two awards in the science-fiction field: the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award (SF’s “People’s Choice” Award) and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award (SF’s “Academy Award”)—making “Identity Theft” the first (and so far only) original publication of the SFBC to ever be nominated for those awards.

  The door to my office slid open. “Hello,” I said, rising from my chair. “You must be my nine o’clock.” I said it as if I had a ten o’clock and an eleven o’clock, but I didn’t. The whole Martian economy was in a slump, and, even though I was the only private detective on Mars, this was the first new case I’d had in weeks.

  “Yes,” said a high, feminine voice. “I’m Cassandra Wilkins.”

  I let my eyes rove up and down her body. It was very good work; I wondered if she’d had quite so perfect a figure before transferring. People usually ordered replacement bodies that, at least in broad strokes, resembled their originals, but few could resist improving them. Men got buffer, women got curvier, and everyone modified their faces, removing asymmetries, wrinkles, and imperfections. If and when I transferred myself, I’d eliminate the gray in my blond hair and get a new nose that would look like my current one had before it’d been broken a couple of times.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Wilkins,” I said. “I’m Alexander Lomax. Please have a seat.”

  She was a little thing, no more than a hundred and fifty centimeters, and she was wearing a stylish silver-gray blouse and skirt, but no makeup or jewelry. I’d expected her to sit down with a catlike, fluid movement, given her delicate features, but she just sort of plunked herself into the chair. “Thanks,” she said. “I do hope you can help me, Mr. Lomax. I really do.”

  Rather than immediately sitting down myself, I went to the coffee maker. I filled my own mug, then opened my mouth to offer Cassandra a cup, but closed it before doing so; transfers, of course, didn’t drink. “What seems to be the problem?” I said, returning to my chair.

  It’s hard reading a transfer’s expression: the facial sculpting was usually very good, but the movements were somewhat restrained. “My husband—oh, my goodness, Mr. Lomax, I hate to even say this!” She looked down at her hands. “My husband…he’s disappeared.”

  I raised my eyebrows; it was pretty damned difficult for someone to disappear here. New Klondike was only three kilometers in diameter, all of it locked under the dome. “When did you last see him?”

  “Three days ago.”

  My office was small, but it did have a window. Through it, I could see one of the supporting arches that helped to hold up the transparent dome over New Klondike. Outside the dome, a sandstorm was raging, orange clouds obscuring the sun. Auxiliary lights on the arch compensated for that, but Martian daylight was never very bright. That’s a reason why even those who had a choice were reluctant to return to Earth: after years of only dim illumination, apparently the sun as seen from there was excruciating. “Is your husband, um, like you?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. We both came here looking to make our fortune, just like everyone else.”

  I shook my head. “I mean is he also a transfer?”

  “Oh, sorry. Yes, he is. In fact, we both just transferred.”

  “It’s an expensive procedure,” I said. “Could he have been skipping out on paying for it?”

  Cassandra shook her head. “No, no. Joshua found one or two nice specimens early on. He used the money from selling those pieces to buy the NewYou franchise here. That’s where we met—after I threw in the towel on sifting dirt, I got a job in sales there. Anyway, of course, we both got to transfer at cost.” She was actually wringing her synthetic hands. “Oh, Mr. Lomax, please help me! I don’t know what I’m going to do without my Joshua!”

  “You must love him a lot,” I said, watching her pretty face for more than just the pleasure of looking at it; I wanted to gauge her sincerity as she replied. After all, people often disappeared because things were bad at home, but spouses are rarely forthcoming about that.

  “Oh, I do!” said Cassandra. “I love him more than I can say. Joshua is a wonderful, wonderful man.” She looked at me with pleading eyes. “You have to help me get him back. You just have to!”

  I looked down at my coffee mug; steam was rising from it. “Have you tried the police?”

  Cassandra made a sound that I guessed was supposed to be a snort: it had the right roughness, but was dry as Martian sand. “Yes. They—oh, I hate to speak ill of anyone, Mr. Lomax! Believe me, it’s not my way, but—well, there’s no ducking it, is there? They were useless. Just totally useless.”

  I nodded slightly; i
t’s a story I heard often enough—I owed most of what little livelihood I had to the local cops’ incompetence and indifference. “Who did you speak to?”

  “A—a detective, I guess he was; he didn’t wear a uniform. I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Red hair, and—”

  “That’s Mac,” I said. She looked puzzled, so I said his full name. “Dougal McCrae.”

  “McCrae, yes,” said Cassandra. She shuddered a bit, and she must have noticed my surprised reaction to that. “Sorry,” she said. “I just didn’t like the way he looked at me.”

  I resisted running my eyes over her body just then; I’d already done so, and I could remember what I’d seen. I guess her original figure hadn’t been like this one; if it had, she’d certainly be used to admiring looks from men by now.

  “I’ll have a word with McCrae,” I said. “See what’s already been done. Then I’ll pick up where the cops left off.”

  “Would you?” Her green eyes seemed to dance. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Lomax! You’re a good man—I can tell!”

  I shrugged a little. “I can show you two ex-wives and a half-dozen bankers who’d disagree.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t say things like that! You are a good man, I’m sure of it. Believe me, I have a sense about these things. You’re a good man, and I know you won’t let me down.”

  Naïve woman; she’d probably thought the same thing about her husband—until he’d run off. “Now, what can you tell me about your husband? Joshua, is it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. His full name is Joshua Connor Wilkins—and it’s Joshua, never just Josh, thank you very much.” I nodded. Guys who were anal about being called by their full first names never bought a round, in my experience. Maybe it was a good thing that this clown was gone.

  “Yes,” I said. “Go on.” I didn’t have to take notes, of course. My office computer was recording everything, and would extract whatever was useful into a summary file for me.

  Cassandra ran her synthetic lower lip back and forth beneath her artificial upper teeth, thinking for a moment. Then: “Well, he was born in Calgary, Alberta, and he’s thirty-eight years old. He moved to Mars seven mears ago.” Mears were Mars-years; about double the length of those on Earth.