Red Planet Blues

TWENTY-NINE

I’d have enjoyed watching the descent stage being hauled inside by the tractor—I don’t care how big a boy gets, he still loves watching large machines at work. But I’d seen the process before. The giant south airlock was over 300 meters wide and fifty deep. If a ship could fit in—the Skookum Jim barely would have squeezed in sideways—it could be brought inside the dome; if it didn’t, there was no other way to get it in. The whole process of filling or draining the lock took about an hour.

I headed back to NewYou, grabbing some synthetic sushi on the way. I got there just as Pickover was coming out of the workroom. His shirt still had a rip in it, but I presumed his chest was repaired, and he was no longer limping. I let him settle up with Fernandez—at this rate, Rory was going to have to sell a pentapod or two to stay afloat. And then I turned to Fernandez. “Can we take a crack at Dazzling Don now?”

“Absolutely,” he replied.

Just then, Mac came through the front door. Mercifully, Huxley was no longer with him; Mac himself was carrying the disruptor disk under one arm—maybe he was afraid that Trace wasn’t really dead.

“Okay,” Fernandez said generally to the room. “Come along.”

I’d assumed Pickover was going to join us, but he waved me off and went to have a word with Miss Takahashi. Maybe he wanted to try his luck—or maybe, as someone who had bought and paid for immortality, the notion of attending the autopsy of a transfer was too unsettling. In any event, only Mac and I followed Fernandez into the workroom. Given his massive arms, I had no doubt Horatio had been able to carry Trace here on his own. In fact, I suspected he’d done it as soon as we’d left; having a fried transfer in the middle of his showroom probably wasn’t good for business.

Dead humans always looked smaller than they had in life, but for whatever reason that effect didn’t apply to transfers. Doubtless Fernandez was used to dressing and undressing transfers—people might be born naked, but no one wanted to pop into a new body that wasn’t wearing clothes. He undid the buttons on Trace’s shirt, exposing a chest that was surprisingly doughy. I found myself thinking the guy should have worked out—but then realized how ridiculous that was.

Fernandez got a small cutting laser and aimed it at the top of the chest, just below the Adam’s apple. With practiced efficiency, he played the beam downward. I’d once seen a biological autopsy and had been impressed by all the blood that had spilled out when the chest was opened, but there was none of that here, although the melting plastiskin gave off an odor like burnt almonds.

Fernandez put on blue latex gloves, and as he pulled the chest flaps apart, I could see why: the melted skin was tacky, and some of it stuck to the gloves.

Beneath the skin was a layer of foam rubber, and beneath that was a skeleton that had the purplish pink sheen of highly polished alloy. There was nothing corresponding to organs inside the chest. Indeed, a lot of it seemed to be empty space.

Fernandez got a tool—like pliers, but with oddly shaped jaws—and he attached it to one of a pair of cylinders positioned more or less where the lungs should have been. The tool seemed to unlock something; there was a loud click, and the cylinder came free. Fernandez pulled the cylinder out and placed it on the table next to the body. The cylinder was covered with lubricant, which he wiped off with a green cloth, and then he got a large magnifying glass with a light attached and looked at the metal casing. “This is a ballast unit,” he said. “Gives heft to the torso. We don’t advertise the fact, but they’ve got serial numbers on them.”

He said the word “Keely,” then spoke a string of numbers into the air.

His computer responded in a pleasant female voice. “Transfer completed—” and it named a date two years ago.

“Where was the transfer done?” Fernandez asked.

“The body was assembled here,” said Keely, “at this NewYou franchise.”

“That was before I started working here,” Fernandez said to me. He spoke to Keely again. “And what’s this person’s name?”

“Unknown,” said Keely.

Fernandez frowned. “There has to be a record of the transference,” he said—but whether he was telling me, or reminding his computer, I didn’t know. He tried rephrasing his question. “Who came in for a transfer that day?”

“Nobody.”

I frowned, thinking of what Trace had said: “I’m nobody.”

“There had to be a source mind copied into this body,” Fernandez said into the air. “Whose mind was scanned that day?”

“No one’s.”

“Then how was the transfer made?”

“I don’t know,” said Keely.

“You’re sure it was done here?” Mac asked.

“That ballast unit was taken from our stock,” the computer replied.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said, looking at Fernandez. “You said the face was off-the-rack, so to speak. What about the rest of the body? Did it have any special modifications?”

The female voice answered. “Option package five selected: superior strength. No other modifications to standard body.”

“He said he was hired muscle,” I said. “I guess he was. But who hired him?”

“Who indeed?” asked Mac. He looked at Fernandez. “What do you do with a dead transfer? A funeral for a transfer seems like an oxymoron.”

“Yeah,” said Fernandez. “Transfers do get destroyed every once in a while, of course, but not often; I don’t think we’ve had more than a couple of cases here on Mars.” He paused. “Well, with no record of who transferred into this body, there’s no way to contact next of kin. I guess I’ll just strip him down for spare parts.” He looked at the body stretched out before him. “Although I gotta say, I rarely need any so big.”

When Mac and I went back through the sliding door into the showroom, I was surprised that not only was Pickover gone, but so was Reiko Takahashi.

Fernandez, who came out a moment later, was angry; he didn’t like that his shop had been left unattended. Then again, it wasn’t as if anyone was going to steal a transfer body; there was nothing you could do with one until it had had a consciousness moved into it, and that was hardly a do-it-yourself affair.

I asked my phone to get hold of Pickover. He didn’t answer, which could mean he was in trouble, or it could mean he was indeed getting it on with Miss Takahashi; even I had eventually learned that you don’t answer your phone when you’re in bed with a lady.

Reiko had been anxious to see her grandfather’s body, but I doubted Pickover would go to the descent stage without me, and only teenagers went to the shipyard to make out. I looked around the showroom for any sign of a struggle; there couldn’t have been a loud one or we’d have heard it in the next room. But there was no indication of anything amiss—excepting for the missing miss.

I looked at Fernandez, who was using his own phone, presumably to call Reiko. “No answer?” I said.

“No.” He shook the phone off. “She wouldn’t just disappear. She’s not like that.”

“Alex,” said Detective McCrae. “What’s going on?”

I took a deep breath; I needed to give him something so he wouldn’t shut me down. “Reiko Takahashi is Dennis O’Reilly’s granddaughter.”

Fernandez’s eyeballs looked like they were going to pop out. I went on. “Dennis O’Reilly didn’t die when his ship burned up on re-entry. Rather, he was marooned here by Simon Weingarten. Reiko had a hard copy of a diary written by her grandfather, which he transmitted back to Earth before he was marooned, but she loaned it to Lakshmi Chatterjee, who is the writer-in-residence here in town.”

Mac sounded incredulous. “We have a writer-in-residence?”

“That’s what I said! They have to advertise these things better.”

“So, this Lakshmi person has the diary?” asked Mac.

“No. Not anymore. It’s somewhere safe—but that big bruiser, Trace, thought I had it; that’s why he broke into my apartment.” I turned to Fernandez. “I was told during the Wilkins case that there were no security cameras upstairs.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“But do you have them down on this floor?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Can we see a playback?”

“This way.” He led us through the sliding door again; beyond the workshop there was a small office. He turned on a wall monitor and spoke to Keely. “Camera two playback, quad speed, starting thirty minutes ago.”

The camera was obviously mounted above the cash desk and showed the transparent door that led outside. The door slid open and—well, the expression “I thought I saw a ghost” perhaps didn’t apply when a transfer was involved, but there, in the doorway, illuminated rather dramatically from behind, was Trace—or rather an exact duplicate. There wasn’t just one Moose; there were Meese.

“Well,” said Fernandez, “it is an off-the-shelf face. Keely, normal speed.”

I’d been so intent on the mug’s mug I hadn’t initially noticed that he was packing heat. But Miss Takahashi clearly did, for she froze in the video. Moose the Second rapidly closed the distance between him and her and signaled for her to be quiet.

Pickover had initially been oblivious, but he soon spotted the man and then the gun. The big transfer couldn’t do much to Pickover, but he could kill Reiko, and Pickover clearly realized that. He looked back at the door to the room we’d been standing in, as if wondering whether to call for help, but after a second he decided against it. The camera had recorded audio, too, but none of them said a word. Pickover was flexing his legs ever so slightly; now that his ankle was fixed, I think he was trying to decide if he could leap across the room and tackle the other transfer.

But just then the door slid open again, and a third transfer with Dazzling Don Hutchison’s face came in. That was enough to make Pickover think better of trying to be a hero; either one of the giants could rip his metal skull off his titanium spine. It was galling that all of this had been going on just meters away from me. The transfer who had entered first gestured with his gun, and Reiko headed out the door, followed by Pickover.

Mac was already on his phone, calling the police station to see if the strange party—two giant twins, a transferee paleontologist, and a hot little biological—had been seen by any of the public security cameras, but, of course, most of those had long ago been smashed.

“Who’d want to kidnap Professor Pickover?” Fernandez asked.

“Maybe they wanted Miss Takahashi instead,” Mac said.

“Why would anyone kidnap her?” asked Fernandez.

“Ransom?” I suggested. “If they knew she’s Denny O’Reilly’s granddaughter, they might have figured there was money to be had.” I turned to Fernandez. “Did you know?”

He crossed his massive arms in front of his chest. “Are you accusing me?”

“No. No. I’m just asking. You looked surprised when I mentioned it.”

“I was surprised. I mean, she’s Japanese; he was Irish. I’d never even suspected.”

“Right,” I said. “I doubt anyone did. But she told me.” I walked closer to the wall. “And she told me when I was standing right about there.” I pointed to a spot in the image, which now showed the empty showroom. “Which means a record of her telling me was made, by the same security camera that made this picture. You could have reviewed it and found out.”

“I had no reason to go over the security recordings,” Fernandez said.

“Does anybody else have access to them?” asked Mac. “Any of the other employees able to call them up?”

“Well, the Wilkinses could, of course—the previous owners. But Cassandra’s dead, and Joshua has gone off to be a fossil hunter.”

“Anyone else?” asked Mac.

“Reiko has access, too, but she’d hardly be spying on herself. None of the other employees can unlock the security footage, though, and I swear I didn’t know who Reiko’s grandfather was.”

Mac pulled out a handheld sensing device and headed into the showroom. Transfers didn’t leave behind DNA, but they might still shed cloth fibers or have unusual dirt in their footprints that could be useful. While he busied himself with that, I gestured toward the staircase. “Horatio,” I said, “there’s something I want to see up in the scanning room.”

Fernandez shrugged. “Okay.” I let him lead the way to the second-floor landing. He went into the left-hand room, and I followed him, closed the door behind me, pulled out my gun, and, as he turned around to face me, I aimed it at the middle of his chest.