Red Planet Blues

FORTY-SIX

Rory wanted to go home, and I could hardly blame him for being anxious to finally get there. After all, this version of him hadn’t been to his own place since he’d been created. He had woken up in a primitive robotic body, had endured torture aboard the Skookum Jim, had upgraded that body to assume the identity of Joshua Wilkins, and had retreated for the past couple of months out onto the planitia to look for fossils, all without ever once seeing his own place. And so we parted company at NewYou. I headed to Gully’s for a workout, then went to my apartment—and slept clear through to 10:00 a.m. the next morning.

When I awoke, there was voice mail from Ernie Gargalian, requesting my presence for a noon meeting at Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.

I got there bang on time; one doesn’t keep Mars’s Mister Big waiting. I was surprised to find two other people already inside: Reiko Takahashi and Dr. Rory Pickover. Reiko was leaning against one of the display tables but looked no worse for wear; Ernie, of course, had gotten her the best medical treatment when his plane had arrived back at the dome—no Windermere Clinic butchery for Denny O’Reilly’s granddaughter.

“Ah, Alex, my dear boy, good to see you!” Ernie said. “Come in, come in!” He gestured expansively. “Can I get you something? I have a hundred-year-old Scotch you might like.”

“Maybe later,” I replied.

“Later,” agreed Ernie. “Yes, yes—propriety, my boy! One doesn’t start business with alcohol; one concludes it. We’ll save it for a toast.”

Ernie’s showroom didn’t have any seats in it, but he led us to his opulent office, a room I’d never been in before. It had three wine red chairs that I imagined were upholstered with real leather. Ernie took the one behind the wide, ornately carved desk. Reiko took another, crossing her lovely legs. I took the final one. Rory, of course, could stand comfortably for hours.

“Alex, you’ve created a problem for me,” Ernie said, “and we need to sort it out.”

“A problem?” I repeated.

“Yes, my boy, yes. You’ve led me to the promised land; you’ve shown me Denny and Simon’s mother lode. Riches beyond imagining, one might think.”

“And that’s a problem how?”

“Back on Earth,” Ernie said, pointing vaguely at the sky, “they synthesize gold, they manufacture diamonds, they replicate rubies. Those things have no value—virtually no material object does. But actual fossils of extraterrestrial life—ah, those collectors will pay dearly for! And why, my dear Alex, why?”

“Their provenance,” I said.

Ernie’s fat face exploded in laughter. He looked at Pickover. “Did you hear him, my good professor? ‘Provenance,’ he said. Such a highfalutin word for him to know!” He turned his attention back to me. “Yes, absolutely—the fact that they’re demonstrably genuine, that they haven’t been synthesized or replicated, yes, indeed, my boy, that’s one reason they’re so valuable. But there’s another criterion. After all, you can’t make any money selling genuine moon rocks anymore, even though their provenance is easy to establish; it’s hard to even give them away. But in days of yore, they used to be the most valuable stones on Earth. And do you know why that was?”

I had an idea, but you learn more by letting people tell stories their way rather than trying to beat them to the punch. “No.”

“Because between 1972, when the last Apollo astronaut walked on the moon, until humans finally returned there, there were only 382 kilograms of moon rocks on Earth. Scarcity, my boy! Supply and demand! There were tons of diamonds then, but—well, my lad, I’ll say it because I know you’re thinking it! You know that surface suit of mine? The purple one? You could fit all the Apollo booty into it. And so of course those stones were highly valued.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay.”

“But it’s not okay, dear Alex. Not at all. I now know where a huge cache of wonderfully preserved Martian fossils is located—the best of the best, and not just quality, but quantity! I simply can’t reveal that fact to the public. Oh, if I started selling a lot of material from there, yes, for a short time, I might realize spectacular prices, but soon Alpha fossils would be ubiquitous, and not just directly via me but on the secondary market, too. Alphas will be a drug on the market—everybody selling alphas; there will be alphas everywhere.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

Ernie smiled, his grapefruit cheeks moving up as he did so. “That’s the question! And the answer is this, my boy: we’re going to curate the Alpha. Dr. Pickover here will get to select the specimens to work on, studying them, scanning them, learning from them, describing them for science. He works at a slow pace; I know that, and that’s fine. And when he’s finally done with each specimen, he’ll release it to me, and I will bring it to market; we’ll find an appreciative buyer. And Miss Takahashi, here, the descendant of my dear old friend Denny, will share in the profits; I will send her a cut from every sale.”

“But… but that could take years.”

“By Gad, Alex, yes, it might! But so what? We not only live in an age of material abundance, my boy, we live in an age of immortality! Dr. Pickover has already made the transition, and surely none of the rest of us intend to ultimately join his fossils in the ground! I’m the oldest one in this room by a good piece, but I’ve just barely begun my life! And, as any good businessperson knows, an asset that pays steady dividends over time is far more valuable than one consumed quickly.”

I looked up at Pickover. “And you’re okay with this, Rory?”

Rory shrugged a bit. “It’s not ideal; not even close. But I’ve got the site map that Weingarten and O’Reilly made, and Ernie here has been plugged into the black market for fossils since the very beginning; he’s going to help me locate the collectors who have those old specimens. Now that Willem Van Dyke is gone, Ernie is just about the only lead I have for ever getting access to those fossils and describing them in the scientific literature. And I do get to scan and describe every new specimen that’s excavated.”

I turned to Reiko Takahashi. “And what about you? This works for you?”

She nodded her lovely head. “It’ll do.”

“But what about Lakshmi?” I said. “She knows where the Alpha is, too.”

“My dear boy, please don’t worry about that. She’s no longer a problem.”

“She’s going back to Earth?” I asked.

Ernie’s eyebrows climbed toward his slicked-back hair. “So unfortunate. She really shouldn’t have resisted arrest.”

I frowned; she hadn’t.

“Of course, the body will be shipped back,” he said. He tilted his fat head. “I hear our next writer-in-residence will be a playwright.”

I looked over at Pickover, but it was hard to read a transfer’s expression.

“And so that just leaves you, Mr. Double-X.” Ernie shook his massive head. “I knew Stuart Berling, as you know—he was selling his fossils through me. Found some fabulous specimens not that long ago, and they made him a rich man, but he couldn’t bring himself to return to Earth—that nasty business aboard the B. Traven had scarred him for life. And you’re in much the same situation, aren’t you, my boy? Berling couldn’t return to Earth and neither can you; his reasons were psychological and yours are legal, but the effect is the same, isn’t it?”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “And your point is?”

“My point is that for all this to work, the Alpha will still need protection—and nothing so clumsy as land mines. It will need someone to look after it. And that someone can be you. Insane wealth will do you no good, not here, not on Mars, but you’ll make enough to have your life-support tax always paid, and your tab at The Bent Chisel always settled, and, when the time comes, you’ll be able to afford to have yourself transferred into the finest of bodies.” He raised a beefy hand. “It won’t be full-time work, of course; you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to ply your usual trade. But it will keep you nicely in the black for many mears to come.”

“And you think that’ll be enough for me?” I asked.

“My dear Mr. Double-X, I would not presume to speak for you. But it strikes me as win-win all around. What do you say?”

I thought about the four fossil slabs I’d jackhammered out of the Alpha and then hidden outside the dome. But my own little pieces of the stuff that dreams are made of had waited billions of years—they could wait a while longer… perhaps, even, until the day when I might be able to go back home.

And so I looked at each of the faces in turn: at the broad countenance of Gargantuan Gargalian, who had always known how to get what he wanted; at the exquisite, delicate features of Reiko Takahashi, who had perhaps gotten what I had wanted; and at the inquisitive visage of Rory Pickover, who would walk naked into a live volcano if he thought he could learn something that no other man knew.

I turned back to Ernie. “I want my own Mars buggy. My own surface suit.”

“Of course,” said Ernie. “Consider it done.”

“And I need a new gun.”

“Naturally.”

“And my own broadband disruptor.”

Ernie laughed heartily. “Alex, my boy, that’s thinking ahead, by Gad, it is. Yes, certainly, we’ll get you one of those, too.”

“All right,” I said, nodding slowly. “We’ll drink on it. Get that Scotch.”

Because of speed-of-light delays, it’s impossible to interact in real time with people on Earth. You can’t chat with them by video; you can’t speak with them on the phone; you can’t swap instant messages. And so I hadn’t spoken to Wanda—really spoken to her—in the ten years I’d been on Mars.

I didn’t regret my choice, I didn’t regret it at all. Wanda had done the only thing she could do. That abusing bastard had to be stopped, and she had stopped him, simply, cleanly, and for all time. But when you love someone, you look after them—and I looked after her. I took the rap for her, and, rather than face decades in jail, I escaped to a sealed dome on a red, barren rock; sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference.

Despite everything that had gone down these last few days, a man needs routines in his life, he needs order, he needs something to hold on to. Every week—every seven Earth days—I would record a video message for Wanda and pay to have it transmitted to Earth: Howard Slapcoff got his fee whether you were coming or going, whether you were living or dying, or whether you were just one of the living dead. I always found it awkward making the videos; it wasn’t like me to talk about what was going on in my life. But a few days after she received mine, she’d send one of her own in reply, and when I got those, when I saw how happy she was, how at peace, how full of joy, it made everything worthwhile; it made me, at least for a time, feel alive.

And so I sat in the chair in my office, the wallpaper displaying the alternating green and caramel stripes of our house from all those years ago, and I straightened my collar, patted down my hair, cleared my throat, activated my camera, and spoke to it. “Hello, sis…”