Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

“Looks that way.”

“But… no, no. That’s… why, that’s illegal. Bootleg copies of human beings—my God, Lomax, it’s obscene!”

“I’m going to go see if I can find him,” I said.

“It,” said Pickover forcefully.

“What?”

“It. Not him. I’m the only ‘him’—the only real Rory Pickover.” He shuddered. “My God, Lomax, I feel so… so violated! A stolen, active copy of my mind! It’s the ultimate invasion of privacy…”

“That may be,” I said. “But the bootleg is trying to tell you something. He— it —gave Wilkins the passphrase and then tacked some extra words onto it, in order to get a message to you.”

“But I don’t recognize those extra words,” said Pickover, sounding exasperated.

“Do they mean anything to you? Do they suggest anything?”

Pickover re-read the text on the screen. “I can’t imagine what,” he said, “unless… no, no, I’d never think up a code like that.”

“You obviously just did think of it. What’s the code?”

Pickover was quiet for a moment, as if deciding if the thought was worth giving voice. Then: “Well, New Klondike is circular in layout, right? And it consists of concentric rings of buildings. Half past eight—that would be between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, no? And seven courses—in the Seventh Circle out from the center? Maybe the damned bootleg is trying to draw our attention to a location, a specific place here in town.”

“The Seventh Circle, off Eighth Avenue,” I said. “That’s a rough area. I go to a gym near there.”

“The shipyard,” said Pickover. “Isn’t it there, too?”

“Yeah.” Dry-dock work was so much easier in a shirtsleeve environment, and, in the early days, repairing and servicing spaceships had been a major business under the dome. I started walking toward the door. “I’m going to investigate.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Pickover.

I shook my head. He would doubtless be more hindrance than help. “It’s too dangerous. I should go alone.”

Pickover looked for a moment like he was going to protest, but then he nodded. “All right. But if you find another me…”

“Yes?” I said. “What would you like me to do?”

Pickover gazed at me with pleading eyes. “Erase it. Destroy it.” He shuddered again. “I never want to see the damned thing.”

Ihad to get some sleep—damn, but sometimes I do wish I were a transfer—so I took the hovertram out to my apartment. My place was on Fifth Avenue, which was a great address in New York but a lousy one in New Klondike, especially out near the rim; it was mostly home to people who had tried and failed at fossil hunting, hence its nickname “Sad Sacks Fifth Avenue.”

I let myself have six hours—Mars hours, admittedly, which were slightly longer than Earth ones—then I headed out to the old shipyard. The sun was just coming up as I arrived there. The sky through the dome was pink in the east and purple in the west.

Some active maintenance and repair work was still done on spaceships here, but most of these hulks were no longer spaceworthy and had been abandoned. Any one of them would make a good hideout, I thought; spaceships were shielded against radiation, making it hard to scan through their hulls to see what was going on inside.

The shipyard was a large field holding vessels of various sizes and shapes. Most were streamlined—even Mars’s tenuous atmosphere required that. Some were squatting on tail fins; some were lying on their bellies; some were supported by articulated legs. I tried every hatch I could see on these craft, but, so far, they all had their airlocks sealed tightly shut.

Finally, I came to a monstrous abandoned spaceliner—a great hull, some three hundred meters long, fifty meters wide, and a dozen meters high. The name Skookum Jim was still visible in chipped paint near the bow, which is the part I came across first, and the slogan “Mars or Bust!” had been splashed across the metal surface in a paint that had survived the elements better than the liner’s name. I walked a little farther alongside the hull, looking for a hatch, until—

Yes! I finally understood what a fossil hunter felt when he at last turned up a perfectly preserved rhizomorph. There was an outer airlock door and it was open. The other door, inside, was open, too. I stepped through the chamber, entering the ship proper. There were stands for holding space suits but the suits themselves were long gone.

I walked to the far end of the room and found another door—one of those submarine-style ones with a locking wheel in the center. This one was closed; I figured it would probably have been sealed shut at some point, but I tried the wheel anyway, and damned if it didn’t spin freely, disengaging the locking bolts. I pulled the door open, then took the flashlight off my belt and aimed it into the interior. It looked safe, so I stepped through. The door was on spring-loaded hinges; as soon as I let go of it, it closed behind me.

The air was dry and had a faint odor of decay to it. I headed down the corridor, the pool of illumination from my flashlight going in front of me, and—

A squealing noise. I swung around, and the beam from my flashlight caught the source before it scurried away: a large brown rat, its eyes two tiny red coals in the light. People had been trying to get rid of the rats—and cockroaches and silverfish and other vermin that had somehow made it here from Earth—for mears.

I turned back around and headed deeper into the ship. The floor wasn’t quite level: it dipped a bit to—to starboard, they’d call it—and I also felt that I was gaining elevation as I walked along. The ship’s floor had no carpeting; it was just bare, smooth metal. Oily water pooled along the starboard side; a pipe must have ruptured at some point. Another rat scurried by up ahead; I wondered what they ate here, aboard the dead hulk of the ship.

I thought I should check in with Pickover—let him know where I was. I activated my phone, but the display said it was unable to connect. Of course: the radiation shielding in the spaceship’s hull kept signals from getting out.

It was growing awfully cold. I held my flashlight straight up in front of my face and saw that my breath was now coming out in visible clouds. I paused and listened. There was a steady dripping sound: condensation, or another leak. I continued along, sweeping the flashlight beam left and right in good detective fashion as I did so.

There were doors at intervals along the corridor—the automatic sliding kind you usually find aboard spaceships. Most ships used hibernation for bringing people to Mars, but this was an old-fashioned spaceliner with cabins; the passengers and crew would have been awake for the whole eight months or more of the journey out.

Most of the door panels had been pried open, and I shined my flashlight into each of the revealed rooms. Some were tiny passenger quarters, some were storage, one was a medical facility—all the equipment had been removed, but the examining beds betrayed the room’s function. They were welded down firmly—not worth the effort for scavengers to salvage, I guess.

I checked yet another set of quarters, then came to a closed door, the first one I’d seen along this hallway.

I pushed the open button but nothing happened; the ship’s electrical system was dead. There was an emergency handle recessed into the door’s thickness. I could have used three hands just then: one to hold my flashlight, one to hold my revolver, and one to pull on the handle. I tucked the flashlight into my right armpit, held my gun with my right hand, and yanked on the recessed handle with my left.