Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

“Thirty years ago, just after the dome went up,” said Mac. “Ship arrived here bringing a load of stampeders in hibernation, plus their supplies. Cargo was being offloaded, but one of the carrying cases had become damaged in transit—wasn’t anchored properly in the hold, I guess. The worker who’d been unloading the ship could see inside, and recognized the objects within as land mines.” Mac pointed at the wall, and a portion of an image expanded, showing a flat disk like the one Pickover had brought to my office, but in pristine condition. “Same kind of device, right?”

I nodded.

“It was in one of the last cases offloaded from the ship,” Mac said. “All of the other cargo had been collected by that point. Could well have been more of the same kind of mines in other cases, but no way to tell—and no record of who collected them. And, of course, no one ever claimed the three mines that had been found.”

I nodded. “What’s the status of that ship?”

He made motions in the air, and the wall changed to show the answer. “The B. Traven,” he said. “Decommissioned in—no, check that. It’s still in service, but under a new name, the Kathryn Denning. Owned and operated by InnerSystem Lines, a division of Slapcoff Interplanetary.”

The ship’s original name rang a faint bell, but I couldn’t place it. “Can I get a list of who was on it when it arrived with the land mines?”

I expected Mac to want his palm greased, but he was in a generous mood; I guess his daughter’s appointment had gone well. “Sure.” He gestured at the wall some more, and a passenger manifest appeared.

I scanned the names, checking under V and D, and even W, for a Willem Van Dyke, but none was listed. Well, this clown hardly would have been the first person to come to Mars under an alias. “How many names are there?” I asked.

“One hundred and thirty-two,” Mac’s computer said helpfully; it always amused me that it had a brogue as thick as Mac’s own.

“How many males?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Can you download the full list into my tab—males and females?” I said to Mac.

He spoke a command to his computer, and it was done.

A gender change was possible, of course, but Rory himself would doubtless tell me that the simplest hypothesis was preferable, so I’d start by assuming there were only seventy-one suspects—if one could apply the word “only” to so many. I had my work cut out for me.

I’d returned to my office and was leaning back in my chair, feet once more up on my desk. Since I wasn’t expecting anyone, I had my shoes and socks off, letting the dogs air out. I’d copied the seventy-one male names from the B. Traven ’s passenger manifest onto my wall monitor, replacing my usual wallpaper, which looked like, well, wallpaper—alternating forest green and caramel stripes, like in the house Wanda and I had lived in all those years ago back in Detroit. It’d be too much to have a picture of her on display, but the pattern subtly reminded me of her, and I liked having it in my peripheral vision.

No distinction was made between biologicals and transfers on the passenger manifest, but the B. Traven had completed this voyage back when uploading into an artificial body cost, as the saying goes, the Earth. Anyone who could afford to transfer back then wouldn’t have been rushing to Mars to try to make a fortune; he or she already had one. So it was a safe bet that all these men had been flesh and blood.

In the intervening years, thirty-two had gone back to Earth, and thirteen others had died; neither condition exonerated them from really being Willem Van Dyke, but it did make it hard to question them in the former case and impossible in the latter. And so I started with the twenty-six who were still here. One name immediately leapt out at me: Stuart Berling; I’d interviewed him during the Wilkins case. He was the full-time fossil hunter who had transferred the same day Joshua Wilkins supposedly had—the guy who’d opted to have his new face look like holovid star Krikor Ajemian. I’d told him I worked for NewYou’s head office when I’d questioned him then; he’d been the first transfer to pass my patented where-do-you-keep-your-screwdrivers game—the Turning Test, if you will.

I decided to start by speaking to him, so I put my footwear back on. When I’d been a kid, I’d thought “gumshoe” referred to getting chewing gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe because you’d been skulking in unsavory neighborhoods; it actually refers to the soft-soled shoes favored by those in my line of work, because they make it easier to follow people without being heard. My pair was taupe, a color name I’d learned from the box the shoes had come in.

I opened my office door, hoofed it to the hovertram stop, rode over to Third Avenue and Seventh Circle, went over to Berling’s redstone, pressed the illuminated door buzzer, and—

And wow.

“Why, it’s—it’s Mr. Lomax, isn’t it?” said the voice from the perfect bee-stung lips on the flawless heart-shaped face.

I blinked. “Lacie, is—is that you?”

She smiled, showing teeth as white as the polar caps. “Guilty.”

Berling’s wife had been a plain Jane who’d looked every one of her sixty-odd years when I’d last seen her. But, well, if he was going to upload into a beefcake holo star’s likeness, it did make sense that she’d opt for this. My fondness for old 2D movies made me think first of Vivien Leigh, but I’d be surprised if there were more than three people under the dome who knew who she had been. It came to me that Lacie’s new face—and her supernova-hot body—had been patterned after that of Kayla Filina, who had starred as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in last year’s horrid remake of The Maltese Falcon.

“You look stunning,” I said.

Lacie spun around, a perfect gyroscopically balanced pirouette. “Don’t I, though?” she replied, flashing her pearly whites again. “Won’t you come in?”

She stepped aside, I crossed into the townhouse, and the door slid shut behind me. “Is your husband home?” I asked. As before, the living room was filled with worktables covered with hunks of reddish rock.

“No. He’s outside the dome, working his claim.” She smiled broadly. “He won’t be back for hours.”

“Ah. I was hoping to ask him some questions.”

She was wearing a light blue dress that could have been painted on—and perhaps was. Its plunging neckline revealed the tops of two large perfect breasts. “What about me?” she said, placing exquisite hands on rounded hips. “You work for NewYou, right? Quality assurance? Well, I just transferred. Don’t you have some questions for me?”

I had thought I’d have to come clean with Berling to get answers about his trip out from Earth on the B. Traven all those mears ago, but one doesn’t blow a good cover unnecessarily. “I can see,” I said, “that we did a magnificent job.”

She tipped her head down, appraising her own body. “Oh, it looks great. Exactly what I was hoping for. But I do want to be sure that everything is functioning properly.” She looked back up at me, aquamarine eyes beneath long dark lashes. “You know, while the work is still under warranty.”

“Surely you and Mr. Berling have, um, tested things out.”

“Yes, yes, of course—but he transferred first. I haven’t yet had an opportunity to, ah, put this new body through its paces with a biological.” She lifted her perfect eyebrows, and her forehead didn’t crease at all as she did so. “It’s like I’m a virgin again.”