Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

It’s at moments like this that a man’s morals are truly tested, and I asked myself the question that needed asking: could I actually bill Pickover for the time I spent making love with Lacie?

She took my hand, and I let her lead me to the bedroom. If you keep in good shape, sex on Mars is amazing, thanks to the low gravity. Zero-g, I’m told, is no fun: it’s too easy to send your partner spinning across the room. But a third of a gee—well, that’s just perfect. You can do acrobatics that put Earth-based porn stars to shame. And it’s even better if, as Berling and his wife did, you have some handles mounted on the ceiling above the bed.

This wasn’t my first time with a transfer, but Lacie was the best-looking one I’d ever been with, and she was a very generous lover. I’d heard it said that among biologicals, beautiful women got cheated on more often than plain ones, because the plain ones did all the things to keep their partners happy that the beauties wouldn’t. Lacie still had the mind of someone who had had to work to interest men—and the body of someone who could have anyone she wanted. It was a very appealing combination.

When we were done—and it was a good thing that Berling was gone for hours—I had a sonic shower, and she buffed her plastic skin with a chamois.

I couldn’t question her about Berling’s arrival on Mars without telling her I wasn’t with NewYou. I doubted she’d really be upset, but given that she might be able to pull my head off, I didn’t want to risk it. Instead, I simply asked her to have him give me a call when he got home. But just as I was leaving, he called her. I stood out of view and listened. He’d had a good day out by the Reinhardt dunes, he said, and was heading to Ernie Gargalian’s fossil dealership to sell his finds. I hadn’t seen Gargantuan Gargalian for a few weeks, and so I made my way over there to intercept Berling; it was more seemly, I thought, to question him somewhere other than where I’d just banged his wife.

The sun was setting over Syrtis Major way, and the sky was growing dim. But Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe stayed open after dark every night: that’s when the prospectors came back inside with their booty, and many wanted to sell immediately rather than storing fossils overnight in their homes and inviting thieves to come get them.

The walk over was pleasant—and not just because I was still grinning from my encounter with the now-lovely Lacie. Walking on Mars was virtually effortless, as long as you didn’t have to wear a surface suit.

Ernie’s shop was in the center of town near NKPD headquarters, which said a lot about who was really in charge here. “Mr. Double-X!” he proclaimed with his usual precise enunciation as I entered. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Ernie Gargalian was sixty-five and hugely fat, with man boobs that were only perky thanks to Mars’s low gravity. His thinning silver hair was slicked straight back from his forehead, and his pale face had been puffed out enough to fill in most of the wrinkles. His brown eyes were close together and deeply set.

“Hey, Ernie,” I said. “Has Stuart Berling been in yet?”

“Today? No. I haven’t seen him all week.”

“Well, he’s on his way here. Mind if I wait?”

Gargantuan spread his giant arms, encompassing his showroom. “Fossils are fragile things, Alex. I don’t want any rough stuff in the shop.”

“Never fear, Ernie, never fear. Besides, Berling has transferred—and I’m not fool enough to get into a fistfight with someone who’s presumably had mods for surface work.”

“Oh, right,” said Gargalian. “He’s got that actor’s face now, doesn’t he? I don’t hold with that.” He made a circular motion in front of his own round visage. “If I were ever to transfer, I’d want to go on looking exactly as I always have. You aren’t the same person if you change your appearance.”

Ernie liked to call me “Mr. Double-X” because both my names ended in that letter, but he’d need an artificial body in Triple-X at least, and I doubted such things were stock items. But I didn’t say that aloud; some jokes are best kept to yourself, I’d learned—after two broken noses.

A prospector came in, a woman in her thirties, biological, pulling a surface wagon with big springy wheels. Little wagons on Earth were traditionally red—I’d had one such myself as a kid—but they tended to get lost outside here if they were painted that color. This one was fluorescent green, and it was overflowing with gray and pink hunks of rock, including one on top that I recognized, thanks to Pickover’s little lesson, as a counter slab.

Our town’s name harked back to the Great Klondike Gold Rush, but at the end of a good day those stampeders had carried their bounty of dust in small pokes. Fossil matrix was bulky; extracting and preparing the specimens was part of what Ernie and his staff did for their thirty-five percent of every transaction they brokered for prospectors with Earth-based collectors. It was much too expensive to ship rock to Earth that was going to be thrown away there. The tailings were discarded outside our dome; there was a small mountain of them to the east.

Ernie went to tend to the female prospector, and I looked around the shop. The fossils on display were worth millions, but they were being watched by ubiquitous cameras, and, besides, no one would try to steal from Gargantuan Gargalian, if they knew what was good for them. Ernie was one of the richest men on Mars, and he had on retainer lots of muscle to help guard that wealth. On Earth, a multimillionaire might own a mansion, a yacht, and a private jet. There was no point in owning a yacht on Mars, but Ernie certainly had the big house—I’d seen it from the outside, and the damn thing had turrets, for God’s sake—and he had the airplane, too, with an impossibly wide wingspan; it was one of only four planes I knew of here on the Red Planet.

There was a chart on one of Ernie’s walls: side-by-side geologic timelines for Earth and Mars. Both planets were 4.5 billion Earth years old, of course, but their stories had been very different. Earth’s prehistory was broadly divided into Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras—and I knew a few were pushing for a new era, the Transzoic, to have begun the year Howard Slapcoff had perfected the uploading of consciousness. But on a meter-high chart, that slice wouldn’t have been thick enough to see without one of the microscopes that dotted Ernie’s shop.

Martian prehistory, meanwhile, was divided into the Noachian, Hesperian, and Amazonian eras, each named, the chart helpfully explained, for a locale on Mars where rocks characteristic of it were found (and yes, ironically for a time scale that stretched back billions of years, the place that gave us the term Noachian had been named by Schiaparelli in honor of Noah’s flood).

Both worlds developed life as soon as they’d cooled enough to allow it—some four billion Earth years ago. But Earth life just twiddled its—well, its nothings —for the next three and a half billion years; it was mostly unicellular and microscopic until the dawn of the Paleozoic, 570 million years ago.

But Mars produced complex, macroscopic invertebrates with exoskeletons within only a hundred million years. All of the fossils collected here dated from the Noachian, which covered the first billion years. By the time multicellular creatures appeared on Earth, life on Mars had been extinct for hundreds of millions of years: two ships that didn’t quite pass in the cosmic night…

Ernie and the woman were exchanging words. “Surely these are worth more than that!” she declared.

“My sincerest apologies, dear lady,” he replied, “but Longipes bedrossiani is the most common of finds; they were everywhere. And see here? The glabella is missing. And on this one, there are only three intact limbs—not much of a pentapod!”