Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

Still, I didn’t expect any trouble as I headed along Fourth Avenue toward my 11:00 p.m. date with Diana. After all, a good percentage of the lowlifes in town knew me on sight—and knew to avoid me. And even those who didn’t know me could hardly assume I’d be an easy mark: I was muscular in the way most Martians weren’t. But as I crossed the Third Circle, I was accosted by a tough-looking punk: biological, male, maybe eighteen years old, wearing a black T-shirt, with an animated tattoo of a snake with a rattling tail on his left cheek. “Gimme your money,” he said.

“And if I don’t?” I replied, my hand finding the Smith & Wesson.

“I cut you,” he said, and a switchblade unfolded.

“Try it,” I said, drawing the gun—for the second time in an hour; not a record, but close—“and I shoot you.”

“Fine,” said the punk. “Do me a favor.” And he astonished me by spreading his arms and dropping the knife, which fell with typical Red Planet indolence to the fused regolith of the sidewalk.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my gun trained on him, “I’ll bite. How would that be doing you a favor?”

“I got nothing, man. Nothing.”

“Been on Mars long?”

“Six weeks. Spent everything to get here.”

“Where you from?”

“Chicago.”

That was a place I had been to back on Earth; I could see why he’d wanted to get out. Keeping him covered, I bent over and picked up the knife. It was a beautiful piece, with a nicely carved wine-colored handle—I’d been admiring one like it a while ago in a shop Diana and I had visited over on Tenth. I retracted the blade and slipped it into my pocket.

“Man, that’s mine,” the punk said.

“Was yours,” I corrected.

“But I need it. I need to get money. I gotta eat.”

“Try your hand at fossil hunting. People get rich every day here.”

“Tried. No luck.”

I could sympathize with that. I reached into my other pocket, found a twenty-solar coin, and flipped it into the air. Anyone who had been on Mars long could have caught it as it fell, but he really was new here: he snatched at air way below the coin.

“Get yourself something to eat,” I said and started walking.

“Hey, man,” he said from behind me. “You’re all right.”

Without turning around, I gave him a hat tip and continued along my way.

As I’d said, Diana and I weren’t exclusive—and I was detective enough to pick up the signs that she’d been routinely seeing someone else for well over a month now, although I had no idea who. But that was fine.

My encounter with the punk had delayed me a bit, and by the time I got to The Bent Chisel, she’d already put her top on. “Hey,” I said, leaning in to give her a quick kiss.

“Hey, Alex.”

“All set to go?”

“Yup.”

We walked back to her place, which was four blocks away. There was no sign of the kid who’d accosted me, so I didn’t feel any need to mention it, but when we got into Diana’s little apartment—it was even smaller than mine—and I’d pulled her into an embrace, she said, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

I wondered if she knew she was paraphrasing Mae West. “Actually,” I said, smiling, “it’s a switchblade.” I brought it out and told her the story of how I’d acquired it.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s nice.”

“Yeah. My lucky day, I guess.”

It was her turn to smile. “And now it’s going to be your lucky night.”

We headed into her little bedroom. My earlier encounter with Lacie had been athletic indeed, but Diana and I always had gentle, playful sex. She’d been here on Mars for a dozen years, and that had taken its toll; she had the typically weak musculature of the long-term inhabitants of this world. I couldn’t go back to Earth for legal reasons; Diana was stuck here because she’d never be able to hack a full gee again. But, still, we made do; we always did. And I was happy to see her.

Turned out there wasn’t any New Klondike Historical Society, but I guess things like that are never created while the history is being made. In the morning I headed over to the shipyard. I started by checking in at the yard office, which was little more than a shack between two dead hulks. The yardmaster was Bertha, a husky old broad with a platinum blonde buzz cut.

“Hey, gorgeous,” I said as I entered the shack. I wondered briefly why whenever you said, “Hey, gorgeous,” people thought you were being serious, but if you said, “Hey, genius,” they thought you were being sarcastic.

“Hi, Alex. What’s up.”

“Just some research.”

“No rough stuff, okay?”

“Why does everyone say that to me?”

“I’ve got two words for you: Skookum and Jim.”

“Okay; true enough. But it’s a different ship I’m interested in this time.”

She gestured at her computer screen. “Which one?”

“Something called the B. Traven.”

“Jesus,” she said.

“What?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“The Traven.”

“What about it?”

“It was a death ship.”

I looked at her funny. “What?”

“How’d you get to Mars?”

“Me? Low-end liner. I forget what it was called. Saget, Saginaw —something like that.”

“Sagan?”

“That’s it, yeah.”

“Good ship. Made eight round trips to date.”

“If you say so.”

“And how long was the journey?”

“Christ, I don’t remember.”

“Right. You literally don’t—because the Sagan, like most of the ships that come here, uses hibernation. They freeze you when you leave Earth and thaw you out when you arrive here. That kind of ship employs a Hohmann transfer orbit, which takes very little power but a whole lot of time to get here. Transit time if you leave at the optimum moment is 258 Earth days, but it all passed in a blink of an eye for you. The Traven was supposed to do the same thing—all of the passengers in deep sleep, with just a bowman to keep things running.”

“Bowman?”

“That’s what they call the person who stays awake during a voyage when everyone else is hibernating. After a guy named Bowman in some old movie, apparently.”

“Ah, right,” I said; I knew which one. “But something went wrong?”

“Crap, yeah. The bowman went crazy. He thawed out passengers one at a time and terrorized them—abused them sexually. By the time one of the people he’d awoken managed to get word out—a radio message to Lunaport—there was nothing anyone could do. Orbital mechanics make it really hard to intercept a ship that’s several months into its interplanetary journey. The whole thing was quite a sensation at the time, but—how old are you?”

“Forty-one.”

“You’d have been just a kid.”

“The name of the ship didn’t seem to ring a bell with Dougal McCrae at the NKPD, either.” I said it to defend my ignorance; I probably should have known about this. But maybe we’d studied it in school on a Friday. Memo to all boards of education everywhere: never schedule crucial lessons for a Friday.

“Yeah, well, Mac’s about your age,” Bertha said, exonerating him, too.

“Anyway, that explains why a guy lunged at me when I brought it up. He’d been on that ship.”

“Ah,” said Bertha. “But what’s your interest? I mean, if this is news to you, you can’t be like the other person who was asking about it.”

Needless to say, my ears perked up. “What other person?”

“A couple of weeks ago. The writer-in-residence.”