Robert Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

I blinked. “We have a writer-in-residence?”

“Hey, there’s more to New Klondike culture than The Bent Chisel and Diamond Tooth Gertie’s.”

“And Gully’s Gym,” I said. “Don’t forget Gully’s Gym.”

Bertha made a harrumphing sound, then: “You know who Stavros Shopatsky is?”

“One of the first guys to make a fortune from fossils here. After Weingarten and O’Reilly, I mean.”

“Exactly. He bought a ton of land under the dome from Howard Slapcoff. But he was also a writer—adventure novels; my dad used to read him. And so he donated one of the homes he built here to be a writer’s retreat. Authors from Earth apply to get an all-expenses-paid round trip to Mars, so they can come and write whatever they want. They usually stay six months or so, then head back.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And the current writer is doing a book about the B. Traven.”

“I understand it’s still in service, but under a different name,” I said.

“Really?” replied Bertha. “What name?”

“The Kathryn Denning.”

“Oh, is that the Traven? Interesting. Yeah, she’s still active.” Bertha looked at a monitor. “In fact, she’s on her way here. She’s due to arrive on Friday.”

“Can you let me know when she touches down? I’d like to give her a once-over.”

“You didn’t tell me why you were interested in this.”

She said it in a way that conveyed if I expected her to help satisfy my curiosity, I had to satisfy hers. And so I did: “I’m tracking down what became of some cargo she brought here, back when she was called the Traven.”

“It’s been thirty years since she last sailed under that name. Surely you don’t expect to find a clue aboard her at this late date?”

I smiled. “Can’t hurt to have a look.”

My office was on the second of two floors. Instead of the rickety elevator, I always took the two half flights of stairs up. As I came out of the stairwell, I spotted a man at the end of the corridor. He could have been there to see anyone on this floor, but—

Jesus.

Well, not exactly. This guy was better-looking than Jesus. But he had the same longish hair, short beard, and lean face you saw in stained-glass windows.

It was Stuart Berling—unless the real Krikor Ajemian had come to Mars for some reason. I figured he was either here to beat the crap out of me for bringing up the B. Traven, or to beat the crap out of me for sleeping with his wife. Either way, discretion seemed the better part of valor, and I turned around and headed back to the stairwell. But—damn it!—he’d spotted me. I heard a shout of “Lomax!” coming from down the corridor.

I leapt, going down the whole flight at once. The thud of my landing echoed in the stairwell. I turned around and took the second set of stairs in a single go, too—but Berling could run like the wind, his transfer legs pumping up and down. Looking up the open stairwell from the ground floor, I saw him appear at the second-floor doorway. I hightailed it through the dingy lobby, almost colliding with an elderly woman who tossed a “Watch it, sonny!” at me.

The automatic door wasn’t used to people approaching it at the speed I was managing, and it hadn’t finished sliding out of the way by the time I reached it; my right shoulder smashed into it, hurting like a son of a bitch, but I made it out onto the street. I could head either left or right, chose left, and continued along.

Running on Mars isn’t like doing it on Earth: if you’ve got decent legs, you propel yourself several meters with each stride, and you spend most of your time airborne. The street wasn’t particularly crowded, and I did my best to bob and weave around people, but once you’re aloft you can’t easily change your course, and I finally did collide with someone. Fortunately, it was a transfer; the impact knocked him on his metal ass, but probably did him no harm—although he threw something a lot less polite than “Watch it, sonny!” after me as I scrambled to my feet. While getting up, I’d had an opportunity to look backward. Berling was still in hot pursuit.

I’d chosen left because it led to a hovertram stop. My lungs were bound to give out before Berling’s excimer pack did; if I could hop a tram that pulled away before he could get on it, I’d be safe but—

—but there’s never a hovertram handy when you need one. The stop was up ahead, and no one was waiting at it, meaning I’d probably just missed the damn thing.

I continued along. There was a seedy tavern on my right called the Bar Soom—a name somebody must have thought clever at some point—and who should be coming out of it but that kid who’d tried to rob me last night. I was breathing too hard to make chitchat as I passed, but he clearly recognized me. He looked behind me, no doubt saw Berling coming after me like a bat out of Chicago, and—

And the kid must have tripped Berling as he passed, because I heard a big thud and the kind of swearing that could have made a sailor blush, if there had been any sailors on Mars.

I halted, turned around, and saw Berling trying to get up. “Damn it, Lomax!” he called, without a trace of breathing hard. “I just want to talk to you!”

Even though it seemed I now had an ally in this alley, I still didn’t like my chances in a fight with a high-end transfer. Of course, maybe he’d spent all his money on that handsome face—I wondered if Krikor Ajemian got a royalty? But when in doubt it was safest to assume that a transfer had super strength, too. “About… what?” I called back, the two words separated by a gasp.

“The—that ship,” he replied, apparently aborting giving voice to the cursed name.

I had my hands on my knees, still trying to catch my breath. Doesn’t anyone phone for appointments anymore? “Okay,” I managed. “All right.” I walked back toward him, several people gawking at us. I nodded thanks at the punk as I approached. Berling’s clothes were dusty—Martian red dust—from having skidded on the sidewalk when he’d been tripped, but otherwise he looked great, with not a hair out of place; I wondered how they did that. “What do you want to say?”

He turned his head as he looked left and right, noting the people around us, then moved his head side to side again, signaling “No.” “Somewhere private,” he said. And then, a little miffed: “I had been hoping for your office.”

The number of my colleagues back on Earth who had been shot dead in their own offices was pretty high. “No,” I said. “The Bent Chisel—you know it?”

“That rat hole?” said Berling. He did know it. But he nodded. “All right.”

I figured we both needed some time to cool off figuratively, and I needed to do so literally, too. “Twenty minutes,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

He nodded, turned, and departed. I looked at the kid.

“What’s your name?”

“Dirk,” he said.

“Huh,” I said. “Your name is Dirk, and you came at me with a knife.”

“Yeah. So?”

I shook my head. “Forget it. You still need money?”

He nodded.

“I’m a private detective. I could use some backup for this meeting with Berling at The Bent Chisel in case things get ugly. Twenty solars for an hour’s work, tops.”

The snake’s rattle shook on his face. “Okay,” he said. “I’m in.”

Buttrick looked up suspiciously as Dirk and I entered the bar. He opened his mouth, as if to issue an automatic complaint about me needing to pay off my tab, but closed it, presumably realizing I was uncharacteristically up-to-date.