Robert Sawyer: Red Planet Blues

“How?” But then it came to me. “Dirk. The switchblade. You figured if Rory Pickover was back to being my client, I was bound to eventually learn where the Alpha was, and so you arranged for me to acquire something that had a tracking chip in it.”

Diana nodded. “Sorry, baby, but, well, it was Reiko’s rightful claim, not yours and not Dr. Pickover’s. Lakshmi was already working with Dirk, and every time you returned to the dome, the tracking chip uploaded its data to the Shopatsky House computer—so Reiko and I took it when we planted the body.”

“Clever,” I said.

“Yes, but Lakshmi must have been anticipating something, because by the time we got it, she’d wiped the data from the computer. And, of course, by that point you’d figured out about the tracking chip and destroyed it.”

“Ah, and so you decided it would be easier to just force Lakshmi to show Reiko where the Alpha was than it would be to get the secret from me—and so you kidnapped her.”

“I didn’t; Reiko did. But I did tail them, running a couple of kilometers behind, just in case Reiko needed help—which, of course, it turned out she did.”

My head was spinning. She’d betrayed me, she’d used me, she’d outsmarted me. I took a step back and looked at her, absolutely stunned.

“You…” I said, my voice quavering, and I raised my right hand, pointing a finger at her. “You are…”

The blue eyes blinked. “Yes?”

“You are amazing,” I said.

“I am that,” she replied, and smiled. “Sorry, honey.”

“So what happens now?”

She lifted her blonde eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. “Now? Why, we go to Bleaney’s, of course.”

“But you don’t need to eat.”

“No, of course not. But I love to dance.”

“And after?”

She indicated her amazing new body with a sweeping motion of her hands. “A night we’ll both remember.”

Transfers weren’t supposed to die. I’d never heard of a funeral for one, and, anyway, there couldn’t be much of a funeral for Rory Pickover here on Mars. Whatever family he had was back on Earth, and he had few friends here. In fact, I think he had only one.

Dougal McCrae had released the dead transfer bodies, including that of the legitimate Rory Pickover, to NewYou. After the bootleg had come to see me at my office, as promised, he and I headed over there. We came through the front door, and that must have triggered a signal, because Horatio Fernandez immediately appeared from the workroom. His eyes went wide the moment he saw the bootleg Pickover. “Joshua!”

I scratched my ear. “Ah, yes. Um, this is going to take a little explaining. This isn’t actually Joshua Wilkins. It’s a bootleg copy of Dr. Rory Pickover.”

“Good God,” said Horatio. “Seriously?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then—then where’s Joshua?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “He was mixed up in some bad stuff, and the police fried him with their disruptor.”

“My… God. Really?”

“Yes,” I said. Then: “Is Reiko in?”

“No,” replied Horatio. “No, and she won’t be coming back. I had to let her go. She was performing unauthorized transfers after hours.”

“Transfers, plural?”

“Well, at least one.”

“Are you going to bring charges?”

Horatio lifted his massive shoulders. “No cameras upstairs, remember. Hard to make an airtight case against her. And, besides, I’ve got a business to run. Going after the granddaughter of Denny O’Reilly isn’t going to make me popular.”

“Ah.”

Horatio was looking at the bootleg. “I guess lots of things were going on here that I didn’t know about.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I understand the body of the legitimate Pickover is here?”

“In the back room. Along with three bodies that look like Dazzling Don Hutchison, and one that looks like Krikor Ajemian.” Horatio shook his head. “I honestly don’t know what to do with them all.”

Rory spoke for the first time since we’d come into the shop. “May I—can I—have a moment with… with the other me?”

Horatio nodded, and he led us into the workroom. Uno, Dos, and Tres—not necessarily in that order—were on their backs on the floor by the far wall. Stuart Berling was up on one worktable, his chest open; fiber-optic cables were running from the cavity to some equipment. And on the other table, the body of Professor Rory Pickover, Ph.D., was lying on his back, face up. His mouth was slightly ajar, revealing a strip of artificial dentition, and his acrylic eyes were open. They weren’t staring straight ahead, though. Rather, they were looking to the right, frozen in a sideways glance.

As I’ve said, it’s hard to read a transfer’s expression, and so all I could do was guess at what the bootleg Pickover was thinking as he regarded his dead brother. It couldn’t have made things any easier that the legitimate Pickover had opted to keep his original face. Oh, he’d had it cleaned up a bit, and he’d taken a lot of the gray out of his hair and had most of the wrinkles erased, but it was still recognizably Rory Pickover, mousy paleontologist.

The bootleg Pickover stood over him, unblinking. I’d have thought blinks were autonomic even for a transfer. Maybe he was trying not to cry—not that he could —and that was keeping his eyelids from moving.

“Give us a minute, won’t you, Horatio?” I said.

Fernandez nodded and returned to the showroom. When he was gone, the bootleg lifted his head and looked at me, while indicating the dead transfer. “He knew about me, didn’t he?”

“He didn’t know you were still around, but, yes, he knew you’d been created.”

“What did he say about me?”

What the legit Pickover had said was, “If you find another me, erase it. Destroy it. I never want to see the damned thing.” Looking now at the bootleg, I found it hard to give voice to those words. “What would you have said in the same position?”

More silence, then the slightest of nods. “I don’t blame him.”

We stood quietly for a while, then the bootleg Rory said, “Okay. I’m ready.”

We went back into the showroom. Horatio was at his cash station. We approached him and when he looked up, I said, “I ask for fal-tor-pan, the refusion.”

If it had been my fellow old-movie-buff Lakshmi, I might have gotten the response, “What you seek has not been done since ages past—and then, only in legend.” But all Horatio managed was, “Excuse me?”

“Let’s go upstairs.”

At least that generated a smile from Horatio. “I thought you’d never ask.” He headed for the staircase, and I followed, with the bootleg Pickover making up the rear. Once upstairs, I pointed at the scanning room, Horatio opened the door, and we all went in. “You said there were no security cameras up here,” I said. “Was that the truth?”

Horatio nodded.

“Good,” I said. “We want you to open up this bootleg’s skull, take out the artificial brain, and transplant it into the legitimate Rory’s body.”

Horatio looked stunned for a moment, but then he slowly nodded. “Yes, I guess—yes, I can do that. Of course, there are a bunch of systems in the body that will have to be recalibrated, but—”

“Whatever it takes,” I said. “Do it.”

“But… but Pickover is officially dead now.”

“Only the cops know that—the cops and you. It does your business no good to have word getting spread around that transfers aren’t in fact immortal, so I know you’ll keep your trap shut. And the cops are in Ernie Gargalian’s back pocket—or, at least the top cop is. Ernie owes me a favor; he’ll get the report about Pickover to disappear.”