Robert Sawyer: Red Planet Blues

“Alex, you’ve created a problem for me,” Ernie said, “and we need to sort it out.”

“A problem?” I repeated.

“Yes, my boy, yes. You’ve led me to the promised land; you’ve shown me Denny and Simon’s mother lode. Riches beyond imagining, one might think.”

“And that’s a problem how?”

“Back on Earth,” Ernie said, pointing vaguely at the sky, “they synthesize gold, they manufacture diamonds, they replicate rubies. Those things have no value—virtually no material object does. But actual fossils of extraterrestrial life—ah, those collectors will pay dearly for! And why, my dear Alex, why?”

“Their provenance,” I said.

Ernie’s fat face exploded in laughter. He looked at Pickover. “Did you hear him, my good professor? ‘Provenance,’ he said. Such a highfalutin word for him to know!” He turned his attention back to me. “Yes, absolutely—the fact that they’re demonstrably genuine, that they haven’t been synthesized or replicated, yes, indeed, my boy, that’s one reason they’re so valuable. But there’s another criterion. After all, you can’t make any money selling genuine moon rocks anymore, even though their provenance is easy to establish; it’s hard to even give them away. But in days of yore, they used to be the most valuable stones on Earth. And do you know why that was?”

I had an idea, but you learn more by letting people tell stories their way rather than trying to beat them to the punch. “No.”

“Because between 1972, when the last Apollo astronaut walked on the moon, until humans finally returned there, there were only 382 kilograms of moon rocks on Earth. Scarcity, my boy! Supply and demand! There were tons of diamonds then, but—well, my lad, I’ll say it because I know you’re thinking it! You know that surface suit of mine? The purple one? You could fit all the Apollo booty into it. And so of course those stones were highly valued.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay.”

“But it’s not okay, dear Alex. Not at all. I now know where a huge cache of wonderfully preserved Martian fossils is located—the best of the best, and not just quality, but quantity! I simply can’t reveal that fact to the public. Oh, if I started selling a lot of material from there, yes, for a short time, I might realize spectacular prices, but soon Alpha fossils would be ubiquitous, and not just directly via me but on the secondary market, too. Alphas will be a drug on the market—everybody selling alphas; there will be alphas everywhere.”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

Ernie smiled, his grapefruit cheeks moving up as he did so. “That’s the question! And the answer is this, my boy: we’re going to curate the Alpha. Dr. Pickover here will get to select the specimens to work on, studying them, scanning them, learning from them, describing them for science. He works at a slow pace; I know that, and that’s fine. And when he’s finally done with each specimen, he’ll release it to me, and I will bring it to market; we’ll find an appreciative buyer. And Miss Takahashi, here, the descendant of my dear old friend Denny, will share in the profits; I will send her a cut from every sale.”

“But… but that could take years.”

“By Gad, Alex, yes, it might! But so what? We not only live in an age of material abundance, my boy, we live in an age of immortality! Dr. Pickover has already made the transition, and surely none of the rest of us intend to ultimately join his fossils in the ground! I’m the oldest one in this room by a good piece, but I’ve just barely begun my life! And, as any good businessperson knows, an asset that pays steady dividends over time is far more valuable than one consumed quickly.”

I looked up at Pickover. “And you’re okay with this, Rory?”

Rory shrugged a bit. “It’s not ideal; not even close. But I’ve got the site map that Weingarten and O’Reilly made, and Ernie here has been plugged into the black market for fossils since the very beginning; he’s going to help me locate the collectors who have those old specimens. Now that Willem Van Dyke is gone, Ernie is just about the only lead I have for ever getting access to those fossils and describing them in the scientific literature. And I do get to scan and describe every new specimen that’s excavated.”

I turned to Reiko Takahashi. “And what about you? This works for you?”

She nodded her lovely head. “It’ll do.”

“But what about Lakshmi?” I said. “She knows where the Alpha is, too.”

“My dear boy, please don’t worry about that. She’s no longer a problem.”

“She’s going back to Earth?” I asked.

Ernie’s eyebrows climbed toward his slicked-back hair. “So unfortunate. She really shouldn’t have resisted arrest.”

I frowned; she hadn’t.

“Of course, the body will be shipped back,” he said. He tilted his fat head. “I hear our next writer-in-residence will be a playwright.”

I looked over at Pickover, but it was hard to read a transfer’s expression.

“And so that just leaves you, Mr. Double-X.” Ernie shook his massive head. “I knew Stuart Berling, as you know—he was selling his fossils through me. Found some fabulous specimens not that long ago, and they made him a rich man, but he couldn’t bring himself to return to Earth—that nasty business aboard the B. Traven had scarred him for life. And you’re in much the same situation, aren’t you, my boy? Berling couldn’t return to Earth and neither can you; his reasons were psychological and yours are legal, but the effect is the same, isn’t it?”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “And your point is?”

“My point is that for all this to work, the Alpha will still need protection—and nothing so clumsy as land mines. It will need someone to look after it. And that someone can be you. Insane wealth will do you no good, not here, not on Mars, but you’ll make enough to have your life-support tax always paid, and your tab at The Bent Chisel always settled, and, when the time comes, you’ll be able to afford to have yourself transferred into the finest of bodies.” He raised a beefy hand. “It won’t be full-time work, of course; you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to ply your usual trade. But it will keep you nicely in the black for many mears to come.”

“And you think that’ll be enough for me?” I asked.

“My dear Mr. Double-X, I would not presume to speak for you. But it strikes me as win-win all around. What do you say?”

I thought about the four fossil slabs I’d jackhammered out of the Alpha and then hidden outside the dome. But my own little pieces of the stuff that dreams are made of had waited billions of years—they could wait a while longer… perhaps, even, until the day when I might be able to go back home.

And so I looked at each of the faces in turn: at the broad countenance of Gargantuan Gargalian, who had always known how to get what he wanted; at the exquisite, delicate features of Reiko Takahashi, who had perhaps gotten what I had wanted; and at the inquisitive visage of Rory Pickover, who would walk naked into a live volcano if he thought he could learn something that no other man knew.

I turned back to Ernie. “I want my own Mars buggy. My own surface suit.”

“Of course,” said Ernie. “Consider it done.”

“And I need a new gun.”

“Naturally.”

“And my own broadband disruptor.”

Ernie laughed heartily. “Alex, my boy, that’s thinking ahead, by Gad, it is. Yes, certainly, we’ll get you one of those, too.”

“All right,” I said, nodding slowly. “We’ll drink on it. Get that Scotch.”