Robert Sawyer - Biding Time

“You sold them?”

“That’s what I do.”

“And gave her her share of the proceeds?”

“Yes.”

“How much did it come to?”

He spoke to the computer again, and pointed at the displayed figure. “Total, nine million solars.”

I frowned. “NewYou charges 7.5 million for their basic service. There can’t have been enough cash left over after she transferred to be worth killing her for, unless…” I peered at the images of the fossils she’d brought in, but I was hardly a great judge of quality. “You said two of the specimens were really nice.” ‘Nice’ was Gargantuan’s favorite adjective; he’d apparently never taken a creative-writing course.

He nodded.

“ How nice?”

He laughed, getting my point at once. “You think she’d found the alpha?”

I lifted my shoulders a bit. “Why not? If she knew where it was, that’d be worth killing her for.”

The alpha deposit was where Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly—the two private explorers who first found fossils on Mars—had collected their original specimens. That discovery had brought all the other fortune-seekers from Earth. Weingarten and O’Reilly had died twenty mears ago—their heat shield had torn off while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere after their third trip here—and the location of the alpha died with them. All anyone knew was that it was somewhere here in the Isidis Planitia basin; whoever found it would be rich beyond even Gargantuan Gargalian’s dreams.

“I told you, one of the specimens was junk,” said Ernie. “No way it came from the alpha. The rocks of the alpha are extremely fine-grained—the preservation quality is as good as that from Earth’s Burgess Shale.”

“And the other two?” I said.

He frowned, then replied almost grudgingly, “They were good.”

“Alpha good?”

His eyes narrowed. “Maybe.”

“She could have thrown in the junk piece just to disguise where the others had come from,” I said.

“Well, even junk fossils are hard to come by.”

That much was true. In my own desultory collecting days, I’d never found so much as a fragment. Still, there had to be a reason why someone would kill an old woman just after she’d transferred her consciousness into an artificial body.

And if I could find that reason, I’d be able to find her killer.

My client was Megan Delahunt’s ex-husband—and he’d been ex for a dozen mears, not just since Megan had died. Jersey Delahunt had come into my little office at about half-past ten that morning. He was shrunken with age, but looked as though he’d been broad-shouldered in his day. A few wisps of white hair were all that was left on his liver-spotted head. “Megan struck it rich,” he’d told me.

I’d regarded him from my swivel chair, hands interlocked behind my head, feet up on my battered desk. “And you couldn’t be happier for her.”

“You’re being sarcastic, Mr. Lomax,” he said, but his tone wasn’t bitter. “I don’t blame you. Sure, I’d been hunting fossils for thirty-six Earth years, too. Megan and me, we’d come here to Mars together, right at the beginning of the rush, hoping to make our fortunes. It hadn’t lasted though—our marriage, I mean; the dream of getting rich lasted, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “Are you still named in her will?”

Jersey ’s old, rheumy eyes regarded me. “Suspicious, too, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they pay me the medium-sized bucks for.”

He had a small mouth, surrounded by wrinkles; it did the best it could to work up a smile. “The answer is no, I’m not in her will. She left everything to our son Ralph. Not that there was much left over after she spent the money to upload, but whatever there was, he got—or will get, once her will is probated.”

“And how old is Ralph?”

“Thirty-four.” Age was always expressed in Earth years.

“So he was born after you came to Mars? Does he still live here?”

“Yes. Always has.”

“Is he a prospector, too?”

“No. He’s an engineer. Works for the water-recycling authority.”

I nodded. Not rich, then. “And Megan’s money is still there, in her bank account?”

“So says the lawyer, yes.”

“If all the money is going to Ralph, what’s your interest in the matter?”

“My interest, Mr. Lomax, is that I once loved this woman very much. I left Earth to come here to Mars because it’s what she wanted to do. We lived together for ten mears, had children together, and—”

“Children,” I repeated. “But you said all the money was left to your child , singular, this Ralph.”

“My daughter is dead,” Jersey said, his voice soft.

It was hard to sound contrite in my current posture—I was still leaning back with feet up on the desk. But I tried. “Oh. Um. I’m… ah…”

“You’re sorry, Mr. Lomax. Everybody is. I’ve heard it a million times. But it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, although…”

“Yes?”

“Although Megan blamed herself, of course. What mother wouldn’t?”

“I’m not following.”

“Our daughter JoBeth died thirty years ago, when she was two months old.” Jersey was staring out my office’s single window, at one of the arches supporting the habitat dome. “She smothered in her sleep.” He turned to look at me, and his eyes were red as Martian sand. “The doctor said that sort of thing happens sometimes—not often, but from time to time.” His face was almost unbearably sad. “Right up till the end, Megan would cry whenever she thought of JoBeth. It was heartbreaking. She couldn’t get over it.”

I nodded, because that was all I could think of to do. Jersey didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, so, after a moment, I went on. “Surely the police have investigated your ex-wife’s death.”

“Yes, of course,” Jersey replied. “But I’m not satisfied that they tried hard enough.”

This was a story I’d heard often. I nodded again, and he continued to speak: “I mean, the detective I talked to said the killer was probably off-planet now, headed to Earth.”

“That is possible, you know,” I replied. “Well, at least it is if a ship has left here in the interim.”

“Two have,” said Jersey, “or so the detective told me.”

“Including the one whose firing engine, ah, did the deed?”

“No, that one’s still there. Lennick’s Folly , it’s called. It was supposed to head back to Earth, but it’s been impounded.”

“Because of Megan’s death?”

“No. Something to do with unpaid taxes.”

I nodded. With NewYou’s consciousness-uploading technology, not even death was certain anymore—but taxes were. “Which detective were you dealing with?”

“Some Scottish guy.”

“Dougal McCrae,” I said. Mac wasn’t the laziest man I’d ever met—and he’d saved my life recently when another case had gone bad, so I tried not to think uncharitable thoughts about him. But if there was a poster boy for complacent policing, well, Mac wouldn’t be it; he wouldn’t bother to get out from behind his desk to show up for the photo shoot. “All right,” I said. “I’ll take the case.”

“Thank you,” said Jersey. “I brought along Megan’s datapad; the police gave it back to me after copying its contents.” He handed me the little tablet. “It’s got her appointment schedule and her address book. I thought maybe it would help you find the killer.”

I motioned for him to put the device on my desk. “It probably will, at that. Now, about my fee…”

Since Mars no longer had seas, it was all one landmass: you could literally walk anywhere on the planet. Still, on this whole rotten globe, there was only one settlement—our domed city of New Klondike, three kilometers in diameter. The city had a circular layout: nine concentric rings of buildings, cut into blocks by twelve radial roadways. The NewYou franchise—the only place you could go for uploading on Mars—was just off Third Avenue in the Fifth Ring. According to her datapad, Megan Delahunt’s last appointment at NewYou had been three days ago, when her transfer had actually been done. I headed there after leaving Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe.