Robert Sawyer - Biding Time

Ralph looked left and right. There was no way out, of course; I was seated between him and the door, and my Smith Wesson was now in my hand. He might have done a sloppy job, but I never do. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

I made what I hoped was an ironic smile. “Guess that’s another advantage of uploading, no? No more DNA being left behind. It’s almost impossible to tell if a specific transfer has been in a specific room, but it’s child’s play to determine what biologicals have gone in and out of somewhere. Did you know that cells slough off the alveoli of your lungs and are exhaled with each breath? Oh, only two or three—but today’s scanners have no trouble finding them, and reading the DNA in them. No, it’s open-and-shut that you were the murderer: you were in the cockpit of Lennick’s Folly , you touched the engine controls. Yeah, you were bright enough to wear gloves—but not bright enough to hold your breath.”

He got to his feet, and started to come around from behind his funky desk. I undid the safety on my gun, and he froze.

“I frown on murder,” I said, “but I’m all for killing in self-defense—so I’d advise you to stand perfectly still.” I waited to make sure he was doing just that, then went on. “I know that you did it, but I still don’t know why. And I’m an old-fashioned guy—grew up reading Agatha Christie and Peter Robinson. In the good old days, before DNA and all that, detectives wanted three things to make a case: method, motive, and opportunity. The method is obvious, and you clearly had opportunity. But I’m still in the dark on the motive, and, for my own interest, I’d like to know what it was.”

“You can’t prove any of this,” sneered Ralph. “Even if you have a DNA match, it’s inadmissible.”

“Dougal McCrae is lazy, but he’s not stupid. If I tip him off that you definitely did it, he’ll find a way to get the warrant. Your only chance now is to tell me why you did it. Hell, I’m a reasonable man. If your justification was good enough, well, I’ve turned a blind eye before. So, tell me: why wait until your mother uploaded to kill her? If you had some beef with her, why didn’t you off her earlier?” I narrowed my eyes. “Or had she done something recently? She’d struck it rich, and that sometimes changes people—but…” I paused, and after a few moments, I found myself nodding. “Ah, of course. She struck it rich, and she was old. You’d thought, hey, she’s going to drop off soon, and you’ll inherit her newfound fortune. But when she squandered it on herself, spending most of it on uploading, you were furious.” I shook my head in disgust. “Greed. Oldest motivation there is.”

“You really are a smug bastard, Lomax,” said Ralph. “And you don’t know anything about me. Do you think I care about money?” He snorted. “I’ve never wanted money—as long as I’ve got enough to pay my life-support tax, I’m content.”

“People who are indifferent to thousands often change their ways when millions are at stake.”

“Oh, now you’re a philosopher, too, eh? I was born here on Mars, Lomax. My whole life I’ve been surrounded by people who spend all their time looking for paleontological pay dirt. My parents both did that. It was bad enough that I had to compete with things that have been dead for hundreds of millions of years, but…”

I narrowed my eyes. “But what?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“No? Why not?”

He paused, then: “You got brothers? Sisters?”

“A sister,” I said. “Back on Earth.”

“Older or younger?”

“Older, by two years.”

“No,” he said. “You couldn’t possibly understand.”

“Why not? What’s that got—” And then it hit me. I’d encountered lots of scum in my life: crooks, swindlers, people who’d killed for a twenty-solar coin. But nothing like this. That Ralph had a scarecrow’s form was obvious, but, unlike the one from Oz, he clearly did have a brain. And although his mother had been the tin man, so to speak, after she’d uploaded, I now knew it was Ralph who’d been lacking a heart.

“JoBeth,” I said softly.

Ralph staggered backward as if I’d hit him. His eyes, defiant till now, could no longer meet my own. “Christ,” I said. “How could you? How could anyone…”

“It’s not like that,” he said, spreading his arms like a praying mantis. “I was four years old, for God’s sake. I—I didn’t mean—”

“You killed your own baby sister.”

He looked at the carpeted office floor. “My parents had little enough time for me as it was, what with spending twelve hours a day looking for the god-damned alpha.”

I nodded. “And when JoBeth came along, suddenly you were getting no attention at all. And so you smothered her in her sleep.”

“You can’t prove that. Nobody can.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“She was cremated, and her ashes were scattered outside the dome thirty years ago. The doctor said she died of natural causes, and you can’t prove otherwise.”

I shook my head, still trying to fathom it all. “You didn’t count on how much it would hurt your mother—or that the hurt would go on and on, mear after mear.”

He said nothing, and that was as damning as any words could be.

“She couldn’t get over it, of course,” I said. “But you thought, you know, eventually…”

He nodded, almost imperceptibly—perhaps he wasn’t even aware that he’d done so. I went on, “You thought eventually she would die, and then you wouldn’t have to face her anymore. At some point, she’d be gone, and her pain would be over, and you could finally be free of the guilt. You were biding your time, waiting for her to pass on.”

He was still looking at the carpet, so I couldn’t see his face. But his narrow shoulders were quivering. I continued. “You’re still young—thirty-four, isn’t it? Oh, sure, your mother might have been good for another ten or twenty years, but eventually …”

Acid was crawling its way up my throat. I swallowed hard, fighting it down. “Eventually,” I continued, “you would be free—or so you thought. But then your mother struck it rich, and uploaded her consciousness, and was going to live for centuries if not forever, and you couldn’t take that, could you? You couldn’t take her always being around, always crying over something that you had done so long ago.” I lifted my eyebrows, and made no effort to keep the contempt out of my voice. “Well, they say the first murder is the hardest.”

“You can’t prove any of this. Even if you have DNA specimens from the cockpit, the police still don’t have any probable cause to justify taking a specimen from me.”

“They’ll find it. Dougal McCrae is lazy—but he’s also a father, with a baby girl of his own. He’ll dig into this like a bulldog, and won’t let go until he’s got what he needs to nail you, you—”

I stopped. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch—but he wasn’t; he was the son of a gentle, loving woman who had deserved so much better. “One way or another, you’re going down,” I said. And then it hit me, and I started to feel that maybe there was a little justice in the universe after all. “And that’s exactly right: you’re going down, to Earth.”

Ralph at last did look up, and his thin face was ashen. “What?”

“That’s what they do with anyone whose jail sentence is longer than two mears. It’s too expensive in terms of life-support costs to house criminals here for years on end.”

“I—I can’t go to Earth.”

“You won’t have any choice.”

“But—but I was born here. I’m Martian, born and raised. On Earth, I’d weigh… what? Twice what I’m used to…”