Robert Sawyer: Biding Time

Ernie Gargalian was fat—“Gargantuan Gargalian,” some called him. Fortunately, like me, he lived on Mars; it was a lot easier to carry extra weight here. He must have massed a hundred and fifty kilos, but it felt like a third of what it would have on Earth.

Ironically, Gargalian was one of the few people on Mars wealthy enough to fly back to Earth as often as he wanted to, but he never did; I don’t think he planned to ever set foot on the mother planet again, even though it was where all his rich clients were. Gargalian was a dealer in Martian fossils: he brokered the transactions between those lucky prospectors who found good specimens and wealthy collectors back on Earth, taking the same oversize slice of the financial pie as he would have of a real one.

His shop was in the innermost circle—appropriately; he knew everyone . The main door was transparent alloquartz with his business name and trading hours laser-etched into it; not quite carved in stone, but still a degree of permanence suitable to a dealer in prehistoric relics. The business’s name was Ye Olde Fossil Shoppe—as if there were any other kind.

The shoppe’s ye olde door slid aside as I approached—somewhat noisily, I thought. Well, Martian dust gets everywhere, even inside our protective dome; some of it was probably gumming up the works.

Gargalian, seated by a long worktable covered with hunks of rock, was in the middle of a transaction. A prospector—grizzled, with a deeply lined face; he could have been sent over from Central Casting—was standing next to Gargantuan (okay, I was one of those who called him that, too). Both of them were looking at a monitor, showing a close-up of a rhizomorph fossil. “ Aresthera weingartenii ,” Gargalian said, with satisfaction; he had a clipped Lebanese accent and a deep, booming voice. “A juvenile, too—we don’t see many at this particular stage of development. And see that rainbow sheen? Lovely. It’s been permineralized with silicates. This will fetch a nice price—a nice price indeed.”

The prospector’s voice was rough. Those of us who passed most of our time under the dome had enough troubles with dry air; those who spent half their lives in surface suits, breathing bottled atmosphere, sounded particularly raspy. “How nice?” he said, his eyes narrowing.

Gargantuan frowned while he considered. “I can sell this quickly for perhaps eleven million… or, if you give me longer, I can probably get thirteen. I have some clients who specialize in A. weingartenii who will pay top coin, but they are slow in making up their minds.”

“I want the money fast,” said the prospector. “This old body of mine might not hold out much longer.”

Gargalian turned his gaze from the monitor to appraise the prospector, and he caught sight of me as he did so. He nodded in my direction, and raised a single finger—the finger that indicated “one minute,” not the other finger, although I got that often enough when I entered places, too. He nodded at the prospector, apparently agreeing that the guy wasn’t long for this or any other world, and said, “A speedy resolution, then. Let me give you a receipt for the fossil…”

I waited for Gargalian to finish his business, and then he came over to where I was standing. “Hey, Ernie,” I said.

“Mr. Double-X himself!” declared Gargalian, bushy eyebrows rising above his round, flabby face. He liked to call me that because both my first and last names—Alex Lomax—ended in that letter.

I pulled my datapad out of my pocket and showed him a picture of a seventy-year-old woman, with gray hair cut in sensible bangs above a crabapple visage. “Recognize her?”

Gargantuan nodded, and his jowls shook as he did so. “Sure. Megan Delacourt, Delany, something like that, right?”

“Delahunt,” I said.

“Right. What’s up? She your client?”

“She’s nobody’s client,” I said. “The old dear is pushing up daisies.”

I saw Gargalian narrow his eyes for a second. Knowing him, he was trying to calculate whether he’d owed her money or she’d owed him money. “Sorry to hear that,” he said with the kind of regret that was merely polite, presumably meaning that at least he hadn’t lost anything. “She was pretty old.”

“ ‘Was’ is the operative word,” I said. “She’d transferred.”

He nodded, not surprised. “Just like that old guy wants to.” He indicated the door the prospector had now exited through. It was a common-enough scenario. People come to Mars in their youth, looking to make their fortunes by finding fossils here. The lucky ones stumble across a valuable specimen early on; the unlucky ones keep on searching and searching, getting older in the process. If they ever do find a decent specimen, first thing they do is transfer before it’s too late. “So, what is it?” asked Gargalian. “A product-liability case? Next of kin suing NewYou?”

I shook my head. “Nah, the transfer went fine. But somebody killed the uploaded version shortly after the transfer was completed.”

Gargalian’s bushy eyebrows went up. “Can you do that? I thought transfers were immortal.”

I knew from bitter recent experience that a transfer could be killed with equipment specifically designed for that purpose, but the only broadband disrupter here on Mars was safely in the hands of the New Klondike constabulary. Still, I’d seen the most amazing suicide a while ago, committed by a transfer.

But this time the death had been simple. “She was lured down to the shipyards, or so it appears, and ended up standing between the engine cone of a big rocketship, which was lying on its belly, and a brick wall. Someone fired the engine, and she did a Margaret Hamilton.”

Gargalian shared my fondness for old films; he got the reference and winced. “Still, there’s your answer, no? It must have been one of the rocket’s crew—someone who had access to the engine controls.”

I shook my head. “No. The cockpit was broken into.”

Ernie frowned. “Well, maybe it was one of the crew, trying to make it look like it wasn’t one of the crew.”

God save me from amateur detectives. “I checked. They all had alibis—and none of them had a motive, of course.”

Gargantuan made a harrumphing sound. “What about the original version of Megan?” he asked.

“Already gone. They normally euthanize the biological original immediately after making the copy; can’t have two versions of the same person running around, after all.”

“Why would anyone kill someone after they transferred?” asked Gargalian. “I mean, if you wanted the person dead, it’s got to be easier to off them when they’re still biological, no?”

“I imagine so.”

“And it’s still murder, killing a transfer, right? I mean, I can’t recall it ever happening, but that’s the way the law reads, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s still murder,” I said. “The penalty is life imprisonment—down on Earth, of course.” With any sentence longer than two mears—two Mars years—it was cheaper to ship the criminal down to Earth, where air is free, than to incarcerate him or her here.

Gargantuan shook his head, and his jowls, again. “She seemed a nice old lady,” he said. “Can’t imagine why someone would want her dead.”

“The ‘why’ is bugging me, too,” I said. “I know she came in here a couple of weeks ago with some fossil specimens to sell; I found a receipt recorded in her datapad.”

Gargalian motioned toward his desktop computer, and we walked over to it. He spoke to the machine, and some pictures of fossils appeared on the same monitor he’d been looking at earlier. “She brought me three pentapeds. One was junk, but the other two were very nice specimens.”