Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Off in the distance, out in the corridor: the squeal of a rat and—

  Footfalls.

  The transfer heard them, too. Its eyes darted left and right in what looked like panic.

  “Please,” he said, lowering his volume. As soon as he started speaking, I put a vertical index finger to my lips, indicating that he should be quiet, but he continued: “Please, for the love of God, get me out of here. I can’t take any more.”

  I made a beeline for the closet, stepping in quickly and pulling that door most of the way shut behind me. I positioned myself so that I could see—and, if necessary, shoot—through the gap. The footfalls were growing louder. The closet smelled of rat. I waited.

  I heard a voice, richer, more human, than the supposed Pickover’s. “What the—?”

  And I saw a person—a transfer—slipping sideways into the room, just as I had earlier. I couldn’t yet see the face from this angle, but the body was female, and she was a brunette. I took in air, held it, and—

  And she turned, showing her face now. My heart pounded. The delicate features. The wide-spaced green eyes.

  Cassandra Wilkins.

  My client.

  She’d been carrying a flashlight, which she set now on another, smaller table. “Who’s been here, Rory?” Her voice was cold.

  “No one,” he said.

  “The door was open.”

  “You left it that way. I was surprised, but . . .” He stopped, perhaps realizing to say any more would be a giveaway that he was lying.

  She tilted her head slightly. Even with a transfer’s strength, that door must be hard to close. Hopefully, she’d find it plausible that she’d given the handle a final tug and had only assumed that the door had closed completely when she’d last left. Of course, I immediately saw the flaw with that story: you might miss the door not clicking into place, but you wouldn’t fail to notice that light was still spilling out into the corridor. But most people don’t consider things in such detail; I hoped she’d buy Pickover’s suggestion.

  And, after a moment’s more reflection, she seemed to do just that, nodding her head, apparently to herself, then moving closer to the table onto which the synthetic body was strapped. “We don’t have to do this again,” said Cassandra. “If you just tell me . . .”

  She let the words hang in the air for a moment, but Pickover made no response. Her shoulders moved up and down in a philosophical shrug. “It’s your choice,” she said. And then, to my astonishment, she hauled back her right arm and slapped Pickover hard across the robotic face, and—

  And Pickover screamed.

  It was a long, low, warbling sound, like sheet metal being warped, a haunted sound, an inhuman sound.

  “Please . . .” he hissed again, the same plaintive word he’d said to me, the word I, too, had ignored.

  Cassandra slapped him again, and again he screamed. Now, I’ve been slapped by lots of women over the years: it stings, but I’ve never screamed. And surely an artificial body was made of sterner stuff than me.

  Cassandra went for a third slap. Pickover’s screams echoed in the dead hulk of the ship.

  “Tell me!” she demanded.

  I couldn’t see his face; her body was obscuring it. Maybe he shook his head. Maybe he just glared defiantly. But he said nothing.

  She shrugged again; they’d obviously been down this road before. She moved to one side of the bed and stood by his right arm, which was pinned to his body by the nylon strap. “You really don’t want me to do this,” she said. “And I don’t have to, if . . .” She let the uncompleted offer hang there for a few seconds, then: “Ah, well.” She reached down with her beige, realistic-looking hand and wrapped three of her fingers around his right index finger. And then she started bending it backward.

  I could see Pickover’s face now. Pulleys along his jawline were working; he was struggling to keep his mouth shut. His glass eyes were rolling up, back into his head, and his left leg was shaking in spasms. It was a bizarre display, and I alternated moment by moment between feeling sympathy for the being lying there and feeling cool detachment because of the clearly artificial nature of the body.

  Cassandra let go of Pickover’s index finger, and for a second I thought she was showing some mercy. But then she grabbed it as well as the adjacent finger and began bending them both back. This time, despite his best efforts, guttural robotic sounds did escape from Pickover.

  “Talk!” Cassandra said. “Talk!”

  I’d recently learned—from Cassandra herself—that artificial bodies had to have pain sensors; otherwise, a robotic hand might end up resting on a heating element, or too much pressure might be put on a joint. But I hadn’t expected such sensors to be so sensitive, and—

  And then it hit me, just as another of Pickover’s warbling screams was torn from him. Cassandra knew all about artificial bodies; she sold them, after all. If she wanted to adjust the mind-body interface of one so that pain would register particularly acutely, doubtless she could. I’d seen a lot of evil things in my time, but this was the worst. Scan a mind, put it in a body wired for hypersensitivity to pain, and torture it until it gave up its secrets. Then, of course, you just wipe the mind, and—

  “You will crack eventually, you know,” she said, almost conversationally, as she looked at Pickover’s fleshless face. “Given that it’s inevitable, you might as well just tell me what I want to know.”

  The elastic bands that served as some of Pickover’s facial muscles contracted, his teeth parted, and his head moved forward slightly but rapidly. I thought for half a second that he was incongruously blowing her a kiss, but then I realized what he was really trying to do: spit at her. Of course, his dry mouth and plastic throat were incapable of generating moisture, but his mind—a human mind, a mind accustomed to a biological body—had summoned and focused all its hate into that most primal of gestures.

  “Very well,” said Cassandra. She gave his fingers one more nasty yank backward, holding them at an excruciating angle. Pickover alternated screams and whimpers. Finally, she let his fingers go. “Let’s try something different,” she said. She leaned over him. With her left hand, she pried his right eyelid open, and then she jabbed her right thumb into that eye. The glass sphere depressed into the metal skull, and Pickover screamed again. The artificial eye was presumably much tougher than a natural one, but, then again, the thumb pressing into it was also tougher. I felt my own eyes watering in a sympathetic response.

  Pickover’s artificial spine arched up slightly as he convulsed against the two restraining bands. From time to time, I got clear glimpses of Cassandra’s face, and the perfectly symmetrical synthetic smile of glee on it was sickening.

  At last, she stopped grinding her thumb into his eye. “Had enough?” she asked. “Because if you haven’t . . .”

  As I’d said, Pickover was still wearing clothing; it was equally gauche to walk the streets nude whether you were biological or artificial. But now Cassandra’s hands moved to his waist. I watched as she undid his belt, unsnapped and unzipped his jeans, and then pulled the pants as far down his metallic thighs as they would go before she reached the restraining strap that held his legs to the table. Transfers had no need for underwear, and Pickover wasn’t wearing any. His artificial penis and testicles now lay exposed. I felt my own scrotum tightening in dread.

  And then Cassandra did the most astonishing thing. She’d had no compunctions about bending back his fingers with her bare hands. And she hadn’t hesitated when it came to plunging her naked thumb into his eye. But now that she was going to hurt him down there, she seemed to want no direct contact. She started scanning around the room. For a second, she was looking directly at the closet door; I scrunched back against the far wall, hoping she wouldn’t see me. My heart was pounding.

  Finally, she found what she was searching for: a wrench, sitting on the floor. She picked it up, raised it above her head, and looked directly into Pickover’s one good eye—the other had closed as soon as she
’d removed her thumb and had never reopened as far as I could tell. “I’m going to smash your ball bearings into iron filings, unless . . .”

  He closed his other eye now, the plastic lid scrunching.

  “Count of three,” she said. “One.”

  “I can’t,” he said in that low volume that served as his whisper. “You’d ruin the fossils, sell them off—”

  “Two.”

  “Please! They belong to science! To all humanity!”

  “Three!”

  Her arm slammed down, a great arc slicing through the air, the silver wrench smashing into the plastic pouch that was Pickover’s scrotum. He let out a scream greater than any I’d yet heard, so loud, indeed, that it hurt my ears despite the muffling of the partially closed closet door.

  She hauled her arm up again, but waited for the scream to devolve into a series of whimpers. “One more chance,” she said. “Count of three.” His whole body was shaking. I felt nauseous.

  “One.”

  He turned his head to the side, as if by looking away he could make the torture stop.

  “Two.”

  A whimper escaped his artificial throat.

  “Three!”

  I found myself looking away, too, unable to watch as—

  “All right!”

  It was Pickover’s voice, shrill and mechanical.

  “All right!” he shouted again. I turned back to face the tableau: the human-looking woman with a wrench held up above her head and the terrified, mechanical-looking man strapped to the table. “All right,” he repeated once more, softly now. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  NINE

  You’ll tell me where the Alpha Deposit is?” asked Cassandra, lowering her arm.

  “Yes,” Pickover said. “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Pickover was quiet.

  “Where?”

  “God forgive me . . .” he said softly.

  She began to raise her arm again. “Where?”

  “Head 16.4 kilometers south-southwest of the Nili Patera caldera. There are three craters there, each just under a hundred meters wide, forming a perfect equilateral triangle; the Alpha starts just past the twin fossae about five hundred meters east of them.”

  Cassandra’s phone was doubtless recording all this—as was my own. “I thought it was here in Isidis Planitia.”

  “It’s not—it’s in the adjacent planum; that’s why no one else has found it yet.”

  “You better be telling the truth,” she said.

  “I am.” His voice was tiny. “To my infinite shame, I am.”

  Cassandra nodded. “All right, then. It’s time to shut you off for good.”

  “But I told you the truth! I told you everything you need to know.”

  “Exactly. And so you’re of no further use to me.” She took a multipronged tool off the small table, returned to Pickover, and opened a hatch in his side.

  I stepped out the closet, my gun aimed directly at Cassandra’s back. “Freeze,” I said.

  She spun around. “Lomax!”

  “Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, nodding. “I guess you don’t need me to find your husband for you anymore, eh? Now that you’ve got the information he was after.”

  “What? No, no. I still want you to find Joshua. Of course I do!”

  “So you can share the wealth with him?”

  “Wealth?” She looked over at the hapless Pickover. “Oh. Well, yes, there’s a lot of money at stake.” She smiled. “So much so that I’d be happy to cut you in, Mr. Lomax—oh, you’re a good man. I know you wouldn’t hurt me!”

  I shook my head. “You’d betray me the first chance you got.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I’ll need protection; I understand that—what with all the money the fossils will bring. Having someone like you on my side only makes sense.”

  I looked over at Pickover and shook my head. “You tortured that man.”

  “That ‘man,’ as you call him, wouldn’t have existed at all without me. And the real Pickover isn’t inconvenienced in the slightest.”

  “But . . . torture,” I said. “It’s inhuman.”

  She jerked a contemptuous thumb at Pickover. “He’s not human. Just some software running on some hardware.”

  “That’s what you are, too.”

  “That’s part of what I am,” Cassandra said. “But I’m also authorized. He’s bootleg—and bootlegs have no rights.”

  “I’m not going to argue philosophy with you.”

  “Fine. But remember who works for who, Mr. Lomax. I’m the client—and I’m going to be on my way now.”

  I held my gun rock-steady. “No, you’re not.”

  She looked at me. “An interesting situation,” she said, her tone even. “I’m unarmed, and you’ve got a gun. Normally, that would put you in charge, wouldn’t it? But your gun probably won’t stop me. Shoot me in the head, and the bullet will just bounce off my metal skull. Shoot me in the chest, and at worst you might damage some components that I’ll eventually have to get replaced—which I can, and at a discount, to boot.

  “Meanwhile,” she continued, “I have the strength of ten men; I could literally pull your limbs from their sockets, or crush your head between my hands, squeezing it until it pops like a melon, and your brains, such as they are, squirt out. So, what’s it going to be, Mr. Lomax? Are you going to let me walk out that door and be about my business? Or are you going to pull that trigger, and start something that’s going to end with you dead?”

  I was used to a gun in my hand giving me a sense of power, of security. But just then, the Smith & Wesson felt like a lead weight. She was right: shooting her with it was likely to be no more useful than just throwing it at her—and yet, if I could drop her with one shot, I’d do it. I’d killed before in self-defense, but . . .

  But this wasn’t self-defense. Not really. If I didn’t start something, she was just going to walk out. Could I kill in cold . . . well, not cold blood. And she was right: she was a person, even if Pickover wasn’t. She was the one and only legal instantiation of Cassandra Wilkins. The cops might be corrupt here, and they might be lazy, but even they wouldn’t turn a blind eye on attempted murder under the dome.

  “So,” she said, at last, “what’s it going to be?”

  “You make a persuasive argument, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said in the most reasonable tone I could muster under the circumstances. And then, without changing my facial expression in the slightest, I pulled the trigger.

  I wondered if a transfer’s time sense ever slows down, or if it is always perfectly quartz-crystal timed. Certainly, time seemed to attenuate for me then. I swear I could actually see the bullet as it followed its trajectory from my gun, covering the three meters between the barrel and—

  And not, of course, Cassandra’s torso.

  Nor her head.

  She was right; I probably couldn’t harm her that way.

  No, instead, I’d aimed past her, at the table on which the faux Pickover was lying on his back. Specifically, I’d aimed at the place where the thick nylon band that crossed over his torso, pinning his arms, was anchored on the right-hand side—the point where it made a taut diagonal line between where it was attached to the side of the table and the top of Pickover’s arm.

  The bullet sliced through the band, cutting it in two. The long portion, freed of tension, flew up and over his torso like a snake that had just had 40,000 volts pumped through it.

  Cassandra’s eyes went wide in astonishment that I’d missed her, and her head swung around. The report of the bullet was still ringing in my ears, but I swear I could also hear the zzzzinnnng! of the restraining band snapping free. To be hypersensitive to pain, I figured you’d have to have decent reaction times, and I hoped that Pickover had been smart enough to note in advance my slight deviation of aim before I fired.

  And, indeed, no sooner were his arms free than he sat bolt upright—his legs were still restrained—and grabbed one of Cassandra’s arms, pulling
her toward him. I leapt in the meager Martian gravity. Most of Cassandra’s body was made of lightweight composites and synthetic materials, but I was still good old flesh and blood: I outmassed her by at least thirty kilos. My impact propelled her backward, and she slammed against the table’s side. Pickover shot out his other arm, grabbing Cassandra’s second arm, pinning her backside against the edge of the table. I struggled to regain a sure footing, then brought my gun up to her right temple.

  “All right, sweetheart,” I said. “Do you really want to test how strong your artificial skull is?”

  Cassandra’s mouth was open; had she still been biological, she’d probably have been gasping for breath. But her heartless chest was perfectly still. “You can’t just shoot me,” she said.

  “Why not? Pickover here will doubtless back me up when I say it was self-defense, won’t you, Pickover?”

  He nodded. “Absolutely.”

  “In fact,” I said, “you, me, this Pickover, and the other Pickover are the only ones who know where the Alpha Deposit is. I think the three of us would be better off without you on the scene anymore.”

  “You won’t get away with it,” said Cassandra. “You can’t.”

  “I’ve gotten away with plenty over the years,” I said. “I don’t see that coming to an end.” I cocked the hammer, just for fun.

  “Look,” she said, “there’s no need for this. We can all share in the wealth. There’s plenty to go around.”

  “Except you don’t have any rightful claim to it,” said Pickover. “You stole this copy of my mind, and you committed torture. And you want to be rewarded for that?”

  “Pickover’s right,” I said. “It’s his treasure, not yours.”

  “It’s humanity’s treasure,” corrected Pickover. “It belongs to all mankind.”

  “But I’m your client,” Cassandra said to me.

  “So’s he. At least, the legal version of him is.”

  Cassandra sounded desperate. “But—but that’s a conflict of interest!”

  “So sue me.”

  She shook her head in disgust. “You’re just in this for yourself!”