Remains

by Mark W. Tiedemann

  “That assumes I can get my hands on them.”

  “Can you?”

  “No.”

  “So much for the first option. The second... there is a strong conviction that your wife had something to do with the incident.”

  “You said she wasn’t there.”

  “Officially, no. But your claim that she was has raised questions. She wasn’t officially there. She should have been back on Aea seventy days ago. She hasn’t been found, alive or dead.”

  “That’s... incredible.”

  Cambel Guerrera shrugged. “Personally, I don’t think much of the idea. Helen Croslo also has an exemplary record with the company, much longer than yours. There simply isn’t anything in her jacket to suggest anything like this. But the fact remains, we need an explanation for the shareholders, and in the absence of anything more credible, this will serve.”

  “But—”

  “Which leads to the second option for you. As spouse, you can legally declare her deceased.”

  “To what end?”

  “A declaration of death would invalidate any and all of her ID throughout Signatory Space. If she did survive, she could not return to Aea or gain admission to any Signatory community as Helen Croslo. She would be a pariah. If she is indeed involved, that would serve as punishment and a safety measure to limit her free movement and access.”

  “You don’t need me to do that.”

  “No. It would be simpler, but we could arrange it ourselves. However, this would ameliorate your own position.”

  “Why would you be worried about that? Fire me and leave me on Mars. Easy solution.”

  “PolyCarb isn’t that cavalier with valued personnel—”

  “Valued hell! I’m a security specialist; we come cheaper by the dozen.”

  “You underestimate your worth. And PolyCarb’s investment in you.”

  Mace grunted. “I’m already being shut out. Keeping me employed, of course, would be an easy way to keep me under scrutiny, wouldn’t it? If you cut me loose I might start turning over all kinds of rocks PolyCarb doesn’t want disturbed.”

  “You can always quit. These are the options the company has instructed me to offer. If Helen is dead, then what difference does a legal declaration on your part make?”

  “What if she isn’t?”

  “Then the only reasonable explanation is that she’s involved.”

  “And if she isn’t?”

  “That’s not a possible view. If you refuse, we can only assume that you’re involved as well.”

  “But I’m not. So if neither of us—”

  “You’re not listening. Nothing else fits what we know. We have no other viable possibilities.”

  “Then you haven’t looked hard enough! What you have is an insurance problem and a possible shareholder crisis. You want to use us to cover the company’s butt.”

  “I won’t say you’re wrong.”

  “You can’t.”

  “But I can say that if you compromise us in this you will remain on Mars, Aean citizenship permanently revoked. You know that much already. But they’ll also claim you were working for Lunase. You’ll find it very hard to get work. In time, a case will be built and you’ll be prosecuted. Think about your options, Mr. Preston.”

  “You’re overlooking the obvious.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do this—use us as scapegoats to pacify the shareholders—and the real perpetrators remain at large. You can’t justify the expense of a continuing investigation if you claim it’s already solved.”

  “I should escort you to your rooms now. You need to get off your feet.”

  “Damn it—”

  “I strongly urge you to think about yourself. Your wife is probably dead. In fact, I’m almost certain. Even if she got out of there alive, she had no way of getting to shelter before her breatherpack gave out. She could have stayed on the site, but we didn’t find her. She ran. Or she’s dead and we simply haven’t found the body. In any case, this is just a formality for you. A formality that can save you a lot of grief. This is a reasonable course of action. You accomplish nothing by going counter to it. That would only jeopardize any future chances you might have.” She came close to him. “Do you understand me, Mr. Preston?”

  He thought he did now. She was linked, this walk was being recorded, the formality was already in process. She could not admit any of that, though, without compromising the company and the validity of anything he might say. But she was trying to give him a chance. He wondered why and thought, for a moment, that perhaps she hated doing this as much as he did.

  “I think I’d like those rooms now, Ms. Guerrera.”

  “And you’ll think about what we’ve discussed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’m sure you’ll make the right decision.”

  He thought he understood the byzantine thinking behind the way PolyCarb was handling this. By declaring Helen dead and allowing him to keep his job, the company did not have to acknowledge a plot to the shareholders. There was nothing for them to see that suggested a lack of confidence in PolyCarb’s employees or employers in the company. It was perverse, but it seemed consistent with the way corporations solved dilemmas. Admit anything, admit nothing, act or not, but above all, preserve the value of the shares.

  And Helen?

  Helen had kept things from him. He always understood this and had accepted it. From time to time he sensed how much she withheld, but it did not matter. It was her job; he was only her husband, and they had agreed not to let it be an issue. But now he felt handicapped by not knowing. What had she done for PolyCarb? The company did not acknowledge her presence at Hellas Planitia. But they had sent her there, diverted her return flight from Ganymede. Mace’s policeman mind could find only one explanation that made sense—her troubleshooting for PolyCarb included high-level security matters. In her own fashion, she was as much a cop as he. Was. Had been.

  So what was going on at Hellas Planitia that brought Helen into it?

  And had now cost her her life.

  He sat in the dark, drinking whiskey, and traced the Minoan maze of his own thoughts. If he fought company wishes now they could dismiss him, strand him on Mars, and put a blight on his record that would keep him from getting another decent security position. Without that, he would lose complete access, and without access, he could never find out what happened. He could do nothing outside Aea. He had to decide what was more important—finding Helen, assuming she lived, or finding out what had happened to her, alive or dead. If she was on Mars and alive, he might find her under any circumstances. But if she was in trouble or off planet... or dead... his ability to find anything out would be virtually nonexistent without his PolyCarb position. Or at least without the resources Aea could provide. Or was that a rationalization? Because, he morbidly and guiltily thought, he could not abide the thought of being stranded on Mars. Particularly not now, not after this. He needed to be on Aea. It was not clear that he needed PolyCarb as much.

  Who had drilled that emergency shaft all the way through? That would require special equipment and time. Someone on site, in a management position most likely, would have to have known. If someone escaped through that shaft, it followed that they would not be running into the desert with no hope of rescue. Someone had picked them up. How many? Did Helen know?

  He discounted any local involvement. Martians distrusted orbitals, but they would not go this far. The benefits to Mars outweighed most other considerations. It made less sense that it was someone from within the company. One of the other orbital communities? Midline? Brasa? Also unlikely.

  Lunase. The moon harbored grudges, resentments, most of them baseless, but they were an insular people. Mace wondered if a Lunessa company had bid on the CircumAres project and been beat out by Aea.

  Helen...

  Believing finally that he had no choice, Mace sobered up long enough to sign the documents and went back to his suite of rooms with a bottle of whiskey. He distrust
ed inebriation but he could think of no good reason not to indulge it this time, especially with good product. Mars produced a variety of vodkas—the potato did remarkably well here—but Mace had never developed a taste for it. Another reason to get back to Aea. Better liquor. He poured three fingers of expensive single malt and raised the glass in toast to his phantom wife.

  Forgive me, he thought. If she was dead, there was nothing to forgive. If she was alive... then she had lied to him, too, because the only way for her to have survived was for her to be part of the incident. Had she been a good enough actor to hide it from him? Evidently, if true. But he did not believe it. There had to be some third answer that could satisfy everyone and give him back his wife.

  “I’ve signed you away, though,” he muttered, staring at the pendant on the dressing table by the bed. The disc contained her ROM encoding. Helen’s persona, downloaded before she had left for Ganymede. He could access it, run it through a hired cyberlink, and find out—

  Find out what? The persona, run through the medium of another person, would be Helen. She could still refuse to tell him anything and it would embarrass them both.

  Besides, he did not think he could bear to talk to her as a ghost.

  He grunted. He thought he loved her. He did. But then why betray her?

  After two days alone in the expensive rooms PolyCarb had put him in he realized that he was waiting for Helen to walk out of the desert and make everything right. He knew better. If she had gotten to the surface and started walking, she had walked to her death. There was no way around it.

  Still, he felt the guilt like a pain he could not locate.

  Through the gummy murk of his stupor he could not say with certainty that he had not married Helen to get off Mars. Her death, it seemed, now served the same end.

  He vaguely expected everything to return to normal after his act of private treason, that in a few days he would be given his position, authority, and access, and be allowed to go back to work. What he did not expect was to be ignored. He made calls which no one returned, tried to tap into the data he had been closed out of to find that he was still barred. He fenced with a few company mouthpieces and in a moment of rage he contacted a lawyer. But he gave that up and continued drinking, waiting to be evicted from the suite. He formed a vague plan of taking the eviction before the Martian Bench himself and forcing PolyCarb to disclose—publicly—why they had placed him in such circumstances. According to Martian law they would be obliged to show just cause or return him to his prior status.

  No one evicted him. One day Cambel Guerrera showed up to fetch him. It did not occur to him to wonder why someone of her corporate rank would be sent to do this. He was too amused watching her control her disapproval at his condition. She and the two orderlies packed his few possessions and escorted him, bottle in hand, to the nearest subsurface rail station.

  Martians glared at him. He glared back, enjoying their discomfort. He was an affront to their oft-denied fastidiousness. They claimed to abhor weakness, but Mace, who knew them from their nurture, believed they had lost the ability to distinguish strength from discipline and responsibility from habit. He returned their disdain by flouting his disregard for Martian tradition—the one thing they never admitted to hating but hated above any moral lapse.

  Once Guerrera and her pair of helpers boarded a bullet for Helium, they had a compartment to themselves, even though the trip only took three hours. Mace huddled in a corner, sipping from his bottle, and stared at his knees.

  He was grateful that Guerrera did not talk to him. All he could have given her then was a surly attitude or worse. He had lost control of his situation. It seemed that keeping this knowledge to himself stole back a fraction of the loss. He could not manage the circumstances, but at least he might keep them from managing him.

  At Helium the balances changed again when he realized where they were taking him. The orderlies escorted him to a hygiene facility where they relieved him of his bottle, now nearly empty, and gave him an injection that brought clarity and vomiting with cruel efficiency. Shakily, he walked alongside Cambel Guerrera through spaceport customs and stayed awake during the blood test and interrogatory before heading up a ramp to a shuttle car. He stood, holding onto a ring overhead, for the short ride out to the orbiter. Once he lay back in the acceleration couch he could not keep his eyes open. Lift-off compressed his already abused stomach, but he held his dignity and made orbit without heaving.

  The orderlies helped him aboard the big company transport and to his cabin—a chamber the size of an overlarge closet dominated by the bed—and left to return downwell, to Mars. Cambel Guerrera remained.

  “We leave orbit in two hours,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”

  She stood in his cabin door, arms folded, unwilling to enter all the way. Mace saw the stress around her eyes, the set of her mouth, the way she stood, feet apart, as if preparing to defend herself, or run.

  “Is she really dead?” he asked.

  She frowned. “You’ll have leave time. You can be alone, do what you like. Acclimate yourself.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why is the company going through all this if Helen’s really dead?”

  “I really don’t know, Mr. Preston.” Cambel stepped back, into the passageway. “The ship’s lounge is fully stocked. I’m told they have a good bar. There’s plenty to keep you occupied during the trip.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home, Mr. Preston. Aea.”

  Three – Lunase, 2116

  “DOLLARD.”

  Nemily looked ceilingward. The woman beside her stopped talking and tugged at her lower lip with her teeth.

  “That’s me,” Nemily said, rising from the narrow bench.

  The woman—Katya or Kanya or something—gazed up at her with a look of anxiety and concern and drew the icon hanging around her neck closer to her face, touching its rounded top with her fingertips. The container shone dully, polished by years of fondling. Nemily wondered what she kept inside, but it was impolite to ask.

  “You’ve been nice,” Nemily said and turned away.

  About twenty other people occupied the inadequate benches in the waiting room, most of them holding their own icons. A few—like Nemily—did not have one. Now they watched her as she headed for the door to the advisors’ cubicles, expressions varying from awe to envy.

  “Remember what I told you,” Katya—or Kanya—called after her.

  “You’ve been helpful,” Nemily said over her shoulder, and hurried through the door. The woman had told her a cautionary tale about her son who had been applying for a travel permit for years, finally achieved his goal and left Lunase only to die in an accident on one of the processing platforms out near the Belt. Safer to stay home, she implied, beneath meters and tons of regolith. The risks of leaving, to wander among the artificial stations, or even to Mars or one of the asteroids, outweighed

  the perceived benefits. A sensible Lunessa put such ambitions aside and settled down to the responsible life of making Lunase a better hab. Look at what happened to that man’s wife when she received permission to go to Brasa to visit relatives and contracted a virus no one in Lunase could even pronounce, much less cure. She was marooned now on Brasa, unable to leave, barely tolerated by the Brasans, her life miserable, and there sat her husband trying to obtain permission to go to the same diseased place just to be with her. Most requests were turned down for medical reasons, and everyone knew the best biotech in the system was on Aea and they never shared and certainly never let Lunessa in, so why even bother to apply for an access visa? Travel was dangerous, unpredictable, unhealthy and unsatisfying. Better to stay. Better to work in the warrens. Better to never go onto the surface to see the perpetual sky. Better to forget there were other places. Dreams of leaving were like dreams of Earth—fruitless and irresponsible.

  Yet Kanya was here, as were they all, chasing after a way off the moon, away from Lunase.

  Nemily crossed the threshold,
into the advisory area. She paused before the large display to locate her name and the cubicle to which she was to report. Bett Rolan had advised her the last three times and she hoped to see her again. The board directed her to Cubicle Twelve.

  She rapped sharply on the door and pushed through. The advisor behind the desk looked up.

  Not Bett.

  “Dollard?” he asked.

  “Nemily.”

  “Sit.”

  Nemily squatted on the low stool in front of the desk and waited while he made notes on his slate. When he looked up he seemed upset.

  “You work for SetNetComb.”

  “Yes.”

  “Doing?”

  “Traffic monitor. We—”

  “Performance?”

  “Adequate. Eighty-nine percentile.”

  “Explain what you do.”

  “I monitor the hydrogen byproduct from the fusion reactors. Helium3

  goes into the reaction chambers, hydrogen, helium4 and a proton come out. I funnel the hydrogen into water production. I—”

  “How long have you worked that station?”

  “Three years.”

  “Before that?”

  “Halide production, electron separation.”

  “Reprimands?”

  “None.”

  That startled him. He blinked as if a bright light had suddenly struck him in the face. He checked his slate, then nodded once.

  “Your loss could affect morale. Do you realize that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re prepared to accept the weight?”

  “Yes.” In truth there would be no weight, no burden of guilt. If she left her cadre, morale would rise. She possessed the highest performance ranking and management constantly reminded everyone else that they fell short. No one there—except management—could be unhappy with her loss.

  “Are you taking a restructure regime?”

  “A preliminary series.”

  “You look it. Stand up.”

  Of course, she thought as she rose, he could mean that management would suffer a drop in morale. That had never occurred to her before. If so, though, why would she carry weight from that?