by Neil Clarke
My goggles weren’t the only thing floating beside me. So were half a dozen other drops of some brown liquid. They had gathered near my left side, as if they were a phalanx of brown marbles lined up for an attack.
“Marvin,” I snapped, “your coffee’s gotten away from you again.”
Marvin Pierce peeked at me from the doorway leading into the community kitchen. He floated sideways, hands gripping the edge of the door, only his bald pate, eyes, and nose visible, like a Kilroy-was-here drawing, something that one of the oldsters here had started sketching on the walls. (You couldn’t call anything a ceiling or a floor here—the place constantly rotated.)
Marvin’s blue eyes were twinkling. As he used his hands to propel himself into the VR work lab, he grinned like a naughty three-year-old.
Which he hadn’t been in more than 125 years.
“Sorry,” he said in a tone that let me know he wasn’t sorry at all. He caught the first three balls of coffee with his mouth, swallowed hard, then used a pair of chopsticks to go after the fourth.
It was the chopsticks that screwed him up. The fourth bubble of coffee slipped through the wooden edges and aimed for me at surprising speed. I floated away, and watched in disgust as the coffee splatted against my goggles.
“Hey,” I said. “I was working.”
“Work, work, work. You know, sometimes you gotta take a coffee break,” Marvin said, and then giggled. His giggle was high-pitched, like a little girl’s.
It was also infectious. But I didn’t let myself smile. Marvin had ruined too many workdays for me—cleaning things wasn’t easy in zero-g—and I didn’t dare lose this day.
I was on a schedule—a tight one. Maybe an impossible one.
And the idea of that made my stomach turn.
That little boy had been the son of Shane Proctor, head of the largest mining company on the Moon. This case was the first high-profile test run of SeniorSource’s new Moon crime unit.
Theoretically, detectives in SeniorSource would solve cases on the Moon from their little perch in Earth’s orbit. I used to think outsourcing detective work wouldn’t work.
But it did work—I’d solved more than two hundred cases, some of them cold—since I arrived here five years ago. SeniorSource outsourced all kinds of highly skilled jobs, from laser surgery to art restoration. Even detective work, with its combination of interrogation, observation, and forensic skills, could succeed from a distance.
However, I had never been a guinea pig before. The chance of failure was high, and I didn’t dare say no.
I was one of the youngest men at SeniorSource—and one of the poorest. I had to work full-time to pay for my healthcare as well as my room and board.
When the doctors told me that I would need full-time care, I investigated all my options. I didn’t like most of them. Residential care hadn’t changed much since I was a kid.
The old were warehoused with the terminally ill, and depending on how much money they had, they either got personal care or they didn’t.
But because I had Manhattan Police Department insurance, which had ties with off-planet organizations like SeniorSource, I could apply here. Which I did.
SeniorSource was the oldest pay-as-you-go orbital residence care facility. It advertised a fUll life for the long-lived, and for the most part, it lived up to that billing.
Some of the oldsters, like Marvin, had lived here for thirty years. He’d been nearly ninety when he arrived, written off by his family as near death, which he probably would have been had he stayed.
In space, in a place like SeniorSource, we lived in a germ-free environment, in zero-gravity that made each of us feel like Superman when we first arrived, along with a full-time medical staff (no one under eighty) who monitored us, kept our bones as strong as possible, made sure our circulation was good, as well as monitoring the physical changes of living in a hermetically sealed world so different from the one we had grown up in.
Guys like me, the younger guys, the full-timers, didn’t have the lifetime health benefits that the oldsters like Marvin had. We didn’t even have a mountain of assets to sell. The differences between my generation (dubbed, somewhere in the midtwenties, “the Sickest Generation”) and Marvin’s generation (the space generation or, as some still called them, the older baby boomers) were legion. Most of the folks my age had died of diabetes or heart attacks before we were old enough to send our peers into national politics. As a result, the younger generations wiped out most of the beneficial legislation that the baby boomers and Generation X had passed—the universal health care, the Retirement Savings Act, and all those others—keeping them intact for the boomers while grandfathering out people who were born in the twenty-first century.
So we didn’t get to retire. We had to work. The Marvins of SeniorSource worked as well, but they only had to put in one day per month, mostly teaching history to college classes via streaming holos.
When I applied, I expected to be turned down. I didn’t realize that SeniorSource badly needed trained detectives. They promised me a large private suite, an adequate food allowance, and midrange healthcare that was still better than anything I could get on Earth.
In exchange, I had to agree to work five days a week, eight hours per day, and exercise two hours per day seven days a week. I loved the idea of work; I hated the idea of exercise (I am a member of my generation, after all). But I agreed to all their terms, missing something important in the fine print.
My stay on this station was performance related. I couldn’t be fired, but I could be demoted, which meant that my life would become a living hell. I would get smaller quarters, a lower-level food allowance, and minimal medical care.
If I really screwed up, I could be banished from the station. I’d be sent to an affiliated residence center somewhere in the Northeast, and warehoused with the rest of the old-timers.
The problem was that most folks who were banished from SeniorSource died within six months. Very few elderly people could handle the transition back to fUll gravity after living in zero-g.
Even though I was still one of the younger elderly, I doubted my bones could survive the transition. My bones—strong as they once were—had become fragile. When I’d left Earth five years ago, I could no longer walk. Plus my arthritis had gotten so bad I could barely move my fingers. It had been clear, even to me, that I could no longer live on my own.
I’d come up here reluctantly, but after I got past the stomach issues caused by the perpetual freefall of being in Earth’s orbit, I loved it.
I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.
Which was why I didn’t want this case.
If I failed to find the murderer of Shane Proctor’s son within twenty-four hours, I could get demoted. If I mouthed off about the impossibility of the task, I could get sent Earthside.
I didn’t want smaller quarters, and I didn’t want to experience full gravity ever again.
And I really, really didn’t want to die.
SeniorSource had recently branched into providing security and law enforcement services to various Moon-based communities, with an eye on capturing most of the Mars market by the turn of the century. If we did well on the Moon and had a proven track record in places outside of Earth, then we could open several care facilities in Mars’s orbit when the time came, and would use those folks to provide services to the new Mars communities.
The success of cases like mine would guarantee more Moon contracts and with those, enough money to build in Mars’s orbit even without full Mars contracts.
My boss, Riya Eoff, made it clear that any work I did on the Moon had to be flawless or I would suffer the consequences.
She didn’t need to scare me. I was already scared enough.
SeniorSource’s Earth-based companion investigation companies had robots and VR cameras and holographic imaging centers. We had weird little programs that I didn’t entirely understand that supposedly sent up puffs of air, filled with the smells of the crime scene.
(David Sullivan, the oldster who had trained me, told me they didn’t actually send up air until two or three days into an investigation. What you got through the nose unit of the goggles was a simulation of the smells. Only since we were using Earth smells and Earth-based equipment, we tended to get it right more often than not.)
On Earth, there were still a few knowledgeable people who could answer questions, do hands-on examination of evidence as well as an old-fashioned autopsy if one of us old-fashioned detectives figured it was necessary.
On the Moon, we had robots, VR cameras, and holographic imaging— and very little else. The human medical professionals residing there had enough to do with their living subjects, and had never really received training in modern forensic pathology.
Not that it mattered, since the Moon was still a collection of bases and mining operations. There was no real legal system there, so prosecuting the criminal would fall on the mining company or whatever Earth-based conglomerate owned the thing, or maybe on the country in which the conglomerate was registered.
As soon as I got the case, I asked one of the oldsters who was fulfilling his monthly day of work doing legal research to find out who owned the mining company and what laws I might have to operate under.
But that would only get me so far.
First I had to solve the case.
And I wasn’t sure I could do that.
Here’s the thing: I know how things work on Earth. If I fall, I bruise. If I grab someone’s arm hard, I could break the bone. If I shoot a gun, I know that the bullet might tear into blood and tissue and bone, leaving a trajectory that makes some kind of sense.
If I shoot a gun up here (not that I could, since firearms are the first thing confiscated before a resident boards the company shuttle), I know that bullet will follow some kind of straight line based on the amount of force from the explosion that released it. If the bullet doesn’t encounter a lot of resistance— meaning it misses a bone—it’ll slam through a human body in that same straight line, go through a wall, maybe another human body, and so on, until the energy that released it is spent.
With luck, that energy doesn’t send the bullet through the walls of our little space habitat, punching a hole into our protective walls and forcing us to vent atmosphere.
The rules of physics still do apply; you just have to subtract for the lack of gravity.
On the Moon, you have domed environments with full Earth gravity, domed environments with two-thirds Earth gravity, domed environments with one-third Earth gravity, and domed environments with no gravity at all.
You also have the Moon’s surface, which has one-sixth Earth gravity— and no atmosphere at all. Like everyone else sent up to this station, I learned what could happen to someone who let himself through both doors of the airlock without a space suit, and I found that lesson too graphic even for my concrete stomach. All I took away from the thing was this: you let yourself outside this place—or outside the Moon’s domes—without an environmental suit, and you’ll die one of the ugliest deaths imaginable.
So before I could do a full-scale Earth-type investigation, I had to find out several nontraditional things. Not only did I have to learn the exact location of the body, but I also needed to know what the gravity level was, and what the oxygen level was. I had to learn if the kid had access to an environmental suit, if he spent time outside the dome, and if he often went to domes with lesser (or greater) gravity.
I had to learn what Moon dust did to the lungs, whether the stuff could be made toxic with little effort, whether it changed from region to region.
Then I had to find out about the kid’s family life, his daily routine, and whether or not he had any friends. I had to factor that routine into my investigation, and see if—say—the bruising that was fairly obvious even from the first glance at his poor little body was the normal result of his everyday life or if it had come from some unusual event.
I had to be not only a detective but also an expert scientist, a lawyer, and an authority on the Moon in just a few short hours.
And I didn’t dare make a single mistake.
Which was why cleaning the coffee off my goggles irritated the hell out of me. It cost me time I truly didn’t have.
I wished I could just change out that pair of goggles for another. But I couldn’t. These goggles, our most high-end, had already been synced with the devices sent to settle the Proctor case, and it would take hours to sync another set of goggles with the Moon.
Not to mention the fact that those goggles would be technologically inferior to the ones I was using.
Cleaning things up here is perhaps the most difficult part of life in zero-g (if you don’t count the first few times you have to use the bathroom). You can’t just turn on a faucet and run the goggles underneath the tap. Everything here floats—including water.
You have to use a series of cloths, all treated with cleaning and drying fluids (but not wet enough to drip, of course). Then you have to put the fluid-covered cleaning cloths in the right containers and place them in the recycler, testing the item you’re trying to clean to make sure the dirt—or in my case, the coffee—has finally been removed.
I got the goggles cleaned, but I lost nearly a quarter of an hour.
During that quarter of an hour, however, I had had a chance to think. And to listen to what little bit we knew about the son of Shane Proctor.
I used the audio function of my own personal computer. We’re all assigned an onboard computer when we arrive; we can choose whether or not to have its component parts attached to our bodies. The oldsters prefer to have the computer as a separate item; I like my ear bud and my fingernail cam and the tiny screen that appears in the palm of my hand whenever I need to view some information.
Shane Proctor’s son was named Chen, a Chinese name that meant great.Oddly enough, he had no middle name.
Chen Proctor had been born in 2070 on the Moon in Proctor Mining Colony, with two midwives presiding. His mother, Lian Proctor, was Shane Proctor’s third wife. A quick search did not tell me what had happened to the previous two wives. I would have to dig for that information.
Chen Proctor had been home-schooled most of his life, partly because he went from mining operation to mining operation with his father and partly because he learned faster than anyone else in his age group.
He had a younger brother named Ellsworth and a baby sister named Caryn. Another quick search told me that Ellsworth and Caryn had different birth mothers than Chen—wives four and five.
No other child lived at home, and all three seemed to stay with their father, rather than their mothers. I couldn’t even do a standard search on where the mothers lived. Proctor Mining Company shielded a lot of personal data about its president and chief shareholder, so I had reached the extent of the public information I could find out about Proctor’s three children.
Or his last three children.
I wasn’t sure which.
I grabbed my goggles and floated back to my workstation. This time I strapped in.
I needed to concentrate fully, and the last thing I wanted to do was drift.
The Proctor Mining Colony took up most of what was once called the Descartes Highlands. The highlands were unrecognizable from the place where Apollo 16 had landed over one hundred years before. Now highlands were covered with mini domes, robotic equipment, newly dug holes, and not so newly dug holes. Lights covered the entire area, and what had once seemed like a dark grayish brown place now continually glowed.
Chen Proctor had spent the last two years of his life in the settlement dome, several kilometers from the current active mine. According to his family, he was never allowed outside. Apparently there had been an incident, and Chen had nearly died.
I let some of the androids—although they were really just talking robots—do the preliminary interviews, using a standard list of questions that I had tailored to this investigation. I would ask some of the tougher questions myself a little later.
; But first, I wanted to examine the body.
A pan-back and a comparison with GoogleMoon showed me exactly where the body had been found. It was at the edge of the new dome, which was being built to replace the settlement where the boy lived. The new dome had just inaugurated its gravity and environmental controls.
It was supposed to replicate the environment inside the settlement— meaning full Earth-normal, down to the oxygen and carbon dioxide mix in the air. The terraformers were working on the Moon dust, trying to make it more like Earth dirt, but that experiment was failing.
It was beginning to look more and more like the new dome would be exactly like the old settlement, only with better filters.
I had to use all five of SeniorSource’s robots, as well as the three VR cameras and the single holoimager, to get a good three-dimensional look at the body.
For an eight-year-old, Chen was tiny. He had the look of a boy raised in low gravity instead of full gravity, like his bio suggested. He had narrow little shoulders, a back so flat and slender that I could see his spine and his shoulder blades outlined against his shirt.
His pants seemed too big, and oddly enough, he was barefoot. His face was turned sideways, his mouth partially open and filled with dirt.
The holoimage showed hair that should have been black turned almost gray with Moon dust, and slightly almond-shaped eyes that were tightly closed.
I made the robots go around him, zooming in their own cameras for a level of detail that the human eye couldn’t see. I needed to know if what I thought were bruises were actually something else.
The bruises ran along the side of his cheek and under his chin, then again along his forearms. The marks on his forearms were small. They ran from the elbow to the wrist and were not evenly spaced.
