by Neil Clarke
The mark on his face was large, covering most of his visible cheek, his jawline, and running all the way down to the middle of his neck.
If they were bruises, they had been created before he died. In that case, someone had grabbed him and hit him. But I wasn’t ready to take the easy solution. I was afraid these were some kind of marking I wasn’t familiar with—something that a person who lived in the Moon colonies would see as normal and not suspicious at all.
So I had the robots give me as much information as they could without disturbing the body. The photographs and vids were great, but I wanted more.
If I had actually been there, I would have leaned over the boy and sniffed. You learn a lot from the way a corpse smells—and I’m not just talking about decomposition. Perfume on the shirt, the scent of cedar oil on the hands, the faint odor of grease on the back of the neck might be all it takes to wrap up a case.
Only I had no time and no way to order up a little whiff of air.
So I did the next best thing. I had the robots take the chemical composition of the air, unit by tiny unit. I hoped I could feed those chemical signatures into our own forensic lab computer and get an analysis of the odors—not quite as good as smelling things myself, but good enough, maybe, to give me an idea of what I was facing.
I also had one of the robots take images of the area, and was startled to see signs in English, proclaiming this part of the new dome completely off-limits.
No one had mentioned that.
In fact, no one had mentioned how the boy’s body had been found in the first place.
I put through a series of instructions—no touching the body until my investigation was finished, no one (human or nonaffiliated robot) allowed on the scene while the work progressed, and no second-party release of information.
That last was the most critical, because information acquired through nonhuman means often had more than one legal owner. I had no idea if the robots I was using belonged solely to SeniorSource or if they were being leased from Proctor Mining.
I had no idea about too many things.
My stomach turned, and I felt queasy for the first time in years. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
When I had worked for the NYPD, I occasionally clashed with my bosses. I became known as one of the most opinionated and successful detectives in homicide. If you wanted a case closed, you picked me to investigate. But you also put up with my attitude and my mouth.
I’d kept both under control here—I knew the risks, and they weren’t worth the hassle.
I could usually succeed without mouthing off.
On this case, however, I couldn’t. SeniorSource had given me an impossible task with an impossible deadline, and somehow expected me to get it done.
Maybe if I confessed about my own inadequacies early enough, I’d only suffer a demotion. Maybe I’d just get a demerit.
Maybe, if I documented everything, I’d have enough evidence to take to one of the elderly lawyers up here and get him (or an Earthbound colleague) to fight my inevitable banishment back to full gravity.
Because I couldn’t work with what I had.
I set my goggles and the nearby computer backups to store each piece of information that was sent through the equipment on the Moon. When I was done, I peeled the goggles off and hung them on the Velcro strap designed especially for them.
Then I headed to my boss’s office, trying not to think of everything I risked.
My boss, Riya Eoff, had decorated every available space of her office with pictures from home. Photographs of her family, starting with her great-grandparents and running all the way to her own great-granddaughter, a baby she had never met. Riya suffered from advanced osteoporosis and had had to sign a special waiver just to get approved at SeniorSource, since space life often leached calcium from the bone.
But it was easier to survive up here with weak bones than it was on Earth. Her doctor had signed her up as an experimental guinea pig—to see how long a severely weakened person could survive in zero-g—and the study had long since ended. Riya was now in her second decade at SeniorSource, and if you didn’t know her history, you’d think the thin, silver-haired woman who haunted this office was one of the most athletic elderly people who had ever come into space.
“This better be important,” she said to me. “You’re on a deadline.”
“I know,” I said. “If you want results by tomorrow, you have to give me the full detective squad plus a few scientists.”
My voice didn’t shake, and that was a plus. I tried to imagine myself back on Earth, making this same pitch in the precinct, but that was hard.
We didn’t float in the NYPD.
“We don’t have the budget for a full squad.” She didn’t quite look at me. Instead, she threaded her hands over her stomach. Her fingers were covered with rings, some as old as she was. A necklace floated around her chin—she had once told me she had worn it since she was twelve and had never taken it off.
My stomach twisted. That queasiness was getting worse.
“If you can’t give me the help,” I said, “then you’re not going to get this contract.”
“Are you saying you can’t solve this crime?” she asked.
I tensed. I never said I couldn’t solve a crime. But I didn’t let her bait me. I spoke slowly, so that I didn’t say something I would regret.
“I’m saying I can’t solve this case in the timeline you gave me with the knowledge I have.”
“You’re the smartest investigator I have,” she said.
That statement should have relaxed me, but it didn’t. “Maybe with Earth crimes,” I said. “But I know nothing about the Moon.”
“You know enough.”
I shook my head, then regretted it as the movement sent me sliding in two different directions at once. I’d gotten rid of most of my counterproductive Earth movements, but head-shaking was one that snuck up on me—I never thought of it as movement, only as communication.
“Nonsense,” she said. “Tell me who you suspect and why.”
“I suspect no one,” I said. “I’m not even sure about the kid’s family relationships. I don’t know if he snuck into that spot in the new dome. I’m not even sure he was murdered.”
I could hear an old tone in my voice—an edge, one that threatened to become strident.
Riya grabbed onto a handhold built into one of the walls. She should have reprimanded me—SeniorSource never admitted that it examined crimes that turned out to be nothing more than an accident—but she didn’t.
Instead she said, “What makes you say that he might not have been murdered?”
The hair rose on the back of my neck—or the hair would have risen if it weren’t already standing at attention from the lack of gravity. Still, that feeling, the one my grandmother used to say was like someone walking on your grave, made me shiver.
Something was going on here. Something I wasn’t sure I liked.
I took a deep breath to keep my temper in check.
“The dome is new,” I said. “The environmental equipment was just turned on. So was the gravity. The boy had a mouthful of Moon dust, but some of the information I received said that scientists were trying to turn that part of the dome into an Earthlike area, one that could grow grass, crops, and trees. So what happens if the boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“Go on,” she said, and that feeling crawling along my spine grew worse.
I knew I was supposed to be a guinea pig, but I was supposed to solve the case. Only Riya was acting like she already knew the solution.
Maybe the test was more complicated than I had originally thought.
“The oxygen mix could be wrong,” I said. “He doesn’t look like a boy who suffocated, but I’m not sure what certain chemical mixes would do to a body.”
She tilted her head at me, her expression neutral. I didn’t like that either.
“Then there’s the so-called soil. If he fell and got a mouthful o
f it, did it poison him? And what happens if the gravity came on too hard? The human body can survive four, five, six times Earth-normal. Healthy adult males can survive as much as eight times Earth-normal for a few minutes. But me? I couldn’t survive that and neither could you. Our bones would shatter and our lungs would collapse. I have no idea if the same thing would happen to a fragile-looking eight-year-old, but I’ll wager it might.”
She nodded, but since she clung to the handhold, she didn’t really move much.
I continued. “He has marks that look like bruises on his face and arms, but that’s the only visible skin I can see. The bruises on his arms look like finger marks, but what if they’re hematomas from shattered bones? What if the long bruise on his face is some kind of darkening agent from a poison he ingested?”
“You’ll find that out,” she said.
“Not by tomorrow,” I said. “Because even if I found out that the gravity was too high and it crushed him, how would I know if he stumbled in there accidentally or if someone told him to sit there and wait, then went to the controls and turned the gravity to nine times Earth-normal?”
“The robots could give you those readings,” she said.
“No, they can’t,” I said. “They’d give me the readings for now, not then. And we both know that computer readings can be tampered with. So the old data is as useless as my guesswork.”
She stared at me.
“Give me a team,” I said, “or I’m going to have to withdraw from this case.”
“You can’t withdraw,” she said, and my stomach clenched. Here came the final moment—the moment when I chose my integrity or I chose my life.
“Watch me,” I said, and shoved my way out of the room.
I’d be lucky to get a demotion. I was probably heading Earthside, to gravity that would feel as heavy to me as 9 g’s would have felt to poor little Chen Proctor.
Riya caught my ankle and tugged me back inside.
“Talk to me,” she said. “There’s something else you don’t like about this case, besides the unfamiliar terrain and the deadline. What is it?”
Whatever you could say about Riya Eoff, you couldn’t call her dumb. I actually hated how perceptive she was.
I also wasn’t fond of the way her hand still clung to my ankle. She wasn’t going to let me out of here until she ruled the conversation over.
But I figured I couldn’t make matters worse—at least, not for me. So it didn’t hurt to be honest with her.
“Ninety-five percent of child murders,” I said slowly, “are committed by a member of the family, usually a parent or stepparent.”
She let go of my ankle. I drifted a little past her and had to grab a handhold to keep myself from spiraling back into the center of the room.
“You think Shane Proctor did this?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have a prime suspect. But if I did have a prime suspect, and if it was someone that Shane Proctor loved, then what? How would we prosecute? How would we even arrest? This whole setup is flawed, Riya. It’s not enough to find out whodunit. We need to know how we’re going to catch them, and even more important, how we’re going to stop them—and anyone else—from ever doing this again.”
She let go of her handhold and crossed her arms. Then she smiled at me. The smile was slow, but effective.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret it.
“You do realize that you have a gift for investigation, don’t you?” she said.
I clutched the handhold. I had no real idea why she was flattering me.
And then I understood. “You do know who killed Chen.”
“Yes,” she said. Then she frowned. “No. Well, maybe I do. The death was ruled accidental. He was crushed when the gravity test malfunctioned. Chen had a penchant for wandering into test areas. He liked to be alone. It wasn’t the first time he’d been caught somewhere he shouldn’t have been. It was the first time he’d been injured.”
“I thought you said he died.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “But I don’t think anyone considered that he hadn’t wandered in there. I’m not sure if anyone thought about the fact that the controls could have been tampered with.”
“Except you,” I said.
Her smile widened. “I needed confirmation.”
“Because you already knew that prosecuting anyone for this would be impossible.”
She nodded, and this time, the movement made her bob like a buoy in a rough sea. “It’s one thing to investigate crimes. It’s another to prosecute them.”
I thought I had just said that. But I didn’t point that out to her. I didn’t dare.
“I needed a simulation,” she said. “I needed to show management that although our investigators can handle anything given the time and the resources, we need support on the ground. And the Moon colonies don’t have that support. I can’t even imagine what it would be like on the frontier, if we went with the settlers to Mars.”
Not that we would be with those settlers. We’d only be observing them. And then we’d only be observing the very darkest sides of them.
“So this was all a simulation,” I said. “The commands I gave the robots, the things I saw through my goggles. You’d set all that up so you had some footage to take to the brass.”
Her smile faded. “It’s not all a simulation,” she said. “Chen Proctor is dead. And there will always be a lot of unanswered questions about the death.”
“I could still investigate it,” I said before I had a chance to think. I wanted to mitigate some of the damage I had done with my harsh tone.
“That boy’s been dead for two years.”
Which explained why I was told I had only rudimentary equipment to work with. Which was why the answers I got to the questions sounded as mechanical as the robots asking those questions.
“Two years,” I repeated. “I suppose the body’s long gone.”
“They don’t bury the dead on the Moon,” she said. “Cremation is more efficient.”
“And no one took the requisite information.”
“Who would?” she asked.
“So who tried to hire us?” I asked. “It wasn’t Proctor Mining, was it?”
She didn’t answer me. She probably couldn’t. It could have been anyone from a Proctor Mining competitor to one of those government unification types who wanted strong central oversight of the Moon.
“I need you to make a complete report,” she said. “I want you to list every single thing we would have to do to successfully prosecute that boy’s killer—if indeed he had a killer.”
“Even if the killer was one of his parents,” I said.
“Even if,” she said.
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t going to be banished. I wasn’t going to get a demotion. I had done the job she wanted. I had passed the damn test, not even realizing exactly what it was.
“Essentially, then,” I said, “I’m designing your Moon outsourcing program, using this one case.”
She winced. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Because,” I said, getting warmed up, “if you said that, you’d owe me more compensation. I’d have moved up from investigator to management.”
She nervously caught her floating necklace with one finger. “You once told me you don’t want to be management.”
I’d been taking risks all day, so I decided to take another. “If you’re going to work me like management, you have to compensate me like management.”
“Not without the job title.”
“I don’t want the job title,” I said. “And I’ll do the work, if you guarantee me my quarters for life, a richer food allowance, and the same medical care that the oldsters get.”
“That’s a lot,” she said.
“I’m designing a brand-new outsourcing program for you.”
“You’re just suggesting it,” she said.
“Still.”
“How about more free time?” she asked.
I shook my head and felt my body sway. I clutched the handhold tighter. “Quarters for life, richer food, oldster-level medical care. Nothing less.”
She made a face. I felt the tension return.
Then she extended a hand. “Done.”
I let out a small sigh as I took her hand.
“Good,” I said. “As soon as we have a contract, I’ll do your report.”
She sighed. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for such a tough negotiator.”
I usually wasn’t. Except when someone’s life was on the line. And this time, it was my life. With those guarantees, I could stop restraining myself. I could speak out about my investigations. I could stop worrying whenever I told the truth.
And I never again had to worry about going Earthside. I would stay here until my heart stopped beating.
I could do what I wanted without fear of losing this grand adventure.
I could truly live out my days, instead of waiting them out. I could float, gravity free, instead of sitting in a tiny piss-scented room, being crushed by the weight of the world and the lack of a future.
“Sometimes,” I said, “you have to be a tough negotiator. It’s the only way to get what you want.”
“And you want to stay here,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
She smiled. “I don’t think there’s any worry about that.”
Not anymore, I thought with more relief than I’d felt in my life. Not anymore.
2009
Sarah Thomas is an award-winning journalist, marketer, essayist, newspaper editor, and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, National Geographic Glimpse, Offbeat Bride, Anvil’s Ring, the Boston Globe, and more. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with her husband, Mike, and a very fat cat.
THE ECONOMY OF VACUUM
Sarah Thomas
PART I
All the predictions regarding how quickly the public would bore of the mission were grossly underestimated.
For fifteen news cycles, at least one network was providing round-the-clock coverage. The base’s larger structures were self-assembling, so there was plenty of time for Virginia to prance around for the cameras in her jumpsuit, sticking posters to the polycarbonate walls with duct tape. The mission directors had encouraged her to take as many mementos from home as she pleased—both for her own peace of mind, and to demonstrate the efficiency of the new Valero thermocakes.
