Red Planet Blues

EIGHT





Ihad to get some sleep—damn, but sometimes I do wish I were a transfer—so I took the hovertram out to my apartment. My place was on Fifth Avenue, which was a great address in New York but a lousy one in New Klondike, especially out near the rim; it was mostly home to people who had tried and failed at fossil hunting, hence its nickname “Sad Sacks Fifth Avenue.”

I let myself have six hours—Mars hours, admittedly, which were slightly longer than Earth ones—then I headed out to the old shipyard. The sun was just coming up as I arrived there. The sky through the dome was pink in the east and purple in the west.

Some active maintenance and repair work was still done on spaceships here, but most of these hulks were no longer spaceworthy and had been abandoned. Any one of them would make a good hideout, I thought; spaceships were shielded against radiation, making it hard to scan through their hulls to see what was going on inside.

The shipyard was a large field holding vessels of various sizes and shapes. Most were streamlined—even Mars’s tenuous atmosphere required that. Some were squatting on tail fins; some were lying on their bellies; some were supported by articulated legs. I tried every hatch I could see on these craft, but, so far, they all had their airlocks sealed tightly shut.

Finally, I came to a monstrous abandoned spaceliner—a great hull, some three hundred meters long, fifty meters wide, and a dozen meters high. The name Skookum Jim was still visible in chipped paint near the bow, which is the part I came across first, and the slogan “Mars or Bust!” had been splashed across the metal surface in a paint that had survived the elements better than the liner’s name. I walked a little farther alongside the hull, looking for a hatch, until—

Yes! I finally understood what a fossil hunter felt when he at last turned up a perfectly preserved rhizomorph. There was an outer airlock door and it was open. The other door, inside, was open, too. I stepped through the chamber, entering the ship proper. There were stands for holding space suits but the suits themselves were long gone.

I walked to the far end of the room and found another door—one of those submarine-style ones with a locking wheel in the center. This one was closed; I figured it would probably have been sealed shut at some point, but I tried the wheel anyway, and damned if it didn’t spin freely, disengaging the locking bolts. I pulled the door open, then took the flashlight off my belt and aimed it into the interior. It looked safe, so I stepped through. The door was on spring-loaded hinges; as soon as I let go of it, it closed behind me.

The air was dry and had a faint odor of decay to it. I headed down the corridor, the pool of illumination from my flashlight going in front of me, and—

A squealing noise. I swung around, and the beam from my flashlight caught the source before it scurried away: a large brown rat, its eyes two tiny red coals in the light. People had been trying to get rid of the rats—and cockroaches and silverfish and other vermin that had somehow made it here from Earth—for mears.

I turned back around and headed deeper into the ship. The floor wasn’t quite level: it dipped a bit to—to starboard, they’d call it—and I also felt that I was gaining elevation as I walked along. The ship’s floor had no carpeting; it was just bare, smooth metal. Oily water pooled along the starboard side; a pipe must have ruptured at some point. Another rat scurried by up ahead; I wondered what they ate here, aboard the dead hulk of the ship.

I thought I should check in with Pickover—let him know where I was. I activated my phone, but the display said it was unable to connect. Of course: the radiation shielding in the spaceship’s hull kept signals from getting out.

It was growing awfully cold. I held my flashlight straight up in front of my face and saw that my breath was now coming out in visible clouds. I paused and listened. There was a steady dripping sound: condensation, or another leak. I continued along, sweeping the flashlight beam left and right in good detective fashion as I did so.

There were doors at intervals along the corridor—the automatic sliding kind you usually find aboard spaceships. Most ships used hibernation for bringing people to Mars, but this was an old-fashioned spaceliner with cabins; the passengers and crew would have been awake for the whole eight months or more of the journey out.

Most of the door panels had been pried open, and I shined my flashlight into each of the revealed rooms. Some were tiny passenger quarters, some were storage, one was a medical facility—all the equipment had been removed, but the examining beds betrayed the room’s function. They were welded down firmly—not worth the effort for scavengers to salvage, I guess.

I checked yet another set of quarters, then came to a closed door, the first one I’d seen along this hallway.

I pushed the open button but nothing happened; the ship’s electrical system was dead. There was an emergency handle recessed into the door’s thickness. I could have used three hands just then: one to hold my flashlight, one to hold my revolver, and one to pull on the handle. I tucked the flashlight into my right armpit, held my gun with my right hand, and yanked on the recessed handle with my left.

The door hardly budged. I tried again, pulling harder—and almost popped my arm out of its socket. Could the door’s tension control have been adjusted to require a transfer’s strength to open it? Perhaps.

I tried another pull and, to my astonishment, light began to spill out from the room. I’d hoped to just whip the door open, taking advantage of the element of surprise, but the damned thing was only moving a small increment with each pull of the handle. If there was someone on the other side and he or she had a gun, it was no doubt now leveled directly at the door.

I stopped for a second, shoved the flashlight into my pocket, and—damn, I hated having to do this—holstered my revolver so that I could free up my other hand to help me pull the door open. With both hands now gripping the recessed handle, I tugged with all my strength, letting out a grunt as I did so. The light from within stung my eyes; they’d grown accustomed to the darkness. Another pull, and the door panel had now slid far enough into the wall for me to slip into the room by turning sideways. I took out my gun and let myself in.

A voice, harsh and mechanical, but no less pitiful for that: “Please . . .”

My eyes swung to the source of the sound. There was a worktable with a black top attached to the far wall. And strapped to that table—

Strapped to that table was a transfer’s synthetic body. But this wasn’t like the fancy, almost perfect simulacrum that my client Cassandra inhabited. This was a crude, simple humanoid form with a boxy torso and limbs made up of cylindrical metal segments. And the face—

The face was devoid of any sort of artificial skin. The eyes, blue in color and looking startlingly human, were wide, and the teeth looked like dentures loose in the head. The rest of the face was a mess of pulleys and fiber optics, of metal and plastic.

“Please . . .” said the voice again. I looked around the rest of the room. There was an excimer battery, about the size of a softball, with several cables snaking out of it, including some that led to portable lights. There was also a closet with a simple door. I pulled it open—this one slid easily—to make sure no one else had hidden in there while I was coming in. An emaciated rat that had been trapped inside at some point scooted out of the closet and through the still-partially-open corridor door.

I turned my attention to the transfer. The body was clothed in simple black denim pants and a beige T-shirt.

“Are you okay?” I said, looking at the skinless face.

The metal skull moved slightly left and right. The plastic lids for the glass eyeballs retracted, making the non-face into a caricature of imploring. “Please . . .” he said for a third time.

I looked at the restraints holding the artificial body in place: thin nylon bands attached to the tabletop, pulled taut. I couldn’t see any release mechanism. “Who are you?” I asked.

I was half prepared for his answer: “Rory Pickover.” But it didn’t sound anything like the Rory Pickover I’d met: the cultured British accent was absent, and this synthesized voice was much higher pitched.

Still, I shouldn’t take this sad thing’s statement at face value—especially since it had hardly any face. “Prove it,” I said. “Prove you’re Rory Pickover.”

The glass eyes looked away. Perhaps the transfer was thinking of how to satisfy my demand—or perhaps he was just avoiding my eyes. “My citizenship number is AG-394-56-432.”

I shook my head. “No good,” I said. “It’s got to be something only Rory Pickover would know.”

The eyes looked back at me, the plastic lids lowered, perhaps in suspicion. “It doesn’t matter who I am,” he said. “Just get me out of here.”

That sounded reasonable on the surface of it, but if this was another Rory Pickover . . .

“Not until you prove your identity to me,” I said. “Tell me where the Alpha Deposit is.”

“Damn you,” said the transfer. “The other way didn’t work, so now you’re trying this.” The mechanical head looked away. “But this won’t work, either.”

“Tell me where the Alpha Deposit is,” I said, “and I’ll free you.”

“I’d rather die,” he said. And then, a moment later, he added wistfully, “Except . . .”

I finished the thought for him. “Except you can’t.”

He looked away again. It was hard to feel for something that appeared so robotic; that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. “Tell me where O’Reilly and Weingarten were digging. Your secret is safe with me.”

He said nothing, but my mind was racing and my heart was pounding—those fabulous specimens the other Rory had shown me, the thought of so many more of them out there to be collected, the incalculable wealth they represented. I was startled to discover that my gun was now aimed at the robotic head, and the words “Tell me!” hissed from my lips. “Tell me before—”

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.”