Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

Gargalian shared my fondness for old films; he got the reference and winced. “Still, there’s your answer, no? It must have been one of the rocket’s crew—someone who had access to the engine controls.”

I shook my head. “No. The cockpit was broken into.”

Ernie frowned. “Well, maybe it was one of the crew, trying to make it look like it wasn’t one of the crew.”

God save me from amateur detectives. “I checked. They all had alibis—and none of them had a motive, of course.”

Gargantuan made a harrumphing sound. “What about the original version of Megan?” he asked.

“Already gone. They normally euthanize the biological original immediately after making the copy; can’t have two versions of the same person running around, after all.”

“Why would anyone kill someone after they transferred?” asked Gargalian. “I mean, if you wanted the person dead, it’s got to be easier to off them when they’re still biological, no?”

“I imagine so.”

“And it’s still murder, killing a transfer, right? I mean, I can’t recall it ever happening, but that’s the way the law reads, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s still murder,” I said. “The penalty is life imprisonment— down on Earth, of course.” With any sentence longer than two mears—two Mars years—it was cheaper to ship the criminal down to Earth, where air is free, than to incarcerate him or her here.

Gargantuan shook his head, and his jowls, again. “She seemed a nice old lady,” he said. “Can’t imagine why someone would want her dead.”

“The ‘why’ is bugging me, too,” I said. “1 know she came in here a couple of weeks ago with some fossil specimens to sell; I found a receipt recorded in her datapad.”

Gargalian motioned toward his desktop computer, and we walked over to it. He spoke to the machine, and some pictures of fossils appeared on the same monitor he’d been looking at earlier. “She brought me three pentapeds. One was junk, but the other two were very nice specimens.”

“You sold them?”

“That’s what I do.”

“And gave her her share of the proceeds?”

“Yes.”

“How much did it come to?”

He spoke to the computer again, and pointed at the displayed figure. “Total, nine million solars.”

I frowned. “NewYou charges 7.5 million for their basic service. There can’t have been enough cash left over after she transferred to be worth killing her for, unless …” I peered at the images of the fossils she’d brought in, but I was hardly a great judge of quality. “You said two of the specimens were really nice.” ‘Nice’ was Gargantuan’s favorite adjective; he’d apparently never taken a creative-writing course.

He nodded.

“How nice?”

He laughed, getting my point at once. “You think she’d found the alpha ?”

I lifted my shoulders a bit. “Why not? II she knew where it was, that’d be worth killing her for.”

The alpha deposit was where Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly—the two private explorers who first found fossils on Mars—had collected their original specimens. That discovery had brought all the other fortune-seekers from Earth. Weingarten and O’Reilly had died twenty mears ago—their heat shield had torn off while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere after their third trip here—and the location of the alpha died with them. All anyone knew was that it was somewhere here in the Isidis Planitia basin; whoever found it would be rich beyond even Gargantuan Gargalian’s dreams.

“I told you, one of the specimens was junk,” said Ernie. “No way it came from the alpha. The rocks of the alpha are extremely fine-grained— the preservation quality is as good as that from Earth’s Burgess Shale.”

“And the other two?” I said.

He frowned, then replied almost grudgingly, “They were good.”

“Alpha good?”

His eyes narrowed. “Maybe.”

“She could have thrown in the junk piece just to disguise where the others had come from,” I said.

“Well, even junk fossils are hard to come by.”

That much was true. In my own desultory collecting days, I’d never found so much as a fragment. Still, there had to be a reason why someone would kill an old woman just after she’d transferred her consciousness into an artificial body.

And if I could find that reason, I’d be able to find her killer.

* * *

My client was Megan Delahunt’s ex-husband—and he’d been ex for a dozen mears, not just since Megan had died. Jersey Delahunt had come into my little office at about half-past ten that morning. He was shrunken with age, but looked as though he’d been broad-shouldered in his day. A few wisps of white hair were all that was left on his liver-spotted head. “Megan struck it rich,” he’d told me.

I’d regarded him from my swivel chair, hands interlocked behind my head, feet up on my battered desk. “And you couldn’t be happier for her.”

“You’re being sarcastic, Mr. Lomax,” he said, but his tone wasn’t bitter. “I don’t blame you. Sure, I’d been hunting fossils for thirty-six Earth years, too. Megan and me, we’d come here to Mars together, right at the beginning of the rush, hoping to make our fortunes. It hadn’t lasted though— our marriage, I mean; the dream of getting rich lasted, of course.”