“Great, thanks. The ship’s on pad seven. You’ll make sure no one comes near it?”
“Yes, of course.” She gestured at the shipyard. “Keeping away looters is half my job; I’m good at it.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“Fifty-fifty, remember,” Bertha said, holding up her left arm and tapping the face of her wrist phone with a sausage-like finger to let me know that it had recorded the arrangement.
I feigned a hurt tone. “After all we’ve been through, you don’t trust me?”
“Would you?” she asked simply.
“I see your point.”
TWENTY-NINE
I’d have enjoyed watching the descent stage being hauled inside by the tractor—I don’t care how big a boy gets, he still loves watching large machines at work. But I’d seen the process before. The giant south airlock was over 300 meters wide and fifty deep. If a ship could fit in—the Skookum Jim barely would have squeezed in sideways—it could be brought inside the dome; if it didn’t, there was no other way to get it in. The whole process of filling or draining the lock took about an hour.
I headed back to NewYou, grabbing some synthetic sushi on the way. I got there just as Pickover was coming out of the workroom. His shirt still had a rip in it, but I presumed his chest was repaired, and he was no longer limping. I let him settle up with Fernandez—at this rate, Rory was going to have to sell a pentapod or two to stay afloat. And then I turned to Fernandez. “Can we take a crack at Dazzling Don now?”
“Absolutely,” he replied.
Just then, Mac came through the front door. Mercifully, Huxley was no longer with him; Mac himself was carrying the disruptor disk under one arm—maybe he was afraid that Trace wasn’t really dead.
“Okay,” Fernandez said generally to the room. “Come along.”
I’d assumed Pickover was going to join us, but he waved me off and went to have a word with Miss Takahashi. Maybe he wanted to try his luck—or maybe, as someone who had bought and paid for immortality, the notion of attending the autopsy of a transfer was too unsettling. In any event, only Mac and I followed Fernandez into the workroom. Given his massive arms, I had no doubt Horatio had been able to carry Trace here on his own. In fact, I suspected he’d done it as soon as we’d left; having a fried transfer in the middle of his showroom probably wasn’t good for business.
Dead humans always looked smaller than they had in life, but for whatever reason that effect didn’t apply to transfers. Doubtless Fernandez was used to dressing and undressing transfers—people might be born naked, but no one wanted to pop into a new body that wasn’t wearing clothes. He undid the buttons on Trace’s shirt, exposing a chest that was surprisingly doughy. I found myself thinking the guy should have worked out—but then realized how ridiculous that was.
Fernandez got a small cutting laser and aimed it at the top of the chest, just below the Adam’s apple. With practiced efficiency, he played the beam downward. I’d once seen a biological autopsy and had been impressed by all the blood that had spilled out when the chest was opened, but there was none of that here, although the melting plastiskin gave off an odor like burnt almonds.
Fernandez put on blue latex gloves, and as he pulled the chest flaps apart, I could see why: the melted skin was tacky, and some of it stuck to the gloves.
Beneath the skin was a layer of foam rubber, and beneath that was a skeleton that had the purplish pink sheen of highly polished alloy. There was nothing corresponding to organs inside the chest. Indeed, a lot of it seemed to be empty space.
Fernandez got a tool—like pliers, but with oddly shaped jaws—and he attached it to one of a pair of cylinders positioned more or less where the lungs should have been. The tool seemed to unlock something; there was a loud click, and the cylinder came free. Fernandez pulled the cylinder out and placed it on the table next to the body. The cylinder was covered with lubricant, which he wiped off with a green cloth, and then he got a large magnifying glass with a light attached and looked at the metal casing. “This is a ballast unit,” he said. “Gives heft to the torso. We don’t advertise the fact, but they’ve got serial numbers on them.”
He said the word “Keely,” then spoke a string of numbers into the air.
His computer responded in a pleasant female voice. “Transfer completed—” and it named a date two years ago.
“Where was the transfer done?” Fernandez asked.
“The body was assembled here,” said Keely, “at this NewYou franchise.”
“That was before I started working here,” Fernandez said to me. He spoke to Keely again. “And what’s this person’s name?”
“Unknown,” said Keely.
Fernandez frowned. “There has to be a record of the transference,” he said—but whether he was telling me, or reminding his computer, I didn’t know. He tried rephrasing his question. “Who came in for a transfer that day?”
“Nobody.”
I frowned, thinking of what Trace had said: “I’m nobody.”
“There had to be a source mind copied into this body,” Fernandez said into the air. “Whose mind was scanned that day?”
“No one’s.”
“Then how was the transfer made?”
“I don’t know,” said Keely.
“You’re sure it was done here?” Mac asked.
“That ballast unit was taken from our stock,” the computer replied.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said, looking at Fernandez. “You said the face was off-the-rack, so to speak. What about the rest of the body? Did it have any special modifications?”
The female voice answered. “Option package five selected: superior strength. No other modifications to standard body.”
“He said he was hired muscle,” I said. “I guess he was. But who hired him?”
“Who indeed?” asked Mac. He looked at Fernandez. “What do you do with a dead transfer? A funeral for a transfer seems like an oxymoron.”
“Yeah,” said Fernandez. “Transfers do get destroyed every once in a while, of course, but not often; I don’t think we’ve had more than a couple of cases here on Mars.” He paused. “Well, with no record of who transferred into this body, there’s no way to contact next of kin. I guess I’ll just strip him down for spare parts.” He looked at the body stretched out before him. “Although I gotta say, I rarely need any so big.”
When Mac and I went back through the sliding door into the showroom, I was surprised that not only was Pickover gone, but so was Reiko Takahashi.
Fernandez, who came out a moment later, was angry; he didn’t like that his shop had been left unattended. Then again, it wasn’t as if anyone was going to steal a transfer body; there was nothing you could do with one until it had had a consciousness moved into it, and that was hardly a do-it-yourself affair.
I asked my phone to get hold of Pickover. He didn’t answer, which could mean he was in trouble, or it could mean he was indeed getting it on with Miss Takahashi; even I had eventually learned that you don’t answer your phone when you’re in bed with a lady.
Reiko had been anxious to see her grandfather’s body, but I doubted Pickover would go to the descent stage without me, and only teenagers went to the shipyard to make out. I looked around the showroom for any sign of a struggle; there couldn’t have been a loud one or we’d have heard it in the next room. But there was no indication of anything amiss—excepting for the missing miss.
I looked at Fernandez, who was using his own phone, presumably to call Reiko. “No answer?” I said.
“No.” He shook the phone off. “She wouldn’t just disappear. She’s not like that.”