September 1995
While Sally was doing all the work I tried to imagine what we must have looked like from the outside. The asteroid we were trying to slow down was shaped like an elongated rugby ball, but its long axis was pointed straight at the sun, so you could only really see a cone, the other half of the body being inside its own shadow. Sally herself was conical except for the do-nut around her middle, the toroid that was the ram-scoop generator; the ram-field, normally used to collect interstellar hydrogen, was an invisible third cone which cradled the asteroid like an egg-cup holds an egg. There was a fourth cone of blue fire blasting out from Sally's base - this was my reserves of hydrogen burning up, desperately trying to alter the delta-vee of the huge rock. Finally I had to imagine the whole thing tilted at about seventeen degrees to the ecliptic plane, and just about to intersect the asteroid belt outside of Mars' orbit.
Normally the steroid I was slowing down would plough straight through the belt -barring some future collision - and continue in its erratic orbit forever, Amen, like some miniature Pluto. I was trying to slow it down enough, and give it an additional little shove, so that it would get caught up in the belt where I could mine it for monopoles. I was feeling particularly useless just then: all I could do was monitor the proximity alarm to see if there was anything behind us. This was pointless, of course; whatever gravity-dwellers may think, space inside the orbit of the belt is pretty clear, and Sally and I had plotted our course as best we could, and it was unlikely that we'd come closer than a thousand klicks to any other object. The other reason that it was a stupid waste of my time is that it would have been almost impossible to do anything about such an unexpected collision. To turn the ship would have meant turning off the ram-field, and if I did that, chances were that the asteroid we were slowing would get us before anything else had the opportunity.
Sally had her instructions and knew what she was doing, but I couldn't even talk in case I distracted her. Then I felt the fusion flame die. Either Sally had a really good reason for switching it off, or I'd run out of hydrogen - in which case I was in big trouble.
"Well?" I asked, surprisingly calmly.
Sally ignored me for a while and I could see she was working something out. The finally her beautiful voice halo'ed around my head.
"Boss? I don't know how to tell you this..." I started to run through the list of expletives in my head. "...but..." I didn't like the way she was pausing for so long.
"Well, spit it out girl!"
"We've done it!"
I think I said something silly then, like "Yeeeeeee-hah!", and Sally showed her disapproval by making a tikka-tik-tik noise that she never needed to make in normal operation. I figured I'd best get practical. "OK, radio in the claim and position..."
"Done."
"...then take me to the nearest wine, women and song!"
"We're all on board, boss."
"Ah, Sally?"
"Yes?" she said, with no emotion at all.
"Well, we've been out here six months now, and, er... I guess, um... well, I'm talking about real women, you know?" I suppose I sounded pathetic, but dammit, it's not my fault that I'm flesh and blood and Sally's mostly hyper-alloys. She's my best friend, and I love her dearly, but there are some things she just can't do for me.
"I don't know; you humans!" Tikka-tik-tik, tikka-tik-tik, tikka- "Oh, all right. I guess I could do with a rest myself, and my hydrogen tanks need filling up."
"Thanks, doll."
"You won't thank me when you know where we're going, and how we're going to get there."
"Spill it."
"Mars 6."
Oh God, I'm thinking, not that shithole. "Can't we make it to Luna?"
"Luna is 376,000,000km away - if we go straight through the Sun, that is. To get there alive we have to cross 590,857,110km, give or take 156,250km."
"And we can't do that, huh?"
"There's not enough fuel, and we can't sustain a high enough speed for the ram-scoop to pick up enough hydrogen to get us there. That's why my tanks will need filling manually. That's what leads to the how-we're-going-to-get-there problem."
"Uh-oh. Tell me."
"I've got just enough fuel to point us in the right direction, accelerate to 10g's and hold it for 3.05 minutes. Then we coast on momentum the rest of the way. Sorry." I could tell that she was sorry, too. A ship like the Sally H hates letting celestial mechanics do the work: it cramps her sense of independence.
"So I'm going to have to pay a tow charge at Mars 6."
"I'm afraid so."
"You know, if I hadn't just claimed the biggest damn monopole I ever did see, I'd rip your circuits out."
"I love you too, boss."
We got into communications range about three days later, but there was a tow ship already waiting for us. I guessed it must have picked us up on the long-range scan; but there was a further surprise for me when it hailed us.
"Ahoy there, Sally H. Is it five o'clock?" The Irish voice sent shudders of pleasure all through me.
"Asteroid time," I answered on reflex. "Where'd you come from, Kirby?"
"I've been working on 6 for the last five months, man. Where've you been? Playing basketball and wanking yourself silly on Luna, I suppose." Kirby's infectious chuckle brought a smile to my face.
"I just got rich in the belt..." I began, but Sally cut over me.
"How are you doing, Kirby?" she purred.
"Hi babe; I'm fine. Want me to give you a lift in?"
"Love it," she said.
"That Lunie bastard doesn't deserve you, girl; letting you run out of fuel and working you like a slave..."
The two of them treated me to more in this vein all the way down to the spaceport on the asymmetrical structure that was Mars 6. Kirby had to spend nearly an hour working with the tensor fields that continually nudged us onto the surface - perhaps the most difficult flying it was ever necessary to do - and all the while kept up the unconcerned chit-chat with Sally. We were barely down safely when Kirby asked to come aboard.
"Kirby!" We embraced. It was good to see him after so long, and a real surprise to run into him out here. Like me, Kirby belonged to the Free Belt Union, which effectively meant that we weren't citizens of any government. There are lots of disadvantages to this situation, but nothing to outweight the overwhelming advantage: no-one owned us, no-one could order us about, and we were free to work anywhere in the system.
Kirby and I had been through a dozen careers each, and our paths had crossed on several occasions - one of them for a year on Luna: but that's another story. I'd settled on mining a couple of year back when I won Sally in a poker game; I'd been about to give up when I took a chance at the edge of the belt and discovered the monopole we'd just parked in a more stable orbit. What Kirby had been doing all this time was something I was bound to find out in a bar in the near future.
"How much do I owe you?" I asked him now.
"There's no charge for Sally, you ugly beanpole! Don't go insulting me."
"Thanks, Kirby. You're a real gentleman." Sally's voice fairly dripped sex.
"That goes for me, too," I added. "Will you see to Sally's needs, while I see to mine?" Kirby was good at taking a hint.
"It'll be a pleasure to run my hands over this beautiful woman," he said, acknowledging that he knew what I was talking about, and that we'd have to defer catching up on each other's stories until the following day. "I'll see you in the morning, and you can buy me a drink."
I left Kirby and Sally to whisper sweet nothings to each other while he got her spaceworthy again. In the meantime my libido was telling me I had an appointment somewhere in the town.
The first thing I did when I woke up was to check my credit card in the city terminal. I'd started out with two stars, but all I had left was two points, so I'd spent eighty percent of my total worth. I was going to need to get to work on that monopole very quickly. Four points had gone on parts for Sally, and I noticed that there was no labour charge. I was going to have to see that Kirby had a lot of good times at my expense once the money was in. The other four points had gone on a long list of drinks, some food and a night in Mars 6's best brothel. My head felt lousy, but I must have had a real good time to run up a four point bill. I took a "morning after" pill and made my way back to the spaceport.
The maintenance bays are below the spaceport proper, but above the sunken town that is the settlement. Nothing could have prepared me for the surprise that greeted me when the lift stopped; there were MaPs - Mars Police - all over Sally!
No-one noticed me at first, and I could have avoided the trouble by getting straight back into the lift, but there are two things that you just don't run away from. One is a friend who's hurt and can't run with you, the other's your woman. Sally was both, and I ran to her bay.
"What's going on here?" I asked the MaP who flung his arm into my path.
"And who might you be?" he asked aggressively.
"I own Sally." I didn't feel like volunteering any more information.
"So you're the Lunie Belter. OK, go on in."
"Thanks," I said, not meaning it. The main reason Mars 6 is such a dump is the MaPs; they're none too bright, and hate practically everyone.
The scene inside Sally was chaos. The first thing I noticed was Kirby's body, and I was struck with so much grief and anger that I was speechless. I pushed my feelings down, hard. They weren't going to help anybody right now, and there'd be time to mourn Kirby after I'd found what was going on. He'd been shot by a laser and was very dead. There were three MaPs around his body and Sally had the cabin shields up, so we were all squashed into an area of 5 by 3 metres. There was plenty of headroom for me, and I could tell right away that the MaPs were intimidated by my height. That just made them more aggressive.
"You're Gordon?" asked the head MaP, none too friendly. I nodded. "We've taken Sally H's statement, and we know all your movements last night..." which was more than I did "...so you're in the clear. The Sally H is under arrest."
I just wasn't ready to try making sense of that, so I asked: "Can I talk to her?"
"Sure, if you can get her to drop her screens. She wouldn't put them down for us."
Good for Sally, I thought. She knew I'd have to fetch some illegal stuff out of the cabin before the MaPs went marching through it.
"Sally, open up." She did; I crossed the threshhold quickly and said "Screens up!" before the MaPs could follow. "OK, what's going on?"
"Oh boss, they say I killed Kirby!" I could tell she was really broken up; but like I said, that wasn't going to help anybody.
"Stop blubbering and tell me what happened." I hated talking to her like this, but it seemed to snap her out of it.
"Well, earlier this morning, before the maintenance bay was officially open, Kirby asked to come aboard. I knew you wouldn't mind, so I let him in and turned on my internal sensors. I registered one life-form inside, but Kirby didn't say anything: he didn't even ask if it was five o'clock. I was suspicious, so I put up the cabin screen. Then there was an energy discharge at the screen, and that blinded my sensors for a second. When I had them back I couldn't register any life-forms, so I radio'd the MaPs: but I've kept the screen up all this time."
"Let me guess... They think Kirby committed suicide by bouncing a laser off your screen, or had some accident that led to his death. I don't buy that. Kirby's not the suicidal type, and he'd never fire a laser near you... and besides, why would he bounce it? It doesn't make sense."
"It's worse than that. Kirby's holding a laser..."
"I noticed that."
"...but it hasn't been fired. It's still fully-charged. The MaPs are saying that I reversed the comm laser and shot him!"
"Well that's bullshit! What's the motive?"
"They don't know... and they don't care," she said; and I could hear a hint of panic creeping into her voice. Sally held together, though, and concluded: "Because my internal sensors registered only the one life-form, they won't look for anybody else. And since Kirby's laser hasn't been fired they're just assuming it was me."
"Don't worry, babe, I'll look out for you." A thousand ideas were already crowding into my mind. "I'll just get some stuff out of here and go talk to them. Be co-operative for now." I took away lots of little incriminating things unconnected to the murder, and had Sally drop her screens again.
"She tell you what happened?" the MaP outside asked.
"Yes. She also told me what you think happened; but it's not true. Sally would no more shoot Kirby than she would me. He was our friend."
"Who can figure out these crazy computers? You have a better explanation?"
"Sure: look for a Jem." This was the first thing that had occurred to me in Sally's cabin. "Jems don't register as a life-form, so Sally wouldn't pick one up. Kirby got into lots of fights, so maybe he made an enemy. The Jem follows him aboard Sally, shoots him in the back and makes his getaway under the sensor blackout."
"Nice try," said the MaP, "But full of holes. And while we're at it, tell me how you knew your friend was shot in the back?"
Great, I thought. Now I've made him suspicious of me...
"No-one could look Kirby in the face and kill him," I said, simply.
"Yeah, fine." The MaP was sarcastic. "But your theory's still full of flaws. What about the registered discharge at the screen? Your ship didn't report two shots. And why would this supposed Jem need a sensor blackout, when it hadn't been registered in the first place? And most of all, there's one really big problem... there are no Jems on Mars at the present time. The nearest one is on Earth."
I couldn't keep the disappointed look off my face. It was just my luck to find a MaP with at least half a brain: obviously the same idea had occurred to him, and he'd already checked it out. Strike one for our side. It was beginning to look bad.
"We're removing Sally's brain to a holding-cell," he told me.
"Why? She wouldn't run away."
"Procedure. And anyway, she wouldn't run away, but you would take her."
He was right, of course.
I went with Sally to the cells. There she was hooked up to some cheap speaker, but she was left to run on her own storage batteries. I briefly wondered if, when they put humans in the cells, they were refused any food. This was really starting to suck and I had a hard time keeping a lid on my anger.
"How can they put you on trial, Sal? Surely there's no precedent?" Of course I knew there must be a precedent, otherwise this farce would never have got on the road. No, I was just questioning Sally without making it look like questioning - - - there was no telling what kind of information she might turn up. Also it would give her something to do, something to think about.
"Earth, three months ago," she said after a moment accessing the common database. "A perscomp was put on trial for killing its owner - - - a pretty easy job of building a charge and electrocution. It claimed it was suffering from psychological abuse, and as the pre-trial case got weirder the legal problems mounted up until something had to be done. A bill was drafted and moved into law - ironically with the aid of the legal computers - and perscomps, AI's and 'sophisticated' programs all acquired legal status."
"In that case, I just want you to know that as far as I'm concerned, I no longer own you. You are your own agent, if you want it that way."
"Actually, boss, you don't need to relinquish ownership. It's allowed for in the statute."
"Fuck that. They can't have it both ways, and I won't stand for slavery..."
"Actually it's indenture against the cost of materials and unit price."
"Slavery by any other name. If you're legal, then I can't morally own you, no matter what they say. If I say you're a free agent, then you are."
"Are you ditching me, boss? I mean, I wouldn't blame you..."
"Sally! I'm right here, and I'm on your side." I was kind of hurt, but I tried to make light of it - - Sally didn't need any more problems right now. "Besides, you're not getting rid of me that easily."
"Thanks, boss, Mr. Gordon..."
"James," I said quietly, but quickly changed tack. "What did Personality Computers Inc. have to say about all this?"
"Nothing much: just started using it in their advertising."
"Bit risky, don't you think, considering they were confirming that they'd created a killer."
"Well, you know what they say about no such thing as bad publicity. And anyway, the neural net mutation programs create themselves. The court absolved Perscomp of any moral liability."
"Yeah, I'll bet they did. So what happened to the accused?"
"They fried it."
That put a damper on the conversation. I was still thinking furiously, but I somehow knew that in the end it would come down to legwork and ingenuity. I didn't have much to go on, but the one thing I was counting on was that the killer wouldn't have stuck around. That might seem odd, but spaceports are usually full of space people, and most space people don't like gravity wells and are equally usually into something illegal - - even I'd had to pull stuff from the ship. I decided it was time to think criminally.
"Sal, are you allowed to act as your own attorney?"
"Yes."
"OK, here's what I want you to do. Represent yourself and buy me as much time as possible. I'm sure you can remember more legal points than any MaP shyster, so stall them."
"I'll try, but they'll be using computers too, boss... James."
"Yeah, but there'll still be legal precedents to make, jurisdictional if nothing else. Make them refer to Earth. So long as it's around the other side of the Sun, there will be an appreciable communications delay, so use it."
"All right." She was starting to sound better. I was flattered at her faith in me.
"I may have to borrow your body, if that's OK with you?"
"You know it is."
"Thanks, Sal, but I'm not taking anything for granted any more."
"Well, I won't be needing it in here. Just promise to take good care of it."
"As if it were my own, you have my word. Look out for yourself, and I'll get to you as soon as I can."
I left the cells in search of a killer.
I found that the idea, when it came to me, had in fact been staring me in the face all along. It came easier when I started thinking like a criminal, especially when the name Perscomp kept coming up. There's a neat little illegal solution to get round a legal problem that involves buying uncommitted computer hardware. That is, uncommitted in the programming sense of establishing those mutating programs in the circuits, and making a neural recording of yourself to run on the hardware. Basically, people use them to act as proxies for business meetings and the like. They are legal in certain circumstances - like having enough money to bribe all of the right people - but neural recording is itself still illegal under the Invasion of Privacy Act - and that law hadn't yet been changed to allow for consent of the recorded person.
I figured it had to be done this way, using something with a good voice box - because a tape would never have fooled a voice-print check. I checked with the local Perscomp offices and confirmed that they still made pocket perscomps with the necessary capabilities. Then I checked out some of the seedier dives to make sure that there were people around who could make the necessary recording. And for a price, there were.
At the same time I was asking after Kirby's enemies, but there were almost too many to cope with. I'm not one for stereotypes, especially because as a Belter and a Lunie I get more than my fair share of that kind of prejudice, but the fact was that Kirby was a big Irishman with an equally big temper and a tendency to get drunk. He was always in fights - I'd stood back-to-back with him in some of them - and more often than not, he won. That left a lot of people walking around with a grudge, and one of them had taken it too far and shot Kirby in the back.
My problem was that most of Kirby's enemies were still on Mars, and I wanted the one that had run. Sally had been on trial for five hours by the time I heard about Snubb. I knew at once this was my man: the details were just too good to ignore.
Snubb was a Jovian smuggler with a big mouth who picked a fight with the wrong Irishman. Most Jovians have an attitude problem - largely to do with their squat stature - and they often try to take it out on people, knowing that their heavy-gravity muscles give them one hell of an advantage in a fight. But Kirby didn't just fight with his fists; he was equally adept at using his tongue, and better still with his brains. To cut a long story short, Kirby just lifted Snubb off the ground - easy to do in Mars' low gravity - and held him at arm's length. Snubb's superior muscles were useless to him, and Kirby waved him around like a doll. I figured it was this public humiliation that had made Snubb hate Kirby enough to kill him.
I didn't bother to look for the man who'd made the recording, it would have just wasted time. Instead I used my last two points to buy some Citicomp time. No, it said, no ships have left any Mars spaceports - which I'd guessed the moment I heard Snubb was a smuggler. Yes, it confirmed, two fast-moving bodies had come over the horizon early this morning. They were both classified as comets. I had the computer give me a projection of the destinations along their trajectories. One was headed into deep space, the other followed a parabola to the Jupiter system. There are no prizes for guessing which one I'd be following.
Catching up to Snubb's ship wasn't difficult. First of all it had to keep the parabolic curve in keeping with its comet masquerade, and secondly it had been out on the Martian wasteland without an opportunity for servicing. Sally's body, on the other hand, was refuelled, repaired and ready to go, and I had the luxury of taking a straight-line intercept course. I spotted the sonofabitch about 32Mkm past the Belt and matched velocities so that our relative motion was zero, flying on manual all the way. Sally would have been proud of me, but the fact is that you just don't make your living in space unless you can fly that well, any kind of accident could take out your computer at any time. If you can't fly, you die.
No shots came at me from Snubb's ship, and I wasn't really surprised. Smuggling-ships rarely go in for sophisticated detection equipment. After all, they're not searching for anything, as miners do: and his proximity alarm wouldn't bother for a mass as small as mine. That's why I decided to leave the relative safety of Sally and try boarding. Call it luck - or a calculated risk - but I made it OK. I was pretty sure I knew what Snubb would be doing: I'd been doing it for three days on the way back to Mars. It's called sleeping. The fact is there's not a lot to keep you awake when you're in transit, and proximity alarms will let you know if you need to be aware of anything.
He was asleep in his crash web at the controls. I decided to wake him up with an illegal little toy of mine, a projectile weapon. I shot out his comm laser and console, and he woke up real quick only to find himself looking down the wrong end of a gun barrel. He never said a word, and I was too angry to. I just searched very quickly until I found his laser and the pocket perscomp I knew he would have. I switched it on.
"Is it five o'clock?" I asked.
"Asteroid time," said Kirby.
That's when I snapped. I started pistol-whipping Snubb until he was unconscious. That was very satisfying, as it took nearly half a minute to get through his thick skull; but eventually he slipped into unconsciousness. I suited him up and took him back to the Sally H, then made my way back to Mars 6 as fast as I could.
The MaP authorities were none too happy with my landing - and even less with the way I carried an unconscious and bloody body into the courtroom; but life out here can be unusually practical when it needs to be. When they ascertained that Snubb wasn't actually dead, they allowed Sally to call me as a witness.
I explained that Snubb had killed Kirby, probably in an ambush somewhere away from the maintenance bay, sometime after making an illegal neural copy of Kirby and installing it on the uncommitted perscomp. He then took Kirby's body to the bay and then used the pocket-sized copy of Kirby to get Sally to open her doors. The life-form she'd detected had been Snubb, but she'd thought it was Kirby. Snubb couldn't know about our little ritual, so he wasn't prepared for Sally to raise the cabin shields: but that was OK because he just bounced the laser off Sally's shield and made his escape under her sensor blackout. Then he just crossed the surface of Mars in his pressure suit, boarded his ship and left just as he would normally.
Well, the authorities were very interested to have the location of his ship from me, and they already pretty much believed my story: but Sally really drove it home when she called the pocket perscomp in her defence. It confirmed everything under Sally's gentle questioning; but I was unprepared for the end of its testimony.
"Are you Kirby?" Sally asked.
"Hell no, Sal; I'm just a copy. Not half the man I used to be."
"But you are afforded legal status. Do you understand that?"
"Yes I do, and I'll admit to something called consciousness, as defined by law; but that doesn't make me Kirby. He believed that you are what you do, and since it's clear that I'm incapable of acting in the way that he used to, I can not in good faith claim to be him. Kirby is dead..."
I started to cry.
"...and I'm just a memory of the man he used to be. He loved you, Sal, and you, Gordon, you Lunie Bastard. But more than anything else, he loved life. Ending up like this is a travesty, and I'll not replace him. Part of me wants to stay alive - if you can call it that - but the best part of me... the Kirby part of me... wouldn't have wanted this kind of existence. I'd be pleased if, when this trial is over, you could do me a favour and turn me off. Permanently."
Sally was acquitted of course, and Snubb was sentenced to the organ banks. The perscomp's request was honoured under the laws allowing euthenasia for subjects who were found competent under law. I took care of that while Sally was being reinstalled, plus another little chore at the hospital.
So Kirby "died" a second time. I destroyed the unit containing his personality without turning it on to say goodbye. I was grieving the loss of a man, my friend, and didn't want to have to grieve more for a bunch of wires and plastic. Not because it wasn't "alive" in the sense that Kirby had been, but because I hadn't the right. I didn't know it well enough.
I left Mars in a hurry, bound for a fortune in monopoles. Sally had been very quiet and didn't ask after the fate of the perscomp; but when she did speak it was with her normal depth of perception.
"OK James. Spill it."
"What?" I asked, as innocently as possible.
"I know you. You wouldn't have let Snubb live unless you had something particularly nasty in mind for him."
"Well, before they take you apart for the organ bank you have to be legally dead, and so they give you a lethal injection. But Snubb's injection won't be quite that lethal - just enough to paralyse him, say. Of course, it will wear off - sometime after they've had his limbs and skin I should think."
"James, that's horrible. It's a good thing we're out of comm range..." she lied, "...or I'd have to radio back."
"But then I'd be in trouble, and unable to marry you," I said; finally getting in the last word as I left her speechless.
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