Martian Knightlife Read online

  Kieran got out and stood for a moment to take in the view, while Guinness sampled and registered the world of new odors, sights, and sensations. Then they walked up two levels of the terraces to Number 357 Park View, which formed the central section of the complex. June had redone her front door in orange and added a trellis with red and white roses to one side. Kieran nodded approvingly. "The feminine touch," he remarked to Guinness, who pricked his ears up in response but remained unenlightened. Kieran produced a magnetic card bearing the code that June had forwarded and inserted it in the door. The lock disengaged. Kieran led Guinness in and put his carryon and briefcase down in the hallway.

  There was a nice, feminine touch to the interior too, as Kieran would have expected—but with the professional, pragmatic feel about it that befitted somebody like June: not too much satins and pink; not too frilly and lacey. The living area had acquired a comfortable-looking couch of eggshell blue that complemented the pale lilac wall at that end, along with a few other knickknacks that Kieran didn't remember seeing before. June had added to her collection of designs, prints and paintings: space views and Mars-scapes; architectural studies; some interesting abstracts; and of course, cats.

  No sooner had the observation registered, when a fit of spits and hisses erupted from the passage leading to the back rooms. Teddy was arched to twice her height, fur standing out like the rays of a symbolic all-black sun, yellow-green saucers of eyes fixed on Guinness. The dog looked back amiably, tongue lolling, and sat on its haunches as if to dispel alarm. "Hello, Teddy," Kieran sighed. "Oh, we haven't got to go through all this again, have we? We're long-lost friends back again, you silly animal." He closed the door and ambled across to the kitchen area, with Guinness getting up to follow. At the dog's movement, Teddy shot back to the far end of the passage in an inelegant display of rear end framed in fur, and about-turned to glare defiance from the bolt-hole of the half-open bedroom door. Kieran punched an order for a coffee into the autochef and filled a dish from one of the closets below the sink with water for Guinness. While the dog lapped appreciatively, Kieran unclipped the leash, took his comset pad from an inside jacket pocket, and slid out the handpiece to call June. She answered a few seconds later.

  "Hi there. So you made it okay? How was the trip?"

  "Smooth and uneventful. About the greatest excitement was fleecing four riggers in a poker game at the layover on Phobos. But I was a good boy and gave it back before we got off the shuttle. You know I only cheat cheaters."

  "Of course—you've always had that soft spot."

  "Just keeping my hand in. Anyhow, what kind of a welcome is this, when a man comes a hundred million miles and no one shows up to meet him? Things like that play havoc with this delicate complex that I have."

  "Sure. Right," June said with just the right note of mock sarcasm. "Kieran, you know we had something big going on here yesterday. You just timed your arrival a couple of days too late. There was no way I could get away." That was evidently as much as she was prepared to be overheard saying in her working environment. Kieran interpreted it as meaning that a crucial experiment he knew Quantonix had been working up to over the past few months had gone ahead.

  "How'd it go?" he asked, dropping the flippancy.

  She paused just long enough to convey prudence. "Just fine."

  "Okay, then I guess I'll have to wait to know more. It's too bad I couldn't have made it in earlier. You know, sometimes I think that Triplanetary plans their schedule just to frustrate me." Triplanetary Spacelines was the carrier that had brought him from the Belt to Phobos.

  "And sometimes I think that God runs the rest of the universe just to suit you. . . . Anyhow, I take it that Guinness is well?"

  "Of course. In fact, right now, slurping and drooling over your kitchen floor."

  "What about the princess who owns the place?"

  "Throwing a fit and hurling death threats, preparing to defend the last bastion of her realm at the bedroom door."

  "Oh dear. Well, she'll get over it. . . ." There was a pause as June seemed to take an interruption from elsewhere. "Look, Kieran, I have to go. Maybe you could use some time resting up. I should get away, I'd say, between six and six-thirty. Maybe we could meet for dinner out somewhere?"

  "How about the restaurant of that new hotel that they've added to the spaceport—the Oasis? Have you tried it yet?"

  "No, I haven't. It's only recently opened. Sounds good."

  "How about seven?"

  "Seven, it is. I've got some quick meals and a few snacks in the apartment if you need them. Or there's some salad, cheese, and a bit of leftover pasta that's not bad. Help yourself. I got some dog food in too—under the counter left of the sink."

  "Fine. So I'll see you later."

  Kieran put the phone back in its slot, the comset back in his jacket pocket, and looked down to find Guinness watching attentively. "Yes, that was Aunt June. You know she was talking about you, don't you?" Guinness wagged his tail, then looked toward the closet below the counter. "You're right. I could use a bite too. Come on, then. Let's see what she's got for us."

  3

  The Oasis restaurant turned out to be pleasantly relaxing, with niches opening off a central area and imaginative use of floral partitions among the tables providing a secluded atmosphere conducive to talk. Kieran and June both settled for the seafood buffet—an odd-sounding offering to be encountered on Mars, which was actually fresh, not frozen imported. "Fish-farm-food buffet would be terminologically more exact," Kieran remarked as they collected their plates and sampled the offerings.

  June had long, midnight-black hair that fell in a sweep to her shoulders, where it broke in an upturned wave, and a finely formed, angular face with a straight nose and full mouth, which in its natural state hovered just short of an impish pout. Her dark, alive eyes had always given Kieran the feeling that anything short of outright candor with her would be pointless, since they could read his thoughts as they formed in his mind. At the same time, whatever went on in her own remained impenetrable unless she chose otherwise. The dark blue, sleeveless dress she was wearing, along with her black hair, accentuated the paler hue of her face and arms in the subdued lighting above the booth they had found.

  She and Kieran were kindred free spirits thriving in the environment of diversity and opportunity being created in the expansion outward from Earth, following orbits that recrossed periodically like those of other errant and adventurous bodies inhabiting the Solar System. June worked for herself as a scientific news explorer and information broker, which she sometimes combined with special commissions as a publicist.

  After they had devoted aperitifs and the appetizer course to the required preliminaries of updating each other on old friends and reliving choice snippets of past adventures, Kieran finally came around to the point. "So everything went okay yesterday at Quantonix?" June had said as much over the phone earlier, but it broached the subject.

  "Perfectly," she replied.

  Kieran looked at her expectantly, but she tantalized him by taking more from her plate and glancing at him challengingly every few seconds while she carried on chewing. "Is it what I think it is?" Kieran asked finally.

  June stopped playing with him and nodded. "They did it with a human: Sarda himself—from a lab in the basement to another upstairs. It was practically his technology. He wouldn't let the first subject be anyone else."

  "And everything went okay? He's walking around and talking normally? Knows everything that the original did?"

  "Absolutely, so far," June said. "And if there were anything amiss, I think it would have shown by now. They've been running him through every kind of test imaginable all day. He registers the same scores on everything: physical, mental, motor; language, numeric, spatial; long-term memory, short-term memory. . . ." She shook her head. "It was astounding. I had trouble believing what I was seeing."

  "So how does he feel about it? Did you get a chance to talk to him?"

  June nodded. "Pretty ec
static. `Relief,' I guess, would be the main impression that came through. But that's hardly surprising. How would you feel?"

  Kieran nodded. "Pretty relieved, I'd say," he agreed.

  Earth's scientific establishment had largely rigidified into associations of priesthoods preserving their dead religions. Most original thinking and innovation these days happened in environments like Mars, the Belt habitations, and various surface and orbiting constructions on and around the moons of the gas giants, as well as other places in between. Among the various forms of entrepreneurial ventures to turn new knowledge into wealth that had come into existence beyond Earth's effective regulatory reach, Quantonix was of the kind known as "sunsiders"—an allusion to the limited time available to get anything useful done on the daylight hemispheres of rotating bodies. Essentially, sunsiders were small, high-pressure research organizations delving into fringe areas of science that had been laughed off or were deemed to be of no practicable value by institutionalized academia—which meant little chance of finding support from conservative Terran investors. Funding therefore came mainly from more nervy, higher-risk, higher-gain sources found in niches through the off-Earth economy, and the hope was to make some significant breakthrough that could be sold to one of the major interplanetary commercial concerns before it ran out. The failure rate of sunsider companies was appalling, but the return for those that succeeded could be fabulous. Life in them was invariably frantic, often acrimonious, but never dull.

  With humanity's numbers climbing rapidly through the high tens of billions and its radius of activity reaching to the outer planets, transporting them and their property around was among the fastest growing and most remunerative industries. But immense though the demand and the future potential were, the means for accomplishing it still took the form of people in cans of some kind being fired off to destinations by engines producing thrust of some kind. Even though the engines might use nuclear fission or fusion, accelerated ions, or in some research that was going on, experimental antimatter, the technologies were all variants on a theme that in essence hadn't changed for centuries. The time was surely ripe for a breakthrough into something totally different.

  Major innovations seldom come as a total surprise, confined to one place. When the state of knowledge is such that the right time is approaching, specialists talk among themselves, journals and news media pick up the topic, and public anticipation is usually solidly established before anything actually happens. The general familiarity in concept of aircraft, space travel, and nuclear energy long before they became realities were cases in point. Advances in quantum physics and high-power computation had led to much popular speculation that a longstanding, but hitherto seldom seriously entertained, favorite of fiction might soon become fact: teleportation—the dematerialization of an object from one place, and its reappearance, after transmitting the information to reconstitute it, somewhere else.

  The bonanza payoff waiting to be made was by the trans-Solar System communications-carrier giants, who already had most of the essential equipment in place and stood to put the regular spacelines virtually out of business. Hence, with the kind of financial resources and influence that they commanded, it was not really a coincidence that for a long time the ground for general public acceptance had been prepared by spectacles of teleporting heroes becoming virtually a standard prop in futuristic movies, regular coverage in books and documentaries, and a procession of generously rewarded experts giving readers and audiences scientific reasons why the information pattern defined a personality, and reassuring them that its transference from one host configuration of matter to another would pose no break in identity.

  A lot of sunsiders were in the race to come up with the first demonstration technology, which would immediately be worth billions. The snag they were consistently running into, however, was the gigantic amount of computation involved in scanning an object at anywhere near the resolution necessary to be believably capable of reconstructing the original—encoding a human to the atomic level, for instance, was estimated as requiring somewhere in the order of ten to the thirty-second-power bits, which would take millions of centuries to transmit. Various shortcuts were being investigated, which attempted to exploit the Uncertainty Principle and other effects which implied that averaging procedures could be used which make the precise derivation of quantum detail unnecessary, but the short answer was that the problem remained mind-boggling.

  Quantonix Researchers Reg., however, were following an approach that was different, and as far as Kieran knew, unique. Using a package of results purchased from an earlier outfit that had gone defunct, their process took advantage of the information implicit in an organism's DNA as a shortcut to directing most of its structural assembly. Hence, in a way that seemed paradoxical to some, they could reconstitute a biological object, but because there were no convenient instruction sets that implicitly defined how it should go together, they couldn't apply the process (yet?) to an inanimate one. Over the preceding months, Quantonix had announced successful trials with a progression of unicells, mosses, plant parts, invertebrates, insects, duplicated rats that could still run mazes that the originals had learned, and a chimp that retained its repertoire of acquired skills. The obvious next step was to do it with a human, and the buzz going around the circles of those who kept close to the subject was not about "if" but "when" it would happen. From what June was saying the experiment had been conducted successfully using Dr. Leo Sarda, whom Kieran knew to be the principal scientist on the TX Project and effectively the developer of the technology.

  As was often the case with sunsiders, Quantonix hadn't attempted to keep its work a close secret. The idea, after all, was to attract potential buyers who possessed the resources to develop a marketable product, and having a number of competing prospects in the know as to what was going on both shortened the timescale and raised the likely price of an eventual deal. At the same time, the object was not to become a feature of the general mass-media circus, which reveled in sensationalizing the wild and preposterous and usually represented a fast way to getting a far-out but genuine claim discounted by association. The usual course, therefore, was to spread the word quietly, through channels known to be reliable to specialized interest markets, selected influential individuals, and relevant departments of the serious scientific journals.

  That was where people like June came in. A huge amount of space existed out there—the toroidal volume of the Belt alone was a trillion times that of the sphere bounded by the Moon's orbit around Earth, with ten billion asteroids over a hundred miles in diameter—and nobody could keep abreast of everything that was going on. But she had particular areas that she followed and a healthy list of clients who benefitted from the leads, referrals, and inside information that she was able to provide. As is so true with many facets of life, buying knowledge was a lot cheaper than paying—one way or another—for ignorance.

  Seeing that Kieran was still absorbing the news, June commented, "He'd been working along similar lines on Earth, but it was all too tied up by restrictions and regulations. You know what it's like there: everyone meddling and lobbying to prevent just about anyone else from doing anything."

  "Hm. I take it that when this gets out, our friend Leo can expect to be a wealthy man," Kieran said finally. "Instant celebrity, in addition to whatever's in it for him from his deal with Quantonix." He sipped his wine. "I assume they've already got a principal lined up?" He meant a potential buyer who had been waiting for a conclusive demonstration.

  June nodded. "They had technical and financial people all over the place yesterday. That's why it was so hectic."

  "Who is it?" Kieran asked curiously.

  "Three Cs. They should have the deal tied up in the next day or two." It was one of the names that Kieran had expected. Three Cs was the popular term for Consolidated Communications Corporation, one of the major trans-system carriers. It wasn't something that June would have disclosed to anyone, but she and Kieran had known each other t
oo long for melodramatics.

  "Well, I suppose they'd want to be sure of all those test results before they sign any big checks." Kieran drank and thought some more. His face creased into a parody of a smile as a macabre thought struck him. "It would be a bit unfortunate if Leo gurgled and fell over now, though, wouldn't it? So what happens when they've got their people-transmitters up and running, do you think? Will they want payment strictly in advance, just in case?"

  "I don't think there'd be much risk once it's offered commercially—no more than you accept with the spacelines, anyway. And since this is the first experiment of its kind ever, they're taking insurance," June said. "The original is being kept in a state they call stasis suspension in a vault in the basement until the tests are complete. I gather he could still be resuscitated if the copy failed to work."

  Kieran stopped, his fork poised in midair, just as he had been about to bite into a piece of flounder. "What? . . . Wait a minute. Run that by me again," he invited.

  "They're keeping the original in a suspended state until everyone's satisfied that the experiment has succeeded."

  Kieran's brow creased. "But that isn't the way it's supposed to work. In everything you see everywhere, the original dematerializes as fast as the sent version is being assembled. There isn't any original left to have any choice about. Its gone—poof!—from here to there."