“Lakshmi Chatterjee? Sure.”
“Is she any good?” It was the first time in my life, I think, I’d asked that about a woman and didn’t mean for the words “in the sack” to be understood.
“She’s great. I read her book about Lunaport when I heard she was coming here. She’s like the Shelby Foote of that war.”
“Ah,” I said. I’d never heard of him, but I imagine with a name like that he got beat up a lot as a kid. “Seems like a sweet deal, getting an all-expenses-paid trip to Mars.”
“Well, she has to work for it,” Diana said.
“Oh, yeah. She’s writing a book on the B. Traven.” Or maybe she’s doing an authorized biography of Denny O’Reilly. Or something.
“Not just that,” said Diana. “She has to meet with beginning writers in the community and critique their manuscripts.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. That’s how these things go: most of the time is the writer’s own, but some of it has to be spent working with newbies.”
“How does that work?”
“You make an appointment, send in a manuscript in advance, and she meets with you for an hour to go over it.”
“At Shopatsky House?”
“I guess.”
“You write poetry,” I said.
She winced. “I write bad poetry.”
There are some things even I couldn’t dispute with a straight face, so I let that pass and simply said, “You could make an appointment to see her.”
“Oh, God, no. I couldn’t show my poetry to her. She’s excellent.”
“That’s what she’s there for. To help beginners.”
“I can’t, Alex.”
“Please, baby. I need you to get into that house.”
“Why don’t you go yourself?”
“I’ve been there.” I pointed to my forehead. “That’s where I got the goose egg.”
Diana was suddenly huffy. She started to get up.
“It’s not like that, babe,” I said. I lowered my voice—not because anyone could listen in on us in the back, but so Diana, in her topless splendor, would have to lean in to hear me. “I, ah, let myself into her place. She had a, um, document that I needed to access.”
“Let yourself in?” Diana said coldly. “So her locks were programmed to recognize you?”
“No, sweetheart—honest. I removed the back window and snuck in. We fought, but I got away with the document. But prior to that, she attacked me and Pickover out on the surface—tried to kill us both.”
Diana frowned. “Pickover is a transfer.”
“Didn’t stop her from shooting spikes into his chest—or coming at me with a shotgun.”
“God!” A beat. “But what’s this all about?”
“She thinks we know where the Alpha Deposit is.”
“And do you?”
This time, my poker face didn’t fail me. “Of course not.”
“But she tried to kill you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you want to send me off to be alone with her?”
“Well, um, she doesn’t have anything against you.”
“Why do you need to get me into her house?”
“So you can plant a bug there, so I can listen in on her conversations. She’s got at least one more accomplice—someone helped her out today, I don’t know who, but I need to find out.”
“Why? What difference does that make?”
The difference was that at least one more person apparently knew the location of the Alpha Deposit—the person who had come to Lakshmi’s rescue there. Also, a bug in Lakshmi’s place might let me know if she was ignoring my warning and planning another trip to the Alpha. But I simply said, “Please, baby. I need you to do this.”
Diana sat back down but a little farther on the bench from me than before.
“Well?” I said, after she’d been quiet for a bit.
“Okay,” she replied. “But you’ve got to take me out.”
“I’d be happy—”
“To Bleaney’s.”
I frowned. Bleaney’s was the pricey nightclub where prospectors who had struck it rich went to celebrate. “Deal,” I said, leaning over and kissing her on the cheek.
I’d just put it on the expense claim I was going to give Pickover.
After leaving Diana at The Bent Chisel, I actually went most of the way back to Shopatsky House, since the Windermere Clinic was near there. Old Doc Windermere—a walrusy-looking biological with a handlebar mustache—would dig out a bullet or patch up a knife wound without feeling a need to involve those pesky folks at the NKPD; taking care of the bruise on my forehead was nothing by comparison, but I figured I might as well give him this bit of business, too. Gloria, his receptionist/nurse—a breathy little pink-haired bundle of energy—was always glad to see me, and, frankly, I rather liked seeing her, too. I think the doc watered his anesthetic down the same way Buttrick watered down his booze, but a gander at Gloria was usually enough to take the pain away, at least for a few minutes.
It was a slow night for fights, I guess; I didn’t have to wait to get in. Doc Windermere played a couple of healing beams over my forehead, and, as I could see in the cracked mirror opposite me, the swelling went down, and the purple color faded away.
I thanked the doc, paid Gloria in cash, and then headed over to Pickover’s place, figuring he should be finished reading Denny’s journal by now.
“Well?” I said after he let me into his apartment. “Anything exciting in the diary?”
“Yes, indeed,” he replied, taking a seat; I did the same. “Weingarten and O’Reilly contacted several people back on Earth, trying to arrange the sale of fossils in advance; the diary includes descriptions of some of the fossils—and it’s got the name of the collector they’d previously sold the decapod to!”
“The what?”
“The decapod! There’s only one known specimen—they brought it back on their second mission.” He held the diary up triumphantly. “My guess is that they were ancestral to the pentapods that came to dominate later—and now I know whose collection it’s in! I tell you, Alex, we may not even need to track down Willem Van Dyke!”
That sounded like my fees were about to dry up, so I quickly protested. “There are still some leads for him I’d like to follow up on.”
Rory was in an expansive mood. “Oh, of course, my boy, of course! Your field and mine, we both say the same thing: leave no stone unturned!”
“Good,” I said. “Now what?”
“Now, we should head out to the Alpha again. We can’t leave those wrecked buggies there; someone’s bound to spot them sooner or later. And we need to finish clearing out the land mines. Are you up for another road trip, old boy?”
Driving to the Alpha took a lot of hours, and that meant a lot of solars for me. “Why not?” I said. “But we’ll need another buggy to get there.”
“Do we rent or borrow one?”
“Borrow,” I said. “I don’t know how Lakshmi and that Darren Cheung fellow managed to tail us in the dark the last time, but it’s possible our rental had a tracking device in it.”
“That’s illegal,” Rory said. I made no reply, and finally he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So who do you know who has a clean buggy we could borrow?”
There were only two reasons to own a buggy: you spent a lot of time prospecting far from the dome, or you liked to race. Isidis Planitia is a plain, after all—it was great for racing. And my buddy Juan Santos liked machines of all types, not just computers. I called him. “Juan,” I said to the little version of his face that appeared on my left wrist, “can I borrow your buggy?”
“Wow, Alex,” he replied. “We must have a bad connection. It sounded like you said, ‘Can I borrow your buggy?’”
“I know I dented it last time, but—”