Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

A few minutes later, Diana came by the booth with my drink, accompanied by Raoul Santos. He took the seat opposite me. “This better be on you, Alex,” said Raoul. “You still owe me for the help I gave you at Dr. Pickover’s place.”

“Indeed it is, old boy. Have whatever you please.”

Raoul rested his receding chin on his open palm. “You seem in a good mood.”

“Oh, I am,” I said. “I got paid this week.”

The man the world now accepted as Joshua Wilkins had returned to NewYou, where he’d gotten his face finished and his artificial body upgraded. After that, he told people it was too painful to continue to work there, given what had happened with his wife. So he sold the NewYou franchise to his associate, Horatio Fernandez. The money from the sale gave him plenty to live on, especially now that he didn’t need food and didn’t have to pay the life-support tax anymore. He gave me all the fees his dear departed wife should have—plus a very healthy bonus.

I’d asked him what he was going to do now. “Well,” he said, “even if you’re the only one who knows it, I’m still a paleontologist—and now I can spend days on end out on the surface. I’m going to look for new fossil beds.”

And what about the other Pickover—the official one? It took some doing, but I managed to convince him that it had actually been the late Cassandra, not Joshua, who had stolen a copy of his mind, and that she was the one who had installed it in an artificial body. I told Dr. Pickover that when Joshua discovered what his wife had done, he destroyed the bootleg and dumped the ruined body that had housed it in the basement of the NewYou building.

Not too shabby, eh? Still, I wanted more. I rented a surface suit and a Mars buggy and headed out to 16.4 kilometers south-southwest of Nili Patera. I figured I’d pick myself up a lovely rhizomorph or a nifty pentaped, and never have to work again.

Well, I looked and looked and looked, but I guess the duplicate Pickover had lied about where the alpha deposit was; even under torture, he hadn’t betrayed his beloved fossils. I’m sure Weingarten and O’Reilly’s source is out there somewhere, though, and the legal Pickover is doubtless hard at work thinking of ways to protect it from looters.

I hope he succeeds. I really do.

But for now, I’m content just to enjoy this lovely scotch.

“How about a toast?” suggested Raoul, once Diana had brought him his booze.

“I’m game,” I said. “To what?”

Raoul frowned, considering. Then his eyebrows climbed his broad forehead, and he said, “To being true to your innermost self.”

We clinked glasses. “I’ll drink to that.”

Come All Ye Faithful

Sometimes, quite unintentionally, a writer develops a schtick: something that identifies himself or herself to the reading public.

Early in my caj-eer, there was no doubt that dinosaurs were my schtick. Four of my first five novels dealt with them: the Quintaglio trilogy (Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner), and the standalone End of an Era. The great beasts are also all over my first short-story collection, Iterations, published in 2002.

But starting with my fifth novel, The Terminal Experiment (winner of the 1995 Nebula Award), my schtick, it seems, has been the conflict between faith and rationality. That theme also runs through such later books as Calculating God and my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy (the Hugo-winning Hominids, plus Humans and Hybrids).

And it’s here again, in this short story, which was written for my dear friend Julie E. Czerneda’s Space Inc., an anthology about off-Earth jobs.

* * *

“Damned social engineers,” said Boothby, frowning his freckled face. He looked at me, as if expecting an objection to the profanity, and seemed disappointed that I didn’t rise to the bait.

“As you said earlier,” I replied calmly, “it doesn’t make any practical difference.”

He tried to get me again: “Damn straight. Whether Jody and I just live together or are legally married shouldn’t matter one whit to anyone but us.”