“Still a stranger, as far as I know,” I said, and shrugged.
About fifty years ago they got cloning straightened out. Nobody much bothered with it. Not as if there weren’t already lots of people. Sure, some people had kids as little personal faxes to the future, but it wasn’t common. It seemed a bit tacky somehow. It was more use for pandas and cheetahs who didn’t get a say in it. Sure, some people mixed up superkids, and animal-ancestry kids like Murtagh, but most people just yawned and pushed the next button.
About forty years ago some idiot had the bright idea of taking some of the DNA from a bloodstained handkerchief in a church in Greece and producing a genuine certified clone of Jesus. There was an uproar, as you’d expect, and the uproar was only calmed down a little when they said they’d give the clones to anyone who wanted one, free of charge, every church and every family can have their own Jesus. A lot of people did, a surprising number of people, enough so that soon having a baby Jesus of your own wasn’t all that interesting or unusual. In fact, it was a fad. Being a Jesus, well, that was another thing. To start with, for the first few, everything we did was news. Jesus suffers little children. Jesus cuts hair, Jesus works in a gas station. By the time I was growing up, Jesi were pretty much just like any other ethnicity, only with fewer women and no cuisine. There were hundreds of thousands of us in the U.S. alone. People argued about whether the DNA was really that of Jesus, people argued about heredity versus environment, people argued about whether we were the Antichrist or the Second Coming. Churches took positions, Jesi took positions. I tried to stand somewhere well away from all the positioning. I kept my hair short and my face shaved and me well out of it. If you have to have a personal role model, I think Sam Spade is better than Jesus Christ any day.
“You’re theoretically a suspect,” Garcia said quietly.
This truly surprised me. Sniffers can tell who’s moved through an area for hours afterwards. Tasters keep photographs and air samples, and with universal logging of DNA it’s really hard to actually get away with a murder these days. “Murder suspect” seemed like a very old-fashioned concept. Crime, and detection too mostly, had moved online. Then I got it. It took longer than it should have.
“Your dead Jesus was killed by another Jesus?”
Garcia grimaced. Murtagh nodded. “You’re the only Jesus on record who’s ever killed anyone.”
“Hell, Garcia, you know about that.”
Garcia tapped her fingers on my screen and brought up a record. She shouldn’t have been able to do that, but I didn’t object. “Like I said,” she said to Murtagh. “He did it to save himself and me. He was a split second ahead of the villain.”
Villain was another old-fashioned word, but it didn’t sound strange on Garcia’s lips, not when referring to Kelly. Kelly, Turrow, and Li had robbed a client of mine of a large amount of money, and Garcia was working on them too. She’d come to see me and we’d agreed to cooperate. We’d worked together so well. I still didn’t like to think about it.
“I had a license for the gun,” I said.
“There wasn’t any question,” Garcia said.
We’d gone in side by side. I’d shot Kelly. She’d shot Turrow and Li without hesitation. Kelly had been coming at us with a gun in her hand. Turrow and Li were sitting at their puters. Li was off in virtual. She hadn’t even moved.
“You’re still the only Jesus on record who’s ever killed anyone,” Murtagh said. “Jesi are always getting killed. A Jesus killing is something new. So, what made you do it?”
“Save my life. Save hers,” I said. I’ve thought about it since, but I didn’t think at all at the time. I saw the gun coming up and squeezed my own trigger. What was Kelly’s life compared to Garcia’s, or even mine? So what if it was casting the first stone? Kelly was coming right at us. One shot, one death. I couldn’t have done what Garcia did, and taken out the others.
“Well this wasn’t any case of self-defense,” Murtagh said.
“There are what, a couple of thousand Jesi in Philly?” I googled around and got an answer right away, 2912. “Others could have flown in, or come by train, hell, even landed at the spaceport. I can’t prove it wasn’t me, but in the same way I don’t see how you can prove it was.” They couldn’t use truth-tell unless they had a court order, or unless I volunteered. Fifth Amendment.
“It wasn’t you,” Garcia said. “The sniffers outside this building show that you came in yesterday and didn’t leave again.”
“Then why are you here?”
“We wanted your help. Your psychological insight into Jesi, the insight of a Jesus who became a private investigator and who killed in self-defense, into which of the suspects it could have been. If we had a good idea we could get a truth-tell, but we can’t just ask to pump it into the lot of them. The lawyers of all the innocents would scream blue murder.” Garcia crossed her legs and bit her lip. “Will you help us?”
“Will you pay my professional rates?”
“Hey—” Murtagh growled, but Garcia cut him off.
“We’ll pay your professional rates. Jesus!” I couldn’t tell if she was calling me by name or swearing.
“So, tell me about the suspects.”
“Well, the taster records are just about useless, as the DNA all comes up as just plain Jesus,” Murtagh said. There are second-generation Jesi now, kids of the originals, not clones, who would show up as a Jesus-mix, same as Murtagh would show as a dog-mix. “But the sniffers let us narrow it down to six individuals who were in the street at the right time.”
“Tell me about them.”
“First, let me tell you about the murder. The dead man is Alambert Jesus,” Garcia said. “You heard of him?”
“The writer,” I said. He was a bestseller, and probably Philly’s best-known Jesus. I hadn’t read any of his books. They looked to be several gig thick, and I don’t have much time for reading.
“Lots of you have writing talent. It seems to be genetic. Come to that I guess the parables are pretty good short stories,” Murtagh said.
“I save my skill in that direction for writing up my cases.”
Murtagh gave a little barking laugh.
Garcia went on. “Well, Alambert Jesus lived in Chinatown. He was home. He opened the door to a Jesus. The Jesus tortured him to death, slowly. Then the Jesus left.”
“Tortured him? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Doesn’t, does it?” Murtagh sighed. “Doesn’t go with the pacifism and thou shalt not kill stuff.”
“Maybe this one came to bring a sword,” Garcia suggested, looking at me.
I had enough of that in my childhood. “Whoever we’re clones of, and as far as I’m concerned Jesus is just shorthand for the person whose blood was on that handkerchief, I think there are enough of us for you to be able to tell that we’re the same in some ways and different in others without getting religion into it.”
“You don’t think religion has anything to do with the murder?” Murtagh asked.
“Was he crucified?” I asked.
“Interesting guess,” Garcia said. “But while I hear that happens a lot in the South, no. Alambert was not crucified.”
“Then it probably wasn’t religious.”
“The suspects,” Murtagh said, getting a look in his eye like he was on the trail. “These are the ones who were on the spot right after. Let me run through them quickly.” As he named them he brought their faces up on my screen, one pair of soulful brown eyes after another, different arrangements of hair and clothes. All of them could have been my brothers. Or me. “Jesus Potrin, 28, local radio talk show host. Only suspect who actually knew Alambert. They weren’t close friends, but he’d had him on the show. Jesus Dowell, 18, down-and-out. No known connection. Alex Jesus Feruglio, 35, chef at Joseph Poon’s, on Arch. Alambert ate in there occasionally. Joshua Jesus, 33, minister of the Church of the Second Coming. No known connection. Karl Jesus, 26, motor mechanic, no known connection. Malcolm Jesus Zimmerman, 29, doctor from Mon
tana, in town for a convention. No known connection.”
“Jesus, they really do have nothing in common except their genes,” Garcia said. This time I was sure she was swearing.
“I don’t know any of them either,” I said. “I’ve eaten in Joseph Poon’s, but who hasn’t?” It was the best fusion food in town.
“Nothing jumps out at you?” Garcia asked.
“Not immediately. They all had the opportunity. The method’s obvious. The problem is motive. I’ll poke about online and see what I can find in their biographies, but I’m not hopeful.” Why would any of them kill Alambert? Why would a Jesus kill another Jesus? What could they possibly get out of it?
“Well, Jesus or not, we’ll catch them, and whichever of them it was will fry for it,” Murtagh said, getting up.
“Though what that will do with public opinion I don’t know,” Garcia said.
“It must have been Joshua Jesus,” I said, as the pieces came together. “Don’t execute him. That’s what he wants.”
Murtagh sat down again. “That’s what he wants? Explain.”
“That’s his motivation. He’s a millenarian, a religious nut, a priest of the Second Coming and he thinks he’s it. He’s thirty-three, the age Jesus was when he was crucified. He must have picked this as a sure way of being executed by the state.”
“A nut,” Garcia said. “A religious fanatic.”
“True-tell will get it out of him, and you ought to be able to get an order. You can put him in a nuthouse and throw away the key,” I said.
“Huh,” barked Murtagh. “Coming, Garcia?”
“I’ll just be a moment,” she said.
Murtagh stepped outside.
“You’re not a religious fanatic,” she said.
“There are possibilities in the genes, not predestination,” I said. “I’m not a writer or a chef either. There’s more to me than my genes.”
“And there’s more to me than my trigger finger.”
We looked at each other, a little wary, a little uncertain, but damn she was beautiful and even more than a beautiful assistant and an outer office I needed a partner. “Blessed be the trigger happy,” I said, and she was in my arms.
Sometimes in this life you’ve just got to ask yourself: “What would Sam Spade do?”
TRADITION
THERE WAS a man called Walter who was born out of a tank. It shouldn’t have been so unusual; after all, when Pyrite was settled everyone had been born out of a tank—they only sent enough people from Earth to run the equipment and get all the babies started and bring them up. They kept right on running those tanks too, until there were enough grown-up people to have babies of their own, people to populate Pyrite City and Great Canyon and Simbardo and clear out to Fool’s Gold, people enough to be talking about building cities off on the other side of the Bumpy Mountains.
By the time Walter was born they were only running the tanks if the children of the children of the first tank children didn’t have enough children. There would be numbers in the news on Landing Day every year, how many babies had been born, and if it wasn’t enough, how many tank babies would be born to make up. So having tank babies meant people weren’t doing as much as they could, and that meant that tank babies were bad, and pretty soon the whole idea of tank babies got to be embarrassing and not to be mentioned around nice people.
Walter grew up well enough in the orphanage, and qualified as an engineer. When he was twenty-four he met and married a nice girl called Maud, who was prepared to overlook his shortcomings of background because she loved him. His shortcomings weren’t very obvious as shortcomings, to tell the truth. In fact he was so good-looking and smart and hardworking that when he told people he was tank born they just didn’t know what to say. Maud didn’t like him to tell people, though. It made her uncomfortable.
The only way his background made him really unusual was that he didn’t have any family. Everyone on Pyrite had more brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts and grandmothers and grandfathers than they could really keep track of. Walter didn’t have anyone, except once he’d got married he had Maud’s relations, who accepted him into the connection fairly graciously, considering. Now, Maud was a Delgarno, or at least her mother was, and her father was a Li, and you’d think that would be enough relations for anyone, and that’s what Maud told her daughter Arabetsy when she was getting old enough to be asking questions.
Walter’s lack of family made him surprisingly fond of Maud’s family traditions. He especially loved all the holidays when they’d get together in each other’s house and eat. One year it was their turn to host the Landing Day dinner for the whole clan. Walter was helping Maud cook in advance, and she asked him to cut the end off the ham for her.
“How much should I cut off?” he asked.
Maud hesitated, and Walter wondered if this was something that everyone knew except tank kids. “Oh, about ten centimetres, honey,” she replied.
He cut the end off in a jiffy with his monofilament saw, and as he gave the ham to his wife he asked, “Why do you do that?”
“What?” she asked, busily sticking silverburrs on sticks.
“Why do you cut the end off that way? It’s good meat, it seems to me.”
“Oh honey, it’s just a thing you have to do with ham. I don’t know why. I do it because that’s what my mother showed me how to do. Maybe you ought to ask her.”
At that moment, Cleo, Maud’s mother, who lived in Fool’s Gold and had come early for the party, came into the kitchen looking for a drink. “Do you know why you cut the end off ham?” Walter asked her.
Cleo poured herself a drink and looked down her nose at Walter. “Did you never see anyone do that before?” she asked. “Well, I suppose it isn’t surprising. I don’t know exactly what it’s for, but that’s the way my mother taught me how to do it.”
The next day as they were eating their dinner, Walter remembered about the ham. He was feeling quite stubborn about it by now. He was an engineer, and it didn’t make sense to him. He wasn’t ashamed of having no family, and he refused to feel that way. He went up to his grandmother-in-law, Alyssanne, who had never quite approved of him, and he asked about the ham. At first she tried to put him off, but at last she admitted that she didn’t know the purpose of it either. “My mother used to cut the end off, so I do it.”
Now Britney, Maud’s great-grandmother, wasn’t at the Landing Day party. She was old and sick, on the end of her life-extension treatments, and she lived in a retirement community over at Johnson Bay. The next time Maud and Walter took the kids over to see her, Walter was glad to have something to talk to her about as she sat in her rocker staring out across the aubergine waves.
“There’s something I was wondering,” he said.
Britney turned her head to look at him. She was so old that she had almost no hair and her eyes were hard to see in all the wrinkles. She still had a lovely smile. “What’s that, Walter?” she asked.
“When you cook a whole ham, for the Landing Day party, why do you cut the end off before cooking it? Maud said she did it because Cleo did, and Cleo said she did it because Alyssanne did, and Alyssanne said she did it because you did. I know I’m a tank kid and don’t have any family traditions of my own, so I’m kind of interested in Maud’s, and this seems strange because it’s good meat and it doesn’t make sense.”
Britney rocked a moment, and then she said, “You know, I’m glad you asked me that question. I was born from a tank myself, and my whole generation, as you know. The thing is, when the ship first landed we only had what we’d brought from Earth, before we got the Mufug Plant set up, and even then, it could only make certain things, not like today. So when I was growing up, in the orphanage, and when I was first married we didn’t have any dishes big enough to take a whole ham, so we used to cut the end off to fit in the dish.”
And Walter laughed, and Britney smiled her sweet smile, and Maud laughed, and Arabetsy, who was the only one of the children old en
ough to understand, laughed until she almost fell off the balcony into the sea.
WHAT JOSEPH FELT
WHEN YOU'RE working with wood, sometimes, you’ll be planing or cutting and there’ll be a snag, an unseen snag under the grain that throws you off, and a piece you had almost done will get spoilt. Between one breath and the next it’ll go from something good, something beautiful and useful and what you’re working on to junk, maybe a pile of splinters, or maybe something you can patch, though you know it’ll never be the same.
The feeling you have when that happens, that’s the feeling I had when she told me, except it was my whole life gone to splinters in an instant.
She was the only one I ever loved, and the only one I’d ever thought of loving. The future was something I was working on, something I knew the shape of. We were going to marry in the spring, and of course I hadn’t touched her. If she was pregnant then—well, there were only two rational possibilities. Someone had raped her, in which case I’d have to deal with the results of that whether I married her or not, or—well, the other possibility would mean that she wasn’t who I thought she was, she wasn’t the girl I’d fallen in love with. The third one, the irrational one, which was what she told me, well, it was a fairy tale, a romance, something nobody could believe, not really, not when your girlfriend just comes out with it that way.
You see, she got an angel telling her she was blessed among women. I didn’t get anything, except her telling me. I’m only a carpenter.
Patch it, that was my instinct, try to smooth the knot, try to hold things together, this is my life.
So we got married quickly and my mother nagged at me for not waiting and my friends made crude jokes and she spent all her time with her cousin Elizabeth.
Then, just before the baby was due, the Romans called a census. The worst thing about it was that my idiotic father had misunderstood the Roman tax form, and where you were supposed to put down where you were based, which was Nazareth, where I’d lived my entire life, he’d put down Bethlehem, which was where he’d come from originally. I’d tried to change it a million times, but dealing with bureaucracy means you need bribes, which I never had, so every time there was a census, about every ten years, I had to go off to Bethlehem and go through the same stupid ritual about how no, I didn’t live there . . . you can imagine. It wasn’t so bad when my grandparents were still alive and I had somewhere to stay.