Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

What Would Sam Spade Do?

Written by Jo Walton

Illustrated by Barb Jernigan

It was shaping up to be a quiet day when Officer Murtagh and Officer Garcia came knocking on my door. The PI business isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially not in Philly and especially not this week. With sniffers and true-tell and DNA logging, and most especially with the new divorce laws, I'd have been better off in home insurance. I'd have been better off, that is, if it wasn't for the glamour, and the best thing you can say for glamour is that it isn't religion. I was amusing myself that morning by rearranging the puters and phones on top of my desk and calculating how long it would be before I could afford to hire a beautiful assistant to sit in the outer office. I couldn't afford an outer office either; my door opened directly from the street. The answer had come out at fourteen thousand and seven years when the knock came. I couldn't wait that long, so I answered it myself.

They showed me their IDs straight off. I looked them over while pretending to read. Murtagh was a typical cop, solid muscle all through. His canine ancestry showed in his expression as well as his build. I'd put it at half bulldog and half terrier. Garcia, on the other hand, was thoroughly human and thoroughly female and gorgeous enough to bring an inertialess drive to a full stop. Unfortunately, I'd met her before.

They came in. I took my usual seat. Murtagh took the client's chair, which left Garcia perching on the side of the desk.

"So what can I do for you, Officers?" I asked. It's always good for people in my profession to keep on the right side of the law.

"Where were you last night at eighteen-thirty?" Garcia asked.

"Right here," I said.

"You work that late?" Murtagh asked, wrinkling his pug nose, skepticism practically oozing out of his pores.

"This is my home as well as my office."

Murtagh looked around pointedly.

Garcia took pity on me. "It's all nanogear. It doesn't always look like Sam Spade's office. The desk turns into a bed."

Murtagh looked at her like maybe he was wondering how she knew. With her long black hair and tight-fitting uniform I might just have wished that Garcia's knowledge of my bed was more than just theoretical, but as I said, I'd met her before. Murtagh decided to let it go for once.

"There's a Jesus been killed," he said, and watched me closely for a reaction.

He didn't get one. It didn't seem like front page news. Jesi get killed all the time. Goes with being pacifists, goes with being set to push a lot of buttons on a lot of religious nuts. He held the pause, so I asked: "How does this affect me?"

"You don't care?" Murtagh barked.

"Only in so far as no man is an island," I replied. "I guess the dead man was a brother, but—" I was going to say he was also a stranger. Garcia cut me off.

"Closer than a brother," she said. "More like another you, as I understand cloning."

"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 blood-stained handkerchief in a church in Greece and producing a genuine certified clone of Jesus. There was 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 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.