“Well, even junk fossils are hard to come by.”

That much was true. In my own desultory collecting days, I’d never found so much as a fragment. Still, there had to be a reason why someone would kill an old woman just after she’d transferred her consciousness into an artificial body.

And if I could find that reason, I’d be able to find her killer.

* * *

My client was Megan Delahunt’s ex-husband—and he’d been ex for a dozen mears, not just since Megan had died. Jersey Delahunt had come into my little office at about half-past ten that morning. He was shrunken with age, but looked as though he’d been broad-shouldered in his day. A few wisps of white hair were all that was left on his liver-spotted head. “Megan struck it rich,” he’d told me.

I’d regarded him from my swivel chair, hands interlocked behind my head, feet up on my battered desk. “And you couldn’t be happier for her.”

“You’re being sarcastic, Mr. Lomax,” he said, but his tone wasn’t bitter. “I don’t blame you. Sure, I’d been hunting fossils for thirty-six Earth years, too. Megan and me, we’d come here to Mars together, right at the beginning of the rush, hoping to make our fortunes. It hadn’t lasted though—our marriage, I mean; the dream of getting rich lasted, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “Are you still named in her will?”

Jersey ’s old, rheumy eyes regarded me. “Suspicious, too, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they pay me the medium-sized bucks for.”

He had a small mouth, surrounded by wrinkles; it did the best it could to work up a smile. “The answer is no, I’m not in her will. She left everything to our son Ralph. Not that there was much left over after she spent the money to upload, but whatever there was, he got—or will get, once her will is probated.”

“And how old is Ralph?”

“Thirty-four.” Age was always expressed in Earth years.