Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 72

The male paused before her sat in a wheelchair, his hands folded across his lap. He was ugly even by human standards, bald and bristly and scalded-looking, with heavy jowls and watery eyes that squinted through thick thumbprint gla.s.ses. He pointed to the rack of cues over Gretchen's shoulder and said, "There's only one table. Mind if I play the winner?"

His voice was everything his body wasn't. So rich and comforting, full of shadowy resonances like the echoes off of hard close planes. Tamara recognized him: he was the male who had been with the dark-haired female eating the chicken wings. Tamara glanced toward the door, but his companion seemed to have left. He smelled of salt water and beer, not grease and rotten meat the way most humans did. "I'm Pinky Gilman," he said, as if Tamara had answered, and extended his hand.

crippled, Gretchen murmured. weak. Tamara made sure to keep her teeth covered when she smiled. prey, she answered, and felt Gretchen laugh, tongue lolling, though her human cage remained impa.s.sive. "Tamara," Tamara said. She reached out and gingerly squeezed thick human fingers. "Gretchen is my sister."

"I see the resemblance," he said. "Am I interrupting?"

"No." Gretchen turned to reach another stick down. "I was going to take a break."

Tamara disentangled her fingers from the meat-puppet's, and stepped back. Her tongue adhered to the roof of her weird blunt-toothed mouth. "Can you? ..."

"Well enough," he said, and accepted the cue stick Gretchen extended across the table at arm's length.

Gretchen patted Tamara on the arm as she went by. "Do either of you want a beer?"

Tamara was learning so many new emotions in her cage, and so many nuances on the old ones. Worry, discontent, and now another: surprise.

Because she didn't have to try not to beat Pinky Gilman too easily. Rather, he was making her work.

The first game, she let him break, and never chalked her stick. In fact, Tamara handled Pinky's cue more than her own, because he pa.s.sed it to her to hold while he manipulated the wheelchair.

He sank three b.a.l.l.s on the break, chose solids, and proceeded to clear the table with efficiency and a series of small flourishes, mostly demonstrated when he spun his wheelchair into position. By the time he reached the eight ball, though, he looked up at her and winked.

Gretchen had just returned with the beer. She pushed her hair behind her shoulder with the back of her fingers and handed Tamara a drink. i don't believe it.

can meat puppets do that?

shoot pool?

win at pool. Gretchen leaned her shoulder on Tamara's so her bones bruised her sister's cage's flesh. Tamara sighed, comforted.

apparently, she answered, some can.

The male, leaning forward in his wheelchair to peer the length of the cue stick, did not glance at them. His eyes narrowed behind the gla.s.ses and the stick flicked through his fingers like a tongue. It struck the scuffed white ball, and the white ball spun forward, rebounding from the wall and striking the black at an angle. Click. Hiss. Clunk.

Eight ball in the corner pocket.

Pinky laid his stick across the table, spun the wheels of his chair back six inches, and turned to Tamara, holding up his hand. "Shark," she said, and put the beer into it instead of accepting the greasy clasp.

Pinky smiled at her and swallowed deeply as Gretchen pa.s.sed her a second bottle. She was thirsty. She was always thirsty. "Go again?"

Beer was bitter in her mouth, cold and foaming where it crossed her tongue. She swallowed and rubbed her cage's tongue against its palate for the lingering texture, then gulped once more. The cold hurt the teeth of her cage. "Gretchen," she said, stepping backwards, "you play."

Gretchen beat him, but just only, and only because she broke. He laughed like a drain as she sunk the smooth, black eight ball, and raised his cue stick in his hands, holding it overhead as if it were a bar he meant to chin himself upon. He had blunt nails, thick enough that Tamara could see the file marks across them, and the tendons of his forearms ridged when he lifted them. "So," he said, "how would you feel about playing for forfeits?"

Gretchen smiled, and Tamara could see the difference. "What do you have in mind?"

The human lowered his cue stick and shrugged. "If I win, you come back to my place and let me feed you dinner." Tamara started, and he held up his hand. "Never fear; I don't have improper designs. And there are two of you, and only one of me, after all."

Tamara looked at Gretchen. Gretchen looked at Tamara, her luminous eyes huge, the pupils contracted to pinp.r.i.c.ks. "Not to mention the wheelchair," Tamara said.

"Not to mention the wheelchair," he agreed. "And if you win, you can make me dinner." He let his cue stick fall forward so that it rested on the edge of the table.

Tamara smiled at him.

Tamara lingered in the bathroom, sc.r.a.ping her fingertips across pungent white soap to fill the gaps so her nails would stay clean. Through the wallboard, she could hear the clink of dishes and the rumble of the human's voice, the occasional answering chirp of Gretchen's. She turned the water on with the heel of her hands and cupped it to her mouth in br.i.m.m.i.n.g palm-fuls. It tasted faintly of Dial and made her blunt human teeth ache, her throat stretch and hurt when she gulped.

The smell of the alcohol the human was pouring reached her from the kitchen. She swallowed more tap water, filling the hollow s.p.a.ces inside her, squinching her eyes against the following, welcome pain.

She straightened and turned off the tap, then checked her nails to see if the white crescents of soap had gotten loose. They gave her hands the appearance of a careful manicure. She stuffed them into her pockets as she walked down the hall.

As Tamara came down the hall, she saw Gretchen bent over the breakfast bar in the kitchen, a strip of pale skin revealed between her s.h.i.+rt and the band of her jeans. The male stumped about the kitchen on elbow crutches, which he had produced when Gretchen and Tamara helped him into his car. The wheelchair was because he couldn't shoot pool with something in his hands, he said.

Tamara had been all for eating him in the parking lot, but Gretchen had thought it better to wait. For privacy, and leisure, in which to enjoy their first good meal in days.

Tamara cleared her throat. And Gretchen jumped a little-guiltily? Tamara flinched in silent sympathy. We cannot live like this. We just cannot.

It was an effort to think we, and that almost moved her to tears. It was an effort, too, to remember divinity. To remember certainty. To remember what it had been like to be clean.

hungry, she said, and felt Gretchen stretch inside her skin. Gretchen grinned and ran her tongue over her teeth, and together they moved forward. Soon there would be blood and sinew, bone and flesh-and if not an end to thirst and hunger, sweet surcease, for as long as the dining lasted.

The air was cool and full of rich smells. Tamara's feet were springy on the floor. One more step forward. One more.

Over the spit of bacon, without turning, the male said, "I'd reconsider that if I were you."

Gretchen checked, and Tamara hesitated a half-step later. She hissed between her teeth as the male lifted bacon from the grease with tongs, set it on a paper napkin, and turned off the heat under the pan. Only then did he turn, leaning heavily on his elbow crutches.

tamara? Gretchen said, and Tamara's breath almost sliced her; the name struck her like a cue ball. Sisters did not need names. Not between sisters. Names were a human-thing, part of the lie.

She bit blood from her cheek as Gretchen said, again, tamara?!

The human male said, "He won't take you back, you know. You can starve yourself to the bone, starve yourself until you're blades, starve yourselves until your human hearts stop-and he will never forgive you. Time does not offer second chances. History does not give do-overs. It doesn't matter how hard you try to be entropy's angels again. The only kind of angel you can ever be from now on is fallen."

That whine. That was her. Or was it Gretchen?

The male-not a human male, no, she'd been fooled by his disguise, but she knew from his words that he must be an angel too, of some one of the dark G.o.ds or another-continued. "Or you can learn to live in the world."

She should have stepped forward, rent him with her nails, shredded with her teeth. But she could taste it already, the grease of his flesh, the fat and the soil. She drove her nails into her own palms again. Gretchen crouched beside her. "You're not the Master's. You are not a Hound."

"No," the male said, leaning on his crutches so they squeaked on the linoleum. "I was born to the Father of Frogs. But I belong to myself now. Like you."

"You failed. You fell."

"I climbed, my angels."

And that explained why he smelled of sea air and not sour maggoty meat. Unlike Tamara, who could feel her own flesh rotting on the bones when she breathed too deep.

Filthy. Greasy. Everything was dirt. Tamara sobbed and licked blood from her nails, tasting the soap, stronger than ever. Some of it was her own blood. She wished that some of it was the watery blood of this smiling monster.

"I won't be dirty. I won't be hungry," Gretchen said, her hands bridged on the tile, one knee dropped. Her voice rose. "I won't be dirty forever. I won't."

The male's face was soft. Compa.s.sionate. Sickening. He tilted his head. "You'll be dirty," he said, pitiless as the Master, "or you'll be dead. Being hungry is being human. Can they bear more than you?"

Gretchen recoiled. Tamara thrust her thumb into her mouth, sucked the clean moon crescent of soap onto her tongue. She swallowed, hard, and again, and again, sucking each finger clean, feeling the soap reach her stomach, acid and alcohol hissing around it.

The male would not stop talking. She didn't think he'd stop if she jammed her fingers in her ears. "And that's the human condition. None of us can get clean. The world is sticky.

"And we don't have to like it.

"But you can't be an angel anymore. So you're going to have to learn to talk to each other."

you can't know that Tamara didn't know if she'd said it, or Gretchen. Gretchen, from the lift of her shoulders, the upward glance, did not know either. The sound was dim, broken.

"I know," Pinky said, and held out one ugly hand, with its filed thick nails and its bulging knuckles. The webs that stretched between the fingers were vestigial, greenish, vascular along the underside of the membrane. He spread them wide. "I used to be a terrible angel too."

The soap, the words, the dirt, the blood. Something was coming back up. Something. Tamara went to her knees beside Gretchen, smacked down on the slate floor (so smooth, so hard, so planar). She retched. A thin stream of frothy bile trickled between her gritted teeth. She heard Gretchen whine.

And then someone was there, holding her, stroking her hair, pus.h.i.+ng the flat feathered strands out of her eyes, his sleek aluminum props splayed out on either side. "Shh," said the monster, the fallen angel, the inhuman man. "Shhh," he said, and held her head as she bent down again and vomited soap and liquor on what had been a scrubbed floor, her belly clenched around cramping agony. "We don't eat soap," he said, and petted her until she stopped choking. "We don't eat soap. Silly angel."

She lifted her head, when she could, when the yellow slaver no longer dripped down her jowls. Pinky Gilman leaned over her, his wattled throat soft, tender, so close to her aching jaws. She lifted her head and saw her sister staring back at her.

A held breath. A quick shake of the head. Sharp silence, so hard that it might have ricocheted.

And Tamara, looking at Gretchen, heard the answer not because she knew it, but because she would once have known.

Dolly On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thursday-on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow's-wing, and her hands were red with blood.

In her black French maid's outfit, she was the only thing in the expensively appointed drawing room that was not winter-white or antiqued gold. It was the sort of room you hired somebody else to clean. It was as immaculate as it was white.

Immaculate and white, that is, except for the dead body of billionaire industrialist Clive Steele-and try to say that without sounding like a comic book-which lay at Dolly's feet, his viscera blossoming from him like macabre petals.

That was how she looked when Rosamund Kirkbride found her, standing in a red stain in a white room like a thorn in a rose.

Dolly had locked in position where her program ran out. As Roz dropped to one knee outside the border of the blood-saturated carpet, Dolly did not move.

The room smelled like meat and bowels. Flies cl.u.s.tered thickly on the windows, but none had yet managed to get inside. No matter how hermetically sealed the house, it was only a matter of time. Like love, the flies found a way.

Grunting with effort, Roz planted both green-gloved hands on winter white wool-and-silk fibers and leaned over, getting her head between the dead guy and the doll. Blood spattered Dolly's silk stockings and her kitten-heeled boots: both the spray-can dots of impact projection and the soaking arcs of a breached artery.

More than one, given that Steele's heart lay, trailing connective tissue, beside his left hip. The crusted blood on Dolly's hands had twisted in ribbons down the underside of her forearms to her elbows and from there dripped into the puddle on the floor.

The android was not wearing undergarments.

"You staring up that girl's skirt, Detective?"

Roz was a big, plain woman, and out of shape in her forties. It took her a minute to heave herself back to her feet, careful not to touch the victim or the murder weapon yet. She'd tied her straight light brown hair back before entering the scene, the ends tucked up in a net. The severity of the style made her square jaw into a lantern. Her eyes were almost as blue as the doll's.

"Is it a girl, Peter?" Putting her hands on her knees, she pushed fully upright. She shoved a fist into her back and turned to the door.

Peter King paused just inside, taking in the scene with a few critical sweeps of eyes so dark they didn't catch any light from the sunlight or the chandelier. His irises seemed to bleed pigment into the whites, warming them with swirls of ivory. In his black suit, his skin tanned almost to match, he might have been a heroically sized construction paper cutout against the white walls, white carpet, the white-and-gold marble-topped table that looked both antique and French.

His blue paper booties rustled as he crossed the floor. "Suicide, you think?"

"Maybe if it was strangulation." Roz stepped aside so Peter could get a look at the body.

He whistled, which was pretty much what she had done.

"Somebody hated him a lot. Hey, that's one of the new Dollies, isn't it? Man, nice." He shook his head. "Bet it cost more than my house."

"Imagine spending half a mil on a s.e.x toy," Roz said, "only to have it rip your liver out." She stepped back, arms folded.

"He probably didn't spend that much on her. His company makes accessory programs for them."

"Industry courtesy?" Roz asked.

"Tax writeoff. Test model." Peter was the department expert on Home companions. He circled the room, taking it in from all angles. Soon the scene techs would be here with their cameras and their tweezers and their 3D scanner, turning the crime scene into a permanent virtual reality. In his capacity of soft forensics, Peter would go over Dolly's program, and the medical examiner would most likely confirm that Steele's cause of death was exactly what it looked like: something had punched through his abdominal wall and clawed his innards out.

"Doors were locked?"

Roz pursed her lips. "n.o.body heard the screaming."

"How long you think you'd scream without any lungs?" He sighed. "You know, it never fails. The poor folks, n.o.body ever heard no screaming. And the rich folks, they've got no neighbors to hear 'em scream. Everybody in this modern world lives alone."

It was a beautiful Birmingham day behind the long silk draperies, the kind of mild and bright that spring mornings in Alabama excelled at. Peter craned his head back and looked up at the chandelier glistening in the dustless light. Its ornate curls had been spotlessly clean before aerosolized blood on Steele's last breath misted them.

"Steele lived alone," she said. "Except for the robot. His cook found the body this morning. Last person to see him before that was his P.A., as he left the office last night."

"Lights on seems to confirm that he was killed after dark."

"After dinner," Roz said.

"After the cook went home for the night." Peter kept prowling the room, peering behind draperies and furniture, looking in corners and crouching to lift up the dust-ruffle on the couch. "Well, I guess there won't be any question about the stomach contents."

Roz went through the pockets of the dead man's suit jacket, which was draped over the arm of a chair. Pocket computer and a folding knife, wallet with an RFID chip. His house was on palmprint, his car on voice rec. He carried no keys. "a.s.suming the ME can find the stomach."

"Touche. He's got a cook, but no housekeeper?"

"I guess he trusts the android to clean but not cook?"

"No tastebuds." Peter straightened up, shaking his head. "They can follow a recipe, but-"

"You won't get high art," Roz agreed, licking her lips. Outside, a car door slammed. "Scene team?"

"ME," Peter said, leaning over to peer out. "Come on, let's get back to the house and pull the codes for this model."'

"All right," Roz said. "But I'm interrogating it. I know better than to leave you alone with a pretty girl."

Peter rolled his eyes as he followed her towards the door. "I like 'em with a little more s.p.u.n.k than all that."