“What’s this?”
“I’ve had my husband under surveillance for some time now. I went to this place because it was new in town. They had an opening offer.”
“Two stake-outs of the price of one?”
Kisi raised one immaculate eyebrow. “You know the outfit?”
I jerked my thumb at the door. “Hell, lady, we’re practically neighbors. The Scrutator moved in a month or two back. Talk about close competition. Lucky for both of us there’s more than enough work to go round.”
“Well, despite all the assurances, I’m afraid the Scrutator failed to live up to its sales pitch.”
I parked my boots on the desk, thought better of it and dropped them to the floor again. “Let me guess,” I said. “Scrutators are robots, right? This one spun you some line about how truth is logic and the universe is all made of cogs and ratchets and pinions, which means everything can be fixed in time and space and proved to eleven decimal places? The whole cosmic watchmaker thing?”
“I do seem to recall something of the sort. How did you know?”
“It’s my business to research the competition. Scrutators are your basic standard issue adding machines—the Thanes use them up on the Mountain to wrangle the city budgets, plan political campaigns, that kind of thing. But Scrutators are also built to learn, so every now and then one gets ideas above its station. Each year the Thanes let a few Scrutators set up in business, just to see what happens. Mostly they go bankrupt and end up back on the Mountain, crunching numbers. That’s robots for you—all hard edges but inside soft as cheese.”
“Perhaps. But actually it was the hard edges that put me off.”
“Meaning?”
Kisi Sunyana leaned across the desk. Her dress gaped. I tried not to. “I got my free stake-out. I even got evidence that my husband was conducting secret liaisons with someone—I have no idea who. But I soon realised that there’s one thing a mechanical man will never understand.”
“Which is what?”
She ground her cigarette into her glass. The bourbon sizzled. She seized my hand, pulled it to her, pressed it against her exposed ribcage. Her skin smouldered. Her heart hammered against my palm.
“This!” she said. “This, gumshoe, this! Because, yes, I do love my husband, I love him enough to want him back, whatever he’s done. But before I forgive him I want to see him dragged screaming through burning coals, see his lights drawn from his belly and the living skin flayed from his back! I love him enough to hate him and ruin him and see him lose everything he’s ever worked for and hoped for, including me, especially me. Especially me. Only then will I let him have me again. The asansa are powerful but I am a woman, and more powerful still. No robot could ever understand this, only a man. I need a man to seek me out the truth. I need a man. Are you that man, gumshoe? Are you?”
25
TWO HOURS LATER I was crouched in a wrecked railroad caboose, staring through a spyglass at the biggest freezer in String City.
Eight years had passed since the Big Tusk Railhead had closed down. These days it looked like more a scrapyard. Some would-be sculptor had heaped all the rolling stock in the downside fiddle yard and called it art. Nobody came to look. Which made it the perfect place for a stake-out: the junked carriages made good hideaways and I knew I wouldn’t be disturbed. Big Tusk is the highest outcrop of the ivory ranges flanking String City’s river plains. Sure, it’s weird to get mountains made of ivory but, when cosmic string gets tangled, geology takes a sharp turn into left field.
The railhead overlooks the warehouses south of the Lethe wharf. The tracks—all rusted now—snake out over the river via the Scrimshaw Bridge. Time was most of the city’s trade came through the railhead. Then things changed. Container ships started bringing in cheap goods from the Unknown Worlds and suddenly the steam trains weren’t running any more. The wharf grew itself a dandy set of monster cranes; behind the docks a whole new warehouse district sprang up. For a while, String City groaned under the weight of foreign imports.
Now even the container trade was drying up. The ships were growing barnacles, getting too heavy to sail. Entropy everywhere. The cranes were rusting quicker than the rail tracks. The warehouses were beyond shabby.
All except one.
The headquarters of Sunyana Enterprises was a squat silver slab. Even in the fog it shone. The yard was full of gleaming automobiles; busy figures swarmed behind polished windows. Seemed it wasn’t just the private investigation business that was booming.
The building was mostly one giant freezer. The silver cladding was insulation; criss-cross refrigerant pipes made the roof look like a huge waffle iron. The offices were bunched at one end, including the big one with the widescreen window where my client’s husband spent most of his days.
I zoomed the spyglass, saw a tall man through the tinted pane, pacing the boards. The fog made the image murky; I adjusted the optics to sharpen things up. The man was talking into a voice recorder. The spyglass gyros stopped the lens wobbling as I zoomed in on his tie pin, read the name engraved there:
Kweku Sunyana.
There he was. The biggest meat mogul in the city. Slaughterhouses, sausage factories, burger joints... Sunyana owned them all. That was why the name had sounded familiar. He was one of String City’s rich and famous.
I lifted the lens to his face. Ladykiller face, all soul and jawbone. Luscious hair. Iron teeth like a mako shark.
Just what you’d expect of a man-eater.
26
"ASANSA?” ZEPHYR HAD said after Kisi had left the office. “What’s that?”
“One of the old city families,” I said, flicking through the notes I’d made on the meeting. “Kweku Sunyana is chief. He handles meat. Not literally: he buys and sells carcasses, makes burgers and sausages, owns the city’s biggest restaurant chains. Call it an extension of his natural urge.”
“Which is what?”
“To drink human blood.”
“What? He’s a vampire?”
“No. The vampires left String City a couple of years back. The zombies too. Time was it was fashionable to be undead. Not any more. With the apocalypse coming, death’s the new black.”
“Apocalypse? Are you serious?”
I shrugged. “It’s what the front pages say. Me, I just keep breathing.”
“So this Sunyana character...”
“Kweku Sunyana.”
“... he’s just a guy who likes to drink blood?”
“All his family do. It’s their thing. But habits like that make for bad PR. And if there’s one thing an asansa craves more than human flesh, it’s respect. So they focus on fresh food and good wine and keep the blood baths to a minimum.”
“So is this Kweku Sunyana some kind of celebrity?”
“Not so you’d recognise him in the street. But everyone knows his brands. I’ll say this about the asansa—they know how to get the best out of a raw steak.”
With Kisi gone, Zephyr was relaxing again. She bunched her legs on the couch, grinned at me over her knees.
“So,” she said, “when do we go and check him out?”
I went to the filing cabinet—the one without any files in it. I opened the middle drawer, pulled out a spyglass and a seven-shot Colt. “We don’t,” I said, checking the chambers on the gun.
I holstered the Colt and grabbed my coat off the peg.
“Wait a second,” said Zephyr, leaping off the couch. “I thought we were partners.”
“Honey, you’re my assistant. That means you assist. So far it’s working out. Don’t push it.”
“But what will I do while you’re gone?”
“Same as you’ve been doing. Push some paper, get the place straight.”
She planted small hands on bony hips. Her cheeks turned crimson. “The place is straight! Thanks to me! I’ve spent half the morning pushing paper, planning your day, only to have you take off on a wild vampire chase just because Kisi-with-the-yellow-dress Sunyana let you squeeze her tits!”
“I didn’t touch her... she just wanted me to feel her heartbeat. And they’re not vampires.”
“Look, you’re the one who wanted an assistant. I’m here to help, to learn. You could train me up. I could be of real use to you, if you’d let me!”
She took a step toward me. Small as she was, somehow she filled up the office. I almost backed away.
“Honey,” I said, “it’s sweet of you, but...”
“Don’t patronise me!” Her cheeks were as red as Kisi Sunyana’s eyes. “Are you going to take me or not?”
I turned my coat inside-out three times until it was black leather, slung it over my shoulder. “It could be dangerous. Riverside’s not safe these days, not since they cordoned the wharf.”
She pouted. “‘Stay at home, little girl’? Is that it?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“How long will you be?”
“Don’t wait up.”
She coiled like a prizefighter. I steeled myself for the blow. Gradually she relaxed again. The color drained from her face and her shoulders dropped. “I suppose I could start work on the cellar. It’s still a mess down there.”
“Sounds like a plan. Watch the roaches. They move in gangs.”
“I’ll be careful. Make sure you are too.”
“I didn’t know you cared.”
“I don’t. It’s just that you haven’t paid me yet.”
“End of the month. Like I said.”
“Whatever.”
I left her scowling on the cellar steps and set off on foot for the river.
27
I SPENT THE morning watching Kweku Sunyana through the widescreen window of his office. He dictated letters, held meetings—standard CEO stuff. At one-fifteen the fog broke and he took lunch on the roof terrace with another city bigwig: Theo Carr, the fusion king. I wondered if Carr had come for a loan. He was badly in need of one, ever since the Titans had unplugged his power plants.
After lunch, Sunyana went back to business. More dictation, more meetings. Occasionally he went to a cage in the corner of the office, fed whatever was inside. It looked like some kind of bird: a parrot, maybe. Between times I read the Scrutator’s reports on the guy. Nothing remarkable—I could have written them myself, based on what I was seeing today. One odd thing stood out though: mid-afternoon the previous Wednesday, Sunyana had answered the phone. Immediately after the call he’d canceled all his appointments for the rest of the day and jumped in a cab. The Scrutator had tried to follow but lost him.
The last thing the Scrutator recorded was that the cab had been headed toward the wharf.
Nobody went to the wharf.
The sun dropped behind the dockside skyline. Cranes jabbed it like rusty scalpels. The daylight went away and the fog came back. I paced up and down in the caboose, stretching bunched muscles, waiting.
At six-seventeen, Sunyana’s window went dark. I swung the spyglass down to the white Cadillac in the car park. It was a convertible with six legs and sentient brakes. Very chic, very expensive.
Time passed. Sunyana didn’t show. I rewound the lens and flicked the bloodhound switch. The gyros pulled the spyglass sideways to a catwalk on the side of the freezer building. A dark figure was hustling along it. I let the lens zoom in, saw sodium light glint off iron teeth.
At the end of the catwalk, a set of steps led down to the service yard. Sunyana slipped between delivery trucks, moving with that weirdly fishy gait all the asansa have. Soon he was through the perimeter and headed across the wasteland behind the yard.
Beyond the wasteland was the wharf.
I stowed the spyglass and jumped out of the caboose. The fog scoured me like cold steel wool, but there was no time to turn my coat around. Sunyana had two hundred yards on me, and he was moving fast.
The railhead steps took me straight past the service yard. From there I crossed a culvert and cut a diagonal on to the wasteland. The open ground behind the Sunyana freezer was nuclear swamp, hard to build on. There was nowhere to hide, but the fog was thick and Sunyana wasn’t looking back. The mud sucked my boots. I hoped the isotopic alligators weren’t awake yet.
Sunyana stepped up the pace. Where was he going? You sneak away to meet a lover, you don’t want to turn up with radioactive ankles. Besides, there was nothing out here. Pretty soon he’d fetch up against the wharf cordon fence. End of the line.
I jumped an open sewer grate. The stench was shocking. A voice floated up, calling me back. I kept running. In String City, the sewer system has a mind of its own. Trouble is, it’s the mind of a serial killer. Near the fence, Sunyana slowed down. I ducked behind what looked like a wrecked automobile; it turned out to be an alligator’s ribcage. All that radiation means the swamp critters grow big.
Sunyana pulled some kind of tool from his jacket. He thumbed a toggle and the dusk lit up with pink maser light. He swung his arm in a circle and the fence grew a hole. He stepped through the hole and took off across the swamp again.
Astonished, I came out from behind the alligator bones. Cutting the cordon fence was a major felony. Crossing it was suicide. Worse, Sunyana had left a hole in the fence big enough to ride a pony through.
It wasn’t exactly ponies the fence was built to contain.
I approached with caution. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I should have been running, alerting the cops. Mostly running.
When I got near I saw the hole was closing up of its own accord. Sunyana’s maser must have had a synchronous disjunction field. Attachments like that are expensive, but then so are six-legged Caddy convertibles.
I gauged the distance between me and the fence. I tried to gauge how crazy a guy would have to be to do what Sunyana had just done. Was I that crazy too?
I checked the Roentgen counter on my boots. Radiation was low this evening; I could afford to stay out here another couple of hours. The question was, did I want to?
The hole was halfway shut.
I ran for the fence.
Six yards short of the hole, my shin cracked on something hard. I went down, face-first into the swamp. I spat mud, rolled on my back. A figure rose up and loomed over me. I reached for the Colt; my hand barely touched the grip before something like a carpenter’s vice closed on my wrist and hauled me upright. The mud tried to suck me down, but whoever was doing the lifting was strong.
I swiped mud from my face and cursed. The mud might have been low-gamma, but with this much on me I’d need more than just a wipe down. I yanked my wrist free, made ready to shout at my assailant. But the dude spoke first, in a voice like an old-time radio broadcast:
“Forgive me for tripping you, but I could not let you follow our quarry into the quarantine zone.”
A face resolved itself: burnished and bronzed and almost human. Its cheeks were scarred with fretwork; through the perforations I could see about a billion tiny gears spinning around each other.
“Scrutator!” I said.
The robot bowed its intricate head. “At your service.”
“In your electric dreams.” I looked at the fence in time to see the hole close up completely. “See what you did? You just lost me his trail!”
“An alternative analysis suggests I have saved your life.”
“It’s my life, buddy. I’ll do with it what I please.”
“All is not lost.”
The Scrutator pointed with a slim, hydraulic arm. I peered through the fence and the fog. Sunyana had reached the water’s edge, where floodlights washed a stepped pyramid surrounded by cranes. A big sign stood before it carrying a picture of giant gold feather and the words Quetzal Imports. The cranes moved like herons, fishing for loads and hefting them skyward.
As we watched, Sunyana disappeared inside the pyramid.
“There,” said the Scrutator. “We now possess information we did not possess before. We have pushed back the tide of entropy. The cosmos is a more ordered place.”
I resisted the urge to poke out its whirling eyes. “Less of
the ‘we’, buddy. You just queered my pitch.”
“I cannot parse that sentence.”
“Don’t get funny with me.”
“The case is one step closer to being solved. Is this not progress?”
“The only progress you’re making is toward the breaker’s yard. Don’t you get it? Kisi Sunyana fired you. You’re off the case, pal. Go home and wind up your clockwork, or whatever it is you do to keep yourself busy.”
“I cannot. The truth is not yet established. Order has not yet been restored.”
“Not your problem, pal.”
“I do not disagree: the truth belongs to no one individual. Nevertheless, truth exists, and must be found.”
I took a breath. Inside the robot’s chest, cogs whirred. No heart there. I remembered how Kisi Sunyana had held my hand to her breast.
“Look,” I said, “The lady came to me. So it’s up to me to see this thing through. Let it go, buddy. Find yourself some nice fat writs to serve. Work like that—it’s what you were built to do.”
A purring sound came from inside the Scrutator’s head. It stood still so long I thought it had shut down. Then it said, in a small, still voice:
“Do you hear that?”
Something tingled down the back of my neck. “Hear what?”
The robot raised its finger, cocked its head. “Something. Everything.” Then some widget clanged in its chest. The strange moment passed. “There is nothing more to be done here. I will return to my center of operation.”
“First smart thing you’ve said.” I scraped my boots clean on an alligator bone.
“Can I assist you with an offer of transportation? I have an automobile parked not far from here.”
I took my coat off, turned it inside-out six times until the radioactive mud had turned to vanilla.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’d rather walk.”
28
BY THE TIME I got back to my office it was full dark. Across the street, the hamadryads were painting their leaves vivid scarlet; greasers in hot rods cruised the corners, looking for trouble. Beyond the tenements, smoke still rose from the wrecked eastside. The streetlights were out across approximately half the city. At least the garbage collectors had taken away the neon sign that had flown here from the Tartarus Club.
String City Page 8
