“Will they let you?” he asked indifferently.
“They invited me. I’ve been accepted.”
“D’you actually want to waste your time?”
“As a matter of fact, I do, for two reasons—I must and I want to.”
“Must?”
“Psytech is bugging me, Blaise. My gut is sending up signals that there may be some sort of rotten construct deep down inside these women.”
Shima’s interest kindled. “As rotten as our Golem-Hundred-Hander-Thing?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. That’s what I must find out.”
“Hmmm. And you said you want to?”
“Yes. I really like them, Blaise. On the surface they’re all characters; funny, different, refreshing.”
“All except Ms. Ipanema,” he said gloomily.
“Maybe she isn’t to a schnook who used to be in love with her and keeps the memory locked in a drawer, but women see each other differently. She’s a delicious caricature.”
“Sure, of humanity.”
“No, Nellie’s human, all right; she’s just the schoolgirl’s idea of the femme fatale.” Gretchen did a lightning pastiche of Ildefonsa’s rattle-rattle undulations.
Shima laughed. “But I always thought that type had to be tall, dark, and handsome… like the Yenta Calienta number you described.”
“No way. She’s a dyke.”
“Then what about the actress-manquée? Passionate, you said, with burning blue eyes.”
“Sarah Heartburn. Strictly for laughs. You can’t be a clown and be fatal.”
“The black-and-white twins who look like a pair of succulent Greek slaves?”
“Oodgedye and Udgedye. Too cold-blooded and stubborn. They’re always dissenting and objecting and refusing and recusing.”
“And switching.”
“Miss Priss lisps and stammers. Very fetching, but the Alice in Wonderland bit is far from fatal. Mary Mixup’s just a darling dumb bunny.”
“That’s the one with fair hair like a helmet and a dancer’s bod?”
“Uh-huh. You’ve got to have a mind to make a man fall down in a dead faint.”
“Regina has a mind.”
“Too dignified and stately.”
“You said she gave you a wink.”
“Oh, she has a sense of humor but it’s evah sew refayned. I’m not putting her down. She’s a gracious and generous queen, and she’s madly in love with Lord Nelson.”
“Lord… ? Oh. The admiral.”
“Horatio, Lord Nelson. He had a wild thing with Lady Hamilton which was a scan. mag. in the seventeen-hundreds. Regina spent an hour reading me Nelson’s love letters to Emma Hamilton.”
“And the pie-faced slavey is out?”
“Absolutely. Now what is all this, Blaise? You couldn’t possibly be interested in the construct of a femme fatale.”
“Just curious about the hive, is all.”
“The hell you’re just curious. Come on, man.”
“You see through me as usual.”
“You’re transparent.”
“I was feeling out the possibility that one of the bee-ladies might have an outside connection with Guff gorills.”
“I see. Yes, one might.”
“Who? Pi?”
“No. Me.”
“You!”
“Sure. I’m a bee-lady now, and I keep pretty rotten, low-down company in my business.”
“Like me?”
“Like Mr. Wish.”
Shima took a deep breath, held it, then let it out in a grunt. “I wish you wouldn’t joke about that.”
“All right, no more funnies, but we can’t escape the fact that there’s a damned incomprehensible network that’s got us all twisted up in it; you, me, Mr. Wish, goons, Promethium, Ind’dni, the beehive, and Golem100.”
“Golem-one-hundred? Why d’you call it that?”
“Because it seems to be a polymorph and can assume a hundred different forms.”
Shima sighed. “I wish we could take off for Mars, Mother of Men.”
“If you want to run away from the hard knocks, baby, why not Venus, also a very far planet?”
“Ah, le pauvre petit? Yes, you’re right,” Shima acknowledged with a wry smile. He pulled himself together. “So what’s our plan of op.? You go back to the hive for more witchcraft, yes? And I? Ich? Moi?”
“You get cozy with Subadar Ind’dni.”
“Oh I do, do I? Like why?”
“Like for data. I want to find out whether there’s any sort of connection between the hive séances and the Golem100 atrocities. In time. In space. Even the most doubtful link. Oh, and keep that Pm jazz in your lab under lock and key. And install burglar alarms.”
“Alarms? Why, for God’s sake?”
“Maybe this Golem creep is a junkaroola, too, in its own charming fashion.”
“On Promethium?”
“Only a maybe, Blaise; just hoping for anything. It might get hungry for fresh supplies and visit CCC to tap the till. Turn your Pm into a trap. You might catch something interesting.
Shima shook his head wearily. “If that goddam polymorph thing could get in and out through your safed door, how in hell can I trap it?”
“What? The late, great Blaise Shima, B.A., M.A., Ph.D.? Brilliant inventor of my secret contract weapon which Subadar Ind’dni would give his eyeteeth to prove phony? Not capable of devising an infallible trap for a freak thing that defies all common sense?”
“In a word, no.”
“Damn right you can’t. Nobody can… yet. I seriously doubt whether we can zap it if we’re ever ingenious enough to catch up with it, but we can worry about that when and if we do. Right now we’re looking for connections, any link, and you may trap a Guff geek who—surprise, surprise—may turn out to be a Pm pusher.”
* * *
By the turn of the 21st century the population of Old New York City was nine and a half million. By the turn of the 22nd New York had become the Guff precinct of the Corridor, and its swarming population could no longer be counted; only estimated. The guesses ranged from ten to twenty million.
Every member of those millions entertained the belief that he or she was unique. Subadar Ind’dni’s Computer Section in the Precinct Complex entertained more realistic ideas. In their experience there were hundreds of thousands of look-alikes among the millions, ranging from rather similar to all-fours replication.
The chief of the section was cynical. “Take any Guff turkey and program him for the machine, and his software would match at least a hundred others.”
“Ah,” Ind’dni replied gently. “Perhaps en gros, but it is our function to discover the small uniquedoms that distinguish one look-alike from all her others.”
He was nettled and dismayed by seven fantastic outrages perpetrated against seven look-alikes by the polymorphic Golem100.
* * *
No one knew how or when this new troubleshooter first appeared or who had hired him. The Wall Street Complex was so convoluted with management dissociation that pretenders had been known to draw payment vouchers without having been hired for any job. It took months for Accounting to catch up with them “through channels.”
He could cure any and all of the ills that plagued the Big Board think-tanks. (When the computers stop real-time thinking, fortunes can be imperiled in minutes.) He was no electronic genius. He was simply a mechanic who worked out of an uncanny intuition, a sort of symbiotic sympathy with the tantrums and foibles of the temperamental electronic brain trust that controlled the market. He had foibles of his own.
Example: He would appear without request or complaint (through channels) carrying his complicated toolbox, and everybody judged that a thunderstorm was approaching. Lightning can throw computers into fits.
Example: You could chalk a line tracing the 440-volt input cables under the Exchange floor from the course he habitually walked. He was drawn to the field generated by the high voltage.