I yelped, K-mart came running, flashlight in hand. He lasered the creature dead. Inside its still quivering husk were several datapins.
We dried them and popped them into K-mart's poqetpal. Images cohered. Right away I noticed something missing: the usual WTO official imprimatur: ALL MODELS ARE ENFRANCHISED CITIZENS OVER AGE TWELVE. Then I focused on the pictures.
Back in that reedpair time I had been recently speculating on, there had been a flourishing porn trade-conducted mostly in the old nation-state of Japan-known as bura-sera. Images of young schoolgirls hoisting their skirts to reveal their simple, functional underwear. Sometimes this speciality extended to the sale of the underwear itself. Preferably soiled.
With the gradual lowering of the franchise to its current level, this trade had disappeared-merged, rather, into the mainstream. But what K-mart and I now viewed reminded me of it and was plainly an offshoot or descendent of the burasera.
It was pix after pix of diaper-clad individuals, ages ranging from newborn to elderly. There was no actual sex going on that would have made the pins contraband. But there was a lot of peeing and crapping.
K– mart was disgusted. "This stuff isn't even illegal! It's just stupid! Why would anyone murder over it?"
I shut off the display. "You got me, Kaz. But if this accurately represents Mayr's hardwiring, then you can see how the Blankie was like a match to tinder for him. When Ixsys took it away from him, all he could think of was revenge."
Just then a bulletin came in. Another Blankie taken out, this time by a swarm of sweatbees. Luckily, no loss of human life.
"What next?" asked K-mart. "Maybe a talk with Rowena Mayr?"
"Sounds good. I think I'd like to ask her where she got her parenting license."
Rowena Mayr lived in an insensate building in a dismal neighborhood right below the Seraphim tracks. The super-fast train suspended from its overhead monorail was relatively quiet. But the Boston-Montreal Express went by once an hour, and somehow you could feel its passage in your gut as it split the air.
The crumbling stoop outside Mayr's building was occupied with dole-proles and their nonschema prodges. The adults were drinking cheer-beers while the kids were playing with those cheap trilobite pets so popular that summer. We garnered dirty looks as we went in, but no one tried to stop us. We left the Bulldog by the entrance to forestall anyone sending up a warning.
As we approached the third floor door of Rowena Mayr's flat, I spotted K-mart's hand hovering near his flashlight.
I didn't know what to expect from Rowena Mayr, but it wasn't what appeared when the door finally opened to our knock.
Rowena Mayr was a frazettatoid, member of a highly egocentric group that had splintered off the old Society for Creative Anachronism. Boris had probably been one too.
You didn't see them around much anymore, and I was surprised there were any left unretrofitted. No wonder the Mayrs hadn't felt comfortable in the spartan, utilitarian environment of Aquarius…
Rowena had had her body sculpted to resemble one of the impossible fantasy women from the canvases of her faction's namesake reed-pair artist. Huge cantilevered boobs, a waist so slim it must have involved major organ displacement, and callipygian ass. She wore a tiny metal bra, some faux barbaric jewelry. From a fake gold chain around her waist hung a few wisps of colored silk.
She was such a self-contained, self-immersed, impossible creation that being in the same room with her was like sharing space with an ancient animatronic figure. I tried imagining having her as my mother. It was a major stretch.
"Yes, Officers. How can I help you?"
"It's about your son, Bert. Can we come in?"
"Certainly."
The flat was furnished in High Conan. We sat on embroidered cushions and explained the trouble her son had gotten himself into.
"Well, I feel extremely bad for Bertie. He was always a good boy and showed such promise. Red Sonia knows, I did my best with him! But I don't see how I can help you now."
"He hasn't been in touch with you recently?"
"Not for years."
K– mart stood. "Mind if we have a look around?"
Rowena got hastily to her feet. "Unless you have a warrant, I'm afraid that's out of the question."
Nodding toward a closed door, K-mart said, "What's in there?"
"That's my shrine to Dagon. Very innocent, I assure you. But sacred. Now, if you don't mind, Officers, I'd like to be alone-"
K– mart started to rap a string of antisense as he ambled about the room. "Oh, I was raised Dagonite, but I fell away. Haven't seen a shrine in ages. You don't mind, do you?"
Before Rowena could stop him, K-mart had pulled the door open.
The Blankie was waiting.
It reared up as tall as a man and twice as bulky, a quivering blue wall of cryptoflesh. Unlike what I knew about the small Blankies, this one radiated an ammoniacal, fecal reek.
Bert had obviously been tweaking its parameters a little.
Before K– mart could get his flashlight up, the Blankie fell forward on him, wrapping him in its straitjacket embrace.
Rowena screamed. I had my own flashlight up, but couldn't shoot for fear of piercing the swaddled K-mart.
Something barreled past me so fast and hard it spun me around. When I recovered, I saw our Bulldog tangling with the Blankie, all fangs and talons. It zeroed in on a major ganglion, ripping it out in a bloody mess of dendrites.
The Blankie collapsed like an air-mattress that had sprung a leak.
I went to help a slimed K-mart up. Rowena rushed past me into the Blankie's room, shouting, "Bertie, Bertie, I tried to stop them!"
K– mart seemed shaken, but uninjured. "Tara! I smell like the time I fell into the family outhouse back in Kazakhstan!"
Flashlight in hand, I followed Rowena into the room.
But I needed no weapon to deal with little Berrie.
The fearsome mastermind behind the Blankie murder lay in an oversized Bayer cradle usually used for burn victim treatment, naked except for an oversized cloth diaper. In one lax hand was an Allelix sonic injector. From the utterly wiped look on Bertie's face, I could guess that the injector had been loaded with a probably irreversible dose of Neonate Nine or some other retrogressive synapse-disconnecting trope.
Rowena was kneeling by the cradle, weeping. Together, she and her son resembled some kind of tawdry, modern Pieta.
K– mart came up beside me, shaking his head. "Muy hesomagari."
I thought back to my own days as a mel-head. "But we've all got navels that can get twisted, Kaz. Leastwise, those of us born human."
On our way out, I came on the Bulldog chewing up the evidence. In the heat of the moment, its ancient instincts had overwhelmed its training.
I went to kick it, but changed my mind.
The Bad Splice
As if blindly obedient to one of the weirder plectic neothomist catastrophe figures, my life seemed to be warping itself around strange attractors, spiraling and darting up and down cusps and caustics, pleats and furrows that led to some unpredictable yet inevitable terminal boundary condition.
And the worst part was-I couldn't tell if on balance I should be scared or glad.
Changes had swarmed through my life as thick as harvest thrips on a cloth-tree during the past few months, enough so as to necessitate a few unscheduled sessions with Doctor Varela, my BP advisor. I had thought I had seen the last of that calm and erudite Behavioral Pragmatist after he had helped me over the rough patch following my departure from the PI biz.