The man with the picture looked down at Wilde and smiled, showing perfect but strangely shaped incisors, long canines. Perfumed fumes poured off him like sweat.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘you look interested. Big reward, you know.’
Wilde looked up reluctantly from the picture. He shook his head.
‘She reminds me of somebody I used to know,’ he said. ‘That’s all. But I’ve never seen her here.’
The man glared at him. ‘She’s been here,’ he said. ‘I can smell it.’ He turned his head this way and that, inhaling gently, as if his statement were literally true. The other man gave a sudden gleeful yell and snatched up something from the floor.
He brandished it under Wilde’s nose. Wilde recoiled slightly. The robot, leaning between a chair and the table-top, jerked forward a couple of centimetres.
The thing the man was holding was a newspaper.
‘Knew it!’ he said. ‘Bloody bolishies! Right, that’s it. We know where to look for her!’
Stuffing the newspaper and the poster in their pockets, the two men stalked out through another silence. The doors banged again. The music came back on. The hominid behind the bar looked at Wilde with an expression of deep rue, then shrugged his wide shoulders and spread his broad hands, his long arms comically extended. The shrug completed, he turned away and switched the music back on, louder.
Wilde returned to his meal, and downed his glass of spirits in a gulp that brought tears to his eyes.
‘I still want to speak to her,’ he said.
‘If you’re concerned about the gynoid,’ the machine said, ‘don’t worry. If she’s with abolitionists she’ll be legally and physically safe from repossession, at least for a while. And if she isn’t…’ It moved the upper joints of its forelimbs in a parody of a shrug. ‘They aren’t going to harm her. Just fix a programming error. It’s not important.’
‘Because she’s just a machine, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, it may be tactless to point this out, but so are you.’
‘Of course,’ the machine said. ‘But I’m human-equivalent, and she’s a sex-toy. Like I said: just a fucking machine.’
Surveillance systems? Don’t make me smile. Any recording made around the centre of Circle Square is irredeemably corrupted, hacked and patched, spliced and remixed. Even Dee’s memories are understandably giddy: Soldier and Spy just shut off in disgust, leaving only simple reflexes on the job. Humans pass drugs from hand to hand, machines pass plugs. The music has amplitudes and electronic undertow that work to the same effect. Dee sees Tamara talking to a tall fighting man with an industrial arm, finds herself talking to a spidery gadget with airbrushes and a single mind. It thinks, and can talk, of nothing but murals. It knows about concrete surfaces and the properties of paint and the physics of aerosols. It tells her about them, at considerable length.
She could have listened to it all night. She’s a good listener. But the artist sees a builder, and without an excuse or goodbye skitters away through the crowd to chat it up.
Tamara catches Dee’s elbow and stares after the machine. Then she turns and Dee can, as they say, see the wheels going round as the speech centres overcome intoxication.
Eventually the words break through.
‘Not human equivalent!’
‘I’ve talked to worse men,’ Dee says.
Dee’s mindlessly bopping – this is a Self-specific skill – when she notices the man she’s bopping opposite, who’s moving as if he presumes he’s dancing with her. Her gaze moves up from his shiny leather fake-plastic shoes to the trousers and jacket of his fancy but unstylish suit, past the miasma of disgusting scent rising from the sweat-stained tee-shirt neckline inside the open-necked shirt-collar to his –
face!
– and the shock of recognising one of the greps, the repossession men, sends an adrenaline jolt that rouses Soldier. Everything slows, except her. (The music goes from disco to deep industrial dub.) A quick glance around sets Surgeon swiftly to work on the tendons and cartilages of her neck and brings back the intelligence that Tamara is writhing sinuously a couple of metres away, her back half-turned, and behind Tamara, sideways on to Dee, is the other grep. His movements and stance are as if he’s fucking a virtual image of Tamara a metre or so in front of the real one, but that’s just disco-dancing. His gaze doesn’t leave the real Tamara for an instant.
She sees the sweat flick from his hair as his head flips. He looks fully occupied for at least the next couple of seconds.
The other grep, the one who’s got his eye on her, has definitely noticed Dee’s mental shift (that sudden blurred head-movement’s a dead giveaway) and his pupils are shrinking to pin-holes even as his eyelids are opening wider. Dee is aware of her pistol as a heavy shape in the soft leather of that silly, cissy bag at her feet, aware of her narrow skirt as drag that’ll impede the tactically obvious lethal kick.
She could yell, but a yell is nothing in this noise. The only pitch audible above it would be inaudible – to human ears. Her mouth opens, her chest inflates with rib-stressing speed and she lets out an ultrasonic yell she hopes is audible to machines for hundreds of metres around: ‘Fucking IBM, help!’
The music stops. Lights flood. People blink and stumble. At the same moment Dee’s right hand reaches down, her right foot kicks up behind her – still in a move that could be part of a dance-step – and her high-heeled shoe flies into her hand. She holds it high like a hammer, ready to nail the grep through the eyeball. Recognition of this ripples through the muscles and blood-vessels of his face as the speakers suddenly speak. The voice of the IBM, to Dee’s Soldier-speeded senses, now sounds deeper and more menacing than anything in de Mille:
‘Invisible Hand client threatened; please assist.’
The grep backs off, and the one beside Tamara does too. Everybody else looks momentarily off-balance, except Tamara, who’s looking at Dee with a dawning, jaw-slackening awe. Dee’s sweeping glance around the crowd, before Soldier subsides to a watchful withdrawal, shows her that there are other faces, dotted through the crowd, responding to the call as best they can: tensing, rising or crouching or – in the case of one or two machines – telescoping. These folk start up a slow-hand-clapping chant: ‘Out! Out! Out!’
And Dee shoves the man, and Tamara shoves, and the two greps are shoved and man-handled from one person or robot to another until they’re ejected from the edge of the crowd into the waiting grasp of a couple of heavy bikers, who escort them away.
‘OK,’ Dee says. She smiles around and slips her shoe back on, waves and calls out ‘Thanks, everybody!’ in a girlishly grateful voice that sends Soldier away in a squirm of embarrassment and brings a small flush to her cheeks.
The music and the lights resume their rhythm.
Dee dances; but she knows the next time won’t be so easy. These guys may not come back, but somebody will.
Dee’s in a small room at the top of a house on Circle Square, overlooking the Ring Canal. Tamara has brought her back to a flat in this tall house, after what seems like hours at the outdoor party – and retired to her own room to sleep, with apologetic explanations that she starts work early in the morning. ‘Ax will sort you out,’ she’s told her.
Dee is used to vague human speech. She doesn’t ask for explanations. Her own human flesh and nerves are tired. She doesn’t need to sleep, but she needs to rest, and to dream. One after another her selves have to shut down, go off-line, compress and assimilate and integrate the doings of the day.