Finn's Golem Read online

She approached and leaned in towards her side of the bar, setting her elbows down in such a way that her arms pushed her breasts in together softly. Just enough to give the trained eye a perfect sense of their texture. She leaned in a little further, as if to speak over the music, which wasn’t really loud enough to merit it. It was at that moment that I realized that her skin was just a little bit too pink.

  Even when they were building new Synths, it was illegal to make them look exactly human. Didn’t matter for the most part, they were designed to work, not to look pretty. Except for those for whom looking pretty had been their work. Units built for sex had been created with as subtle a deviation from human standards as possible under the law, which satisfied everybody but a few perverts, and they could always find a way. But this one was something else again. Like I say, the light wasn’t good, but she could almost pass.

  There must have been something like surprise on my face, because she looked up and smiled wide. I could see then how her designers had got away with the skin tone; her eyes were almost shocking violet. They seemed to dance with amusement at my expression.

  “Disappointed?” she asked.

  “Always,” I replied. “Sooner or later, always.”

  “Aw,” she pouted. “Poor baby. What can I get you?”

  “Scotch and information.”

  She looked around quickly. “One’ll cost you more than the other,” she purred.

  “When you find out what I’m after,” I warned, “you might not want to play.”

  “Mmmm,” she said, arching her back a little. “And here I thought you just wanted to talk.” Her nipples suddenly showed like diamonds through the fabric of her top. Like all of her kind, she responded to the slightest stimulation as if it were flowers, candy and a half a bottle of tequila, and it pissed me off.

  “Is the flirting good for business, or just a subroutine you can’t shake?” I snapped. “In any case, stow it. I don’t go in for silicon.”

  The smile left her face and was replaced by something harder and colder. Something I wouldn’t have thought she had in her. “Spill it or blow, flatfoot. I’ve got a reputation to maintain, and talking to cops ain’t good for it.”

  “I’m not a cop, I’m a shamus.”

  “You say potato.”

  “Vince sent me,” I said.

  “Of course Vince sent you. Why do you think I came over here? Because you’re so pretty?”

  “He said it was a favor to him.”

  “It is. But I don’t owe Vince no favors just now, so don’t push your luck.”

  There didn’t seem to be any profit in getting my back up. “Look, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot, but I’m having kind of a long night, and I could use some help.”

  She looked at me sideways. “Sure. I heard what you did for Joey.”

  “Let’s keep it among friends, shall we?”

  “Are we friends now?”

  “We are if you say we are.”

  She smiled again, as if amused by the idea. “All right... friend. Go sit in that booth.” She pointed. “I’ll be over in a minute.”

  I did what I was told. She sauntered over two minutes later with a glass for each of us. I stood when she arrived, figuring she’d like that, and she did. The booth she’d pointed to was remote, but positioned in such a way that every patron in the place had a nice clear view. It seemed like an odd choice.

  She sat down on the side by the wall, where I had been. I moved to sit across from her but she shook her head just enough to get my attention.

  “No,” she said quietly. “Next to me.”

  She was sitting just far enough into the booth for me to squeeze in next to her, but no more. I sat awkwardly and reached for my drink.

  “Don’t face the bar, look at me,” she said.

  “You’re not looking at me,” I said irritably.

  “We’re not playing that we’re in love,” she hissed. “You’re trying to talk me into bed, and I am playing hard to get.”

  “You’ve never played hard to get in your life,” I growled.

  “That’s better. But smile a little. Like you are telling me jokes and trying very hard to impress me. From time to time I will smile and look at you like you’re clever and like I just might say yes.”

  “What are we doing?” I was getting irritated.

  “I don’t care if people here think I am a tramp,” she said. “First of all, it’s probably true. Secondly, no one cuts your throat for being a tramp. But selling information can get you killed. So tell me what you want, but tell me like you’re telling me that I’m pretty and funny and clever and that your wife doesn’t understand you.”

  She was smooth and elegant, but I could tell her heart was racing. I couldn’t tell if she was nervous or just getting off on this.

  “I need some information about an out-of-town operator,” I began.

  “You’re very bad at this,” she said. “Put your hand on my knee.”

  “No one can see your knee.”

  “Shut up and do it,” she said, her eyes flashing.

  I did so. Her leg was just as soft as you would want it and just as firm as you could ask it to be. It was a symphony. I could feel her thigh muscles tighten at my touch and her abdominal muscles pull in as if by reflex. She bit the inside of her lips and shivered a little.

  “You have nice hands,” she said and looked back at her drink. “Does my pleasure disgust you?”

  “You feel it too easily,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She snorted. “Puritan.”

  “You’re programmed to feel it.”

  “We’re all programmed to feel it,” she said coldly. “You’re programmed by biological imperative to want it, to need it. Millions of years of evolution make you feel it. Those that liked it the best did it the most, those that did it the most spread their filthy genes the farthest and the song carried on and on and on. Then you mixed in little details like love and guilt and religion and made the easiest thing in the world so complicated you can hardly stand to do it.” She took a drink. “I just like having sex. But apparently I’m the one with problems.”

  She had said all of that before, I was sure of that. It was impossible to tell her age, impossible to tell how much time she would have done in some cathouse before the Labor Guilds petitioned to make her a person. And in the process to have her and her nice, clean friends thrown out in favor of pox-ridden Guild whores. She’d have been a Sub, that much I was sure of. She was too little and soft for a Dom. Too much like the eager-to-explore girl-next-door is supposed to be and never is. She caught me with my eyes on her breasts and there was no point pretending that she hadn’t.

  “Are you looking for seams?” she asked.

  “What if I am?”

  “You don’t know much about Artificials, do you?”

  “I thought the term was Synthetics again?”

  “Shut up,” she said. “Only the big industrial models were grown in separate parts. The top lines, the soldiers and whores, we were grown all in one piece. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Be a good boy and I just might let you check.”

  “I told you, I don’t go in for Synths.”

  She turned in to face me. I could feel her breath in my face, just inches away. It smelled of lilacs. It would always smell like lilacs. “You know what I think? I think you want me so badly you could scream, and I think it makes you sick. And that makes me very, very sad for you.”

  “I thought we weren’t playing that we were in love,” I sneered.

  She laughed like I was funny and clever. She said something that sounded like “Imbeeceel.”

  “Speak human or I’ll smack your ass until it’s baboon-red,” I said, looking as much as possible like I was reciting love poetry.

  She purred and her thighs pulled tight again. “You’re getting better at this. All right. Your out-of-town operator, what’s his name?”

  “Cyrus Carter.”

  She froze. “The Locu
st? You’re out of your mind.”

  “I just need information.”

  “I might not have been born, but I can still be killed.”

  “It’s a favor to Vince,” I said, getting pissed off with this.

  “Vince never did me a favor this big,” she said. “Vince doesn’t have a favor this big in him.” She wasn’t haggling, she was scared.

  “Nobody will ever know. And I can pay.”

  “You have no idea. No idea how these things work.” She was quivering now, trying to find a way to gracefully exit the booth she’d put us on display in. I held her wrist under the table. “Do you have any idea how badly you have to hurt someone who was designed to feel every clumsy gesture as indescribable pleasure in order to make them feel pain?” she protested.

  I slipped my hand inside her open neckline and slid it down, quickly and with purpose, running the length of one finger over her nipple, which practically shook in its eager response. She gasped and closed her eyes. They fluttered open a moment later.

  “You do know a thing or two about Synths after all,” she whispered. “At least some of us.”

  “Like you said, a clumsy gesture,” I said. “But it calmed you down.”

  She shook her head. “I would not say that the sensation I am feeling is exactly calm. But you did get my attention. Come on, let’s step into my office.”

  I let her push me out of the booth, she stood up after me and led me into the back.

  “Whatever will people think?” I asked.

  “That you’re the luckiest meat-bag in the city,” she said without looking back at me. “But if it took you any longer than that to persuade me, they’d know that something was up.”

  TWELVE

  When we got to the office she was all business. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t this. The room wasn’t the bordello you’d expect to find her in, all satin and pillows. If she did use it for recreational activities, she’d have had to clear space on the crowded desk first.

  She pointed me into a hard-backed chair and slid into a comfortable-looking swivel model on the other side of the desk. She picked up the phone and dialed. It was a replica of an old rotary model and it made me like her a little better. I looked around the office as she made her calls. It was tasteful, but simple. Tidy, but clearly in heavy use. It was the back office of someone trying to keep a business above water. I watched her work the phones, mixing gentle persuasion with unsubtle threats until she had what she needed from each contact.

  I thought about how far this ran against what she’d been built for. Running a bar, even a Synthtown dive like this, acting as an information broker to keep the credits coming in. It was all a pretty big leap for someone designed to be soft and yielding and say Yes as if the answer had ever been in doubt.

  At last she hung up the phone and rubbed her eyes a little. She leaned her head on the fingertips of her left hand, her elbow propped on the desk and looked at me in silence.

  “Glamorous business, ain’t it?” she smiled when she spoke at last.

  I nodded.

  “You see how it works? How many calls did I just make?”

  “I wasn’t counting.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Maybe I was undressing you with my eyes,” I lied.

  “No you weren’t. You don’t have the brains for it. Stay right there,” she said in response to a shift I’d made in my seat. “You have busy hands and I need to focus just now.”

  I sat where I was and tried to look chastised, since I knew it was what she wanted. I could tell by the way that she shook her head that she wasn’t fooled.

  “How many calls did I just make?” she said like she wanted an answer.

  “Six,” I replied.

  “Right. And now there are at least six people out there who know that I was asking questions about Locust and his business. Six people who also sell information for a living.”

  “That’s six too many,” I said simply.

  “You make it difficult for me to lecture you when you make my thesis for me,” she said, slightly annoyed.

  “Yeah, well, that was kind of the point.”

  She shook her head again. “You almost had me on that one. I was almost sure that was empathy, just for a second.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re the original horse’s ass, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that so I didn’t. She seemed to be waiting for a reply.

  “What if I wouldn’t tell you anything?” she asked at last.

  “You think anyone who saw us leave the bar would come back here to check if they heard screaming?” I said, with my most charming smile.

  “I don’t know who you are,” she said simply. “Usually I can tell just by looking. Sometimes it takes me a few minutes. But you, Mister Finn, are an enigma.”

  “Look, lady,” I said, “those six people know what they know and I’m sorry for that. If it’s in my power to see that no trouble is made for you, I’ll do it. If there’s trouble and I can help, I’ll help. I can’t promise more than that and I won’t deliver less. But not telling me what you know won’t help a damn thing now, will it?”

  She smiled. She looked a little tired. “I don’t imagine there’s much I need to give you in the way of background. Cyrus Carter is big. He’s bigger than big. He owns most of the North Coast. He owns half the major media outlets in this hemisphere. He has twice as much money as God and three times as much power and if he came by any of it honestly, no one knows about it.”

  “I know who Cyrus Carter is,” I said, and it was true. The Locust seemed to be one of the essential facts of the cosmos that had escaped my brain-bashing intact.

  “That’s nice,” she smiled. “Did you also know that he’s here in Bountiful?”

  “You mean he’s got operations here?”

  “I mean he’s here. Carter. The man. Is in Bountiful City.”

  I gave a low whistle in spite of myself. She seemed pleased.

  “I don’t know what you’re in the middle of, but anything Cyrus the Locust can’t bear to have his Shades handle for him has got to be something you want no part of.”

  “His Shades?”

  “Sure. The Locust uses Shades for all his big-money jobs. Anything too far outside the law to be swept under the carpet with a bribe or a threat. That’s why his hands are so clean.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” I said.

  She looked at me as if I were an idiot, which just might have been the case. “Henchmen can be turned. They can be bought or brought in for... I don’t know, for murder, or black market trafficking or whatever the cops can scare them with, and then make a deal to put their bosses away and get off scott free. This is what passes for police work.”

  I had the thread now. “But you can’t arrest a Shade, because they’ve been erased from Omniframe.”

  “And you can’t arrest something that doesn’t exist,” she said. “Everyone knows about Shades. Everyone but the Omniframe, which says such a thing is impossible. So the cops can’t even file a report that mentions Shades. When they do bring someone in they can’t pull up a sheet on, all they can do is use them for target practice.”

  “So if one of Cyrus the Locust’s boys is taken, they can’t testify against him, because they’re a figment of the law’s imagination.”

  She nodded. “Something like that. Locust touched down at a private Pad across the river two days ago and came into Bountiful in the biggest stretch Hov my guy had ever seen. Had six of his boys with him, including his fixer.”

  “A Lieutenant?” I asked.

  “A king among the dead,” she replied. “The Shade that runs his crews for him. My guy didn’t even want to talk about him. Very, very scary son of a bitch. They call him the Monarch.”

  “An un-person named Monarch,” I said. “Mister Carter has a sense of irony.”

  “Yeah, and I hear he’s a terrific dancer and I hope the two of you wi
ll be very happy together. Any idea how long he’s gonna be in town?”

  “I didn’t even know he was here,” I protested.

  “Yeah, but my guess is you know why he is.”

  I looked deep in those violet eyes. I was almost sure that she wasn't going to pick up that phone after I left and sell me out to one of the six people who knew that she was in this. Almost. She looked serious, and she looked scared.

  “My best guess?” I said. “Couple of days. Then it’ll all be over, one way or another.”

  She nodded. “Then I'm getting out of town for a couple of days. Maybe a week. If you live through this Flyboy, you should look me up sometime.”

  “I might do that.” I stood and reached into my coat pocket. “Can I leave you anything for your trouble?”

  She closed her eyes and arched an eyebrow, as if recalling a less-than-pleasant memory. “Like an envelope on the dresser? Don't bother. Whatever you’ve got, it isn’t enough to compensate me for tilting at this particular windmill.”

  “Then why did you?”

  She looked up at me like she wasn’t sure she wanted to say what came next, but was more afraid of not saying it. “Vince’s boys are some pretty tough customers for the most part. They’re about as jaded as they come. But they just might make a folk hero out of the human that shot two of his own to save one of us.”

  “They shouldn’t do that,” I said. “I don’t deserve it.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she smiled. “My guess is you didn’t know you were saving a Synthetic until it was too late. But when you realized what you’d done, you know what the easiest thing to do would have been? The smartest, easiest thing to do?”

  “Blow Joey’s head off and walk away fast,” I said, because it was true.

  “So why didn’t you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Because he didn’t deserve it.”

  She nodded again. “It ain’t much, Flyboy. But down here, it’s a lot.”

  I didn’t have to say a thing. We both understood. She held out her hand from across the desk. I took it. It was small and soft and perfect and still too pink to be real.

  “Someone once told me,” she began, “that the girls that men remember the sweetest and the longest are the ones you never even kiss. Is that true?”