He and Black took the large black air pistol from the case, then put a dart in the chamber. “It should put her out for hours,” Black said confidently. “I’ll give her some food, then shoot her from the door when she’s eating.” He tucked the pistol into the back waistband of his trousers, took a paper plate of cold pizza from the refrigerator, and walked to the bag lady’s door. He unlocked the heavy padlock and cautiously opened the door. Hubbard and Matthias unconsciously took a step back, half-expecting Black to vanish into whatever space-time singularity inhabited the bag … but Black’s expression changed, and he poked his head into the room, glanced right and left. When he stepped back into the hallway, his expression was baffled.
“She’s gone,” he said. “She’s not in the room anywhere.”
Modular Man looked at the drinks lined up in the bar before him. Irish coffee, martini, margarita, boilermaker, Napoleon brandy. He seriously wanted to try new tastes right now, and wondered if getting his parts crushed by the bag lady’s gizmo had wakened in him a sense of mortality.
“I am beginning to realize,” said the android raising the Irish coffee to his lips, “that my creator is a hopeless sociopath.”
Cyndi considered this. “If you don’t mind some theology, I think that this just puts you in the same boat with the rest of us.”
“He’s beginning to—well, never mind what he’s beginning to do. But I think the man is sick.” The android wiped cream from his upper lip.
“You could run away. Last I heard, slavery was illegal. He’s not even paying you minimum wage, I suppose.”
“I’m not a person. I’m not human. Machines do not have rights.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to do everything he says, Mod Man.”
The android shook his head. “It won’t work. I have hardwired inhibitions against disobeying him, disobeying his instructions, or revealing his identity in any way.”
Cyndi seemed startled. “He’s thorough, I’ll hand that to him.” She looked at Modular Man carefully. “Why’d he build you, anyway?”
“He was going to mass-market me and sell me to the military. But I think he’s having so much fun playing with me that he may never get around to selling my rights to the Pentagon.”
“I’d be thankful for that if I were you.”
“I wouldn’t know.” The android reached for another drink, then showed Cyndi the Polaroid of the bag lady.
“I need to find this person.”
“She looks like a bag lady.”
“She is a bag lady.”
She laughed. “Haven’t you been listening to the broadcasts? You know how many thousands of those women there are in this town? There’s a recession going on out there. Winos, runaways, people out of a job or out of luck, people who got kicked out of mental institutions because of state cutbacks on funding … The shelters give Swarm refugees precedence over street people. Jesus—and on a night like this, too. You know it’s already the coldest night in history for December? They’ve had to open up churches, police stations—all sorts of places so the vagrants won’t freeze to death. And a lot of the vagrants won’t go to any kind of shelter, because they’re too scared of the authorities or because they’re just too crazy to realize they’re gonna need help. I don’t envy you, Mod Man, not at all. The dumpsters’ll be full of dead people tomorrow.”
“I know. I found some.”
“You want to find her before she freezes to death, try the trash-can fires first, the shelters later.” She frowned at the picture again. “Why are you trying to find her, anyway?”
“I think … she may be a witness to something.”
“Right. Well. Good luck, then.”
The android glanced over his shoulder at the patio observation deck with its glistening skin of ice. Beyond the rail Manhattan gleamed at him coldly, with a clarity that he hadn’t before seen, as if the buildings, the people, the lights, had all been frozen inside a vast crystal. It was as though the city were no closer than the stars, and as incapable as they of giving warmth.
Inside his mind, the android performed a purely mental shudder. He wanted to stay here in the warmth of the Aces High, going through the—for him—perfectly abstract motions of raising a warm drink to his lips. There was something comforting in it, in spite of the logical pointlessness of the act. He did not entirely understand the impulse, only knew it for a fact. The human part of his programming, presumably.
But there were restrictions placed on his desires, and one of those was obedience. He could stay at the Aces High only so long as it could help him in his mission of finding the bag lady.
He finished the row of drinks and said good-bye to Cyndi. Unless a mircle happened and he found the bag lady soon, he’d be spending the rest of the night on the streets.
Four A.M. The car ran over a manhole, and hot coffee spilled on Coleman Hubbard’s thigh. He ignored it. He raised the big styrofoam cup from between his thighs and drank urgently. He had to stay awake.
He was looking for the bag lady, going through every shelter, driving down every dark street, casting out with his mind, hoping to find the pattern of lunacy and anger that he had seen in her disturbed brain.
He’d been doing this for the better part of twenty-four hours. The heater in his cheap rented heap had given out. His body was a mass of cramps and his skull was pounding to a slow piledriver rhythm. The fact that Black and Judas were freezing themselves on the same errand was no consolation.
Hubbard jammed the coffee cup between his thighs, turned on his map light, and glanced at the paper for the list of shelters. There was a girls’ school gymnasium filled with refugees nearby, and he hadn’t sensed it yet.
As he approached the place, Hubbard began to feel a disturbing familiarity, something like déjà vu. His headache battered at his eyes. His stomach felt queasy. It was a few seconds before he recognized the sensation.
She was here. Elation seized him. He wrenched his mind away from the twisted patterns of the bag lady’s mind and reached out to where Black patrolled, the loaded dart gun on the seat next to him.
Hurry! he cried. I’ve found her!
Modular Man walked down the long rows, scanning left and right. Eight hundred refugees had been crammed into the prep school gym. There were cots for about half, apparently acquired from some National Guard depot, and the remaining refugees were sleeping on the floor. The big room echoed to the sound of snores, cries, the wail of children.
And there she was. Walking among the rows of cots, mumbling to herself, dragging her heavy bags. She looked up at the same moment that the android saw her, and there was a mutual shock of recognition, a snaggletoothed, malevolent grin.
The android was airborne in a picosecond of his light-speed thought. He wanted to be clear of any innocent bystanders if she was going to unleash whatever she had in her bag. He had barely left the floor before his flux-force field snapped on, crackling around his body. The bag-thing was not going to be able to seize anything solid.
Radar quested out, the gas-grenade launcher on his left shoulder whirred as it aimed. His shoulder absorbed the recoil. The grenade became substantial as soon as it left the flux-field but kept its momentum. Opaque gas billowed up around the bag lady.
She smiled to herself. A blackness snapped into existence around her, and the gas drowned in it, drawn into her bag like a waterspout.
Panic roared among the refugees as they awoke to the battle.
The bag lady opened her shopping bag. The android could see the blackness lying there. He felt something cold pass through him, something that tried to tug at his insubstantial frame. The steel girders supporting the ceiling rang like chimes above his head.
The bag lady’s crooked smile died. “Sonofabitch,” she said. “You remind me of Shaun.”
Modular Man crested his flight near the ceiling. He was going to dive at her, turn substantial at the last second, make a grab for the shopping bag, and hope it didn’t eat him.
The bag lady began
grinning again. As the android reached his pushover point just above her, she pulled the shopping bag over her head.
It swallowed her. Her head disappeared into it, followed by the rest of her body. Her hands, clutching the end of the bag, pulled the bag after her into the void. The bag folded into itself and vanished.
“That’s impossible,” somebody said.
The android searched the room carefully. The bag lady was not to be found.
Ignoring the growing disturbance below, he drifted upward, through the ceiling. The cold lights of Manhattan appeared around him. He rose alone into the night.
Hubbard gazed for a long, endless moment at the space where the bag lady had been. So that’s how she did it, he thought.
He rubbed his frozen hands together and thought of the streets, the endless freezing streets, the long cold hours of his search. The bag lady might have gone to Jersey, for all he knew.
It was going to be a long night.
“Goddamn the woman!” Travnicek said. His hand, which was holding a letter, trembled with rage. “I’ve been evicted!” He brandished the letter. “Disturbances!” he muttered. “Unsafe equipment! Sixty fucking days!” He began to stomp on the floor with his heavy boots, trying deliberately to rattle the apartment below. Breath frosted from his every word. “The bitch!” he bellowed. “I know her game! She just wanted me to fix the place up at my own expense so she could evict me and then charge higher rent. I didn’t spend a fortune in improvements, so now she wants to find another chump. Some member of the fucking gentrifying class.” He looked up at the android, patiently waiting with a carryout bag of hot croissants and coffee.
“I want you to get into her office tonight and trash the place,” Travnicek said. “Leave nothing intact, not a piece of paper, not a chair. I want only mangled furniture and confetti. And when she’s cleaning that up, do the same to her apartment.”
“Yes, sir,” the android said. Resigned to it.
“The Lower East Fucking Side,” Travnicek said. “What’s left, if this neighborhood’s starting to get pretensions? I’m gonna have to move into Jokertown to get any peace.” He took his coffee from the android’s hand while he continued stomping the pressboard floor.
He looked over his shoulder at his creation. “Well?” he barked. “Are you looking for the bag lady or what?”
“Yes, sir. But since the gas launcher didn’t work, I thought I’d change to the dazzler.”
Travnicek jumped up and down several times. The sound echoed through the loft. “Whatever you want.” He stopped his jumping up and down, and smiled. “Okay,” he said. “I know what to do. I’ll turn on the big generators!”
The android put the paper bag down on a workbench, swapped weapons, and flew soundlessly up through the ceiling. Outside, the cold wind continued to batter the city, flooding between the tall buildings, blowing the people like straws in the water. The temperature had risen barely above freezing, but the wind chill was dropping the effective temperature to below zero.
More people, the android knew, were going to die.
“Hey,” Cyndi said. “How about we take a break?”
“If you like.”
Cyndi raised her hands, cupped the android’s head between them. “All that exertion,” she said. “Don’t you even sweat a little bit?”
“No. I just turn on my cooling units.”
“Amazing.” The android slid off her. “Doing it with a machine,” she said thoughtfully. “You know, I would have thought it would be at least a little kinky. But it’s not.”
“Nice of you to say so. I think.”
Modular Man had been looking for the bag lady for forty-eight hours, and had concluded he needed a few hours to himself. He justified this stop as being necessary for his morale. He was planning to move the body of the evening’s memory from its sequential place to somewhere else, and fill the empty space with a boring rerun of the previous night’s patrol for the bag lady. With any luck, Travnicek would just speed through the patrol and wouldn’t go looking for memory porn.
She sat up in the bed, reaching for the night table. “Want some coke?”
“It’s wasted on me. Go ahead.” She set the mirror carefully in front of her and began chopping white powder. The android watched as she snorted a pair of lines and leaned back against the pillows with a smile. She looked at him and took his hand.
“You really don’t have to be so hung up on performance, you know,” she said. “I mean, you could have finished if you’d wanted.”
“I don’t finish.”
Her look was a little glassy. “What?” she said.
“I don’t finish. Orgasm is a complex random firing of neurons. I don’t have neurons, and nothing I do is truly random. It wouldn’t work.”
“Holy fuck.” Cyndi blinked at him. “So what does it feel like?”
“Pleasant. In a very complicated way.”
She cocked her head and thought about this for a moment. “That’s about right,” she concluded. She snorted another pair of lines and looked at him brightly.
“I got a job,” she said. “That’s how I was able to afford the coke. A Christmas present for myself.” He smiled.
“Congratulations.”
“It’s in California. A commercial. I’m in the hand of this giant ape, see, and I’m rescued by Bud Man. You know, the guy in the beer ads. And then at the end—” She rolled her eyes. “At the end we’re all happily drunk, Bud Man, the ape, and me, and I ask the ape how he’s doing, and the ape belches.” She frowned. “It’s kind of gross.”
“I was about to say.”
“But then there’s a chance for a guest shot on Twenty-Dollar Hotel. I get to have an affair with a mobster or something. My agent wasn’t too clear about it.” She giggled. “At least there aren’t any giant apes in that one. I mean, one was enough.”
“I’ll miss you,” the android said. He wasn’t at all sure how he felt about this. Or, for that matter, if what he felt could in any way be described as feeling. Cyndi sensed his thoughts.
“You’ll get to rescue other nice ladies.”
“I suppose. None nicer than you, though.”
She laughed some more. “You have a way with a compliment,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
She patted him on his dome. “It’ll be a week or so before I have to leave. We can spend some time together.”
“I’d like that.” The android was considering his yearning for experience, the strange fashion his career had of providing it, the way it seemed to him that the experience provided was not enough, would never prove enough.
Infrared detectors snapped on and off in the android’s plastic eyes as he floated over the street. Gusts of wind tried to lash him into buildings. Except for the few hours he’d spent with Cyndi, he’d been doing this nonstop for four days.
Below in the street, someone tossed a styrofoam cup out the window of a blue Dodge. Modular Man wondered where he’d seen that particular action before.
Macroatomic switches performed a silent superliminal sifting of data. And the android realized he’d been seeing that blue Dodge a lot, and in many of the same places Modular Man had been in the last few days—refugee centers, shelters, a ceaseless midnight patrolling of the streets. Whoever was in the Dodge was looking for someone. The android wondered if the Dodge was looking for the bag lady. Modular Man decided to keep the Dodge under observation.
The car’s search was slower than the androids—so Modular Man began scissoring, searching streets left and right of the car while returning to the Dodge every so often. At the Jokertown Salvation Army center he got a good look at the Dodge’s occupant—a middle-aged white man, his crooked face drawn and harried. He memorized the car’s license plate and rose into the sky again.
And then, hours later, there she was—dead ahead of the Dodge, huddled beside someone’s front stoop with her bags piled on top of her. The android settled onto a rooftop and waited. The Dodge was slowing down.
/>
“And Shaun says to me, he says, I want you to see this doctor…”
Hubbard hunched into his overcoat. It felt as if the wind were blowing through his body, traveling right through flesh and bone. His teeth were chattering. He had been driving for what seemed years before, once again, getting that awful, nauseating feeling of déjà vu. He’d found her again, crouched behind someone’s stoop behind a rampart of shopping bags.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with your mother that a shot of the Irish couldn’t fix.…”
Black, I have found her again. Lower West Side.
Black’s answer was sardonic. Are you certain nothing’s going to go wrong this time?
The robot isn’t here. I will stay out of sight.
Ten minutes.
Bring food, Hubbard said. We’ll try to catch her unawares.
“Fuck you, Shaun, I says. Fuck you.” The bag lady had jumped to her feet, was shaking her fist at the sky.
Hubbard looked at her. “I’m with you, lady,” he mumbled. And then he looked up. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Modular Man floated off the rooftop. He couldn’t tell whether the bag lady was screaming at him or at the sky in general. The occupant of the Dodge was several houses away, sheltered behind another front stoop. It didn’t look as if the man intended any action.
He thought about the way she had twisted his components, of the obliteration of existence that would happen if she ripped into his generators or brain. Memories rose to his mind; the snap of single-malt in his nose, the fat man with his rifle, Cyndi moaning softly in his arms, the ape’s foaming snarl.… He didn’t want to lose any of it.
“Oh, shit,” Hubbard said, staring up in horror. The android was floating forty feet over the bag lady. She was screaming at him, reaching into her bag. The thing in the bag hadn’t been able to snatch him last time.