Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things

by Richard Calder

  I picked her up—staggering at the concentrated mass - and clambered into the dumbwaiter. ‘Press the button marked K.’ Her voice was muffled by the clingwrap of her flesh. ‘You’ll have to reach outside.’ My body, more painfully, if less dramatically contorted than Primavera’s, accomplished the feat to a snap, crackle and pop of outraged joints.

  The hatch slid shut; in darkness, we ascended.

  Broken conversations; the blare of TVs and magazines; and the undertones of passion, bitterness and remorse, slipped by as we passed each floor. Somewhere off tha.

  tunnel of lust was the abandoned suite that for three years had sheltered us from retribution. We had never called it home.

  ‘I can feel her,’ said Primavera, no longer speaking, but transmitting from deep within her hermitage of flesh. ‘She’s alone. Unless there are gynoids or androids with her. Bijouterie I can read; but machine minds...’

  With a hiss of air brakes we stopped.

  ‘Are we here?’ Her mind rustled with impatience.

  I eased back an eye-width of hatch. We were in a kitchen similar to the one in which we had hitched our lift; but here a seven-foot Negro, wearing nothing but the heavy electromusculature of a primitive walking, talking AI, was prissily attending to the evening meal. His fire hose of a member was like a third leg amputated just above the knee.

  ‘Android,’ I said subvocally. ‘Big one.’ I felt Primavera grin inside my head.

  ‘Making dinner?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s Mr Bones. He’s dangerous. Pull back the door and don’t get involved.’

  The hatch squealed on its runners; Mr Bones looked up. At once, Primavera dropped into the kitchen and bounced across the floor.

  ‘Lordy,’ cried Mr Bones, his nigger-minstrel programme seemingly a leftover from Nana’s patriotic S-M revue (pirated from Broadway and premiered before the country’s top brass) The Birth Of A Nation, ‘it de white lady Miss Kito bin tellin’ us about!’ Primavera, on bouncing off wall, ceiling and work surface, unravelled with a damp whipcrack of limbs in mid-air, to land (tottering a little on her six-inch stilettos) on the table where the giant android had been dicing meat. Mr Bones smoothed a hand across his shaven head.

  ‘De white trash brother too,’ he said, as I fell from the dumbwaiter. ‘Miss Kito sure gonna be mighty upset!’ A huge hand shot out; Primavera hopped to safety.

  ‘Stay back, Iggy,’ she said. Kicking off her high heels she sprang upon her opponent. Her feet found purchase on the ledge of his hip bone; her claws made hand-holds in his neck. Hanging as if from some perilous cliff face of obsidian, she bared her teeth and bit. The fangs penetrated his forehead, champing at a red mush of biochips.

  Mr Bones danced about the kitchen in a clumsy rendition of a cakewalk, smoke issuing from ears, nostrils and- mouth, until, freezing in mid-stride, he collapsed, Primavera riding him to the ground. ‘Where,’ groaned the android, ‘are all de white women... ?’ The brain box combusted in a flash of sparks.

  ‘He tasted really faecal.’Primavera spat onto the floor I ripped an extinguisher from a wall and gave Mr Bones a dousing.

  ‘Somebody must have heard that,’ I said.

  ‘No; Kito’s in her bedroom, and if other automata are around they’re likely to be gynoids. They’re not programmed for security. They might hear, but they won’t care.’

  ‘Pikadons?’

  ‘I can’t feel them. There are some guards—human guards—in the corridor outside. But I know where all the cameras are; and there’ll be no closed circuit in Madame’s boudoir.’

  Primavera led me through the apartment’s blind spots. A children’s game, it seemed, as we ducked behind sofas, crawled behind curtains, and shuffled beneath tiger skins and Persian rugs. The lights were out; but Primavera’s night vision allowed us to negotiate the obstacles with ease.

  We stood outside Kito’s bedroom. Primavera placed her hand on the doorknob; turned. Darkness. Primavera was past me, leaping into the void, her cat’s eyes like green kryptonite streaking to Earth as she described a trajectory calculated to bring her prey to ground.

  Lights.

  Primavera screamed. She knelt on a heart-shaped bed and in her hands wriggled a python-sized millipede. She threw it across the room. It was Kuhn Yow, one of Kito’s bioengineered pets. On Sundays, Kito would walk through Lumpini Park, Kuhn Yow trailing on a long pink leash, his bejewelled chitin scintillating in the sun.

  Kito made a sarcastic wai. ‘Good evening, children.’ Replicas of Mr Bones—five in all—surrounded the bed. Each held a particle weapon. Kito tightened the sash of her peignoir and indicated that I should join Primavera. I was thinking, Well done. Thanks. I told you that... Primavera silenced me by throwing the mental equivalent of a glass of iced water in my face. Her tongue ran over her fangs; and her eyes—like those of a decadent Byzantine princess—appraised the virility of Kito’s mechanical slaves. She was ready to rumble.

  ‘I know what you think, bijouterie,’ said Kito. ‘You down one of my six-pack, only five to go. But move and I scramble your womb.’

  ‘It’s scrambled already. Cervix, ovaries, Fallopian tubes. You name it. The works. I’m sick, Madame.’

  ‘This I know long time: so girlygirl, but—’ and Kito raised an eyebrow—‘so sick.’

  ‘I mean really sick. Ill. Unwell. I didn’t come here to hurt you.’

  Kito took Kuhn Yow into her arms. She cuffed it; its mandibles were nipping at her breast. ‘You come here to give present? Say goodbye? Eat rice?’ Cheek pressed to the exoskeleton of her disgusting pet, Kito paced back and forth, taking care to stay behind her phalanx of electric blackamoors. ‘Mr Jack tell me you get loose. Why you come here? Crazy. Pasad! Kito have many eye: TV, photo-mechanical, human...’

  ‘Of course,’ I began, ‘Madame is a lady of dark influence. A godmother. A chao mae who . .

  ‘Shut up, stupid boy.’

  ‘Yeah, Iggy. Don’t be so creepy.’

  ‘Well?’ said Kito. ‘Why come here? You want go England so bad?’

  ‘You still make sex diseases, Madame?’ said Primavera.

  Kito ceased her pacing. ‘Tell you before, I stop all that after trade war with Cartier. Forty year ago...’

  ‘Madame,’ said Primavera, ‘I know why you turned us in. I know—’

  ‘You know nothing,’ said Kito, ‘half-doll Angritt. You are disease!’

  ‘Yeah, well at least my Mum wasn’t roboto.’

  ‘Don’t call me roboto, you little tramp!’

  The exchange died. In green-eyed perplexity the two women faced off, lips feinting insults that were never thrown.

  ‘Jack Morgenstern,’ said Primavera, swallowing her gall, ‘he told you that you were responsible for the doll-plague, didn’t he?’

  Kito blanched, her complexion achieving the pallor of a full moon on a winter’s night. Kuhn Yow slithered to the floor.

  ‘ Klong fever,’ continued Primavera. ‘Didn’t he say that’s how it all began? Forty years ago Cartier Paris -getting pretty tired with the way people like you were flooding the market with imitation dolls—cooked a virus that could bridge the hardware-wetware divide. A bug that could be transmitted from machine to man. Cartier stole some of your dolls, your imitation Cartier; infected them; then returned them to the Weird. The bug was an STD, but it was also ethnically selective. It was turned on by genes peculiar to oriental DNA. Klong fever, the Thais called it. It made men impotent. Sort of long-term genocide à la beau monde. Nobody suspected the sourc.

  of the virus; dolls are supposed to be disease-free. Nobody, that is, except you. You chose to retaliate. You cooked your own virus. Had it taken to Paris to infect their dolls. It was supposed to induce priapism, which I suppose you, Madame (you are so predictable), thought you could exploit. But according to Jack Morgenstern things didn’t quite work out that way...’

  ‘How you know this?’ said Kito.

  ‘About twenty-four hours ago,’ said Primavera, ‘I became
telepathic. It’s tasty. When they had me and Iggy in the embassy I dreamed ... I dreamed of Jack Morgenstern. And I dreamed of you. Morgenstern was saying that there was no place on Earth you could hide if it got known that you started the doll-plague.’

  Kito pulled a transcom from her peignoir. ‘The sooner they get you back England...’ She began punching numbers.

  ‘Except you didn’t,’ said Primavera, looking at her nails.

  ‘ American Embassy,’ piped a voice over the ISDN.

  ‘Let me have the duty officer,’ said Kito. She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘What you mean?’

  ‘I know who started the plague, Madame. And it wasn’t you.’

  ‘May I ask what it’s in connection with?’

  ‘Put the com away. They don’t have anything on you.’ Kito frowned; hesitated. ‘I can prove it.’ The com died; Kito replaced it within the folds of her gown.

  ‘I waiting,’ said Kito.

  ‘First,’ said Primavera, ‘you’re going to have to get me cleaned up. I’ve been dusted.’

  ‘No,’ said Kito. ‘You forget I in trouble too. With America. So tell me about doll-plague. What you know?’

  ‘Madame,’ said Primavera, getting to her feet; her software cousin withdrew behind Mr Bones, one through five. ‘I’m sick. Really. You’ve got to help. In fact eve.

  now...’ The black phalanx closed ranks.

  ‘More reason,’ said Kito, ‘to do as I say. Then— maybe. We see.’

  Primavera flopped down and lay her head in my lap. ‘I’m so tired, Madame. So tired. But I’ll try. I have to tell you about Iggy and me. How we got out of London. I have to tell you about Titania...’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Westward Ho

  In the antechamber several young girls await execution. The girls, seated upon a curvilinear bench that follows the contour of the walls (one can almost feel the bench transfusing its coldness through their thin diaphanous shifts), have their eyes fixed, with dark surmise, upon the man who is walking through the door. Pupils shrink from the superfluity of light into pinpricks; lips quiver; there is a rattling of chains. The man takes a ballpoint pen from his clipboard and, making a cursory tick, assists the night’s first victim to her feet...

  ‘It’s no use,’ said Dad. He had just returned from the roof. ‘Doesn’t matter where I point that dish, all we get is BBC.’

  The girl is led down a long corridor littered with wheelchairs and stretchers. The white light is unbearable...

  ‘From A to Z,’ said Dad, ‘from Z to A. So it will go on. Unending.’ Dad put the TV to sleep. My veins clotted with anger; my heart clenched. ‘Nothing for a child’s eyes.’

  ‘It’s late anyway,’ said Mum. ‘Who’d like some Ovaltine?’

  I shook my head. ‘I think I’ll go upstairs.’

  ‘You haven’t done your French yet,’ said Dad.

  ‘I’ve got a headache.’

  ‘It’s only for half an hour.’

  Mum put her sewing to one side. ‘You should really teach him what it means. Ignatz finds it all so boring. All he knows are the bad words the other boys use.’ She left the room and went into the kitchen.

  ‘Half an hour,’ said Dad. ‘Just to get me started.’ He began to lower himself into the dreamscaper. A primitive model, the dreamscaper resembled a large water tank and hogged a sizeable portion of our lounge. It had taken Dad five years to pay for it. He still couldn’t afford the software. (His black market creditors were browbeating him; once again, we queued at the co-op.)

  Dad sealed himself inside. ‘Are you ready?’ he said.

  I selected the Pléiade edition of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu from Dad’s autodidactic shelves. At first, before Dad had taught me to pronounce written French (no time, he’d said, for grammar or semantics) I had gone through the collected works of Charles Dickens. But Dad said that it was the past that he wanted; the world of Dickens was too much like our own. The English, Dad said, were reverting to type; John Bull growled with ata­vistic savagery.

  What was Dad doing? He was quiet. Desperately quiet. ‘You got the catheter fixed?’ I said. ‘And the autocerebro-scope?’

  ‘Give it five minutes, then start reading.’

  I waited, scanning the incomprehensible pages. The book was something to do with the belle epoque (a different one, I learned later, than the one Dad used to talk about); something about regaining lost time. My time machine, Dad called his dreamscaper.

  ‘Longtemps...’ I murmured.

  ‘Not yet. I’m not in REM. Keep your eyes on the alpha-wave monitor.’

  Time. The melancholy of memory and lost time. Have You Seen These Girls? asked the posters at street corners, Primavera’s face amongst the wanted. Night-times, on the roof of the tower block, I had focused my telescope on the streets, on houses, on deserted faraway warehouses and factories, on anything that might have served as a hideaway for a doll. But the distances framed only the drones making their nightly supply drops from across the interdiction.

  That summer had been wrought of gold. Her eyes. Her hair. Her lips. Her teeth. The golden ecstasy of her venom. But now summer had come to an end. All was lost, as Primavera was lost: to the world’s baseness.

  ‘The dolls who run away,’ I said, ‘do they ever get far?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The dolls who run away.’

  ‘Not now, Ignatz.’

  Dreams. Maybe they were the only escape. Software dreams you could walk into as you would your own brain (or, in Dad’s case, wordware dreams, realtime and analgesic). I checked Dad’s alpha waves. Soon, I would begin my recital, downloading what to me might as well have been machine code into a trough for Dad’s dream-hungry head. I was hungry too; Primavera had been missing for a week; I was going into withdrawal.

  ‘Longtemps...’

  After thirty minutes I left Dad to his oneironautical explorations and retired to my room.

  That night I too seemed to wake in the midst of dreams. Primavera was outside the tower, twenty floors above the street, her nightdress billowing in the midnight breeze, and she was tap-tap-tapping against the window. I somnambulated across the bedroom and let her in.

  ‘Shit, that was some climb—just look at my nails, just look at my cuticles!’ She slapped me across the face. ‘Wake up, pinhead!’ I crossed the dividing line between sleep and consciousness to find that nothing had changed. ‘Every day, in every way, I get a little bit dollier.’

  I wanted to switch on the light; she caught my wrist. The amoral flippancy that animated her brittle face had drained away; she was again a child, a twelve-year-old whose brittleness was that of human vulnerability rather than that of porcelain.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she said. I put my arms about her. ‘I ran away at night. I don’t have any clothes.’

  In her white nightdress Primavera seemed the incarnation of those bubble-gum cards we swapped in school: No. 52, Carmilla. An underage Carmilla. Carmilla’s kid sister, perhaps. I ran my hand down her spine to where the sacrum had been trephinated to allow passage of the tzepa.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘The cricket pavilion.’

  ‘The whole week?’ I could feel her bones through her flesh; what had she been living on? ‘You should have come to me. I can hide you.’

  ‘Hiding’s no good. I’ve got to get away. You’ll help me, Iggy, won’t you?’ I tightened my grip about her waist and went to kiss her; she turned away, transfixing the TV with a cold, serpentine stare. ‘On,’ she said. The TV awoke. ‘Tasty trick, eh?’ A broken fingernail snagged in my pyjamas. ‘But how can they do this?’

  A great circular chamber; three black marble slabs; and on each slab... The pictures flickered across my bedroom walls like the projections of an infernal magic lantern.

  ‘That one there,’ said Primavera, as the camera closed in to catch a subtle delineation of pain on a pale adolescent face. ‘That’s Anna Belushi! My God, I know her!’ The gentlemen of the English press m
obbed the dying girl: stage-door Johnnies feting the star of death’s chorus line.

  ‘Miss Belushi, what do you think of the HF’s success?’

  ‘Are your mother and father watching tonight, Miss Belushi?’

  ‘Miss Belushi, how about a scream for the viewers at home?’

  Flash bulbs exploded as Anna Belushi obliged.

  ‘She ain’t got no Dad,’ said Primavera. ‘Her Mum had her at fourteen. Her Dad died a few years later, junked up on allure.’ I pressed my finger into the small indentation at the base of Primavera’s spine. ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t.’ I turned the TV off.

  ‘There’s nowhere to run,’ I said.

  ‘There has to be.’ Her voice was an earnest tremolo. ‘Lots of dolls run away. They don’t find them all.’

  ‘There’s only the city. Central London. We’d be hunted down.’

  She slipped the nightdress off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She pressed herself against me, her body’s chill filtering through my pyjamas and into my muscles and veins. She took my hand and placed it on her abdomen.

  ‘It’s yours, Iggy. Prime sirloin. I give it to you.’ I felt the precious throb of the abdominal aorta locked safely within its casket of mutating flesh. ‘Don’t throw it away. It’s something to be cherished. A box of magic. A box of tricks. Everything’s there. Everything in the universe. Everything that’s happening. Everything that can happen. Look after it and it’ll look after you.’ She nuzzled my chest. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘make a wish.’

  ‘Escape,’ I said.

  ‘That was easy, wasn’t it? And you still have two wishes left.’

  ‘You know I love you.’

  ‘You hate me,’ she whispered. I felt the scratch of her fangs. ‘You want me to dirty up your genes a little more?’