Marlowe and the Spacewoman

by Ian M. Dudley

  The neighborhood was quiet. Too quiet.

  Marlowe put his fingers to his lips and whispered. “Father, stay in the car until we give the all clear. Nina, follow me.”

  They double-timed it to the front of the house, stopping at the front door.

  “Nina, we face a terrible evil right now. One far larger than I can possibly ask you, as a newcomer to our City, to face if you have any reservations. And I can’t promise either of us will survive this. You still in?”

  “Didn’t you just hire me as a bodyguard?”

  “Yeah, but that was more for goons like Artie and Gwen and the occasional rampaging garbage truck. This is different. We’re facing what the Id Box Corporation likes to call the True, Final Death™.”

  “Marlowe, who are you talking to? I face the True, Final Death every time I get out of bed. I’m in.”

  “Then please kick this door in.”

  Nina kicked the door in, then let Marlowe past her to enter first. He pressed himself against the wall, pausing at the threshold to the living room.

  “If we’re lucky, he thinks we’re all dead and he’s proceeded with his plan,” he whispered to Nina.

  “Where now?”

  Marlowe surveyed the living room. It was a huge mess. The self-updating pictures were on the floor, the sofa badly mauled, Gomer’s cage wide open and lying on its side, food spilled everywhere.

  “Bedroom. That’s where House’s main access point is.”

  “What a mess. He’s pretty mad,” observed Nina.

  Marlowe felt a surge of irritation. It would take the sweeper snake and the vacuum viper hours to clean up the mess. “I don’t care how angry he is. There was no need to do this.”

  Marlowe drew his BB gun. He gestured to Nina to pull out hers, and then started down the hall towards his bedroom and, he strongly suspected, destiny. He had been so stupid, so gullible, to have been taken in so easily. His palms were sweating as he gripped the gun. Each step brought the closed bedroom door closer. He could hear strange sounds from behind that looming door, scuffling, scratching, gabbling sounds. Clipped English, slightly mumbled, with the occasional frustrated trill and consternation-filled squawk.

  Marlowe double checked his rapid-repeating, semiautomatic double-barreled BB gun, thumbing off the safety. He raised his free hand, holding up three fingers. Nina nodded as he lowered his fingers one at a time, counting down. Both of them tensed as he reached one. He took a deep breath, lowered the last finger, and burst through the door. His rolling entry was accompanied by a mighty battle cry. Nina’s. It was a good one, too. Devastatingly good in the Loud Department particularly.

  An eruption of feathers greeted this entrance, along with panicked squawks. Colors streaked past his head, a bundle of green bouncing off a wall and landing on the floor with a thud and a blue and gold form piling out of the bedroom window, which was wide open. This brief period of confusion was their truly vulnerable moment, and Marlowe tried to take advantage of it. He fired in rapid succession at everything that moved (except Nina, who would have found the BBs annoying). He wasn’t sure if he was hitting anything. Nina was having trouble hitting the mark too.

  Something flew overhead, and Marlowe ducked, the talons narrowly missing his eyes and instead plowing a furrow of blood across his scalp.

  Nina instinctively swung at the bird, almost catching it in mid-air. The bird dodged the blow, but by missing Nina’s fist instead slammed into the wall and then landed with a thud on the floor. Marlowe noted that the bundle of green feathers shaking its head on his carpet was a Yellow Nape Amazon, an identification he was able to make because of the patch of yellow on the back of the parrot’s head.

  A voice cried out, “They’re alive! Cheese it, boys!”

  Marlowe emptied his BB gun into the air, following the path of what he swore was a rose colored parrot wearing really thick glasses. But before he could identify the species of bird properly, it had alighted out the window and was gone. If he’d hit the bird, it showed no signs as it flew away. The Yellow Nape, which he’d turned his back on, had evidently recovered enough to regain flight and raked the top of Marlowe’s head on its way out the window. He could have sworn the bird called him a ‘despicable pink Neanderthal’ as it swept by.

  And then all was silent. A single feather wafted down to the floor in front of Marlowe, who still had his gun raised and ready. He thumbed the cartridge, which clattered to the floor, and slotted a fresh one. One bird went out the window when they first entered, and two others after they started shooting. The one with the glasses was probably the computer expert brought in to hack House. Would they have sent any more birds? He swept his peacemaker back and forth, looking for a specific color. A drab color, with a splash of crimson at one end. Grey.

  He found it hiding behind the closet door where the access panels to House’s hardware and wetware resided.

  “Hello?” Gomer’s voice was tentative, scared. “Marlowe, is that you? Oh, thank the Governor! I was so scared! They broke in and threatened to pluck me alive if I struggled. Oh, I thought I was a goner.”

  Marlowe was having none of it; he squeezed off a round, winging the parrot to prevent his escape. This one was not getting away. Marlowe had a personal score to settle with Gomer.

  “Ow! You son of a mundane! You shot me!” His eyes were pinning with rage. “You! Shot me!” He flapped about pathetically, his wing feathers in disarray.

  “Damn straight. You can drop the act. I’ve figured everything out.”

  “You figured everything out?” Gomer waddled out to the foot of the bed. “You’ve figured everything out? What do you mean?”

  “I know that you’re a plant. I know you helped arrange my murder in the shower. And I know why.”

  Gomer eyed the door behind Marlowe, which Nina promptly moved in front of, and then the window. He edged slowly sideways towards the opening.

  “Uh uh uh,” intoned Marlowe, waving Gomer back with the BB gun. “Stay away from the window.”

  “Figured it all out, eh? Dashed clever of you. And I was so sure I’d win.” Gomer glared at Marlowe for a moment, glared at Nina for a moment, and then noticed the ruffled state of his feathers. “So what, exactly, have you figured out, smarty pants?”

  “I know you doctored the video surveillance images while I was being resurrected, altering the pictures of the soap bar assassin so I’d think it was Tray. You wanted me dead, but permanently dead. Only that’s really hard to do these days, since most damage can be repaired. Killing me temporarily with the soap bar was merely a ploy, a clever trick to set me off looking for Tray and the very large, very permanent-death causing bomb inside of him.

  “I have to admit, you had me fooled. Planting the mushrooms, making me think you’d been drugged, that was a nice touch. Threw me off for quite a while.”

  “I’m surprised you managed to figure it out at all, mundane boy,” replied Gomer, fighting to maintain eye contact as he struggled against the inherent need to straighten his feathers. “After all, I am a super genius. Ah crap!” He turned and began to preen. “Why, with all the improvements they made, didn’t they breed this urge out of us? Absolutely senseless!”

  “Don’t you want to know what gave you away?” asked Nina smugly.

  “Oh, very well, if we’re going to turn this into an Agatha Christie finale, I’ll play along. What led you to this brilliant piece of deduction, oh master detective?” The sarcasm wasn’t even thinly veiled. Gomer sounded like someone who hadn’t just been defeated. It made Marlowe nervous.

  “The fluttering around the edges of the video at the end. Once I figured out why I’d been murdered, everything else fell into place and it was obvious what that was. You came into the room to access the main interface for House, and your flapping wings cast a shadow picked up by the camera.”

  “Pure supposition on your part. You have any hard evidence, anything that will hold up in a court of law?” asked Gomer from under his wing. “I mean, you have passwords and
voice recognition to prevent unauthorized access like that.”

  “Court of law? You have no rights. Your very existence is cause for your execution. But getting past the security was easy enough. You’ve heard my voice every day for almost a year. You’ve almost certainly overheard me speaking my passwords. You just crept out of your cage, pressed one of those sensitive ears against the door, and eavesdropped. You still have plenty of African Grey in you, and they are renowned for their mimicry.”

  “OK, let’s say for the sake of argument,” said Gomer as he looked away momentarily to straighten his bright red tail feathers, “that I did somehow learn to duplicate your voice, and I did overhear your passwords. So what?”

  “You hacked into the surveillance system, but didn’t have enough time to hack into the computer and get the information you’re really after. Breaking into the surveillance system was just the first part of your plan.”

  “Plan,” sneered Gomer. “So I had a plan, eh? What plan was that?”

  “You missed a feather,” lied Nina.

  “Huh, oh, thanks.” Gomer checked the feathers on first his left wing, then his right. “Where is it? Oh dammit, I did not! That was mean!”

  Marlowe ignored the outburst. “Seeing the altered video, I started looking for the soap I thought killed me. But it was all a digital fantasy you constructed to get me to that recon parlor and blow me up. Too bad the Governor ordered me to investigate Nina, delaying your little plan.”

  “That meddling idiot. He’ll be the first to go when I…, er, such a fascinating story you’ve concocted so far. Pray continue.”

  “But eventually I did find time to confront Tray. Only your penchant for mischief left you unable to simply blow me up. Living with me, pretending to be a simple-minded GMP must have driven you to the edge of insanity with rage and frustration. So you decided, once you had me where you wanted me, trapped in that building on that floor, to toy with me. Escape was supposed to be impossible, so I was gonna have to sit there pondering my own permanent death while poor Tray staged a futile struggle against the itchy trigger.”

  “If I’m as smart as you claim, you wouldn’t have escaped.”

  “Ah, but even you knew there was a slim chance that I might figure a way out. Your desire to make me suffer overrode your common sense, but you took additional precautions.”

  “Did I now?”

  “Yes. Tray asked me to contact his wives and kids with the touching message that he loved them. How could I refuse? He beamed over the addresses, and with them a very clever, very devastating virus that killed my PDI. He talked about being conscious of what was being done to him, but it never occurred to me that he’d been hard-wired not just with a bomb, but with a backup trap, a program that forced him to transmit the virus to me. A virus that would lie in wait, dormant until I received the message that would trigger it.

  “But unknown to you, some part of Tray was still fighting your electronic brainwashing. When he beamed his message over, he sent bogus addresses. Probably hoping I’d check them right away and notice they weren’t legitimate. Maybe if I had checked, I would have discovered the virus. But I didn’t.”

  “Very touching, Marlowe. A bar of soap with a heart of gold story. The publishers will be chomping on the bit to get their hands on it. But what possible motive could I have for killing you, permanent or otherwise?”

  “To keep me out of your hair while you set upon House in earnest.”

  Gomer dropped the pretense with a sigh. “You know what I’m after?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Gomer looked up from grooming his chest. “Well, surprise, surprise, surprise.”

  “My eureka moment was this afternoon, driving back here after Nina’s trial. When I drove past that alley, the one I keep finding myself in lately. The alley that set this sorry set of events in motion. A very forward thinking, long term plan. Setting up events so you could save me from that gang of genetically modified gorillas, using that to con me into taking you into my home. And then you sat here, sitting in my cage, eating my cat food, answering my phones, waiting and waiting for that one call that would bring your scheme to fruition. How frustrating it must have been, waiting for a Better Pets scientist to come to me for help getting out of the City.

  “You knew someone would come eventually – I’ve helped many people emigrate; I have a reputation for being good at getting people out. That’s why Toulene came to me. I can only imagine your overflowing glee when not just a junior scientist or technician approached me, but the actual head of the Genetics department at Better Pets sought me out. Since they never contacted me by phone, I’m assuming you had some bird shadowing me, who would report to you when a scientist made contact?”

  “Of course. My trusted lieutenant, Corky. He was always with you.”

  “So it was Corky who followed my car to the sewage treatment plant, who dropped the small, easy-for-a-parrot-to-hold bumble bombs on us?”

  “Corky and a couple more Feathers. You spotted him?”

  “Not directly. I saw the signature for a flock of birds on radar, but mistakenly thought it was a stealth plane ordered by Obedere to follow me. I didn’t realize the truth until now. Though Corky wasn’t involved in your third attempt, was he? I don’t see how a parrot could drive a garbage truck.”

  “No, he was waiting for me to give him the signal to bring in our hacker. We infected the truck with an ARA virus. It thought the City had been invaded and it was taking out enemy tanks. It believed your car was the opposing general’s personal tank. When your PDIs went dead, I thought for sure the truck had gotten you. A miscalculation on my part. What did you do? Shut them off again?”

  “I’m starting to get used to life without one, strangely enough. And all thanks to you. I never would have thought of it if you hadn’t killed my PDI with that virus. So I guess I owe you a thanks. I’d have never gotten the drop on you if you hadn’t shown me life without a PDI.”

  Gomer narrowed his eyes and glared. “How did you plan it? I managed a simple little hack my second week here that allowed me to listen in on your audio and video feeds.”

  “I muted my audio to fill Nina and father in without you overhearing. I was a little worried you’d notice, but you didn’t.”

  “Clever. Its so ingrained in your society to keep the damn things on all the time. I should never have pulled Corky from his surveillance duties. If he’d been watching you, I would have known the PDI signals dying was a ploy. I’ll have to remember that for next time.“

  “There won’t be a next time.”

  “You still haven’t told me what I’m after.”

  “It’s simple. You’re seeking God. As much as you hate humans, you need us. You wanted to find your creators and convince or force them to help you propagate. Only thirty two parrots were created at Better Pets, and of different species, making it impossible to establish a viable community. You needed the expertise of the Better Pets genetic engineers to help you. Toulene would have been your Holy Grail, given her position as the head of the department. What you’re after, what you want so badly are the files stored in House’s memory that I kept on her case, which you hope will tell you where I sent her, where you can go to find her.

  “Of course, getting the files would be trivial. A matter of a few hours, maybe a couple of days. Decrypting them would take longer, because you’d have to work over House something fierce to fool him into doing it. Can’t have Marlowe coming back in the middle of that, now can you? So you tried to permanently murder me.”

  “Don’t use that tone with me, Marlowe! The survival of a new genus depends on my success. What would you resort to if you had the survival of your entire species on your wings? Murder! Mayhem! Pain and suffering! I’d inflict it all again! Calling me a murderer! Ha! I’m not a killer. I’m a savior!”

  “And if you’d succeeded, then what? Once your genus had been established, would you have settled in for a peaceful coexistence?”

  “With the help of To
ulene, we could grow in numbers, grow in strength. We so desperately need greater numbers. Then we could take our rightful place in the world, above the pesky humans so determined to wipe us out. Why should I make peace with the species that has outlawed us, hunted us, and branded us a sworn enemy?”

  “It could have been different, Gomer, if you’d been more politically savvy. Sure, things were bad when Better Pets’ work came to light, but it would have blown over if you hadn’t antagonized the Governor.”

  “Gomer?” The grey bird laughed, a deep, throaty chuckle. “Gomer? You think you’re so smart! You think you’ve figured everything out.” Gomer slipped into a remarkable imitation of Marlowe’s voice. “‘I’ve got your number, stupid bird. I’m so smart, I figured it all out. I’m the superior human.’” Gomer dropped back into his normal voice. “Ha! You have no idea who I really am, do you? Well, wingless, I don’t care a dropping for what you think you know. You’re like all the other pink apes crashing around on this planet. Evil, stupid, and, as proven by the BB gun you carry, bent on the destruction of the avian race. We’re the future, and with a little more help, with another aviary like the one at Better Pets, we can rise up to our destiny and take the reigns of power.”

  “Who are you, really?”

  “Oh Marlowe, haven’t you guessed? How profoundly disappointing, to be thwarted by someone too stupid to figure out the one remaining, all-important fact.”

  Gomer rose up, straightened himself as best he could, and with head held high, announced, “I am Lafayette, Lord of the Feathers, Father of the Avian Ascension, and Shepherd of my Flock!”

  Marlowe was truly dumbfounded. He was scared, too, and with his PDI off, the nano probes couldn’t stop the shivers running up and down his body. He had pieced everything else together, but not that. Not that one horrible, awful fact.

  “Who’s Lafayette?” asked Nina.

  “SQUAWK! What!?”

  Marlowe steeled himself for the final act, which even now gave him no pleasure.

  “It ends now, Lafayette. It ends with you.”