The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “Forty-six bucks,” repeated the skycab.

  “Pay him,” suggested Maggie evenly.

  Spreading his hands wide, Ben said, “I left my wallet on my other body.”

  She inhaled sharply, marched back to the cab and jabbed her Banx card into the meter slot. “Exactly forty-six bucks, asshole, and no tip,” she said, tight-lipped.

  “Much obliged, ma’am.”

  The card came popping out of the slot, Maggie caught it and the cab rose up into the midnight sky.

  “And, because of you,” Maggie resumed as she followed the overcoated robot along a row of moored house-boats, “I also had to devote two full hours of my life to answering halfwit questions from the SoCal State Police, the Native Californian Insurance Syndicate and at least a full dozen of my pea-brained, overly inquisitive damn neighbors.” She stopped still, hands on hips. “Is this the same houseboat where you dallied with that blonde floozie?”

  “Red-haired floozie.” Balancing carefully, arms held out at his sides, Ben walked across the narrow gangplank from the dock to the deck of the fourteenth houseboat. “And this rundown pesthole was about all I could afford after your shyster persuaded me to bestow most of my income on you as a separation settlement and –”

  “I’m hoping we’ll find you – your real self, that is – inside here.” Maggie made her way, gingerly, over the shimmying gangplank. “Probably in a drunken or drugged stupor. Soon as we do, I’ll take my leave.”

  “My lifeless corpse is what we’ll likely find.” He stepped up to the door of the deck cabin, spoke into the voice ID box. “Avast, you lubbers, pipe me aboard.”

  “What an extremely dippy password.”

  “It came with the boat.”

  “Aye, aye, captain,” said the door as it swung open inward.

  Maggie nudged the big robot across the darkened threshold. “OK, let’s make a quick search.”

  “Hold it,” warned Ben. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Not another bomb?”

  “No, nope. I’m sensing something else.” He, very carefully, entered the parlor.

  “It must be very difficult for a robot to tiptoe.”

  “Hush.” He made a rattling, throat-clearing sound. “Lights, please.”

  Light blossomed.

  “I thought so,” said Ben forlornly.

  “Is she dead?”

  The body of a pretty, sunbrown blonde of about thirty was sprawled on her back on an oval carpet near a plazrocker.

  “This is an android.” Ben was kneeling beside the body.

  The mechanism’s midsection had two small sooty holes burned through its tunic, sinflesh and metal undercoating. A few small gears, twists of wire and glittering little springs had spilled out, along with splashes of long-dry machine oil.

  “That’s Portia Talwin,” recognized Maggie. “What’s a defunct simulacrum of the Advertising Manager of the Serv-U, Inc. outfit doing in your place, Ben?”

  When the robot stood, he creaked slightly. “Well, Portia and I – the real Portia – had become sort of friendly the past few weeks,” he admitted.

  “Another dame? Won’t your philandering ever cease?”

  “Hey, you and I are officially separated,” he reminded his wife.

  Maggie was moving toward the doorway to the bedroom. “Let’s see if you’re around here someplace, too, Ben.”

  He sprinted as best he could, catching hold of her arm. “Whoa, it’ll be easier if I just use some of my built-in gear,” he suggested. “If I’m in any of the other rooms, I’ll sense it.”

  “I don’t know why anybody would want to show off about being a gadget.”

  The robot began making small whirring noises inside his broad metallic chest. His eyes flickered momentarily green. After a moment, he shook his head. “Nope, no, I’m not here. Drugged, drunk, dead or in any other condition.”

  “Darn, I was hoping we’d find you within a reasonable time and I could get back to the important stuff in my life again.”

  “Your concern is appreciated.” Ben strode to a linoleum covered sofa and sat, nodding at the defunct android. “I have no recollection of this, no memory of finding this andy here. So it either happened after I did the brain content download with Ira or it’s one more thing I’ve forgotten.”

  Maggie slowly circled the android dupe of Portia Talwin. “Whoever used a kilgun on her probably thought, at first anyway, that they were knocking off the actual Portia,” she suggested. “Had she hinted to you that anybody was out to kill her, too?”

  The robot frowned, struggling to remember. “Wait now, I’m getting a flash of something, Mag,” he told his wife. “Yeah, this whole mess has to do with Portia. She’s involved with it.”

  Maggie lowered herself into the plazrocker and eyed her husband. “Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? The poor woman – or a reasonable facsimile – is lying dead in your darn parlor, Ben.”

  He drummed on one metallic knee with his metallic fingers, producing little ponging sounds. “Seeing Portia, it’s triggered some memories. But shit, they’re vague,” he said. “It occurs to me that maybe she confided in me about some trouble at Serv-U – something crooked they were up to with those robot servants and housekeepers they manufacture.”

  “Such as?”

  “I can’t dredge that up yet.” His fingers tapped again on his knee. “Could be, though, that it was something to do with Trevor Rawls.”

  “The CEO of Serv-U?” She stood suddenly up, causing the rocker to tick back and forth. “Don’t go making trouble for him or we’ll lose the account. That bills twenty-one million dollars a year for us, remember? Rawls is such a nasty guy, he’d dump our ad agency for a lot less than accusing him of attempted murder.”

  “Just thought of something.” Ben rose, went lumbering across his parlor.

  He crossed into the small bedroom and opened a closet.

  “Now what?” Following, Maggie watched him poke around inside the closet, using the lightbeam built into his right thumb for illumination.

  “My two neohyde suitcases aren’t here.”

  “You figure you deliberately took off then? Packed and went someplace to hide?”

  “Seems possible,” he acknowledged. “Thing is, where the hell did I go?”

  “I was hoping you two folks could tell me that.” A large blond man was smiling in at them, framed in the bedroom doorway. He was a cyborg and his coppery right hand had a kilgun built into it.

  The forefinger that formed the barrel was pointing at Maggie.

  * * *

  “Some Guardbot you turned out to be,” accused Maggie, glaring across at Ben.

  “Hey, I’ve only been a damn robot for . . . what? . . . a few hours.”

  “So typical of you.” She took two steps back away from him. “You seem to have an excuse for every darn –”

  “C’mon, folks,” cut in the cyborg intruder, gesturing with his gunhand. “We had this dump bugged, so we’d know if anybody came nosing –”

  “Oh, go ahead and shoot him,” invited Maggie, increasing the distance between her and the robot version of her husband. “He’s supposed to have all sorts of built-in warning devices, yet he lets a flatfooted oaf sneak up on us and doesn’t even –”

  “I’m not exactly flatfooted, lady,” contradicted the cyborg. “Fact is, ma’am, that before I became a thug I was rising in the SoCal Community Modern Dance Troupe and was noted for –”

  “If you hadn’t been blathering,” Ben told Maggie as he backed further from her and nearer the thug, “I’d have been better able to monitor my sensors.”

  “Oh, sure, blame me for your darn failings.” Turning her back on him, she started striding toward the door to the bathroom.

  “Hold it, lady. I’ll have to shoot you if –”

  “Now!” Maggie dived for the thermocarpeted floor.

  Ben, while the gunman was momentarily distracted, lunged for him.

  Before the husky blond man could swing his gunh
and around to fire at the charging bot, Ben was right there.

  The robot hit him twice, hard, on the jaw with his big metallic right fist.

  “Oof,” remarked the gunman as he went slamming back against the bedroom wall.

  He folded up in the middle, blond head rocking forward. Then he went slumping into a lopsided sprawl and passed into temporary oblivion.

  Maggie laughed. “Well, you’re not as dense as I thought,” she said.

  Ben eyed her, then knelt next to the fallen intruder. “Nope, I recognize a diversion when I see one, darling.”

  She joined him, frowning down at the blond cyborg. “We make a pretty good team actually,” she admitted. “Do you know this goon?”

  “No, nope. And he hasn’t got any ID material on him.” The robot shook his chrome-plated head. “I’m going to have to use some of my interrogation gear.”

  She glanced toward the doorway to the parlor. “Better do it swiftly, Ben,” she advised. “They’re sure to send more louts to replace this one.”

  Nodding, he yanked the unconscious thug up off the floor and tossed him into the nearest chair.

  Leaning back in the passenger seat of the climbing black skycar, Maggie conceded, “OK, you didn’t do badly.”

  “Keep in mind that I’ve never given anybody an injection of Trutok before.” He was occupying the driveseat. “And I did manage to swipe the guy’s skycar without a hitch.”

  “Well, yes, true,” his wife admitted. “But I couldn’t help feeling a mite uneasy when you had to stop midway through the hijacking to double-check the details on how to do it in the Guardbot instruction book.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Maggie asked, “And you’re sure we’re heading for the right destination?”

  “Yep. When that thug mentioned that they’d tracked the real Portia as far as the Ensenada Sector and then lost the trail, it jogged my chip.”

  The borrowed skycar was heading south through the night, the lights of Greater Los Angeles ten thousand feet below.

  Maggie, arms folded under her breasts, said, “That was impressive when you exclaimed, ‘Eureka!’ and whapped your forehead.”

  “It was an important moment, when I remembered that Ira has a hideaway down in Ensenada.”

  “But that’s Ira, not Portia.”

  “No, they’ve got to be in cahoots in some way,” said the robot. “That explains the gaps in my memory.”

  “Um,” she said, not exactly agreeing.

  The skycar continued quietly southward.

  She finally said, “Curt can help us.”

  “In what possible manner, for God’s sake?”

  “Well, we’re up to here in a mess, Ben, in case it hasn’t occurred to you.”

  “It has,” the robot said. “The guy who runs one of our biggest agency accounts is also behind the efforts to kill me. So we have to figure out how to expose him without annoying too many other people up at Serv-U.”

  “Of course, that thug might’ve been wrong about Trevor Rawls working secretly for a group of very conservative vigilantes who –”

  “Not just Rawls, but other execs up there,” put in Ben. “Right now we don’t even know how many are involved. All we’ve got is the fact that some of their top tech people have worked out a special type of servo – one that can be instructed to do a little assassination work on the side. You plant one in the home of one of the people on this group’s shit list and it goes to work. It looks like a regular, ordinary cleaning bot, cooking bot, something like that. Slips in by security and takes care of the enemy.”

  “If only Portia hadn’t confided in you.”

  “Well, she did confide in me and they found out about it. That explains the attempts on my life – and maybe the fact that I seem to have vanished from the face of the Earth,” he said. “And, according to our thug, there are a dozen of these special servos all ready to be shipped out. We’ve got to stop that.”

  “Certainly, ninny,” said his wife. “But we don’t have to do it directly. I’m betting that everybody at the top of Serv-U isn’t involved in this. Once Rawls and his cronies are ousted, we want the survivors to think our agency is still a swell outfit.”

  “Agreed, but how does sensitive Curt fit in?”

  “His ex-wife’s an Investigative Anchor with Newz,” explained Maggie. “We’ll get her the information, let her break the story worldwide. That’ll stop the assassinations but not draw undue attention to Quincade & Quincade.”

  “I thought his former wife was an electronic accordion player with a pacifist marching band.”

  “That’s a different ex-wife. This one, trust me, works for Newz.”

  “How come such a sensitive guy has so many former wives?”

  “Two isn’t a large quantity.”

  He nodded at the control dash. “We’ll be there in about five minutes, Mag.”

  “OK, so let’s,” she suggested, “work out a foolproof plan.”

  The robot shivered. “I’d have preferred a plan that,” he said as he and Maggie made their way along the brightly lit Ensenada Sector street, “didn’t call for me to wander around jaybird naked.”

  “We’ve already gone over what’s proper attire for a robot and what isn’t,” she reminded. “You’re still having a big problem – and let’s face it, this is one of the main reasons we parted – admitting that I’m smarter than you. Especially when it comes to strategy.”

  “And you’re still harboring the cockeyed notion that your intelligence equals mine.”

  A Border Patrol skycar, shaped like a huge piñata and brightly colored, flew swiftly overhead in the direction of the Borderland Strip.

  “Look, since you suspect that Ira and Portia may be holed up in an underground villa beneath this secondhand robot sales lot that Ira’s cousin Lupita runs down here – well, the best way to approach the place is by pretending to be somebody who wants to unload a robot. And normal everyday robots don’t wear overcoats and berets.”

  “OK, but the whole plan strikes me as lacking in subtlety.”

  “We don’t have time for subtlety, dear.” Maggie was wearing his overcoat and beret, plus a low-cost blonde wig.

  “Your disguise isn’t all that convincing either.”

  “What do you expect from a wig purchased at a shop that calls itself the 24-Hour Tourist Trap? Besides, Lupita’s never seen me.”

  “With all my built-in accessories, I could’ve worked out a better way of approaching the problem.”

  Maggie took hold of his arm. “There’s Loco Lupita’s Used Bot Lot up ahead. Try to look used.”

  The lot was covered by a huge see-through plazglass dome and stretched across almost an acre of close-cropped neograss. There were a hundred or more robots in lopsided rows lined up on the grounds, plus a few dented android butlers, a grey-haired nanny sim and a wheeled wetbar servo. Floating above the dome was a large litesign announcing We Got Your Bot! There were no customers to be seen.

  “Buenas noches,” said the smiling young woman who came hurrying out of the neowood office to greet them as they stepped through the entryway. “You didn’t buy that rattletrap bot off me, did you? No, no es posible.”

  Maggie whispered to Ben, “Is this her?”

  He nodded. “I happen to be,” he told the approaching Lupita, “a topflight example of the robotic arts.”

  Ignoring him, Lupita eased closer to Maggie, frowning. “You’re not intending to try to sell this pile of junk to me, are you?”

  “Well, yes, I’d like to see how much I can get for it.”

  Lupita came striding over, kicked the robot in the left knee.

  His leg bonged and he said, “Ow.”

  “Shoddy construction.” Lupita made a disdainful face, shook her head. “But then most Guardbot products are shoddy.”

  “Shoddy, my ass,” said Ben, angry. “And how can you criticize a product made by a company your own cousin works for? I’m a near-mint example of –”

&nbs
p; “How come you know about my cousin, amigo?”

  Maggie suggested, “Let’s go into your office and talk this over. I’m sure we can make a deal.”

  “No, I think I better alert . . . awk!”

  Ben had used the stungun built into his left forefinger on the suspicious lot owner. Then he trotted forward, catching the unconscious woman just as she began to totter. Slipping a metal arm around her, he carried Lupita into her office.

  “Your vanity’s going to be the ruin of you,” warned Maggie, following him inside. “And me, too, more than likely.”

  “You never could tell the difference between healthy self-esteem and narcissism, Mag.” After placing Lupita face down across her neowood desk, he glanced around the small office.

  “They must have security cams hereabouts,” reminded Maggie. “So your up and stunning her out in the open is going to bring down –”

  “I disabled all those before I shot her,” he said.

  “How’d you do that?”

  “It’s another built-in knack. Involves sonics.”

  “And what are you sensing about this alleged concealed villa?”

  The robot genuflected and tapped several of the plaztile squares. “There’s an entry ramp right below this movable section of the floor,” he answered.

  “Who’s down there?”

  “No guards,” he said after a few seconds. “Only Portia and Ira and . . .”

  “And who?”

  “Well, I seem to be down there in the villa with them,” he said quietly.

  “Is that a standard Guardbot function?” Maggie inquired as they descended the ramp leading to the main corridor of the underground hideaway.

  “Dismantling the security system electronically, you mean?”

  “That, yes. Is it?”

  The robot answered, “I think I’ve been able to modify myself somewhat since becoming a bot.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re adjusting so well,” observed his wife. “In your human days you complained about all sorts of minor –”

  “Silence from here on,” he cautioned in a tinny whisper. “They’re in the room up ahead on the left – the one with the simulated oaken door.”

  “That includes you?”

  He nodded. He motioned Maggie to stay back, then, slowing his pace, he approached the door.