Picnic on Nearside (12 page)

When she left the Atlas clinic, she felt she would pass for a barbie as long as she kept her clothes on. She hadn’t gone
that
far.

*   *   *

People tended to forget about access locks that led to the surface. Bach had used the fact more than once to show up in places where no one expected her.

She parked her rented crawler by the lock and left it there. Moving awkwardly in her pressure suit, she entered and started it cycling, then stepped through the inner door into an equipment room in Anytown. She stowed the suit, checked herself quickly in a washroom mirror, straightened the tape measure that belted her loose white jumpsuit, and entered the darkened corridors.

What she was doing was not illegal in any sense, but she was on edge. She didn’t expect the barbies to take kindly to her masquerade if they discovered it, and she knew how easy it was for a barbie to vanish forever. Three had done so before Bach ever got the case.

The place seemed deserted. It was late evening by the arbitrary day cycle of New Dresden. Time for the nightly equalization. Bach hurried down the silent hallways to the main meeting room in the temple.

It was full of barbies and a vast roar of conversation. Bach
had no trouble slipping in, and in a few minutes she knew her facial work was as good as Atlas had promised.

Equalization was the barbie’s way of standardizing experience. They had been unable to simplify their lives to the point where each member of the community experienced the same things every day; the
Book of Standards
said it was a goal to be aimed for, but probably unattainable this side of Holy Reassimilation with Goddess. They tried to keep the available jobs easy enough that each member could do them all. The commune did not seek to make a profit; but air, water, and food had to be purchased, along with replacement parts and services to keep things running. The community had to produce things to trade with the outside.

They sold luxury items: hand-carved religious statues, illuminated holy books, painted crockery, and embroidered tapestries. None of the items were Standardist. The barbies had no religious symbols except their uniformity and the tape measure, but nothing in their dogma prevented them from selling objects of reverence to people of other faiths.

Bach had seen the products for sale in the better shops. They were meticulously produced, but suffered from the fact that each item looked too much like every other. People buying hand-produced luxuries in a technological age tend to want the differences that non-machine production entails, whereas the barbies wanted everything to look exactly alike. It was an ironic situation, but the barbies willingly sacrificed value by adhering to their standards.

Each barbie did things during the day that were as close as possible to what everyone else had done. But someone had to cook meals, tend the air machines, load the freight. Each component had a different job each day. At equalization, they got together and tried to even that out.

It was boring. Everyone talked at once, to anyone that happened to be around. Each woman told what she had done that day. Bach heard the same group of stories a hundred times before the night was over, and repeated them to anyone who would listen.

Anything unusual was related over a loudspeaker so everyone could be aware of it and thus spread out the intolerable burden of anomaly. No barbie wanted to keep a unique experience to herself; it made her soiled, unclean, until it was shared by all.

Bach was getting very tired of it—she was short on sleep—when the lights went out. The buzz of conversation shut off as if a tape had broken.

“All cats are alike in the dark,” someone muttered, quite near Bach. Then a single voice was raised. It was solemn; almost a chant.

“We are the wrath. There is blood on our hands, but it is the holy blood of cleansing. We have told you of the cancer eating at the heart of the body, and yet still you cower away from what must be done.
The filth must be removed from us
!”

Bach was trying to tell which direction the words were coming from in the total darkness. Then she became aware of movement, people brushing against her, all going in the same direction. She began to buck the tide when she realized everyone was moving away from the voice.

“You think you can use our holy uniformity to hide among us, but the vengeful hand of Goddess will not be stayed. The mark is upon you, our one-time sisters. Your sins have set you apart, and retribution will strike swiftly.

“
There are five of you left
. Goddess knows who you are, and will not tolerate your perversion of her holy truth. Death will strike you when you least expect it. Goddess sees the differentness within you, the differentness you seek but hope to hide from your upright sisters.”

People were moving more swiftly now, and a scuffle had developed ahead of her. She struggled free of people who were breathing panic from every pore, until she stood in a clear space. The speaker was shouting to be heard over the sound of whimpering and the shuffling of bare feet. Bach moved foward, swinging her outstretched hands. But another hand brushed her first.

The punch was not centered on her stomach, but it drove the air from her lungs and sent her sprawling. Someone tripped over her, and she realized things would get pretty bad if she didn’t get to her feet. She was struggling up when the lights came back on.

There was a mass sigh of relief as each barbie examined her neighbor. Bach half expected another body to be found, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The killer had vanished again.

She slipped away from the equalization before it began to break up, and hurried down the deserted corridors to room 1215.

She sat in the room—little more than a cell, with a bunk, a chair, and a light on a table—for more than two hours before the door opened, as she had hoped it would. A barbie stepped inside, breathing hard, closed the door, and leaned against it.

“We wondered if you would come,” Bach said, tentatively.

The woman ran to Bach and collapsed at her knees, sobbing.

“Forgive us, please forgive us, our darling. We didn’t dare come last night. We were afraid that . . . that if . . . that it might have been you who was murdered, and that the wrath would be waiting for us here. Forgive us, forgive us.”

“It’s all right,” Bach said, for lack of anything better. Suddenly, the barbie was on top of her, kissing her with a desperate passion. Bach was startled, though she had expected something of the sort. She responded as best she could. The barbie finally began to talk again.

“We must stop this, we just have to stop. We’re so frightened of the wrath, but . . . but the
longing!
We can’t stop ourselves. We need to see you so badly that we can hardly get through the day, not knowing if you are across town or working at our elbow. It builds all day, and at night, we cannot stop ourselves from sinning yet again.” She was crying, more softly this time, not from happiness at seeing the woman she took Bach to be, but from a depth of desperation. “What’s going to become of us?” she asked, helplessly.

“Shhh,” Bach soothed. “It’s going to be all right.”

She comforted the barbie for a while, then saw her lift her head. Her eyes seemed to glow with a strange light.

“I can’t wait any longer,” she said. She stood up, and began taking off her clothes. Bach could see her hands shaking.

Beneath her clothing the barbie had concealed a few things that looked familiar. Bach could see that the merkin was already in place between her legs. There was a wooden mask much like the one that had been found in the secret panel, and a jar. The barbie unscrewed the top of it and used her middle finger to smear dabs of brown onto her breasts, making stylized nipples.

“Look what
I
got,” she said, coming down hard on the pronoun, her voice trembling. She pulled a flimsy yellow blouse from the pile of clothing on the floor, and slipped it over her shoulders. She struck a pose, then strutted up and down the tiny room.

“Come on, darling,” she said. “Tell me how beautiful I am. Tell me I’m lovely. Tell me I’m the only one for you. The only one. What’s the
matter
? Are you still frightened? I’m not. I’ll dare anything for you, my one and only love.” But now she stopped walking and looked suspiciously at Bach. “Why aren’t you getting dressed?”

“We . . . uh, I can’t,” Bach said, extemporizing. “They, uh, someone found the things. They’re all gone.” She didn’t dare remove her clothes because her nipples and pubic hair would look too real, even in the dim light.

The barbie was backing away. She picked up her mask and held it protectively to her. “What do you mean? Was she here? The wrath? Are they after us? It’s true, isn’t it? They can see us.” She was on the edge of crying again, near panic.

“No, no, I think it was the police—” But it was doing no good. The barbie was at the door now, and had it half open.

“You’re her! What have you done to . . . no, no, you stay away.” She reached into the clothing that she now held in her hand, and Bach hesitated for a moment, expecting a knife. It was enough time for the barbie to dart quickly through the door, slamming it behind her.

When Bach reached the door, the woman was gone.

*   *   *

Bach kept reminding herself that she was not here to find the other potential victims—of whom her visitor was certainly one—but to catch the killer. The fact remained that she wished she could have detained her, to question her further.

The woman was a pervert, by the only definition that made any sense among the Standardists. She, and presumably the other dead barbies, had an individuality fetish. When Bach had realized that, her first thought had been to wonder why they didn’t simply leave the colony and become whatever they wished. But then why did a Christian seek out prostitutes? For the taste of sin. In the larger world, what these barbies did would have had little meaning. Here, it was sin of the worst and tastiest kind.

And somebody didn’t like it at all.

The door opened again, and the woman stood there facing Bach, her hair disheleveled, breathing hard.

“We had to come back,” she said. “We’re so sorry that we
panicked like that. Can you forgive us?” She was coming toward Bach now, her arms out. She looked so vulnerable and contrite that Bach was astonished when the fist connected with her cheek.

Bach thudded against the wall, then found herself pinned under the woman’s knees, with something sharp and cool against her throat. She swallowed very carefully, and said nothing. Her throat itched unbearably.

“She’s dead,” the barbie said. “And you’re next.” But there was something in her face that Bach didn’t understand. The barbie brushed at her eyes a few times, and squinted down at her.

“Listen, I’m not who you think I am. If you kill me, you’ll be bringing more trouble on your sisters than you can imagine.”

The barbie hesitated, then roughly thrust her hand down into Bach’s pants. Her eyes widened when she felt the genitals, but the knife didn’t move. Bach knew she had to talk fast, and say all the right things.

“You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?” She looked for a response, but saw none. “You’re aware of the political pressures that are coming down. You know this whole colony could be wiped out if you look like a threat to the outside. You don’t want that.”

“If it must be, it will be,” the barbie said. “The purity is the important thing. If we die, we shall die pure. The blasphemers must be killed.”

“I don’t care about that anymore,” Bach said, and finally got a ripple of interest from the barbie. “I have my principles, too. Maybe I’m not as fanatical about them as you are about yours. But they’re important to me. One is that the guilty be brought to justice.”

“You have the guilty party. Try her. Execute her. She will not protest.”

“
You
are the guilty party.”

The woman smiled. “So arrest us.”

“All right, all right. I can’t, obviously. Even if you don’t kill me, you’ll walk out that door and I’ll never be able to find you. I’ve given up on that. I just don’t have the time. This was my last chance, and it looks like it didn’t work.”

“We didn’t think you could do it, even with more time. But why should we let you live?”

“Because we can help each other.” She felt the pressure ease up a little, and managed to swallow again. “You don’t want to kill me, because it could destroy your community. Myself . . . I need to be able to salvage some self-respect out of this mess. I’m willing to accept your definition of morality and let you be the law in your own community. Maybe you’re even right. Maybe you
are
one being. But I can’t let that woman be convicted, when I
know
she didn’t kill anyone.”

The knife was not touching her neck now, but it was still being held so that the barbie could plunge it into her throat at the slightest movement.

“And if we let you live? What do you get out of it? How do you free your ‘innocent’ prisoner?”

“Tell me where to find the body of the woman you just killed. I’ll take care of the rest.”

*   *   *

The pathology team had gone and Anytown was settling down once again. Bach sat on the edge of the bed with Jorge Weil. She was as tired as she ever remembered being. How long had it been since she slept?

“I’ll tell you,” Weil said, “I honestly didn’t think this thing would work. I guess I was wrong.”

Bach sighed. “I wanted to take her alive, Jorge. I thought I could. But when she came at me with the knife . . .” She let him finish the thought, not caring to lie to him. She’d already done that to the interviewer. In her story, she had taken the knife from her assailant and tried to disable her, but was forced in the end to kill her. Luckily, she had the bump on the back of her head from being thrown against the wall. It made a blackout period plausible. Otherwise, someone would have wondered why she waited so long to call for police and an ambulance. The barbie had been dead for an hour when they arrived.

“Well, I’ll hand it to you. You sure pulled this out. I’ll admit it, I was having a hard time deciding if I’d do as you were going to do and resign, or if I could have stayed on. Now I’ll never know.”