Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

The rear wall of the little reception area was bright with pix of some Mediterranean seaside town. A clump of bad pixels made the empty beach flicker. A bot stepped through the door that led to the spa and took up a position at the front desk. “Good afternoon, Madam,” he said. “It’s most gratifying to welcome you. This one is called…”

“I’m looking for Kate Vermeil.” I don’t waste time on chitchat with bots. “Is she in?”

“It’s regrettable that she no longer takes work here.”

“She worked here?” I said. “I was told she lived here.”

“You was told wrong.” A granny filled the door, and then hobbled through, leaning on a metal cane. She was wearing a yellow flowered dress that was not quite as big as a circus tent and over it a blue smock with Noreen embroidered over the left breast. Her face was wide and pale as a hardboiled egg, her hair a ferment of tight gray curls. She had the biggest hands I had ever seen. “I’ll take care of this, Barry. Go see to Helen Ritzi. She gets another needle at twelve, then turn down the heat to 101.”

The bot bowed politely and left us.

“What’s this about then?” The cane wobbled and she put a hand on the desk to steady herself.

I dug the sidekick out of my slacks, opened the PI license folder and showed it to her. She read it slowly, sniffed and handed it back. “Young fluffs working at play jobs. Do something useful, why don’t you?”

“Like what?” I said. “Giving perms? Face peels?”

She was the woman of steel; sarcasm bounced off her. “If nobody does a real job, pretty soon the damn bots will replace us all.”

“Might be an improvement.” It was something to say, but as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. My generation was doing better than the grannies ever had. Maybe someday our kids wouldn’t need bots to survive.

Our kids. I swallowed a mouthful of ashes and called the pix Seeren had given me onto the sidekick’s screen. “I’m looking for Kate Vermeil.” I aimed it at her.

She peered at the pix and then at me. “You need a manicure.”

“The hell I do.”

“I work for a living, fluff. And my hip hurts if I stand up too long.” She pointed her cane at the doorway behind the desk. “What did you say your name was?”

The battered manicure table was in an alcove decorated with fake grapevines that didn’t quite hide the water stains in the drop ceiling. Dust covered the leaves, turning the plastic fruit from purple to gray.

Noreen rubbed a thumb over the tips of my fingers. “You bite your nails, or do you just cut them with a chainsaw?”

She wanted a laugh so I gave her one.

“So, nails square, round, or oval?” Her skin was dry and mottled with liver spots.

“Haven’t a clue.” I shrugged. “This was your idea.”

Noreen perched on an adjustable stool that was cranked low so that her face was only a foot above my hands. There were a stack of stainless steel bowls, a jar of Vaseline, a round box of salt, a bowl filled with packets of sugar stolen from McDonald’s, and a liquid soap dispenser on the table beside her. She started filing each nail from the corner to the center, going from left to right and then back. At first she worked in silence. I decided not to push her.

“Kate was my masseuse up until last week,” she said finally. “Gave her notice all of a sudden and left me in the lurch. I’ve had to pick up all her appointments and me with the bum hip. Some days I can’t hardly get out of bed. Something happen to her?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“But she’s missing.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know where she is, but that doesn’t mean she’s missing.”

Noreen poured hot water from an electric kettle into one of the stainless steel bowls, added cool water from a pitcher, squirted soap and swirled the mixture around. “You soak for five minutes.” She gestured for me to dip my hands into the bowl. “I’ll be back. I got to make sure that Barry doesn’t burn Helen Ritzi’s face off.” She stood with a grunt.

“Wait,” I said. “Did she say why she was quitting?”

Noreen reached for her cane. “Couldn’t stop talking about it. You’d think she was the first ever.”

“The first to what?”

The granny laughed. “You’re one hell of a detective, fluff. She was supposed to get married yesterday. Tell me that pix you’re flashing ain’t her doing the deed.”

She shuffled off, her white nursemate shoes scuffing against dirty linoleum. From deeper in the spa, I heard her kettle drum voice and then the bot’s snare. I was itching to take my sidekick out of my pocket, but I kept my hands in the soak. Besides, I’d looked at the pix enough times to know that she was right. A wedding. The hand with the ring would probably belong to a Christer priest. There would have been a witness and then the photographer, although maybe the photographer was the witness. Of course, I had tumbled to none of this in the two days I’d worked Rashmi Jones’s disappearance. I was one hell of a detective, all right. And Rashmi’s mom must not have known either. It didn’t make sense that she would hire me to find her daughter and hold something like that back.

“I swear,” said Noreen, leaning heavily on the cane as she creaked back to me, “that bot is scary. I sent down to City Hall for it just last week and already it knows my business left, right, up, and down. The thing is, if they’re so smart, how come they talk funny?”

“The devils designed them to drive us crazy.”

“They didn’t need no bots to do that, fluff.”

She settled back onto her stool, tore open five sugar packets and emptied their contents onto her palm. Then she reached for the salt box and poured salt onto the sugar. She squirted soap onto the pile and then rubbed her hands together. “I could buy some fancy exfoliating cream but this works just as good.” She pointed with her chin at my hands. “Give them a shake and bring them here.”

I wanted to ask her about Kate’s marriage plans, but when she took my hands in hers, I forgot the question. I’d never felt anything quite like it; the irritating scratch of the grit was offset by the sensual slide of our soapy fingers. Pleasure with just the right touch of pain—something I’d certainly be telling Sharifa about, if Sharifa and I were talking. My hands tingled for almost an hour afterward.

Noreen poured another bowl of water and I rinsed. “Why would getting married make Kate want to quit?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Something to do with her church?” Noreen patted me dry with a threadbare towel. “She went over to the Christers last year. Maybe Jesus don’t like married women giving backrubs. Or maybe she got seeded.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Everybody does eventually.”

I let that pass. “Tell me about Kate. What was she like to work with?”

“Average for the kind of help you get these sorry days.” Noreen pushed at my cuticles with an orangewood stick. “Showed up on time mostly; I could only afford to bring her in two days a week. No go-getter, but she could follow directions. Problem was she never really got close to the customers, always acting like this was just a pitstop. Kept to herself mostly, which was how I could tell she was excited about getting married. It wasn’t like her to babble.”

“And the bride?”

“Some Indian fluff—Rashy or something.”

“Rashmi Jones.”

She nodded. “Her I never met.”

“Did she go to school?”

“Must have done high school, but damned if I know where. Didn’t make much of an impression, I’d say. College, no way.” She opened a drawer where a flock of colored vials was nesting. “You want polish or clear coat on the nails?”