It was a dive off B Street. A dingy, dirty bar filled with sweaty, stinking men yelling and laughing and swearing, drinking copiously. Where there’s water, there’s booze.
Voltumus had plenty of water, deep beneath its sun-seared surface. Thanks to an ancient Ice Age that had long ago melted into the planet’s cracks and crevices. And now Voltumus had plenty of ‘drips’, the roughnecks shipped out from Earth to drill and pipe and tank the cool, crystal-clear water, barge it back to an increasingly parched home planet. Watertown was the center of it all, a boomtown in the middle of a vast and desolate nowhere, a rugged oasis.
My drip was crowded up against the brass-railed bar that ran the length of one side of the stifling room. He was shoulder-to-shoulder with other broad-shouldered cohorts, yet strangely all by himself. He’d take a sip from his shotglass, then fling the lethal moon mash down his throat. Like he was building up the courage to do something out of character, perhaps out of bounds.
I watched him from a tiny round table in the corner, smoke and alcohol fumes blurring my vision. My table rocked with the bodies of men stumbling or shoving against it, so I held my drink in my hand, untouched.
Kit Misker finally set his latest empty shotglass down and pushed away from the bar, mind seemingly made up. He elbowed his way through the raucous throng, to the saloon-style swing doors, out into the night. I followed, getting challenged to more than one fight as I muscled my way clear of the room. Voltumus was a hostile environment, and it showed in its inhabitants.
The street was almost as packed as the bar. It was Saturday, pay had been distributed, and the drips were sloshing their money around before they returned to the dunes and the underground, on Monday. Misker made his way along B Street to the canopied entrance of the Hotel Largo. He glanced right, left, stared straight ahead at the heavy, frosted glass doors of the joint.
The Hotel Largo was five storeys of sandstone brick and pulsing pleasure. The ground floor was lit up neon-bright and noisy, the others floors sporting shade-drawn windows that leaked just a little light, but throbbed with excitement. It was a brothel, thirty rookers or so inside to choose from.
I leaned against an undertaker’s storefront window and waited for Misker to make his move, one way or the other. The tall, curly-haired man with the hangdog expression and brown, puppy dog eyes at last gulped his protruding Adam’s apple and walked forward, pushed through the front doors of the brothel.
“Pleasure dreams,” I murmured, mouthing the Hotel Largo’s blazing red signage.
I cooled my heels while Misker heated his loins. I’d have to break the bad news to his jealous wife back on Earth. She’d hired me to find out if her drip was cheating on her way out in the galaxial wastelands. And she hadn’t differentiated between real women, of which there were few, and rookers, of which there were more. She was the possessive type, a rooker as good, or bad, as the real thing.
For most, it was a fine line: was having sex with a robot-hooker actually cheating? They weren’t humans, after all, just shrewdly crafted along those lines. I pulled a deck of cigs out of my jacket pocket, shook one out, getting all philosophical. Never a wise thing to do in Watertown.
Sure enough, a beefy hand slapped my cig away, another huge mitt jarring the deck down to the ground. My arms were clasped in twin vises. “Tenn Galon wants to see you, Diamond,” one of the thugs growled.
They were big men, even for Watertown. They walked me over to a vehicle waiting by the curb, and we all got in as a threesome.
“I’m not swilling enough moon at Tenn Galon’s joints, that it?” I cracked, when the vehicle hit zoom.
Their faces were as cool and blank as the sky. I let it and me ride.
* * * *
“I don’t give a damn what your business is! You’re working for me now!” Tenn Galon jabbed a sausage finger down at me for emphasis, blowing smoke and garlic.
The notorious business, brothel, and bargain game owner-operator towered over me in my chair. His round face was filmed with grease and sweat, like everything he touched, his corpulent body encased in a tuxedo that strained its stitching and his credibility.
His office was opulent in a blatantly obvious way, filled with expensive items like the woman standing in back of his football field-sized desk. She was blonde and sleek, decked out in a shiny silver dress and a stunning array of jewellery. She watched the proceedings with a bland expression on her aristocratic face, her green eyes burning dully.
“You don’t have any right to hijack me off the street and into your operations,” I protested, for show more than effect. “I—”
“Shut your hole! Two-bit gumshoes don’t tell me what I can’t do—not on this or any planet!” His beady blue eyes glared down at me out of his fat-laden face.
I sat back in the chair, waited. At least I was still alive. Many of those called upon for conference with the galactic gangster never surfaced again, or so I’d heard. The sands of Voltumus ran deep, I’d been told.
Tenn Galon swivelled around, his skin-tight tuxedo and black leather shoes squeaking. “Out!” he barked at the woman.
She shrugged. Then slipped through a side door in a lithe, flowing motion that captured the room’s attention.
Tenn Galon was back on top of me. “One of my rooker’s been stole!”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Ebony. Cost me a cool million! The latest and greatest model—fully functional.” He gestured obscenely with his hands. “I can’t get a replacement from Earth for another six months. I’d use the missus,” he jerked a thumb at the door where the blonde had made her exit, “but, unfortunately, she’s a real woman.” He hacked out a phlegmy laugh.
Prostitution was semi-legal on Voltumus, but only if robots were employed.
“What do you—”
“I want you to find Ebony, get her back! Then I’ll take care of the asswipes who stole her.” He turned and rumbled around his desk, sat down in his shiny brown leather chair in a whoosh of stale air. “I hear you’re pretty good at jobs like that. And since you was on Voltumus anyway…” He hefted his hamhocks and grinned.
“Who do you—”
“Bim Starrett or Sedge Mackey. They run the other joy houses in town.” He pursed his mouthflaps. “Tough part’s going to be making sure it’s her. See, with these newer models, you can even better change their eyes and hair and skin. Their tit size, too, of course. Even their body shape and length.”
He grunted, his pig’s eyes gleaming with obvious fond remembrances of Ebony. Then he pointed at me again. “But that’s your job—to figure out how to find her and get her back. Hedge’ll help you.”
He looked at the screen on his desk. Our meeting was over.
* * * *
Hedge was a house mechanic. Every brothel had one; a computer and mechanical whiz who kept the machinery of commerce functioning, maintaining and repairing rookers. Some of the customers could be a little rough on the merchandise, and there was always normal wear and tear, and bugs of a non-medical kind.
Tenn Galon’s number one mechanic was a gnarled gnome of a man with a twisted grin and sense of humor. “Maybe you should test-drive ’em all, huh?” he quipped. “There’re only about five hundred spread out in fifteen different houses.”
“Did Ebony have any ‘tells’? Pull to the right or anything like that?”
Hedge chortled. “Naw. That’s old-school, early-model. Ebony had eight distinct personalities, from shy to sultry, all designed to give pleasure. She didn’t have any flaws.”
That was the thing about rookers, the way they were built: their personalities had to be friendly, accommodating. They couldn’t pout or mope or get angry or murderous. In that respect, they weren’t like real woman at all.
I glanced around Hedge’s workshop. It was in the basement of Tenn Galon’s brothel on F Street, the Okay! Corral. The claustrophobic room was cluttered with computers and tools, pornographic holograms projected all over the place. And against one wall, six actual rookers were lined up, five females and one male, naked and turned-off. Their unseeing eyes glittered obscenely in the light, their bodies shining so.
Hedge scuttled over to an ivory-skinned, big-breasted brunette with wide violet eyes and lips as red and plush as rose petals. He grinned perversely at me, then pointed and clicked a remote control. The rooker shuddered to life, her long, dark eyelashes fluttering and sensual mouth opening, her body softening, breathing.
Hedge’s stumpy fingers danced on the remote, and the rooker’s hair went from black to blonde to red, long to short, eyes brown and then blue, skin pale to olive to black, breasts pumping up huge, body rising up taller. “You’ll never find Ebony,” the mechanic drooled. “Their BIN’s are easily removed and replaced. That’s so they can be easily stolen—so the manufacturers can sell more units. But their software—what really runs them—is proprietary, of course.” He frowned like a petulant teenager. “Even I can’t hack into it, to make ’em really unique.”
The rooker was now caressing Hedge’s face, and other working parts due south.
“We’re going to have to wait for them to steal another one, then,” I grated.
Hedge looked at me, his expression sublime. “What’ll that accomplish?”
“In the old West it was called rustling. Know how they stopped it?”
Hedge nestled into the rooker’s arms, settling his head down on her rising and falling breasts. “Hanging?”
“Branding.”
Two weeks after I’d been shanghaied by Tenn Galon, another of his rookers turned up missing: Angelica, a blue-eyed blonde with pixiesque features, for all those were worth in identification. Also going missing at the same time, perhaps coincidentally but probably not, was Tenn Galon’s wife.
I went on the prowl.
The Filly Ranch was located on the outskirts of Watertown, where the dust met the desert. It was one of Sedge Mackey’s brothels. The western motif shot straight through to the white cowgirl hats the rookers wore, the silver six-shooters slung seductively from their bare hips.
Clementine was a bubbly, fun-loving redhead with a Dixie accent and a smile as big as all Texas. I crowded her up against a wall of our loving pen on the second floor before she even had a chance to unlatch her chaps, unholster my gun. I thrust my tongue into her open mouth and swirled it around inside, scouring her gums in back of her front teeth with the curled tip of my sticker. My oral explorations yielded no small T.
That’s what Hedge and I had come up with: a small T branded just above the upper gumline in back of the rookers’ front teeth. We knew whoever was rustling Tenn Galon’s joy toys would go over the sophisticated stolen equipment with a fine-tooth scanner, or get his mechanic to do so, looking for any distinguishing exterior marks or under-skin identifiers, eliminating moles, birthmarks, and giveaway signs of stress and strain as required. And a rebuilt remote control would render the rooker sufficiently changed in other physical appearance for their camouflaging purposes. But it would have to be a really thorough, or kinky, house mechanic who searched in behind the upper front teeth for a tiny identifying brand.
I let go of Clementine and sat down on the bed, flared a cig.
“Why, honey, I hope that ain’t all you got to offer a gal!?”
Her teeth shone like a constellation of lone stars, her grey eyes beaming with western hospitality. She dropped the white leather chaps, eager to please, built for it in the truest sense of the phrase. All rookers were programmed to be willing and able, compliant with any human desire, all of the time. Only this time, her considerable charm was wasted.
When she strolled over to me in her cowgirl boots, her breasts bouncing like overstuffed saddlebags, I switched her off. The room remote wasn’t just for working the bed and screen.
* * * *
I worked my way across town, from west to east. By the time I hit the Hotsheet Motel on Pipeline Road, the plastic chit Tenn Galon had given me was running dangerously low on credit. I’d probed more females with tongue or finger in three days and nights than a gynaecologist does in a month. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it, I guess.
And I’d like to say that I carried my part off strictly professionally, testing the merchandise for markage and then moving on. But if I left a room in under the thirty minimum bought and allotted minutes, suspicions would be aroused. I had to kill time somehow. I found a way.
So, when I pushed through the roadside glass office doors of the Hotsheet Motel, I was more than a little worn out.
This place was owned by Bim Starrett. It was done up low-track sleazy, a one-storey horseshoe loop of twenty rooms connected to the front office. The flaky paint scheme was yellow and red, the rooms threadbare, the beds creaky, the sheets hot as advertised.
Taylor was tall and skinny and tanlined, dressed for cheap thrills in a purple tubetop and pair of pink shorty-shorts. Her blonde, black-rooted hair was a fluffy mess, her warpaint garish. Her mouth hung loose as her joints. She was everything you’d expect to find and pay for in a motel like that, open for business all hours.
“So, how you want it, big boy?” she slurred, Mae West-style.
I grasped her arms and pulled her close. She groaned when I kissed her, moaned when I thrust my tongue into her mouth and curled it upwards.
I groaned. Nada.
I headed for the door, getting suddenly weary of the grind.
She grabbed my arm and spun me around. “What the fuck! Is that all you got!?”
I stared at her. Taylor’s heavily made-up face had darkened with rage.
“Sorry, sweetheart, but I’ve got miles to go before I sleep with yet another rooker.”
I shook off her claw and exited, bumping into Cindy on the sidewalk outside. She was placidly bringing some dirty sheets to the front office. But when we touched skin, she went into full seduction mode.
Her shtick was little girl lost, her overripe body on shameful display in a white shirt tied up at the front and a ruffled plaid skirt that barely came down to her thighs. She toed the concrete with a patent-leather shoe tip, her brown pigtails bobbing, eyes and braces glinting softly in the harsh light as she glanced up at me.
Eschewing the preliminaries, I stuck a finger in her mouth. She eagerly sucked on it. And I touched paydirt—the small T brand! “We’re going home, sweetie,” I rasped. And I joyously meant the both of us, the blue ball of Earth blazing in my memory.
Cindy blinked her liquid-brown eyes. “Back to my room, sir?”
It just wasn’t in her programming to go anywhere else. So I manually switched her off, slung her over my shoulder. The door to Room 20 opened up and Taylor glared at me. I blew her kiss and spun around and strode forward. Right into the broad waiting chests of two male motel employees. “That’s the guy,” Taylor sneered.
“Takin’ little Cindy for a walk?” one of the men asked.
“Dine-in only, pal,” the other man growled.
They formed a solid wall of muscle, blocking my path and seriously jeopardizing my future.
I did a slow half-turn and dumped Cindy up against Taylor. “Okay, okay,” I said, nice and easy. “No harm done.” Yet.
I clenched my hands into fists and whirled around, hit the man on my right full in the face, knocking him backwards. I sunk a left hook into the other guy’s gut, doubling him over. Followed that up with a kick to the jaw, toppling him onto the pavement. His cement head cracked on the concrete.
The other man charged me with open arms. I avoided his crushing embrace with a well-timed foot to the groin, leaving him retching. Then I brought my right fist up from my knees and shattered it and his chin. Only I cried out, though, because my assailant was out cold, joining his buddy in enforced slumber on the ground.
I scooped Cindy back up onto my shoulder, preparatory to rushing her over to my vehicle and zooming back to the relative safety of Tenn Galon’s office. But a pointed boot-tip tripped me up. I staggered forward, spun around.
“Mrs. Tenn Galon, I presume?”
The scowling female in the purple tubetop and pink shorty-shorts confirmed my suspicions by spitting in my face, trying to claw my eyes out. I clicked a short left off the point of her chin and her eyes flickered like candles. I caught her up, draped her over my other shoulder, and shuffled fast and furious for my vehicle.
“You helped Bim Starrett steal the rookers?” I said more than asked, when we were all safely zooming away from the battleground and stolen property depot known as the Hotsheet Motel. Tenn Galon’s wife was in the front seat with me, Cindy in the back.
“We were going to be partners!” she retorted, rubbing her jaw. “Which is more than Tenn Galon would ever let me become.”
“Then why were you working the rooms?”
She looked at me, her eyes glittering defiantly. “For compassion, for empathy, for love! What a woman needs!”
I stared at her.
She shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand. In a world of rookers, what chance does a real woman have? All females are property, objects, as far as men like Tenn Galon are concerned—not people.” She brushed a couple of fingers under her nose. “And he’d rather get his pleasure from a rooker. They don’t give him any backtalk, or demand anything of him. And there’s more variety.”
She blinked, tears in her eyes. “So I take my feelings where I can get them. The customers give me tenderness…and longing.”
She almost had me crying.
But then her voice changed, back to the way it’d sounded when she was putting the finger on me. “And they give me money.”
I snorted.
She suddenly pressed against me. A warm, slim arm coiled around my neck, a soft, slender hand sliding up onto my chest, then lower, where the crux of the matter lay with most men. “Don’t take me back to Tenn Galon,” she breathed in my ear. “He’ll kill me.” She squeezed the growing interest in between my legs, her body hot and inviting, like her parted lips. “We can be together—knock off Bim and take over his operation!”
She was a woman, all right: scheming and manipulative, and very, very restless.
I clipped her on the chin again, the bruise I raised there branding her as off-limits.
All I wanted to do was deliver unto Tenn Galon what was his. And then get the hell off that wild desert planet where the waters ran too deep for the likes of me to fathom.