Picnic on Nearside (9 page)

Weil deposited a folder on top of the teetering pile marked “For Immediate Action,” then leaned back again. Bach eyed the stack of paper—and the circular file mounted in the wall not half a meter from it, leading to the incinerator—and thought about having an accident. Just a careless nudge with an elbow . . .

“Aren’t you even going to open it?” Weil asked, sounding disappointed. “It’s not every day I’m going to hand-deliver a case.”

“You tell me about it, since you want to so badly.”

“All right. We’ve got a body, which is cut up pretty bad. We’ve got the murder weapon, which is a knife. We’ve got thirteen eyewitnesses who can describe the killer, but we don’t really need them since the murder was committed in front of a television camera. We’ve got the tape.”

“You’re talking about a case which has to have been solved ten minutes after the first report, untouched by human hands. Give it to the computer, idiot.” But she looked up. She didn’t like the smell of it. “Why give it to me?”

“Because of the other thing we know. The scene of the crime. The murder was committed at the barbie colony.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus.”

*   *   *

The Temple of the Standardized Church in Luna was in the center of the Standardist Commune, Anytown, North Crisium. The best way to reach it, they found, was a local tube line which paralleled the Cross-Crisium Express Tube.

She and Weil checked out a blue-and-white police capsule with a priority sorting code and surrendered themselves to the New Dresden municipal transport system—the pill sorter, as the New Dresdenites called it. They were whisked through the precinct chute to the main nexus, where thousands of capsules were stacked awaiting a routing order to clear the computer. On the big conveyer which should have taken them to a holding cubby, they were snatched by a grapple—the cops called it the long arm of the law—and moved ahead to the multiple maws of the Cross-Crisium while people in other capsules glared at them. The capsule was inserted, and Bach and Weil were pressed hard into the backs of their seats.

In seconds they emerged from the tube and out onto the plain of Crisium, speeding along through the vacuum, magnetically suspended a few millimeters above the induction rail. Bach glanced up at the Earth, then stared out the window at the featureless landscape rushing by. She brooded.

It had taken a look at the map to convince her that the barbie colony was indeed in the New Dresden jurisdiction—a case of blatant gerrymandering if ever there was one. Anytown was fifty kilometers from what she thought of as the boundaries of New Dresden, but was joined to the city by a dotted line that represented a strip of land one meter wide.

A roar built up as they entered a tunnel and air was injected into the tube ahead of them. The car shook briefly as the shock wave built up, then they popped through pressure doors into the tube station of Anytown. The capsule doors hissed and they climbed out onto the platform.

The tube station at Anytown was primarily a loading dock and warehouse. It was a large space with plastic crates stacked against
all the walls, and about fifty people working to load them into freight capsules.

Bach and Weil stood on the platform for a moment, uncertain where to go. The murder had happened at a spot not twenty meters in front of them, right here in the tube station.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Weil volunteered.

“Me, too.”

Every one of the fifty people Bach could see was identical to every other. All appeared to be female, though only faces, feet, and hands were visible, everything else concealed by loose white pajamas belted at the waist. They were all blonde; all had hair cut off at the shoulder and parted in the middle, blue eyes, high foreheads, short noses, and small mouths.

The work slowly stopped as the barbies became aware of them. They eyed Bach and Weil suspiciously. Bach picked one at random and approached her.

“Who’s in charge here?” she asked.

“We are,” the barbie said. Bach took it to mean the woman herself, recalling something about barbies never using the singular pronoun.

“We’re supposed to meet someone at the temple,” she said. “How do we get there?”

“Through that doorway,” the woman said. “It leads to Main Street. Follow the street to the temple. But you really should cover yourselves.”

“Huh? What do you mean?” Bach was not aware of anything wrong with the way she and Weil were dressed. True, neither of them wore as much as the barbies did. Bach wore her usual blue nylon briefs in addition to a regulation uniform cap, arm and thigh bands, and cloth-soled slippers. Her weapon, communicator, and handcuffs were fastened to a leather equipment belt.

“Cover yourself,” the barbie said, with a pained look. “You’re flaunting your differentness. And you, with all that hair . . .” There were giggles and a few shouts from the other barbies.

“Police business,” Weil snapped.

“Uh, yes,” Bach said, feeling annoyed that the barbie had put her on the defensive. After all, this was New Dresden, it was a
public thoroughfare—even though by tradition and usage a Standardist enclave—and they were entitled to dress as they wished.

Main Street was a narrow, mean little place. Bach had expected a promenade like those in the shopping districts of New Dresden; what she found was indistinguishable from a residential corridor. They drew curious stares and quite a few frowns from the identical people they met.

There was a modest plaza at the end of the street. It had a low roof of bare metal, a few trees, and a blocky stone building in the center of a radiating network of walks.

A barbie who looked just like all the others met them at the entrance. Bach asked if she was the one Weil had spoken to on the phone, and she said she was. Bach wanted to know if they could go inside to talk. The barbie said the temple was off limits to outsiders and suggested they sit on a bench outside the building.

When they were settled, Bach started her questioning. “First, I need to know your name, and your title. I assume that you are . . . what was it?” She consulted her notes, taken hastily from a display she had called up on the computer terminal in her office. “I don’t seem to have found a title for you.”

“We have none,” the barbie said. “If you must think of a title, consider us as the keeper of records.”

“All right. And your name?”

“We have no name.”

Bach sighed. “Yes, I understand that you forsake names when you come here. But you had one before. You were given one at birth. I’m going to have to have it for my investigation.”

The woman looked pained. “No, you don’t understand. It is true that this body had a name at one time. But it has been wiped from this one’s mind. It would cause this one a great deal of pain to be reminded of it.” She stumbled verbally every time she said “this one.” Evidently even a polite circumlocution of the personal pronoun was distressing.

“I’ll try to get it from another angle, then.” This was already getting hard to deal with, Bach saw, and knew it could only get tougher. “You say you are the keeper of records.”

“We are. We keep records because the law says we must. Each citizen must be recorded, or so we have been told.”

“For a very good reason,” Bach said. “We’re going to need
access to those records. For the investigation. You understand? I assume an officer has already been through them, or the deceased couldn’t have been identified as Leah P. Ingraham.”

“That’s true. But it won’t be necessary for you to go through the records again. We are here to confess. We murdered L. P. Ingraham, serial number 11005. We are surrendering peacefully. You may take us to your prison.” She held out her hands, wrists close together, ready to be shackled.

Weil was startled, reached tentatively for his handcuffs, then looked to Bach for guidance.

“Let me get this straight. You’re saying you’re the one who did it? You, personally.”

“That’s correct. We did it. We have never defied temporal authority, and we are willing to pay the penalty.”

“Once more.” Bach reached out and grasped the barbie’s wrist, forced the hand open, palm up. “
This
is the person, this is the body that committed the murder? This hand, this one right here, held the knife and killed Ingraham? This hand, as opposed to ‘your’ thousands of other hands?”

The barbie frowned.

“Put that way, no.
This
hand did not grasp the murder weapon. But
our
hand did. What’s the difference?”

“Quite a bit, in the eyes of the law.” Bach sighed, and let go of the woman’s hand. Woman? She wondered if the term applied. She realized she needed to know more about Standardists. But it was convenient to think of them as such, since their faces were feminine.

“Let’s try again. I’ll need you—and the eyewitnesses to the crime—to study the tape of the murder.
I
can’t tell the difference between the murderer, the victim, or any of the bystanders. But surely you must be able to. I assume that . . . well, like the old saying went, ‘all Chinamen look alike.’ That was to Caucasian races, of course. Orientals had no trouble telling each other apart. So I thought that you . . . that you people would . . .” She trailed off at the look of blank incomprehension on the barbie’s face.

“We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bach’s shoulders slumped.

“You mean you can’t . . . not even if you saw her again . . .?”

The woman shrugged. “We all look the same to this one.”

*   *   *

Anna-Louise Bach sprawled out on her flotation bed later that night, surrounded by scraps of paper. Untidy as it was, her thought processes were helped by actually scribbling facts on paper rather than filing them in her datalink. And she did her best work late at night, at home, in bed, after taking a bath or making love. Tonight she had done both and found she needed every bit of the invigorating clarity it gave her.

Standardists.

They were an off-beat religious sect founded ninety years earlier by someone whose name had not survived. That was not surprising, since Standardists gave up their names when they joined the order, made every effort consistent with the laws of the land to obliterate the name and person as if he or she had never existed. The epithet “barbie” had quickly been attached to them by the press. The origin of the word was a popular children’s toy of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a plastic, sexless, mass-produced “girl” doll with an elaborate wardrobe.

The barbies had done surprisingly well for a group which did not reproduce, which relied entirely on new members from the outside world to replenish their numbers. They had grown for twenty years, then reached a population stability where deaths equalled new members—which they call “components.” They had suffered moderately from religious intolerance, moving from country to country until the majority had come to Luna sixty years ago.

They drew new components from the walking wounded of society, the people who had not done well in a world which preached conformity, passivity, and tolerance of your billions of neighbors, yet rewarded only those who were individualist and aggressive enough to stand apart from the herd. The barbies had opted out of a system where one had to be at once a face in the crowd and a proud individual with hopes and dreams and desires. They were the inheritors of a long tradition of ascetic withdrawal, surrendering their names, their bodies, and their temporal aspirations to a life that was ordered and easy to understand.

Bach realized she might be doing some of them a disservice
in that evaluation. They were not necessarily all losers. There must be those among them who were attracted simply by the religious ideas of the sect, though Bach felt there was little in the teachings that made sense.

She skimmed through the dogma, taking notes. The Standardists preached the commonality of humanity, denigrated free will, and elevated the group and the consensus to demi-god status. Nothing too unusual in the theory; it was the practice of it that made people queasy.

There was a creation theory and a godhead, who was not worshipped but contemplated. Creation happened when the Goddess—a prototypical earth-mother who had no name—gave birth to the universe. She put people in it, all alike, stamped from the same universal mold.

Sin entered the picture. One of the people began to wonder. This person had a name, given to him or her
after
the original sin as part of the punishment, but Bach could not find it written down any where. She decided that it was a dirty word which Standardists never told an outsider.

This person asked Goddess what it was all for. What had been wrong with the void, that Goddess had seen fit to fill it with people who didn’t seem to have a reason for existing?

That was too much. For reasons unexplained—and impolite to even ask about—Goddess had punished humans by introducing differentness into the world. Warts, big noses, kinky hair, white skin, tall people and fat people and deformed people, blue eyes, body hair, freckles, testicles, and labia. A billion faces and fingerprints, each soul trapped in a body distinct from all others, with the heavy burden of trying to establish an identity in a perpetual shouting match.

But the faith held that peace was achieved in striving to regain that lost Eden. When all humans were again the same person, Goddess would welcome them back. Life was a testing, a trial.

Bach certainly agreed with that. She gathered her notes and shuffled them together, then picked up the book she had brought back from Anytown. The barbie had given it to her when Bach asked for a picture of the murdered woman.

It was a blueprint for a human being.

The title was
The Book of Specifications. The Specs
, for short.
Each barbie carried one, tied to her waist with a tape measure. It gave tolerances in engineering terms, defining what a barbie could look like. It was profusely illustrated with drawings of parts of the body in minute detail, giving measurements in millimeters.

She closed the book and sat up, propping her head on a pillow. She reached for her viewpad and propped it on her knees, punched the retrieval code for the murder tape. For the twentieth time that night, she watched a figure spring forward from a crowd of identical figures in the tube station, slash at Leah Ingraham, and melt back into the crowd as her victim lay bleeding and eviscerated on the floor.