"The lovemaking, though, Shad. Do you miss it?” I almost regretted asking. Each question is, in its own way, a confession.
Shad stared at me for a second. “Sure, I miss it. About a year ago there was this hooded merganser I met on a landfill in Skowhegan, Maine. Cutest little tail you ever saw."
"How is a mallard attracted to a hooded merganser? Doesn't that violate some sort of law of nature?"
Shad waved a wing, dismissing the question. “Every year in New England some moose comes out of the bogs and falls in love with a dairy cow, and I'm talking real moose and real cows. You do realize I'm not a real duck, don't you?"
"Pardon me if I seem a bit dense, Shad, but it seems even more perverse for a human to be sexually attracted to a hooded merganser."
"You need to walk a mile in my webbed feet. Besides, you never saw her fluffy pink and white pinfeathers. Your theory works the other way, though. She wouldn't give a mallard a second look.” He faced me. “I still haven't forgotten my question."
I stared at the rivulets of rainwater streaming down the canopy. “About three years ago my wife died. It was in some sort of building explosion. Killed seven others as well, including the bomber."
"Religious nut?"
"Insurance scam gone awry, as it turned out. The fire brigade's paramedics managed to harvest my wife's engrams before she went neutral.” I smiled sadly, recalling her reaction when she regained consciousness in the generic female bio the National Health and the IPBA had provided. I glanced at Shad. “She called her bio Averill Average."
Shad only nodded, his gaze fixed on some inward quandary of his own.
"My wife had many health problems: chronic headaches, arthritis, difficulties with her heart—"
"None of which Averill Average had,” completed Shad.
"Quite.” I let out an involuntary sigh. “She was so healthy I imagined it would be for her like being born again. To be honest with you, Shad, generic that female bio may have been, but I found her rather attractive."
"Built, huh?"
I felt myself blush. “Well ... in a word.” I glanced at him. “That notwithstanding, my wife couldn't stand her new body. She saw a therapist and all the rest, but I'm afraid she had some rather severe issues that were brought to full flower by inhabiting what she considered someone else's body, although hers was the suit's first imprint. We explored the possibility of doing a Quik-gro bio from her own DNA, but the NH and the PBA wouldn't cooperate because of her DNA's built-in health problems."
"Policy,” remarked Shad.
"Indeed. The short of it was that she wanted out."
"Suicide?” asked Shad.
"No. She wanted out of Averill Average. She wanted a new meat suit."
"How? The union wouldn't spring for a second body—particularly not a designer suit. Those can cost millions."
"As it turned out, she didn't want a human bio no matter who it looked like. Valerie traded her human meat suit on eSwap for an automatic dishwasher, ten years housekeeping service from Rent-A-Mech, and an amdroid meat suit. She had her engrams imprinted on a female cat bio."
"You're married to a cat?"
"A Tonkinese. We're still together, of course. I love her very much."
The duck let out a snort of frustration. “Great. Neither of us are getting any."
I burst out with a laugh at that. “Quite.” I looked over at him. “Regarding your question, I'm on my second bio myself. Between that and my experience with Val, I qualified for ABCD.” And now came the difficult part. “Perhaps my work at the Yard was slipping. Set in my ways. I'd been a detective for almost sixty years. Perhaps Metro just needed to clear the upper ranks in order to bring up deserving youth. Whatever. Since I refused to retire, I was forced to take a position with ABCD."
"Yeah,” said Shad as he nodded. “Now I know who you remind me of. You sort of look like Basil Rathbone."
"I noticed the same resemblance in this bio. I rather like it. How does one so young remember Rathbone?"
Shad placed the back of one wingtip against his forehead. “Surely you jest. Basil Rathbone, big star in the nineteen forties and fifties, his Sherlock Holmes films still on the B&W vids all the time."
"Ah, yes,” I said as I recalled. “'Guard this with your life, Watson.’ He was an early Sheriff of Nottingham, as well."
"The Sheriff of Nottingham was a brother officer who got a bum rap from a biased media,” Shad observed, then held out his wing. “So, what happened? Did you get killed?"
"The first time. The second time there was a genetic glitch in the bio that resulted in rather debilitating health problems. The IPBA insurance covered bio replacements both times, and Valerie insisted I take this one."
"What happened to the old you?"
"The first was ransacked for body parts with the remainder cremated and scattered in Val's garden—back when she used to garden. The second one, believe it or not, is still alive and in the nick up in North Yorkshire awaiting trial for multiple murders."
"G'wan. North Yorkshire? The old you is the Harrogate Slasher? Chucky Bulvine? The guy who used a portable engram assignment unit to steal an identity to disguise himself for his nighttime murder sprees?"
"That's the one. Some terminal pensioner from Otley took on my old body thinking he might get an additional four or five severely limited years out of it for next to nothing. Then one night Chucky Bulvine caught him, wiped him, did a swap, killed his first victim, then reassigned back to his old body. He kept that up, using my old body, then reverting to his usual self between killings. He might never have been caught except Bulvine's ex-wife found his body in stasis when he was out in mine and put a plastic bag over his head. By the time he returned, his old self was covered with flies."
"So Bulvine's stuck in the old you."
I couldn't help but smile. “The old me simply wasn't up to running from the police."
"Too much cop in your DNA."
"Mostly a weak heart and a pair of bad knees.” I grinned as I added, “Quite a dilemma for Bulvine, though."
"How so?"
"Bulvine's best legal strategy is to drag things out until the crown's aged chief witness either dies or can be frightened off. The doctors, however, don't think the old me can possibly live another six months. Quite a predicament."
"That's the future,” Shad remarked laconically. “What a fascinating modern age we live in."
I grinned as I pointed at the duck. “Lucky Jack Aubrey in the vid remake of Master and Commander. Right?"
"You know your flicks. In the Master and Commander remake, do you remember the flightless cormorant the doctor saw when the Surprise made the Galapagos Islands?"
"Of course."
The duck crossed his right wing across his breast, held out his left wing and did a courtly bow.
"No,” I said. “I don't believe it—"
A tapping sound came from Shad's side of the cruiser. He straightened from his bow and looked down through his side of the canopy. “We better copy into the mechs, boss. It's Archie Quartermain, and right now he's going into a muddy hole in the ground."
"No. Impossible. I cannot believe Ida killed Miles,” said the fox.
Archie Quartermain paced back and forth, looking about warily in what passed for his office. The site of the medieval village below ground level was a warren of tunnels and chambers, many of the chambers being old hidey-holes formed from the village's remaining root cellars, wells, and cisterns. The stone slab chamber in which our meeting took place was a little over three meters by two and contained an occupant other than Shad, Quartermain, and myself: a human skeleton.
While our meat suits reclined in the cruiser, hovering prudently out of reach of local malefactors, Shad and I were in the mechs. Mine resembled a tread-mounted aluminum grapefruit topped with miniaturized vid, lighting, audio, and analysis equipment. Shad was in the fist-sized hover mech, which resembled an art deco Saturn with a badly straightened set of rings. The only illumination in the chamber was provided by our mech lights. While Quartermain paced, I did a quick carbon on the skeleton to see if it was something I needed to ring in. It wasn't. The bones dated back to the thirteenth century. Judging from the earthenware jug next to the bones, the likely cause of death was slow suicide. From his own mech, Shad tuned into my test data and responded with a signal inaudible to the fox, "Talk about your cold cases."