The ascent at the Jardin de Luxembourg is still the best science fiction of the Year Three.
Dolly
ELIZABETH BEAR
Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com) lives in Hartford, Connecticut. Prolific as well as talented, she has published fourteen SF and fantasy novels since 2005, more than forty stories since 2003, and a collection, The Chains That You Refuse. She has won in that short time two Hugo Awards, the John W. Cambell Award for Best New Writer (2005), a Theodore Sturgeon Award, and several others, including an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award.
“Dolly” appeared in Asimov’s, and is situated in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s robot and detective stories. This tale is emblematic of one of this year’s dominant themes: humaniod technology that is not given fully human social status; how people feel entitled to behave toward humaniod technology; and how that technology returns the favor. In this story, a human detective who at least partly comprehends this dynamic attempts a partial solution.
On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thursday—on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her hands were red with blood.
In her black French maid’s outfit, she was the only thing in the expensively appointed drawing room that was not winter-white or antiqued gold. It was the sort of room you hired somebody else to clean. It was as immaculate as it was white.
Immaculate and white, that is, except for the dead body of billionaire industrialist Clive Steele—and try to say that without sounding like a comic book—which lay at Dolly’s feet, his viscera blossoming from him like macabre petals.
That was how she looked when Rosamund Kirkbride found her, standing in a red stain in a white room like a thorn in a rose.
Dolly had locked in position where her program ran out. As Roz dropped to one knee outside the border of the blood-saturated carpet, Dolly did not move.
The room smelled like meat and bowels. Flies clustered thickly on the windows, but none had yet managed to get inside. No matter how hermetically sealed the house, it was only a matter of time. Like love, the flies found a way.
Grunting with effort, Roz planted both green-gloved hands on winter-white wool-and-silk fibers and leaned over, getting her head between the dead guy and the doll. Blood spattered Dolly’s silk stockings and her kitten-heeled boots: both the spray-can dots of impact projection and the soaking arcs of a breached artery.
More than one, given that Steele’s heart lay, trailing connective tissue, beside his left hip. The crusted blood on Dolly’s hands had twisted in ribbons down the underside of her forearms to her elbows and from there dripped into the puddle on the floor.
The android was not wearing undergarments.
“You staring up that girl’s skirt, Detective?”
Roz was a big, plain woman, and out of shape in her forties. It took her a minute to heave herself back to her feet, careful not to touch the victim or the murder weapon yet. She’d tied her straight light brown hair back before entering the scene, the ends tucked up in a net. The severity of the style made her square jaw into a lantern. Her eyes were almost as blue as the doll’s.
“Is it a girl, Peter?” Putting her hands on her knees, she pushed fully upright. She shoved a fist into her back and turned to the door.
Peter King paused just inside, taking in the scene with a few critical sweeps of eyes so dark they didn’t catch any light from the sunlight or the chandelier. His irises seemed to bleed pigment into the whites, warming them with swirls of ivory. In his black suit, his skin tanned almost to match, he might have been a heroically-sized construction-paper cutout against the white walls, white carpet, the white and gold marble-topped table that looked both antique and French.
His blue paper booties rustled as he crossed the floor. “Suicide, you think?”
“Maybe if it was strangulation,” Roz stepped aside so Peter could get a look at the body.
He whistled, which was pretty much what she had done.
“Somebody hated him a lot. Hey, that’s one of the new Dollies, isn’t it? Man, nice.” He shook his head. “Bet it cost more than my house.”
“Imagine spending half a mil on a sex toy,” Roz said, “only to have it rip your liver out.” She stepped back, arms folded.
“He probably didn’t spend that much on her. His company makes accessory programs for them.”
“Industry courtesy?” Roz asked.
“Tax write-off. Test model.” Peter was the department expert on Home companions. He circled the room, taking it in from all angles. Soon the scene techs would be here with their cameras and their tweezers and their 3D scanner, turning the crime scene into a permanent virtual reality. In his capacity of soft forensics, Peter would go over Dolly’s program, and the medical examiner would most likely confirm that Steele’s cause of death was exactly what it looked like: something had punched through his abdominal wall and clawed his innards out.
“Doors were locked?”
Roz pursed her lips. “Nobody heard the screaming.”
“How long you think you’d scream without any lungs?” He sighed. “You know, it never fails. The poor folks, nobody ever heard no screaming. And the rich folks, they’ve got no neighbors to hear ’em scream. Everybody in this modern world lives alone.”
It was a beautiful Birmingham day behind the long silk draperies, the kind of mild and bright that spring mornings in Alabama excelled at. Peter craned his head back and looked up at the chandelier glistening in the dustless light. Its ornate curls had been spotlessly clean before aerosolized blood on Steele’s last breath misted them.
“Steele lived alone,” she said. “Except for the robot. His cook found the body this morning. Last person to see him before that was his P.A., as he left the office last night.”
“Lights on seems to confirm that he was killed after dark.”
“After dinner,” Roz said.
“After the cook went home for the night.” Peter kept prowling the room, peering behind draperies and furniture, looking in corners and crouching to lift up the dust ruffle on the couch. “Well, I guess there won’t be any question about the stomach contents.”
Roz went through the pockets of the dead man’s suit jacket, which was draped over the arm of a chair. Pocket computer and a folding knife, wallet with an RFID chip. His house was on palmprint, his car on voice rec. He carried no keys. “Assuming the M.E. can find the stomach.”
“Touché. He’s got a cook, but no housekeeper?”
“I guess he trusts the android to clean but not cook?”
“No taste buds.” Peter straightened up, shaking his head. “They can follow a recipe, but—”
“You won’t get high art,” Roz agreed, licking her lips. Outside, a car door slammed. “Scene team?”
“M.E.,” Peter said, leaning over to peer out. “Come on, let’s get back to the house and pull the codes for this model.”
“All right,” Roz said. “But I’m interrogating it. I know better than to leave you alone with a pretty girl.”
Peter rolled his eyes as he followed her towards the door. “I like ’em with a little more spunk than all that.”
“So the new dolls,” Roz said in Peter’s car, carefully casual. “What’s so special about ’em?”
“Man,” Peter answered, brow furrowing. “Gimme a sec.”
Roz’s car followed as they pulled away from the house on Balmoral Road, maintaining a careful distance from the bumper. Peter drove until they reached the parkway. Once they’d joined a caravan downtown, nose-to-bumper on the car ahead, he folded his hands in his lap and let the lead car’s autopilot take over.