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I put my hand to my mouth. I'm no pussy when it comes to dead bodies, but this was messier than autopsy school.
Outside, six cop cars pulled up with screeching tyres.
The golem looked down at the girl's remains. At first I thought his face was melting. Then I saw he was crying.
Each cop car pumped four armed officers into the rain.
And, so help me, I put the water pistol down.
"Shut the door," I said.
"What?"
"You heard me."
The cops had drawn their weapons. They looked a lot nastier than my water pistol. The golem kicked the door shut with a heel the size of a labrador.
"Deadlocks!" I said.
The door obeyed. The room shook as the singularity bolts engaged.
"Will that keep them out?" said the golem.
"Not for ever," I replied. "Just long enough."
"Long enough for what?"
"For you to put down that axe and tell me what the hell is going on."
"I guess you don't like golems. Not many folks do. But we ain't all the same. There's different moulds."
The golem rocked from one foot to the other, twisting his muddy hands like a schoolgirl. His vast bulk obscured the mess on the carpet. That was no bad thing.
"Last time I ran into a golem," I said, "he grabbed my ankles and held me upside down over a cloud of toxic gas. Any wonder I'm cagey?"
"Lots of golems are like that. Bad clay. I should know-I have to work with them every day."
It figured. The yellow jacket and the garbage can were a giveaway: this golem was a municipal refuse collector. Garbage golems are dangerous like unstable cliffs: they're fine if you keep clear; get too close-they'll bury you. Literally.
"So what's different about you?"
"I got a name."
"A name?"
"It's Byron."
"Golems don't have names. They have numbers."
"I got something else too."
"What?"
"I got a soul."
A word about golems.
First, golems aren't born-they're manufactured, like crockery. Most anyone can knock up a golem: you just take a couple of tons of river silt and compress it into a mould. Then you scribble out a chunk of Hebrew binary code on a square of parchment and bury it in the golem's chest. Bingo: instant walking mountain. Golems are grumpy, slow-witted, and obedient. They have phenomenal memories and no conscience at all. They're ultra-loyal and ultra-violent in equal measure. They make great bodyguards and even better tax collectors.
But underneath they're just machines. Wet machines, but machines all the same.
So when a golem tells you he's got a soul, it's kind of hard to take.
Now, you ask a hundred different folk what a soul is, you get a hundred different answers. But there's one thing everyone agrees on: whatever a soul is, it's what a golem ain't got.
Except here's this golem, big as life, says he's just like me. Bigger collar size maybe. Thing is, if this golem thinks he's different, maybe they'll all start thinking they're different. Thinking they don't want to do the crappy jobs any more. Thinking they've got rights. Who knows-maybe they do.
But if all the golems in the city start thinking that… that's a whole heap of angry clay to have on the loose.
I stood at the window and watched the cops pile sandbags in the rain. I'd silvered the glass so they couldn't see in.
"Let's forget the soul thing for now," I said. "Tell me about the garbage can. Tell me about the girl."
The golem-it was hard for me to think of him as
Byron-sat on the couch. The couch broke. "I was on the morning shift. Down on the east side-you know, those old tenements?"
I nodded. I knew that part of town pretty well. Even the daylight keeps its distance. The tenements are old and mostly ruined. Some have fallen right over, but it doesn't stop folk living in them. Even the ones still boarded up from last year's plague.
"I didn't think the city bothered collecting garbage from the east side."
"We do it once a year. Looks good on the a
"Figures."
"So there I was, collecting garbage, dragging it back to the truck. I like to go out ahead. The other golems stick together but I… well, I guess I'm a loner. So, I get to this big old brownstone. It's a dive, but there's still a garbage can out front. Fu
"The girl? In pieces?"
"The girl in pieces, right. And the axe lying on top. All at once I'm scared. I du
"What happened next?"
"Four-Oh-Seven-One-he's shift supervisor-he looks at the axe. Then he looks in the garbage can. He says, "What did you do to her, you freak?" Then they all back off and Two-Two-Eight-Six says, "I'm calling the cops!" and that's when I ran."
"Why run if you didn't do anything?"
"I du
"Why didn't you drop the garbage can? Or the axe, for that matter?"
"It's evidence, ain't it? I need it to prove my i
I looked out at the cops. They'd finished piling the sandbags; now they were hunkered down, waiting. I looked at Byron the golem sitting forlorn in the wreckage of my couch. Whichever way you sliced it, this was a doozy of a mess. Best thing I could do was open the door and let the cops do their thing.
I poured myself another coffee.
I forced myself to look at the girl's torn-up remains.
"This tenement on the east side," I said. "Where was it exactly?"
" Crucifix Lane. Does this mean you believe me? You're go
"Don't get excited. I'm just curious. I think you and me should take a little stroll."
"But how are we go
"The front door isn't the only door."
Byron looked at the four blank walls. He scratched his crotch. There was a lot of clay down there.
"You got a back door?"
Everyone knows there's eleven dimensions. Most places you go, you only see three or four. Maybe five if it's late and the bar's still open. But there's some places where the dimensions… well, they get kind of crowded up together.
Think of a ball of yarn. However neat it looks, you start unravelling it, sooner or later you'll get a knot. Yarn gets snarled up-it's in its nature. Same with dimensions.
Take this city. It was built right on top of one mother of a cosmic knot. Mostly it looks like a city, but underneath it's got way too many dimensions for its own good. That's why it works the way it does. It's why the cops are all zombies and all the big crime lords are Titans. It's why time runs slower uptown than downtown and the mayor is a gangster-turned-goddess called Pallas Athene. It's why the skies are full of thunderbirds and the sewers have minds of their own. It's why nothing makes sense but everything hangs together. This city's like a knot all right, a knot in the middle of a great spider's web. Only the web's not made of silk, it's made of cosmic string. And whenever the string vibrates it sends all these echoes down into the web, into the knot, into this city. That's what this city is: it's all the sounds of the cosmos, all rolled into one.