Читать книгу Bruggil's Bride - Robert F. Young - Страница 5

She came off the Androids, Inc., production line in September, 2241. She was five feet, seven inches tall, weighed 135 pounds, had flaxen hair and pale blue eyes. Her built-in batteries were guaranteed for ten years, her tapes were authentic Kirsten Flagstad, and her name was Isolde.

She was shipped to New York via strato-freight, and late in October she opened the season at the Metropolitanette in what the hundred or so diehard enthusiasts still holding the Wagnerian fort, called the best Tristan ever. Afterwards, she was deactivated and stored away, along with Tristan, Brangane, Melot, King Marke, Kurvenal, the shepherd and the helmsman, and the various knights, soldiers, attendants, and sailors that constituted the rest of the dramatis personae.

At that time the black market in androids was relatively new, and only standard measures were taken to guard the Metropolitanette storeroom. Operatic androids were not exactly the kind of merchandise the average twenty-third century citizen liked most to find underneath his Christmas tree, and to a Wagnerian aficionado, the idea of the average music lover stealing one was as preposterous as the idea of a twentieth century bobby-soxer stealing a Caruso original. But an operatic android was potentially capable of doing other things besides singing recitative and arias—as a number of twenty-third century operators had begun to realize some time before the beginning of this history. Hans Becker was one of them.

You’ve seen Hans. You’ve seen him in bars and on airbusses, in waiting rooms and in automats. He likes to sit in secluded corners and study people through his cigar smoke. He has a penchant for ostentatious blondes and dirty comic films. He has a passion for the quick credit.

You see him now. He is talking to a mousy little man in a decrepit bar off Fifth Avenue. The little man nods every now and then, smiles a satisfied smile every time Hans sets him up a beer. The little man is a night watchman. He is a night watchman in the very building where the Metropolitanette stores its deactivated androids. He is in his fifties, and he too likes ostentatious blondes. But on a night watchman’s pay, the only ones he can afford are a little too ostentatious even for him. He would like them to be a little less ostentatious, and, if possible, a little younger. He smiles, nods his head again. He drinks the fresh beer the bartender sets before him. He licks the froth from his from his lips with the tip of his gray tongue. He pockets the sheaf of credits which Hans slips him. He nods again. “Tomorrow night, then,” he says. “At the backdoor. I’ll have her ready for you.”

Isolde’s first stop, after her abduction, was at the house of a converter Hans knew. The converter’s name was Wisprey, and he was an artist in his own right. By the time he finished with Isolde, you never would have dreamed—unless you were a Wagnerian devotee—that once upon a time she had been a bona fide reproduction of an Irish heroine in a German opera. You would have sworn, instead, that she was a Swedish-type maid of the kind Androids, Inc., specialized in, and which retailed for 2500 credits. Her flaxen hair had been drawn back into a little chignon, her period costume had been exchanged for a modern servant’s outfit, and her classic features had been subtly altered to suggest sycophancy. As though that were not enough, she could scrub floors, wash dishes, cook, and darn socks.

The only part of her the converter did not alter was the sealed-in unit containing her voice tapes. That, he told Hans, would have involved too intricate an operation. Besides, who cared if she sang instead of talked, anyway, as long as she could work?

“That’s right,” Hans said. “Who cares? When they see how strong she is, they’ll buy her like sixty.”

“Sure they will.”

“And she’s only the first. There’s lots of other big ones where she came from and I’m going to grab them off, too.”

He didn’t grab them off, though. A week later, he fell into his blonde mistress’ barbecue pit and was so drunk he couldn’t get back out before he was barbecued to the bone. Before this lamentable occurrence, however he sold his pilfered princess to an interstellar trader, and thereby launched Isolde upon her odyssey.

The interstellar trader, whose name was Higgens, owned a Class B merchant ship of the old photon-ejection variety. He stored Isolde in the after-hold and left her there till his fourth planetfall—Sirius 21. Then he got her out, dusted her off, combed her hair and activated her. He led her down the gangplank and stood her on the collapsible auctioneer’s block he’d set up at the ship’s base. There were a number of colonists gathered around the block already, but he saved her till last, auctioning off the rest of his payload first. By the time he took her hand and led her to the center of the block, word of her presence had got around the nearby colony, and there was a near-maximum turnout.

“All right,” Higgens said. “She’s beautiful and she’s strong and she’s sturdy. I don’t need to tell you those things because you can see them for yourself. I’m merely reminding you of them. But what you can’t see are the things she can do. So here’s the way we’ll work it: you name something you’d like a servant of yours to be able to do, and I’ll tell you whether she can do it or not. Who’s first?”

“Can she cook?” a thin-faced woman wanted to know.

“I knew you’d ask that one first. The answer is yes. Next?”

“Can she milk a milch bront?” This time the asker was a middle-aged colonist of Dutch descent.

Higgens consulted a small notebook. “She can—if a milch bront is enough like a cow,” he said presently.

There was the inevitable drunk in the crowd. “Can she keep a man’s bed warm?”

Higgens played along. “She sure can, buddy, but you know the law as well as I do.”

“Can she scrub floors, lift, carry, wash clothes, do dishes and wait on people?” It was the Dutch colonist again.

Higgens nodded. “Seems to me you’ve just about covered everything, friend. Want to make the first bid?”

“200 credits,” the Dutch colonist said.

“I have 200 credits,” Higgens intoned, “which, if I do say so, is about one tenth of what she’s worth? Do I hear three?”

“300,” the drunk said.

“350,” the Dutch colonist said.

“450.”

The Dutch colonist could outbid anybody in the crowd, and everybody in the crowd knew it, including the drunk. But the drunk didn’t give a damn, and he went along to the one thousand mark before dropping out. The Dutch colonist got her for 1100 credits, and the first stage of Isolde’s servitude began.