The Race for God by Brian Herbert Read Free Book Online

significant, something really significant.
    The robotic helper was a PYA1200, with exponential strength. It could lift a medium-sized building if called upon to do so, and had the added feature of storage compactability. Now through black wisps of opium smoke Gutan saw it as a rolling Erector-set-man more than two meters high, that in an instant, at an operator’s command, could compress itself into a neat little box no larger than a toaster oven. Gutan called it “Fork” because of the stiff-armed forkliftlike manner in which it loaded and unloaded dispatchees from Mnemo.
    Fork had pincers on the ends of his arms, which he was using to hold a huge naked woman. The van floor flexed as Fork rolled toward Gutan, passing the cryogenic bodychambers that were on one side.
    The robot was like a good hunting dog with a prize for its master, but before the kill. The designers of Fork hadn’t bothered with much of a face—just a few rivets where features belonged, on a paper-thin alloy surface. Most modern robots had faces, apparently by popular demand, and even this unit had one, despite the premium of utility and compactness. Fork’s tightly riveted expression was entirely neutral—two parallel straight lines for the mouth, two rectangles for eyes, a circle for the nose. But now, in a drug-induced hallucination, Gutan thought he detected the glimmerings of a smile around the edges of the rivets comprising the mouth.
    The woman in Fork’s grasp rivaled small planet mass, and in her naked, prone position her great pendulous breasts hung halfway to the floor. She didn’t struggle, although five of the twenty-eight already dispatched this day had struggled ferociously and paid for it. Fork wasn’t programmed to show patience or compassion, so he gave them pincer shots to the kidneys.
    According to the death docket on the electronic clip pad, this woman was a “war criminal,” which probably meant she was a dissident involved in the peace movement, sentenced to death by the Bureau of Loyalty. A keloid scar spanned her face, and by her calm expression Gutan guessed she was either playing possum or in acceptance of her fate.
    Gutan wished he were on commission, or better yet that he owned all this equipment. Just think what he could earn with a cushy government dispatch contract!
    He tugged at the pipe, felt soothing smoke permeate his body.
    In the reflection of a mirrored partition to his left he saw himself. A short man nearing sixty, he had curly black hair, black eyes and a close-cropped beard flecked with gray. He had a rather simian appearance, with a protruding forehead and high cheekbones. His head had a forward thrust to it, and as he stood by the memory machine he leaned forward involuntarily, his posture having long before been sacrificed through inattention. The stoop made him appear shorter than he actually was, but none of the cadavers he made love to ever complained. His arms and hands were long and apelike, with slender graceful fingers that dangled below his knees. His mother used to say he might have been a pianist with those fingers, if he hadn’t lost one in the tricycling accident.
    Mnemo was regularly moved between truck-trailer rigs, and the rigs needed maintenance—so someone undoubtedly had a ripe government contract there for the picking. At appointed stops, workers in lime-green rubber coveralls moved Mnemo between truck transporters with strange looking extruders. At these stops, Dispatchers and rigs changed.
    There were four Dispatchers including Gutan, and the general routine was one month on duty and two months off, with allowances for sick pay. Most of the time Gutan ended up flying home to Ciscola from all over the country, then flying to meet the mnemonic machine wherever it ended up two months later.
    Gutan’s first work experience had been as an embalming technician in his father’s mortuary. After Gutan spent fifteen years there, a scandal over gold and silver fillings that were missing