“Yes, shit.” I swallowed my anger, said more evenly, “So you see why I might want what is Broken fixed.”
WIDE OPEN
Dumont revealed “her” discovery the next day. The NGU Physics Department Chair was the first to be informed that not only had his alien-crazy colleague been right all along, she’d found an answer to one of the questions humanity had been asking since the first hairy primitive looked up into the night sky and wondered if we were alone. He was sacked a few months later. She was, and remains, the toast of the intellectual community.
I did my time and left AL-1517B. I never heard from Renaud again. Last I heard he’d gone looking for other Broken to heal. The relic remained on AL-1517B. Others were found, both in the belt and in the system Renaud told us about.
I’m . . . happy. I do a brisk, profitable trade in alien artifacts. I like to imagine that some even find their way into the hands of the Broken.
Healing them.
I like to think Mother would approve.
HEART OF CLAY
A DAN SHAMBLE, ZOMBIE PI ADVENTURE
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
I.
“It makes me feel all hollow inside, Shamble,” said officer Toby McGoohan, my best human friend, as we looked down at the mangled corpse of the golem on the grass of the overflow parking area.
Someone had opened the clay guy’s chest from the base of his throat down to his waist, splitting him like an orange. He was completely empty inside.
“Not a good time to joke, McGoo.” I tilted my fedora and scratched my forehead around the hard edge of the bullet-hole scar from the night I’d been killed.
McGoo pulled out his notebook. “I always make jokes. You know that.” He wore his usual blue patrol officer’s uniform and cap from the Unnatural Quarter Police Department. At his side he carried a .38 Special police revolver and a .38 Extra Special loaded with silver bullets for troublesome monsters. His belt also had pepper spray and a squirt bottle of holy water. “These days, if I don’t think all the ghosts and goblins are funny, I might get nightmares.”
I knelt down on stiff knees next to the dead golem. Despite lingering rigor mortis, my joints worked rather well once I got warmed up. I decided it was time to get a top-off at the embalming parlor again.
I touched the clay of the body. It was still soft and pliable, but drying out. From the hardness of the stone, the coroner could determine the time of death. According to the three letters imprinted on his forehead, his name was Joe.
Golems were hardworking but downtrodden, second-class citizens even among the unnaturals, fashioned by wizards and animated to do the dirty jobs that even slime demons liked to avoid. Since all golems looked alike, and because they often had trouble distinguishing themselves from one another, each golem had his name imprinted right on the forehead.
“I wonder what he was like,” I pondered.
“He was probably like a golem, Shamble.” McGoo used his radio to call in the report. Backup would arrive soon, but there was no emergency. Joe had been murdered out in the vacant parking ground for Dred’s Real Renaissance Faire, but the fair’s gates had been long closed for the day when Joe met his untimely end.
As I looked at the dead gray mud of the corpse, I muttered, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I ran my fingers along the skin, smearing a soft line. “And Play-Doh to Play-Doh.”
“They can just scrunch up the clay again,” McGoo said. “Moisten it with a little water and squish it into shape. Reanimate another golem.”
“But it wouldn’t be Joe anymore. And you know Robin would give you one of her famous stern looks if she heard you talking like that.”
Robin Deyer was my human lawyer partner at Chambeaux & Deyer Investigations, a firebrand attorney who fought for all the unnaturals that had returned to the world after the strange and improbable event called the Big Uneasy. Robin was a lovely and intelligent young African American woman; I thought McGoo had a crush on her, although