“Fun facts,” Rhyme said to Spinnerette as they entered a bombed-out room with its sliding doors stuck halfway open. The bodies of two of Webmistress’s musclebound mooks were crumpled in a corner, along with piles wrecked machinery and destroyed battle droids. “Do you know how your boss got started in the business?”
“She sold her boyfriend’s power armor,” Spinnerette said. “She told me when she hired me.”
“That was her first real break,” Rhyme said. “But how do you go from a twelve million dollar windfall to running the largest criminal operation in the world without any experience, training, or contacts? She wasn’t even eighteen yet when she made her first deal. How do you think she got from there to here in twenty-eight years?”
“Twenty… wait, she told me she was twenty-five when she hired me,” Spinnerette said. “That doesn’t…”
“How old do you think she told Markham she is?” Rhyme asked. “The point, dearest Janie, is that it didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t a straight-line path. Twelve million dollars is both less money than it sounds like and more than enough to make a modest person’s dreams come true, but your mistress has never been one for modesty, has she?”
“Is this important?” Spinnerette said. She was looking around the shadowy room, which smelled of smoke, ozone, and motor oil, as if she thought that Webmistress herself would jump out from behind the rubble.
“Is my mouth moving?” Rhyme asked. “Yes, it’s important.”
“But don’t we have things to do?” Spinnerette asked. “Like… getting out of here?”
“Only after we’ve killed Sevenger,” Rhyme said.
“You mean Clev…”
“If you’re going to make me repeat every little thing I say, we’ll be here longer,” Rhyme said. “Now, if your mistress had been a man with even the minimal connections of her deceased lover, she… or rather he… might have parlayed that money into more by financing some drug deals or some arms shipments. But the men she approached took her money and represented it as their own stake. None would take her as a partner in the sense that she wanted… instead, they saw her as a rich girlfriend who would buy success for them.”
“So she went into business for herself,” Spinnerette said.
“No,” Rhyme said. “All she had was her initial stake, somewhat depleted, and a circle of acquaintances who wanted everything from her and offered her nothing more than their doubtful charms. But with no other tools at her disposal, she still took the first action that could truly be said to be the work of the Webmistress: she told each of her gentlemen friends about one of the others and his design on both her luscious form and her more luscious capital. The papers called it a gang war, which it was by the time it ended, as many of these fools were members of gangs. The most bloody gang war in the history of Los Angeles, but its real purpose was completed in the opening salvos: everybody who knew about her and her money were dead. She’d even implicated those who had brokered the power suit auction. No one was left alive who knew about her money.”
“Then how do you know this?”
“Oh, she started telling the story once she was established on her own,” Rhyme said. “She likes to brag. It’s a nice rags-to-riches story, and a fitting opening move for the mistress of web and shadow. It’s the next part that she doesn’t talk about, that I only knew about because of my short stint wearing the mantle of my fallen father. I doubt she even lets herself think about it all that often… I suspect when her voice gets all shrill and raspy, it’s because something has reminded her of this sordid chapter of her life.”
“I… I don’t think I want to hear this,” Spinnerette said, feeling a sick panic coming over her.
“Oh, no, love… I think it will be very therapeutic for you,” Rhyme said. “You might learn something. You see, the woman who would become Webmistress had been excluded from the paltry brotherhood of street criminals because she was a woman. Had she set her sights a little higher to begin with, she might have found an entree, though things would doubtlessly have been easier for a man regardless. But the unfairness of it all grated on her, as nothing but unfairness can, and so she took her money and she lived a frugal life while she set about planning her next stratagem. She scoured newsgroups and bulletin board systems, seeking to find kindred spirits without betraying her own existence or that of her nest egg. She learned an awful lot about femdom BDSM and radical lesbian separatism, and dabbled in each of them a bit.”
“Lesbian? But she hates lesbians,” Spinnerette said.
“So do many radical lesbian separatists, I suspect,” Rhyme said. “There’s no loathing like self-loathing, like no loathing I know. But in her case, it never really resonated with her. It was a dabbling, that’s all. She was looking for a way to turn her money into power… while her sisters on the proto-web called for the dismantling of all the machines of patriarchy, she was more interested in figuring out how to get her hands on the controls.
“And thus it was that she met the man known as Sha-Man One.”
Rhyme followed this pronouncement by glancing upward. Spinnerette followed her gaze, started perplexedly at the ruin of the ceiling as if she expected to find the ludicrously named figure staring down at them.
“No? Nothing?” Rhyme said. “Hmm. I guess we really are off the radar here. Wonderful… I’ll have to work quickly.”
“But what about the story?”
“What story?” Rhyme asked, vaulting nimbly over some rubble to get at a mostly-intact security robot, a quadrupedal construct with stilt-like insectile legs and an array of gun barrels and cameras mounted on its flat trapezoidal body. She began dismantling the body.
“Webmistress. Sha-Man One.”
“Oh, Janie, I was only telling that story to make certain Webmistress wasn’t listening,” Rhyme said. “If she had any working ears in this area, there would have been an immediate response.”
“But what happened?”
“Nothing,” Rhyme said. “Which means she can’t hear us.”
“But the story…”
“Hush,” Rhyme said.
“You said it would be therapeutic. You said I might learn something.”
“You might some freaking patience if you shut your mouth and let me work!” Rhyme snapped, ripping parts of the robot’s drive train out of the chassis. She threw them in the direction of another wreck and then leapt after them, salvaging what she needed from the second, less-recognizable hulk.
“But… but…”
“Janie, dear, Janie,” Rhyme said, not looking at her. “We both have important jobs to do in this partnership. Right now my job is to work as quickly as I can and yours is to stand guard by the door, since it won’t close all the way.”
“You can’t work and tell me at the same time?” Spinnerette asked.
“What? You think I can’t multitask?” Rhyme asked. “Maybe I’m not sure you can watch and listen at the same time. Oh, very well… the woman who would become Webmistress connected with this man who considered himself a revolutionary in every sense of the word: his revolutionary thoughts would result in a revolutionary change in the world. Man, Sha-Man One had decided, was the cause of all evil in the world: all war, all violence, all hatred, all crime. It was time for men to bow out, to step aside, and it would take one man… one true man, one great man, to show them that, and to teach the little women who had grown up in man’s world how to become fully realized matriarchal Womyn.”
“How was he going to do that?” Spinnerette asked.
“Watch the door!” Rhyme said, and when Spinnerette obeyed, she continued. “Oh, he wasn’t going to do anything,” she said. “For all that he represented himself online as a cutting-edge transhumanist, Sha-Man One wasn’t anything more than a failed science fiction writer and a deluded fetishist who represented his stories as a vision of the humanity’s future. He wrote ‘erotic’ stories about women being altered by biotech so that they could impregnate each other through direct vulva-on-vulva contact, take on a semblance of masculine genitalia, etc. He envisioned a future in which the men of the species were reduced to mindless bioroids, worker drones who did all harsh physical labor, freeing the Womyn to be matriarchal and do the bump-and-grind with each other. He thought all he had to do was show the world the path and it would happen… the whole thing was nothing more than his vulgar masturbatory fantasies put down in electronic form, but to your mistress-to-be, they sounded more like a plan than anything else she had heard.
“So, enraptured by his shitty writing, she pledged herself to him and his vision and used her money to finance his operation, which at that point was little more than he himself living in a ‘compound’ of fenced-in trailer houses. Once she joined, it was the two of them. She spent the next few years living at the master’s feet, hearing about how come the revolution men would serve women… it took those years, before she realized that the revolution was never coming and she was sitting at his feet. Despite her money being used to finance small-press editions of the Sha-Man’s work… the blueprints, he insisted, that would lead the budding field of transhuman science in the only direction in which it could logically grow… the only change she managed to effect in the world was to deplete her bank account and have an awful lot of unsatisfying sex with the other women her master occasionally managed to coax into coming out to the compound. None of them ever stayed very long… his words were often appealing to other lost women looking for direction in cyberspace, but it didn’t take long for most of them to realize the basic conflict between what he preached and what he practiced when they got to his compound.
“His first disciple was the exception there,” Rhyme continued. “For years, she was his tool, in every sense of the word. She’d financed his lifestyle as well as his books, spending without question because he insisted it was for the good of all. Her presence made him less threatening to other women, made them more ready to believe that his true goal was to selflessly usher in the matriarchy. I don’t know if he believed that himself or not. It might have been fascinating to find out if he’d bought his own hype, but such was not to be… we come, of course, to the reason that I know all this: I investigated the apparent murder-suicide of a futurist love cult out in the California desert. It didn’t take me long to realize that there was no suicide, and practically no cult: just one sad old man, a few passing groupies and a sugar mama… and hers was the only body not found in the compound. You see, when the scales finally fell off her eyes, they fell hard… it was during a party of some sort, and by ‘party’ I mean ‘orgy’ and by ‘of some sort’ I mean ‘of lesbian sex for the master’s amusement.’ I would love to know exactly what the final straw was. Suffice it to say, she killed everybody there and then burned the place to the ground. As a melodramatic touch, she even salted the ground… they’d been stockpiling salt along with other basic supplies, for the revolution that never came.
“Her funds totaled less than a million dollars at that point, but without Sha-Man’s eccentric ‘vision’ to guide her any more, she was able to put it to better use. As his lackey… or lap-dog, or whatever… one of her tasks had been to write to members of the scientific establishment on a regular basis, to attempt to proselytize them into the True Way, to read their papers and follow their work and look for the tiniest sign that the Sha-Man’s dream of technological sappharchy was just around the corner while he prepared himself to teach the women of the world how to love each other. She changed her name and hid all of her ties to the pair of crackpots who’d harassed so many men and women of science, but in her new life she’d make use of the contact info she’d dug up and the files she’d kept.
“She’d also learned a very useful skills from the old coot: how to weave a web with words and electronic connections, how to send strands out into the world that would catch hold of just the right flies. Sha-Man One had been crazy, and trying to sell the world on a vision that only appealed to people with a rather narrow set of interests, but his techniques had been basically sound. Webmistress used these techniques coupled with the advantages of sanity, and she began to rebuild her fortune. But I can promise you, Janie, she’ll never forget her time in the desert… slobbing the knob of a man who insisted that it was her destiny to rule. How could she, when she’s incorporated part of his vision into her own M.O.? Her drones are the very image of the Sha-Man’s bioroids, save for the fact that they haven’t yielded their position in the ruling woman’s bed to other women. And that, my dear Janie, is the part of Webmistress’s origin you won’t hear from any lips besides mine.”
“So…” Spinnerette said. “Before she was Webmistress, Webmistress was a henchwoman?”
“To a joke of a man who wasn’t even a supervillain,” Rhyme said.
“I… I need to sit down,” Spinnerette said.
“You need to stand back,” Rhyme announced. “Because things are about to get interesting.”
Spinnerette turned her attention from the open door and saw that Rhyme had cobbled together something that looked like a metal scarecrow made from found objects, a vaguely humanoid frame with long, spindly arms and legs and a multi-eyed head made from various camera parts. Hanging from the head, suspended in a web of wires, was Spinnerette’s cellphone. Rhyme was poking at its touchscreen with a stylus.
“What are you doing?” Spinnerette asked.
“Reaching out and touching someone,” Rhyme said. “The Portaliens’ servants broke me out of the madhouse, you know… it seems like I should do something nice for them. Do you think they would like having a Web of Shadows?”
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