Marlowe and the Spacewoman Read Free Page B

to get his head around.  Ever since they’d been granted citizenship, the sentient soaps had been like the rest of humanity.  Some were good, some were bad, some were indifferent until a certain amount of money changed hands.  Marlowe, not for the first time, cursed the day the two giant toy companies had set aside their differences and merged to form HasMatt.  The combined research and dollar might of these two formerly warring corporations had led to products such as Sentient Soap.
    The soaps had a chip in the middle of the bar that did their thinking.  The rest of the bar served as a heat sink (which caused problems in early models where kids were scalded if the soaps thought too hard).  They had their own language made up of different sized bubbles blown at varying rates, known as Bubbonics.  There was even a video series that taught you – Hooked On Bubbonics.
    Marlowe didn’t learn Bubbonics until the law changed, recognizing the soap bars as sentient, granting them most of the rights of citizenship, and banning their sale within the City.  Immediately following the court decision, the soap bars, flush with the righteousness of victory, set about creating a cultural identity for themselves.  They formed their own communities, built communal bathtubs to worship in, had families, tried to find jobs.  Some of Marlowe’s best informants were down-on-their-luck, unemployed soaps struggling to survive on the fringe of society.  The soap bars and a few other HasMatt products, such as-
    “Marlowe.   Oh Marlowe.”  The high-pitched, Helium voice caused an involuntary wince in Marlowe.  “Please, Marlowe, you need to brush your teeth.  I crave the sensation of my bristles scrubbing away all that yucky, nasty gunk off your teeth.”
    “Shut up, toothbrush, or I’ll dump you in the garbage disposal.  And this time, I’ll turn it on!”
    Toothy, the Codependent Toothbrush, another of HasMatt’s diabolical forays into childhood hygiene, fell silent.  You could still buy these, because they had fought tooth and nail against a grant of citizenship.  They feared that as citizens, nobody would use them.  Marlowe had bought his on the advice of his now former dentist.  He hated Toothy with a passion usually reserved for baby-eating telemarketers, but every time he threw it out, the damn thing wailed piteously until Marlowe felt guilty and retrieved it.  The dentist had warned him that owning a sentient toothbrush was a responsibility, a commitment to care for it.  Commitment seemed like the right word to Marlowe, but not the kind of commitment the dentist had in mind.
    “House,” Marlowe asked, shaking off thoughts of his oral hygiene, “can we make out the guts of the soap when it dissolved?”
    “Here.”  House zoomed in on the bar of soap during the last few moments of its escape, playing at one quarter speed.  “As you can see, it spouted a lot of nonsense to lay down a field of bubbles as cover.”
    “What’s it saying?”
    “Let’s see.  ’Nothing personal, just business.’  Some long, multisyllabic words and phrases to increase bubble density.  Meaningless drivel, really.”
    House looped the few seconds of video that showed the soap’s escape.  The bubbles came up thick and fast, obscuring any glimpse of the electronic guts underneath.  But Marlowe noticed something interesting at the start of the dissolve sequence: a fissure running through the center of the soap bar.
    “Am I imagining things, or is that soap bar broken?”
    “Analyzing.  Hmm, I think you’re right.  Let’s compare to when you first picked it up.”  The wall image shifted back to when Marlowe first reached for the soap and zoomed in.  The bar was unmarred.
    “Perhaps when you flung it against the shower wall.  Tracking.”
    The video stayed zoomed in and centered on the soap as Marlowe’s giant hand grabbed it.  A flick of motion as the hypo jabbed into the hand, then the background blurred as the