Posturetalk

Master Licko was in one of his bad moods again.  Around his sculptury were fragments of stone and from inside there was a cacophony of crashing, bashing, and thumping.  Every now and then some luckless piece of statuary would fly through a window, whose glass had much earlier been shattered and scattered, and dive to the earth, throwing up loose soil and losing parts of itself in an ignominious partial burial.  Squashed vermiforms either lay splattered beneath stone or squirmed uneasily, trying to detach their broken parts and wriggle away from the zone of destruction.
I paused at the door, wondering if this was really the right time to visit Master Licko and tell him that his Income Tax was overdue, but even though I could hear what sounded like an overworked lump hammer, I reminded myself that I was a Lawyer-at-arms and not frightened of people like Master Licko.  Despite his enhanced musculature and his days spent lifting hundredweights of stone.  I knocked on the door, and then went in without waiting for an answer.
Master Licko was topless, as he often was, and wearing a heavy hessian wrap-around apron around his lower half, which he didn't always do and left me wondering where to rest my eyes for decency.  In one hand he was holding a lump hammer, in another a metal chisel, and in his third a powder-welding tube.  He glared at me.
"Worthless worm," he said, but without much rancour.  "I knew it had to be you.  Everyone else has patience."
"Talentless hack," I countered.  "All of my other clients have learned to appreciate me."
With the pleasantries out of the way, I looked at what he'd been doing when I came in.  A humaniform woman was crouching atop an anvil, her legs splayed out but supporting her nonetheless, her arms stretched out to the sides, and the top of her head flattened to support a tray or slab.  Her eyes moved constantly, scanning back and forth, but there was no sign of consciousness behind them.
"It's new," said Master Licko putting the powder-welding tube down.  "It's so damn new I'm having trouble getting to the essence of it."
"What is it?" I asked, genuinely intrigued.  I knew that Master Licko had real talent and didn't just churn out minor variations on a theme like so many artists I had dealings with.
"Posturetalk," he said.  "These humaniforms... they have so many different ways of presenting themselves, their very posture tells you something of what they're thinking.  If you sit and watch their soap operas you can see it: their lips say one thing, but their body language says another.  So.  I'm creating humaniform objects that can communicate with you, that can recognise your mood and adjust themselves accordingly.  There's really not much structure required to maintain a flat surface for a table, for example.  If we freeze this womanform's head, then the table is perfectly stable, and she can use her limbs to indicate a mood.  She can adjust her face to show her mood.  She can even tremble slightly if there's nothing spillable on the table."
"I'm... interested," I said, despite knowing that Master Licko always put his prices up if he thought he had a sale.  I rather liked the idea of a table that trembled when you came near it, or a lamp-holder that could vary between sexy and functional depending on the guests.
"As you should be!"  Master Licko's shouts calmed down quickly.  "Except I'm having real difficulties getting the humaniform to recognise our moods.  It's like they don't realise that we're real here."
"Perhaps you're flattening their heads too much?" I suggested.  "I seem to recall that they keep squishy stuff in their heads and they break if it leaks out."
"Hmph," said Master Licko, but he frowned the way he does when he's thinking.  "Perhaps I could build the head up instead.  Or use the hands, they're easy to take off and put back on again at the right angle, and the wrists lock in place with no trouble if you use long enough locking pins.  I saw a soap opera of theirs I think, they were all walking like Egyptians, and that would probably be a good posture for posturetalk."
"What's an Egyptian?" I asked, but Master Licko shrugged, already uninterested.
"Are you still here?" he said.
"Yes," I said, pulling the paperwork from a pocket.  "I have your Income Tax papers here."
I watched, mildly impressed, as the humaniform's head sailed off her shoulders and through the window, bouncing in the flower-bed outside, and Master Licko howled.

Madonna in Heat

The Madonna in Heat was delivered to my office while I was out as part-payment from Master Licko. When I returned in the late afternoon I first heard cries of mild anguish coming from my office while I was stood in the outer office wondering where my secretary had gone. I allowed myself a half-smile, it is good when clients know their place after all; but shortly thereafter it occurred to me that if I wasn't in my office explaining the psychopathy of the law then no client should be in there either. I set down my briefcase, ruffled my cilia into my most intimidating stance, and opened the door.
The Madonna in Heat, a motile statue of a human woman designed by Master Licko for a collector of religious art, had pinned my secretary against the wall underneath the family portraits and was lunging her head at her repeatedly, her tongue flickering in and out of her mouth like a garshgwa. My secretary gurgled a little, her cilia greenly inflamed, and the Madonna lunged again. I dialled the combination in the legal cupboard to my left, and pulled a semi-automatic taser out. The settings on the side of this model offered me Counsel, Mediate, Remediate and Court Action, and as I didn't yet know why the statue was there I selected Mediate to avoid damaging it too much.
Sixteen taser darts lanced into the Madonna delivering enough voltage to stun a stampeding earth-elephant, and I was delighted to see the Madonna freeze in place, her eyes rolling up in her alabaster face and her hands falling to her side.
"She actually looks like a statue now!" I said to my secretary, but she was clutching at her throat and having a panic attack. I dialled the taser back down to Counsel and switched it to single shot and tased her.

*
"I don't actually want any artwork in my office, Master Licko, nor do I intend to accept it as payment for my services. I am a lawyer-at-arms, not an art-afficionado."
Master Licko whined on the other end of the phone, telling me in a round-about and tedious manner that my services were proving rather more expensive than he was in a position to pay for at the present time. Finally I hung up on him, and then made a note in my desk-pad to have a couple of violent criminals sent to him for community service. Then I went to take a look at my new statue.
The Madonna was fairly quiescent for now, and a little research had revealed that she'd been attempting to be amorous with my secretary; according to the human television channels this was a very common pastime for their females. However, while doing the research a different human television channel had also caught my eye, and I'd seen some potential, the kind that drops the garshgwa amongst the pigeons, so to speak.
The outer door opened and a would-be client intruded. The Madonna swung round on her plinth, hissed like a boiling kettle and produced two pistols from somewhere in the folds of her clothes. They both pointed at the would-be client's forehead ridge, right where any bullets fired would be guaranteed to ricochet around inside the recipient's head. The client swallowed nervously, and his eye-stalks sought out my secretary, who was shivering at her desk.
"I have an appointment!" the client squeaked, and my secretary checked her screen. She nodded, and the Madonna lowered the weapons.
"This way," I said, trying to remember how to smile. Normally I only smile when I'm delivering bad news. "Do you like our new statue? We're calling it the Madonna packing heat...."

Master Licko

Mr Eaves was based on the proportions of Mrs Eaves, but Master Licko took some liberty with his design. Where Mrs Eaves was statuesque Mr Eaves took on a stretched-out appearance. Where Mrs Eaves had sharp, bird-like features, Mr Eaves's became cruelly sharp, and elements of both the crow and the vulture fought together. And where Mrs Eaves had the usual number of limbs, Master Licko forgot himself completely and gave Mr Eaves three arms and eight legs. When Marianne, who had commissioned the Eaves's from Master Licko, came to the shop to collect them, she was appalled.
"This is a travesty of what I asked for!" she said, her voice going high-pitched as she waved her arms around agitatedly. Glendinning the butler hurried behind her, escorting motile statues out of her way. "I wanted a normal, human couple for my menagerie. I see them all the time on their television shows, and the men do not look like... that." She pointed for effect and her arm telescoped out nearly skewering Master Licko.
"How will they mate and have children?" she said.
Master Licko had been looking sheepish up until now, aware suddenly that his little design liberties had once again built up into a rather big liberty that was looking as though it might be expensive to retreat from, but when she mentioned children he turned pale.
"Glendinning!" he snapped. The butler, still wrestling with the statue of the Madonna in Heat which was reluctant to leave the Inspiration for David alone, looked up. "Glendinning, the specification for the Eaves's. Quickly now."
As it was, I had the specification to hand as I'd been expecting Marianne's upset, so I waved it at Glendinning who was being straddled by the Madonna who was trying to use him as a springboard.
Master Licko seized the specification from my hands and turned the pages quickly, skimming each in turn and muttering imprecations under his breath. Suddenly he stopped and read more slowly, turning the page, then turning back again. He looked at Marianne.
"There's no requirement in here for the Eaves's to be capable of reproduction."
"Well why would there be, silly? All humans reproduce. It's what most of their television shows are about." Not all though, as we knew. The religious collector had refused the Madonna in Heat precisely because she apparently was well-known for not reproducing, or at least, not like that.
"If it's not the spec, then I don't have to deliver it. It so happens," he raised a hand to forestall her fury, "that the base model I use is normally fertile, so they well be able to have children, but it's not a guarantee and you didn't ask for it."
"What do you say?" Marianne stared at me, her eyes white and vacant as always.
"Legal stuff, mostly, I'm Master Licko's lawyer-at-arms."
"I see. Well, he's still got too many legs! Pull some off him."
Master Licko licked his lips delicately. "They're quickened already. That means that they can feel pain."
"I don't care! Do it, or I'll refuse the order."
"I can't."
"He actually can't," I said smoothly. "The law states that once they've been quickened they have to be treated humanely."
"And what does humanely mean?" Marianne had an odd smirk on her face now.
"Legally, we use it to mean treat them the way they'd treat each other."
"Then you can pull his legs off," she said, tasting victory. "Because they're absolutely vile to each other much of the time. Just turn to channel 31 and see."
"The war-zone, sir," said Glendinning.
And so it was, after much argument and disagreement, that Mr Eaves was induced to stand on a land-mine and have almost six of his extra limbs blown off, bringing him a little closer in shape to Mrs Eaves and probably doing dreadful things to his sanity at the same time.