Counting Heads (3 page)

“The Tri-D?” El said. “Are you sure? What did we do now?”

Calendar morphed into Cabinet’s attorney general who said, “Unknown. There’s no memo, and the connection is highly encrypted.”

“Have we stepped on any important toes? Have any of our clients stepped on any important toes?”

“All of the above, probably,” the attorney general said.

After stalling as long as possible, El accepted the call. The stately though unimaginative seal of the Tri-Discipline Council—a globe gyrating on a golden axis—filled our living room. I asked El if I should leave.

She gave me a pleading look, the first time I’d ever seen her unsure of herself. So I stayed as the overdone sig dissolved into thin air and Agnes Foldstein, herself, appeared before us sitting at her huge glass desk. Eleanor sucked in her breath. Here was no minor bureaucrat from some bottom tier of the organization but the very chair of the Board of Governors, one of the most influential people alive, parked at her trademark desk in our hotel suite. Both El and I stood up.

“Greetings from the Council,” Foldstein said, looking at each of us in turn. “I apologize for interrupting your honeymoon, but Council business compels me.” She turned to me and praised the inventiveness of my work in packaging design. She spoke sincerely and at length and mentioned specifically my innovations in battlefield wrap for the Homeland Command as well as my evacuation blankets for victims of trauma and burns. Then she turned to El and said, “Myr Starke, do you know why I’m here?”

Foldstein appeared to be in her late forties, an age compatible with her monstrous authority, while my El looked like a doe-eyed daughter. El shook her head. “No, Governor, I don’t.”

But she must have had some inkling, because Henry whispered,
Eleanor’s chief of staff says Eleanor asks twice if you know what this means
.

I puzzled over the message. Apparently, it had been flattened by its passage through two artificial minds. What Eleanor had probably said was, “Do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?” Well, I didn’t, and the whole thing was making me nervous.

“After careful consideration,” Foldstein continued, “the Council has nominated you for a seat on the Board of Governors.”

“Sorry?” El said and grasped my arm to steady herself.

Foldstein chuckled. “I was surprised myself, but there you have it—I’m offering you a seat at the grown-ups’ table.”

BY THE TIME we shuttled back to Earth, the confirmation process was well under way. Over the next few torturous weeks, El’s nomination was debated publicly and in camera by governments, corporations, the Homeland Command, labor charters, pundits, and ordinary putzes alike. Such a meteoric rise was unheard of, and conspiracy theories abounded. El, herself, was at a loss to explain it. It was like skipping a dozen rungs on the ladder to success. Nevertheless, at no time did she doubt her ability to fill the post, and she marched through our town house in splendiferous pomp, only to crash in her bedroom an hour later to fret over the dozens of carefully buried indiscretions of her past. On the morning she testified before the Tri-D Board of Governors, she was serene and razor sharp.

Immediately upon returning home she summoned me to my bedroom and demanded screaming monkey sex from me. Afterward she could hardly stand the sight of me.

I supported her as much as I could, except for a couple of times when I just had to get out of the house. I retreated to my Chicago studio and pretended to work.

When Eleanor’s appointment was confirmed, we took the Slipstream down to Cozumel for some deep-sea diving and beachcombing. It was meant to be a working vacation, but by then I suffered no delusions about Eleanor’s ability to relax. There were too many plans to make and people to meet. And indeed, she kept some member of Cabinet at her side at all times: on the beach, in the boat, at the Mayan theme village, even in the cramped quarters of the submersible.

We had planned to take advantage of an exclusive juve clinic on the island to shed some age. My own age-of-choice was my mid-thirties, the age at which my body was still active enough to satisfy my desires, but mellow enough to sit through long hours of creative musing. El and I had decided on the three-day sifting regimen and had skipped our morning visola to give our bodies time to excrete their cellular gatekeepers. But at the last moment, El changed her mind. She decided she ought to grow a little older to better match her new authority. So I went to the clinic alone and soaked in the baths twice a day for three days. Billions of molecular-sized janitors flowed through my skin and permeated my muscles, cartilage, bones, and nerves, politely snip, snip, snipping protein cross-links and genetic anomalies and gently flushing away the sludge and detritus of age.

I returned to the bungalow on Wednesday, frisky and bored, and volunteered to prepare it for our regular weekly salon. I had to page through a backlog of thousands of recorded greetings from our friends and associates. More confetti for El’s appointment. The salon, itself, was a stampede. More people holoed down than our bungalow could accommodate. Its primitive holoserver was overwhelmed by so many simultaneous transmissions, our guests were superimposed over one another five or ten bodies deep, and the whole squirming mass of them flickered around the edges.

Despite the confusion, I quickly sensed that this was a farewell party—for Eleanor. Our friends assumed that she would be posted on the Moon or at Mars Station, since all Tri-D posts on Earth were already filled. At the same time, no one expected me to go with her—who would? Given people’s longevity, it could take decades—or centuries—for Eleanor to acquire enough seniority to be transferred back to Earth.

By the time the last guest signed off, we were exhausted. Eleanor got ready for bed, but I poured myself a glass of scotch and went out to sit on the beach.

Wet sand. The murmur of the surf. The chilly breeze. It was a lovely equatorial dawn. “Henry,” I said, “record this.”

Relax, Sam. I always record the best of everything
.

In the distance, the island’s canopy dome shimmered like a veil of rain falling into a restless sea. Waves surged up the beach to melt away in the sand at my feet. There was a ripe, salty smell of fish and seaweed and whales and lost sailors moldering in the deep. The ocean, for all its restlessness, had proven to be a good delivery medium for nanotech weapons—NASTIEs—which could float around the globe indefinitely, like particularly rude messages in tiny bottles, until they washed up on the enemy’s shore. Cozumel’s defense canopy, more a sphere than a dome, extended through the water to the ocean floor, and deep into bedrock. A legacy of the Outrage in the 2060s.

“So tell me, Henry, how are you and Cabinet getting along?” I had taken his advice and bought him more neuro-chem paste.

Cabinet is a beautiful intelligence. I consider emulating it
.

“In what way?”

I may want to trifurcate my personality bud
.

“So that there’s three of you? Uh, what would that accomplish?”

Then I would be more like a human
.

“You would? Is that good?”

I believe so. I have recently discovered that I have but one point of view, while you have several which you can alternate at will
.

“It sounds like I bought you more paste than what’s good for you.”

On the contrary, Sam. I think I’m evolving
.

I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I changed the subject. “So, how do you feel about moving off-planet?”

It’s all the same to me, Sam. Have bandwidth—will travel. You’re the one to be concerned about. Have you noticed how constipated you become at low-g?

“I’m sure there’s something for that.”

But what about your work? Can you be creative so far away?

“I can always holo to Chicago. As you say, have bandwidth—” I sipped my drink and watched the sun rise from the sea. Soon I saw El strolling up the beach in her robe. She knelt behind me and massaged my shoulders.

“I’ve been neglecting you,” she said, “and you’ve been wonderful. Can you forgive me?”

“There’s nothing to forgive. You’re a busy person. I knew that from the start.”

“Still, it must be hard.” She sat in the sand next to me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s like a drug. I’m drunk with success. But I’ll get over it. I promise.”

“There’s no need. You should enjoy it.”

“You don’t want to move off-planet, do you?”

So much for small talk. I shrugged and said, “Maybe not forever, but I could probably use a change of scene. I seem to have grown a bit fusty here.”

She squeezed me and said, “Thank you, Sam. You’re wonderful. Where do men like you come from?”

“From Saturn. We’re saturnine.”

She laughed. “I don’t think we have any posts that far out yet. But there’s a new one at Trailing Earth. I suspect that’s where they’ll be sending me. Will that do?”

“I suppose,” I said, “but on one condition.”

“Name it.”

I hadn’t had anything in mind when I said that; it had just come out. Was there something else bothering me?

Henry chimed in,
Tell her to have Cabinet show me how to trifurcate
.

That certainly wasn’t it, but it did help me to articulate what I was feeling. “Only this,” I said. “I realize now that you’ve been preparing yourself for this moment for most of your life. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re in the big league now. Don’t get in over your head too soon.”

NO SOONER HAD we returned to our Connecticut town house than another shocker hit the media. Myr Mildred Rickert, Tri-Discipline Governor posted in mid-western USNA, was missing for three hours. Eleanor blanched when she heard the news. Governor Rickert had been a dominant force in world affairs for over fifty years, and her sudden disappearance was another seismic shift in the world’s power structure. Still, she was only missing.

“For three hours?” El said. “Come on, Sam, be realistic.”

Over the next twenty-four hours, Eleanor’s security chief discreetly haunted the high-security nets to feed us details and analyses as they emerged. A homcom slug, on wildside patrol, discovered Governor Rickert’s earthly remains in and about a Slipstream car in a low-security soybimi field outside the Indianapolis canopy. She was the apparent victim of a NASTIE. Her valet system, whose primary storage container was seized by the Homeland Command and placed under the most sanitary interrogation, reported that Rickert was aware of her infection when she entered the tube car beneath her Indianapolis residential tower. She ordered the valet to use her top-security privileges to route her car out of the city and jettison it from the tube system. So virulent was the attacking NASTIE and so stubborn Rickert’s visola-induced defenses, that in the heat of cellular battle her body burst open. Fortunately, it burst within the car and contaminated only two or three square kilometers of farmland. Rickert’s quick thinking and her reliable belt system had prevented a disaster within the Indianapolis canopy. The HomCom incinerated her scattered remains after the coroner declared Myr Rickert irretrievable.

And so a plum post in the heartland was up for grabs. Eleanor turned the living room into a war room. She sent her entire staff into action. As the appointee with the least amount of seniority, she had no reasonable expectation of winning that post, but she wasn’t going to lose it for lack of trying. She lined up every chit she’d ever collected in her several careers and lobbied for all she was worth. My own sense of dread increased by the hour.

“Look,” I said, trying to talk sense to her, “you don’t imagine that this is a coincidence, do you? Your nomination and then this? Someone is setting you up. Don’t you see?”

“Relax,” she said. “I know I don’t have a chance in hell of getting this post. I’m just flexing my muscles and getting in the game. People would wonder if I
didn’t
.”

Early one morning a week later, Eleanor brought coffee and a Danish and the morning visola to me in bed. “What’s this?” I said, but I already knew by the jaunty angle of her eyebrows.

WE MOVED INTO temporary quarters—an apartment on the 207th floor of the Williams Towers in Bloomington. We planned to eventually purchase a farmstead in an outlying county surrounded by elm groves and rye fields. El’s daily schedule, already at a marathon level, only intensified with her new responsibilities as the regional Tri-D director. Meanwhile, I pottered about the campus town trying to come to grips with my new circumstances.

A couple of weeks later, an event occurred that dwarfed all that came before. Eleanor and I, although we’d never applied, were issued a permit to retro-conceive a baby. These permits were impossible to come by, since only about a hundred thousand were issued each year in all of the USNA. Out of all of our friends and acquaintances, only two or three had ever been issued a permit. I hadn’t even seen a baby in realbody for decades (although simulated babies figured prominently in most holovids and comedies). We were so stunned at first we didn’t know how to respond. “Don’t worry,” said the undersecretary of the Population Division, “most recipients have the same reaction. Some faint.”

Eleanor seemed far from fainting, and she said matter-of-factly, “I don’t see how I could take on the additional responsibility at this time.”

The undersecretary was incredulous. “Does that mean you wish to refuse the permit?”

Eleanor winced. “I didn’t say that.” She glanced at me for help.

“Uh, a boy or a girl?” I said.

The undersecretary favored us with a fatuous grin. “That’s entirely up to you, now isn’t it? My advice to you,” he added with forced spontaneity—he’d been over this ground many times before, and I wondered if that was the sum total of his job, to call a hundred thousand strangers each year and grant them one of life’s supreme gifts—“is to visit the National Orphanage in Trenton. Get the facts. No obligation.”

For the next hour or so, El and I sat arm in arm in silence. Suddenly El began to weep. Tears sprang from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. I held her and watched in total amazement.