Counting Heads (45 page)

The Bogdan model rolled his eyes.

“How would I do something like that?” Bogdan asked.

“Ask it a question. If you can ask it a question that it can’t answer, but you can, then you can stay.”

“Deal,” Bogdan said and tried to come up with something that he kept locked away in the deepest, most secret recesses of his mind. Something that not even a visceral response probe could reach. It wasn’t easy, and his double started munching snickerdoodles in the meantime.

Bogdan’s sleepless mind put forth and rejected dozens of possibilities. Finally the HR director said, “Time’s up.”

“I’ve got it,” Bogdan said. He decided he had to cheat and ask the sim something that not even he knew himself. “Tell me, Bogdan impostor,” he said, “if you’re so smart, what does the dust H stand for?”

The false Bogdan laughed. “That’s easy. It stands for Hubert.”

Of course it did. Even as the phony Bogdan uttered it, Bogdan knew it to be true. The H stood for Hubert, and this could only mean that the Tobblers already knew of the mentar’s arrest. Or maybe only Troy and Slugboy knew it. Bogdan took another look at his double. And as disturbing as its revelation was about Troy knowing about Hubert, Bogdan had another question he sorely wanted an answer to.

“You’re right,” he said. “It does. That was a practice question. Here’s the real question: Who stole Lisa?”

The simulated boy twirled in his chair. “Who else? Troy Tobbler and his evil friend Slugboy.”

Again, his double astounded him. Who else, indeed? Clearly, the E-Pluribus model of him was flawed—it possessed too much insight. But before Bogdan could report this to the director and possibly keep his job, the faux Bogdan, out of the blue, raised his hand and saluted him. At first, Bogdan thought it was reminding him of Troy and Slugboy’s mockery on the steps, but it held the salute and locked eyes with him and continued to salute until Bogdan gave in and saluted back. Then it said, with creepy sincerity, “If you don’t believe in it yourself, how can you make it happen?”

“YOU ABOUT DONE in there?” Rusty called into the shower stall. “April says the bus is almost here.”

Bogdan blinked and looked around. He was in the shower. He got out, dried himself off, and donned the party togs April had given him. Rusty hung around making small talk and doing a bad job of pretending not to be watching to see if he was all right.

“I’m all right,” Bogdan said.

“I know it.”

IN THE SECURITY shack at McCormick Place, Commander Fred Londenstane turned away from a venue diorama and rubbed his eyes. On either side of him, twenty sullen pikes surveilled other dioramas, which were laid out in the same arrangement as the real rooms that they modeled. Altogether, Rendezvous filled three dozen halls and ballrooms. The largest was the multitiered Hall of Nations, the scale-model diorama of which would completely fill Fred’s living room at home.

Across the security shack, which itself was a commandeered ballroom, Gilles caught Fred’s eye, and Fred went over to see what was up. Gilles was watching the second largest display, the Welcome Hall, which was the Rendezvous entrance. Thirty conveyor belt scanways converged on Welcome Hall, feeding it four hundred Rondy-goers per minute. In the diorama, these people looked like multicolored ants marching across the marbelite floor and climbing the Grand Staircase to the adjoining Hall of Nations.

Of the thousands of attendees, a small fraction had flags pacing them over their heads. The flags marked potential troublemakers as identified by the McCormick Place mentar, MC, which also ran the scanways.

Gilles reached into the diorama and pointed to a man with not one flag but three. Fred skimmed the man’s doss: violent crimes and prison time, but no new offenses in the last seventy years. Fred zoomed in on the man’s face—no hint of hostility, only high expectations. He was accompanied by several men and women of the same charter.

“Let him pass,” Fred said, “but assign him his own bee.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Gilles replied. “Oh, and by the way—” He tilted his head at the large Hall of Nations diorama and two of the pikes assigned to surveil it. Fred had assigned half of his contingent of forty pikes to monitor the dioramas. This was just busy work—MC was fully able to monitor the entire complex. These two, instead of watching out for trouble, were engaged in it. They were zooming in on women in the upper tiers of the terraced building and viewing their naked bodies through their clothes. Fred went over and said, “Stop that behavior immediately.” The pikes’ ratlike eyes never blinked, but they returned to the women their clothing.

Fred continued around the room, chewing over this new bit of information—pikes, at least, were a type who liked hinks and weren’t shy about showing it.

ON THE STAIRS, Bogdan met Denny who was carrying Samson down from the roof. Samson seemed awake and clear-witted. “Sam’s going to Rondy with us,” Denny said. Apparently, so was the homcom bee, which tagged behind.

On the second-floor landing, April and Kale waited next to a lifechair. Denny placed Samson gently into it, and the chair introduced itself. “Hello, Myr Kodiak,” it said in a cheery voice while covering him with a smart tartan blanket. “I am a Maxilife Empowerment Chair—at your service! I am equipped to meet all of your special needs with feeding, autodoc, hygiene, colonies, massage, telecom, media, and transport functions. I will even scrub the local air of malodorants. I’m your home on wheels. You need never leave me again!”

“What a gruesome thought!” Samson said.

“I am currently coupling you into my toilet facilities. Please excuse any momentary discomfort.”

Samson said, “Can’t anyone make this thing shut up? Where’s Hubert? Hubert, where are you?”

Kale seemed waiting to pounce on that very question. He stood over the chair and said, “You want to know where Hubert is, Sam? Well, I’ll tell you. He’s been disappeared because of you and your stupid stunt.”

Samson wrinkled his brow. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kale, as usual.”

Kitty came down the stairs with the belt valet and said, “Sam, look what I have.” She handed the belt to the chair and said, “Stow it someplace safe, chair.”

Samson said, “What is it?”

“Your belt, Sam, with a bit of Hubert left in the valet.”

“Hubert?”

“Hello, Sam,” said the valet through the chair’s speakers. “I am taking control of this lifechair. I am not the full Hubert but only a Hubert terminal repeater with minimal attention units. You may call me Belt Hubert.”

“But you sound just like Hubert,” Samson said hopefully.

“That’s right, I do,” Belt Hubert said as it steered the chair down the remaining steps and out the front door. Snuggled in the chair’s basket, Samson was asleep by the time they boarded the bus.

Down the street, the Tobblers were also leaving for Rendezvous. Spanking new buses dropped out of the sky one after another to pick them up. The Kodiak bus, by comparison, was small and armored. It had mesh screens over its windows and suspicious stains on its seats. When the Kodiak bus departed, it did not spring into the air on fans, but labored heavily across town on wheels.

AT MCCORMICK PLACE, their bus was ensnared in traffic. They watched out of grimy windows as a sea of buses, vans, and taxis all headed for the same destination. Bogdan stared out the window and relived his day several times in exhaustive Hour 59:30 detail.

“Remember, people,” Kale announced over the PA, “you only get one chance to make a first impression.”

THE SPACE SET aside for the Kodiak booth was on the heavily congested third tier of the Hall of Nations. April uploaded her design specs to MC, and their empty booth space was quickly transmorphed by the hall’s scape system into the deck of a house barge. The Kodiak House Barge had been the defining product of the fledgling Kodiak charter eighty years before. The design, with its vertical axis turbines, desalination plant, hurricane and tsunami worthiness, fish-processing plant, and NBC hazmat filters, was still the world’s most popular house barge model, and it housed millions of people in floating burbs that lined most lakes and continental shelves. Though the Kodiaks had long ago been forced to liquidate all interest in the house barge design, it still served them for recruitment purposes.

Soon, a herd of deck chairs and buffet tables arrived and set themselves up on the holofied deck. Caterbeitors arrived and arranged finger foods and beverages on the tables. In no time at all, House Barge Kodiak was open for business. Kale gathered his distracted ’meets together for a pep talk. Megan and BJ were sniffing the sleeves of their party togs. The bus ride with Samson had ruined their new clothes.

“Right, then,” Kale said with enthusiasm. “Here we are! Let’s make the most of this opportunity. You all have your booth duty schedule. Be here on time. In the meantime, go out there and have fun, but for pity sake, try to meet people. Don’t clump up together. Mingle! Mingle! So go. Wait! Remember, if anyone should ask, tell them that Belt Hubert is really Hubert.”

“I am Belt Hubert,” the valet said from the chair, which arrived with Rusty and the sleeping Samson. Samson’s scanner waiver had meant a detour through a bypass security station where he was assigned a second monitor bee. “I am only a pale approximation of Hubert Prime.”

“Yes, we know that, dear,” Kitty said to the chair. “Now shut up and don’t say that again.”

Already, Samson’s odor was causing consternation among chartists at neighboring booths. Kale gave April a told-you-so look, and April said, “Kitty, why don’t you take Sam down to the open-air beer garden.” But just then Kitty spied a group of children playing a game of tag, and off she skipped to join them.

April sighed and said, “Boggy?”

BOGDAN WOVE DOGGEDLY through aisles and aisles of charter booths, tailed by Samson’s chair and two homcom bees. He had just swallowed his sixth Alert! and he felt he had a lot to report: The keepers of soup pots and trad vals have gone all out to greet us. Here are the legions of viridian-green-taupe—at your service! The champions of blue-orange-green—at your service, myr! The disciples of red-black-gray—at your service, myr! And followers of rainbows glimpsed but not recognized—Lisa would know them all—bow to you, myr, and wish you and your retinue a happy Rondy—at least until Sam’s ripeness catches up with us and then everyone makes potty faces.

So we keep moving and talk to no one, down endless galleries of tarnished promises where we see the same prayer on every lip: Only grant us one more transplant farm, one more stone quarry, one more popular bentwood chair design, and this time we’ll do a better market plan.

Oh, kettlers of boiling green peanuts and smithies of decorative iron window grating and balustrades. Oh, makers of wooden drums with stretched reindeer hide (and shaped like little Oships!) and distillers of crushed rose petals, yarrow stalk, and eucalyptus leaves. Your cash cows lay on their sides, bloated and black, yet you keep pulling at their putrid teats. When will you give it a rest?

Bogdan halted when he saw the Kodiak booth. He had been walking in a big circle. From the distance, their booth
did
look like the roof deck of a house barge. The holo even rolled a little with imaginary swells. Francis and Barry, not the Kodiaks’ most auspicious greeters, lounged on deck chairs, eating up the cheese plate. But since no visitors appeared to be coming aboard anyway—

We were never a seagoing charter, though we lived on the water off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. In 2054, thirteen women and nineteen men, employees at the Kodiak Elevator Space Port Authority, grew disgruntled with their KESPA housing and decided to move out. But there was a housing shortage on the island, so they organized a co-op to buy and convert a factory barge into a floating residential condo. They had to tie it up along a section of cliff face near Kaguyak, where the tidemark on the rocks was the only beach, and their floating home lay fully exposed to Pacific storms in the winter and the monsoons of summer solstice.

Those were more confident times, the decade before the Outrage, the decade when people first began to realize that they would live forever.

The thirty-two Kodiak Island plankholders were able engineers and confident designers, and in the three-year process of perfecting their condo craft, they also created an egalitarian community, one they would later formalize with a social charter (and, presumably, the aluminum stock pot).

Bogdan turned and headed for the nearest down pedway. On the next tier down in the Hall of Nations he hurried past the first booth. Albacore chartists (white-yellow-white) and their darling transgenic swine, showing off restless lumps under baggy skin. Gonads-for-hire. Rent-a-wombs. Their human medical trials rarely returned death verdicts—and the compensation was excellent. Thanks, but no thanks.

Next, a double booth doing banner business—Charter Long (brown-black-red)—the merger masters of last resort. Swallow your house whole, no questions asked. Greetings, Kodiak. The beevine says your house might be “going
Long
” soon. Thanks, but no thanks. Good-bye. So
Long
.

Bogdan turned a corner and spied the Beadlemyren booth at the end of a row. It appeared to be a micromine wellhead sunk into a compacted trash heap. A crowd of about a hundred chartists were milling around in front of a crew shack, where three Beadlemyren, in their black robes, stood behind a counter and answered questions. Not the same Beadlemyren from dinner last night. Bogdan’s curiosity about Wyoming was strong, but he considered the snoring, stinking lifechair behind him. A badge of honor, for sure, but one that might be better worn on a different sleeve.

Bogdan took the pedway down to the main floor where he found a site map and touched the beer garden icon. A candy-striped usher line issued from under his shoes and stretched out across the thronging hall. He followed its meandering course through and around exhibits and kiosks. Hail to Charter Jiff (red-white-green), the flagship of our Great Chartist Movement, who owns extruder recipes to practically everything and boasts of conveniently located outlets everywhere, including our own pirate-infested building on Howe Street.