Counting Heads (48 page)

Then
another
officer shows up, a russ who doesn’t shout but speaks in a calm voice, Officer Pells, let the boy down. The pike has to think about it. Officer Pells, I’m ordering you to release that boy at once.

Yes! Sir! The pike bounces Troy once by his arm and there’s a sharp crack. Then he drops him on the floor.

They disarm the pike and take him away. The russ unglues us, and a medic attends to Troy’s arm. The russ says, That’s quite a nose you have there, son. Then he notices my colors and he sniffs me and says, Another Kodiak?

At the Roosevelt Clinic, the lights were low in Feldspar Cottage. The silent scent clock marked the passage of time: lavender, mushroom brie, the sea. There had been no medical rounds since midnight, and the night evangelines were slowly succumbing to the seduction of sleep. Only the skull’s eyes were wide open, but cloudy and dull.

Cyndee yawned and whispered, “I’m going for coffee. Want some?” In the chair next to her, Ronnie shook her head. Cyndee stood up and stretched her arms over her head. When she glanced at the daybed, the Ellen jacket’s feet were twitching. “Myr Starke?” Cyndee said. She reached to touch her shoulder, forgetting it was a jacket. “Ronnie, get the vurt gloves!”

Ronnie was already out of her chair. She dashed to the table and fumbled for gloves in the dark. Suddenly all the cottage lights came on, the door swung open, and Concierge strode in with a procession of physicians, Jennys, medtechs, and carts. They surrounded the tank and set frantically to work. Wee Hunk appeared too, in a tiger-striped bathrobe. He glanced at the tank but joined the evangelines at the daybed.

“Hello, Ellen,” he said to the jacket. “It’s me, Wee Hunk.”

The Ellen jacket’s only response was to arch its back and stretch its face in a grimace of pure, uncut anguish.

NOISE AND BRIGHT light woke him up. Meewee rubbed his eyes and struggled to remember where he was.

“This is happening live at the clinic,” a voice said. Meewee sat up in bed and swung his feet to the cold concrete floor. There was a large diorama of the cottage interior in the middle of his bunker bedroom, and Wee Hunk appeared both within and beside it. Inside the cottage, a throng of medical staff surrounded the tank, while nearby, the Ellen jacket was frozen in a rigid pose.

“What’s happening?”

“The doctors are uncertain,” Wee Hunk said, “but it would appear that the neurological dynamics within Ellen’s brain have shifted catastrophically.”

“What does that mean?” It was chilly in the bunker. Meewee felt around with his feet for his slippers, and he draped blankets over his shoulders.

“It would appear that Ellen’s awareness is trapped in an endless moment of terror.”

“My God! Can they stop it?”

“They’re attempting to, even as we watch.”

Inside the scape, Concierge left the group at the tank and joined Wee Hunk and the evangelines at the daybed. He looked down at the jacket and shook his head.

“What’s he saying?” Meewee said.

The diorama zoomed to the daybed and the audio shifted to Concierge. “—cafeteria lounge. I’ll summon you when it’s all right to return.”

The evangelines looked doubtful. Ronnie said, “Our instructions are to remain here.” She glanced at Wee Hunk for confirmation, but he merely watched her.

Concierge also appraised Wee Hunk’s lack of reaction, and he continued. “That may be so, Myr Ryder, but inside the clinic, I have the final say. Now run along.”

The evanglines glanced nervously at each other. In the bunker, Meewee said, “Aren’t you going to back them up?”

“I’ll step in if I have to, but I want to see how they react. After all, how do they know that that’s really me standing there? Besides, I’m willing to bet that these evangelines won’t need me. Would you like odds?”

“Go along now,” Concierge said dismissively. Behind him the doctors were shouting orders, and the control unit displayed a large pulsing brain.

The evangelines went to the door but stopped before exiting and turned around. Cyndee said, “I’m calling for arbitration. Nick?”

Nicholas, the Applied People mentar, appeared suddenly in the cottage as a dashing young man in formal evening clothes. He wiped the corner of his mouth with a silk serviette and said, “I’m afraid Concierge is acting within its rights. Although your client has ordered you to remain in the cottage with those silly hats, in point of law such orders have no force. Like a captain of a ship at sea, Concierge is the final arbiter here, and so I am authorizing you to disobey your client’s orders. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m at dinner with Strombly Mahousa.” He vanished.

Meewee said, “Is that true? Concierge has such authority?”

Wee Hunk replied, “It’s a gray area. I can’t find enough case law to say definitively one way or the other. But that wasn’t Nick, only a clever forgery. This is Concierge’s simiverse, don’t forget.”

Not Nick? But it had looked and acted just like Zoranna’s mentar that Meewee knew so well. The thought occurred to him to challenge Wee Hunk’s identity.

In the cottage, the evangelines looked into each other’s frightened faces as into a mirror. They returned to the daybed and Cyndee said, “We refuse to leave.”

“Stay then,” Concierge said and returned to the tank.

The Wee Hunk in the diorama smiled at the evangelines then and said, “Well done, companions.”

Meewee said, “Why did Concierge do that? He knew you were watching. And he does it while Ellen is suffering a crisis. How monstrous!”

“Tactically, it’s an ideal time to probe the enemy’s weaknesses,” Wee Hunk replied. “I believe I would have tried something of the sort myself.”

That was too much; Meewee challenged the mentar in Starkese: “Now that I’m awake, are there any other news headlines I should know about? Do we have a plan yet?”

“I’m still weighing options,” Wee Hunk said, answering the challenge. “In the meantime, why don’t you return to bed. I probably didn’t need to awaken you to see this.”

“Not at all,” Meewee said and yawned. “I’m glad you did. And please wake me again if anything changes.”

“Good night, then,” Wee Hunk said, extinguishing the scape and himself.

Meewee returned to bed and stared skyward as his eyes attempted to adjust to the darkness. He no longer felt buried alive in the bunker. Instead, he felt like he was at the bottom of a deep well. “Ten lumens,” he said, and the room lit up with a dim, even glow, like moonlight on snow. He turned on his side and tried to sleep. After five long minutes he turned on his other side, with no better results. Finally, he sat up and found his robe and slippers and got out of bed. “Usher line to the lifts.” A faint orange line led out of the room. He followed it across the expanse of the bunker shelter to the blast doors, where Wee Hunk was waiting for him.

“Going somewhere?”

“Yes, I need air.”

“We can generate any kind of air you like down here. What do you prefer: meadow, rainstorm, deep forest?” When Meewee didn’t answer, Wee Hunk went on, “If I can’t protect you up in the manse, how in blazes am I supposed to protect you outdoors?”

“That’s my risk to take.”

“You are correct, Bishop. I consider you valuable in helping me free Ellen, but not indispensable. So, if you insist on exposing yourself to harm, be my guest.” With that he vanished again.

Meewee took the elevator up to the ground floor. He walked through dark, silent rooms to a set of french doors, opened them, and stepped out onto a patio. The air was crisp and laden with the perfume of life, which he doubted anyone could counterfeit.

Meewee strode across the moonlit patio to the lawn, where he removed his slippers and waded across dew-soaked grass to a gate. He hadn’t had a chance to explore the manse grounds and had no idea what lay beyond the gate.

he said in Starkese, trying to be as clear as possible. He wondered if that was enough for the literal-minded mentar.

Meewee put his slippers back on and went through the gate. One ghostly path led to another as he passed through fields of fragrant troutcorn and sunflowers. He came to a meadow in the shape of an hourglass. In each bulb of the hourglass was a large pond. He went to the nearer pond and stood on its bank. A chorus of crickets filled the meadow with ratchety chatter. There was a splash, and as Meewee watched, a large fish leaped out of the dark water and seemed frozen for an instant in the moonlight, before falling again and slapping the water with the side of its body. A female, no doubt, loosening her roe sacks. When Meewee was a child, his family farmed fish too. Nostalgia and sadness filled him, and he felt unequal to the task that Eleanor had left him. “I’m sorry,” he said to the night. “I try, but I am not smart enough.”

BOGDAN PAUSED AT the bottom of the stairs. Never in his life had the charterhouse seemed so lonesome. Everyone was still at Rondy. At least he had convinced them not to cut their own enjoyment short on account of him. The McCormick Place medic had applied a moleskin to his face to set his nose and relieve the swelling. Her autodoc had found no internal injuries, and the russ security officer seemed only too glad to be rid of him.

Bogdan considered buying a Sooothe at the NanoJiffy, but his latest Alert! was about to run out anyway, so he climbed the creepy stairs. He forgot to stop at seven and found himself at his old room above nine. It was sealed with a new metal door with a flashing NO ENTRY glyph. The door was locked, so he continued up to the roof.

Bathed in moonlight, the garden exhaled audibly, and the city around him grumbled. Across town in Elmhurst, E-Pluribus struck camp and moved with Annette Beijing to a city beyond his reach. The pirates in the bricks sang work songs as they mined Calumet clay, and the Oships left the solar system without him. The Beadlemyren and Tobblers fell in love and got married on top of a trash heap. If only he’d been able to connect with one good punch, it might have all been worth it.

When the Alert! ran out, there was no time to go down to Rusty’s room, so Bogdan slogged to the garden shed and unrolled a seed mat on the floor. He was asleep before he fell on it and he slept soundly for the next thirty hours.

FRED ARRIVED HOME at 3:00
AM
, thinking only of sleep. The moment he entered the apartment, he sensed that something was wrong.

The living room was serving a self-teaching lesson on “The Regeneration Rates of Necrotic Neurotransmitters,” but Mary wasn’t in the room, and her spot on the couch was cool to the touch. The door to the bedroom was open, and the lights were on, but there was no sound.

The slipper puppy came over and waited expectantly. Fred sat down and traded his shoes for slippers. Only then did he catch the whiff of Samson’s odor on his own clothes. He sniffed his hand.

When Fred went into the bedroom, Mary was sitting up in bed, reading something. He said, “Hi, there,” and she flicked her eyes at him in the most perfunctory of greetings. He leaned over to see what she was reading. Poetry. For an evangeline to be reading poetry at three o’clock in the morning wasn’t a good sign, but not necessarily a bad sign either.

Fred went to the bathroom to tear off his clothes. He took a hot, pelting shower with plenty of gel. He scrubbed his hands. He exfoliated in the dryer. Had his hair trimmed. Shaved. Used an extra dollop of cologne.

When he returned to the bed, the lights were off, and Mary lay with her back to him. That could be either bad or good. He climbed in and spooned himself against her. She was very warm. After a couple of minutes, he whispered, “How was your day?”

For a while, it seemed that she was asleep, but then she said, “A very full and successful day, though exhausting. What about you? How did the chartist convention go?”

Fred thought about the event. “A little bumpy toward the end, but, overall, a wild success and a feather in my cap.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”

They lay still so long that Fred was drifting off when Mary said, “Fred, what
is
that odor?”

His fastidious toilette and the extra cologne had proven no match for Samson’s essence. Fred pondered how much he could tell her. Although he hadn’t worked for the Starke family for forty years, there was no statute of limitations on client confidentiality. Fortunately, there was no ban on talking about common knowledge.

“Did you see that guy on the Skytel last night?”

“Mmm.”

That was all he said. If she was curious enough, she could connect the dots on her own.

On Thursday morning, Reilly Dell was again on duty at South Gate when Mary arrived, only this time at the outer gate next to the brick drive. He greeted Mary warmly and inquired after Fred.

Mary passed through the gatehouse scanway, made her way around the barriers, and emerged in South Gate Plaza during the quarter hour of baked bread. On Mineral Way in front of Feldspar Cottage, she heard a strange sound, a sustained, dissonant chord. It grew louder as she approached the cottage door. The only thing it could be was some piece of therapeutic equipment. So she was surprised to discover the source of the sound to be the Ellen jacket lying on the daybed. Its arms were outstretched, its neck and spine arched back painfully, tendons taut as wires, and on its face a look of wild-eyed terror. “EeeEeeEee,” it screamed without pause. Mary searched the room for some explanation.

There were two male medtechs wearing elbow-length vurt gloves crouched on either side of Ellen’s daybed. Nearby, a gaggle of medical professionals, including Coburn, surrounded the tank and controller. The night evangelines, Cyndee and Ronnie, sat in the far corner. None of them had noticed Mary’s arrival.

The two medtechs at the daybed were rubbing the Ellen jacket here and there on its torso with their gloved hands. Their action must have been for some legitimate purpose, but it struck Mary as lewd. Then the medtechs each grasped one of the jacket’s outflung arms and tried to bend them to its sides. They seemed to be tearing them from their sockets. And all the while the jacket wailed its ululating cry.

“Stop that!” Mary shouted at them. “Leave her alone.”

The medtechs glanced at her and continued their efforts.

“Make them stop!” she cried to the others.

Medtech Coburn said, “Butt out, clone.”

Mary covered her ears but could not muffle the jacket’s cry. Outdoors, down the garden path, up the shady lane, across the athletic field, to the little pond she ran. Renata was already there, sitting on a wooden bench, contemplating the water. The two evangelines were at first surprised and then embarrassed to see each other. They had both arrived at the cottage within minutes of each other, and they had both fled to the same sanctuary.

Mary sat on the bench next to her sister. “So, they have you back on mornings,” she said.

“Looks like it.”

A mother duck swam across the sun-dappled pond, followed by a string of ducklings.

“The screaming upset me,” Renata said.

“Me too. I don’t know how Cyndee and Ronnie can stand it.”

Concierge strolled up the path and smiled when he saw them. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “I apologize for not forewarning you.”

“What’s happening to Ellen?”

“Without getting too technical, the jacket is expressing a condition similar to oculogyria. Note the position of the arms, the fixed stare, the cry. What you saw is a somatic response to a single thought pattern, probably a memory engram, that is restimulating itself in a continuous loop. When a human body does this, it can maintain a cataleptic fixation for hours, but eventually the muscles tire and the body collapses. A jacket, however, never tires; it needn’t even pause to draw breath.

“Of course, it’s not the jacket experiencing this but Ellen’s own brain. I think we can safely say that Ellen is no longer comatose, but her new mental state is just as grave.”

Mary said, “What’s causing it?”

“That’s uncertain. At the time it commenced, we were attempting to restore Ellen’s ideomimetic constellation.”

“Ideomimetic constellation?” Mary said. “You mean her ego?”

Both Renata and Concierge looked at Mary in surprise, and Concierge said, “Someone’s been doing her homework. Yes, Myr Skarland, her ego, or
focus foci
, or spirit, or soul, or any of the hundreds of other fanciful terms humans have applied to it over the centuries. It’s that particular and unique pattern of synaptic discharge that occurs inside our brains whenever we think, ‘Here I am. Here I am.’ In humans, it originates in the neocortex and branches downward into the evolutionarily more ancient lobes and encompasses the whole brain.

“In any case, we may have stimulated a memory engram instead. We believe it to be a part of her death experience, an impression not yet processed into long-term memory when her brain was flash frozen.”

“Can’t you make it stop?”

“That’s what the medtechs were attempting to do when you arrived.”

The evangelines exchanged a sheepish glance and rose to return to the cottage.

IT WAS WELL after noon, and most of the ’meets were still in bed, but April had decided to keep the lifechair a few more days, and Rusty and Denny were clearing a path for it in the stairwell above three.

Samson had spent the night in the chair in the administrative outer office, and Kitty was there trying to feed him breakfast.

“I’m not hungry,” he insisted.

“I don’t care,” she said. “You’ll eat or else.”

“Maybe after I see Ellie.”

Kitty stirred his gruel impatiently.

“You promised,” Samson went on. “You thought I’d forget, but I told the belt to remind me.”

“Fine,” she replied, “but not before you eat.”

“Buy me a Gooeyduk and I’ll eat on the way.”

Kitty sighed and dropped the spoon on the tray. “Oh, all right!” she said and went down to the NanoJiffy. The chair followed her down and tried to leave the house without her, but the homcom bee blocked the door with a large Do Not Exit frame.

“See?” Kitty said. “The HomCom denies you permission. You’re under house arrest, remember?”

“I remember nothing of the sort. Onward, Belt!”

“This chair is incapable of disobeying a Command order,” Belt Hubert said.

Suddenly the frame vanished, and the bee dropped to the floor, inert.

“Good work, Belt.”

“Let me assure you, Sam, I was not responsible.”

“Mush, Belt, mush!”

The lifechair stepped over the fallen bee and left the house. Kitty expected to hear sirens at any moment. In all honesty, she, herself, was sorely curious to meet this famous daughter of Sam’s, and after half a minute of hesitation, she knocked the bee into a corner with the toe of her shoe, picked up her busking costume bag, and followed.

THE DECATUR TRAIN station was a few blocks from the Roosevelt Clinic. Kitty’s bead car arrived first. She swiped a route map and saw that Samson’s car was still a few minutes out. She went to wait near the stiles and watched commuters walking by. They were mostly iterant service people at this station and a few free-rangers. No charter members that she could tell.

Kitty scratched herself. Her arms and legs were raw where she’d been at them all morning. She knew that the retirement of the slugs had been too good to be true, for they’d been replaced with tiny mechs that resided under your skin, the so-called nitwork. They were supposed to be less intrusive than the slugs. And they weren’t supposed to itch.

Finally, the lifechair, with Belt Hubert at the helm, came into sight. It looked as though Sam had fallen asleep again. She didn’t wait for them but swiped herself out to the street. It was a fresh spring morning. What caught Kitty’s attention, though, was how much valuable litter lay in the gutter and along the pedway. A gleaner’s treasure trove: bits of plastic and composites, gravel, scraps of metal. Kitty resisted the urge to fill her pockets.

The lifechair rolled out of the Decatur station and joined Kitty on the pedway. She gave it her busking bag and skipped alongside. Soon, they turned a corner and exited the pedway. From here on there were streets and sidewalks and no pedways. Grand houses were concealed behind hedges and walls. The neighborhood had an eerie sense of flatness because there was nothing in sight taller than a tree. And the streets were picked absolutely clean of all debris, courtesy of lawn scuppers that lurked in the shrubbery and watched them go by.

“Kitty?” Samson said. He was awake again. He smiled beatifically when she peeked over the rim of the chair basket. “Where are we going?”

“Oh, Sam, I’m tired of telling you. Ask Belt Hubert.”

They passed under an iron arch and proceeded down a brick drive that was lined on the right with a tall hedge. To their left was an expanse of lawn, a greensmoat that encircled the clinic.

In the wall at the bottom of the drive was a wide gate of pressed air. Behind a sentry window in the gate, a russ guard said, “Morning, myren. Can I help you?”

When Sam didn’t respond, Kitty addressed the russ, “This gentleman is Samson Kodiak. His daughter, Ellen Starke, is a patient here. We’ve come to visit her.”

The russ, Dell by his name patch, said, “Please wait while I ask Concierge.” A moment later a slot opened in the pressure gate, and the russ waved them in. He seemed startled when the odor hit him.

“Samson can’t go through a scanner,” Kitty hastened to say as they entered the gatehouse. “He has a special health waiver. The chair can show it to you.”

“No need, myr. We won’t be using the scanner.” The russ escorted them to a set of double doors with a sign above it that read, “Arbor Gate.” Behind the doors stretched a corridor with an usher line twinkling along the wall.

“Where does it lead?” Kitty asked.

“To Concierge’s office,” said the russ.

The lifechair with Samson led the way, and she followed. The russ closed the doors behind them, and they followed the usher line down identical corridors. The usher line beckoned, and they followed. Finally, at the end of what seemed to be the longest corridor of all stood a lone door labeled “CONCIERGE.” It opened to admit them and closed behind them, and they found themselves back on the street outside the iron arch.

“Son of a bitch,” Kitty said.

“My navionics must be malfing,” said Belt Hubert.

“No kidding?”

THE BLUE TEAM entered the gatehouse hidden in the hankie. The hankie was not successful in reaching the prize, but it had fulfilled its purpose, and the Blue Team abandoned it before it exited the gatehouse. The bee and wasp concealed themselves on the gatehouse ceiling.

KITTY AND BELT Hubert spent the next hour trying to reach the gatehouse again, but every time they launched forward down the drive, they seemed to veer left to the greensmoat. They tried to compensate by steering to the right, but then they were in the hedge. It was as if the gatehouse lay in a direction unavailable to them, and they found themselves back each time on the street outside the arch. Belt Hubert even tried aiming the chair at the gatehouse and locking its steering, but that got them no closer.

Samson slept the whole time. Finally, Kitty gave up and told Belt Hubert to steer them a course back to the train station.

“It’s an interesting conundrum,” Belt Hubert said as they rolled along the sidewalk. “If I was my whole self, I’m sure I could solve it.”

KITTY’S BEAD CAR was approaching Millennium Park when she got a message from Belt Hubert that Samson had diverted his car to the Museum of Art and Science. So she fed the new destination to her own car.

Kitty strolled through the main lobby of the MAS, past its trademark display of life-size dancing elephants made of shaped water. She knew exactly where to look for him.

She strode past galleries of traveling collections, past the rondophone display in which sounds made by historical persons and events—the actual sounds, not recordings—traveled in continuous loops and could be heard through a stethoscope.

She hastened through galleries of twenty-first-century art. Here were icky reminders of that troubled time: real babies splayed open like colorful little snowsuits, freeze-dried house pets dressed like prostitutes, and excrement from extinct rhinoceroses used as paint.

One twenty-first-century room was decked out as a banquet hall, the table covered in white linen and set with silver service and crystal wineglasses. A frame said that tickets to the “Next Last Supper with Bene Alvarez” were sold out. Each Thursday, artist Bene Alvarez hosted a gourmet dinner consisting of roasts, steak and kidney pies, pâtés, sausages, and all the trimmings. The meat came from his own body. Or rather, from his extensive personal organ bank. The odors drifting from the gallery were enticing, but Kitty hurried by.

There was another gallery where Kitty invariably lingered, though it was perhaps the creepiest of all the installations from that century. It was a simulated town house living room from eighty years ago with all the period furnishings and decoration intact. Standing next to a table piled high with wrapped gifts was a wedding couple, a bride and groom in all their formal finery, posing for their wedding simulacrum. They were flush with happiness, standing very still, and completely unaware that they weren’t real. The real wedding couple had broken their pose, returned to their guests, and lived out their lives a long time ago. It took the sim couple about a half hour to work this information out for themselves, an agonizing process, after which the museum staff reset them and started the whole thing over again. It was chilling, and Kitty could watch their repeating, painful revelation for hours—but not today. Kitty pushed on farther into the past, to the galleries of twentieth-century art. Here the work was tame by comparison. Statues that didn’t move and flat pictures that didn’t evolve. It was in this century that Samson Harger first made a name for himself. And it was here that she found him fast asleep in his lifechair in front of a wall-sized canvas of his own creation. Despite the chair’s airfiltering system, his odor had cleared other patrons from the gallery.