Counting Heads (23 page)

When the slug crept toward Mary, however, she dropped her nightgown on it and retreated to the gel stall. Fred shook his head and freed the slug from her clothing. “Honestly, Mary,” he said, “you’re begging for trouble. What’s got into you?”

“Funny you should ask,” she said and turned on the mist, drowning out all conversation.

The slug, undeterred, crept up the glass door to the stall’s slugway near the ceiling. Like it or not, the slug would have its taste. Fred, meanwhile, decided he’d better use the face dresser before Mary finished her shower. He sat under the boxy appliance and said, “Fred’s party setting.” He didn’t need to use a mannequin; he had only three faces—house, work, and party—and he never altered them. He lowered the dresser and buried his head in its soft, warm folds. It quickly washed, shaved, toned, and made up his face, while at the same time hydrating his skin and trimming his hair. Fred bit down for a peppermint ultrasound mouth scrub.

When Fred removed the dresser, his own pint-sized figure was posing in the mirror. It wore alternating styles and colors of leisure suits.

“That one,” he said, picking a jaunty, plum-colored crepe jumpsuit that would match Mary’s getup. The little Fred in the mirror took a step forward, grinned, and turned on its heel.

To my cloned brothers: we are one handsome son of a bitch
.

In the bead car next to Bogdan, a man was scrunched up against the window, fast asleep. Bogdan, too, was being lulled by the gentle swaying of the speeding train, when there was a click, and his neighbor’s car unhitched and hurtled itself down a side tunnel. A moment later, another car dropped from an injection ramp and snapped into place next to him. His new neighbor, across two sheets of unbreakable glassine, was a woman with see-through skin. She was drumming her fingers on the armrest of her seat, and Bogdan became hypnotized by her tendons and muscles sliding over each other. When the woman noticed him staring, she seemed offended, though with a see-through face it was hard to tell. In any case, she opaqued her window.

Bogdan didn’t care. He was lost in a daydream. Although his session in the Aria Ranger ended before he and the weird sim reached the inhabited core of Trailing Earth, his next assignment was just as outstanding. The sim, in his green and red overalls, reappeared and said, “Hello again, Bogdan. Care to visit the future?”

Bogdan had looked around. They were alone in an E-Pluribus auditorium, not in a spaceship.

“Yah sure, why not?”

“Splendid. Now imagine this. Four hundred years have elapsed. You’re a plankholder aboard an Oship on its way to a new home system. Let’s go visit the bridge.”

A moment later they were standing in a room the size of a soccer field. There were dozens of young people in cool uniforms attending to a forest of flat monitors and control panels. In the center of the colossal room floated a giant scale model of an Oship.

“Here’s the decade captain,” the Meewee sim said as a young woman approached them. She was stunningly beautiful. As beautiful as Annette Beijing, if that was possible. She stopped in front of them, placed her hands on her shapely hips, and examined Bogdan from head to toe.

“Ah, Merrill,” she said, “you have a knack for picking the finest crew. Won’t you please introduce us.”

“Gladly,” the Meewee sim said. “Captain Suzette, I’m pleased to introduce Plankholder Bogdan Kodiak, one of our most promising young jump pilot cadets.”

“Welcome to the bridge of the ESV
Garden Charter
, Cadet Kodiak,” the captain said. “Merrill has asked me to give you a tour, and I thought we’d start right here in the command center. That sound acceptable?”

“Perfectly,” Bogdan said, his voice threatening to crack.

“Excellent.”

The Meewee sim said, “Well, Bogdan, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of our good captain. Till next time—” The sim dissolved into twinkling stars and disappeared.

“That’s a fine man,” Captain Suzette said, looking wistfully at the spot Meewee had occupied. “I hope you realize how lucky you are that he’s taken a shine to you.” She motioned for Bogdan to join her in front of the mammoth holo Oship. “Let’s begin with ship propulsion. I suppose you know about the Oship torus.”

The model Oship towered over him like a ten-story building. “Certainly,” Bogdan said, straining to remember what Meewee had said about it in the earlier session. “Uh, a magnetic trap for particle beams from a solar harvester.”

The gorgeous captain glanced at him admiringly. “Well put,” she said. “Let’s start with the harvesters. Back home in the system surrounding Sol—” She made gestures as she spoke, and the Oship model shrank to a pinpoint in an upper corner of the huge scape, making way in the center for a large dazzling star. Bogdan shielded his eyes against its intensity.

“Here, let me dampen that,” the captain said and twirled her finger. Dampened, the sun resembled a ball of squirming pink noodles. Girdling its northern hemisphere was a loose ring of black specks.

“Those are Heliostream harvesters,” Captain Suzette continued. “They’re as far out as Mercury orbit but above Sol’s equatorial plane. And of course, to be able to see the harvesters at all in this scape, I’ve had to scale them up to the size of Jupiter.”

“Of course,” Bogdan said.

“All right, let’s sketch in the rest of the system.” She pointed her finger here and there, and planets and habplat and fabplat colonies appeared, including a blue-and-white-mottled marble representing Earth.

“The harvesters capture the raw energies of Sol and transfer them to where they can be useful. Ready?” She snapped her fingers, and a thick spiderweb of colored threads shot out in all directions from the ring of solar harvesters. Most of them terminated at Earth. “The white ones are microwave beams which are converted to electricity, the red ones are laser, the yellow ones are streams of hydrogen plasma, and the green one there—do you know what that is?”

The green thread she indicated led directly to the tiny Oship in the upper corner. “That would be our particle mass beam,” Bogdan said.

“Excellent!” the captain said merrily. She waved her hands to close the Sol system and return the Oship model to its original imposing size. “Which leads us to our torus, which is, as you have already pointed out, a fortified electromagnetic force field that converts particle beams striking it into motive force.” As she spoke, a wire diagram, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe, appeared in the donut hole of the Oship. In the exact center, the lines bulged forward, like a finger poking a rubber sheet. “For the last four hundred years,” the captain continued, “Heliostream has been directing a narrow beam of charged photonic particles at Planet 2013LS in the Ursae Majoris system. That’s our destination. We have positioned the torus of our ship on the beam so as to ride it.” She pointed at the center of the donut hole. “That convexity you see in our torus is the particle beam striking it. Most of its energy is being converted into propulsion—we’ve attained 0.367 light speed—while a fraction is bled off to supply ship’s power. And, of course, the beam doubles as an ultra-broad communication band between us and Earth.”

Bogdan said, “So, how is old Earth doing four hundred years on?”

The sparkle seemed to leave Captain Suzette’s eyes. “Ah, Cadet Kodiak, the news hasn’t been good for a long time now. Our dear mother planet has suffered terribly since our launch, especially during the Second Phage War of 2184. Earth has been poisoned so extensively that nothing can live on its surface. Humans must live deep underground, or on Mars, the moons of Jupiter, or a number of orbital habplats. There are actually more people alive aboard the
Garden Charter
and our sister Oships than in all of Sol System combined. It would appear that we launched none too soon. We’re very, very lucky we had the wisdom to make the choices that we did.”

“But aren’t you afraid the Heliostream beam will fail without Earth?”

“Not really,” said the captain. “Heliostream is robotically controlled. We might have suffered if it had failed a century ago, but by now a beam failure would add less than ten years to our travel time. You see, we’ve almost reached the beam-off point.”

She waved her lovely hand, and the grand display switched to a view of open space and millions of stars. A broad arc connected two stars. Half of the arc glowed green, half red, and between them was a narrow colorless gap.

“When Heliostream cuts the beam in two years, we’ll travel by inertia for about seventy-five years, as represented by the gap there. The ship will use its fusion reactors for power during that time. We’ll lose gravity here in the lattice frame, though the occupied hab drums will begin to rotate and generate their own gravity.”

“But, but—” Bogdan said, questions piling up in his mind.

“Oh, I know what you’re going to ask,” the captain said. “Everyone does. If we’re the first ones out here, where does the braking beam come from? Right?”

That wasn’t it, but Bogdan nodded his head anyway. “And what do you mean, occupied hab drums? I thought your passengers were corpsicles.”

“I see you’re a thinker, and I like that in my officers. First, the beam. In the year 2136, a year before our own launch, the Garden Earth Consortium sent a flotilla of advance ships ahead of us. They were small, robotically controlled, and had chemical/fusion boosters. They were capable of acceleration speeds greater than a human could withstand. Most of them have already reached Ursae Majoris fifty years ago. They immediately scouted our destination planet to confirm its suitability for terrestrial life. By the way, Planet 2013LS has exceeded our most optimistic projections. We have stunning pictures, if you’d care to view them.

“We already have confirmation that some of the advance ships have made successful planetfall and are now constructing an energy, transportation, and habitation infrastructure on the planet in preparation for our arrival in about four hundred seventy-five years. By the time we enter orbit, there’ll be modern, fully functional cities waiting for us to inhabit them. The remaining advance ships are building solar harvesters (or in this case—ursine harvesters) to generate our braking particle beam.”

The Oship model returned, and four of the hab drums were highlighted. “As to your second question, no, not everyone is frozen. Our passengers have the option of spending an average of two hundred years of the voyage in a quickened state if they like. We can have up to twenty percent of our population active at any time. Currently, there are 93,545 persons occupying those four drums. That one has a town with a population of 62,000, while the others contain twenty-nine smaller settlements and thousands of rural homesites.”

A young officer approached them bearing a slate for the captain. He smiled at Bogdan and nodded. The captain studied the slate a moment and said, “Cadet Kodiak, I must attend to business. Perhaps you’d like to continue our tour with Lieutenant Perez?”

“Yes, ma’am, I would.”

“In that case, Lieutenant, show Cadet Kodiak anything he’d care to see, and Cadet Kodiak—welcome aboard!” She saluted him, and when he snapped to return the salute, he noticed that he, too, was wearing a cool uniform.

“I bet you’ll want to see our combat training course,” the young officer said, leading Bogdan to a companionway, “or the officers’ club. Or maybe our private nude beach.”

TOO SOON, BOGDAN’S bead car split off and rolled into Library Station, and the boy was roused from his reverie. As his car rolled to a stop on the platform, he stuck his Kodiak patch—brown-yellow-white—to the shoulder of his jumpsuit and, with an oppressive sense of loss, rejoined reality. No sooner had he decarred and started across the platform than a man stepped on his foot. Bogdan howled in pain and surprise, while the man merely inspected the sole of his shoe. Satisfied, the man looked down at Bogdan and said, “What’s your problem?”

“You feckin’ stepped on my foot!” Bogdan said. “That’s my problem!”

The man pursed his lips and said, “It’s not my fault you choose to be so small.”

“I’m not so small you can’t see me!”

The man shrugged and turned to go, though not without first reaching down to rub Bogdan’s head. Bogdan swatted his hand away and screamed, “You practically run me over, and then you want a rub? Are you
crazy
?”

The man strolled away without another word. Bogdan limped toward the exit. It felt like his toe was broken. A transit bee dropped down to him and said, “Myr Kodiak, do you require medical attention?”

“No!” Bogdan said without stopping. “But that
asshole
over there should be arrested for assault!”

“Our records show the mishap clearly to be an accident. However, if you require medical attention, be informed that this CPT station maintains a fully stocked crisis intervention booth and makes it available at reduced cost to ticketed travelers. In addition to a clinic class autodoc, we offer crisis counseling. Perhaps you’d like counseling for your recent experience.”

Tears welled in Bogdan’s eyes, and he savagely wiped them away. He ignored the bee and left the station. Outside, the evening air was warm. Hollyholos did not troll his neighborhood since no one could afford to interact with them. There were few kiosks and fewer sidewalk emitters. At the station exit, however, was the nightly bumbazaar, a line of homeless people trying to peddle a sad collection of worn-out junk. One old woman sat on a stool next to an antique bathroom scale. A handlettered sign taped over the scale said, “Yer Wait—UDC 1/7.” A millionth of a yoodie to step on a broken scale. She looked up at Bogdan hopefully, but he despised her and her poverty.

Despite his throbbing toe, Bogdan began to jog home, shouting out, “Desist! Desist!” to the bees as he went.

WHEN BOGDAN TURNED the corner onto Howe Street, he noticed two Tobblers engaged in unusual behavior on the sidewalk in front of the Kodiak building. One Tobbler was hunched over something on the ground, and the other was peering over his shoulder. The air around them was thick with curious bees. Bogdan’s own curiosity got the better of him, and he went over to see what was happening.

“Hello, young Kodiak,” the crouching Tobbler groaned as he straightened up.

“Hello, Houseer Dieter,” Bogdan replied. “What’s up?”

“What’s down you should ask,” said the houseer.

The other Tobbler, whose name was Troy, was carefully pouring a viscous liquid from a foil pouch into a crack in the sidewalk. He didn’t even glance at Bogdan. He was a boy, a real boy, not a retroboy. The dozen years that he had been walking the earth were all the years he could claim. Technically, Bogdan wasn’t a retroboy either, but an arrested boy because he had stopped his maturation before reaching adolescence, but that fact didn’t seem to draw the boys any closer together.

When the pouch was empty, Troy Tobbler put on a pair of utility spex and peered closely into the crack. “Nothing,” he said.

“Let it seep some more,” said the houseer.

“Still nothing,” the boy said after another minute, whereupon the houseer removed a rubber mallet from a tool chest and began thumping the sidewalk on either side of the crack. “That helps,” said the boy. “Go that way,” he said, pointing toward the charterhouse.

The houseer beat the ground in a line toward the building and then began tapping the brick side of the building, itself.

“Good! Stop!” said his companion. “I have the little vermin. Come take a look.” He gave the spex to his houseer and looked up at Bogdan. “What are you staring at?” he said.