Counting Heads (32 page)

A tired commuter, a big man trapped in a little man’s body, arrived at Home Run station in Decatur by bead car. When the car came to a stop and the hatch popped open, the man stood up and stepped across the gap to the platform. On his way to the lobby, he switched on his jumpsuit, which began to twinkle in bright neon colors and flash to the rhythm of his footsteps. He threw back his shoulders and marched to the out stiles, smiling and greeting everyone he passed. His jumpsuit cast a wide circle of merry light about him. By the time he left the station in West Decatur, he was once again the popular guy he always knew himself to be.

To the Orange Team bee, however, the commuter was nothing more than a convenient hankie. The bee and one of its wasps crawled out from underneath his wide lapels and took to the air unnoticed. The team’s second wasp was riding a separate hankie from Bloomington and was a few minutes behind.

As the Orange bee and its wasp rose above the rooftops and flew to 2131 Line Drive, the bee finished coordinating with the teams already at the scene and the Legitimate Order Giver 2 who had recently made verified contact and taken command of the mechs. LOG2 had given them a new mission—to locate and tag the prize—and it designated Orange Team Bee as Fleet Leader. The fleet was composed of the remnants of Teams Green (one bee and wasp), Yellow (one bee and wasp), and Red (one beetle), in addition to Orange Bee and its own two wasps.

The target building was shielded and impenetrable to the limited scanning assets at the fleet’s immediate disposal. Orange Bee fed what they knew to its onboard scenario mill, as well as relaying it to LOG2. The fleet hadn’t been the first on the scene. Dozens of witness bees hiding in the foliage surrounding the house at 2131 had set up a covert grid. But the neighboring houses had sensed their network and assumed a defensive posture: informing their residents, summoning the neighborhood watch, and alerting the rest of the houses in the neighborhood. The area’s heightened alert status attracted media and homcom bees. Any chance of the fleet launching a sneak attack was ruined, another fact to feed LOG2 and the scenario mill.

The mechs of Orange Bee’s fleet were in various states of disrepair, having already completed their primary objectives earlier in the day. None of the wasps had a full charge of weapons plasma, and Red Beetle had nothing but a pinch of fish food flakes left in its carapace. More grist for the scenario mill.

WHEN THE SECOND Orange wasp caught up and was integrated into the fleet, LOG2 ordered the attack. Orange Bee, choosing from among the mill’s best results, pointcast its most promising plan to its multihued armada. The mechs made a stealthy ground approach from different directions, taking advantage of local cover. When they reached the house, they explored its foundation for cracks or gaps. Red Beetle found one, and Green Wasp widened it to fashion an entry point. It was located at the seam between the clinker sill and brick foundation. It was ideal, and the mechs crawled through into the basement of the house. Orange Bee was last in line. It entered only partway and took a position with a clear line of sight to the street.

The interior walls and floors of the house were made of construction foam slab. Though the material was thin and light, it was soundproof and opaque to EM transmission. Therefore, to keep their comm open, the mechs linked up into a pointcasting beevine, with seven joints and Orange Bee as anchor. They extended up the basement stairs and probed the main floor. With the number of corners they had to negotiate, the vine could not reach every room, and twice they incorporated household mirrors to extend their range. As they crawled along ceilings and walls to map and survey, they passed their readings back to Orange Bee, which scattercast it to LOG2 while also milling it itself. There were no humans detectable in the house, no fauna whatsoever, for that matter. None of the house’s detectable machines seemed smarter than a houseputer.

When the beevine, with Yellow Bee at the head, reached the main parlor, it discovered two provocative objects. One was a procedure cart and the other a glass-topped coffee table. Yellow Bee ran every scan at its disposal on the objects. The cart—titanium steel, smart, with multiple servo appendages of unknown function—stood at one end of the room. Orange Bee, watching the pictures, could not fit such a cart into any of its library models of things found in residential households.

The coffee table, next to the cart, was a slab of glassine resting on a four-legged base. The base was made of military-grade resins normally used in body armor.

Orange Bee, sitting in the gap between the sill and foundation, made a best guess decision and ordered Red Beetle to advance up the beevine, trading places with the other mechs until it was within the parlor.

When all was in place, Orange Bee ordered,
Prepare to launch
Paintbrush.

All six mechs countersigned,
Paintbrush
.

Launch
.

Red Beetle’s carapace snapped open, and the beetle dove into the open room, flying straight for the procedure cart. At the same moment, the other mechs broke from the beevine and flew pell-mell through the rooms and halls, dodging in all directions. Except for Orange Bee, which stayed at its post and began to broadcast a message to the world at large in all bands and channels at its disposal.

A millisecond later, the glassine top of the coffee table exploded upward as the resin base sprang up on four legs and began to spit rapid-fire laser pulses from cannon mounted along its legs. Red Beetle was hit first and incinerated before it could reach the cart. Flakes trailing from its carapace drifted to the floor. More laser fire cut through the walls and floor like wax, hitting and destroying all of the fleeing mechs in seconds.

The four-legged mech turned its fire on the Orange bee but couldn’t penetrate the clinker sill covering it. Meanwhile, the bee continued to broadcast. The mech bounded out of the parlor and down the hall, crashed through the cellar door and down the steps until it had a better firing angle. Then it easily picked off the last member of the fleet. End of transmission.

REILLY DELL RETURNED to Rolfe’s and joined them on the Stardeck where they were mostly ignoring the canopy variety show on the boards overhead. He brought a small package that he tossed to Fred. “Here, someone’s trying to reach you.” It was a skullcap, like the one he, himself, wore.

“Is it against the law to be off-line for one evening?” Fred complained, but from the blank stares he got from the others, apparently it was. He sighed and opened the wrapper and let Mary fit the cap to his head. Its gummy material migrated through his hair to his scalp. There followed several uncomfortable moments as the cap’s microvilli wriggled through his skin to lay against his skull. He heard discordant scraps of overlapping signals as interfaces were established and aligned. When he got a pure tone, he peeled a throat patch from its backing and stuck it next to his Adam’s apple.

Testing, testing
, he glotted, and then checked his DCO channel.

Good evening, Commander
, said an all-too-familiar voice.

So, it’s Commander again
, he replied.

Only if you’re up to it
, Inspector Costa said.
I realize you’re off duty after a hard day, but an opportunity has arisen that you might be interested in
.

I doubt that
.

When Fred noticed Mary watching him, he rolled his eyes and shook his head to try to put her at ease.

A Cabinet rogue has appeared downstate, and I thought you might want to help me catch it
.

A rogue? You mean another Cabinet backup?

Looks like it
, said the inspector,
except Cabinet, the Cabinet we caught and processed, claims to know nothing about this one. Says it doesn’t have any records or recollection of it
.

Then how do you know it’s Cabinet?

It made a brief transmission from a private residence a few minutes ago in which it used Starke’s sig. We checked it out; the sig is authentic, and as you know, those things are impossible to counterfeit
.

Fred rubbed his forehead. The new skullcap was going through an itchy phase, and Mary, bless her heart, was scratching her own head in sympathy.

It’s all very fascinating
, Fred told the inspector,
but I think I’ll pass
.

Really? A shame, because Cabinet asked specifically for you
. Fred’s heart skipped a beat.
Yes
, Costa continued,
it told me it trusts your long experience in this matter. It feels we’ve cooked enough of its backups today and would like to salvage this one intact, if at all possible, and it wants you there. Far be it from me to ask you why. All I want is the pastehead. Are you in?

Fred seethed. Would the unnatural creature never leave him alone?

Where do I meet you, Inspector?

I’m waiting on the taxi deck next to Rolfe’s
, she said.

Figures, Fred thought, and he glanced in that direction.
I suppose you brought me a kit and blacksuit
.

Affirmative, in size russ
.

Fred leaned over to Mary. “Seems there’s a loose end to tie up. I won’t be long.” He tried to leave the table, but she held onto his hand and wouldn’t let him go.

The spectator placeholders in the bleachers around them suddenly went silent. “There, how’s that now?” Victor Vole said. The placeholders still bounced in their seats and waved and mouthed back and forth, but now the roar of the stadium was more distant, like the sound of a remote motorway.

“Better,” Samson said. He could talk without straining his voice. “Where was I?” He had told Victor and Justine and their cat, Murphy, about how, at the beginning of his and Eleanor’s life together, when power and praise, a baby permit, and unwarranted joy were being heaped upon them, a defective slug sampled him. He didn’t tell them about his and Eleanor’s suspicions that his assault was an object lesson for her.

Naturally, the Voles had heard of Eleanor Starke. How could they not? She was a figure of mythic stature and ever in the news. But that such a woman should be married to this bundle of sticks and rags seated between them stretched their credulity. And when Samson informed them that Eleanor had died that very morning, Justine was compelled to exclaim, “Ah, Myr Harger, just like in a novella.”

This had caused Samson to pause in his narrative and reassess his life through the filter of melodrama. “Yes, I suppose it is, Myr Vole,” he said. “Now, where was I?”

WHEN FIRST I departed from Eleanor’s manse, I was in high spirits. Or as high as possible, given the fact that I had been seared through no fault of my own, that I stank to high heaven, that no one could bear to be in the same room with me, and that strangers on the street avoided or insulted me. To balance the bad, I had my good health. Up to the time I was seared, I had enjoyed the best health that credit could buy. Though I was 140 real years old, my body maintenance was all up-to-date. I had just erupted my sixth set of teeth, my neurons had all recently been resheathed, and my pulmonary and circulatory systems had been scraped and painted. I was an apparent thirty-five-year-old man in excellent health. This was fortunate because the seared cannot avail themselves of modern medicine, and from there on out it was all downhill for me.

Likewise, I was in excellent fiscal shape. My own vast estate was tied up in court (I had been declared legally dead for a few minutes during the searing process, and this flummoxed everything for years), but Eleanor put her even vaster fortune at my temporary disposal.

Likewise, I was in a fairly positive frame of mind. Oh, I had gone through a lengthy funk following my searing. I hid out in the subfloors of the manse, shut myself away for several months to lick my wounds. But I survived that and felt ready for an adventure. It had been decades since I’d tossed my fate to the wind. I figured I had thirty or forty years ahead of me (if I didn’t accidentally self-immolate in the meantime), nothing and no one to tie me down, an inexhaustible credit account, and a brand-new valet by the name of Skippy.

I did travel. I visited the places I had somehow missed in my previous wanderings: the Chinas, Africa, Mississippi, Malaysia. A liberal application of tips and bribes lubricated my passage. Nevertheless, I wasn’t able to break out of my own company. Gargantuan tips could get me seated in a restaurant, but they could not persuade the other diners to finish their own meals. On too many occasions, I had the entire wait and kitchen staffs to myself.

The same applied to clubs, casinos, theaters, and concert halls. To pool halls, bars, bowling alleys—you name it. I was the only tourist on the boat, the only rube at the bazaar, the only bozo on the bus. It didn’t take long for my adventure to grow stale. So I returned to Chicago and moved into an apartment suite on the 300th floor of Cass Tower. I redecorated the place and declared my parlor open each Thursday evening for a weekly salon. I sent out thousands of invitations. Three Thursdays went by, and only a few dozen guests showed up.

Not willing to admit defeat, I hired a publicist. She advised me that radical measures were called for—expensive radical measures. I told her that credit was no object, and she took me at my word. She organized a series of weekly dinner banquets to take place in my home. She hired famous chefs, musical performers, actors, and comedians from around the globe to feed and entertain us. She paid celebrities handsome, confidential “honorariums” to show up and have their pictures taken. Each banquet was to be a tightly staged, show-stopping production.

Nevertheless, she warned me that not even all this was enough to guarantee more than a few hundred gawkers to show up. What I needed, according to her, was someone to co-host the banquets with me, someone of gigantic popularity. She found such a worthy in the person of the former president of the USNA, good old Virginia Taksayer. Taksayer’s star had never set. She seemed to grow more beloved the longer she was out of office. She was expensive, sure, but she was worth it, at least according to my publicist.

Deposed as host in my own home, I was given a special role—that of resident freak. Indeed, we provided bowls of souvenir nose filters in every room. They were hardly necessary, for I slathered myself with thick, odor-blocking skin mastic and wore a mouth dam and flatulence scrubbers. What odors I could not stifle were neutralized by a state-of-the-art air filtration system I had installed in the suite. It produced a cone of negative pressure that could follow me through the rooms and discreetly exchange the air around me.

We were a smash success. From the very first banquet, my house was elbow to elbow with the cream of society, the lights of academia, and the jackdaws of government. Everyone who was anyone paraded through my parlor, supped at my board, and ravaged my wine closet. Couples coupled in my spare bedrooms, crooks conspired on my balcony, and celebrities manifested themselves from room to room. And I? I explored new frontiers of self-loathing.

Not that I knew it at the time. At the time, I thought the whole thing was pretty neat. I threw my banquets for seven years, never missing a Thursday. Although she was invited, Eleanor never attended. Meanwhile, I never left my apartment; I found quiet ways to entertain myself and to pass the time.

That’s not to say that El never visited me; she did, on my birthday, on Father’s Day, other occasions. She always brought little Ellie with her, who hung around my neck and called me daddy. Ellie claimed not to need those ugly nose filters when visiting my house because she was “habituated” to my smell, which anyway wasn’t as bad as other people said it was.

Gradually, their visits tapered off. They were on Mars one year and otherwise occupied the next. I was surprised to discover that I survived their absence. I mostly missed them during the holidays, but otherwise learned how to get by just fine.

ONE WEEK MY routine malfed. On Tuesday night I had gone to bed and asked for a vid. Skippy, my valet, was in charge of surveying the millions of programs available on the nets and selecting ones that could capture my interest long enough to escort me to sleep. On this particular night, he ran a segment from a Heritage Biography series on important cultural figures of the past.

“What’s this crap?” I said. Skippy knew I wasn’t interested in biographies, especially bios of so-called cultural figures. But I soon saw why Skippy had flagged this particular segment—it was about me. It was called “On the Surface—the Work of Samson Paul Harger, 1951-2092, A Retrospective.”

I was surprised, but not flattered. I had long ago sworn off reviews of my work. Something about this one caught my eye, though, as it must have Skippy’s. Remember, this was only a few years after my reputed mulching at the hands of the Homeland Command, and this was my first major retrospective. I found the prospect of watching it too Tom Sawyeresque to resist.

I won’t bore you, Myren Vole, with the cockamamie insights revealed in this retrospective. I will only say that the producers managed to unearth a surprising variety of archival vids and photos of my childhood family and that these were difficult for me to view without a fair amount of heartache. They had a home movie of me and my first wife, Jean Scholero, back in the late twentieth century when I was first making a name for myself with my paintings. That was especially hard to watch. I hadn’t thought of Jean in quite a while. And of course they couldn’t resist using the surveillance vids of me that day in 2092 when the slug hog-tied me on the patio of the Foursquare Café in Bloomington, from whence I was delivered to Utah for deconstruction.

I will mention only one conclusion of the retrospective and that because of the degree to which it riled me. It was hinted at in the production’s title—“On the Surface.” The show’s writers accused me of being shallow. Specifically, they asserted that either I had no feelings or I was incapable of expressing them in my work. They cited the cold, inhuman quality of my paintings and emphasized the fact that when I reinvented myself in the twenty-first century, I did so as a specialist in package design. Artificial skin, battlewrap, tetanus blanket, novelty gift wraps. Everything on the surface—get it? The wrapper—not the gift.

Myren Vole, have you ever been accused of being superficial? Here, the first draft of my legacy was being written before my eyes, and this was what was being said of me? That I was superficial? Believe me, the vid threw me off my feed. It shattered my soporific routine. I spent the entire next day stewing over it. I composed a long, insightful rebuttal to the show’s producers, which I never sent. Thursday rolled around, and I was in a terrible foul mood and I canceled the banquet at the last minute. Canceled all of them. Fired my publicist.

I decided then and there that my best rebuttal would be to “reinvent” myself once again. I was still capable of doing that, wasn’t I? I wasn’t dead yet.

I HAD BEEN out of the art biz for a while, and a whole raft of new tools and techniques had come into use in the meantime. I ordered in some of everything: story wire, smart sand, smart clay, professional holography equipment, rondophone traps, aerosol sculpture gases, liquid stone—you name it. I spent eleven months playing with this stuff, getting to know what it could and couldn’t do. I didn’t have a work in mind yet, except that I wanted to do a piece about Jean, my long-lost first wife. She was my subject.

Before Eleanor, Jean was the only woman who had truly touched me. She was my first love and you only get one of those, no matter how long you live. To my lasting shame and regret, it was I who had driven her away. I was too full of myself in those early days, too wonderful for my own good.

I spent about a year with my new toys creating works about Jean while trying to uncover my theme. I sped through a number of motifs: unexpected attraction, energetic eroticism, identification with the body, jealousy, spooky union, fights, obsession/compulsion, self-hatred. Eventually, I realized I was attempting to re-create a young man’s palette. And though that makes sense—Jean and I
had
been young then—now I was old.

This realization only spurred my efforts. I was deeply engaged in the hunt. My former routine was in shambles. I left it to Skippy to send me food every few hours in case I was hungry. I lay down on the nearest couch whenever sleep overcame me. It was almost like the good old days.

As I zeroed in on my vision, I eliminated media that didn’t seem to serve my purpose. Rejected were the iteration sequencers, photonic wax, and gene splicers, the robotics, and most of the holography equipment. Eventually, I narrowed my media down to one old one and one new. I decided to do a rather conventional, flat portrait of Jean in oil paints. For this I even retrieved from storage some of my beloved old boar-hair and sable brushes.

The new medium I chose was an organic gestalt compiler of the sort used to record emotive slices for hollyholo sims, like your Jason and Alison across the way.

The very first time I set brush to canvas, a title for the piece popped into my head. I would call it “Her Secret Wound.”

Well now, I thought, I wonder what
that
means. What wound? Why secret? I didn’t have a clue, so I mixed some browns and umbers with thinner and set about firing off quick sketches on paper to try to discover Jean’s secret wound.

I hadn’t handled a brush in over a century, and I had to relearn how to paint, but it came back, and soon I was knocking out little story boards of our ancient life together. The ups and downs, the miracles of understanding and the betrayals. After two months of this, I picked up my head one day and saw it: the wound was actually my own, not hers. The wound was loneliness.

What is loneliness, Myren Vole? I am speaking of the garden variety, the kind we all encounter. No matter how wrapped up we are in our lover’s embrace, it manages to slither in for a short stay now and then, eh?

In truth, there’s not much to say about loneliness, for it’s not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour.

Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear.

Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddle-some Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror—duration.

Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated—as my daughter used to say—to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain?

Likewise, most pain loses its edge over time. Time heals all—as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life’s most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week.