Counting Heads (38 page)

April Kodiak got her vigil for Samson after all. Bogdan called her from the taxi, and she ran up the stairs with the news. Several of her housemeets were still sitting in the rooftop garden looking up. With the Skytel dark and the protective canopy burnt to ashes, the Moon alone ruled the sky. “Boggy’s got him,” April exclaimed. “He’s bringing him back! He’s all right!”

The ’meets stirred as though from a dream. “I’ll get his cot,” Kale said and, rising from a chaise lounge, lumbered to the garden shed.

“Good, and let’s bring some blankets up here,” April said, “and make some mush and juice.” She sent Megan and BJ down to roust ’meets already in bed. She sent Denny down to wait in the street for the taxi.

In the shed, Kale gathered up the paper envelopes, each bearing a housemeet’s name in Samson’s handwriting, and stacked them on the potting bench. He carried the cot out to the garden where April rearranged benches and chairs around it. All was ready when Denny returned, climbing ten flights of stairs bearing Samson’s emaciated body. They entombed the old man in pillows and comforters and slipped an autodoc probe into his ear. They barely got any lifelike readings from him at all.

“It won’t be long now,” April whispered.

“But why are his eyes wide open?” Kitty said.

“It’s all the Alert! he took,” Bogdan said.

At the autodoc’s suggestion, they placed a Sooothe patch on Samson’s throat, and in a little while his eyelids fluttered shut, and in a little while more he was snoring comfortably. The ’meets, themselves, battled sleep on chairs and benches. Finally, Kale returned to the shed to retrieve the envelopes. He passed them out, and the ’meets took turns reading Samson’s personal farewells to them by flashlight. They held hands and sang several charter hymns. They traded anecdotes about first meetings with Samson, about living with him through the years. They approached the cot one by one to kiss his burning cheek and to whisper in his ear.

When it was his turn, Bogdan sat on the cot and didn’t know what to say. He had been a toddler when Samson joined the charter, and therefore none of Samson’s troubled DNA had gone into his own patchwork genome. Not that they could, what with the searing and all. But even though Bogdan had no blood tie to Samson, he still felt closer to him than any other ’meet. He lay down on the cot next to the old man and listened to his breath whistling through the gaps in his teeth.

In a little while, April tugged Bogdan’s sleeve and told him to go to bed. She sent everyone to bed. “Check your vigil schedule on the houseputer,” she told them. “We’ll call you if anything develops.” But most of the ’meets decided to stay, and since he had to be up in a few hours anyway to get ready for work, Bogdan stayed too.

Kale and Gerald, meanwhile, left the garden to huddle near a cam/emitter mounted on the side of the building. “Hubert, can you hear me?” Kale said.

“Loud and clear.”

“How could you let him do that? How could you let him do something so stupid?”

“I don’t see how I could have dissuaded him,” the mentar replied.

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Kale snapped.

“What tone? This is my standard conversational tone.”

“What he means,” Gerald said, “is why did you help him? You took an active role in this stunt.”

“Well, yes, I did. I
am
his mentar.”

“There’s that tone again,” Kale said, and Gerald added, “What you did to the Skytel was highly illegal, Hubert. Surely, even a mentar can see that. You have jeopardized this charter’s integrity and endangered your own freedom.”

“Don’t worry about my freedom,” Hubert said. “They’ll never be able to trace that hack to me.”

Suddenly floodlights hit the rooftop from all directions, and a voice said, “That’ll do nicely, folks.” It was a jerry’s voice, and behind the lights, dark shapes could be glimpsed rappelling from cars that hung silently above them. “This is the Homeland Command,” the voice continued. “Don’t nobody move.”

Sleepy Kodiaks awoke with a start to find themselves surrounded by a squad of blacksuited officers. Rusty and Louis jumped to their feet, but the hommers motioned them back down with standstill wands.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Kale bellowed.

The jerry commander strode over and said, “I am Lieutenant Grieb of the Northeast Region Homeland Command, myr, and I’m here to serve this warrant.” The commander held up his open palm, but Kale didn’t swipe it. “I said I’m serving a warrant, myr.”

“Then serve away, officer,” Kale replied, “but I don’t have a palm array.”

The jerry said, “Amazing.” A moment later a homcom bee flew down from a hovering GOV and opened a frame in front of Kale that contained a warrant for the arrest of Samson P. Harger Kodiak. The commander then nodded to another officer who approached Samson’s cot. But Kitty flung herself in the way.

“Step aside, myr retrogirl,” the officer said.

Kitty refused to give way, and April joined her and said, “Can’t you see he’s dying?”

“Step aside!” the officer snapped. But the women held their ground, and the officer simply strode between them, sweeping them aside with his sheer bulk. When he reached the cot he recoiled. “My God, but he stinks!” he exclaimed. “This guy is already dead.”

The commander said, “He’s a seared. He’s supposed to stink.”

“He’s dead, I tell you.”

The commander joined his officer next to the cot and opened an autodoc probe. He stuck it into Samson’s ear, next to the first probe, and a moment later he turned to the Kodiaks and said, “I have new orders. We are placing this man under house arrest. He is not to leave these premises without prior authorization. Is that clear?”

“Yes, officer,” April said.

“To assure your compliance,” the commander continued, “I will leave this bee here as an official monitor. Now, to our second item of business.”

The homcom bee opened a new page—a warrant to frisk the house and arrest the mentar known as Hubert. The ring of officers in the garden broke formation and headed for the roof door.

“No!” Kale cried. “You can’t do that!” The houseer ran to the door and blocked the way. “Hubert is the most valuable asset we have left,” he pleaded.

The commander spat on the ground. “We only have so much patience, myr,” he said, and when Kale continued to protest, two officers flipped him around, cuffed him, and shoved him through the door ahead of themselves. “Anyone else have a hankering to spend the night in jail?” the commander asked. “If you folks are smart, you’ll stay up here out of the way.”

For a while, the ’meets waited obediently in the garden. But then Kitty said, “The bastards are in my room.” She strode to the door and down the steps. A moment later April got up to join her. Bogdan looked at Rusty, and Rusty shrugged his shoulders. They, too, went down the stairs but got no farther than the corridor outside Bogdan’s room. There, two officers were trying to peer through the brick walls with their visors.

“Hey, kid,” one of them said, “what do you keep in here?”

“Nothing,” Bogdan said. “That’s the elevator machine room.”

“Oh, yeah? With a barricade door like this?” He rapped his knuckles on the massive door.

Bogdan beamed with pride. “That’s right,” he said. “But you’ll just have to take my word for it since you’ll never get in there on account of the door.”

But the officer had stopped listening to him. “Confirm receipt,” he said and swiped the door’s control panel with his palm.

“Welcome, officers,” the door said as it noisily retracted its bolts.

“Son of a bitch,” Bogdan said.

“Tough luck,” Rusty said.

The two officers swung the heavy door open and entered Bogdan’s bedroom. When Bogdan tried to go in, they ordered him back. He and Rusty watched from the corridor as the officers swept the room with sniffers.

“There ain’t nothing in there but machinery,” one of the officers complained as they came out.

“What did I tell you?” Bogdan said, but Rusty nudged him to be quiet. The officers went by them and continued down the corridor, scanning and sniffing as they went.

When Bogdan turned to shut his door, he was confronted by four Tobblers who had come up from behind. “Good morning, Myr Bogdan. Good morning, Myr Rusty,” said one of them. It was Houseer Dieter.

Bogdan sprang forward, dodged between the Tobbs, and tried to push the heavy door shut, but one of the Tobbs easily held it open while the others pulled wrenches from their pockets and began to disassemble the hinges.

“Stop that! Don’t do that!” Bogdan shouted. “You have no right!”

Houseer Dieter only snorted. “No right? You have the arrogance to say this to me after
two years
you occupy our room? I’ll show you no right.” He went into the room and started hauling Bogdan’s bedding and dirty clothes out and tossing them in the hallway.

Bogdan turned to Rusty. “Can’t you stop them?”

Rusty calmly appraised the situation and said, “I suppose I could take all four of them with my bare hands. Do you want me to try?”

Bogdan’s worldly possessions made an unimpressive pile on the floor. He leaned over and picked through it for anything worth salvaging.

“We can’t seem to catch a break tonight,” Rusty said and took ahold of a corner of Bogdan’s mattress. “Let’s haul this to my room. You can bunk with me for a while.”

DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT, Bogdan was very sleepy by the time he and Rusty had moved his stuff. He went down to the NanoJiffy to buy a package of eight-hour Alert! tablets and watched the HomCom officers carry a box containing Hubert’s canister down the steps. They loaded it into a GOV parked on the street. They loaded Kale into another, and Rusty and Louis followed by taxi to post his bail. Though it was only 3:00 AM, Bogdan thought he might as well head out to work. But first he wanted to say good-bye to Samson in case the old man didn’t survive the day. So he climbed up to the roof again. After all the drama, the house was eerily quiet.

When he passed his former bedroom, his beloved door was completely off its hinges and lying flat in the middle of the corridor. He was forced to walk over it to get by. He stopped in front of the doorway and looked in. Two large young Tobbler men were sitting at a folding table next to the cable drum, playing a drowsy game of cards. They glanced at him, stifling yawns.

Up on the roof, only a few Kodiaks were keeping vigil. Samson, in fact, was awake, and Megan and Kitty were feeding him.

“We were washing him,” Kitty told Bogdan. “Changing his clothes and stripping off the old mastic, and it woke him up.”

“’Lo, Sam,” Bogdan said. The old man, mouth full of mush, didn’t seem to hear, so Bogdan went to sit with Denny.

Denny said, “It was scary to see him up in the Skytel.”

“I know it,” Bogdan replied.

“It made me real nervous. I wish he didn’t do it.”

“Me too.”

Samson’s old jumpsuit lay in tatters on the ground. Bogdan leaned over and snagged it, looked under the lapels, but the blue mech was gone.

“Kitty, did you find any mechs on Sam’s clothes?”

“No,” she said and gestured up at the homcom bee hovering overhead. “Only that one.”

Bogdan looked around for the blue mech, but with all the leafy vegetables and rows of hydroponics, it could be hiding anywhere. He picked up Samson’s belt and said, “Hubert?”

“I am not Hubert,” the belt said. “I am a Hubert terminus with nominal personality and cognition. I lost contact with Hubert prime at 02:21 today.”

“Well, good for you,” Bogdan said and dropped the belt. To Denny he said, “Did you see the fight Kale put up over Hubert? I didn’t even think he liked the pastehead.” As he spoke, Kitty gave him a calculating look. “What?” he said, but she turned back to Samson to wipe dribble from the corner of his mouth.

“What about Kale and Hubert?” Bogdan insisted.

“Is that Boggy?” Samson said. “Come here, Boggy; I have something to tell you.”

Megan and Kitty finished and gathered up the tray and bath supplies, and Bogdan sat on the cot next to Samson and took his hand.

“I learned something today, boy.”

“I imagine you did.”

“I learned that killing yourself is hard to do when all you really want to do is live.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Really?” Samson said and tried to focus on the boy. “I don’t think so, Boggy. You haven’t even figured out how to pass through puberty yet. What do you know of dying?”

Fred hadn’t seemed as positive about Mary’s duty call out as she expected him to be. When the canopy show was finished and the last of the glowing ashes had fallen, Mary rode the tower lifts and pedways home to get ready for work. She ordered up a smart teal and brown ensemble (not a uniform—evangelines didn’t wear uniforms), researched train schedules, and pulled as much information about the Roosevelt Clinic as she could find on the WAD. Which wasn’t much. It was an exclusive aff facility that shunned publicity.

Fred dragged himself home around 2:00 AM, looking even more beat-up than before. He wanted to celebrate her job, but she sent him straight to the shower and bed. She lay with him until he fell asleep, which didn’t take long. When she got out of bed, he stirred and said, “Be careful.”

“What did you say, Fred?” But he must have spoken in his sleep, because he didn’t answer.

BEFORE LEAVING THE apartment at 5:00
AM
, Mary inspected her 360 reflection in the mirror. The simple business outfit she had selected looked both professional and flattering. Her face wore a bright, sensitive, and friendly expression. Her large brown eyes were warm but discerning. In short, she looked the part of a successful evangeline.

In the lower corner of the mirror, a mail glyph began to pulse—there was an urgent message on the DCO board. Her heart sank. She’d known it was too good to be true—her companion assignment had been canceled at the last minute. She was sure of it.

Drenched in self-pity, Mary tiptoed through the bedroom, past Fred’s sleeping form, to the living room and flatscreen. The screen was set to the default window high in the tower. She switched it to her DCO board and held her breath. Her eyes darted across the message scanning for the keywords: “canceled” or “regret” or “error,” and finding none of these, she relaxed enough to actually read it.

No, thank heaven, her duty had not been canceled. Instead, she was instructed to attend a brief orientation meeting before proceeding to the clinic. This she was happy to do, and she swiped the directions and left the apartment.

The corridors and lifts of APRT 7 were congested with tens of thousands of Applied People iterants on their way to morning shifts: helenas, steves, isabellas, jennys—plenty of jennys—in a sea of brown and teal. This was the time of day that Mary had always dreaded the most. She couldn’t bear the sight of gainfully employed mobs. But today was different, and her excitement must have shown, for people—strangers—smiled at her. “G’morning, Myr ’Leen,” they said. “Off to work?”

“Hi ho!” she replied.

Down in the Slipstream station, the crowds were swelling by the moment, and the boarding queue had an estimated thirty-minute wait. This was manageable—Mary had allowed for such delays. But when she swiped the conductor post with her destination from the DCO board, to her surprise it directed her to a distant platform reserved for private cars. Feeling deliciously conspicuous, Mary left the queue and took a pedway to the platform where she found a grand car already waiting for her. No mere bead car, it was large and swank, with plush seating, full media access, a snack bar, and its own serving arbeitor. She took a seat and buckled her harness, and the car rolled noiselessly down the injection ramp.

A half hour later, the car swooshed through a flow gate and decelerated, bouncing on its wheels and rolling into a small deserted station. Through the car windows Mary glimpsed polished marbelite floors and curved walls made from tall blond limestone blocks. Her car came to a smooth stop, and the doors slid open. There didn’t seem to be anyone waiting for her. The station lacked signs and kiosks, and she had no idea where she was. Mary recalled Fred’s sleep-talk warning, and she was a little afraid to leave the car. But she forced herself, and when she stepped on the platform, another car was arriving.

This one, identical to her own, came to a silent halt several meters away. When the doors opened, another evangeline stepped out and looked around the quiet station.

Mary and the other evangeline walked across the shiny marbelite floor to greet each other. “Mary Skarland,” Mary said, offering her hand.

“A pleasure,” said her sister. “Renata Carter.” Renata seemed rather big-boned for an evangeline and thick-waisted, but within germline norms. She squeezed Mary’s hand nervously and said, “Are we supposed to go somewhere? Or wait here?”

“Not a clue.” Mary laughed. Already she felt a kindred spirit in her sister. “I just arrived myself.”

As if on cue, an elevator door across the platform opened, and a household arbeitor rolled out. It approached and parked before them and opened a little scape above its head. A miniature man appeared in the scape, naked but for an animal-skin loincloth. His head was smallish for his body and had heavy brow ridges and a thick jaw. “Good morning,” he said, bowing to each of them, “and welcome to Starke Manse.”

Starke! The famous name had been in the news continuously since yesterday.

“I see from your reaction that both of you are aware of my family’s tragedy,” the little man said. “That will save time. Eleanor Starke is deceased, as the media reports, but her daughter, Ellen Starke, has survived the crash. She is your new client. I am Wee Hunk, Ellen’s mentar and your supervisor.”

The little muscleman proceeded to describe the scope of their assignment. He had engaged eight evangelines, he said, to cover around-the-clock shifts. Since the shifts overlapped at both ends, there would be four of them on duty for two of each eight hours.

“Please take these and put them on,” the mentar said, and the arbeitor below him held out two little round caps in its gripper arm. They were odd little hats, flattish, beige, and unadorned. When the ’leens put them on, the caps sat on their heads like teacup saucers. One look at Renata in her cap and Mary saw just how ridiculous she, herself, must look. Renata tipped her cap to sit at a jaunty angle, and Mary approved and tipped hers too.

“Splendid,” Wee Hunk said. “My first attempt at haute couture is a success. Now, my most important instructions to you are these. First, you are to put these hats on
before
you enter the clinic grounds and are
not
to remove them for any reason until you leave. Is that understood?”

Both women nodded.

“Second and just as critical, you are never to leave Ellen alone, not even for a second. That’s why I’ve arranged for teams of two. You are to time your breaks accordingly so that at least one of you is in the same room as Ellen at all times. She is being housed in a cottage surrounded by a flower garden. You may consider the cottage and garden to be one room. That means that at least one of you is to remain in the cottage or garden at all times. No exceptions, no excuses. Is that clear?”

“What if Myr Starke leaves the cottage area?” Renata asked.

“She won’t.”

“What if Myr Starke asks us to leave?” Mary said.

“She won’t.”

The evangelines glanced at each other, and Wee Hunk continued. “Be aware that I’ll be watching you continuously and that I will debrief you at the end of the day. Now, time is fleeing, so please board the lead car, and it will take you to Decatur East where a limo will be waiting. That is all.” With that, the scape closed, and the arbeitor rolled away.

THE LIMOUSINE LANDED in an outer parking lot and rolled along a brick drive to a gatehouse set into the fortresslike walls of Roosevelt Clinic. The evangelines decarred and approached a sentry window set into a large pressure gate. A jerry guard asked them their business, and they swiped the guard post with open palms.

“Been expecting you,” the guard said. “Come through the gate.” A slot opened in the wide, translucent gate of shaped air. The slot was wide enough for only one person to pass at a time. Two jerry guards awaited them inside, both armed and typically officious. Their voices reverberated in the large concrete space. Incongruously, the place smelled of sautéed garlic.

“G’wan through there,” one of the guards told them, pointing to the entrance of the pedestrian scanway.

The evangelines passed through the long scanway tunnel in single file, pausing at the various stations to spit, peer at the target, and submit to sniffers and irradiation. It was one of the most thorough scanways Mary had ever encountered.

They emerged in the middle block of the gatehouse, where another jerry guard awaited them. “Hang on while we look at your results,” he said. There were massive, floor-to-ceiling clinker epoxy barriers in the middle block, and any vehicle passing through would have to make a tight S-turn around them.

“Sorry, ’leens,” the guard said, “but you’ll have to lose those.” He patted the top of his head.

Under normal circumstances, Mary would have complied without question, but with Wee Hunk’s instructions fresh in her mind, she said, “Sorry, Myr Jerry, but we can’t do that.”

“Don’t worry,” he replied, “you’ll get them back when you leave.” When the evangelines still refused to remove their saucer caps, he pointed to a spot on the concrete floor and said, “Wait there.”

On the floor was painted a WAIT HERE box. They went to stand on it while the jerry ducked into a control booth. Renata said, “I wonder who trumps who, Starkes or Roosevelts.”

A few minutes later, the jerry returned and waved them through to the inner block with no further discussion. Starkes, apparently.

Like the outer gate, the inner gate was a wall of highly pressurized air. Beyond its shimmering expanse lay a plaza and the clinic grounds. But before they could enter the grounds, the evangelines had to wait in another WAIT HERE box with a dozen or so other Applied People contractees. And here the guard was a russ, not a jerry. He was no russ that Mary knew, but as she and Renata joined the others in the box, he flashed them a friendly smile.

“I heard they hired a pack of ’leens today,” he said. “Congratulations, and welcome to Roosevelt Clinic.”

Just like a russ. The evangelines thanked him.

When a few more Applied People iterants arrived, mostly Johns and janes in custodial uniforms, the russ lowered the pressure gate. The dense air collapsed like a splash of water, and the day workers entered the clinic grounds at last. Immediately abutting the gatehouse was a cobblestone plaza, South Gate Plaza, which in turn was surrounded by a parklike wooded area divided by lanes and footpaths. A tall man in a long, white jacket was waiting for them.

“Good morning, all,” he said cordially, “and welcome to Roosevelt Clinic, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Fagan Health Group. My name is Concierge, and I am the Fagan Health Group mentar and your supervisor. Since all of you are new assignees, I thought I’d take this opportunity to orient you to our facility as I escort you to your respective duty stations. Please divide yourselves into groups of similar job rubric: groundskeepers here, housekeepers here, and so on.”

As the iterants sorted themselves into groups, five more Concierges, identical to the first, ambled up a path and entered the plaza. They spread out, one to each group. Mary and Renata made up a group of two. Their own copy of the mentar made a slight bow and said, “Mary Skarland and Renata Carter, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Since we have a little extra time before your shift begins, allow me to give you a brief tour of the campus. How does that sound?” The evangelines agreed eagerly, and the small party set off via a footpath.

The clinic grounds were extensive and rich. Six hundred acres of woods, meadows and fields, brilliant ponds, and flower gardens. By and large, the buildings were only one or two stories high, constructed of brick or stone, and styled after nineteenth-century English country homes. Most were hidden behind dense foliage and gave no sign as to their function. Concierge pointed them out: Here was a noted restaurant, here the physical therapy/spa building, there the theater, here the dining commons, there the stables and boathouse. Along the way they passed clinic guests out for a stroll or sunning themselves on lush green lawns. The guests were, without exception, accompanied by jenny nurses. Concierge addressed the guests by name, wishing them a pleasant day. All but a few guests ignored the mentar, or returned his courtesy with a curt nod or disinterested grunt. As though the mentar were just another servant, which Mary supposed he was. But the mentar’s charm never wavered. Mary, who found most mentars to be too stiff or too silly, was impressed. This was no caveman in a loincloth.

There was something odd about odors. Mary had smelled garlic in the gatehouse, wood smoke in the plaza, and just now fresh-baked bread.

“Oh, that,” Concierge said when she asked. “After a while you won’t even notice it. That’s our scent clock. Every fifteen minutes, olfactory generators located throughout the campus pump out a designated odor. Here’s a list of them with their times. They repeat the same every day.” He swiped the evangelines the list. “After a few days, you’ll be able to tell the time in your sleep.

“Which is the whole point,” he went on. “Most of our guests spend the bulk of their days in jacketscapes where it’s easy to lose track of clinic time. We find that our scent clock helps them anchor themselves here even when they’re projecting themselves across continents. Also, and more importantly in your own client’s case, we’ve learned that even people in deep coma can sense changes in ambient odor.” The evangelines glanced at each other—coma? “We can use this to help them experience the passage of time. Being able to sense the passage of time is very stimulating to the brain. It has proven to hasten a return to consciousness.”

“But do the smells have to be so yummy?” Renata said and inhaled the fragrance of baking bread.

“THIS IS MINERAL Way,” Concierge said when they turned onto a shady lane. “South Gate, where you entered the clinic, is just through those woods.” He pointed the direction. “We’ve taken a roundabout way to arrive here.” They passed little stone-paved footpaths marked with rustic signs: Jasper, Quartz, Mica, Hornblende. “These lead to guest cottages,” the mentar continued. “Ah, here’s Feldspar, the temporary residence of Myr Ellen Starke.”