Counting Heads (40 page)

“You want my opinion, there’s something unnatural about this state of affairs. I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods. We’re so obsessed with trying to stay true to our germline that we repress anything we think might set us apart. Believe me, brothers, that way lies madness.

“Anyway, that’s how I feel about it, and if I feel that way, I’m pretty sure there’s at least a half
million
of you out there who feel the same way.

“And so, this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to dedicate this volume, this
Book of Russ
, to the free expression of russness, and I encourage all of you, my brothers, to add your bit. Tell us all what makes us tick.

“To get the ball rolling, I’ll go first.”

Fred paused to think of the most provocative thing about himself that he could reveal in order to loosen the guarded russ tongue. Eventually, he wanted to get into the whole issue of mission loyalty, but that was probably too explosive a topic to start off with. Better go with something safer and saltier.

“All right,” he continued. “Here goes. I want to sleep with a hink. Got that? I’d like to screw a woman whose body is unlike any other woman’s body in the world. Don’t get me wrong; I love our iterant women. They’re the best. I’m not putting down our ’leens or jennys or any of the other types, not in the least. But once in a while, I wonder, I really wonder what a free-ranger might be like in the sack.

“There you have it. And please don’t tell me that I’m the only russ in the world who’s ever lusted after hinks.

“Your turn. Thanks for listening.”

Fred closed the entry and reread it. He was appalled. His first impulse was to delete the
Book of Russ
altogether, but he held back. If this was going to work, someone had to take the first step. Besides, he was
positive
he was right. How could he be wrong? So he did not delete his entry or even censor it. He was tempted to post it anonymously, but that would defeat the whole purpose, so he appended his sig, turned off the booth’s isolation field, and posted the inaugural entry of the
Book of Russ
. A moment later he wondered what in God’s name he had done.

Yesterday Bogdan had been late for work; today he had time to dawdle. Strolling to the Library train station from Howe Street, he was on the lookout for any sign of the destruction of Chicago by NASTIES, now that the canopy was down. The sidewalk under his feet felt odd. Maybe it was his imagination, but it felt spongy, so he crossed to the other side of the street. Another thing he noticed was that his skin was itchy. He imagined tiny terrorist engines, too small to see, tunneling through his epidermis to commandeer his cellular machinery and turn him into a puddle of protoplasm. So he tried not to scratch.

Something he didn’t see were homcom slugs on patrol. They were usually out in force, but this morning they were mysteriously absent.

The train ride to Elmhurst was uneventful. Unlike yesterday he took his time walking from MacArthur Station to the Bachner Building, where E-Pluribus was camping out for a second day. He had a chance to take in the local scene, which was abuzz with early morning commuters.

Elmhurst boasted dozens of shopping arcades, one stacked atop another, all the way to Munilevel 85. They bustled with youngish, extravagantly dressed and coiffed free-rangers. There were so many cars flying overhead they stirred up a breeze. No wonder E-Pluribus was upreffing here.

Ahead of him a crowd of people blocked the sidewalk and spilled into the street. Bogdan wormed his way to the front of the crowd. There, in the middle of the street, was a bloom.

It was the first one Bogdan had ever seen in realbody, and it was frighteningly beautiful. Dome-shaped, it expanded in little surges. Feathery amber crystal tendrils swelled up from a central mound and froze into place. They built up on top of each other until the whole structure collapsed on itself in a shattering, tinkling heap. Only to swell again. And it was hot, as hot as a bonfire. Bogdan and the spectators moved backward each time it grew. The people hooted and joked as they watched, as though it was no big deal. Someone said there were hundreds of such blooms all over town. Most of them were like this one, a simple one- or two-stage nanobot that was programmed to eat one or two common substances—in this case the glassine pile that was used to pave roadways, arcades, and rooftops. Where the bloom reached the curb, it stopped: the curb was made of concrete, which wasn’t part of the nanobot’s diet. But the bloom was consuming the street in both directions and would spread until it reached the intersections with their concrete firebreaks.

Soon, bloomjumpers arrived overhead in tanker cars. They projected a police cordon around the bloom and ordered everyone back. When the spectators were clear, the tankers sprayed the bloom with a foam that caused the churning mound to sputter to a halt. For a giddy moment its intricate arabesque of crystal tendrils held its shape. Then the whole thing crashed into a pile of yellow sand.

AT THE BACHNER Building, Bogdan wasn’t allowed to go right up. The E-Pluribus floors were still being converted over from their overnight tenant, a Cathouse Casino. Among the Cathouse employees leaving the building were girls with tails poking out through the rear of their skirts. Bogdan approved of tails on girls. He liked how the girls tied bells to them or braided them with ribbons, or did other interesting things to draw attention to them. What drew his special attention were the tail holes in their clothes that usually exposed a little sliver of bare ass.

Bogdan was still scratching himself, but he noticed that everyone else was scratching too, so it was probably normal.

When he was finally permitted to go up, the Annette Beijing hollyholo was waiting to speak to him. “G’morning, Boggo,” she said, flashing him her world-famous smile. “My, aren’t you looking handsome this morning.”

“Thanks,” he said, beaming with pleasure. She was always complimenting him like that, and though it was probably only part of her programming, it still thrilled the hell out of him. “Looking good yourself, Nettie,” he said, “which, in your case, is an understatement.”

“Thanks. Well, I have visitors to greet,” she said. “You have yourself a bodacious day. Oh, and don’t forget about your meeting with HR tomorrow.” She turned and sashayed away. She was so beautiful, from the rear as well as the front. Bogdan mentally pinned a tail on her.

BOGDAN’S OWN REAR was the first in line for the fitting booths. Once the visceral response probe had been inserted, linking his body’s every sensation to the E-Pluribus superluminary computer, he hitched up his jumpsuit and went to his first upreffing assignment. He fervently hoped it would be another visit to the Oship with that weird little Birthplace guy, Meewee. But his first assignment took place in an auditorium full of daily hires, with whom he was subjected to an hour of probable news: mud slides in Bogota, a horrific soccer stadium stampede in Sudan, world leaders being knocked off by their own bodyguards, and more of the same. His next assignment was equally dreary, a consensus vid about an asteroid hitting the Earth and how, years before it hit, scientists used a rust-producing bacteria to gobble up oxygen out of the atmosphere, reducing global oxygen levels to fifteen percent, a concentration high enough for life but too low for open flames, effectively making the planet fireproof.

Boring.

Finally, his last assignment before lunch took him to a solo booth where, sure enough, the lights dimmed and the emitters hummed, and Bogdan found himself back on the Oship ESV
Garden Charter
. He was in an urban hab drum this time, sitting at a long table on a raised dais in front of a stadium crowd of tens of thousands. Beyond them he could see the spires and roofs of a great city stretching all the way to the bulkhead of the drum. At his table sat dozens of young men and women, all wearing the crisp uniforms of the jump pilot corps. Bogdan looked at his sleeve and saw that he, too, was a jump pilot. When he looked to his left, he discovered that he was seated right next to—Annette Beijing! A teenaged Annette who was also dressed as a pilot. She smiled at him.

There was a lectern in front of the table, and a man was speaking to the vast audience. It was the little Meewee guy in his green and red overalls. “During the next few months of the General Awakening,” he was saying, “more of our citizens will leave the cryovaults and be quickened than at any other time during our thousand-year voyage—well over two hundred thousand, or eighty percent of our great ship’s population. All sixty-four hab drums are being pressurized and activated to accommodate them. Now that we have reached our new home system, we must prepare for planetfall. The next twelve months will be a time of joyous activity as we make ready to take possession of our new planet.”

Amid sustained applause, Meewee pointed at the sky and said, “I give you Planet Lisa!” The crowd gasped. Bogdan looked straight up and was astounded by the sight. The hull of the hab drum was becoming transparent, a window to space. And there, directly overhead, a shiny blue-green planet was coming into view. It was endowed with brilliant oceans under whorls of white clouds. There were three major land masses visible, and ice-capped polar regions. Except for the unfamiliar shapes of the continents, it could have been Earth, old pre-industrial Earth.

“Stunning, isn’t it?” the teen-aged Annette said to him. “Our new home.”

“Planet Lisa,” Bogdan whispered.

“Have you picked out your thousand acres yet?”

“Um, no. Have you?”

“Almost. I’ve split mine up into three or four parcels. Five hundred acres of coastline on Kalina Island there.” She raised a slender arm and pointed to the edge of the world. “Look quick,” she said, “night is falling. And over there, below the Bay of Renewal, there’s a city called Capa. I have a hundred acres near there. As for the rest, I don’t know. Someplace in the mountains? In the agribelt? I just don’t know. What about you?” She searched his face with her green eyes and continued. “And to think, I’ve received all this: the millennial voyage, a thousand acres on a pristine planet, an exciting career, unlimited rejuvenation—a life!—all in exchange for one lousy acre on a dying planet.”

“Tell me about it,” Bogdan said. “My acre came from a superfund site polluted with toxic industrial waste.”

The crowd cheered, and Bogdan and Annette looked up again at Planet Lisa. On the western coast of a dark continent, the lights of a metropolis were coming on.

“That’s New Seattle,” Annette said. “The builder mechs are testing its energy grid.”

Just yesterday (though it was six hundred years ago in ship time) Captain Suzette had explained to him how robotic advance ships would reach their destination several centuries before the Oship to construct the planet’s infrastructure.

“And now the event you’ve all been waiting for,” the little man at the lectern said. The vast audience thrummed with anticipation. “In three months, the brave jump pilots seated behind me will begin to ferry colonists down to the surface. Naturally, everyone wants to be on the historic first landing. Who those lucky people will be depends upon the launch order of the jumpships—which we will now determine.”

The crowd went wild as a young man pushed a cart across the dais with what looked like a cage hopper filled with little balls. Audience members rose from their seats and screamed as Meewee rotated the hopper with a hand crank. A group of girls near the front, all of them stunningly gorgeous, chanted, “Bog-dan, Bog-dan, Bog-dan.”

Annette smirked. “I envy the pilot who gets the first launch. She, or he, will have all the lovers she can handle.”

The first ball dropped out and rolled to the end of the slot. Meewee picked it up and turned it in his hand. “The first ship to Lisa will be piloted by—”

Bogdan, who had been awake and active nonstop for twenty-nine hours, closed his eyes. The eight-hour Alert! tablet that he had taken ran out all at once, and he fell asleep where he sat. A few minutes later, his chair nudged him awake, but it was too late; the Oship scenario had ended. He swallowed another Alert! and trudged off to lunch.

Meewee slept most of the morning. The lump under his skin, his new brainlette, didn’t bother him when he scratched it. In midafternoon he left his executive suite at Starke Enterprises headquarters for the last time and made the short trip to Starke Manse. An arbeitor with Wee Hunk perched atop it was waiting for him in the family’s private Slipstream station.

“Top o’the afternoon to you, Bishop,” the tiny mentar said, greeting him like an old friend. “I trust your leave-taking from Cabinet territory was civil.”

“Civil enough, though Cabinet saw fit to send a security team to escort me to the tube. As though I intended to steal the linen or something.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Steal the linen.”

Meewee took the question for a tasteless joke and did not answer. The arbeitor grabbed up his luggage, and he followed it to the lifts. It was only when they were riding up to the ground floor that he realized that he and Wee Hunk had been conducting two conversations at once. The banter about Cabinet was only the surface one. Beneath it was a more serious one—Wee Hunk had just updated him about Ellen’s condition—still critical—and asked if he’d had any more direct encounters with Cabinet.

Moreover, Meewee had left the question dangling. So he said, “Sheets, towels, robes—I took as much as I could carry.”

Wee Hunk guffawed and said, “I’ve set aside a room for you overlooking the fields. Would you like to go there now?”

Under the surface, this was an identity challenge. Meewee replied, “Yes, please. I would like to get settled in.” Then in turn, he challenged the mentar’s own integrity, “Do you happen to have an extruder on the premises? I need to make some new apparel.”

Wee Hunk responded positively to both layers of inquiry, and as he led Meewee through the warren of rooms, he secretly briefed him on events of the last dozen hours: Ellen’s head had been installed in a hernandez tank in a cottage at the clinic, evangeline hires were with her now with continuity counters embedded in their hats, no progress had been made in tracking down Eleanor’s assassins or Ellen’s abductors, and efforts to find an independent revivification specialist had thus far been fruitless.

The Starke Manse, for all its impressive size, managed to retain a homey ambiance. The arbeitor led Meewee to a suite of rooms that was easily double the size of his executive quarters. More room than Meewee knew how to occupy.

“I’m pleased to see that the metalanguage has kicked in,” Wee Hunk said in plain English. “And with no lasting harm done to your health. Your sudden command of Starkese is impressive, but there is no need to use it or to glot while we are here. The manse is double canopied and shielded against all forms of espionage. It’s more secure here than in many null rooms.”

Wee Hunk jumped off the arbeitor and assumed a full-sized appearance. He opened a small scape showing the interior of Ellen’s clinic cottage, with four of the eight evangelines present. Two of them were preparing to leave, and the scape split into two, one remaining inside the cottage, and the other following the departing companions down a path to South Gate.

“You said she’s not doing well?” Meewee said, zooming in on the skull inside the hernandez tank.

“No, not well at all. Critical neural functions have not resumed. Concierge says the doctors have no explanation but are guardedly optimistic.”

“Damn, I wish we had our own doctor.”

“I’m still looking for one,” the mentar said, “but all of the thousands of qualified revivificationists practicing in the UD are either employed by or on retainer to the Fagan Health Group, and thus are unacceptable. Fagan has a solid lock on the specialty in the West. Perhaps one of your old Birthplace contacts outside the UD would be useful.”

“I’ll look into it, but there’s not much call for revivification in famine countries.”

In the scape, a medtech entered the cottage and went to the tank. He checked its controller, then climbed a ladder and dipped a small vial into the tank for a sample of the amber amnio fluid. After marking the vial, he dropped it into a pocket and proceeded with other monitoring tasks. Meanwhile, in the other scape, the two off-shift evangelines reached the South Gate gatehouse and were processed through. On the other side of the gatehouse a Starke limo waited for them.

“I’ll debrief them as soon as the car leaves the grounds,” Wee Hunk said.

“You mentioned something about continuity counters. What are those?”

“Something like time code generators. The Roosevelt Clinic, as we saw in the nustscape last night, is a self-enclosed environment. It, like this house, is double canopied and shielded. All transmissions to and from the clinic must pass through a gatekeeper, which happens to be Concierge. While it’s true that I’ve been watching Ellen continuously, how can I trust the images and data that Concierge is feeding me? When the evangelines leave the mentar’s domain, I’ll be able to compare the time log in their hats to my own records. Any tampering whatsoever with my surveillance will show up.”

“Clever.”

The evangelines boarded the limo, which drove up the drive to the parking lot and jumped into the air. Once outside clinic space, a miniature Wee Hunk appeared on the seat opposite them and said, “Good afternoon, myren. How did your first day go?”

Mary said, “Good afternoon, Myr Hunk. It went well, I think. Concierge is very nice.” Then she added, “Will she ever recover?”

“Ah, Myr Skarland, that’s a difficult question. The doctors are troubled by Ellen’s lack of improvement but aren’t ready to panic yet. According to their experience with such cases, there is a five-day window in which a cryogenically frozen brain may regain consciousness, with the rate of recovery proportional to the cube of the inverse of days since thawing.”

Mary glanced at Renata who shrugged, and Mary said, “Excuse me, Myr Hunk, but I’m not good at math.”

Back at the manse, Wee Hunk said to Meewee, “Unfortunately, without our own specialist, there is no way we can test the findings of these clinic doctors.”

“Surely there are autodocs equipped to analyze such cases,” Meewee said. “Why don’t you bring out a sample of that hernandez tank fluid? That ought to tell us something.”

“Good idea,” Wee Hunk said. “I’ll see what I can do.” In the limo, he said, “Sorry, Myr Skarland, what it means is that if Ellen doesn’t wake up tomorrow, she’ll have only one chance in eight of waking up on Thursday. If she doesn’t awaken on Thursday, she’ll have one chance in twenty-seven on Friday, one chance in 256 on Saturday, and one in 625 on Sunday. You see how quickly her prospects dim. By then, even if she does awaken, she would most likely suffer irreparable psychosis.”

In the manse bedroom, the arbeitor finished unpacking Meewee’s luggage and putting his things away. It came around the bed to where Meewee was sitting and held out a trophy in its gripper arm. It was the 2082 Mandela Humanitarian Award that Meewee had won for his Birthplace work.

“Put it there for now,” Meewee said and pointed at the night table. The arbeitor placed the trophy on the table and then, without warning, extended its arm and tried to grab Meewee by the throat. Meewee reared back reflexively and blocked it with his hands. The arbeitor caught one of his arms and squeezed it in a crushing grip. Meewee screamed and tried to break free. “Help! Help!” he cried.

“I’ve called for security,” Wee Hunk replied.

“Make it stop!”

“I can’t. Someone else is controlling it.”

The arbeitor dragged Meewee off the bed by the arm and extended its other gripper, trying to catch his throat, but Meewee squirmed out of reach.

“Listen to me, Bishop,” Wee Hunk said calmly. “Tell Arrow to stop it.”

“Arrow, stop this thing!” Meewee shouted, but the arbeitor continued its assault. It twisted Meewee’s arm, forcing him into gripper range.

“Not in English,” Wee Hunk said. “Use Starkese.”

Meanwhile, in the limo scape, Wee Hunk continued its explanation to the evangelines. “That’s why the doctors will employ more aggressive methods of rousing her in the coming days, including microsurgical tissue replacement.”

“Arrow!” Meewee cried when the gripper found his throat and began to squeeze. “Arrow!” he choked, fumbling for the proper syntax, “make me a pot of tea!”

Immediately something inside the arbeitor’s casing sizzled, and the machine went slack. Meewee pulled its gripper from his throat and rolled away, gulping air.

“Thank goodness,” Wee Hunk said. “Are you all right?” In the limo, he continued. “Tonight they will try to induce dreams and reestablish a ninety-minute sleep cycle by chemical means. Tomorrow they wire her directly to a simulacrum jacket.”

Meewee lay wheezing on the floor while his heart bounced around in his chest. Someone was banging on the bedroom door, unable to get in. Manse security?

“So much for our double canopy and shielding,” Wee Hunk said.

On the other side of the room, the closet opened, and two small cleaning scuppers emerged and charged across the carpet directly at Meewee’s head.