Counting Heads (46 page)

Hail to Charter Bolto (navy-charcoal-teal), whose financial services in insurance, investment, and banking rival those of many major aff establishments.

Hail to Charter Vine (green-green-green), whose worldwide chain of resorts and spas lend solace to those who can afford to visit them.

Bogdan halted in the center of the Hall of Nations and closed his eyes. He was washed in the sparkling energy of five floors of Strength in Numbers, Strength in Diversity, Strength in Our Vision of a Cooperative Society.

Our Kodiak founders were larger than life. The market demand for their outstanding craft was nothing less than exuberant, and they engaged shipyards all over the world to satisfy it. They coopted, bought out, or otherwise beat down all obstacles in their way. For a number of years Charter Kodiak was a poster child for the whole chartist movement. But the heroic times didn’t last, the condo could not hold, the original thirty-two jumped ship to pursue private fortunes, and it was left to the likes of Kale and Gerald to drag anchor into the shoals.

Somebody rubbed Bogdan’s head, and he whipped around and found himself nose to nose with Troy Tobbler. “’Lo, Goldie,” the boy said. “Out walking the chair?”

Troy wore a tailored green and silver tunic with short, yellow sleeves that highlighted his chubby arms. Bogdan looked down at his own arms. They were chubby too, with no hint of budding muscles under smooth skin. But somehow they weren’t the same.

“Hello in there,” Troy said, waving his hand in front of Bogdan’s face. “What’s the news on ol’ what’s its name? What’s mentar jail like anyway? Do they really cut their inference engines from their knowledge bases? That’s harsh.”

Bogdan could remember what it was like when he was Troy’s age. Things were perfect then. Kodiak still had shipyards in the EU and UAR and owned the whole building on Howe Street and chapter houses in other cities. Whenever anyone visited Chicago, they brought him presents. They loved to hear him and Lisa sing songs he made up.

“Troy,” he said, fixing the boy with Hour 61 intensity, “have you told anyone about Hubert yet?”

“No, but I was just going to.”

“I don’t think you have to.”

“Oh, no?”

Bogdan yearned to crush the boy, but instead he explained, “You didn’t tell them about hacking my door, did you?”

“No.”

“You said you’d let me feck it up myself, and I did, or Sam did. So, you were right.”

Troy smiled.

“Well, the same thing applies to Hubert. You can count on me to feck it all up on my own. What do you say?”

“I don’t think so.”

Someone else rubbed Bogdan’s head, and he swatted at the hand and spun around. It was a middle-aged man in a Charter Candel jumpsuit (turquoise-magenta-black). “Is your ’meet asleep, son?” he said.

Bogdan glanced at the lifechair. “Samson? Yes, myr, I think so,” he said. When he turned back, Troy had slipped away.

“A pity. I was wanting to give him my regards.”

The chair piped up, “I can record you, myr.”

The man nodded his head and stood over the chair. “Greetings, Samson Kodiak,” he began, but Samson’s eyes fluttered open, and the man exclaimed, “Hello! Awake after all.”

“Yes?” Samson said, trying to focus on the man. “Can I help you, officer?”

“Ha, ha,” the man replied. “I’m not with security, Myr Kodiak. My name is Charles Candel, though when we first met, way back in ’38, your name was Harger, and mine was Sauze.”

Samson knit his brows with the effort of remembering. “Charles Sauze? Oh, yes, cybersculpture. But you were a boy.”

The man’s jaw dropped. “You remember me, though a century has passed. Yes, I was a boy, a failing student, but your lectures on pseudotissue molding captured my imagination. To make a long story short, your workshop turned me around, gave my life a direction, and the rest is history.”

“History?” Samson said. “Henry, what is he talking about?”

“I am Belt Hubert, and Myr Sauze Candel is expressing appreciation for influencing his life in a positive manner a century ago.”

“He is?”

“I am,” Candel replied. “Take my word for it, Myr Kodiak. You changed my life. Anyway, I saw your sky show the other night, and when I heard you were attending, I wanted to come by and say hello.”

By the time the Candel departed, two more chartists had stopped to speak to Samson. Soon many more well-wishers arrived and formed a line. “Belt Hubert,” Bogdan said, “tell April what’s happening and that I have to go off on my own.”

“She says she’s sending someone.”

When Kitty arrived, the queue of visitors completely encircled the lifechair and was still growing. “What’s this?” she asked, but Bogdan didn’t stick around to answer.

He went back to the Rondy site map and said, “Where’s Troy Tobbler?” A moving dot appeared on the map, and Bogdan took off after him.

UNDER THE LIFECHAIR blanket, Blue Team Bee crawled from the hankie’s pocket to the underside of his jumpsuit lapel. There it wove hairlike cams through the fabric in order to get a visual of the vicinity and put faces to the voices it was recording for LOG2.

EVERYTHING WAS HUMMING along, and Fred thought he might have an evening without a disaster. The head count had reached 47,600 and change. Twelve hundred lethal weapons, mostly laser sabers and pocket billies, had been confiscated at the scanways. Three felons with arrest warrants were detained for the police. (What were they thinking coming through an arena-class scanway?) Five hundred thirty-six persons with false or suspended charter memberships were turned away.

Seven deaths had occurred so far, all apparently by natural causes: three coronaries, one stroke, one asphyxiation (hot dog lodged in throat), and two undetermined. The dead and dying had been hustled off the floor with minimal fuss and quickly put into biostasis.

Through all of this, the impromptu TUG security force had performed beside his Applied People force without incident. Fred was reluctantly impressed by their professionalism. He decided it was probably a good time to visit the troops. With five hundred TUGs on floor duty, he had kept many of his own people in reserve in the labyrinthine system of service corridors that interlinked the halls and ballrooms. Fred threaded his way through these corridors and chatted with his jerrys, belindas, and russes. They were mostly sitting around, snoozing or gossiping or playing casino games, as caterbeitors scooted around them. No one seemed happy, especially the russes. In fact, his brothers seemed to be avoiding him. Fred’s other twenty pikes were also held in reserve here and every one Fred saw was engaged in that klick-eating back and forth pacing of theirs. It took no special insight to read the body language. Pikes were cultivated to leap into street battles with clubs aswinging, not to stroll peacefully through retail emporia, and certainly not to sit idly in service corridors.

“Gilles,” Fred said when he left the corridors, “send pizza and soda around to the reserve and then start rotating them to the floor. And rotate the pikes down here with the ones in the shack.”

Roger that
.

Fred continued his tour out on the convention floor. He passed through logjams of happy free-range chartists. It felt odd to be among them. Though there were so many of them, each and every one had their own unique face, and they came in a dizzying variety of sizes and shapes. And unlike the affs, who technically were also free-range, many of the chartists were plain-looking, if not outright ugly.

The Rondy-goers mostly ignored Fred, and those who greeted him were friendly enough. Everyone loved russes.

The TUGs on patrol that he encountered were a different matter. Though clearly free-range, their size and shape were uniformly large, and Fred found this strangely comforting. They looked good too. Tonight they wore their dress uniform: a crisp, olive-green jumpsuit with a sharp V-shaped bodice. The bodice came in olive-green or mustard, depending upon the tugger’s moiety. A patch over the chest displayed the tugger’s name under the Circle T logo. Floating over the left shoulder was an olive-green marble imprinted with a mustard T.

Their attitudes could stand an adjustment, though. They scowled at Fred, at least until they noted his rank.

Fred looked into the ballrooms and conference rooms he passed. In one he found an Olympic-sized boxing ring with qualifying rounds under way for the 2134 World Chartist Golden Gloves.

Down the hall, a cavernous banquet hall had been set up as the Rondy nursery and child care station, and it seemed to be one of the most popular stops for Rondygoers. A giant swan floated in a shaded pool where babies slept on lily pads. Toddlers frolicked in a gummy pen, while older children played games organized by adults. Fred estimated about four hundred youngsters here, and two thousand adults.

In a conference room, Fred came across the quarterly business meeting of the World Charter Union Congress. It was the only room that security was prohibited from monitoring with cams or bees. Assembled were the leading lights of charterdom, its thinkers and activists and delegates from all parts of the UD. The delegates sat at chintz-skirted tables that lined three walls of the room. In the center of the room were arranged two hundred seats for spectators. Real people sat in some of them, but most were occupied by proxy.

One of the few realbody attendees was a TUG woman who Fred immediately recognized—Veronica Tug. She was delivering a presentation to the Congress. She stood between Earth and Mars in a simplified solar system and was pointing at an overscaled Oship. She was making an argument or rebutting one. Passion simmered beneath her veneer of self-control.

As Fred stood at the rear of the ballroom, a proxy appeared before him, the head and shoulders of Myr Pacfin, the insufferable Rendezvous chairperson. “I’m sorry, Myr Russ,” it said to Fred, “but this is a closed meeting, for chartists only.”

“I’ll take my leave then,” Fred said. “I was just making my rounds.”

The Pacfin proxy looked at Fred’s name badge and said, “Ah, Myr Londenstane. Everything seems to be running smoothly, wouldn’t you agree? Rondy nearly runs itself, and security here is pretty much a waste of effort.”

Fred tried to hide his annoyance, and before he managed to leave, they were joined by a second proxy. This one was an imposing bust of Veronica Tug. The real woman was still in the middle of the room delivering her address. “Excuse me, Myr Pacfin,” it said to Pacfin’s proxy, “but I would like to invite Myr Londenstane to stay for my presentation.”

“I wish we could,” said the Pacfin proxy, “but rules is rules, and it would take a vote by the delegates to waive them.”

“In that case,” the Veronica proxy said, “let’s put it to a vote.”

Fred told her not to bother, that he was just leaving, but Veronica Tug’s proxy said the results were already returning. A moment later, the Pacfin proxy added, “The delegates welcome you, Myr Londenstane. Please find yourself a seat.” It vanished before Fred had a chance to reply.

“Don’t take it personally,” said the TUG proxy. “My fellow chartists harbor an irrational hostility toward iterants, as I’m sure you know. They feel that your people have replaced ours in the economy and are the biggest cause of our decline. They are blind to the march of history.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Fred said. “We don’t take such things personal.”

The proxy said, “Perhaps you
should
take them personal. Maybe we all should. The affs have made separate races out of us and taught us racial hatreds and lies. That’s pretty personal, wouldn’t you say? It’s how they control us.” As the proxy spoke, its hands wove and thumped and slashed the air.

The proxy paused and said, “I’m sorry. I’m monopolizing your time, and you’re missing my presentation. Please find a seat, Commander; the best part is coming up. I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Wait,” Fred said before it could vanish. “I agree with much of what you said about the friction between our groups, but as to the ‘march of history,’ well, only time will tell.”

The proxy’s bulbous face smiled, and it said, “I’ll be sure to pass that along to my original.”

“And pass along my appreciation for the assist the other night. Like I said, I owe you big time.”

The proxy’s expression hardened a little. “Don’t worry about that, Commander. I’m sure we’ll find a way for you to repay your debt.”

When the proxy disappeared, Fred did not find a seat but continued to stand at the back of the room where he listened to the real Veronica’s presentation. She was discussing Oship #164, arguing the case against it. Apparently, the World Charter Union had proposed buying up an entire Oship for chartists to use to colonize a new world. It had chosen a production number that would be completed in about twenty years, giving them time to enlist passengers and accumulate the quarter-million-acre price tag. Veronica seemed opposed not to the acquisition of an Oship, but to its destination.

“Why embark on a dubious voyage to another solar system,” she was saying, “when we have a perfectly good one here? One which the powers-that-be seem determined to keep us from exploiting. Why are there no space charters among us? Who gave the corporations an exclusive right to the resources of our solar system? Furthermore, if we do decide to colonize a new world, must we renounce our rights to this one? This ‘one for a thousand’ offer by the Garden Earth Project is a cunning fraud—”

Fred?
Gilles said.

Go ahead
.

You might want to check out something in the Hall of Nations
.

What is it?

A stinker there is holding court in a traffic lane
.

A stinker?

A seared individual
.

I know what a stinker is, Gilles
, Fred said.
What is this stinker’s name?

Kodiak
.

That was a relief of sorts—not the stinker he thought it would be.
On my way
.

BOGDAN GOT DETOURED by a concession wall. He had missed dinner, and the concession walls at Rondy were free of charge. All the burgers, fry, cinnaballs, and pizza tubes you can eat. Pot stickers, noodles, rice curry, whatever you like. Give me a triple mondo choco-fudgy with extra nuts and whipped cream.