Counting Heads (5 page)

Later, when I brought out dinner and two glasses of visola on a tray, El sat at the patio table in her white terry robe looking at the small pile of elemental dust on the deck—carbon, sodium, calcium, and whatnot—that had recently been a bird. It was not at all unusual for birds to fly out through the canopy, or for a tiny percentage of them to become infected outside. What
was
unusual was that upon reentering the canopy, being tasted, found bad, and enveloped by a swarm of anti-nano agents, so much of the bird should survive the fall in so recognizable a form, as this one had.

El frowned at me and said, “It’s Governor Rickert, come back to haunt us.”

We both laughed uneasily.

THE NEXT DAY I felt the urge to get some work done. It would be another two days before the orphanage would begin the recombination, and I was restless. Meanwhile, Eleanor had some sort of Tri-D meeting scheduled in the living room.

I had claimed an empty bedroom in the back of the apartment for my work area. It about matched my Chicago studio in size and aspect. I had asked the building super, a typically dour reginald, to send up an arbeitor to remove all the furniture except for an armchair and nightstand. The chair needed a pillow to support the small of my back, but otherwise it was adequate for long sitting sessions. I pulled it around to face a blank inner wall that Henry had told me was the north wall, placed the nightstand next to it, and brought in a carafe of strong coffee and some sweets from the kitchen. I made myself comfortable.

“Okay, Henry, take me to Chicago.” The empty bedroom was instantly transformed into my studio, and I sat in front of my favorite window wall overlooking the Chicago skyline and lakefront from the 303rd floor of the Drexler Building. The sky was dark with storm clouds. Rain splattered against the window. There was nothing like a thunderstorm to stimulate my creativity.

“Henry, match Chicago’s ionic dynamics here.” I sipped my coffee and watched lightning strike neighboring towers as the air in my room took on a freshly scrubbed ozone quality. I felt relaxed and invigorated.

When I was ready, I turned the chair around to face my studio. It was just as I had left it months before in realbody. There was the large oak worktable that dominated the east corner. Glass-topped and long-legged, it was a table you could work at without stooping over. I used to stand at that table endlessly twenty and thirty years ago when I still lived in Chicago. Now it was piled high with prized junk: design trophies, hunks of polished gemstones from Mars and Jupiter, a scale model Japanese pagoda of cardboard and mica, a box full of my antique key collection, parcels wrapped in some of my most successful designs, and—the oldest objects in the room—a mason jar of paintbrushes, like a bouquet of dried flowers.

I rose from my chair and wandered about my little domain, taking pleasure in my life’s souvenirs. The cabinets, shelves, counters, and floor were overflowing: an antelope-skin spirit drum; an antique pendulum mantel clock that houseputer servos kept wound; holocubes of some of my former lovers and wives; bits of colored glass, tumbleweed, and driftwood in whose patterns and edges I had once found inspiration; and a bull elephant foot made into a footstool. This room was more a museum now than a functioning studio, and I was more its curator than a practicing artist.

I went to the south wall and looked into the corner. Henry’s original container sat atop three more identical ones. “How’s the paste?” I said.

“Sufficient for the time being. I’ll let you know when we need more.”

“More? Isn’t this enough? You have enough paste to run a major city.”

“Eleanor Starke’s Cabinet is more powerful than a major city.”

“Yeah, well, let’s get down to work.” I returned to my armchair. The storm had passed the city and was retreating across the lake, turning the water midnight-blue. “What have you got on the egg idea?”

Henry projected a richly ornate egg in the air before me. Gold leaf and silver wire, inlaid with once-precious gems, it was modeled after the Fabergé masterpieces favored by the last of the Romanoff tsars. But instead of enclosing miniature portraits or clockwork engines, my eggs would merely be expensive wrapping for small gifts. The recipients would have to crack them open. But then they could keep the pieces, which would reassemble, or toss them into the bin for recycling credits.

“It’s just as I told you last week,” said Henry. “The public will hate it. I tested it against Simulated Us and E-Pluribus.” Henry filled the space around the egg with dynamic charts and graphs. “Nowhere are positive ratings higher than seven percent, or negative ratings lower than sixty-eight percent. Typical comments call it ‘old-fashioned,’ and ‘vulgar.’ Matrix analyses find that people do not want to be reminded of their latent fertility. People resent—”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I get the picture.” It was a dumb concept. I knew as much when I proposed it. But I was so enamored with my own latent fertility, I had lost my head. I thought people would be drawn to this archetypal symbol of renewal, but Henry had been right all along, and now he had the data to prove it.

If the truth be told, I had not come up with a hit design in five years, and I was terrified.

“It’s just a dry spell,” Henry said, sensing my mood. “You’ve had them before, even longer.”

“I know, but this one is the worst.”

“You say that every time.”

To cheer me up, Henry began to play my wrapping paper portfolio, projecting my past masterpieces larger than life in the air.

I held patents for package applications in many fields, from archival wrap and instant skin, to military camouflage and video paint. But my own favorites, and probably the public’s as well, were my novelty gift wraps. My first was a video wrapping paper that displayed the faces of loved ones (or celebrities if you had no loved ones) singing “Happy Birthday” to the music of the Boston Pops. That dated back to 2025 when I was a molecular engineering student and before we lost Boston to the Outrage.

My first professional design was the old box-in-a-box routine, only my boxes didn’t get smaller as you opened them, but larger, and in fact could fill the whole room until you chanced upon one of the secret commands, which were any variation of “stop” (whoa, enough, cut it out, etc.) or “help” (save me, I’m suffocating, get this thing off me, etc.).

Next came wrapping paper that screamed when you tore or cut it. That led to paper that resembled human skin. It molded itself perfectly and seamlessly around the gift and had a shelf life of fourteen days (and a belly button!). It came in all races. You had to cut it to open the gift, and of course it bled. It was creepy, and we sold mountains of it.

The human skin led to my most enduring design, a perennial that was still popular, the orange peel. It, too, wrapped itself around any shape seamlessly (and had a navel). It was real, biological orange peel. When you cut or ripped it, it squirted citrus juice and smelled delightful.

I let Henry project these designs for me. I must say I became intoxicated with my own achievements. I gloried in them. They filled me with the most selfish wonder.

I was terribly good, and the whole world knew it.

Yet even after this healthy dose of self-love, I wasn’t able to buckle down to anything new. I told Henry to order the kitchen to fix me some more coffee and something for lunch.

On my way to the kitchen I passed the living room and saw that Eleanor was having difficulties of her own. Even with souped-up holoservers, the living room was a mess. There were dozens of people in there and, as best as I could tell, just as many rooms superimposed over each other. People, especially self-important people, liked to bring their offices with them when they went to meetings. The result was a jumble of merging desks, lamps, and chairs. Walls sliced through each other at drunken angles. Windows issued cityscape views of New York, London, Washington, and Moscow (and others I didn’t recognize) in various shades of day and weather. People, some of whom I recognized from the newsnets, either sat at their desks in a rough, overlapping circle or wandered through walls and furniture to kibitz with each other and with Eleanor’s Cabinet.

At least this was how it all appeared to me standing in the hallway, outside the room’s emitters. To those inside, it might look like the Senate chambers. I watched for a while, safely out of cam range, until Eleanor noticed me. “Henry,” I said, “ask her how many of these people are here in realbody.” Eleanor raised a finger, one, and pointed to herself.

I smiled. She was the only one there who could see me. I continued to the kitchen and brought my lunch back to my studio. I still couldn’t get started, so I asked Henry to report on my correspondence. He had answered over five hundred posts since our last session the previous day. Four-fifths of these concerned the baby.

We were invited to appear—
with the baby
—on every major talk show and magazine. We were threatened with lawsuits by the Anti-Transubstantiation League. We were threatened with violence by several anonymous callers (who would surely be identified by El’s security chief and prosecuted by her attorney general). A hundred seemingly harmless people requested permission to visit us in realbody or holo during nap time, bath time, any time. Twice that number accused us of fraud. Three men and one woman named Sam Harger claimed that their fertility permit was mistakenly awarded to me. Dr. Armbruster’s prediction was coming true, and the baby hadn’t even been converted yet.

This killed an hour. I still didn’t feel creative, so I called it quits. I took a shower, shaved. Then I went, naked, to stand outside the entrance to the living room. When Eleanor saw me she cracked a grin. She held up five fingers, five minutes, and turned back to her meeting.

I went to my bedroom to wait for her. She spent her lunch break with me. When we made love that day and the next, I enjoyed a little fantasy I never told her about. I imagined that she was pregnant in the old-fashioned way, with an enormous belly, melon-round and hard, and that as I moved inside her, as we moved together, we were teaching our child its first lesson in the art of human love.

ON THURSDAY, THE day of the conversion, we took a leisurely breakfast on the terrace of the New Foursquare Hotel in downtown Bloomington. A river of pedestrians, students and service people mostly, flowed past our little island of metal tables and brightly striped umbrellas. The day broke clear and blue and would be hot by noon. A frisky breeze tried to snatch away our menus. The Foursquare had the best kitchen in Bloomington, at least for desserts. Its pastry chef, Myr Duvou, had earned a reputation for re-creating the classics. That morning we (mostly me) were enjoying strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and coffee. Everything—the strawberries, the wheat for the cakes, the sugar, coffee beans—had been grown, not assembled. The preparation was done lovingly and skillfully by human hand. All the wait staff were steves, who were highly sensitive to our wants and who, despite their ungainly height, bowed ever so low to take our order.

We called Dr. Armbruster. She appeared in miniature, desk and all, on top of my place mat.

“It’s a go, then?” she said, reading our expressions.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” Eleanor said and took my hand.

“Congratulations, both of you. You are two of the luckiest people in the world.”

We already knew that.

“Traits? Enhancements?” asked Dr. Armbruster.

We had studied all the options and decided to allow Nature and chance, not some well-meaning gengineer, to roll our genes together into a new individual. “Random traits,” we said, “and the standard half-dozen alphine enhancements.”

“That leaves gender,” said Dr. Armbruster.

I looked at Eleanor. “A boy,” she said. “I think it wants to be a boy.”

“A boy it is,” said Dr. Armbruster. “I’ll get the lab on it immediately. The recombination should take about three hours. I’ll monitor the progress and keep you apprised. We will infect the chassis around noon. Make an appointment for a week from today to come in and take possession of—your son. We like to throw a little birthing party, and it’s up to you to make media arrangements, if any.

“I’ll call you in about an hour. And again, congratulations!”

We were too anxious to do anything else, so we ate shortcake and drank coffee and didn’t talk much. We mostly sat close and said meaningless things to ease the tension. Finally Dr. Armbruster, seated at her tiny desk, called back.

“The recombination work is about two-thirds done and is proceeding very smoothly. Early readings show a Pernell Organic Intelligence quotient of 3.93—very impressive, but probably no surprise to you. So far, we know that your son has Sam’s eyes, chin, and skeleto-muscular frame, and Eleanor’s hair, nose, and—
eyebrows
.”

“I’m afraid my eyebrows are fairly dominant,” said Eleanor.

“Apparently,” said Dr. Armbruster.

“I’m mad about your eyebrows,” I said.

“And I’m mad about your frame.”

We spent another hour there, taking two more updates from Dr. Armbruster. I ordered an iced bottle of champagne, and guests from other tables toasted us with coffee cups and visola glasses. I was slightly tipsy when we finally rose to leave. To my annoyance, I felt the prickly kiss of a homcom slug at my ankle. I decided I’d better let it finish tasting me before I attempted to thread my way through the jumble of tables and chairs. The slug seemed to take an inordinate amount of time.

Eleanor, meanwhile, was impatient to go. “What is it?” She laughed. “Are you drunk?”

“Just a slug,” I said. “It’s almost done.” But it wasn’t. Instead of dropping off, the slug elongated itself and looped around both of my ankles so that when I turned to join Eleanor, I tripped and capsized our table and cracked my head on the flagstone floor. The slug’s slippery shroud oozed up my body and stretched across my face. It congealed and blurred my view of the tables and umbrellas and crowds of diners who were all fleeing like horror-show shades. I could hardly draw breath. Eleanor’s face loomed over me for an instant, peering in at me, then vanished, though I cried and babbled for help. I tried to sit up, I tried to crawl, but I was tightly bound with my arms pinned to my sides.