Counting Heads (9 page)

“Sam, I detect that you need to urinate.”

“That’s not surprising.”

“Yes, and soon. Also, you are dehydrated and severely deficient in potassium. I suggest breakfast before we leave.”

“I’m not hungry,” Samson said and tapped the buckle beneath his jumpsuit. “You sure you loaded this thing up?”

“Yes, Sam, as much as its outdated tech allows.”

Samson grunted. “Speaking of outdated tech, I suppose that includes you. Are you sure you’re up to the task?”

“I have worked it out to the most minute detail, Sam. And I am not particularly obsolete. I spend most of my unstructured time self-reconfiguring. Of course I haven’t had an electro-neural gel upgrade in decades.”

Samson chuckled. “Are you sure you’re not Henry? That’s what Henry always used to say, ‘I need more paste, Sam. More paste.’ And like a fool, I bought it for him. I think you know where that got me.”

“Yes, I do, Sam, but Henry was a valet, not a true mentar.”

Samson put away his toiletries and kicked the nightshirt rags into the corner. Then he removed the breakfast tray from the footstool. The stool was made from the hollowed-out right rear foot of a wild, male African elephant. Its toenails alone were as large as Samson’s fists. He grasped the zebra-skin cushion and rotated it counterclockwise until it clicked and released. Samson used to hide his treasures here—when he still had treasures. At the bottom of the foot lay a packet of sealed paper envelopes. Each had the name of a housemeet scrawled across it in Samson’s tortured handwriting. He removed these, locked the zebra cushion, and replaced the breakfast tray. When he glanced at the bowl of corn mush, his belly gurgled—or maybe that was Hubert trying to trick him?

“Oh, all
right
,” he said and grabbed a spoon. He ate the mush and drank the juice without tasting either of them. The coffeesh he left because one’s last cup of coffeesh in this life should be hot. Then he fixed up the cot to look like he was still in it and tucked the packet of letters underneath the pillow. At the door he glanced around one last time at his room. A garden shed was not so bad a place to end up in.

Samson patted the empty pockets of his jumpsuit. “What am I forgetting?”

“The bag.”

“Where did I leave it?”

“It’s concealed behind the seed mats.”

Samson groped behind the rolls of troutcorn matting until he found a little yellow duffel bag. He transferred its contents to his pockets: half-liter flasks of electrolyte sports drink, high-energy Gooeyduk bars, his meds and special sunglasses, soothing towelettes, a hat, a handful of debit tokens, a ticket to the nosebleed section of Soldier Field, and the single most important item—a portable simcaster.

“Well then,” he said, “we’re off.”

HOLDING TIGHT TO the banister, Samson Kodiak descended the charterhouse stairs one monumental step at a time. He stopped often to catch his breath. The first door he passed was to the elevator machine room. It also served as Bogdan Kodiak’s bedroom. The diaron-plated, titanium-bolted, epoxy clinker core door was adorned with glowing, 3-D, international glyphs that proclaimed, “WARNING—LETHAL DOOR.” Samson was fairly sure that this was just a bluff to keep the Tobblers from trying to break in and reclaim their elevator machinery. He touched the door as he went by and said, “Good-bye, my boy. Stay out of too much trouble.”

Halfway down the next flight of stairs, Samson’s legs ached so badly he needed to rest. It was simple ischemia, he knew, the weakness of old legs, but if he wasn’t careful, muscular hypoxia could lead to necrosis and set off a chain reaction of fiery apoptosis that would end his trip prematurely right here, between the eighth and ninth floors. And the last thing he wanted to do was to burn from the feet up.

“Not here. Not now,” he muttered, locking his knees as best he could and leaning on the banister. He forced himself to take deep breaths.

“Shall I call for assistance?” Hubert said from the belt buckle under his jumpsuit.

“No! Don’t!” Hooking an arm around the banister, Samson massaged his legs. A door slammed above him, and the sound of footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Young Bogdan flew around the corner, swinging on the banister, taking steps three at a time, and almost ran into Samson.

“Sam!” he said, stumbling to a halt. “I almost ran you over! Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

“I’m late for work,” Bogdan said and continued down the stairs. But he paused at the landing to look up at Samson. He ran back up to him and said, “You don’t look so good to me, Sam.”

Samson smiled. The boy was almost as attentive as April, and the housemeets were entirely too hard on him, Kale especially. “It’s just these old gams of mine,” he said. “Pay no attention.” But the boy took his arm and tried to escort him. “No, Boggy,” Samson protested. “Leave me be. We don’t want you late for
work
.” It was, after all, the only
paid
employment, except for April’s Nanojiffy franchise, that anyone in Charter Kodiak was lucky enough to have.

“I’ll just take you down to seven,” Bogdan said. And he did, almost lifting the old man in his haste. They crossed the Tobblers’ “tunnel” from the south to the north side of the building, where the disputed territory ended and they entered a wholly-Kodiak-owned stairwell. The steps here were piled high with cartons and crates of chemicals, seed mats, and hydroponics frames for the roof garden. Overhead, tiers of shelves held cases of ugoo for the Nanojiffy, spare parts for the wind rams and air miner, and a clutter of the charter’s odds and ends. A narrow trail next to the banister was all that remained clear in what was essentially a seven-story walkup closet.

Bogdan deposited Samson on a sack of garden lime. “Thank you, boy,” Samson said, catching his breath.

“I’ve got to go now,” Bogdan said.

“Then go; I’ll be fine.” When Bogdan turned, Samson added, “What happened to your hat?”

Bogdan winced. “It was—uh—I lost it.”

“Lost it? How is that possible? I thought it was stapled to your noggin’.”

“I gotta go,” Bogdan said and dashed down to the next landing.

Samson watched him disappear around a spare gray-water detoxifier unit. “I’m going to rest here a little while, Henry,” he said. “Don’t let me fall asleep.”

BOGDAN REACHED THE tiny foyer and hurried out the front door. The street was full of Tobblers putting away their breakfast picnic tables. Charter Tobbler closed Howe Street to traffic three times a day in order to eat outdoors. Bogdan jumped down the steps to the sidewalk and turned in the direction of the CPT station when he remembered that he’d forgotten to call ahead, and so he didn’t know where the office was located today.

Damn! He’d have to use the Nanojiffy phone, but when he looked at the store entrance, he saw that it was blocked by a gaunt man holding the end of a couch. The line of customers waiting to get in was backed up to the end of the block. Feck! He’d have to go in through the charterhouse, but when he returned to the front door, it didn’t open.

“Open up!” he said hopefully.

The door remained shut and replied, “Only Kodiak housemeets and their guests are allowed entry.”

“But I
am
Kodiak. I’m Bogdan Kodiak. Don’t you recognize me?”

“Bogdan Kodiak is already at home. Please leave the vicinity of the door, or the police will be summoned.”

Bogdan wanted to scream. Life wasn’t supposed to be this complicated. Why, oh, why did it happen? Why did someone steal Lisa?

Lisa was his cap valet, and despite what he’d told Samson, she had been stolen, not lost. She was his prized possession, a gazillion-terahertz processor with anti-scanning mirrorshades and holocam studs in the sweatband. She interfaced with his brain through a half-SQUID EM I/O, and she had cricket bone surround sound and holoemitters in the bill. And though it was true that Lisa was only a lo-index sub-subem—basically a souped-up grade-school slate—Bogdan had spent years customizing her. He had taught her so many tricks that sometimes he could fool people into believing that she was a subem. And one of the most important tricks he had taught her was to phone E-Pluribus each morning to find out where the fecking office was going to be located that day. And another trick was how to circumvent the charter’s aging houseputer in order to open the fecking front door. And the only reason he’d told Samson that he’d lost her was because he didn’t want to admit that someone had stolen her right off his head without him even knowing it. Lisa, the heart and engine of Lisa, was a ten-centimeter strip of processor felt, which was loosely stitched into the cap’s lining. Yesterday it was gone. He still had the cap, but without the processor felt, it was only just a cap.

The thing was, he never took it off, day or night. How could someone steal the felt without his noticing? It was a complete mystery. Moreover, although the processor felt was outdated, the charter was too impoverished to replace it. Houseer Kale would crap his togs at the mere suggestion.

To hell with it. Bogdan headed for the Nanojiffy entrance. He’d have to buy a cheap phone during his lunch break, but for now the public phone in the store would do. The customer with the couch was still blocking the way, so Bogdan took advantage of his small size and crawled under the couch into the store. Once inside, he squeezed himself between the couch and the wall and stood up. Their Nanojiffy was so small that the couch nearly filled it. The other end of the couch was slowly emerging from the delivery maw of the extruder. April Kodiak stood in a small space across the couch from him and smiled. “Morning, Boggy. Forget something?”

“No. Just gotta use the phone.” He pointed with his thumb outside the shop and said, “Why’d you let that nodder buy a couch in the morning?”

April shushed him with a look and said, “Why don’t you use your cap? Is it broken? Where is it?”

“Yeah, it’s broken,” he said and wondered why he hadn’t thought of that explanation. “We’ll have to buy me a new one.”

April frowned and shook her head. “I think we should try to have it repaired first.”

Bogdan worked his way to the phone board. “You can’t fix stuff like that.” When he reached the phone, he boosted himself up and sat on the still warm couch. The man in the doorway oofed, but said nothing. Bogdan swiped his hand in front of the phone and was baffled by the long list of calls that appeared on the board. Most of them were over
thirty-six hours old
. He didn’t understand. He’d checked his messages last night on the Kodiak houseputer, and none of these had shown up. “Why don’t we get the freaking houseputer fixed instead.”

There was no time to review all his calls. He touched the E-Pluribus icon and learned that the office had been moved to Elmhurst, a good multi-zone commute away. He loaded his hand with route, fares, and rtps in order to save time at the station. Then he crawled back under the couch and out of the Nanojiffy, and April called after him, “Don’t forget you have an Allowance Committee meeting tonight. You can bring up your valet then.”

On the sidewalk, the man holding the end of the couch said, “Didya happen to look at the extruder readout, sonny?”

“No, I didn’t,” Bogdan said.

“Didya happen to notice if the legs were out yet?”

“Sorry.”

The man seemed awfully pale, and he was sweating despite the cool morning air. Bogdan wondered how he planned to carry the couch to wherever it was he lived.

The man shifted the weight of the couch to free one hand. “I bought it for me birthday,” he said and reached out to try to rub Bogdan’s head.

“Happy birthday,” Bogdan said and ducked out of reach. He jogged down the sidewalk to the end of the block. The Kodiak Nanojiffy was the only convenience store in the neighborhood to boast both an extruder and a digester, and most of the people waiting in line carried little sacks of yesterday’s garbage to apply toward today’s purchases.

A media bee keeping tabs on the scene followed Bogdan several blocks on his way to the CPT station, but it must have figured out that he wasn’t a real boy, because it lost interest and flew away.

“SAM,” HUBERT SAID. “Sam, wake up. It’s getting late.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“You were in stage one sleep.”

“I was praying. It produces similar brain-wave patterns.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. I was praying to Saint Wanda to help me get through this day.” Samson grasped the banister and hoisted himself to his feet. Saint Wanda had, in fact, been on his mind lately.

Wanda was Wanda Wieczorek and not a real saint, except in the hearts of stinkers everywhere. Wanda was one of the first of the seared to go mad in a spectacular and public way. She caused her seared body to burst into flame while she sat on a sofa valued at ten thousand old euros on the fifth floor of Daud’s in London. Her personal ground zero took out the silk-covered sofa and its matching armchair and ottoman. Combined value—thirteen thousand old euros. Smoke and water damage ruined much of the rest of the furniture on the floor as well.

Not only did Wanda point the way for effective—if suicidal—protest by the seared, but she demonstrated the ease with which it could be accomplished. While sitting on the display furniture, she reprogrammed a pocket simcaster—the type used by busy people to cast proxies of themselves—to scan her DNA markers. Consumer electronics weren’t actually capable of unraveling a person’s genetic code, but even reading markers was enough to trigger the tiny booby traps guarding her cells.

Before long, the fifth-floor manager approached Wanda, wearing nose plugs, and said, “I really must insist that you leave.” Behind him stood three uniformed jerrys. “These gents will see you to the door.”

“Fine,” Wanda said, “I was just leaving.” She touched the simcaster to her forehead and squeezed the scan button. The moment its field penetrated her skull and combed through the tangled skein of neurons within, her cellular wardens went critical. Smoke seeped from her nose and ears, and she fell back into the silky embrace of the sofa. Her skull split open with several resounding cracks, and gouts of cooking brains spewed forth. Then she burst into flame.