Counting Heads

2.13

In the bead car next to Bogdan, a man was scrunched up against the window, fast asleep. Bogdan, too, was being lulled by the gentle swaying of the speeding train, when there was a click, and his neighbor’s car unhitched and hurtled itself down a side tunnel. A moment later, another car dropped from an injection ramp and snapped into place next to him. His new neighbor, across two sheets of unbreakable glassine, was a woman with see-through skin. She was drumming her fingers on the armrest of her seat, and Bogdan became hypnotized by her tendons and muscles sliding over each other. When the woman noticed him staring, she seemed offended, though with a see-through face it was hard to tell. In any case, she opaqued her window.

Bogdan didn’t care. He was lost in a daydream. Although his session in the Aria Ranger ended before he and the weird sim reached the inhabited core of Trailing Earth, his next assignment was just as outstanding. The sim, in his green and red overalls, reappeared and said, “Hello again, Bogdan. Care to visit the future?”

Bogdan had looked around. They were alone in an E-Pluribus auditorium, not in a spaceship.

“Yah sure, why not?”

“Splendid. Now imagine this. Four hundred years have elapsed. You’re a plankholder aboard an Oship on its way to a new home system. Let’s go visit the bridge.”

A moment later they were standing in a room the size of a soccer field. There were dozens of young people in cool uniforms attending to a forest of flat monitors and control panels. In the center of the colossal room floated a giant scale model of an Oship.

“Here’s the decade captain,” the Meewee sim said as a young woman approached them. She was stunningly beautiful. As beautiful as Annette Beijing, if that was possible. She stopped in front of them, placed her hands on her shapely hips, and examined Bogdan from head to toe.

“Ah, Merrill,” she said, “you have a knack for picking the finest crew. Won’t you please introduce us.”

“Gladly,” the Meewee sim said. “Captain Suzette, I’m pleased to introduce Plankholder Bogdan Kodiak, one of our most promising young jump pilot cadets.”

“Welcome to the bridge of the ESV Garden Charter, Cadet Kodiak,” the captain said. “Merrill has asked me to give you a tour, and I thought we’d start right here in the command center. That sound acceptable?”

“Perfectly,” Bogdan said, his voice threatening to crack.

“Excellent.”

The Meewee sim said, “Well, Bogdan, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of our good captain. Till next time—” The sim dissolved into twinkling stars and disappeared.

“That’s a fine man,” Captain Suzette said, looking wistfully at the spot Meewee had occupied. “I hope you realize how lucky you are that he’s taken a shine to you.” She motioned for Bogdan to join her in front of the mammoth holo Oship. “Let’s begin with ship propulsion. I suppose you know about the Oship torus.”

The model Oship towered over him like a ten-story building. “Certainly,” Bogdan said, straining to remember what Meewee had said about it in the earlier session. “Uh, a magnetic trap for particle beams from a solar harvester.”

The gorgeous captain glanced at him admiringly. “Well put,” she said. “Let’s start with the harvesters. Back home in the system surrounding Sol—” She made gestures as she spoke, and the Oship model shrank to a pinpoint in an upper corner of the huge scape, making way in the center for a large dazzling star. Bogdan shielded his eyes against its intensity.

“Here, let me dampen that,” the captain said and twirled her finger. Dampened, the sun resembled a ball of squirming pink noodles. Girdling its northern hemisphere was a loose ring of black specks.

“Those are Heliostream harvesters,” Captain Suzette continued. “They’re as far out as Mercury orbit but above Sol’s equatorial plane. And of course, to be able to see the harvesters at all in this scape, I’ve had to scale them up to the size of Jupiter.”

“Of course,” Bogdan said.

“All right, let’s sketch in the rest of the system.” She pointed her finger here and there, and planets and habplat and fabplat colonies appeared, including a blue-and-white-mottled marble representing Earth.

“The harvesters capture the raw energies of Sol and transfer them to where they can be useful. Ready?” She snapped her fingers, and a thick spiderweb of colored threads shot out in all directions from the ring of solar harvesters. Most of them terminated at Earth. “The white ones are microwave beams which are converted to electricity, the red ones are laser, the yellow ones are streams of hydrogen plasma, and the green one there—do you know what that is?”

The green thread she indicated led directly to the tiny Oship in the upper corner. “That would be our particle mass beam,” Bogdan said.

“Excellent!” the captain said merrily. She waved her hands to close the Sol system and return the Oship model to its original imposing size. “Which leads us to our torus, which is, as you have already pointed out, a fortified electromagnetic force field that converts particle beams striking it into motive force.” As she spoke, a wire diagram, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe, appeared in the donut hole of the Oship. In the exact center, the lines bulged forward, like a finger poking a rubber sheet. “For the last four hundred years,” the captain continued, “Heliostream has been directing a narrow beam of charged photonic particles at Planet 2013LS in the Ursae Majoris system. That’s our destination. We have positioned the torus of our ship on the beam so as to ride it.” She pointed at the center of the donut hole. “That convexity you see in our torus is the particle beam striking it. Most of its energy is being converted into propulsion—we’ve attained 0.367 light speed—while a fraction is bled off to supply ship’s power. And, of course, the beam doubles as an ultra-broad communication band between us and Earth.”

Bogdan said, “So, how is old Earth doing four hundred years on?”

The sparkle seemed to leave Captain Suzette’s eyes. “Ah, Cadet Kodiak, the news hasn’t been good for a long time now. Our dear mother planet has suffered terribly since our launch, especially during the Second Phage War of 2184. Earth has been poisoned so extensively that nothing can live on its surface. Humans must live deep underground, or on Mars, the moons of Jupiter, or a number of orbital habplats. There are actually more people alive aboard the Garden Charter and our sister Oships than in all of Sol System combined. It would appear that we launched none too soon. We’re very, very lucky we had the wisdom to make the choices that we did.”

“But aren’t you afraid the Heliostream beam will fail without Earth?”

“Not really,” said the captain. “Heliostream is robotically controlled. We might have suffered if it had failed a century ago, but by now a beam failure would add less than ten years to our travel time. You see, we’ve almost reached the beam-off point.”

She waved her lovely hand, and the grand display switched to a view of open space and millions of stars. A broad arc connected two stars. Half of the arc glowed green, half red, and between them was a narrow colorless gap.

“When Heliostream cuts the beam in two years, we’ll travel by inertia for about seventy-five years, as represented by the gap there. The ship will use its fusion reactors for power during that time. We’ll lose gravity here in the lattice frame, though the occupied hab drums will begin to rotate and generate their own gravity.”

“But, but—” Bogdan said, questions piling up in his mind.

“Oh, I know what you’re going to ask,” the captain said. “Everyone does. If we’re the first ones out here, where does the braking beam come from? Right?”

That wasn’t it, but Bogdan nodded his head anyway. “And what do you mean, occupied hab drums? I thought your passengers were corpsicles.”

“I see you’re a thinker, and I like that in my officers. First, the beam. In the year 2136, a year before our own launch, the Garden Earth Consortium sent a flotilla of advance ships ahead of us. They were small, robotically controlled, and had chemical/fusion boosters. They were capable of acceleration speeds greater than a human could withstand. Most of them have already reached Ursae Majoris fifty years ago. They immediately scouted our destination planet to confirm its suitability for terrestrial life. By the way, Planet 2013LS has exceeded our most optimistic projections. We have stunning pictures, if you’d care to view them.

“We already have confirmation that some of the advance ships have made successful planetfall and are now constructing an energy, transportation, and habitation infrastructure on the planet in preparation for our arrival in about four hundred seventy-five years. By the time we enter orbit, there’ll be modern, fully functional cities waiting for us to inhabit them. The remaining advance ships are building solar harvesters (or in this case—ursine harvesters) to generate our braking particle beam.”

The Oship model returned, and four of the hab drums were highlighted. “As to your second question, no, not everyone is frozen. Our passengers have the option of spending an average of two hundred years of the voyage in a quickened state if they like. We can have up to twenty percent of our population active at any time. Currently, there are 93,545 persons occupying those four drums. That one has a town with a population of 62,000, while the others contain twenty-nine smaller settlements and thousands of rural homesites.”

A young officer approached them bearing a slate for the captain. He smiled at Bogdan and nodded. The captain studied the slate a moment and said, “Cadet Kodiak, I must attend to business. Perhaps you’d like to continue our tour with Lieutenant Perez?”

“Yes, ma’am, I would.”

“In that case, Lieutenant, show Cadet Kodiak anything he’d care to see, and Cadet Kodiak—welcome aboard!” She saluted him, and when he snapped to return the salute, he noticed that he, too, was wearing a cool uniform.

“I bet you’ll want to see our combat training course,” the young officer said, leading Bogdan to a companionway, “or the officers’ club. Or maybe our private nude beach.”

TOO SOON, BOGDAN’S bead car split off and rolled into Library Station, and the boy was roused from his reverie. As his car rolled to a stop on the platform, he stuck his Kodiak patch—brown-yellow-white—to the shoulder of his jumpsuit and, with an oppressive sense of loss, rejoined reality. No sooner had he decarred and started across the platform than a man stepped on his foot. Bogdan howled in pain and surprise, while the man merely inspected the sole of his shoe. Satisfied, the man looked down at Bogdan and said, “What’s your problem?”

“You feckin’ stepped on my foot!” Bogdan said. “That’s my problem!”

The man pursed his lips and said, “It’s not my fault you choose to be so small.”

“I’m not so small you can’t see me!”

The man shrugged and turned to go, though not without first reaching down to rub Bogdan’s head. Bogdan swatted his hand away and screamed, “You practically run me over, and then you want a rub? Are you crazy?”

The man strolled away without another word. Bogdan limped toward the exit. It felt like his toe was broken. A transit bee dropped down to him and said, “Myr Kodiak, do you require medical attention?”

“No!” Bogdan said without stopping. “But that asshole over there should be arrested for assault!”

“Our records show the mishap clearly to be an accident. However, if you require medical attention, be informed that this CPT station maintains a fully stocked crisis intervention booth and makes it available at reduced cost to ticketed travelers. In addition to a clinic class autodoc, we offer crisis counseling. Perhaps you’d like counseling for your recent experience.”

Tears welled in Bogdan’s eyes, and he savagely wiped them away. He ignored the bee and left the station. Outside, the evening air was warm. Hollyholos did not troll his neighborhood since no one could afford to interact with them. There were few kiosks and fewer sidewalk emitters. At the station exit, however, was the nightly bumbazaar, a line of homeless people trying to peddle a sad collection of worn-out junk. One old woman sat on a stool next to an antique bathroom scale. A handlettered sign taped over the scale said, “Yer Wait—UDC 1/7.” A millionth of a yoodie to step on a broken scale. She looked up at Bogdan hopefully, but he despised her and her poverty.

Despite his throbbing toe, Bogdan began to jog home, shouting out, “Desist! Desist!” to the bees as he went.

WHEN BOGDAN TURNED the corner onto Howe Street, he noticed two Tobblers engaged in unusual behavior on the sidewalk in front of the Kodiak building. One Tobbler was hunched over something on the ground, and the other was peering over his shoulder. The air around them was thick with curious bees. Bogdan’s own curiosity got the better of him, and he went over to see what was happening.

“Hello, young Kodiak,” the crouching Tobbler groaned as he straightened up.

“Hello, Houseer Dieter,” Bogdan replied. “What’s up?”

“What’s down you should ask,” said the houseer.

The other Tobbler, whose name was Troy, was carefully pouring a viscous liquid from a foil pouch into a crack in the sidewalk. He didn’t even glance at Bogdan. He was a boy, a real boy, not a retroboy. The dozen years that he had been walking the earth were all the years he could claim. Technically, Bogdan wasn’t a retroboy either, but an arrested boy because he had stopped his maturation before reaching adolescence, but that fact didn’t seem to draw the boys any closer together.

When the pouch was empty, Troy Tobbler put on a pair of utility spex and peered closely into the crack. “Nothing,” he said.

“Let it seep some more,” said the houseer.

“Still nothing,” the boy said after another minute, whereupon the houseer removed a rubber mallet from a tool chest and began thumping the sidewalk on either side of the crack. “That helps,” said the boy. “Go that way,” he said, pointing toward the charterhouse.

The houseer beat the ground in a line toward the building and then began tapping the brick side of the building, itself.

“Good! Stop!” said his companion. “I have the little vermin. Come take a look.” He gave the spex to his houseer and looked up at Bogdan. “What are you staring at?” he said.

“Nothing,” Bogdan said and glanced away.

“Ah, this is good,” said the houseer, following an invisible path with the spex. “Three meters deep. Maybe three and a half. We need specimens.” He took off the spex and said to Bogdan, “And so, young Kodiak, how is that room of yours that you share with our elevator? It gets warm up there in this weather, yes? Perhaps you should leave the door open.”

“Warm is good,” Bogdan said, avoiding the topic. They had found something under the charterhouse, and he wanted to know what it was. But he knew they wouldn’t tell him, especially Troy. And since he wasn’t going to beg them for information, he said, “G’night, Tobbs.”

“Good night, Kodiak.”

Bogdan passed the NanoJiffy entrance and climbed up the steps to the Kodiak’s door. This time he didn’t rely on voice recognition. “Here, read this,” he said and placed his open palm against the door plate.

“Hello, visitor,” said a familiar voice. Kitty’s voice.

“Kitty, is that you?” he said hopefully. “It’s me, Bogdan. Open the front door.”

But it was a recording of Kitty’s voice, and an old one at that. It said, “Because of the current state of martial law and ongoing civil unrest, Charter Kodiak has pneumatically sealed its building until further notice. We hope you’ll excuse the inconvenience.”

Martial law? thought Bogdan. That had been way before his time.

Kitty’s voice continued. “We apologize not being able to address you in realbody, but if your business is legitimate, the door will notify us. If not, please move away at once. And remember, this door is a Slage XP model, fully armed and licensed to defend itself against intrusion.”

“Door, tell someone I’m here,” Bogdan said. “Call April or Denny. Just call them.”

There was no reply, and Bogdan was about to give up and go in through the NanoJiffy when the door spoke in yet another voice—Rusty’s? “We’re all asleep at this hour, friend. Please come back in the morning.”

“You are not asleep!” Bogdan cried and kicked the door. There was a metallic click, and gas turrets swung out from the doorjamb and aimed at him. Bogdan kept kicking anyway; he knew that the gas reservoirs had been depleted long ago. The two Tobblers turned from their work to look at him, but he didn’t care, and he kicked until he could hear the intruder alarm go off inside.

At last the door slid open, and there was Houseer Kale. “Bogdan, why are you knocking?”

“Because the feckin’ door won’t open for me. Why can’t you get things fixed around here?” He pushed his way past Kale into the foyer. “Would it kill you to fix the feckin’ houseputer?”

“My, we’re in a testy mood today,” Kale said.

“Are we?” Bogdan said. “I wonder why. Did we have a bad day at work? Or did we sit at home all day wanking off?”

“It sounds like someone’s hungry,” Kale continued, nonplussed. “Go wash up; we’re holding dinner on you. Oh, and take a tray up to Sam. He’s not been feeling well. Tell him we’ll all be up after dinner.”

Too weary to argue, Bogdan trudged to the little room behind the NanoJiffy with its own extruder port that served as the house kitchen. “And don’t forget,” Kale called after him, “you have a meeting scheduled with the Allowance Committee at seven.”

HALFWAY ACROSS THE roof, Bogdan could hear the snoring. Deep, sonorous expressions of revitalizing slumber. He stopped at the screen door and looked in. There was a new hole in the screen, and he stuck his finger in it. Sam’s lumpy form lay on the cot, covered with an old blanket. Bogdan entered as quietly as possible. On the ratty, old footstool, there was another tray—lunch it looked like—untouched. He picked it up and replaced it with the dinner tray he’d brought. The bowl of lunchtime fruitish mash was already fermenting and had a cloying, sweet odor. He wasn’t sure whether to try to wake Sam while his dinner was still warm. He’d apparently returned to bed after Bogdan saw him on the stairs earlier that morning.

“Sam,” he said, not too loud.

“Shhhh,” replied Hubert. “Hello, Boggy. Please be quiet. Sam’s had a rough time of it and needs his rest.” The snoring continued uninterrupted.

“They said to tell him everyone’s coming up later.”

“I’ll relay that to him when he awakens.”

Bogdan turned to go, bearing the lunch tray. But he stopped and whispered, “Hubert, the Tobbs were pouring some kind of optical sapping agent into the ground in front of the building. Any idea what’s up with that?”

“Yes,” Hubert whispered back, “material pirates. It would appear that there are excavating mechs in the neighborhood, and these old brick buildings are being cannibalized. The Tobblers suspect that pirates are hollowing out our house walls.”

“But why would anyone want to steal old brick buildings?”

“Our charterhouse was built with Pullman bricks, bricks made during the nineteenth century from clay from Calumet Lake. This material is highly prized by builders.”

Bogdan was impressed by the quality of Hubert’s information. “They told you all of this?”

“No, I’ve recently learned how to tap their houseputer comm.”

“Great,” Bogdan said. “You can tap their houseputer, but you can’t do anything to fix ours.”

“Not so loud,” Hubert said. “Why don’t you go down to dinner. Everyone’s waiting for you.”

Bogdan opened the screen door, but again he hesitated. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t say just what. The whole time he’d been there, Sam’s snoring continued regularly, maybe too regularly. Then it occurred to him, the really strange thing—he could smell the overripe fruitish on the tray. With Sam in the room you shouldn’t be able to smell anything but him. Bogdan set the tray on the bench and went to the cot.

“What are you doing?” said Hubert. “You’ll wake him up.”

“I doubt that,” Bogdan said, throwing back the blanket. Pillows, no Sam. “What’s going on, Hubert?”

The snoring ceased, and a voice said, “What? What? Where am I, Henry?”

Bogdan went to the speaker on the potting bench. “That’s what I want to know, Sam. Where are you?”

“Bogdan, is that you? Are you in my bungalow?”

“Yeah, are you downstairs?”

“No, upstairs if anything.”

“But I’m on the roof. There’s no upstairs from here.”

“I’m not in the house. I had a little errand to run.”

Bogdan gestured at the rumpled cot. “And you had to sneak out to run it?”

Through the speaker, Bogdan heard Samson sigh. “If I told anyone,” he said, “then you or April or Kitty or someone would try to stop me, and I can’t allow that.”

“You’re scaring me, Sam.”

“Sorry, boy, but I can’t help it. Listen to me, a long time ago, before you were decanted, someone did something inhumanely cruel to me—”

“You’re talking about the searing,” Bogdan said, somewhat relieved, and went to sit on the cot, “and you’re going to torch yourself as a public protest.”

The speaker was silent for several moments, then Samson said, “I see I’ve mentioned this before.”

“Only a few hundred times.”

“Well then, it should come as no great shock, and I’m glad for that. I was a pawn in someone’s big game, Boggy, and though I may never know who was responsible, in the end it was an act that society condoned by its silence. So it’s up to me to show society its error in the only way I can.”

“But all that stuff happened ages ago, Sam, and no one even cares anymore.”

“Well, I’m going to remind them anyway.”

Bogdan discovered the paper envelopes under the pillow and sorted through them. Each was scrawled with a ’meet’s name, one with his own. He dropped the envelopes and jumped to his feet. “I’m telling Kale.”

“Go ahead. It won’t do any good. They can run all over town and still not find me. Best not even to mention it. Promise me you’ll keep this to yourself, Boggy.”

“No! Tell me where you are.”

“Oh, Boggy, this is hard enough to do as it is. Do you think I’ve made this decision lightly?”

“I don’t care.”

I’ll tell you what; if Hubert fucks things up and I need someone to bail me out, he’ll contact you. Agreed?”

“Where are you?”

WHEN SAMSON FINALLY hung up on Bogdan, he thought that Soldier Field must be filling with spectators, for his seat was surrounded by a dozen others. It didn’t take him long, though, to see that he and his immediate neighbors were the only ones there. They were a little island of interlocked seats, like the jammed keys of an antique typewriter, dangling over the chimney of the vacant stadium.

There was a man in the seat to his right—a tall, lean fellow with a bony old face and a neatly trimmed black mustache. “You’re awake, then!” the man boomed. “Splendid! Good evening to you, sir!” His voice had a nasal quality due to large purple plugs stuffed into his nose.

A woman sat in the seat to Samson’s left. She, too, wore nose filters, which gave her a piggy look. She, too, showed the signs of long-deferred body maintenance: papery skin and thin hair. In addition, she was plump. On her lap sat a gray and white cat, who eyed Samson warily.

All of the other seats were occupied by children, from toddlers to tweens. It occurred to Samson to wonder how there were so many children. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen so many, a whole school bus load of them. Then he noticed that unlike the two adults, none of the children were strapped into their seats. They must be commercial children, not real children at all. The cat, on the other hand, was tethered to the woman’s seat with a harness and leash, so it was real.

The man offered Samson his hand in greeting. “Victor Vole,” he said. “And this is my beloved, Justine. These,” he added with a wink and flourish of his hand, “are the brats. Brats, say hello to Monsieur Kodiak.”

“Hello. Monsieur. Kodiak!” chorused the children with startling verve.

“How did you know my name?” Samson said.

“Oh, we were having a fine chat with your valet while you were napping. Haven’t we, Justine?”

Justine nodded and smiled shyly, displaying brownish teeth.

Samson didn’t know what to say. He was quite overcome. The children were standing on their seats to see him better. Surely Hubert wouldn’t have spilled the beans to strangers.

“I hope we’re not disturbing you, Myr Kodiak,” Victor said. “It’s just that no one has bought a ticket to a seat this high up in years. This whole section is usually closed—at least to people. Justine noticed you up here, all by yourself, in the middle of the afternoon, on a day when there’s no game scheduled.”

“I’m here for the canopy ceremony.”

“Oh, that,” Justine said and waved her hand dismissively.

“What Justine means to say is that the ceremony will take place at the very bottom,” Victor said, pointing straight down. “Most likely, it won’t originate in Chicago. They just like to use the old place as a backdrop these days.”

Samson looked at him blankly.

“That’s all Soldier Field is ever used for anymore, as a backdrop—and for suicides.”

Samson flinched. “Suicides?”

“That’s Moseby’s Leap,” Justine said and pointed to a railed parapet on the other side of the stadium. “That’s where it all started.”

“Where all what started?”

“Moseby’s suicides, of course.”

Samson looked from one to the other without comprehension.

“Beer?” Victor said and handed him a cold pouch. It had been years since Samson had indulged in beer. Victor and Justine raised their own pouches in a toast, and Victor said, “To our unexpected guest. Welcome to our home.”

Samson raised his pouch and said, “To my unexpected hosts.” He took a sip. Naturally, he couldn’t taste the beer, hadn’t been able to taste anything for forty years. He noticed that all the children suddenly had ice cream sodas. “You say this is your home? You live here?”

Victor winked again. “Let’s just say we came to watch the track events of the ’28 Olympics, and we haven’t left yet.”

Samson was impressed. Hubert said to him, Sam, they have a clever subem that hides them from security and has cracked concession kiosk codes. I’m studying it for pointers.

“Dog?” Victor said and handed Samson another pouch, this one warm. Inside was a hot dog, heavy with green relish, chopped onions, and bright yellow mustard in a poppy seed bun. Steam assaulted Samson’s nostrils, and for a moment he imagined he could smell this delicious Chicagoland delicacy of his youth.

“Thank you, don’t mind if I do.”