Counting Heads

2.27

Alert! was the perfect drug. It was fast-acting and brought one to a peak of total mental acuity without side effects like tremors or logorrhea. It came in precise doses, from four to twelve hours, and when it wore off, it did so all at once, without a hangover.

Samson washed down the Alert! with a sip of ’Lyte and continued his tale.

MELINA POST’S “ACCIDENT” occurred during an Around the Coyote theater performance that she attended with her husband, Darwin. Midway through delivering a comic soliloquy, one of the actors stopped and clutched his stomach. His waistline swelled ominously, but the audience took it as part of the act, at least until the actor shrieked. Then his bulging abdomen ruptured, and there was a mad rush for the exits. Too late, the building was already surrounded by bloomjumpers.

The Posts, along with audience, cast, and crew, were hauled off to Provo, Utah, and interred in the quarantine block of the Homeland Command holding facility, the same place I had visited several years earlier. Most guests never left quarantine alive, but since my own release, new detainees were given an option. You could stay and live a relatively comfortable life of protective quarantine, or you could leave—after being seared.

Melina and Darwin were permitted to occupy the same cell suite, and it looked as though they were settling in for the long haul—or until their sleepers woke up and expressed themselves. But after a few months of confinement, Melina lapsed into a state of profound depression, and after much brooding and prayer, she opted to be seared and released. Darwin chose to remain. They parted amicably.

Melina’s first couple of years adjusting to the life of a stinker were typically wretched. But then, three years into her new life, she met a dashing man who professed to love her so much he didn’t care about her infelicitous fetor. Naturally, she didn’t believe him because he was poor. But that wasn’t going to prevent her from having a good time. So they traveled together and stayed at posh hotels and tony resorts and took in shows and tours and the whole nine yards. She paid for everything, plus the surcharge stinkers always paid. She didn’t care. She had a beautiful man on her arm who composed sonnets to her.

She awoke one morning, and Mr. Sonnet was gone. She had known his departure was inevitable, but she’d thought he’d make a classier getaway. None of his things seemed to be missing from their St. Croix hotel room, but she could tell he’d flown. All in all, it had been an enjoyable fling.

Next to the bathroom sink he had left the tiny, perfect, scalloped, pink shell she had found on the beach and given to him to remember her by. The fact that he hadn’t taken it upset her more than his departure.

A little while later, when she ordered down for breakfast, the hotel manager asked if he could come up. There were urgent matters to discuss. As though reading from a bad script, he told her that her account was overdrawn. She knew that that wasn’t possible, and while he waited in her room, she called her broker at the Reed Sisters Wealth Management Services in New York, who handled the lion’s share of her and Darwin’s assets. Her broker hemmed and hawed but finally admitted that Melina’s many accounts had been tampered with the day before. Upset but not yet panicked, Melina placed calls to her other banks and brokerages. Little by little, the picture became clear. Mr. Sonnet had taken advantage of his physical proximity to her valet. He’d been very thorough; she was cleaned out. She and Darwin were broke.

Upon hearing this, the manager of the Five Palms Hotel let her know that he’d only tolerated her in his establishment because of his generous nature. He loudly bemoaned his suite, which was ruined by her unchristian odor, and he threatened to call the police.

Melina had to borrow credit from friends to tube back home. The Homeland Command confiscated her valet to assess its role in the theft. What small assets she still had were tied up in the investigation. She had to borrow in order to live modestly for a while in a rented apartment in an unfashionable RT. She started a number of lawsuits against the Reed Sisters and her other financial managers, but the courts ruled that the financial institutions be held harmless. The generosity of her friends had limits and strings. The authorities turned up no leads on Mr. Sonnet or her former wealth. They returned her valet in a hundred pieces. She considered selling it for recycling credits, but some intuition told her to hang on to it.

Melina’s slide into poverty took only weeks. She lost her apartment and was forced to move into a city-subsidized women’s dormitory.

In the three years since her and Darwin’s accident, she had fallen from a penthouse to a barracks, where she could claim only a cot, a chair, and a locker. When she thought she could fall no further, she learned otherwise. The other women in the dormitory reviled her for her odor and petitioned the management to evict her. In an uneasy compromise, management moved her into a supply closet and ruled that her door must be kept shut.

YOU ARE RIGHT, Justine. This is far more than Melina Post could have told me in five minutes. We had more time than that, for her gentleman caller was late in arriving. As we stood at my door, we made way for the arbeitors to ferry the baked shark past us, its mouth agape with butter squash, to her apartment. And we made way again when my arbeitors returned with empty servos. But as the minutes accumulated, and her special guest still hadn’t come or called, she was sure it was business that kept him. She didn’t call him, she said, because she didn’t want to bother him. She tried to mask her growing anxiety by continuing her story. I invited her back in, to sit down and have something to drink, but she was content to stand outside my door. I must say, her story was stirring my own pot of memories. The way she was treated enraged me, and I wished I could have been present to help her in her time of need. If only she had knocked on my door back then instead of waiting so many years.

So, there she was, my mistreated friend, lying on her dormitory cot next to shelves of cleaning solvents, drifting into the type of despair I knew only too well, when an extraordinary event occurred.

Across the Atlantic, Wanda Wieczorek, our Saint Wanda, who you may have heard of, had her little run-in with the furniture floor manager at Daud’s in London. She’d only wanted for her mum to sit on the silk couch; she didn’t intend to sit on it herself, until the floor manager showed up with his attitude and his troop of uniformed jerrys. She sent her mum down to the food court to wait for her, then drew her simcaster from her purse. This is a ten-thousand-euro item of furniture, the manager told her. We simply cannot permit you to ruin it with your unfortunate malodorous condition.

Fine, Wanda said, I’ll take it with me.

She took the whole floor, actually, if you include the smoke and water damage. Her suicide made international headlines. Suddenly, hundreds of seared men and women were bursting into flame everywhere. On buses, in theaters, on rush-hour pedways, in offices of big transnationals—wherever they could scare up a crowd. The greasy, roasted-pork smell of charred human flesh pervaded our cities and awoke the public conscience to our plight.

The Homeland Command had performed searing in the name of public security, and the public had condoned its policy in silence. Now the public started asking questions. Why were we punishing the victims of NASTIE attacks? Why did we have to mutilate them? The civil authorities, meanwhile, were wondering what could have possessed the HomCom to create so many walking firebombs.

Melina Post started receiving a procession of smelly visitors to her supply closet. She was known as a former aff who still owned memberships at exclusive spas and clubs and other places where the seared dearly wanted to stage their wiener roasts. But Melina, always the good citizen, refused to participate (though she admitted to entertaining some middle-of-the-night fantasies of incinerating the bitches in her dormitory while they slept).

The protests went on without her and eventually shamed the UD Parliament to declare a ban on human searing. New, nonmutilating methods of cell-sifting were introduced. The doors to the isolation cells in Utah and elsewhere were flung open, and the quarantined were safely douched and released to rejoin society (alas, too late for Darwin Post who had recently expressed into a cloud of monarch butterflies).

With the searing ban in force, the protests abruptly ceased. But soon a startling fact was uncovered. There was solid evidence that the HomCom’s “new” nonmutilating cell-sifting methods were not so new after all. They had been available to the Command for years, even in 2092 when I made my own excursion to the Utah cop shop.

The revelation that the HomCom had been searing people for years while more humane methods were available was too much to bear, and the remaining seared redoubled their demonstrations. Even Melina Post was angry, if only for the suffering of her dear Darwin. Alone in her cot, she drew up a list of all the people who deserved to broil by her hand. At the top of her list was Mr. Sonnet, if only she could locate him. Trailing close behind was that damned hotel manager in St. Croix. She thought she would tube down there and sit in one of his big rattan chairs in the lobby until he strolled by. But the winner of Melina’s vengeance lottery turned out to be her wealth managers, the Reed Sisters.

The Reed Sisters in whose trust she had placed her fortune. Their offices were only a pedway away.

Melina tried to contact a number of the seared who had recently contacted her, but they were all already toasted, except for one woman. Melina met her in a coffee shop and the woman confided that she planned to take her life on a shopping arcade over Broadway and asked Melina to join her. Melina told her she had a better idea. She had made an appointment with her former broker on the 350th level of the OXO Tower.

The following day, the two women prepared themselves in the dormitory bathroom. They applied three coats of skin mastic, donned business clothes, and soaked themselves with cologne.

Because of newly minted accommodation laws, and because Melina had an appointment, the OXO Tower security admitted them. Since they couldn’t go through the scanway, they were thoroughly frisked and sniffed. The search turned up a laser penknife and pocket simcaster, but since citizens had a constitutional right to such items, they were not confiscated. However, security did inform the Reed Sisters office of their arrival, and when the two coconspirators got off on the 350th level, the brokerage doors were locked against them, and two uniformed jerrys were waiting to escort them back down to the lobby.

Frustrated, the two women rode down in the elevator, bracketed by the jerrys. Melina was trying to take their failure in stride, but her friend wasn’t handling it so well. The woman was rabid. She huffed and puffed. To make matters worse, the jerrys failed to convert the elevator to express status, so it stopped every few floors to take on or let off passengers. At one stop, two brash young men got on, and one of them pinched his nose and said to the other, “Pee-yoo!”

It was a costly remark, for it caused Melina’s friend to snap. She straightened up and, staring Melina in the eye, bellowed, “Right here! Right now!” Melina swallowed hard. In her mind she was already booking fare to the Five Palms in St. Croix. So she was relieved when she reached into her handbag for the simcaster, and found a jerry hand in there already confiscating it.

Her friend was a little quicker on the draw. She had her laser penknife out and lit. She tried cutting her own throat with it, but the other jerry grabbed her arm. She kicked and clawed like a madwoman. She lashed out with her tiny weapon and would have cut the jerry but for his armored suit. She turned it on herself, but only managed to burn superficial gashes in her arm before he removed it from her.

This didn’t stop the woman. By now the other passengers were pressed against the door. The woman swung her cut arm at them, attempting to anoint them with her sizzling blood. Melina’s own jerry cuffed Melina’s hands behind her with plastic shackles. She was too intimidated even to think of resisting. Finally, the elevator stopped, the doors opened, and the passengers piled out. In a sudden move, Melina’s friend squirmed out of her captor’s hold and tried to flee the elevator. In trying to catch her, the jerry clumsily shoved her against the elevator wall where she struck her forehead.

The blow was enough to stun her. She stood quietly while the jerry cuffed her, but when he turned her around, it was apparent to Melina that mortal damage had been done. The woman’s forehead was swollen with a thick, steamy bulge the size of an egg. The jerry, calling for medical assistance, carried her from the elevator. She fought all the way, viciously banging her own head against the wall, against the door frame, against the jerry’s armored chest. The lump grew to the size of an orange. Still she struggled, and the other jerry let go of Melina in order to help.

Melina stood alone, numb, in the elevator, not sure what to do. The circulation in her wrists was cut off. When she noticed her simcaster on the floor next to her feet, she knelt down to retrieve it. She managed to get ahold of the simcaster, but there was no way she could raise it to her head. So she pressed it against her buttocks and said—without much conviction—“Right here, right now.”

Her finger resting lightly on the button, she watched her friend’s lingering suicide in the corridor. The lump had swollen until the skin could no longer contain it, and it burst in a gout of flames. The fire foggers went off, filling the corridor with a cloud of fire suppressant. But suppressant couldn’t quench seared flesh, and Melina heard the woman’s skin crackling as the fire spread across her scalp and down her throat. It was the worst kind of self-immolation. The seared always tried to kill themselves quickly, as Saint Wanda had, from the brain outward. But this poor soul was burning from the outside in, as her incendiary cells killed those underlying them in a chain reaction from skin to muscle to viscera.

Melina lowered her simcaster. Irradiating her own buttocks would have a similar effect, killing her from the bottom up and providing her plenty of time to regret what she had done. So, she left the car and tried to help her friend. She found her in the fog propped up against the wall. The jerrys had foolishly wrapped the woman in a fire blanket, which only increased her core temperature like an oven. It should have killed her, but only stoked her agony.

With her cuffed hands, Melina angled herself to press the simcaster against the charred head. She had never taken a life before, and she steeled herself and pressed the button. But a hand reached from out of the fog and pulled her away.

The hand belonged to a man who was not a jerry. He was a man who liked halibut, cod, or shark. He was a man who worked in an office on that floor. He tipped Melina over his shoulder and carried her to his private office under the cover of fire suppressant and shut and locked the door. The first thing he said to her was, “You don’t want to do that,” and he held out his hand for the simcaster.

She pressed it against her buttocks again and cried oh, yes, she did, but she was no more able to harm herself than before.

They hid in his office, barely speaking, until the commotion had ended and the scuppers had cleaned up the mess. Melina knew that the tower security was looking for her, and the man was unable to cut the tough plastic of the handcuffs. He accompanied her when she turned herself in.

FOR LACK OF evidence or institutional will, Melina Post was not charged with a crime. She was free to return to her supply closet, but the man (she never told me his name) wouldn’t let her go there. He gathered her up into his own home, a modest efficiency in an RT, and took care of her. He rented great lungplants in huge pots to purify the air. He wore nose filters at first but gradually went without them.

By coincidence, the man also worked as a wealth manager. He was an officer for a firm in competition with the Reed Sisters. He was successful in business, but like his apartment and his clothes, he was rather bland. He’d never been married and was, in fact, quite shy. He eagerly volunteered to help Melina Post try to recover her stolen property. He had a friend who had a talented mentar (mentars had recently begun to appear). Melina turned the broken pieces of her valet over to this mentar, and it was able to trace some of her former assets. Out of his own pocket, Mr. Bland hired a specialist in financial forensics, and before long they had uncovered enough evidence to implicate the Reed Sisters. There was a big scandal, more victims were identified, and the Reed Sisters offices were sealed pending investigation. Some of Melina’s assets were eventually recovered, with the prospect of more turning up and the promise of compensatory damages from the Reeds.

Melina Post, with a new lease on life, moved to Chicago and, unbeknownst to me, became my downstairs neighbor.

“HE’S GOING TO ask me to marry him.”

We had been talking for over an hour with no word from the tardy Mr. Bland, when Melina made this bold pronouncement.

To me it was a bucket of ice water.

“Yes,” she continued. “Oh, I don’t know that for sure, but I know it in my bones. We’ve been growing close these last few months. Call it an intuition.”

I had an intuition of my own, only mine was more like a bad feeling.

“He’s very tender,” she continued, “and spends all his free time doting on me or working on my case. I know he loves me, and I’ve grown to love him too. This morning he said that this was going to be a very special evening. It must be some extraordinary circumstance that’s keeping him. He’s taking care of my business now.”

I was almost too afraid to ask, “What do you mean taking care of your business?”

“He’s investing for me. And this morning I signed over power of attorney.”

TO TRAVEL IN spirit with her through her whole desperate odyssey, only to watch her wash up twice on the same rocks, was more than I could bear. I made a perfect ass of myself then. I told her that no matter what happened that evening, no matter how bad and senseless things seemed, she could always come back to me. That I would take care of her. That I would dote on her and never swindle her. And that I needed no lungplant or nose filters to be close to her.

“Whatever are you talking about?” she said, a little frightened by my earnestness.

I told her that her hero was not simply late, but that he had skipped town, just like the Sonnet Man at the hotel. I told her she’d been robbed again, but that I would take care of her.

“I have to go now,” she said abruptly. “Thank you again, Myr Harger, for the fish and for listening to my story.”

“We both know he’s not coming,” I said as gently as I could. “We’re both stinkers, dear Mel, and stinkers shouldn’t try to deceive one other.”

She said good-bye and left.

When she was gone, Skippy closed my door, and I returned to my suite. It seemed unusually cold, but Skippy said the temperature was fine. I told him to dispatch some bees to keep an eye on Melina’s floor.

To my great surprise, in about ten minutes, all the elevators on her floor arrived at the same time and opened their doors. Out came a procession of arbeitors, each of them burdened with bouquets and wreaths and sprays of fresh flowers. The arbeitors looked like floats in a parade to her door. The elevators departed but soon returned with another wave of floral arrangements. Finally, after a third sortie of flower-bearing arbeitors, the man, himself, appeared with a final bundle of red roses in his arms. He was fashionably young but otherwise short on looks. He wore evening clothes and a foolish grin. I followed his progress at the tail of the parade and saw him disappear across Melina’s threshold.

As per my orders, my bees kept vigil throughout the night. Flower Man didn’t reemerge until morning, with Melina on his arm. She was radiant. She wore a gaudy new ring. And that, my dear new friends, was that.

JUSTINE, UNCOMFORTABLY AWARE that Samson’s story lacked a proper ending, prompted him. “Did Melina Post replace your shark with a comparable one?”

“Oh, yes, she did,” Samson said, “the very next day, in fact, and of the same vintage. Skippy learned later that the remains of their dinner, including the fin soup, was enjoyed at shelters across Chicago the following evening.”

Samson was sagging in his seat, but still owl-eyed from the Alert! and any form of interrogation might be too much of a strain on him. Nevertheless, Justine went on to say, “This hero of Myr Post’s. What happened to him?”

“I never saw her or him again,” Samson said, “but I followed them on the Evernet. Together, they founded an association dedicated to forcing the UD Parliament to pay restitution to the survivors of the seared. You may have heard about that. From what I could tell, they lived harmoniously until her death from more-or-less natural causes a few years ago.”

“And what of you, Myr Harger Kodiak? Did you return to your interrupted loneliness?”

“No. That was the unintentional gift Melina left me. In the fleeting minutes she spent in my hermitage, she poisoned it. She succeeded in provoking me to imagine my own smelly self out there in the greater world once more. Even to imagine myself together with a lover again. And once that bug bit me, I could never return to my solitude. The next day I had Skippy unopaque my window walls and I saw my city for the first time in a long time. Soon after that I met my Kitty and her charter. They eventually invited me to join their house, and I can honestly say that at no time in the twenty-seven years since have I ever been lonely. Cranky, perhaps, and obstinate—but never lonely.”

The Skytel overhead was well into the canopy celebration show. Samson and his hosts watched it for a few minutes, comparing the hoopla on the boards above with the emptiness on the field below.

“What about Jean?” Justine said. “Where is Her Secret Wound now? And does it still suffer?”

“If Mr. Flowers still lives, he must have it. I left it unsigned and sent it to them as an anonymous wedding gift, though it couldn’t be anonymous to her. If Mr. Flowers has followed Melina in death, I have no idea where it would be. It hasn’t surfaced at auction. But wherever it is, rest assured that it’s suffering. And it will suffer always.”

Justine said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Myr Kodiak Harger. You should have destroyed it.”

“Yes, perhaps,” Samson agreed. From the expression on Justine’s face, he could tell she was holding something back. “Go ahead,” he said, “tell me what’s on your mind.”

Justine collected the cat into her arms and fixed Samson with a look of motherly disapproval. “I agree with my husband,” she said. “At a time like this, you belong at home with your family, not here making a spectacle of yourself.”

“You’re probably right, Myr Vole, but I’m a seared, probably the last of the seared, and we must never let society forget the cruelty done to us in its name. I missed too many opportunities in the past, out of deference to my ex-wife and out of personal weakness, but what could be a better occasion to remind the public than the retirement of this canopy?”

Justine seemed unconvinced. “That’s not what I see,” she said. “Please excuse my bluntness, Myr Kodiak Harger, but what I see is far worse than personal weakness. Terrible, unfair things happened to you, there’s no denying it, but bad things happen to everyone. And though your long period of loneliness is as sad as anything I’ve ever heard, you found your way out before it was too late. You should be grateful, Myr Harger Kodiak, but instead you seek to punish the very people who have sustained you. If you truly love your charter and truly appreciate all they’ve done for you, then you’ll give them the gift of your final moments. Otherwise, you are nothing more than an emotional coward.”

With that, Justine took the cat’s leash from Victor and added, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I can’t watch.”

“Why not?” Samson snapped. “Already had your fill of suicides for one day?”

Justine unhitched her chair and returned inside without answering. Victor winked and said, “Best of luck, Myr Kodiak,” and followed her in.

Samson fiddled with the controls of his simcaster for a while. “Right here,” he mumbled, “in about forty-five minutes.”

TWO DOZEN TOBBLERS filed through the roof door. They wore identical jumpsuits of a heavy green fabric. April and Kale greeted them, and Francis and Barry ushered them to benches that Bogdan, Rusty, Megan, and Denny were arranging in the vegetable garden.

The Skytel show had begun, but Bogdan found it dull. The Tobbs seemed to like it, though, and they began to sway on the benches and tap their toes.

Bogdan tried to escape through the roof door, but April caught his sleeve and gave him a look that said, We have guests.

“I’ll be right back, I promise,” he told her. “I have to program my phone.”

“Now?”

Bogdan skipped down the stairs and turned the corner to his room. He strode in and looked around to see if anyone had intruded recently. Satisfied, he riffled through his piles of stuff until he found his editor, the same one he had used to program Lisa. He sat down on his mattress and spread the editor across his lap. When he opened his phone log, the queue of waiting calls had grown to 750 million. He dragged his phone icon over his latest uprefs icon, and the gargantuan queue shrank to a more manageable two calls, one of which was flagged urgent.

It was from Hubert. He opened it.

About time you answered, Hubert said.

“Does he need me?”

Not yet, but I felt it prudent to call so that you may prepare yourself to come at a moment’s notice. In fact, I’m sending a taxi to pick you up.

Bogdan stood and tossed the editor aside. “I’ll wait down in the street.”