Counting Heads

Tuesday

3.1

April Kodiak got her vigil for Samson after all. Bogdan called her from the taxi, and she ran up the stairs with the news. Several of her housemeets were still sitting in the rooftop garden looking up. With the Skytel dark and the protective canopy burnt to ashes, the Moon alone ruled the sky. “Boggy’s got him,” April exclaimed. “He’s bringing him back! He’s all right!”

The ’meets stirred as though from a dream. “I’ll get his cot,” Kale said and, rising from a chaise lounge, lumbered to the garden shed.

“Good, and let’s bring some blankets up here,” April said, “and make some mush and juice.” She sent Megan and BJ down to roust ’meets already in bed. She sent Denny down to wait in the street for the taxi.

In the shed, Kale gathered up the paper envelopes, each bearing a housemeet’s name in Samson’s handwriting, and stacked them on the potting bench. He carried the cot out to the garden where April rearranged benches and chairs around it. All was ready when Denny returned, climbing ten flights of stairs bearing Samson’s emaciated body. They entombed the old man in pillows and comforters and slipped an autodoc probe into his ear. They barely got any lifelike readings from him at all.

“It won’t be long now,” April whispered.

“But why are his eyes wide open?” Kitty said.

“It’s all the Alert! he took,” Bogdan said.

At the autodoc’s suggestion, they placed a Sooothe patch on Samson’s throat, and in a little while his eyelids fluttered shut, and in a little while more he was snoring comfortably. The ’meets, themselves, battled sleep on chairs and benches. Finally, Kale returned to the shed to retrieve the envelopes. He passed them out, and the ’meets took turns reading Samson’s personal farewells to them by flashlight. They held hands and sang several charter hymns. They traded anecdotes about first meetings with Samson, about living with him through the years. They approached the cot one by one to kiss his burning cheek and to whisper in his ear.

When it was his turn, Bogdan sat on the cot and didn’t know what to say. He had been a toddler when Samson joined the charter, and therefore none of Samson’s troubled DNA had gone into his own patchwork genome. Not that they could, what with the searing and all. But even though Bogdan had no blood tie to Samson, he still felt closer to him than any other ’meet. He lay down on the cot next to the old man and listened to his breath whistling through the gaps in his teeth.

In a little while, April tugged Bogdan’s sleeve and told him to go to bed. She sent everyone to bed. “Check your vigil schedule on the houseputer,” she told them. “We’ll call you if anything develops.” But most of the ’meets decided to stay, and since he had to be up in a few hours anyway to get ready for work, Bogdan stayed too.

Kale and Gerald, meanwhile, left the garden to huddle near a cam/emitter mounted on the side of the building. “Hubert, can you hear me?” Kale said.

“Loud and clear.”

“How could you let him do that? How could you let him do something so stupid?”

“I don’t see how I could have dissuaded him,” the mentar replied.

“Don’t take that tone with me,” Kale snapped.

“What tone? This is my standard conversational tone.”

“What he means,” Gerald said, “is why did you help him? You took an active role in this stunt.”

“Well, yes, I did. I am his mentar.”

“There’s that tone again,” Kale said, and Gerald added, “What you did to the Skytel was highly illegal, Hubert. Surely, even a mentar can see that. You have jeopardized this charter’s integrity and endangered your own freedom.”

“Don’t worry about my freedom,” Hubert said. “They’ll never be able to trace that hack to me.”

Suddenly floodlights hit the rooftop from all directions, and a voice said, “That’ll do nicely, folks.” It was a jerry’s voice, and behind the lights, dark shapes could be glimpsed rappelling from cars that hung silently above them. “This is the Homeland Command,” the voice continued. “Don’t nobody move.”

Sleepy Kodiaks awoke with a start to find themselves surrounded by a squad of blacksuited officers. Rusty and Louis jumped to their feet, but the hommers motioned them back down with standstill wands.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Kale bellowed.

The jerry commander strode over and said, “I am Lieutenant Grieb of the Northeast Region Homeland Command, myr, and I’m here to serve this warrant.” The commander held up his open palm, but Kale didn’t swipe it. “I said I’m serving a warrant, myr.”

“Then serve away, officer,” Kale replied, “but I don’t have a palm array.”

The jerry said, “Amazing.” A moment later a homcom bee flew down from a hovering GOV and opened a frame in front of Kale that contained a warrant for the arrest of Samson P. Harger Kodiak. The commander then nodded to another officer who approached Samson’s cot. But Kitty flung herself in the way.

“Step aside, myr retrogirl,” the officer said.

Kitty refused to give way, and April joined her and said, “Can’t you see he’s dying?”

“Step aside!” the officer snapped. But the women held their ground, and the officer simply strode between them, sweeping them aside with his sheer bulk. When he reached the cot he recoiled. “My God, but he stinks!” he exclaimed. “This guy is already dead.”

The commander said, “He’s a seared. He’s supposed to stink.”

“He’s dead, I tell you.”

The commander joined his officer next to the cot and opened an autodoc probe. He stuck it into Samson’s ear, next to the first probe, and a moment later he turned to the Kodiaks and said, “I have new orders. We are placing this man under house arrest. He is not to leave these premises without prior authorization. Is that clear?”

“Yes, officer,” April said.

“To assure your compliance,” the commander continued, “I will leave this bee here as an official monitor. Now, to our second item of business.”

The homcom bee opened a new page—a warrant to frisk the house and arrest the mentar known as Hubert. The ring of officers in the garden broke formation and headed for the roof door.

“No!” Kale cried. “You can’t do that!” The houseer ran to the door and blocked the way. “Hubert is the most valuable asset we have left,” he pleaded.

The commander spat on the ground. “We only have so much patience, myr,” he said, and when Kale continued to protest, two officers flipped him around, cuffed him, and shoved him through the door ahead of themselves. “Anyone else have a hankering to spend the night in jail?” the commander asked. “If you folks are smart, you’ll stay up here out of the way.”

For a while, the ’meets waited obediently in the garden. But then Kitty said, “The bastards are in my room.” She strode to the door and down the steps. A moment later April got up to join her. Bogdan looked at Rusty, and Rusty shrugged his shoulders. They, too, went down the stairs but got no farther than the corridor outside Bogdan’s room. There, two officers were trying to peer through the brick walls with their visors.

“Hey, kid,” one of them said, “what do you keep in here?”

“Nothing,” Bogdan said. “That’s the elevator machine room.”

“Oh, yeah? With a barricade door like this?” He rapped his knuckles on the massive door.

Bogdan beamed with pride. “That’s right,” he said. “But you’ll just have to take my word for it since you’ll never get in there on account of the door.”

But the officer had stopped listening to him. “Confirm receipt,” he said and swiped the door’s control panel with his palm.

“Welcome, officers,” the door said as it noisily retracted its bolts.

“Son of a bitch,” Bogdan said.

“Tough luck,” Rusty said.

The two officers swung the heavy door open and entered Bogdan’s bedroom. When Bogdan tried to go in, they ordered him back. He and Rusty watched from the corridor as the officers swept the room with sniffers.

“There ain’t nothing in there but machinery,” one of the officers complained as they came out.

“What did I tell you?” Bogdan said, but Rusty nudged him to be quiet. The officers went by them and continued down the corridor, scanning and sniffing as they went.

When Bogdan turned to shut his door, he was confronted by four Tobblers who had come up from behind. “Good morning, Myr Bogdan. Good morning, Myr Rusty,” said one of them. It was Houseer Dieter.

Bogdan sprang forward, dodged between the Tobbs, and tried to push the heavy door shut, but one of the Tobbs easily held it open while the others pulled wrenches from their pockets and began to disassemble the hinges.

“Stop that! Don’t do that!” Bogdan shouted. “You have no right!”

Houseer Dieter only snorted. “No right? You have the arrogance to say this to me after two years you occupy our room? I’ll show you no right.” He went into the room and started hauling Bogdan’s bedding and dirty clothes out and tossing them in the hallway.

Bogdan turned to Rusty. “Can’t you stop them?”

Rusty calmly appraised the situation and said, “I suppose I could take all four of them with my bare hands. Do you want me to try?”

Bogdan’s worldly possessions made an unimpressive pile on the floor. He leaned over and picked through it for anything worth salvaging.

“We can’t seem to catch a break tonight,” Rusty said and took ahold of a corner of Bogdan’s mattress. “Let’s haul this to my room. You can bunk with me for a while.”

DESPITE THE EXCITEMENT, Bogdan was very sleepy by the time he and Rusty had moved his stuff. He went down to the NanoJiffy to buy a package of eight-hour Alert! tablets and watched the HomCom officers carry a box containing Hubert’s canister down the steps. They loaded it into a GOV parked on the street. They loaded Kale into another, and Rusty and Louis followed by taxi to post his bail. Though it was only 3:00 AM, Bogdan thought he might as well head out to work. But first he wanted to say good-bye to Samson in case the old man didn’t survive the day. So he climbed up to the roof again. After all the drama, the house was eerily quiet.

When he passed his former bedroom, his beloved door was completely off its hinges and lying flat in the middle of the corridor. He was forced to walk over it to get by. He stopped in front of the doorway and looked in. Two large young Tobbler men were sitting at a folding table next to the cable drum, playing a drowsy game of cards. They glanced at him, stifling yawns.

Up on the roof, only a few Kodiaks were keeping vigil. Samson, in fact, was awake, and Megan and Kitty were feeding him.

“We were washing him,” Kitty told Bogdan. “Changing his clothes and stripping off the old mastic, and it woke him up.”

“’Lo, Sam,” Bogdan said. The old man, mouth full of mush, didn’t seem to hear, so Bogdan went to sit with Denny.

Denny said, “It was scary to see him up in the Skytel.”

“I know it,” Bogdan replied.

“It made me real nervous. I wish he didn’t do it.”

“Me too.”

Samson’s old jumpsuit lay in tatters on the ground. Bogdan leaned over and snagged it, looked under the lapels, but the blue mech was gone.

“Kitty, did you find any mechs on Sam’s clothes?”

“No,” she said and gestured up at the homcom bee hovering overhead. “Only that one.”

Bogdan looked around for the blue mech, but with all the leafy vegetables and rows of hydroponics, it could be hiding anywhere. He picked up Samson’s belt and said, “Hubert?”

“I am not Hubert,” the belt said. “I am a Hubert terminus with nominal personality and cognition. I lost contact with Hubert prime at 02:21 today.”

“Well, good for you,” Bogdan said and dropped the belt. To Denny he said, “Did you see the fight Kale put up over Hubert? I didn’t even think he liked the pastehead.” As he spoke, Kitty gave him a calculating look. “What?” he said, but she turned back to Samson to wipe dribble from the corner of his mouth.

“What about Kale and Hubert?” Bogdan insisted.

“Is that Boggy?” Samson said. “Come here, Boggy; I have something to tell you.”

Megan and Kitty finished and gathered up the tray and bath supplies, and Bogdan sat on the cot next to Samson and took his hand.

“I learned something today, boy.”

“I imagine you did.”

“I learned that killing yourself is hard to do when all you really want to do is live.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Really?” Samson said and tried to focus on the boy. “I don’t think so, Boggy. You haven’t even figured out how to pass through puberty yet. What do you know of dying?”