Counting Heads

2.25

The spectator placeholders in the bleachers around them suddenly went silent. “There, how’s that now?” Victor Vole said. The placeholders still bounced in their seats and waved and mouthed back and forth, but now the roar of the stadium was more distant, like the sound of a remote motorway.

“Better,” Samson said. He could talk without straining his voice. “Where was I?” He had told Victor and Justine and their cat, Murphy, about how, at the beginning of his and Eleanor’s life together, when power and praise, a baby permit, and unwarranted joy were being heaped upon them, a defective slug sampled him. He didn’t tell them about his and Eleanor’s suspicions that his assault was an object lesson for her.

Naturally, the Voles had heard of Eleanor Starke. How could they not? She was a figure of mythic stature and ever in the news. But that such a woman should be married to this bundle of sticks and rags seated between them stretched their credulity. And when Samson informed them that Eleanor had died that very morning, Justine was compelled to exclaim, “Ah, Myr Harger, just like in a novella.”

This had caused Samson to pause in his narrative and reassess his life through the filter of melodrama. “Yes, I suppose it is, Myr Vole,” he said. “Now, where was I?”

WHEN FIRST I departed from Eleanor’s manse, I was in high spirits. Or as high as possible, given the fact that I had been seared through no fault of my own, that I stank to high heaven, that no one could bear to be in the same room with me, and that strangers on the street avoided or insulted me. To balance the bad, I had my good health. Up to the time I was seared, I had enjoyed the best health that credit could buy. Though I was 140 real years old, my body maintenance was all up-to-date. I had just erupted my sixth set of teeth, my neurons had all recently been resheathed, and my pulmonary and circulatory systems had been scraped and painted. I was an apparent thirty-five-year-old man in excellent health. This was fortunate because the seared cannot avail themselves of modern medicine, and from there on out it was all downhill for me.

Likewise, I was in excellent fiscal shape. My own vast estate was tied up in court (I had been declared legally dead for a few minutes during the searing process, and this flummoxed everything for years), but Eleanor put her even vaster fortune at my temporary disposal.

Likewise, I was in a fairly positive frame of mind. Oh, I had gone through a lengthy funk following my searing. I hid out in the subfloors of the manse, shut myself away for several months to lick my wounds. But I survived that and felt ready for an adventure. It had been decades since I’d tossed my fate to the wind. I figured I had thirty or forty years ahead of me (if I didn’t accidentally self-immolate in the meantime), nothing and no one to tie me down, an inexhaustible credit account, and a brand-new valet by the name of Skippy.

I did travel. I visited the places I had somehow missed in my previous wanderings: the Chinas, Africa, Mississippi, Malaysia. A liberal application of tips and bribes lubricated my passage. Nevertheless, I wasn’t able to break out of my own company. Gargantuan tips could get me seated in a restaurant, but they could not persuade the other diners to finish their own meals. On too many occasions, I had the entire wait and kitchen staffs to myself.

The same applied to clubs, casinos, theaters, and concert halls. To pool halls, bars, bowling alleys—you name it. I was the only tourist on the boat, the only rube at the bazaar, the only bozo on the bus. It didn’t take long for my adventure to grow stale. So I returned to Chicago and moved into an apartment suite on the 300th floor of Cass Tower. I redecorated the place and declared my parlor open each Thursday evening for a weekly salon. I sent out thousands of invitations. Three Thursdays went by, and only a few dozen guests showed up.

Not willing to admit defeat, I hired a publicist. She advised me that radical measures were called for—expensive radical measures. I told her that credit was no object, and she took me at my word. She organized a series of weekly dinner banquets to take place in my home. She hired famous chefs, musical performers, actors, and comedians from around the globe to feed and entertain us. She paid celebrities handsome, confidential “honorariums” to show up and have their pictures taken. Each banquet was to be a tightly staged, show-stopping production.

Nevertheless, she warned me that not even all this was enough to guarantee more than a few hundred gawkers to show up. What I needed, according to her, was someone to co-host the banquets with me, someone of gigantic popularity. She found such a worthy in the person of the former president of the USNA, good old Virginia Taksayer. Taksayer’s star had never set. She seemed to grow more beloved the longer she was out of office. She was expensive, sure, but she was worth it, at least according to my publicist.

Deposed as host in my own home, I was given a special role—that of resident freak. Indeed, we provided bowls of souvenir nose filters in every room. They were hardly necessary, for I slathered myself with thick, odor-blocking skin mastic and wore a mouth dam and flatulence scrubbers. What odors I could not stifle were neutralized by a state-of-the-art air filtration system I had installed in the suite. It produced a cone of negative pressure that could follow me through the rooms and discreetly exchange the air around me.

We were a smash success. From the very first banquet, my house was elbow to elbow with the cream of society, the lights of academia, and the jackdaws of government. Everyone who was anyone paraded through my parlor, supped at my board, and ravaged my wine closet. Couples coupled in my spare bedrooms, crooks conspired on my balcony, and celebrities manifested themselves from room to room. And I? I explored new frontiers of self-loathing.

Not that I knew it at the time. At the time, I thought the whole thing was pretty neat. I threw my banquets for seven years, never missing a Thursday. Although she was invited, Eleanor never attended. Meanwhile, I never left my apartment; I found quiet ways to entertain myself and to pass the time.

That’s not to say that El never visited me; she did, on my birthday, on Father’s Day, other occasions. She always brought little Ellie with her, who hung around my neck and called me daddy. Ellie claimed not to need those ugly nose filters when visiting my house because she was “habituated” to my smell, which anyway wasn’t as bad as other people said it was.

Gradually, their visits tapered off. They were on Mars one year and otherwise occupied the next. I was surprised to discover that I survived their absence. I mostly missed them during the holidays, but otherwise learned how to get by just fine.

ONE WEEK MY routine malfed. On Tuesday night I had gone to bed and asked for a vid. Skippy, my valet, was in charge of surveying the millions of programs available on the nets and selecting ones that could capture my interest long enough to escort me to sleep. On this particular night, he ran a segment from a Heritage Biography series on important cultural figures of the past.

“What’s this crap?” I said. Skippy knew I wasn’t interested in biographies, especially bios of so-called cultural figures. But I soon saw why Skippy had flagged this particular segment—it was about me. It was called “On the Surface—the Work of Samson Paul Harger, 1951-2092, A Retrospective.”

I was surprised, but not flattered. I had long ago sworn off reviews of my work. Something about this one caught my eye, though, as it must have Skippy’s. Remember, this was only a few years after my reputed mulching at the hands of the Homeland Command, and this was my first major retrospective. I found the prospect of watching it too Tom Sawyeresque to resist.

I won’t bore you, Myren Vole, with the cockamamie insights revealed in this retrospective. I will only say that the producers managed to unearth a surprising variety of archival vids and photos of my childhood family and that these were difficult for me to view without a fair amount of heartache. They had a home movie of me and my first wife, Jean Scholero, back in the late twentieth century when I was first making a name for myself with my paintings. That was especially hard to watch. I hadn’t thought of Jean in quite a while. And of course they couldn’t resist using the surveillance vids of me that day in 2092 when the slug hog-tied me on the patio of the Foursquare Café in Bloomington, from whence I was delivered to Utah for deconstruction.

I will mention only one conclusion of the retrospective and that because of the degree to which it riled me. It was hinted at in the production’s title—“On the Surface.” The show’s writers accused me of being shallow. Specifically, they asserted that either I had no feelings or I was incapable of expressing them in my work. They cited the cold, inhuman quality of my paintings and emphasized the fact that when I reinvented myself in the twenty-first century, I did so as a specialist in package design. Artificial skin, battlewrap, tetanus blanket, novelty gift wraps. Everything on the surface—get it? The wrapper—not the gift.

Myren Vole, have you ever been accused of being superficial? Here, the first draft of my legacy was being written before my eyes, and this was what was being said of me? That I was superficial? Believe me, the vid threw me off my feed. It shattered my soporific routine. I spent the entire next day stewing over it. I composed a long, insightful rebuttal to the show’s producers, which I never sent. Thursday rolled around, and I was in a terrible foul mood and I canceled the banquet at the last minute. Canceled all of them. Fired my publicist.

I decided then and there that my best rebuttal would be to “reinvent” myself once again. I was still capable of doing that, wasn’t I? I wasn’t dead yet.

I HAD BEEN out of the art biz for a while, and a whole raft of new tools and techniques had come into use in the meantime. I ordered in some of everything: story wire, smart sand, smart clay, professional holography equipment, rondophone traps, aerosol sculpture gases, liquid stone—you name it. I spent eleven months playing with this stuff, getting to know what it could and couldn’t do. I didn’t have a work in mind yet, except that I wanted to do a piece about Jean, my long-lost first wife. She was my subject.

Before Eleanor, Jean was the only woman who had truly touched me. She was my first love and you only get one of those, no matter how long you live. To my lasting shame and regret, it was I who had driven her away. I was too full of myself in those early days, too wonderful for my own good.

I spent about a year with my new toys creating works about Jean while trying to uncover my theme. I sped through a number of motifs: unexpected attraction, energetic eroticism, identification with the body, jealousy, spooky union, fights, obsession/compulsion, self-hatred. Eventually, I realized I was attempting to re-create a young man’s palette. And though that makes sense—Jean and I had been young then—now I was old.

This realization only spurred my efforts. I was deeply engaged in the hunt. My former routine was in shambles. I left it to Skippy to send me food every few hours in case I was hungry. I lay down on the nearest couch whenever sleep overcame me. It was almost like the good old days.

As I zeroed in on my vision, I eliminated media that didn’t seem to serve my purpose. Rejected were the iteration sequencers, photonic wax, and gene splicers, the robotics, and most of the holography equipment. Eventually, I narrowed my media down to one old one and one new. I decided to do a rather conventional, flat portrait of Jean in oil paints. For this I even retrieved from storage some of my beloved old boar-hair and sable brushes.

The new medium I chose was an organic gestalt compiler of the sort used to record emotive slices for hollyholo sims, like your Jason and Alison across the way.

The very first time I set brush to canvas, a title for the piece popped into my head. I would call it “Her Secret Wound.”

Well now, I thought, I wonder what that means. What wound? Why secret? I didn’t have a clue, so I mixed some browns and umbers with thinner and set about firing off quick sketches on paper to try to discover Jean’s secret wound.

I hadn’t handled a brush in over a century, and I had to relearn how to paint, but it came back, and soon I was knocking out little story boards of our ancient life together. The ups and downs, the miracles of understanding and the betrayals. After two months of this, I picked up my head one day and saw it: the wound was actually my own, not hers. The wound was loneliness.

What is loneliness, Myren Vole? I am speaking of the garden variety, the kind we all encounter. No matter how wrapped up we are in our lover’s embrace, it manages to slither in for a short stay now and then, eh?

In truth, there’s not much to say about loneliness, for it’s not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour.

Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear.

Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddle-some Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror—duration.

Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated—as my daughter used to say—to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain?

Likewise, most pain loses its edge over time. Time heals all—as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life’s most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week.

But if loneliness is the wound, what’s so secret about it? I submit to you, Myren Vole, that the most painful death of all is suffocation by loneliness. And by the time I started on my portrait of Jean, I was ten years into it (with another five to go). It is from that vantage point that I tell you that loneliness itself is the secret. It’s a secret you cannot tell anyone. Why?

Because to confess your loneliness is to confess your failure as a human being. To confess would only cause others to pity and avoid you, afraid that what you have is catching. Your condition is caused by a lack of human relationship, and yet to admit to it only drives your possible rescuers farther away (while attracting cats).

So, you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one.

Believe me in this; I’ve tried all the tricks of the lonely man.

THANK YOU, VICTOR. I was parched. Now, where was I?

I had my media, my subject, and my title. I set myself to work. I mixed shredded processor felt with my oils and painted a life-size portrait of Jean. This took half a year to get right, but when I was finished, it was, in my humble opinion, sublime. Jean’s expression was sweet and sad—just as I remembered her.

Satisfied with the base painting, I began to layer on semitransparent washes of refractive oils to create a sense of depth and motion. It wasn’t exactly holographic; it was still only two-dimensional, but as the viewer’s eyes moved across it, Jean’s image seemed to tremble with life, seemed to breathe and blink, as though she were right there, holding her pose behind the frame.

It was terrific. I loved it. Yet I knew my real work had yet to begin. I had embedded all of that blank processor felt in the paint, and it was time to give Jean her secret wound.

There was enough felt in the paint to supply the canvas with an index of 1.50 or 1.75 on today’s mentar scale. That is, of about the same mental complexity of my Skippy at the time. I could have initialized the painting with a personality bud and thinking noetics and used it as another valet. But instead I wanted to imprint it with a single emotion.

Now, Justine, I don’t know how much you know about sim holography, but those hollyholo sims you enjoy watching are special hybrids. When you cast a sim of yourself (or proxy, for that matter), the simcaster takes a precise picture of your entire brain state at that moment. A slice, if you will, or a gestalt map. This is sufficient to model a software brain that can think. But feelings, unlike thought, are epiphenomena of brain states, and there is only one brain state mapped in your slice, one that captures what you were feeling the moment you press the cast button.

Am I losing you? Please bear with me. I only mean to say that your sim or proxy is capable of feeling only one emotion, the emotion that you, yourself, were feeling when you cast it. So, how do the hollyholos you enjoy watching seem to experience a wide range of emotion? This is made possible by casting millions of slices and stringing them together in emotive cascades. The novella actors who cast these hollyholos spend most of their time sitting in studio booths emoting on command, over and over again: I am happy, I am sad, I am ecstatic, I am miserable—a broad spectrum—and all the while staying in character! (I suppose they earn the fortunes they’re paid.)

My own goal was more modest. I wanted to create slices of only one feeling—you guessed it—loneliness. I wanted to burn it right into the paint, into the felt mixed in the paint. I wanted it to have all the shades, all the layers of my own wretched experience. I wanted a portrait that actually suffered, suffered in the same dumb animal way that I did.

My task was complicated by the fact that, as a seared, I cannot allow myself to be deeply scanned. The radiation of scanways or holographic equipment would set off the wardens in my cells, and I would burn. Even the radiation from this little pocket simcaster I have here is enough to turn me into a human Roman candle (and, by the way, the next time I pull this out you’d better move your seats away from me). For my portrait, I had to use a passive electrocorticographic reader, a sort of metal bowl over my head with ultrasensitive wave frequency pickups. These are no good for modeling a thinking brain, but they do a fine job in recording emotive states.

So there I sat, at my grand banquet table, with a metal colander atop my bald head, gazing at the portrait of my first wife and allowing my love for her and the utter misery of my singledom to fill up all my spaces, and when there was nothing in my heart but a thousand paper cuts of loneliness, I’d tap the controller and feed my agony to the oil painting. The whole exercise sometimes took hours to accomplish, and it would wipe me out for the rest of the day.

Did the painting share my pain? I don’t know for sure, only that my instruments registered a positive emotive flux in the paint’s processor felt. But how could I know if the recorded feelings were true to life? I couldn’t; so the next day I repeated the process, and the next, and every day thereafter.

I hardly noticed the days and weeks streaming by. I can’t say that my spirit was refreshed by my work. On the contrary, this was pretty mucky stuff I was wallowing in. And it was deep enough to swallow the whole Cass Tower, I thought, all six hundred floors of it. At some point, I had opaqued my exterior windows, convinced as I was that the building was, in fact, sinking into the quagmire of my pain. I was weepy, defiant, and strung out. I ate too much or not at all. I slept sometimes thirty-six hours straight. I invented every distraction I could think of to keep me from the banquet hall and the woman who suffered there in secret. But inevitably I wandered in and hooked myself up to shoot her another dose of my love. I hated myself. I pitied poor me. I cursed the day I was born.

Ah, the artistic process. How much I don’t miss it.

Once or twice I thought the portrait must be finished. I doubted it could hold another drop. I’d leave the banquet hall then and break out the champagne. But the next day I would wake up feeling even lonelier than ever before, and I’d rush into the banquet hall to start a new session.

TO LAYPERSONS SUCH as yourselves, I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a particularly healthful or balanced lifestyle. And I would not recommend it to the viewers at home. Indeed, I had long passed the depth where most people would be crushed by the pressure. But to a true artist, one’s art is like a diving bell capable of taking the artist all the way down.

Then, one day, as I sat gazing at my wounded Jean, Skippy intruded to inform me there was someone at the front door. That can’t be, I told him. Who would risk swimming down here?

“She says she’s your neighbor from the next floor down,” Skippy said.

There were still people below me? “What does she want?”

“To see if you have a fish she can borrow. She’s not sure what kind she wants, possibly a halibut or cod, but she’ll settle for salmon or tuna or whatever you have, as long as it’s from deep saltwater.”

I was flabbergasted. All I could think to ask was, “And do I? Have fish?”

Skippy informed me that I did, over three thousand kilograms of live fish of assorted species in the stasis locker. They were left over from my banquet days.

I pulled the metal bowl from my head and massaged my scalp. I said, “Show her to me.”

Skippy opened a view of my foyer. There stood a woman of middle height, a trace of Asian features on an otherwise plain Western face, expensive clothes, and middle age. An eccentric, no doubt. To have money but to allow oneself to age beyond fifty years was eccentric. And she was a busybody too. Who else but a busybody would disturb a neighbor with such a lame request—may I borrow a fish?

“I see you’ve already let her in,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” said my valet. “Was that wrong? I was following the Leichester Code of Modern Etiquette.”

“Yes, it was wrong,” I said. “Remind me to review that code with you sometime.” To the woman in my foyer, I said, “Hello, Myr Neighbor.”

“Post,” she said to the cams in my foyer, “Melina Post. And you are Myr Harger?”

“I am. My valet tells me you require a fish.”

“Oh, yes, Myr Harger, I do. And the sooner the better. Do you happen to have one I could borrow? I’ll replace it as soon as possible.”

“My valet claims that I have a few in stasis. You are welcome to any or all of them. He’ll take you to the pantry where you can view them. If you see something you like, he’ll see to delivery.”

“Thank you so much, Myr Harger. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”

“You’re quite welcome, Myr Post. Good-bye.” I closed the foyer scape, put the bowl back on my head, and returned to my suffering. But the knowledge that a stranger was at that moment trespassing my suite distracted me. I lived like a troll, never shaving or exfoliating. Fortunately, Skippy liked to keep the place clean, and I let him do it, so long as he kept his scuppers out of the banquet hall where I worked.

“Oh, there you are,” said a woman’s voice behind me. I whipped around to behold Myr Post in realbody entering the room. “You have a lovely home, Myr Harger.” Her eyes swept past me and took in the banquet hall, littered with years of detritus and dust, tubes of paint, dried palettes, hundreds of canvases stacked against the walls, towers of recording equipment, ropes of cable—and Jean.

I leaped from my chair, as though caught in a criminal act, and threw a cloth over the portrait, but not before she’d gotten a good look at it.

“My how—” she said. “That’s—” She continued to stare at the canvas. “There’s something extraordinary about that picture, Myr Harger. Please show it to me again.”

“No!” I said, galled by her presumption. “It’s not ready for public viewing.”

My tone startled her. “A pity,” she said, somewhat chastised. “Well, when it is ready, I should be very glad to see it again.”

“As well you should be,” I said. The suggestion that my Jean would someday be on public display disturbed me, though that’s what I’d intended from the start.

Myr Post gave me such a funny look that I became self-conscious. I removed the metal bowl from my head and tossed it on the table. It occurred to me that I was standing there stark naked. With a sick feeling, I glanced down at myself. But no, she had picked a day when I seemed to be wearing a robe. I cinched it tight and gave her a triumphant look.

That must have reminded her of her own mission, for she said, “I hope I’m not intruding,” perfectly aware that she was, “but I’m in a fix, and your valet seems a bit slow. Otherwise, I would never think of troubling you.”

Liar, I thought.

My visitor didn’t appear so old as she had in the foyer, more like my own age, but with weathered skin. She wore rich evening clothes, fit for a banquet, and I smirked, thinking she was years too late to attend one of mine. She began telling me how she had come to need a last-minute fish, but I wasn’t listening. I saw her rub her arm, leaving a pinkish blush on her skin, and this drove home the fact that she was really there. I couldn’t say how long it had been since I shared a room with a real flesh-and-blood person. After so long in my hermitage, the effect was dizzying, and I had to sit down.

She sat next to me, uninvited, all the while chirping away like a happy bird about other people I did not know and wrong addresses and missed deliveries. I didn’t even try to keep up with it all. I thought I could smell her perfume. This was hallucination or fantasy, of course. Seared people lose all sense of smell. Then I realized how close to me she was sitting. I wore no mastic, and my suite’s air exchange was turned off. Yet, she wasn’t gagging.

I interrupted her and said, “You can’t smell me!”

“No, I can’t. And you can’t smell me either, can you, Myr Harger?”

I stared at her, speechless. We were two of a kind.

“Well,” she said into the silence that had settled in the room, “will you be so kind as to do that for me?”

I didn’t hear her. I was too busy detecting the subtle appliances of the seared that she wore. From the barely detectable sheen of her skin mastic to the fire-retardant inner lining of her clothing.

She laughed then and said with mock authority, “Myr Harger, either lead me to your larder, or show me the door. If I don’t have my fish in fifteen minutes, my goose is cooked. And you of all people, Myr Harger, should understand that in my case, that’s no metaphor.”

Commanded, I led her to the kitchens. Or rather, I let Skippy lead us, since I couldn’t recall the way. We sat in the long-abandoned chef’s station while Skippy showed us life-size frames of the saltwater fish I still had in stasis. There were marlin, flounder, albacore, shark, halibut, salmon, octopus, and more.

Skippy said, “We also have a selection of saltwater mollusks and crustaceans and marine mammals.”

“No, thank you, Skippy,” she said. “It’s fish he likes, but I’ve forgotten what kind he said. What other kinds of fish are there in the sea?”

“Haddie, herring, eel, sole, barracuda, fluke, dab, mackerel—” Skippy spouted a long list in no discernible order, none of which rang a bell for her—“orange roughy, rattails, skates, black oreos, spiny dogfish,” and endlessly more.

Trying to be helpful, I interrupted Skippy’s recitation and asked, “How many people does it need to serve?”

She frowned, realizing that I’d not heard any part of her story. “Two,” she said, then added under her breath, “or one.”

“Hmmm,” I said, undeterred, “then one of those small flounders should do the trick, or perhaps a hoki.”

“I see,” she said. “I suppose choosing by size is a practical manner of making a selection. But my choice is more a matter of the heart.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “The heart is no bean counter.” She smiled then for the first time, and I saw that she was pretty.

“Since I can’t recall his favorite fish, I’ll take your advice, Myr Harger, and choose one by size. That shark should do.” She pointed to the largest brute in the pack of sharks that I had.

“The big guy it is,” I said, and all the other fish disappeared. The shark she’d picked was over four meters long. It was a giant mako, farm-raised and put into stasis in 2061, a few years before the Outrage. She’d have a hard time finding one to replace it.

“Oh, and—I almost forgot.” She flashed a “silly me” look and said, “I’ll need it cooked and in my flat in”—she consulted some timekeeper—“ohmigod, in eleven minutes! Is that possible?”

“Most things are,” I said. “Skippy, please cook and deliver the shark to Myr Post’s apartment.”

“At once,” Skippy said.

Kitchen arbeitors wheeled the shark on a cart from the stasis locker. Its stiff flesh quickened moment by moment, and by the time the arbeitors had lifted it to the cooker, it was flapping its powerful tail and snapping its toothy jaws in long-interrupted terror. Before it could do any damage to the kitchen, the cooker brained it and slit it open.

I backed up a little to avoid the splashing blood.

Skippy said, “The cooker asks what recipe it should use.”

Myr Post puffed out her cheeks and pursed her lips. “I don’t think my cooker has a recipe for shark. I’m sorry to be such a pest, but could your cooker use one of its own?”

My contracts with visiting chefs during my banquet days allowed me to record and reuse the recipes they fed into my cooker (after making a handsome royalty payment). The cooker displayed frames of six different shark dishes it had prepared in the past. Myr Post picked the Mako Remoulade in which the shark was baked whole, stuffed with Arabic rice and pine nuts, and served on a swimming-pool-sized platter that mimicked a pebbly beach littered with baby red potatoes, cashews, giant prawns, sea urchins, and kelp. Around it were tidal pools of pungent and tart cocktail sauces and giant cockle shells of shark fin soup. It fed 800.

Arbeitors started hauling ingredients from the lockers.

“And, Skippy,” Myr Post said, “tell your cooker to tell my cooker what starters, soup, wines, et cetera to prepare.”

“Done,” said my efficient valet.

“And your arbeitors can manage bringing it over?” she asked me. “Or should I send mine up to help?”

“Mine are adequate,” I said.

“Splendid,” she said. “You are a marvelous neighbor. I will replace the shark and other ingredients, and I hope someday to have the opportunity to return the favor.” She began to retrace her steps to my front door, and I saw to my horror that she intended to leave, just like that. It had taken some effort for me to get used to her presence, and I thought the least she could do was stay a while longer.

I tried to think of something to hold her, and I said the first thing that came to mind, “I used to throw dinners once.”

“I know. I attended one,” she said, leading me to the foyer.

I was dumbfounded. Out of the thousands of guests at my banquet table, I was sure I’d remember another stinker, especially one so lovely.

Melina and Darwin Post attended March 3, 2097, Skippy informed me. That would have been one of my first banquets.

Perhaps guessing my thoughts, she said, “You may not have noticed us. It was before our accident.”

Accident? I thought. Were we all seared by accident, then?

We reached the foyer, she shook my hand and thanked me again, and the door opened for her.

“Tell me about your accident,” I blurted out, never good at small talk.

She stopped in the hall and looked at me carefully through my open doorway. “Even if I had the time right now, I doubt that I’d want to relive that nightmare, even in memory.” She must have decided to take pity on me then, for she continued. “But I have five minutes, and you have been extraordinarily generous to me, so I’ll give you the thumbnail version of why my dinner tonight, which you are so graciously catering, is so important.”

And she did. I stood in my doorway, and she stood in the hall, and this is what she told me. But first, do you happen to have an Alert!? I could sure use another. The kiosk? Thank you, Victor. I’ll wait until you return.