Counting Heads

3.4

Yesterday Bogdan had been late for work; today he had time to dawdle. Strolling to the Library train station from Howe Street, he was on the lookout for any sign of the destruction of Chicago by NASTIES, now that the canopy was down. The sidewalk under his feet felt odd. Maybe it was his imagination, but it felt spongy, so he crossed to the other side of the street. Another thing he noticed was that his skin was itchy. He imagined tiny terrorist engines, too small to see, tunneling through his epidermis to commandeer his cellular machinery and turn him into a puddle of protoplasm. So he tried not to scratch.

Something he didn’t see were homcom slugs on patrol. They were usually out in force, but this morning they were mysteriously absent.

The train ride to Elmhurst was uneventful. Unlike yesterday he took his time walking from MacArthur Station to the Bachner Building, where E-Pluribus was camping out for a second day. He had a chance to take in the local scene, which was abuzz with early morning commuters.

Elmhurst boasted dozens of shopping arcades, one stacked atop another, all the way to Munilevel 85. They bustled with youngish, extravagantly dressed and coiffed free-rangers. There were so many cars flying overhead they stirred up a breeze. No wonder E-Pluribus was upreffing here.

Ahead of him a crowd of people blocked the sidewalk and spilled into the street. Bogdan wormed his way to the front of the crowd. There, in the middle of the street, was a bloom.

It was the first one Bogdan had ever seen in realbody, and it was frighteningly beautiful. Dome-shaped, it expanded in little surges. Feathery amber crystal tendrils swelled up from a central mound and froze into place. They built up on top of each other until the whole structure collapsed on itself in a shattering, tinkling heap. Only to swell again. And it was hot, as hot as a bonfire. Bogdan and the spectators moved backward each time it grew. The people hooted and joked as they watched, as though it was no big deal. Someone said there were hundreds of such blooms all over town. Most of them were like this one, a simple one- or two-stage nanobot that was programmed to eat one or two common substances—in this case the glassine pile that was used to pave roadways, arcades, and rooftops. Where the bloom reached the curb, it stopped: the curb was made of concrete, which wasn’t part of the nanobot’s diet. But the bloom was consuming the street in both directions and would spread until it reached the intersections with their concrete firebreaks.

Soon, bloomjumpers arrived overhead in tanker cars. They projected a police cordon around the bloom and ordered everyone back. When the spectators were clear, the tankers sprayed the bloom with a foam that caused the churning mound to sputter to a halt. For a giddy moment its intricate arabesque of crystal tendrils held its shape. Then the whole thing crashed into a pile of yellow sand.

AT THE BACHNER Building, Bogdan wasn’t allowed to go right up. The E-Pluribus floors were still being converted over from their overnight tenant, a Cathouse Casino. Among the Cathouse employees leaving the building were girls with tails poking out through the rear of their skirts. Bogdan approved of tails on girls. He liked how the girls tied bells to them or braided them with ribbons, or did other interesting things to draw attention to them. What drew his special attention were the tail holes in their clothes that usually exposed a little sliver of bare ass.

Bogdan was still scratching himself, but he noticed that everyone else was scratching too, so it was probably normal.

When he was finally permitted to go up, the Annette Beijing hollyholo was waiting to speak to him. “G’morning, Boggo,” she said, flashing him her world-famous smile. “My, aren’t you looking handsome this morning.”

“Thanks,” he said, beaming with pleasure. She was always complimenting him like that, and though it was probably only part of her programming, it still thrilled the hell out of him. “Looking good yourself, Nettie,” he said, “which, in your case, is an understatement.”

“Thanks. Well, I have visitors to greet,” she said. “You have yourself a bodacious day. Oh, and don’t forget about your meeting with HR tomorrow.” She turned and sashayed away. She was so beautiful, from the rear as well as the front. Bogdan mentally pinned a tail on her.

BOGDAN’S OWN REAR was the first in line for the fitting booths. Once the visceral response probe had been inserted, linking his body’s every sensation to the E-Pluribus superluminary computer, he hitched up his jumpsuit and went to his first upreffing assignment. He fervently hoped it would be another visit to the Oship with that weird little Birthplace guy, Meewee. But his first assignment took place in an auditorium full of daily hires, with whom he was subjected to an hour of probable news: mud slides in Bogota, a horrific soccer stadium stampede in Sudan, world leaders being knocked off by their own bodyguards, and more of the same. His next assignment was equally dreary, a consensus vid about an asteroid hitting the Earth and how, years before it hit, scientists used a rust-producing bacteria to gobble up oxygen out of the atmosphere, reducing global oxygen levels to fifteen percent, a concentration high enough for life but too low for open flames, effectively making the planet fireproof.

Boring.

Finally, his last assignment before lunch took him to a solo booth where, sure enough, the lights dimmed and the emitters hummed, and Bogdan found himself back on the Oship ESV Garden Charter. He was in an urban hab drum this time, sitting at a long table on a raised dais in front of a stadium crowd of tens of thousands. Beyond them he could see the spires and roofs of a great city stretching all the way to the bulkhead of the drum. At his table sat dozens of young men and women, all wearing the crisp uniforms of the jump pilot corps. Bogdan looked at his sleeve and saw that he, too, was a jump pilot. When he looked to his left, he discovered that he was seated right next to—Annette Beijing! A teenaged Annette who was also dressed as a pilot. She smiled at him.

There was a lectern in front of the table, and a man was speaking to the vast audience. It was the little Meewee guy in his green and red overalls. “During the next few months of the General Awakening,” he was saying, “more of our citizens will leave the cryovaults and be quickened than at any other time during our thousand-year voyage—well over two hundred thousand, or eighty percent of our great ship’s population. All sixty-four hab drums are being pressurized and activated to accommodate them. Now that we have reached our new home system, we must prepare for planetfall. The next twelve months will be a time of joyous activity as we make ready to take possession of our new planet.”

Amid sustained applause, Meewee pointed at the sky and said, “I give you Planet Lisa!” The crowd gasped. Bogdan looked straight up and was astounded by the sight. The hull of the hab drum was becoming transparent, a window to space. And there, directly overhead, a shiny blue-green planet was coming into view. It was endowed with brilliant oceans under whorls of white clouds. There were three major land masses visible, and ice-capped polar regions. Except for the unfamiliar shapes of the continents, it could have been Earth, old pre-industrial Earth.

“Stunning, isn’t it?” the teen-aged Annette said to him. “Our new home.”

“Planet Lisa,” Bogdan whispered.

“Have you picked out your thousand acres yet?”

“Um, no. Have you?”

“Almost. I’ve split mine up into three or four parcels. Five hundred acres of coastline on Kalina Island there.” She raised a slender arm and pointed to the edge of the world. “Look quick,” she said, “night is falling. And over there, below the Bay of Renewal, there’s a city called Capa. I have a hundred acres near there. As for the rest, I don’t know. Someplace in the mountains? In the agribelt? I just don’t know. What about you?” She searched his face with her green eyes and continued. “And to think, I’ve received all this: the millennial voyage, a thousand acres on a pristine planet, an exciting career, unlimited rejuvenation—a life!—all in exchange for one lousy acre on a dying planet.”

“Tell me about it,” Bogdan said. “My acre came from a superfund site polluted with toxic industrial waste.”

The crowd cheered, and Bogdan and Annette looked up again at Planet Lisa. On the western coast of a dark continent, the lights of a metropolis were coming on.

“That’s New Seattle,” Annette said. “The builder mechs are testing its energy grid.”

Just yesterday (though it was six hundred years ago in ship time) Captain Suzette had explained to him how robotic advance ships would reach their destination several centuries before the Oship to construct the planet’s infrastructure.

“And now the event you’ve all been waiting for,” the little man at the lectern said. The vast audience thrummed with anticipation. “In three months, the brave jump pilots seated behind me will begin to ferry colonists down to the surface. Naturally, everyone wants to be on the historic first landing. Who those lucky people will be depends upon the launch order of the jumpships—which we will now determine.”

The crowd went wild as a young man pushed a cart across the dais with what looked like a cage hopper filled with little balls. Audience members rose from their seats and screamed as Meewee rotated the hopper with a hand crank. A group of girls near the front, all of them stunningly gorgeous, chanted, “Bog-dan, Bog-dan, Bog-dan.”

Annette smirked. “I envy the pilot who gets the first launch. She, or he, will have all the lovers she can handle.”

The first ball dropped out and rolled to the end of the slot. Meewee picked it up and turned it in his hand. “The first ship to Lisa will be piloted by—”

Bogdan, who had been awake and active nonstop for twenty-nine hours, closed his eyes. The eight-hour Alert! tablet that he had taken ran out all at once, and he fell asleep where he sat. A few minutes later, his chair nudged him awake, but it was too late; the Oship scenario had ended. He swallowed another Alert! and trudged off to lunch.