Counting Heads

3.9

Bogdan arrived home from work two hours early. He stood in front of the door for a long time, staring at the control plate, not touching it, not saying anything. After a protracted standoff, the door surrendered to his will and slid open. Bogdan marched through the foyer and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, where it seemed the entire house was waiting for him in the corridor outside Green Hall. His first thought was, Who told them? But after watching his ’meets for a few moments he realized that not only were they not waiting for him, they didn’t even know he was home. It’s probably because I’m two hours early, he thought and joined them at the door to Green Hall. Inside the room, April was having some sort of unhappy encounter with Kale. Megan and BJ, standing next to the door, provided a running commentary.

“Samson rose from the dead this morning,” Megan said. “He sat up in his death-cot and croaked, ‘Mush, mush! And juice!’”

BJ said, “Now Denny and Rusty are in the john with him.”

“Assisting in a heroic bowel movement.”

“And he insists on coming to Rondy with us.”

“But Kale says that’s crazy talk. What about his odor? What if he dies in front of everybody?”

“But April is arguing his case. If Sam goes, that means she can go too.”

There was a sharp noise, like a slap, and all eyes snapped back to Green Hall. Kale lifted his paper notebook and slapped it on the tabletop again.

BJ said, “Kale’s been taking assertiveness pills all week.”

Megan said, “Yeah. Every little decision he makes he clings to like a life raft.”

Kitty came down the stairs and joined the ’meets at the door. “I’m going in,” she said. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck,” they all wished her.

Kitty glanced at Bogdan. “What’s wrong with you? Lose your job or something?”

Bogdan was too stunned to reply. Kitty entered the room and announced brightly, “It’s all arranged. I rented the lifechair. It’s on its way.”

“Lifechair?” Kale gasped. “I didn’t approve that. That’s not covered. How will we pay for it? It’s out of the question. I’ve made up my mind.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kitty went on merrily. “It’s coming out of Sam’s own pocket, not the house’s. That Hubert artifact in his belt arranged the whole thing. It’s all arranged and covered and on its way.”

“Cancel it!” Kale roared.

“I will not. He’s coming with us.”

“But, but—” Kale sputtered, “he’s under house arrest!”

“Quit shouting,” Kitty said. “I can hear you fine. I talked to that bee that’s watching him and cleared it with the hommers. They said he can go. They didn’t even seem all that concerned about him, actually.”

“But, but, but—”

“Look, Kale,” April said, rising from her bench seat, “it’s a badge of honor that our house cares enough about him to take him to his last Rendezvous. And it’s a badge of honor we should be proud to wear in front of your damn Beadlemyren. Believe me, none of them look too healthy themselves. We’ll be nursing them soon enough.”

The truth of her argument tipped Kale momentarily off balance, and the woman and girl used the reprieve to exit Green Hall. “I said I made up my mind,” Kale threw at their backs. “Did you hear me? My mind is made up.”

On her way out of the room, April paused to speak to Bogdan. “You’re home early,” she said. “Did you get that bonus?”

“Yes!” Bogdan roared. “I got the feckin’ bonus!”

But April didn’t stay around to hear about it. She sent all the loitering ’meets on last-minute errands. The bus was due to arrive in two hours. April dropped a package into Bogdan’s hands and said, “Wear this.” She wrinkled her nose and sniffed him. “Take a shower first.”

Her suggestion startled him. He lifted his arms to sniff his pits. Subject reeks of unholy fear, he reported to himself. He held the package of party togs before him like a bowl of water and gingerly carried it to the upper spheres of the house. Subject must be careful not to shut his eyes, or even to blink too slowly, for every time he does, a bloodred curtain drops, and he sees again with cornea-blistering clarity the unraveling of his day.

Which started soon after he arrived at work. The morning upreffing sessions had had nothing to do with Oships or Planet Lisa. They were less than memorable consensus exercises, and Bogdan forgot them even as they were playing. During a venue switch, he passed Annette Beijing in the corridor. They stopped to chat, and she said, “I just wanted to wish you luck at your HR meeting today at three.”

A good thing she mentioned, it, for though Bogdan hadn’t forgotten about the meeting, he had forgotten what day it was, which would have amounted to the same thing. She blew him a kiss and sashayed off. The kiss was aimed dead on, and Bogdan waited motionless for it to flutter over to him and press itself softly upon his cheek.

When his fourth Alert! ran out right before lunch, he was ready with his fifth. Hour 53 and all was well. The drug didn’t spoil his appetite. On the contrary, at lunch he returned for seconds of ice cream and fry. And he filled his pockets with snickerdoodles.

At 2:55 PM, Bogdan followed an usher line down the Administrative Corridor. The AC was arranged the same no matter where they were camped, and he knew he would wind up in front of three black doors. He found the doors and the bench opposite them. There was always a bench. He sat on the bench to wait. The subject has to wait on the bench until one of the doors calls his name. They always make him wait. They, in this case, was E-P, the E-Pluribus mentar. Everyone at E-Pluribus was a construct of E-P: the Academy sims, the HR director, even Annette herself. There were no actual human resources at E-Pluribus to manage, except for the dem controls, like himself, and the daily holes. Since the HR department was not real, subject could see no practical reason it could have for making him wait.

However, with the glimmering rays of a promised bonus gilding everything in sight, Bogdan didn’t mind the wait. He had provisioned himself for just such an eventuality. That was what the doodles were for. He sprawled on the bench and dropped a handful of the crisp little elbows of crunchy puffery, piece by piece, into his mouth, where he ground them to a sweet mash that he let trickle down his throat. It was a satisfying pastime. But still, shouldn’t part of a bonus be not having to wait for it?

“Myr Kodiak,” someone said, “this way please.”

Bogdan looked up; the middle door was talking to him. It was always the middle door. He swung his feet to the floor and swallowed his sweet cud. He stood up and brushed crumbs from his jumpsuit. The door slid open, and he entered the office.

The HR director was not there—naturally—which meant another round of waiting.

The office looked exactly as it had the last time. That is, messy. There were piles of paper files everywhere, on shelves, on top of old-timey cabinets, in leaning towers on the floor and desk. A layer of dust covered everything, and the air was stale. Drink cups and takeout packages with desiccated remnants of unfinished meals had been artfully tucked into every available niche. Just for once he wished one of the other doors would call him and he could experience a different—and nicer—corporate culture.

Bogdan knew from past experience that the only real object in the room, other than himself, was the adult-sized chair parked in front of the HR director’s desk. Near the chair was a basket labeled “URGENT” that held a stack of manila folders. When he leaned over to read the top folder, the words printed on it squirmed out of focus.

Bogdan sighed, climbed into the chair, and reached for more snickerdoodles. But the inner door opened, and the Human Resources director sailed in. Her feet seemed barely to touch the floor. She was balancing yet more paper in one arm while using the other to bulldoze a clearing on her overburdened desk. She deposited her stack of papers and shored up several others before even marking Bogdan’s presence. Finally, she clapped realistic dust from her hands and said, “Myr Kodiak. Thank you for coming in.”

Bogdan leaped from his chair and said, “Thank you for asking me, Myr Director.”

The director continued riffling through the files on her desk until she found the one she was seeking. She propped it open between two hillocks of paper and sat down. Without another word to Bogdan, she perused its contents. After a while, Bogdan climbed back into his chair. He was forced to sit and watch her read. She moved her lips as she read. Her lips were big rubbery things, painted purple, all out of proportion with her nose, which was short and pointy. Not an easy face to watch for very long. Especially with the blemishes.

The director’s eyes swiveled up to take him in. “Myr Kodiak, today marks your one-year anniversary with us. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Bogdan said, poised to leap to his feet again. She went back to her reading.

The blemishes on her face were two round fleshy moles, one cresting her cheek, and the other perched on her left nostril. One was brown, but the other was colorless. Each had a single curly strand of hair growing out of it. The moles upset him plenty, but it was the hairs that pushed him over the top. Why couldn’t she pluck them for crying out loud?

Finally, the director closed the folder and said, “I have a memorandum here I’d like you to look at and sign.” A dataframe opened in front of Bogdan with a document on it. The document’s title did not have any variation of “bonus” or “raise” in it. Instead, it read somewhat nonspecifically, “Memorandum of Agreement.”

Bogdan tried to read the tightly wound text but couldn’t make sense out of it, and there were pages of the stuff, with a signature box at the bottom to swipe.

Bogdan said, “What is it?”

“It’s an agreement by which you sell back the final two years of your employment contract to E-Pluribus.”

Bogdan heard the words but couldn’t understand them. Against all hope, he said, “Today is my one-year anniversary.”

“Again, congratulations,” the director said. “We believe you will find our separation payment and bonus quite generous.”

A paragraph entitled “Severance Compensation” became highlighted in the document floating before him. E-Pluribus was offering him a lump sum equal to three months pay, some 103.9174 UD credits in exchange for extinguishing his three-year contract immediately.

“I don’t get it,” Bogdan said. “You’re firing me?”

Another dataframe opened beside the first, and his original employment agreement appeared, with a paragraph highlighted. The director said, “We’re not terminating you, Myr Kodiak. We’re merely exercising this clause which empowers us to buy out your contract at any time for any reason.”

“Is it because I’ve aged a little? I have an appointment at a juve clinic this weekend. You can check it out. I’ll be back to eleven-eleven by next week. You can bank on that.”

The director smiled, with gaps between all her teeth. “We were well aware of your impending adolescence, and we considered using it as cause for dismissal, but we are nothing if not concerned corporate parents, and we’d rather not sully your permanent record unnecessarily.”

“Then why?” Bogdan said miserably. “Aren’t I doing a good enough job?”

“Your performance is not the issue. When we hired you, we calculated that it would take twenty-four months to completely map your personality, and another twelve to verify our model. Our calculations were wildly inaccurate. You are an astonishingly uncomplicated person, Myr Kodiak. One might even say simple. It took us only six months to build an exact replica of your personality that accurately predicts your response to virtually anything. Thus, we no longer need you.”

Bogdan was reeling. He didn’t know what to say and blurted out the first thing that came to him. “That may be so—today, but what about tomorrow? I’m an evolving personality. In no time at all, your replica of me will fall out of synch with the real me.”

“Ho, ho.” The director chuckled. “We knew you were going to say that.” She opened his folder and pointed to a document. “We wrote it down. Want to see?” When he didn’t respond, she shut it again and continued. “We’re not at all interested in your evolution, Myr Kodiak. We have other control subjects for normal human development and maturation. In you we were interested in something entirely different, that is, in a stalled personality, one that has ceased evolving. Imagine, a twenty-nine-year-old boy who hasn’t grown up yet, the spoiled lottery baby of a senescent charter, a housemeet who yearns for adventure but does nothing about it, a virgin too involved with a hollyholo to have a relationship with a real girl, any real girl.” She stopped to pick her teeth with a fingernail, giving him a chance to say the next thing they knew he would say, but he crossed his arms and refused to say anything.

“You’re offended,” she went on reasonably, “even though you know that what I say is true, and you wish that I’d die. You are certain that we don’t know you at all, and you’d just love to get your hands on our so-called model of you. Then you’d show us, correct?

“Very well,” she continued when he refused to agree or disagree, “meet Bogdan Kodiak.”

A chair, duplicate of his own, appeared next to him, and in it slouched a small, skinny boy who observed Bogdan through slitted eyes.

“What do you think?” the director said. “Spooky, eh?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Bogdan said.

“No, you don’t, do you?” the replica boy said, sitting up. “You don’t know nothing.” Suddenly and without warning, the false Bogdan leaped from his chair and, crying and shrieking, ran about the room knocking over piles and towers of folders and scattering paper everywhere. Then he climbed back into his chair and yawned.

The director looked at the real Bogdan and said, “Feel better?”

Bogdan had to admit that he did.

“But you’re still not convinced.”

“No, I’m not. Not that it makes any difference since you plan to fire me anyway.”

The director leaned back in her chair and said, “There may be a way for you to stay.”

Bogdan’s ears pricked up. “Really?”

The director scratched the mole on her cheek. “Yes, you can stay if you can demonstrate a flaw in our model.”

The Bogdan model rolled his eyes.

“How would I do something like that?” Bogdan asked.

“Ask it a question. If you can ask it a question that it can’t answer, but you can, then you can stay.”

“Deal,” Bogdan said and tried to come up with something that he kept locked away in the deepest, most secret recesses of his mind. Something that not even a visceral response probe could reach. It wasn’t easy, and his double started munching snickerdoodles in the meantime.

Bogdan’s sleepless mind put forth and rejected dozens of possibilities. Finally the HR director said, “Time’s up.”

“I’ve got it,” Bogdan said. He decided he had to cheat and ask the sim something that not even he knew himself. “Tell me, Bogdan impostor,” he said, “if you’re so smart, what does the dust H stand for?”

The false Bogdan laughed. “That’s easy. It stands for Hubert.”

Of course it did. Even as the phony Bogdan uttered it, Bogdan knew it to be true. The H stood for Hubert, and this could only mean that the Tobblers already knew of the mentar’s arrest. Or maybe only Troy and Slugboy knew it. Bogdan took another look at his double. And as disturbing as its revelation was about Troy knowing about Hubert, Bogdan had another question he sorely wanted an answer to.

“You’re right,” he said. “It does. That was a practice question. Here’s the real question: Who stole Lisa?”

The simulated boy twirled in his chair. “Who else? Troy Tobbler and his evil friend Slugboy.”

Again, his double astounded him. Who else, indeed? Clearly, the E-Pluribus model of him was flawed—it possessed too much insight. But before Bogdan could report this to the director and possibly keep his job, the faux Bogdan, out of the blue, raised his hand and saluted him. At first, Bogdan thought it was reminding him of Troy and Slugboy’s mockery on the steps, but it held the salute and locked eyes with him and continued to salute until Bogdan gave in and saluted back. Then it said, with creepy sincerity, “If you don’t believe in it yourself, how can you make it happen?”

“YOU ABOUT DONE in there?” Rusty called into the shower stall. “April says the bus is almost here.”

Bogdan blinked and looked around. He was in the shower. He got out, dried himself off, and donned the party togs April had given him. Rusty hung around making small talk and doing a bad job of pretending not to be watching to see if he was all right.

“I’m all right,” Bogdan said.

“I know it.”

IN THE SECURITY shack at McCormick Place, Commander Fred Londenstane turned away from a venue diorama and rubbed his eyes. On either side of him, twenty sullen pikes surveilled other dioramas, which were laid out in the same arrangement as the real rooms that they modeled. Altogether, Rendezvous filled three dozen halls and ballrooms. The largest was the multitiered Hall of Nations, the scale-model diorama of which would completely fill Fred’s living room at home.

Across the security shack, which itself was a commandeered ballroom, Gilles caught Fred’s eye, and Fred went over to see what was up. Gilles was watching the second largest display, the Welcome Hall, which was the Rendezvous entrance. Thirty conveyor belt scanways converged on Welcome Hall, feeding it four hundred Rondy-goers per minute. In the diorama, these people looked like multicolored ants marching across the marbelite floor and climbing the Grand Staircase to the adjoining Hall of Nations.

Of the thousands of attendees, a small fraction had flags pacing them over their heads. The flags marked potential troublemakers as identified by the McCormick Place mentar, MC, which also ran the scanways.

Gilles reached into the diorama and pointed to a man with not one flag but three. Fred skimmed the man’s doss: violent crimes and prison time, but no new offenses in the last seventy years. Fred zoomed in on the man’s face—no hint of hostility, only high expectations. He was accompanied by several men and women of the same charter.

“Let him pass,” Fred said, “but assign him his own bee.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Gilles replied. “Oh, and by the way—” He tilted his head at the large Hall of Nations diorama and two of the pikes assigned to surveil it. Fred had assigned half of his contingent of forty pikes to monitor the dioramas. This was just busy work—MC was fully able to monitor the entire complex. These two, instead of watching out for trouble, were engaged in it. They were zooming in on women in the upper tiers of the terraced building and viewing their naked bodies through their clothes. Fred went over and said, “Stop that behavior immediately.” The pikes’ ratlike eyes never blinked, but they returned to the women their clothing.

Fred continued around the room, chewing over this new bit of information—pikes, at least, were a type who liked hinks and weren’t shy about showing it.

ON THE STAIRS, Bogdan met Denny who was carrying Samson down from the roof. Samson seemed awake and clear-witted. “Sam’s going to Rondy with us,” Denny said. Apparently, so was the homcom bee, which tagged behind.

On the second-floor landing, April and Kale waited next to a lifechair. Denny placed Samson gently into it, and the chair introduced itself. “Hello, Myr Kodiak,” it said in a cheery voice while covering him with a smart tartan blanket. “I am a Maxilife Empowerment Chair—at your service! I am equipped to meet all of your special needs with feeding, autodoc, hygiene, colonies, massage, telecom, media, and transport functions. I will even scrub the local air of malodorants. I’m your home on wheels. You need never leave me again!”

“What a gruesome thought!” Samson said.

“I am currently coupling you into my toilet facilities. Please excuse any momentary discomfort.”

Samson said, “Can’t anyone make this thing shut up? Where’s Hubert? Hubert, where are you?”

Kale seemed waiting to pounce on that very question. He stood over the chair and said, “You want to know where Hubert is, Sam? Well, I’ll tell you. He’s been disappeared because of you and your stupid stunt.”

Samson wrinkled his brow. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Kale, as usual.”

Kitty came down the stairs with the belt valet and said, “Sam, look what I have.” She handed the belt to the chair and said, “Stow it someplace safe, chair.”

Samson said, “What is it?”

“Your belt, Sam, with a bit of Hubert left in the valet.”

“Hubert?”

“Hello, Sam,” said the valet through the chair’s speakers. “I am taking control of this lifechair. I am not the full Hubert but only a Hubert terminal repeater with minimal attention units. You may call me Belt Hubert.”

“But you sound just like Hubert,” Samson said hopefully.

“That’s right, I do,” Belt Hubert said as it steered the chair down the remaining steps and out the front door. Snuggled in the chair’s basket, Samson was asleep by the time they boarded the bus.

Down the street, the Tobblers were also leaving for Rendezvous. Spanking new buses dropped out of the sky one after another to pick them up. The Kodiak bus, by comparison, was small and armored. It had mesh screens over its windows and suspicious stains on its seats. When the Kodiak bus departed, it did not spring into the air on fans, but labored heavily across town on wheels.

AT MCCORMICK PLACE, their bus was ensnared in traffic. They watched out of grimy windows as a sea of buses, vans, and taxis all headed for the same destination. Bogdan stared out the window and relived his day several times in exhaustive Hour 59:30 detail.

“Remember, people,” Kale announced over the PA, “you only get one chance to make a first impression.”

THE SPACE SET aside for the Kodiak booth was on the heavily congested third tier of the Hall of Nations. April uploaded her design specs to MC, and their empty booth space was quickly transmorphed by the hall’s scape system into the deck of a house barge. The Kodiak House Barge had been the defining product of the fledgling Kodiak charter eighty years before. The design, with its vertical axis turbines, desalination plant, hurricane and tsunami worthiness, fish-processing plant, and NBC hazmat filters, was still the world’s most popular house barge model, and it housed millions of people in floating burbs that lined most lakes and continental shelves. Though the Kodiaks had long ago been forced to liquidate all interest in the house barge design, it still served them for recruitment purposes.

Soon, a herd of deck chairs and buffet tables arrived and set themselves up on the holofied deck. Caterbeitors arrived and arranged finger foods and beverages on the tables. In no time at all, House Barge Kodiak was open for business. Kale gathered his distracted ’meets together for a pep talk. Megan and BJ were sniffing the sleeves of their party togs. The bus ride with Samson had ruined their new clothes.

“Right, then,” Kale said with enthusiasm. “Here we are! Let’s make the most of this opportunity. You all have your booth duty schedule. Be here on time. In the meantime, go out there and have fun, but for pity sake, try to meet people. Don’t clump up together. Mingle! Mingle! So go. Wait! Remember, if anyone should ask, tell them that Belt Hubert is really Hubert.”

“I am Belt Hubert,” the valet said from the chair, which arrived with Rusty and the sleeping Samson. Samson’s scanner waiver had meant a detour through a bypass security station where he was assigned a second monitor bee. “I am only a pale approximation of Hubert Prime.”

“Yes, we know that, dear,” Kitty said to the chair. “Now shut up and don’t say that again.”

Already, Samson’s odor was causing consternation among chartists at neighboring booths. Kale gave April a told-you-so look, and April said, “Kitty, why don’t you take Sam down to the open-air beer garden.” But just then Kitty spied a group of children playing a game of tag, and off she skipped to join them.

April sighed and said, “Boggy?”

BOGDAN WOVE DOGGEDLY through aisles and aisles of charter booths, tailed by Samson’s chair and two homcom bees. He had just swallowed his sixth Alert! and he felt he had a lot to report: The keepers of soup pots and trad vals have gone all out to greet us. Here are the legions of viridian-green-taupe—at your service! The champions of blue-orange-green—at your service, myr! The disciples of red-black-gray—at your service, myr! And followers of rainbows glimpsed but not recognized—Lisa would know them all—bow to you, myr, and wish you and your retinue a happy Rondy—at least until Sam’s ripeness catches up with us and then everyone makes potty faces.

So we keep moving and talk to no one, down endless galleries of tarnished promises where we see the same prayer on every lip: Only grant us one more transplant farm, one more stone quarry, one more popular bentwood chair design, and this time we’ll do a better market plan.

Oh, kettlers of boiling green peanuts and smithies of decorative iron window grating and balustrades. Oh, makers of wooden drums with stretched reindeer hide (and shaped like little Oships!) and distillers of crushed rose petals, yarrow stalk, and eucalyptus leaves. Your cash cows lay on their sides, bloated and black, yet you keep pulling at their putrid teats. When will you give it a rest?

Bogdan halted when he saw the Kodiak booth. He had been walking in a big circle. From the distance, their booth did look like the roof deck of a house barge. The holo even rolled a little with imaginary swells. Francis and Barry, not the Kodiaks’ most auspicious greeters, lounged on deck chairs, eating up the cheese plate. But since no visitors appeared to be coming aboard anyway—

We were never a seagoing charter, though we lived on the water off Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska. In 2054, thirteen women and nineteen men, employees at the Kodiak Elevator Space Port Authority, grew disgruntled with their KESPA housing and decided to move out. But there was a housing shortage on the island, so they organized a co-op to buy and convert a factory barge into a floating residential condo. They had to tie it up along a section of cliff face near Kaguyak, where the tidemark on the rocks was the only beach, and their floating home lay fully exposed to Pacific storms in the winter and the monsoons of summer solstice.

Those were more confident times, the decade before the Outrage, the decade when people first began to realize that they would live forever.

The thirty-two Kodiak Island plankholders were able engineers and confident designers, and in the three-year process of perfecting their condo craft, they also created an egalitarian community, one they would later formalize with a social charter (and, presumably, the aluminum stock pot).

Bogdan turned and headed for the nearest down pedway. On the next tier down in the Hall of Nations he hurried past the first booth. Albacore chartists (white-yellow-white) and their darling transgenic swine, showing off restless lumps under baggy skin. Gonads-for-hire. Rent-a-wombs. Their human medical trials rarely returned death verdicts—and the compensation was excellent. Thanks, but no thanks.

Next, a double booth doing banner business—Charter Long (brown-black-red)—the merger masters of last resort. Swallow your house whole, no questions asked. Greetings, Kodiak. The beevine says your house might be “going Long” soon. Thanks, but no thanks. Good-bye. So Long.

Bogdan turned a corner and spied the Beadlemyren booth at the end of a row. It appeared to be a micromine wellhead sunk into a compacted trash heap. A crowd of about a hundred chartists were milling around in front of a crew shack, where three Beadlemyren, in their black robes, stood behind a counter and answered questions. Not the same Beadlemyren from dinner last night. Bogdan’s curiosity about Wyoming was strong, but he considered the snoring, stinking lifechair behind him. A badge of honor, for sure, but one that might be better worn on a different sleeve.

Bogdan took the pedway down to the main floor where he found a site map and touched the beer garden icon. A candy-striped usher line issued from under his shoes and stretched out across the thronging hall. He followed its meandering course through and around exhibits and kiosks. Hail to Charter Jiff (red-white-green), the flagship of our Great Chartist Movement, who owns extruder recipes to practically everything and boasts of conveniently located outlets everywhere, including our own pirate-infested building on Howe Street.

Hail to Charter Bolto (navy-charcoal-teal), whose financial services in insurance, investment, and banking rival those of many major aff establishments.

Hail to Charter Vine (green-green-green), whose worldwide chain of resorts and spas lend solace to those who can afford to visit them.

Bogdan halted in the center of the Hall of Nations and closed his eyes. He was washed in the sparkling energy of five floors of Strength in Numbers, Strength in Diversity, Strength in Our Vision of a Cooperative Society.

Our Kodiak founders were larger than life. The market demand for their outstanding craft was nothing less than exuberant, and they engaged shipyards all over the world to satisfy it. They coopted, bought out, or otherwise beat down all obstacles in their way. For a number of years Charter Kodiak was a poster child for the whole chartist movement. But the heroic times didn’t last, the condo could not hold, the original thirty-two jumped ship to pursue private fortunes, and it was left to the likes of Kale and Gerald to drag anchor into the shoals.

Somebody rubbed Bogdan’s head, and he whipped around and found himself nose to nose with Troy Tobbler. “’Lo, Goldie,” the boy said. “Out walking the chair?”

Troy wore a tailored green and silver tunic with short, yellow sleeves that highlighted his chubby arms. Bogdan looked down at his own arms. They were chubby too, with no hint of budding muscles under smooth skin. But somehow they weren’t the same.

“Hello in there,” Troy said, waving his hand in front of Bogdan’s face. “What’s the news on ol’ what’s its name? What’s mentar jail like anyway? Do they really cut their inference engines from their knowledge bases? That’s harsh.”

Bogdan could remember what it was like when he was Troy’s age. Things were perfect then. Kodiak still had shipyards in the EU and UAR and owned the whole building on Howe Street and chapter houses in other cities. Whenever anyone visited Chicago, they brought him presents. They loved to hear him and Lisa sing songs he made up.

“Troy,” he said, fixing the boy with Hour 61 intensity, “have you told anyone about Hubert yet?”

“No, but I was just going to.”

“I don’t think you have to.”

“Oh, no?”

Bogdan yearned to crush the boy, but instead he explained, “You didn’t tell them about hacking my door, did you?”

“No.”

“You said you’d let me feck it up myself, and I did, or Sam did. So, you were right.”

Troy smiled.

“Well, the same thing applies to Hubert. You can count on me to feck it all up on my own. What do you say?”

“I don’t think so.”

Someone else rubbed Bogdan’s head, and he swatted at the hand and spun around. It was a middle-aged man in a Charter Candel jumpsuit (turquoise-magenta-black). “Is your ’meet asleep, son?” he said.

Bogdan glanced at the lifechair. “Samson? Yes, myr, I think so,” he said. When he turned back, Troy had slipped away.

“A pity. I was wanting to give him my regards.”

The chair piped up, “I can record you, myr.”

The man nodded his head and stood over the chair. “Greetings, Samson Kodiak,” he began, but Samson’s eyes fluttered open, and the man exclaimed, “Hello! Awake after all.”

“Yes?” Samson said, trying to focus on the man. “Can I help you, officer?”

“Ha, ha,” the man replied. “I’m not with security, Myr Kodiak. My name is Charles Candel, though when we first met, way back in ’38, your name was Harger, and mine was Sauze.”

Samson knit his brows with the effort of remembering. “Charles Sauze? Oh, yes, cybersculpture. But you were a boy.”

The man’s jaw dropped. “You remember me, though a century has passed. Yes, I was a boy, a failing student, but your lectures on pseudotissue molding captured my imagination. To make a long story short, your workshop turned me around, gave my life a direction, and the rest is history.”

“History?” Samson said. “Henry, what is he talking about?”

“I am Belt Hubert, and Myr Sauze Candel is expressing appreciation for influencing his life in a positive manner a century ago.”

“He is?”

“I am,” Candel replied. “Take my word for it, Myr Kodiak. You changed my life. Anyway, I saw your sky show the other night, and when I heard you were attending, I wanted to come by and say hello.”

By the time the Candel departed, two more chartists had stopped to speak to Samson. Soon many more well-wishers arrived and formed a line. “Belt Hubert,” Bogdan said, “tell April what’s happening and that I have to go off on my own.”

“She says she’s sending someone.”

When Kitty arrived, the queue of visitors completely encircled the lifechair and was still growing. “What’s this?” she asked, but Bogdan didn’t stick around to answer.

He went back to the Rondy site map and said, “Where’s Troy Tobbler?” A moving dot appeared on the map, and Bogdan took off after him.

UNDER THE LIFECHAIR blanket, Blue Team Bee crawled from the hankie’s pocket to the underside of his jumpsuit lapel. There it wove hairlike cams through the fabric in order to get a visual of the vicinity and put faces to the voices it was recording for LOG2.

EVERYTHING WAS HUMMING along, and Fred thought he might have an evening without a disaster. The head count had reached 47,600 and change. Twelve hundred lethal weapons, mostly laser sabers and pocket billies, had been confiscated at the scanways. Three felons with arrest warrants were detained for the police. (What were they thinking coming through an arena-class scanway?) Five hundred thirty-six persons with false or suspended charter memberships were turned away.

Seven deaths had occurred so far, all apparently by natural causes: three coronaries, one stroke, one asphyxiation (hot dog lodged in throat), and two undetermined. The dead and dying had been hustled off the floor with minimal fuss and quickly put into biostasis.

Through all of this, the impromptu TUG security force had performed beside his Applied People force without incident. Fred was reluctantly impressed by their professionalism. He decided it was probably a good time to visit the troops. With five hundred TUGs on floor duty, he had kept many of his own people in reserve in the labyrinthine system of service corridors that interlinked the halls and ballrooms. Fred threaded his way through these corridors and chatted with his jerrys, belindas, and russes. They were mostly sitting around, snoozing or gossiping or playing casino games, as caterbeitors scooted around them. No one seemed happy, especially the russes. In fact, his brothers seemed to be avoiding him. Fred’s other twenty pikes were also held in reserve here and every one Fred saw was engaged in that klick-eating back and forth pacing of theirs. It took no special insight to read the body language. Pikes were cultivated to leap into street battles with clubs aswinging, not to stroll peacefully through retail emporia, and certainly not to sit idly in service corridors.

“Gilles,” Fred said when he left the corridors, “send pizza and soda around to the reserve and then start rotating them to the floor. And rotate the pikes down here with the ones in the shack.”

Roger that.

Fred continued his tour out on the convention floor. He passed through logjams of happy free-range chartists. It felt odd to be among them. Though there were so many of them, each and every one had their own unique face, and they came in a dizzying variety of sizes and shapes. And unlike the affs, who technically were also free-range, many of the chartists were plain-looking, if not outright ugly.

The Rondy-goers mostly ignored Fred, and those who greeted him were friendly enough. Everyone loved russes.

The TUGs on patrol that he encountered were a different matter. Though clearly free-range, their size and shape were uniformly large, and Fred found this strangely comforting. They looked good too. Tonight they wore their dress uniform: a crisp, olive-green jumpsuit with a sharp V-shaped bodice. The bodice came in olive-green or mustard, depending upon the tugger’s moiety. A patch over the chest displayed the tugger’s name under the Circle T logo. Floating over the left shoulder was an olive-green marble imprinted with a mustard T.

Their attitudes could stand an adjustment, though. They scowled at Fred, at least until they noted his rank.

Fred looked into the ballrooms and conference rooms he passed. In one he found an Olympic-sized boxing ring with qualifying rounds under way for the 2134 World Chartist Golden Gloves.

Down the hall, a cavernous banquet hall had been set up as the Rondy nursery and child care station, and it seemed to be one of the most popular stops for Rondygoers. A giant swan floated in a shaded pool where babies slept on lily pads. Toddlers frolicked in a gummy pen, while older children played games organized by adults. Fred estimated about four hundred youngsters here, and two thousand adults.

In a conference room, Fred came across the quarterly business meeting of the World Charter Union Congress. It was the only room that security was prohibited from monitoring with cams or bees. Assembled were the leading lights of charterdom, its thinkers and activists and delegates from all parts of the UD. The delegates sat at chintz-skirted tables that lined three walls of the room. In the center of the room were arranged two hundred seats for spectators. Real people sat in some of them, but most were occupied by proxy.

One of the few realbody attendees was a TUG woman who Fred immediately recognized—Veronica Tug. She was delivering a presentation to the Congress. She stood between Earth and Mars in a simplified solar system and was pointing at an overscaled Oship. She was making an argument or rebutting one. Passion simmered beneath her veneer of self-control.

As Fred stood at the rear of the ballroom, a proxy appeared before him, the head and shoulders of Myr Pacfin, the insufferable Rendezvous chairperson. “I’m sorry, Myr Russ,” it said to Fred, “but this is a closed meeting, for chartists only.”

“I’ll take my leave then,” Fred said. “I was just making my rounds.”

The Pacfin proxy looked at Fred’s name badge and said, “Ah, Myr Londenstane. Everything seems to be running smoothly, wouldn’t you agree? Rondy nearly runs itself, and security here is pretty much a waste of effort.”

Fred tried to hide his annoyance, and before he managed to leave, they were joined by a second proxy. This one was an imposing bust of Veronica Tug. The real woman was still in the middle of the room delivering her address. “Excuse me, Myr Pacfin,” it said to Pacfin’s proxy, “but I would like to invite Myr Londenstane to stay for my presentation.”

“I wish we could,” said the Pacfin proxy, “but rules is rules, and it would take a vote by the delegates to waive them.”

“In that case,” the Veronica proxy said, “let’s put it to a vote.”

Fred told her not to bother, that he was just leaving, but Veronica Tug’s proxy said the results were already returning. A moment later, the Pacfin proxy added, “The delegates welcome you, Myr Londenstane. Please find yourself a seat.” It vanished before Fred had a chance to reply.

“Don’t take it personally,” said the TUG proxy. “My fellow chartists harbor an irrational hostility toward iterants, as I’m sure you know. They feel that your people have replaced ours in the economy and are the biggest cause of our decline. They are blind to the march of history.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Fred said. “We don’t take such things personal.”

The proxy said, “Perhaps you should take them personal. Maybe we all should. The affs have made separate races out of us and taught us racial hatreds and lies. That’s pretty personal, wouldn’t you say? It’s how they control us.” As the proxy spoke, its hands wove and thumped and slashed the air.

The proxy paused and said, “I’m sorry. I’m monopolizing your time, and you’re missing my presentation. Please find a seat, Commander; the best part is coming up. I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Wait,” Fred said before it could vanish. “I agree with much of what you said about the friction between our groups, but as to the ‘march of history,’ well, only time will tell.”

The proxy’s bulbous face smiled, and it said, “I’ll be sure to pass that along to my original.”

“And pass along my appreciation for the assist the other night. Like I said, I owe you big time.”

The proxy’s expression hardened a little. “Don’t worry about that, Commander. I’m sure we’ll find a way for you to repay your debt.”

When the proxy disappeared, Fred did not find a seat but continued to stand at the back of the room where he listened to the real Veronica’s presentation. She was discussing Oship #164, arguing the case against it. Apparently, the World Charter Union had proposed buying up an entire Oship for chartists to use to colonize a new world. It had chosen a production number that would be completed in about twenty years, giving them time to enlist passengers and accumulate the quarter-million-acre price tag. Veronica seemed opposed not to the acquisition of an Oship, but to its destination.

“Why embark on a dubious voyage to another solar system,” she was saying, “when we have a perfectly good one here? One which the powers-that-be seem determined to keep us from exploiting. Why are there no space charters among us? Who gave the corporations an exclusive right to the resources of our solar system? Furthermore, if we do decide to colonize a new world, must we renounce our rights to this one? This ‘one for a thousand’ offer by the Garden Earth Project is a cunning fraud—”

Fred? Gilles said.

Go ahead.

You might want to check out something in the Hall of Nations.

What is it?

A stinker there is holding court in a traffic lane.

A stinker?

A seared individual.

I know what a stinker is, Gilles, Fred said. What is this stinker’s name?

Kodiak.

That was a relief of sorts—not the stinker he thought it would be. On my way.

BOGDAN GOT DETOURED by a concession wall. He had missed dinner, and the concession walls at Rondy were free of charge. All the burgers, fry, cinnaballs, and pizza tubes you can eat. Pot stickers, noodles, rice curry, whatever you like. Give me a triple mondo choco-fudgy with extra nuts and whipped cream.

Bogdan spotted an unoccupied quiet nook across the busy corridor and carried his towering frozen concoction over to it. Once he passed through the pressure curtain, the din of the hall fell to a murmur, and he dropped into an armchair. For long moments he spooned up sweet bliss and watched as silent crowds went by. Then he noticed a Doorprizer frame next to the pressure curtain that was displaying the ongoing drawings. Every three minutes another prize was given away. An aff’s ransom in household necessities. A garbage digester appeared in the frame, and three minutes later the name of the winning charter—not Kodiak.

That’s all right—we have the one in the NanoJiffy. We don’t need another. One thousand square meters of indoor lawn—where would we put it? A thousand liters of Sara Lee Gourmet Ugoo—well, yes, let’s win that one. It’ll feed us for six months. Let’s—that’s all right.

A slew of lesser prizes followed, and then one of the hourly premium prizes—a brand-new 2.5 index General Genius houseputer, including installation. Here was a prize worth winning. Here was a prize the Kodiaks deserved to win, must win. It would go a long way in reversing their lousy streak of misfortune.

Bogdan set his empty dish on the floor and closed his eyes and prayed. Please, oh please, oh please.

Installers arrive at the door and say, Where do you want it? In here, in here. Tear this old one out. Put cam/emitters in every room, including the stairwells, including Sam’s shed. Hello, I am your new GG Expressions. Please assign me a name.

A name, a name. Lisa is already taken. There’s a whole planet named for her, don’t you know. How about—

Bogdan opened an eye and peeked at the frame. The winning charter was flashing, but it was not Kodiak. Bogdan slumped in his chair.

Just then, Troy Tobbler walked by the quiet nook. “Hey you!” Bogdan yelled and pushed himself to his feet. “Stop!” But by the time Bogdan exited the nook, Troy had melted into the crowd. Bogdan dashed after him, dodging pokey people. At the end of a corridor, he peered left and right. No Tobb in sight. He doubled back and checked the ballrooms along the way. They were holding some kind of meeting in one, boxing in another. In a third they were waltzing, trancedancing in a fourth. In a fifth he spied April standing alone against a wall. She was swaying in time to the music and clapping her hands to the beat, as though she were a temporarily sidelined dancer.

When she saw him, she got a guilty look. Stubbornly, she continued to clap to the music and said to him, “It’s amazing how many hundreds of men can go by without noticing me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Bogdan said. “Everyone notices you. You’re beautiful!” And she was, warm and alive with love. The house would collapse without her. She is our heart. But suddenly the picture drops away like a cardboard cutout, and we see April as any guy might. We see her with the same eyes we use to see Annette Beijing, and the comparison is not kind. April has a long, horsey face, as though it got stretched while it was still soft, and her eyes are too small and set too far apart. Her torso, by contrast, is too compact. Her chin rests on her hips with not much in between. Her legs are long, but bandy, and her toes point in opposite directions. We shudder from the sight of her, but only for a moment before her warm, loving picture snaps back into place.

“You’re wrong, April,” Bogdan said. “You are freakin’ gorgeous.”

“Oh, Boggy.”

Just then a woman in a brick-black-apricot pantsuit, Charter Saurus, approached them. “Happy Rondy, April Kodiak,” she said and offered her hand.

“Do I know you?”

“Sally Saurus,” the woman said. She glanced at Bogdan and added, “I wonder if I could have a moment alone with your housemeet, young man. I have something of a personal nature to discuss with her.”

“Sure thing,” Bogdan said. “I was looking for someone anyway.”

A JERRY AND belinda team had thrown a holo cordon around the lifechair and the queue of well-wishers surrounding it. They rerouted foot traffic around them. The jerry said to Fred, “We wanted to clear him out of here, but this guy is covered by so many conflicting laws and treaties there’s no clear protocol. Gilles told us to leave ’im be till you got here.”

“That’s good,” Fred said. “MC, can you create a spot filter of negative pressure around the stinker with about a twenty-meter radius?”

I’ll do my best, the mentar replied.

“And get this,” the jerry went on. “He’s under modified house arrest. He’s got his own monitor bee.”

“He’s a criminal?”

He’s Samson Kodiak, Gilles said in his ear, the joker in the Skytel the other night.

Fred had missed the hack but had heard about it. “Say the name again.”

Samson Kodiak.

It was too much of a coincidence for there to be two stinkers still alive, both named Samson. Fred consulted his visor to view the man’s doss. Samson P. Harger Kodiak. How the mighty had fallen. Fred couldn’t imagine what would cause an aff, even a seared one, to join a charter. The lifechair was too distant for him to see its occupant clearly, but his odor alone was enough to bring back a flood of memories.

“Gilles, register Myr Kodiak for VIP status.”

Sir?

“You heard me.”

VIP he is.

With the situation well in hand, Fred lingered outside the cordon. He, too, wanted to greet Samson—for old times’ sake—but there were too many people ahead of him, and the line advanced too slowly. A chartist at the tail of the line said, “Good evening, Myr Russ. There’s no need for you to stand in line. Go to the head. People, let the good russ through.”

Fred demurred, but the chartists insisted, and he advanced to the front of the queue. Here, Samson’s odor assaulted him. After all these years, Fred had not forgotten the tang of Samson’s vile fragrance, only its potency. He had nose filters in a utility pocket but felt it would be discourteous to use them. Especially since none of the chartists did.

Soon it was Fred’s turn to greet Samson, but the chair said, “Myr Kodiak has fallen asleep. He’s bound to reawaken at any moment. You’re welcome to stay and wait, or if you must go, I would be glad to convey any message you wish to leave him.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Belt Hubert, a pithy remnant of Sam’s mentar, Hubert.”

Fred said, “Well, Belt Hubert, Myr Kodiak probably won’t remember me, but please tell him I dropped by to say my regards. My name is Fred Londenstane. I worked for him once long ago.”

As Fred spoke, he noticed a pretty little girl scrutinizing him from the other side of the lifechair. She wore a flower print jumpsuit with brown-yellow-white trim, the same colors as Samson’s clothes. She had long, lustrous mahogany hair that was worked into an intricate braid. When he returned her look, her hazel eyes did not flinch but continued to stare at him with the unnerving directness of a child.

Samson stirred in his chair. “Yes, officer?” he said. Samson had awakened, though his eyelids drooped. “Is there something wrong?”

“No, Myr Kodiak,” Fred said, “there’s nothing wrong. I stopped by to say hello. You may not remember me, but I once worked for you. It was many years ago.” Samson’s eyes grew heavier and heavier until they were shut again.

Fred continued. “It was in the Starke household when she was a governor. Right after you were seared.”

Samson’s sleepy eyes opened a slit, and he said, “You’re the russ who used to visit me in the basement. You brought me mouth mints and deodorant.”

“Yes, that was me.”

Samson struggled with the chair, trying to free a hand. “Let go of me!” he complained, and the blanket rolled back a little. He raised a skeletal arm and reached out to shake Fred’s hand. Renewed stench rippled in the air (and the hidden blue bee made a special note of this apparent iterant ally).

“You haven’t changed a bit, Fred. How was Mars?”

Mars? Fred had left the Harger household to do a five-year stint at Mars Station.

“And your wife, Corrine?” Samson said. “How is she?”

“Let me see,” Fred said, doing a quick calculation. “Corrine would be three wives ago. Right now I’m married to an evangeline named Mary Skarland.”

“An evangeline. What a charming name. I don’t believe I’ve met one of these evangelines.”

“They’re rather recent and somewhat rare,” Fred said.

“Is she here, Fred?”

“No, Myr Harger. She’s at home. I’m here on duty. Anyway, when I saw that you were here, I wanted to say hello. Also to offer my condolences for your loss.”

Samson blinked. “Henry, have I lost something?”

“I am Belt Hubert,” replied the chair, “a fraction of my former self, and Officer Londenstane is probably referring to the tragic death of your ex-wife Eleanor Starke two days ago.”

The news hit the ancient man like a train. He gulped and choked and pushed himself into a half-sitting position. “Hubert, take me to Roosevelt Clinic immediately.”

The chair’s motors revved up, and its brakes unlocked, but the girl jumped in front of it and said in a very adult tone, “Stop!”

“Kitty, is that you?”

“Yes, Sam, I’m here.”

Samson reached out over the side of the basket, and Kitty took his hand.

“Kitty, I must go. My daughter needs me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ellen, my daughter. She survived the crash. I must go be with her.”

This is where I came in, Fred thought and backed away. Outside the holo cordon he paused to sniff his hand. It stank.

BOGDAN FOLLOWS A rubberband to Troy Tobbler. If the Tobb boy happened to turn around, he’d see it stretched out on the floor behind him and either cancel it or follow it back to me.

It vibrates faster the closer we get to each other. I race along it, and it leads me to the open doors of a grand ballroom where I am stunned by a ghastly sight—the Rondy Nursery—hundreds of kids and thousands of grown-ups rubbing their heads.

Bogdan is a graduate of the Rondy Nursery, magna cum laude, having spent his first nine Rondies in them. And though that was twenty years ago, his impulse is to turn around and flee. But he spots the Beadlemyren, the two ghouls from dinner last night, standing next to the lily pond with—Bogdan discovers—Tobbler Houseer Dieter, who is handing them a toddler dressed in a bright orange-green-brown playsuit—a Tobbler toddler! The Beadlemyren attempt to bounce it, and when it begins to cry, they bounce it harder and make goo-goo faces; when it starts to shriek, they give it back to Dieter.

I weave through the crowd following my rubberband until it vibrates so fast it rumbles, and I spot him, Troy Tobbler, heading straight for the Beadlemyren. His mouth falls open and the tongue in his head begins to wag. I sprint to cut him off. The humming rubberband goes pop when we collide.

Whoa! The feck! Goldie!

Listen very carefully, Tobb. I want you to keep your big mouth shut about Hubert!

It’s enough to make him think, but only for a moment. He shoves me in the shoulder and says, Make me, Kodiak!

But I don’t shove him back. I can’t make you do anything, Troy, but there’s one thing you should think about before you say anything. If this micromine merger of ours falls through, then we won’t be leaving Chicago and we’ll be your neighbors forever.

That gets his attention. Even a boy can see the logic in it. So I crank it up a notch. Or even better, your charter will merge with them and you’ll be the ones going to Wyoming. You, Troy Tobbler, the microminer. Is that what you want?

That does the trick. I can see a parade of horrors passing through his brain. So why don’t you give the whole Hubert thing a rest and keep your fecking mouth shut.

Something in my tone? He looks suddenly defensive and says, You’re not my boss.

I know I’m not your boss, and you don’t have to listen to me, only think about what I said.

Losers, he roars and shoves past me. I grab his arm but the ceiling lights swing by in a swoosh and BAM! I’m flat on my back, all breath driven from my lungs.

He stands over me and says, Don’t never touch me, Goldie.

To the left and right of us, kids are being snatched up by vigilant adults. I swivel on my back and sweep his feet from under him with my leg. He goes down but not hard and not for long and in a flash his boot sweeps across my vision and explodes in a red ball behind my nose. Hot blood is gushing from my nose.

Legs all around, adults making a pen with their bodies. I try to stand up but get all woozy and have to fall down again and sit in my own blood. And if that’s not humbling enough I lean over and add a layer of triple mondo choco-fudgy puke.

Oh, hell, says a tugger who presses a thick wad of field dressing against my face. His partner looks down at me and says, MC, we need a medic and a mop. Tuggers are big feckers, especially when you’re on the floor. Troy tries to sneak away but they grab him. Looks like you boys need some time in the penalty box.

Not the Tobbler, not the Tobbler, Dieter is shouting from outside the circle. The Kodiak started it. Punish him.

Just then another officer shows up, not a tugger—a pike!

Pike yells at everyone, Break it up, break it up. The TUGs tell him, We’ve got the situation in hand, officer, but he yells at them to feck off.

It’s handled, officer. No need to butt in now.

The pike whips out his wand and snaps it open. The TUGs back off and give him plenty of floor. Dieter backs off too, and the Beadlemyren have eyes round like saucers.

The pike spins me around and glues my wrists together. Leave them alone! roars the room. Don’t touch them! roar the TUGs. Troy tries to sneak away again and the pike snicks him on the butt with his wand. Just a little snick but it must be cranked up all the way because Troy falls down and flops around like a fish. Everyone is screaming genocide and I’m screaming too.

Just then another officer, a belinda, shows up and orders the pike to halt. She keeps the crowd back and shouts, Stand down, Rudy, that’s an order. But the pike twists Troy’s arm behind his back and glues it way up high to his opposite shoulder. Then he lifts him up by the arm and Troy is all crazy-eyed.

Then another officer shows up, a russ who doesn’t shout but speaks in a calm voice, Officer Pells, let the boy down. The pike has to think about it. Officer Pells, I’m ordering you to release that boy at once.

Yes! Sir! The pike bounces Troy once by his arm and there’s a sharp crack. Then he drops him on the floor.

They disarm the pike and take him away. The russ unglues us, and a medic attends to Troy’s arm. The russ says, That’s quite a nose you have there, son. Then he notices my colors and he sniffs me and says, Another Kodiak?