Counting Heads

Thursday

3.10

At the Roosevelt Clinic, the lights were low in Feldspar Cottage. The silent scent clock marked the passage of time: lavender, mushroom brie, the sea. There had been no medical rounds since midnight, and the night evangelines were slowly succumbing to the seduction of sleep. Only the skull’s eyes were wide open, but cloudy and dull.

Cyndee yawned and whispered, “I’m going for coffee. Want some?” In the chair next to her, Ronnie shook her head. Cyndee stood up and stretched her arms over her head. When she glanced at the daybed, the Ellen jacket’s feet were twitching. “Myr Starke?” Cyndee said. She reached to touch her shoulder, forgetting it was a jacket. “Ronnie, get the vurt gloves!”

Ronnie was already out of her chair. She dashed to the table and fumbled for gloves in the dark. Suddenly all the cottage lights came on, the door swung open, and Concierge strode in with a procession of physicians, Jennys, medtechs, and carts. They surrounded the tank and set frantically to work. Wee Hunk appeared too, in a tiger-striped bathrobe. He glanced at the tank but joined the evangelines at the daybed.

“Hello, Ellen,” he said to the jacket. “It’s me, Wee Hunk.”

The Ellen jacket’s only response was to arch its back and stretch its face in a grimace of pure, uncut anguish.

NOISE AND BRIGHT light woke him up. Meewee rubbed his eyes and struggled to remember where he was.

“This is happening live at the clinic,” a voice said. Meewee sat up in bed and swung his feet to the cold concrete floor. There was a large diorama of the cottage interior in the middle of his bunker bedroom, and Wee Hunk appeared both within and beside it. Inside the cottage, a throng of medical staff surrounded the tank, while nearby, the Ellen jacket was frozen in a rigid pose.

“What’s happening?”

“The doctors are uncertain,” Wee Hunk said, “but it would appear that the neurological dynamics within Ellen’s brain have shifted catastrophically.”

“What does that mean?” It was chilly in the bunker. Meewee felt around with his feet for his slippers, and he draped blankets over his shoulders.

“It would appear that Ellen’s awareness is trapped in an endless moment of terror.”

“My God! Can they stop it?”

“They’re attempting to, even as we watch.”

Inside the scape, Concierge left the group at the tank and joined Wee Hunk and the evangelines at the daybed. He looked down at the jacket and shook his head.

“What’s he saying?” Meewee said.

The diorama zoomed to the daybed and the audio shifted to Concierge. “—cafeteria lounge. I’ll summon you when it’s all right to return.”

The evangelines looked doubtful. Ronnie said, “Our instructions are to remain here.” She glanced at Wee Hunk for confirmation, but he merely watched her.

Concierge also appraised Wee Hunk’s lack of reaction, and he continued. “That may be so, Myr Ryder, but inside the clinic, I have the final say. Now run along.”

The evanglines glanced nervously at each other. In the bunker, Meewee said, “Aren’t you going to back them up?”

“I’ll step in if I have to, but I want to see how they react. After all, how do they know that that’s really me standing there? Besides, I’m willing to bet that these evangelines won’t need me. Would you like odds?”

“Go along now,” Concierge said dismissively. Behind him the doctors were shouting orders, and the control unit displayed a large pulsing brain.

The evangelines went to the door but stopped before exiting and turned around. Cyndee said, “I’m calling for arbitration. Nick?”

Nicholas, the Applied People mentar, appeared suddenly in the cottage as a dashing young man in formal evening clothes. He wiped the corner of his mouth with a silk serviette and said, “I’m afraid Concierge is acting within its rights. Although your client has ordered you to remain in the cottage with those silly hats, in point of law such orders have no force. Like a captain of a ship at sea, Concierge is the final arbiter here, and so I am authorizing you to disobey your client’s orders. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m at dinner with Strombly Mahousa.” He vanished.

Meewee said, “Is that true? Concierge has such authority?”

Wee Hunk replied, “It’s a gray area. I can’t find enough case law to say definitively one way or the other. But that wasn’t Nick, only a clever forgery. This is Concierge’s simiverse, don’t forget.”

Not Nick? But it had looked and acted just like Zoranna’s mentar that Meewee knew so well. The thought occurred to him to challenge Wee Hunk’s identity.

In the cottage, the evangelines looked into each other’s frightened faces as into a mirror. They returned to the daybed and Cyndee said, “We refuse to leave.”

“Stay then,” Concierge said and returned to the tank.

The Wee Hunk in the diorama smiled at the evangelines then and said, “Well done, companions.”

Meewee said, “Why did Concierge do that? He knew you were watching. And he does it while Ellen is suffering a crisis. How monstrous!”

“Tactically, it’s an ideal time to probe the enemy’s weaknesses,” Wee Hunk replied. “I believe I would have tried something of the sort myself.”

That was too much; Meewee challenged the mentar in Starkese: “Now that I’m awake, are there any other news headlines I should know about? Do we have a plan yet?”

“I’m still weighing options,” Wee Hunk said, answering the challenge. “In the meantime, why don’t you return to bed. I probably didn’t need to awaken you to see this.”

“Not at all,” Meewee said and yawned. “I’m glad you did. And please wake me again if anything changes.”

“Good night, then,” Wee Hunk said, extinguishing the scape and himself.

Meewee returned to bed and stared skyward as his eyes attempted to adjust to the darkness. He no longer felt buried alive in the bunker. Instead, he felt like he was at the bottom of a deep well. “Ten lumens,” he said, and the room lit up with a dim, even glow, like moonlight on snow. He turned on his side and tried to sleep. After five long minutes he turned on his other side, with no better results. Finally, he sat up and found his robe and slippers and got out of bed. “Usher line to the lifts.” A faint orange line led out of the room. He followed it across the expanse of the bunker shelter to the blast doors, where Wee Hunk was waiting for him.

“Going somewhere?”

“Yes, I need air.”

“We can generate any kind of air you like down here. What do you prefer: meadow, rainstorm, deep forest?” When Meewee didn’t answer, Wee Hunk went on, “If I can’t protect you up in the manse, how in blazes am I supposed to protect you outdoors?”

“That’s my risk to take.”

“You are correct, Bishop. I consider you valuable in helping me free Ellen, but not indispensable. So, if you insist on exposing yourself to harm, be my guest.” With that he vanished again.

Meewee took the elevator up to the ground floor. He walked through dark, silent rooms to a set of french doors, opened them, and stepped out onto a patio. The air was crisp and laden with the perfume of life, which he doubted anyone could counterfeit.

Meewee strode across the moonlit patio to the lawn, where he removed his slippers and waded across dew-soaked grass to a gate. He hadn’t had a chance to explore the manse grounds and had no idea what lay beyond the gate.

he said in Starkese, trying to be as clear as possible. He wondered if that was enough for the literal-minded mentar.

Meewee put his slippers back on and went through the gate. One ghostly path led to another as he passed through fields of fragrant troutcorn and sunflowers. He came to a meadow in the shape of an hourglass. In each bulb of the hourglass was a large pond. He went to the nearer pond and stood on its bank. A chorus of crickets filled the meadow with ratchety chatter. There was a splash, and as Meewee watched, a large fish leaped out of the dark water and seemed frozen for an instant in the moonlight, before falling again and slapping the water with the side of its body. A female, no doubt, loosening her roe sacks. When Meewee was a child, his family farmed fish too. Nostalgia and sadness filled him, and he felt unequal to the task that Eleanor had left him. “I’m sorry,” he said to the night. “I try, but I am not smart enough.”

BOGDAN PAUSED AT the bottom of the stairs. Never in his life had the charterhouse seemed so lonesome. Everyone was still at Rondy. At least he had convinced them not to cut their own enjoyment short on account of him. The McCormick Place medic had applied a moleskin to his face to set his nose and relieve the swelling. Her autodoc had found no internal injuries, and the russ security officer seemed only too glad to be rid of him.

Bogdan considered buying a Sooothe at the NanoJiffy, but his latest Alert! was about to run out anyway, so he climbed the creepy stairs. He forgot to stop at seven and found himself at his old room above nine. It was sealed with a new metal door with a flashing NO ENTRY glyph. The door was locked, so he continued up to the roof.

Bathed in moonlight, the garden exhaled audibly, and the city around him grumbled. Across town in Elmhurst, E-Pluribus struck camp and moved with Annette Beijing to a city beyond his reach. The pirates in the bricks sang work songs as they mined Calumet clay, and the Oships left the solar system without him. The Beadlemyren and Tobblers fell in love and got married on top of a trash heap. If only he’d been able to connect with one good punch, it might have all been worth it.

When the Alert! ran out, there was no time to go down to Rusty’s room, so Bogdan slogged to the garden shed and unrolled a seed mat on the floor. He was asleep before he fell on it and he slept soundly for the next thirty hours.

FRED ARRIVED HOME at 3:00 AM, thinking only of sleep. The moment he entered the apartment, he sensed that something was wrong.

The living room was serving a self-teaching lesson on “The Regeneration Rates of Necrotic Neurotransmitters,” but Mary wasn’t in the room, and her spot on the couch was cool to the touch. The door to the bedroom was open, and the lights were on, but there was no sound.

The slipper puppy came over and waited expectantly. Fred sat down and traded his shoes for slippers. Only then did he catch the whiff of Samson’s odor on his own clothes. He sniffed his hand.

When Fred went into the bedroom, Mary was sitting up in bed, reading something. He said, “Hi, there,” and she flicked her eyes at him in the most perfunctory of greetings. He leaned over to see what she was reading. Poetry. For an evangeline to be reading poetry at three o’clock in the morning wasn’t a good sign, but not necessarily a bad sign either.

Fred went to the bathroom to tear off his clothes. He took a hot, pelting shower with plenty of gel. He scrubbed his hands. He exfoliated in the dryer. Had his hair trimmed. Shaved. Used an extra dollop of cologne.

When he returned to the bed, the lights were off, and Mary lay with her back to him. That could be either bad or good. He climbed in and spooned himself against her. She was very warm. After a couple of minutes, he whispered, “How was your day?”

For a while, it seemed that she was asleep, but then she said, “A very full and successful day, though exhausting. What about you? How did the chartist convention go?”

Fred thought about the event. “A little bumpy toward the end, but, overall, a wild success and a feather in my cap.”

“That’s good to hear,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”

They lay still so long that Fred was drifting off when Mary said, “Fred, what is that odor?”

His fastidious toilette and the extra cologne had proven no match for Samson’s essence. Fred pondered how much he could tell her. Although he hadn’t worked for the Starke family for forty years, there was no statute of limitations on client confidentiality. Fortunately, there was no ban on talking about common knowledge.

“Did you see that guy on the Skytel last night?”

“Mmm.”

That was all he said. If she was curious enough, she could connect the dots on her own.