Counting Heads

by David Marusek

  Somebody’s got to go there, Meewee said. I guess that’ll have to be me.

  You? Wee Hunk snorted again. And do what? Knock on the door and ask if Ellen Starke can come out to play?

  Then what do you suggest? Meewee snapped. You don’t trust the authorities. You don’t trust russes. You don’t trust Zoranna. Who do you trust?

  Wee Hunk shook his shaggy head. Excuse my metaphor, Merrill, but you’re talking through your ass. You are so far out of the loop you’re in a separate reality. Allow me to catch you up on recent events since apparently either Arrow doesn’t know how to keep you informed or you never asked it to. In brief then: an hour ago, Saul Jaspersen’s compound in Alaska was attacked by a missile and completely destroyed. As luck would have it, Myr Jaspersen, himself, was inside his mountain redoubt and escaped harm.

  Meanwhile, Andie Tiekel in her Oakland hillside home was not so lucky. A laser pulse, probably from a suborbital drone, pierced the top of her skull. Her hair and makeup were hardly mussed, but inside her skull, the yolk was poached, so to speak.

  This is my Ellen’s life we’re dealing with, Merrill, not your position on the GEP board, not the launch schedule of your Oships. I don’t have Cabinet’s resources. I don’t have the luxury of error. But I’m not completely helpless.

  Meewee said, So, who are you sending?

  The caveman grinned. Why, the same folks who are going to move your stuff out of here tomorrow.

  At first Meewee didn’t follow, and then it made no sense. You’re sending a moving company?

  2.24

  A tired commuter, a big man trapped in a little man’s body, arrived at Home Run station in Decatur by bead car. When the car came to a stop and the hatch popped open, the man stood up and stepped across the gap to the platform. On his way to the lobby, he switched on his jumpsuit, which began to twinkle in bright neon colors and flash to the rhythm of his footsteps. He threw back his shoulders and marched to the out stiles, smiling and greeting everyone he passed. His jumpsuit cast a wide circle of merry light about him. By the time he left the station in West Decatur, he was once again the popular guy he always knew himself to be.

  To the Orange Team bee, however, the commuter was nothing more than a convenient hankie. The bee and one of its wasps crawled out from underneath his wide lapels and took to the air unnoticed. The team’s second wasp was riding a separate hankie from Bloomington and was a few minutes behind.

  As the Orange bee and its wasp rose above the rooftops and flew to 2131 Line Drive, the bee finished coordinating with the teams already at the scene and the Legitimate Order Giver 2 who had recently made verified contact and taken command of the mechs. LOG2 had given them a new mission—to locate and tag the prize—and it designated Orange Team Bee as Fleet Leader. The fleet was composed of the remnants of Teams Green (one bee and wasp), Yellow (one bee and wasp), and Red (one beetle), in addition to Orange Bee and its own two wasps.

  The target building was shielded and impenetrable to the limited scanning assets at the fleet’s immediate disposal. Orange Bee fed what they knew to its onboard scenario mill, as well as relaying it to LOG2. The fleet hadn’t been the first on the scene. Dozens of witness bees hiding in the foliage surrounding the house at 2131 had set up a covert grid. But the neighboring houses had sensed their network and assumed a defensive posture: informing their residents, summoning the neighborhood watch, and alerting the rest of the houses in the neighborhood. The area’s heightened alert status attracted media and homcom bees. Any chance of the fleet launching a sneak attack was ruined, another fact to feed LOG2 and the scenario mill.

  The mechs of Orange Bee’s fleet were in various states of disrepair, having already completed their primary objectives earlier in the day. None of the wasps had a full charge of weapons plasma, and Red Beetle had nothing but a pinch of fish food flakes left in its carapace. More grist for the scenario mill.

  WHEN THE SECOND Orange wasp caught up and was integrated into the fleet, LOG2 ordered the attack. Orange Bee, choosing from among the mill’s best results, pointcast its most promising plan to its multihued armada. The mechs made a stealthy ground approach from different directions, taking advantage of local cover. When they reached the house, they explored its foundation for cracks or gaps. Red Beetle found one, and Green Wasp widened it to fashion an entry point. It was located at the seam between the clinker sill and brick foundation. It was ideal, and the mechs crawled through into the basement of the house. Orange Bee was last in line. It entered only partway and took a position with a clear line of sight to the street.

  The interior walls and floors of the house were made of construction foam slab. Though the material was thin and light, it was soundproof and opaque to EM transmission. Therefore, to keep their comm open, the mechs linked up into a pointcasting beevine, with seven joints and Orange Bee as anchor. They extended up the basement stairs and probed the main floor. With the number of corners they had to negotiate, the vine could not reach every room, and twice they incorporated household mirrors to extend their range. As they crawled along ceilings and walls to map and survey, they passed their readings back to Orange Bee, which scattercast it to LOG2 while also milling it itself. There were no humans detectable in the house, no fauna whatsoever, for that matter. None of the house’s detectable machines seemed smarter than a houseputer.

  When the beevine, with Yellow Bee at the head, reached the main parlor, it discovered two provocative objects. One was a procedure cart and the other a glass-topped coffee table. Yellow Bee ran every scan at its disposal on the objects. The cart—titanium steel, smart, with multiple servo appendages of unknown function—stood at one end of the room. Orange Bee, watching the pictures, could not fit such a cart into any of its library models of things found in residential households.

  The coffee table, next to the cart, was a slab of glassine resting on a four-legged base. The base was made of military-grade resins normally used in body armor.

  Orange Bee, sitting in the gap between the sill and foundation, made a best guess decision and ordered Red Beetle to advance up the beevine, trading places with the other mechs until it was within the parlor.

  When all was in place, Orange Bee ordered, Prepare to launch Paintbrush.

  All six mechs countersigned, Paintbrush.

  Launch.

  Red Beetle’s carapace snapped open, and the beetle dove into the open room, flying straight for the procedure cart. At the same moment, the other mechs broke from the beevine and flew pell-mell through the rooms and halls, dodging in all directions. Except for Orange Bee, which stayed at its post and began to broadcast a message to the world at large in all bands and channels at its disposal.

  A millisecond later, the glassine top of the coffee table exploded upward as the resin base sprang up on four legs and began to spit rapid-fire laser pulses from cannon mounted along its legs. Red Beetle was hit first and incinerated before it could reach the cart. Flakes trailing from its carapace drifted to the floor. More laser fire cut through the walls and floor like wax, hitting and destroying all of the fleeing mechs in seconds.

  The four-legged mech turned its fire on the Orange bee but couldn’t penetrate the clinker sill covering it. Meanwhile, the bee continued to broadcast. The mech bounded out of the parlor and down the hall, crashed through the cellar door and down the steps until it had a better firing angle. Then it easily picked off the last member of the fleet. End of transmission.

  REILLY DELL RETURNED to Rolfe’s and joined them on the Stardeck where they were mostly ignoring the canopy variety show on the boards overhead. He brought a small package that he tossed to Fred. “Here, someone’s trying to reach you.” It was a skullcap, like the one he, himself, wore.

  “Is it against the law to be off-line for one evening?” Fred complained, but from the blank stares he got from the others, apparently it was. He sighed and opened the wrapper and let Mary fit the cap to his head. Its gummy material migrated through his hair to his scalp. There followed several unc
omfortable moments as the cap’s microvilli wriggled through his skin to lay against his skull. He heard discordant scraps of overlapping signals as interfaces were established and aligned. When he got a pure tone, he peeled a throat patch from its backing and stuck it next to his Adam’s apple.

  Testing, testing, he glotted, and then checked his DCO channel.

  Good evening, Commander, said an all-too-familiar voice.

  So, it’s Commander again, he replied.

  Only if you’re up to it, Inspector Costa said. I realize you’re off duty after a hard day, but an opportunity has arisen that you might be interested in.

  I doubt that.

  When Fred noticed Mary watching him, he rolled his eyes and shook his head to try to put her at ease.

  A Cabinet rogue has appeared downstate, and I thought you might want to help me catch it.

  A rogue? You mean another Cabinet backup?

  Looks like it, said the inspector, except Cabinet, the Cabinet we caught and processed, claims to know nothing about this one. Says it doesn’t have any records or recollection of it.

  Then how do you know it’s Cabinet?

  It made a brief transmission from a private residence a few minutes ago in which it used Starke’s sig. We checked it out; the sig is authentic, and as you know, those things are impossible to counterfeit.

  Fred rubbed his forehead. The new skullcap was going through an itchy phase, and Mary, bless her heart, was scratching her own head in sympathy.

  It’s all very fascinating, Fred told the inspector, but I think I’ll pass.

  Really? A shame, because Cabinet asked specifically for you. Fred’s heart skipped a beat. Yes, Costa continued, it told me it trusts your long experience in this matter. It feels we’ve cooked enough of its backups today and would like to salvage this one intact, if at all possible, and it wants you there. Far be it from me to ask you why. All I want is the pastehead. Are you in?

  Fred seethed. Would the unnatural creature never leave him alone?

  Where do I meet you, Inspector?

  I’m waiting on the taxi deck next to Rolfe’s, she said.

  Figures, Fred thought, and he glanced in that direction. I suppose you brought me a kit and blacksuit.

  Affirmative, in size russ.

  Fred leaned over to Mary. “Seems there’s a loose end to tie up. I won’t be long.” He tried to leave the table, but she held onto his hand and wouldn’t let him go.

  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.