Counting Heads Page 4

  “That won’t be necessary,” El said.

  “The decision is yours, of course, but it could save you an extra trip if you change your mind.”

  BACK AT THE Williams Towers in Bloomington, we lay on the balcony in the late-afternoon sun and skimmed the queue of messages. Our friends had grown tired of our good fortune: the congratulations were fewer and briefer and seemed, by and large, pro forma, even tinged with underlying jealousy. And who could blame them? The Population Treaties had been in effect for nearly sixty years, and sixty years was a long time for a society to live outside the company of children. Probably no one begrudged us our child, although it was obvious to everyone—especially to us—that we’d come by the permit unfairly.

  El deleted the remaining queue of messages and said, “Talk to me, Sam.” Our balcony was situated halfway up the giant residential tower that ended, in dizzying perspective, near the lower reaches of the city’s canopy. The canopy, invisible during the day, appeared viscous in the evening light, like a transparent film rippling and folding upon itself. In contrast, our tower had a smooth matte surface encrusted with thousands of tiny black bumps. These were the building’s resident homcom slugs, absorbing the last rays of the setting sun. They were topping off their energy stores for a busy night patrolling living rooms and bedrooms.

  I asked her, “Have you ever had children before?”

  “Yes, two, a boy and a girl, when I was barely out of college. Tom died as a child in an accident. Jessica grew up, moved away, married, led a successful career, and died at age fifty-four of cancer of the larynx.” Eleanor turned over, bare rump to the sky, chin resting on sun-browned arms. “I grieved for each of them. It’s hard to bury one’s kids.”

  “Would you like to have another?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. I watched a slug creep along the underside of the balcony of the apartment above us. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s funny. I’ve already been through it all: pregnancy, varicose veins, funerals. I’ve been through menopause and—worse—back through remenses. I was so tangled up in motherhood, I never knew if I was coming or going. I loved or hated every moment of it, wouldn’t have traded it for the world. But when it was all over, I felt an unbearable burden lifted from me. Thank God, I said, I won’t have to go through that again. Yet since the moment we learned of the permit, I’ve been fantasizing about holding a baby in my lap. I don’t know why, but I can’t get it out of my mind: the feeding, the cooing, snuggling, rocking. My arms ache for a baby. I think it’s this schoolgirl body of mine. It’s a baby machine, and it intends to force its will on me. I’ve never felt so betrayed by my own body.”

  The slug bypassed our balcony, but another one was making its way slowly down the wall.

  I said, “Why not have another one?”

  She turned her head to peer at me. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Doomsayer, but aren’t you the one who warned me not to take this posting? Aren’t you the guy who said something about someone setting me up? I’ve had Cabinet scouring the nets for the past few weeks trying to piece together who’s behind all this. But a baby? Do you have any idea how vulnerable a child makes you? You might as well tie a leash around your own neck.”

  She relaxed again and went on, “But for the sake of argument, let’s just say that I have some powerful unknown benefactor promoting my career. And that this baby is a carrot to gain my loyalty. Well, here’s a basic law of life, Sam—wherever there’s a carrot, there’s a stick just out of sight.”

  I thought about that as I watched the homcom slug. It had sensed us and was creeping across the balcony toward us.

  “Well?” El said. “Any comments? It’s your permit too.”

  “I know,” I said. “It would be madness to go through with it. And yet—”

  “And yet?”

  “Could you imagine our baby, El? A little critter crawling around our ankles, half you and half me, a little Elsam or Sameanor?”

  She closed her eyes and smiled. “That would be a pitiable creature.”

  “And speaking of ankles,” I said, “we’re about to be sampled.”

  The slug, a tiny strip of biotech, touched her ankle, attached itself to her for a moment, then dropped off. With the toes of her other foot, Eleanor scratched the testing site. Slugs only tickled her. With me it was different. There was some nerve tying my ankle directly to my dick, and I always found that warm, prickly kiss unavoidably arousing. So, as the slug attached itself to my ankle, El watched mischievously. At that moment, in the glow of the setting sun, in the delicious ache of perfect health, I didn’t need the kiss of a slug to arouse me. I needed only a glance from my wife, with her ancient eyes set like opals in her girlish body. This must be how the Greek gods lived on Olympus. This must be the way it was meant to be, to grow ancient and yet to have the strength and appetites of youth. El gasped melodramatically as she watched my penis swell. She turned herself toward me, coyly covering her breasts and pubis with her hands. The slug dropped off me and headed for the balcony wall.

  We lay side by side, not yet touching. I was stupid with desire and lost control of my tongue. I spoke without thinking. I said, “Mama.”

  The word, the single word, “mama,” struck her like a physical thing. Her whole body shuddered, and her eyes went wide with surprise. I repeated it, “Mama,” and she shut her eyes and turned away from me. I sidled over to her, wrapped my arms around her, and took possession of her ear. I tugged its lobe with my lips. I breathed into it. I pushed her sweat-damp hair clear of it and whispered, “I am the papa, and you are the mama.” I watched the side of her face and repeated, “You are the mama.”

  “Oh, Sam,” she sighed. “Crazy Samsamson.”

  “You are the mama, and Mama will give Papa a son.”

  Her eyes flew open at last, fierce, challenging, but amused.

  “Or a daughter,” I added quickly. “At this stage, Papa’s not picky.”

  “And how will Papa arrange either, I wonder.”

  “Like this.” I rolled her onto her back to kiss and stroke her. But she was indifferent to me, willfully so. Nevertheless, I let my tongue play up and down her body. I visited all the sweet spots I had discovered since first we made love, for I knew her girlish body to be my ally. Her body and I wanted the same thing. Soon, with or without El’s blessing, her body welcomed me, and when she was ready, and I was ready, and all my sons and daughters inside me were ready, we went for it.

  Somewhere in the middle of all this, a bird, a crow, came crashing to the deck beside us. What I could make out, through the thick anti-nano envelope that contained it, was a mess of shiny black feathers, a broken beak clattering against the deck, and a smudge of blood that quickly boiled away. The whole bird, in fact, was disassembling. Steam rose from the envelope, which emitted a piercing wail of warning. Henry spoke loudly into my ear, Attention, Sam! In the interest of safety, the HomCom isolation device orders you to move away from it at once.

  We were too distracted to pay much mind. The envelope seemed to be doing its job. Nevertheless, we dutifully moved away; we rolled away belly to belly, like the bard’s “beast with two backs.” A partition formed to separate us from the unfortunate bird, and we resumed our investigation of the merits of parenthood.

  Later, when I brought out dinner and two glasses of visola on a tray, El sat at the patio table in her white terry robe looking at the small pile of elemental dust on the deck—carbon, sodium, calcium, and whatnot—that had recently been a bird. It was not at all unusual for birds to fly out through the canopy, or for a tiny percentage of them to become infected outside. What was unusual was that upon reentering the canopy, being tasted, found bad, and enveloped by a swarm of anti-nano agents, so much of the bird should survive the fall in so recognizable a form, as this one had.

  El frowned at me and said, “It’s Governor Rickert, come back to haunt us.”

  We both laughed uneasily.

  THE NEXT DAY I felt the urge to get some wor
k done. It would be another two days before the orphanage would begin the recombination, and I was restless. Meanwhile, Eleanor had some sort of Tri-D meeting scheduled in the living room.

  I had claimed an empty bedroom in the back of the apartment for my work area. It about matched my Chicago studio in size and aspect. I had asked the building super, a typically dour reginald, to send up an arbeitor to remove all the furniture except for an armchair and nightstand. The chair needed a pillow to support the small of my back, but otherwise it was adequate for long sitting sessions. I pulled it around to face a blank inner wall that Henry had told me was the north wall, placed the nightstand next to it, and brought in a carafe of strong coffee and some sweets from the kitchen. I made myself comfortable.

  “Okay, Henry, take me to Chicago.” The empty bedroom was instantly transformed into my studio, and I sat in front of my favorite window wall overlooking the Chicago skyline and lakefront from the 303rd floor of the Drexler Building. The sky was dark with storm clouds. Rain splattered against the window. There was nothing like a thunderstorm to stimulate my creativity.

  “Henry, match Chicago’s ionic dynamics here.” I sipped my coffee and watched lightning strike neighboring towers as the air in my room took on a freshly scrubbed ozone quality. I felt relaxed and invigorated.

  When I was ready, I turned the chair around to face my studio. It was just as I had left it months before in realbody. There was the large oak worktable that dominated the east corner. Glass-topped and long-legged, it was a table you could work at without stooping over. I used to stand at that table endlessly twenty and thirty years ago when I still lived in Chicago. Now it was piled high with prized junk: design trophies, hunks of polished gemstones from Mars and Jupiter, a scale model Japanese pagoda of cardboard and mica, a box full of my antique key collection, parcels wrapped in some of my most successful designs, and—the oldest objects in the room—a mason jar of paintbrushes, like a bouquet of dried flowers.

  I rose from my chair and wandered about my little domain, taking pleasure in my life’s souvenirs. The cabinets, shelves, counters, and floor were overflowing: an antelope-skin spirit drum; an antique pendulum mantel clock that houseputer servos kept wound; holocubes of some of my former lovers and wives; bits of colored glass, tumbleweed, and driftwood in whose patterns and edges I had once found inspiration; and a bull elephant foot made into a footstool. This room was more a museum now than a functioning studio, and I was more its curator than a practicing artist.

  I went to the south wall and looked into the corner. Henry’s original container sat atop three more identical ones. “How’s the paste?” I said.

  “Sufficient for the time being. I’ll let you know when we need more.”

  “More? Isn’t this enough? You have enough paste to run a major city.”

  “Eleanor Starke’s Cabinet is more powerful than a major city.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s get down to work.” I returned to my armchair. The storm had passed the city and was retreating across the lake, turning the water midnight-blue. “What have you got on the egg idea?”

  Henry projected a richly ornate egg in the air before me. Gold leaf and silver wire, inlaid with once-precious gems, it was modeled after the Fabergé masterpieces favored by the last of the Romanoff tsars. But instead of enclosing miniature portraits or clockwork engines, my eggs would merely be expensive wrapping for small gifts. The recipients would have to crack them open. But then they could keep the pieces, which would reassemble, or toss them into the bin for recycling credits.

  “It’s just as I told you last week,” said Henry. “The public will hate it. I tested it against Simulated Us and E-Pluribus.” Henry filled the space around the egg with dynamic charts and graphs. “Nowhere are positive ratings higher than seven percent, or negative ratings lower than sixty-eight percent. Typical comments call it ‘old-fashioned,’ and ‘vulgar.’ Matrix analyses find that people do not want to be reminded of their latent fertility. People resent—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I get the picture.” It was a dumb concept. I knew as much when I proposed it. But I was so enamored with my own latent fertility, I had lost my head. I thought people would be drawn to this archetypal symbol of renewal, but Henry had been right all along, and now he had the data to prove it.

  If the truth be told, I had not come up with a hit design in five years, and I was terrified.

  “It’s just a dry spell,” Henry said, sensing my mood. “You’ve had them before, even longer.”

  “I know, but this one is the worst.”

  “You say that every time.”

  To cheer me up, Henry began to play my wrapping paper portfolio, projecting my past masterpieces larger than life in the air.

  I held patents for package applications in many fields, from archival wrap and instant skin, to military camouflage and video paint. But my own favorites, and probably the public’s as well, were my novelty gift wraps. My first was a video wrapping paper that displayed the faces of loved ones (or celebrities if you had no loved ones) singing “Happy Birthday” to the music of the Boston Pops. That dated back to 2025 when I was a molecular engineering student and before we lost Boston to the Outrage.

  My first professional design was the old box-in-a-box routine, only my boxes didn’t get smaller as you opened them, but larger, and in fact could fill the whole room until you chanced upon one of the secret commands, which were any variation of “stop” (whoa, enough, cut it out, etc.) or “help” (save me, I’m suffocating, get this thing off me, etc.).

  Next came wrapping paper that screamed when you tore or cut it. That led to paper that resembled human skin. It molded itself perfectly and seamlessly around the gift and had a shelf life of fourteen days (and a belly button!). It came in all races. You had to cut it to open the gift, and of course it bled. It was creepy, and we sold mountains of it.

  The human skin led to my most enduring design, a perennial that was still popular, the orange peel. It, too, wrapped itself around any shape seamlessly (and had a navel). It was real, biological orange peel. When you cut or ripped it, it squirted citrus juice and smelled delightful.

  I let Henry project these designs for me. I must say I became intoxicated with my own achievements. I gloried in them. They filled me with the most selfish wonder.

  I was terribly good, and the whole world knew it.

  Yet even after this healthy dose of self-love, I wasn’t able to buckle down to anything new. I told Henry to order the kitchen to fix me some more coffee and something for lunch.

  On my way to the kitchen I passed the living room and saw that Eleanor was having difficulties of her own. Even with souped-up holoservers, the living room was a mess. There were dozens of people in there and, as best as I could tell, just as many rooms superimposed over each other. People, especially self-important people, liked to bring their offices with them when they went to meetings. The result was a jumble of merging desks, lamps, and chairs. Walls sliced through each other at drunken angles. Windows issued cityscape views of New York, London, Washington, and Moscow (and others I didn’t recognize) in various shades of day and weather. People, some of whom I recognized from the newsnets, either sat at their desks in a rough, overlapping circle or wandered through walls and furniture to kibitz with each other and with Eleanor’s Cabinet.

  At least this was how it all appeared to me standing in the hallway, outside the room’s emitters. To those inside, it might look like the Senate chambers. I watched for a while, safely out of cam range, until Eleanor noticed me. “Henry,” I said, “ask her how many of these people are here in realbody.” Eleanor raised a finger, one, and pointed to herself.

  I smiled. She was the only one there who could see me. I continued to the kitchen and brought my lunch back to my studio. I still couldn’t get started, so I asked Henry to report on my correspondence. He had answered over five hundred posts since our last session the previous day. Four-fifths of these concerned the baby.

  We were i
nvited to appear—with the baby—on every major talk show and magazine. We were threatened with lawsuits by the Anti-Transubstantiation League. We were threatened with violence by several anonymous callers (who would surely be identified by El’s security chief and prosecuted by her attorney general). A hundred seemingly harmless people requested permission to visit us in realbody or holo during nap time, bath time, any time. Twice that number accused us of fraud. Three men and one woman named Sam Harger claimed that their fertility permit was mistakenly awarded to me. Dr. Armbruster’s prediction was coming true, and the baby hadn’t even been converted yet.

  This killed an hour. I still didn’t feel creative, so I called it quits. I took a shower, shaved. Then I went, naked, to stand outside the entrance to the living room. When Eleanor saw me she cracked a grin. She held up five fingers, five minutes, and turned back to her meeting.

  I went to my bedroom to wait for her. She spent her lunch break with me. When we made love that day and the next, I enjoyed a little fantasy I never told her about. I imagined that she was pregnant in the old-fashioned way, with an enormous belly, melon-round and hard, and that as I moved inside her, as we moved together, we were teaching our child its first lesson in the art of human love.

  ON THURSDAY, THE day of the conversion, we took a leisurely breakfast on the terrace of the New Foursquare Hotel in downtown Bloomington. A river of pedestrians, students and service people mostly, flowed past our little island of metal tables and brightly striped umbrellas. The day broke clear and blue and would be hot by noon. A frisky breeze tried to snatch away our menus. The Foursquare had the best kitchen in Bloomington, at least for desserts. Its pastry chef, Myr Duvou, had earned a reputation for re-creating the classics. That morning we (mostly me) were enjoying strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and coffee. Everything—the strawberries, the wheat for the cakes, the sugar, coffee beans—had been grown, not assembled. The preparation was done lovingly and skillfully by human hand. All the wait staff were steves, who were highly sensitive to our wants and who, despite their ungainly height, bowed ever so low to take our order.