Counting Heads by David Marusek Page B

errand. I was in the kitchen when I heard Ellen crying. In the nursery I found a hapless russ—Fred’s replacement—holding the kicking and screaming baby. The jenny called from the open bathroom door, “I’m coming. One minute, Ellie, I’m coming.” When Ellen saw me she reached for me with her fat little arms and howled.
    “Give her to me,” I ordered the russ. His face reflected his hesitation. “It’s all right,” I said.
    “One moment, myr,” he said and asked silently for orders. “Okay, here,” he said after a moment. He gave me Ellen who wrapped her arms around my neck. “I’ll just go and help Marilee,” he said, crossing to the bathroom. I sat down and put Ellen on my lap. She looked around, caught her breath, and resumed crying; only this time it was an easy, mournful wail.
    “What is it?” I asked her. “What does Ellen want?” I reviewed what little I knew about babies. I felt her forehead, though I knew babies don’t catch sick anymore. And with evercleans, they don’t require constant changing. The remains of dinner lay on the tray, so she’d just eaten. A bellyache? Sleepy? Teething pains? Early on, Ellen was frequently feverish and irritable as her converted body sloughed off the remnants of the little boy chassis she’d overwritten. I thought about the son we almost had, and I wondered why during my year of brooding I never grieved for him. Was it because he never had a soul? Because he had never got beyond the purely data stage of recombination? Because he never owned a body? And what about Ellen? Did she have her own soul, or did the original boy’s soul stay through the conversion? And if it did, would it hate us for what we’ve done to its body? I was in no sense a religious man, but these questions troubled me.
    Ellen cried, and the russ stuck his head out of the bathroom every few moments to check on us. This angered me. What did they think I was going to do? Drop her? Strangle her? I knew they were watching me, all of them: the chief of staff, the security chief. They might even have awakened Eleanor in Hamburg or Paris where it was almost midnight. No doubt they had a contingency plan for anything I might do.
    “Don’t worry, Ellie,” I crooned, swallowing my anger. “Mama will be here in just a minute.”
    “Yes, I’m coming, I’m coming,” said Eleanor’s sleep-hoarse voice.
    Ellen startled and looked about, and when she didn’t see her mother, bawled more insistently. The jenny, holding a blood-soaked towel to her nose, peeked out of the bathroom.
    I bounced Ellen on my knee. “Mama’s coming, Mama’s coming, but in the meantime, Sam’s going to show you a trick. Wanna see a trick? Watch this.” I pulled a strand of hair from my head. The bulb popped as it ignited, and the strand sizzled along its length. Ellen quieted in mid-fuss, and her eyes went wide. The russ burst out of the bathroom and sprinted toward us, but stopped and stared when he saw what I was doing. His nose wrinkled in revulsion. “Get out of here,” I said to him, “and take the jenny.” It was all I could do not to shout.
    “Sorry, myr, but my orders—” The russ paused, then cleared his throat. “Yes, myr, right away.” He escorted the jenny, her head tilted back, from the nursery.
    “Thank you,” I said to Eleanor.
    “I’m here.” We turned and found Eleanor seated next to us in an ornately carved, wooden chair. Ellen squealed with delight, but did not reach for her mother. Already by six months she had been able to distinguish between a holobody and a real one. Eleanor’s eyes were heavy, and her hair mussed. She wore a long silk robe, one I’d never seen before, and her feet were bare. A sliver of jealousy pricked me when I realized she had probably been in bed with a lover. But what of it?
    In a sweet voice, filled with the promise of soft hugs, Eleanor told us a story about a kooky caterpillar she’d seen that very day in a park in Paris. She used her hands on her