“Can’t you make it stop?”
“That’s what the medtechs were attempting to do when you arrived.”
The evangelines exchanged a sheepish glance and rose to return to the cottage.
IT WAS WELL after noon, and most of the ’meets were still in bed, but April had decided to keep the lifechair a few more days, and Rusty and Denny were clearing a path for it in the stairwell above three.
Samson had spent the night in the chair in the administrative outer office, and Kitty was there trying to feed him breakfast.
“I’m not hungry,” he insisted.
“I don’t care,” she said. “You’ll eat or else.”
“Maybe after I see Ellie.”
Kitty stirred his gruel impatiently.
“You promised,” Samson went on. “You thought I’d forget, but I told the belt to remind me.”
“Fine,” she replied, “but not before you eat.”
“Buy me a Gooeyduk and I’ll eat on the way.”
Kitty sighed and dropped the spoon on the tray. “Oh, all right!” she said and went down to the NanoJiffy. The chair followed her down and tried to leave the house without her, but the homcom bee blocked the door with a large Do Not Exit frame.
“See?” Kitty said. “The HomCom denies you permission. You’re under house arrest, remember?”
“I remember nothing of the sort. Onward, Belt!”
“This chair is incapable of disobeying a Command order,” Belt Hubert said.
Suddenly the frame vanished, and the bee dropped to the floor, inert.
“Good work, Belt.”
“Let me assure you, Sam, I was not responsible.”
“Mush, Belt, mush!”
The lifechair stepped over the fallen bee and left the house. Kitty expected to hear sirens at any moment. In all honesty, she, herself, was sorely curious to meet this famous daughter of Sam’s, and after half a minute of hesitation, she knocked the bee into a corner with the toe of her shoe, picked up her busking costume bag, and followed.
THE DECATUR TRAIN station was a few blocks from the Roosevelt Clinic. Kitty’s bead car arrived first. She swiped a route map and saw that Samson’s car was still a few minutes out. She went to wait near the stiles and watched commuters walking by. They were mostly iterant service people at this station and a few free-rangers. No charter members that she could tell.
Kitty scratched herself. Her arms and legs were raw where she’d been at them all morning. She knew that the retirement of the slugs had been too good to be true, for they’d been replaced with tiny mechs that resided under your skin, the so-called nitwork. They were supposed to be less intrusive than the slugs. And they weren’t supposed to itch.
Finally, the lifechair, with Belt Hubert at the helm, came into sight. It looked as though Sam had fallen asleep again. She didn’t wait for them but swiped herself out to the street. It was a fresh spring morning. What caught Kitty’s attention, though, was how much valuable litter lay in the gutter and along the pedway. A gleaner’s treasure trove: bits of plastic and composites, gravel, scraps of metal. Kitty resisted the urge to fill her pockets.
The lifechair rolled out of the Decatur station and joined Kitty on the pedway. She gave it her busking bag and skipped alongside. Soon, they turned a corner and exited the pedway. From here on there were streets and sidewalks and no pedways. Grand houses were concealed behind hedges and walls. The neighborhood had an eerie sense of flatness because there was nothing in sight taller than a tree. And the streets were picked absolutely clean of all debris, courtesy of lawn scuppers that lurked in the shrubbery and watched them go by.
“Kitty?” Samson said. He was awake again. He smiled beatifically when she peeked over the rim of the chair basket. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, Sam, I’m tired of telling you. Ask Belt Hubert.”
They passed under an iron arch and proceeded down a brick drive that was lined on the right with a tall hedge. To their left was an expanse of lawn, a greensmoat that encircled the clinic.
In the wall at the bottom of the drive was a wide gate of pressed air. Behind a sentry window in the gate, a russ guard said, “Morning, myren. Can I help you?”
When Sam didn’t respond, Kitty addressed the russ, “This gentleman is Samson Kodiak. His daughter, Ellen Starke, is a patient here. We’ve come to visit her.”
The russ, Dell by his name patch, said, “Please wait while I ask Concierge.” A moment later a slot opened in the pressure gate, and the russ waved them in. He seemed startled when the odor hit him.
“Samson can’t go through a scanner,” Kitty hastened to say as they entered the gatehouse. “He has a special health waiver. The chair can show it to you.”
“No need, myr. We won’t be using the scanner.” The russ escorted them to a set of double doors with a sign above it that read, “Arbor Gate.” Behind the doors stretched a corridor with an usher line twinkling along the wall.
“Where does it lead?” Kitty asked.
“To Concierge’s office,” said the russ.
The lifechair with Samson led the way, and she followed. The russ closed the doors behind them, and they followed the usher line down identical corridors. The usher line beckoned, and they followed. Finally, at the end of what seemed to be the longest corridor of all stood a lone door labeled “CONCIERGE.” It opened to admit them and closed behind them, and they found themselves back on the street outside the iron arch.
“Son of a bitch,” Kitty said.
“My navionics must be malfing,” said Belt Hubert.
“No kidding?”
THE BLUE TEAM entered the gatehouse hidden in the hankie. The hankie was not successful in reaching the prize, but it had fulfilled its purpose, and the Blue Team abandoned it before it exited the gatehouse. The bee and wasp concealed themselves on the gatehouse ceiling.
KITTY AND BELT Hubert spent the next hour trying to reach the gatehouse again, but every time they launched forward down the drive, they seemed to veer left to the greensmoat. They tried to compensate by steering to the right, but then they were in the hedge. It was as if the gatehouse lay in a direction unavailable to them, and they found themselves back each time on the street outside the arch. Belt Hubert even tried aiming the chair at the gatehouse and locking its steering, but that got them no closer.
Samson slept the whole time. Finally, Kitty gave up and told Belt Hubert to steer them a course back to the train station.
“It’s an interesting conundrum,” Belt Hubert said as they rolled along the sidewalk. “If I was my whole self, I’m sure I could solve it.”
KITTY’S BEAD CAR was approaching Millennium Park when she got a message from Belt Hubert that Samson had diverted his car to the Museum of Art and Science. So she fed the new destination to her own car.
Kitty strolled through the main lobby of the MAS, past its trademark display of life-size dancing elephants made of shaped water. She knew exactly where to look for him.
She strode past galleries of traveling collections, past the rondophone display in which sounds made by historical persons and events—the actual sounds, not recordings—traveled in continuous loops and could be heard through a stethoscope.
She hastened through galleries of twenty-first-century art. Here were icky reminders of that troubled time: real babies splayed open like colorful little snowsuits, freeze-dried house pets dressed like prostitutes, and excrement from extinct rhinoceroses used as paint.
One twenty-first-century room was decked out as a banquet hall, the table covered in white linen and set with silver service and crystal wineglasses. A frame said that tickets to the “Next Last Supper with Bene Alvarez” were sold out. Each Thursday, artist Bene Alvarez hosted a gourmet dinner consisting of roasts, steak and kidney pies, pâtés, sausages, and all the trimmings. The meat came from his own body. Or rather, from his extensive personal organ bank. The odors drifting from the gallery were enticing, but Kitty hurried by.