“You want me to hire a bee?”
“Yes.”
“Bee engaged,” said Hubert. The room’s emitters projected a scene overlooking the park’s second-tier free speech reserve. Millennium Park was indeed busy today, a milling menagerie of transhumanity.
“Where is she?” Samson said. “I don’t see her.” A circle appeared in the crowded scape, highlighting a tiny figure in blue and white. Samson said, “And where is Denny?” Another circle marked a man eating ice cream on a nearby bench. “So far away? He couldn’t stay closer?”
“Shall we fly down and tell him so?”
“Later. I want to get the lay of the land first. Drop down some.”
The ground zoomed up before Samson could shut his eyes. “Easy! Easy!” he said. They hovered at treetop level and now he could make out the tiny impromptu stages. Some of the performers he recognized. On one side of Kitty’s space were the “Modular Sisters,” who were in the process of plugging themselves into each other’s large intestines.
Across from Kitty’s spot was the battle mat of the “Machete Death Grudge” where six beautiful, oiled athletes of indeterminate sex struck erotic poses and flexed obscenely supple muscles. They made halfhearted thrusts at one another with their deadly ceramic-edged blades. They were waiting for the purse icons on their pay-posts to reach mortality levels before doing any harm to each other. Their body tenders paced the edge of the mat, trying to incite blood lust among the prelunchtime crowd. Portable trauma and cryonics units hummed under tarps.
The “Slime Minstrel” was laid out in a trough behind Kitty’s space. Three meters in length, the minstrel was a blubbery hill of translucent blue protoplasm. It was one of the few buskers that performed without a paypost. Spectators threw credit tokens directly at it. Tokens that had pierced its outer membrane could be seen slowly migrating through its gelatinous mass to a collection gut. Depending on what people donated—and how the spirit moved it—the minstrel would sing. It had six blow holes arranged along its spine, connected to inner bellows and bladders. It could trumpet or roar, serenade with a chorus of sweet voices, or spray foul juices, or do all at once. People said that the Slime Minstrel was once a young man, a Shakespearean player, whose augmentations had gotten out of hand.
Satisfied with his look at Kitty’s competitors, Samson told Hubert to bring the bee down closer. Now his little scape contained only Kitty on her tiny stage and her small audience. Her audience was roaring with laughter, and Samson didn’t understand why. This was her new act that she’d been rehearsing for weeks, and it was meant to be precious, not funny. She was on the last verse of the candy-shop song and was tap dancing in accompaniment when she made a furious kick, and the audience howled. Now Samson saw the problem; a homcom slug had crawled up her leg and clung to her calf above her shoe. It should have fallen away after it sampled her, but its lo-index noetics told it to hang on until she stood still. Samson shuddered. He was no fan of homcom slugs.
Kitty threw open her arms and sang and tapped the final measure, then bowed from the waist, her veil of springy curls cascading around her. There was mild applause and a few swipes at her paypost. The moment she stopped moving, the little black slug dropped off and crawled away to continue its patrol. Her audience clapped again, then drifted away as well.
Samson said, “My poor baby.” Kitty straightened up but continued to hide her face in her curls. “How much did she earn?”
Hubert said, “Less than one ten-thousandth.”
“So little? That’s insulting! That’s criminal. My poor baby.” Kitty stepped off her stage, unlocked it, and gave it a little kick in its tender spot. It collapsed and folded and folded again until it was the size of a deck of cards, which she dropped into her pocket. She collapsed her paypost as well and carried it over to Denny’s bench. The moment she vacated her space, another act set up in it. It was a trio of pink unicorns—mama, papa, and baby—who warbled show tunes in harmony.
Samson jabbed his bony finger into the scape. “See this aff here?” He pointed to a young woman in a shear sunsuit departing the scene surrounded by four jerry bodyguards. “She was watching Kitty’s act, and I saw her make a swipe. How much did she give?”
“Nothing,” said Hubert. “She made a dry swipe.”
“Jeeze!” cried Samson. “Cripes almighty, I detest that. The people with the most to give! Selfish, greedy affs—I hate them.”
Meanwhile, the bee followed Kitty to the bench where Denny had been hogging space with his large body. He scooched up to make a place for her. She sat and leaned against him wearily, and he flagged down a passing vending arbeitor.
Samson said, “Don’t let that boy eat up their train fare.”
The arbeitor stopped in front of them and squeezed out a half meter of steamy, cheesy pizza tube, two cold drinks, and towelettes. Kitty listlessly swiped payment while Denny broke the pizza tube into two fairly equal pieces and offered one to her. But she refused with a shake of her head. Denny said something to her, to which she hunched her shoulders.
“Get in closer,” said Samson. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
The bee advanced until Kitty’s pretty little head filled his holoscape. Sweat glistened on her forehead, and her cheeks were flushed. She snapped open her drink and wrapped her lips around the straw.
“I love this,” Denny said. “Do you think I can come tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” she replied listlessly. “We’ll ask Sam. Maybe he’ll let you come. I’ll teach you a routine. We’ll buy you a license.”
Denny guffawed. “No, Kit, I mean, can I come watch, like today?”
“I could teach you to juggle or something.”
“Get out of here.”
Without warning, Kitty made a lightning backhanded swat at the public bee, but the bee dodged it effortlessly. She looked directly at the bee, directly at Samson it seemed, and said, “Desist, you creep. I invoke my right to privacy.”
The scene zoomed out as the bee rose to hover outside her privacy zone. Samson shut his eyes against the vertigo. He wished he could be there to comfort his darling Kitty, to shame the stingy affs, to prime the pump by swiping her paypost himself, all the little things he so loved to do. After a while, he opened his eyes and was surprised to find himself sitting in Kitty’s bedroom.
“Hubert?”
“Here, Sam.” The voice came from the wardrobe where he kept Hubert’s container. Little by little, it all came back to him. They weren’t at the park anymore. He would never visit the park again. He got up and opened the bedroom door a crack. The hallway and stairwell were quiet. “Onward,” he said.
2.2
“That about covers it,” Eleanor Starke said. “Let’s move on to new business.”
The regularly scheduled board meeting of the Garden Earth Project was entering its third hour without a break. This was of no inconvenience to the ten members who had sent proxies to attend in their place. The only two members attending in realbody, Alblaitor and Meewee, fidgeted in their seats. Eleanor Starke, who was returning from space, chaired the meeting via holopresence. Her image sat at the head of the table. Behind her stood her Cabinet’s chief of staff, and behind it, a window wall overlooking the serrated landscape of the Starke Enterprises Southern Indiana headquarters. Except for the reception building, in which they met, the Starke facilities were located underground, leaving the ten-thousand acre campus free for tilt-slab soybimi cultivation.
“Merrill,” Eleanor said, “we’ll move your report to the end, if you don’t mind. I want to hear about Adam’s breakthrough discovery first.”