Naked, he began to methodically scrub himself from the bald crown of his head to the flat soles of his feet.
“Sam,” said Hubert, “a little while ago you addressed me as Henry. I only mention this because you requested I inform you each time it occurred.”
“Umm,” said Samson, flinging motes of dead skin from his shoulders with the wand. They burst into tiny puffs of flame and drifted to the plank floor. “You’re Hubert, not Henry. I know. Thank you, Hubert.” Samson didn’t have much hair left anywhere on his body, but an odd strand of it came dislodged and sizzled away, spinning like a Chinese pinwheel. He was some piece of work, no doubt about it, more mineral than animal. All tendons and bones. He could plainly see each rib beneath his brittle skin. He could count the eight jigsaw bones of his wrists. He recalled again his old fat friend Renee and had a panicky thought that maybe he’d waited too long, lost too much volatile mass.
“Hubert, how much do I weigh?”
“When I weighed you yesterday, you weighed 34.2 kilograms.”
“And how much of that is flesh?”
“Sam, you’ve instructed me to alert you whenever you ask me the same question five times in a twenty-four-hour period.”
“Well, that was certainly wise of me.”
“And you told me that if you asked about your tissue ratio again to remind you that bones contain marrow, and while they don’t burst into flame like muscle tissue or generate billowing black smoke like adipose tissue, bones do nevertheless burn with intense heat from the inside out, and that long bones, especially the femur and humerus, can build up enough pressure to explode like pipe bombs. And that even at your present weight you’ll produce a spectacle quite breathtaking in its own way.”
“Yes, of course, pipe bombs. I remember now. Thank you, Hubert.”
After finishing the scrape down, Samson soothed his raw flesh with a binding mastic and got dressed. He put the valet belt on first, for contact with his skin, and then the jumpsuit. He noticed it had extra pockets today.
“Sam, I detect that you need to urinate.”
“That’s not surprising.”
“Yes, and soon. Also, you are dehydrated and severely deficient in potassium. I suggest breakfast before we leave.”
“I’m not hungry,” Samson said and tapped the buckle beneath his jumpsuit. “You sure you loaded this thing up?”
“Yes, Sam, as much as its outdated tech allows.”
Samson grunted. “Speaking of outdated tech, I suppose that includes you. Are you sure you’re up to the task?”
“I have worked it out to the most minute detail, Sam. And I am not particularly obsolete. I spend most of my unstructured time self-reconfiguring. Of course I haven’t had an electro-neural gel upgrade in decades.”
Samson chuckled. “Are you sure you’re not Henry? That’s what Henry always used to say, ‘I need more paste, Sam. More paste.’ And like a fool, I bought it for him. I think you know where that got me.”
“Yes, I do, Sam, but Henry was a valet, not a true mentar.”
Samson put away his toiletries and kicked the nightshirt rags into the corner. Then he removed the breakfast tray from the footstool. The stool was made from the hollowed-out right rear foot of a wild, male African elephant. Its toenails alone were as large as Samson’s fists. He grasped the zebra-skin cushion and rotated it counterclockwise until it clicked and released. Samson used to hide his treasures here—when he still had treasures. At the bottom of the foot lay a packet of sealed paper envelopes. Each had the name of a housemeet scrawled across it in Samson’s tortured handwriting. He removed these, locked the zebra cushion, and replaced the breakfast tray. When he glanced at the bowl of corn mush, his belly gurgled—or maybe that was Hubert trying to trick him?
“Oh, all right,” he said and grabbed a spoon. He ate the mush and drank the juice without tasting either of them. The coffeesh he left because one’s last cup of coffeesh in this life should be hot. Then he fixed up the cot to look like he was still in it and tucked the packet of letters underneath the pillow. At the door he glanced around one last time at his room. A garden shed was not so bad a place to end up in.
Samson patted the empty pockets of his jumpsuit. “What am I forgetting?”
“The bag.”
“Where did I leave it?”
“It’s concealed behind the seed mats.”
Samson groped behind the rolls of troutcorn matting until he found a little yellow duffel bag. He transferred its contents to his pockets: half-liter flasks of electrolyte sports drink, high-energy Gooeyduk bars, his meds and special sunglasses, soothing towelettes, a hat, a handful of debit tokens, a ticket to the nosebleed section of Soldier Field, and the single most important item—a portable simcaster.
“Well then,” he said, “we’re off.”
HOLDING TIGHT TO the banister, Samson Kodiak descended the charterhouse stairs one monumental step at a time. He stopped often to catch his breath. The first door he passed was to the elevator machine room. It also served as Bogdan Kodiak’s bedroom. The diaron-plated, titanium-bolted, epoxy clinker core door was adorned with glowing, 3-D, international glyphs that proclaimed, “WARNING—LETHAL DOOR.” Samson was fairly sure that this was just a bluff to keep the Tobblers from trying to break in and reclaim their elevator machinery. He touched the door as he went by and said, “Good-bye, my boy. Stay out of too much trouble.”
Halfway down the next flight of stairs, Samson’s legs ached so badly he needed to rest. It was simple ischemia, he knew, the weakness of old legs, but if he wasn’t careful, muscular hypoxia could lead to necrosis and set off a chain reaction of fiery apoptosis that would end his trip prematurely right here, between the eighth and ninth floors. And the last thing he wanted to do was to burn from the feet up.
“Not here. Not now,” he muttered, locking his knees as best he could and leaning on the banister. He forced himself to take deep breaths.
“Shall I call for assistance?” Hubert said from the belt buckle under his jumpsuit.
“No! Don’t!” Hooking an arm around the banister, Samson massaged his legs. A door slammed above him, and the sound of footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Young Bogdan flew around the corner, swinging on the banister, taking steps three at a time, and almost ran into Samson.
“Sam!” he said, stumbling to a halt. “I almost ran you over! Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”
“I’m late for work,” Bogdan said and continued down the stairs. But he paused at the landing to look up at Samson. He ran back up to him and said, “You don’t look so good to me, Sam.”
Samson smiled. The boy was almost as attentive as April, and the housemeets were entirely too hard on him, Kale especially. “It’s just these old gams of mine,” he said. “Pay no attention.” But the boy took his arm and tried to escort him. “No, Boggy,” Samson protested. “Leave me be. We don’t want you late for work.” It was, after all, the only paid employment, except for April’s Nanojiffy franchise, that anyone in Charter Kodiak was lucky enough to have.
“I’ll just take you down to seven,” Bogdan said. And he did, almost lifting the old man in his haste. They crossed the Tobblers’ “tunnel” from the south to the north side of the building, where the disputed territory ended and they entered a wholly-Kodiak-owned stairwell. The steps here were piled high with cartons and crates of chemicals, seed mats, and hydroponics frames for the roof garden. Overhead, tiers of shelves held cases of ugoo for the Nanojiffy, spare parts for the wind rams and air miner, and a clutter of the charter’s odds and ends. A narrow trail next to the banister was all that remained clear in what was essentially a seven-story walkup closet.