Glasshouse (13 page)

I've got to get out of here
, I realize, aghast. The thing is, I've seen swords like that before. Vorpal blades, they call them, I'm not sure why. This one's obviously decommissioned, but how did it get here? They don't rely on the edge or point to cut, that's not what they're for. They belonged to, to—
Who did they belong to?
I rack my brains, trying to find the source of this terrible conviction that I stand in the presence of
something utterly evil, something that doesn't belong in any experimental polity, a stink of livid corruption. But my treacherous memory lets me down again, and as I batter myself against the closed door of my own history, I walk back into the light outside, blinking and wondering if I might be wrong after all. Wrong about Cass being Kay. Wrong about Mick being violent. Wrong about the sword and the chalice. Wrong about who and what I am . . .

TIME
passes glacially slowly. I don't say anything to Sam about the events in Church, not about Cass's black eye nor the Vorpal blade on the Church altar. Sam is comfortable to live with, happy to listen to my depressive chatter about the women's world, but there's always the worm of worry gnawing at the back of my mind:
Can I trust him?
I want to, but I can't be sure he isn't one of my pursuers. It's a horrible dilemma, the risk/trust trade-off. So I don't talk about what I do in the garage, or on the basement exercise machine, and he doesn't volunteer much information about what he does at work. A couple of the ladies who lunch are talking about organizing dinner parties, but if we invited ourselves into that kind of social circle they'd expect us to reciprocate and the stress would be—well, I don't think either of us is up to it. So we live our lonely lives in each other's back pockets, and I worry about Cass, and Sam reads a lot and watches TV, trying to understand the ancients.

When we get home after the abortive meeting in Church, I use my netlink to check our group's public points. Jen is leading on social connectedness, while Alice is second on that score—her helping me with clothes seems to be good for her. To my surprise I see that I'm at the bottom of the cohort. There's an activity breakdown and it looks like
everyone else is having sex with their partner: Forming stable relationships is a good way to jack up your score, easy points. I backtrack a week or two and see that Cass is regularly active with Mick.

For some reason I find this unaccountably depressing. The others are watching, and I'm
supposed
to be involved with Sam, and I don't want to do anything that might give Jen any sense of satisfaction whatsoever. It's an immature attitude, but I'm really conscious of the fact that they're keeping an eye on my score, waiting for me to surrender. Waiting for me to give Sam what they think he ought to want. Too bad they don't really know us.

ABOUT
two weeks later I finally reach the end of my tether. It's a hot, tiresome Tuesday evening. I've spent the morning exercising outdoors—there are still no neighbors, although a couple of families are due to move in when the next cohort arrives in a couple of weeks' time—and then worked in the garage all afternoon. I'm trying to relearn welding the hard way, and I'm lucky not to have burned my arm off or electrocuted myself so far.

I have vague recollections of having done this stuff a long time ago, in gigaseconds past, but it's so long ago that the memories are all second-hand and I've clearly forgotten almost everything I knew. There's something wrong with my technique, and the pieces of spring steel I'm trying to make into a single fabrication are going brittle around the weld. I try bending the last one in the vise and the join I've just spent an hour working on snaps and small fragments go flying. If I was standing a bit farther over to the left, I could have got one in the eye. As it is, I get a nasty shock and go inside to try to sort our dinner out, because Sam is usually back from work around now, and if left to his own devices, he'll flop down in front of the television rather than sorting out food for both of us.

So I'm in the kitchen all on my own, rummaging through the frozen packages in the freezer cupboard for something we both eat, and I manage to drop a pizza box on the floor. It splits open and the contents spill everywhere. It's one of those moments when the whole universe comes spinning down on the top of your head, and you realize how alone and
isolated you are, and all your problems seem to laugh at you.
Who do I think I'm kidding?
I ask myself, and I burst into tears on the spot.

I'm trapped in a wholly inadequate body, with only patchy memories of whoever I used to be left to prod me along in search of a better life. I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs. Here I am, thinking I remember being in rehab, reading a letter written to myself by an earlier version—and how do I
know
I wrote the letter to myself? I don't even remember doing it! For all I know it's a confabulation, my own bored attempt to inject some excitement into a life totally sapped of interest. Certainly the rant about people who are out to kill me seems increasingly implausible and distant—outright unbelievable, if not for the man with the wire.

I can't remember any reasons why anyone would want me dead. And even a half-competent trainee assassin would find killing me a trivial challenge at best, right now. I can't even put a frozen pizza in a microwave oven without dropping it on the floor. I'm spending my spare hours in the garage trying to weld together a crossbow and busily planning to make myself a sword when the bad guys, if they're real, are running a panopticon—a total surveillance society—and have weapons like the one on the Church altar, edged with the laser-speckling strangeness of supercondensates, waveguides for wormhole generators. Knives that can cut space-time. They'll come for me in the clear light of day, and they'll be backed by the whole police state panoply of memory editors and existential programmers. There's nowhere for me to run, no way out except through the T-gates controlled by the experimenters, and no way in bar the same, and I don't even know if I've lost Kay, or if Kay is Cass or someone else entirely, and I'm not sure why I let Piccolo-47 talk me into coming here. All I've got are my memories, and I can't even trust
them.

I feel helpless and lost and very, very small, and I stare at the pizza through a blurring veil of tears, and right then I hear the front door lock click to itself and footsteps in the front hall, and it's more than I can bear.

Sam finds me in the kitchen, sobbing as I fumble around for the dustpan.

“What's wrong?” He stands in the doorway looking at me, a bewildered expression on his face.

“I'm, I—” I manage to get the box into the trash, then drop the brush on top of it. “Nothing.”

“It can't be nothing,” he insists, logically enough.

“I don't want to talk about it.” I sniff and wipe my eyes on the back of my sleeve, embarrassed and hating myself for this display of weakness. “It's not important—”

“Come on.” His arm is around my shoulders, comforting. “Come on, out of here.”

“Okay.”

He leads me out of the kitchen and into the living room and over to the big glass windows. I watch, not really comprehending, as he opens one of them. Floor to ceiling, it forms a door in its own right, a door into the back garden. “Come on,” he says, walking out onto the lawn.

I follow him outside. The grass is getting long.
What do you want?
I wonder.

“Sit down,” he says. I blink and look at the bench.

“Oh, okay.” I sniff again.

“Wait here,” he says. He vanishes back into the house, leaving me alone with my stupid and stupefying sense of inadequacy. I stare at the grass. It's moist (we had a scheduled precipitation at lunchtime, water drizzling gently from a million tiny nozzles embedded in the sky), and a snail is inching its way laboriously up a stem, close to my feet. Not far away there's another one. It's a good time for mollusks, who haul their world around with them, self-contained. I feel a momentary flash of envy. Here I am, trapped inside the biggest snail shell anyone can imagine, a snail shell made of glass that exposes everything we do to the monitors and probes of the experimenters. And in my hubris I think I can actually crawl out of my shell, escape into my own identity—

Sam is holding something out to me. “Here, have a drink.”

I take the tumbler. It's blue glass, with a fizz of bubbles trapped in the weighted base and a clear liquid half-filling it. I sniff a bouquet of bitters and lemon.

“Go on, it won't poison you.”

I raise my glass and take a mouthful.
Gin and tonic
, some submerged ghost of memory tells me. “Thanks.” I sniff. He pours himself one, too. “I'm sorry.”

“What for?” he asks, as he sits down next to me. He's shed his jacket and necktie, and he moves as if he's weary, as if he's got my troubles.

“I'm a dead loss.” I shrug. “It just got too much for me.”

“You're not a dead loss.”

I look at him sharply, then have to sniff again. I wish I could get my sinuses fixed. “Yes I am. I'm wholly dependent on you—without your job, what would I do? I'm weak and small and badly coordinated, and I can't even cook a pizza for supper without dropping it all over the floor. And, and . . .”

Sam takes another mouthful. “Look,” he says, pointing at the garden. “You've got this. All day.” He shakes his head. “I get to sit in an office full of zombies and spend my time proofreading gibberish. There's always more make-work for me, texts to check for errors. It makes my head hurt. You've at least got this.” He looks at me, a guarded, odd look that makes me wonder what he sees. “And whatever it is you're doing in the garage.”

“I—”

“I don't mean to pry,” he says, looking away shyly.

“It's not secret,” I say. I swallow some more of my drink. “I'm making stuff.” I nearly add,
It's a hobby
, but that would be a lie. And the one person I haven't actively lied to so far is Sam. I've got a feeling that if I start lying to him now, I'll be crossing some sort of irrevocable line. With only myself for an anchor, and knowing how fallible my memories are, I won't be able to tell truth from fantasy anymore.

“Making stuff.” He rolls his glass between his big hands. “Do you want a job to go to?” he asks.

“A job?” That's a surprise and a half. “Why?”

He shrugs. “To see people. Get out of the house. To meet people other than the score whores, I mean. They're getting to you, aren't they?”

I nod mutely.

“Not surprising.” He stays tactfully silent while I drain my glass.

To my surprise, I feel a little better.
Get a job!
“How do I find a job?” I ask. “I mean, not being a man—”

“You phone the Chamber of Commerce and ask for one.” He puts his glass down. I look at it, see the two snails climbing opposite sides of the same blade of grass, leaving their iridescent trails of slime. “It's as simple as that. They'll send a car to pick you up and take you somewhere with room for a body. They didn't run you through the induction course when you arrived, but it's easy enough. I don't know what they'll find for you or how much they'll pay you—I'd guess a lot less than they pay men, that seems to be how they did things in the dark ages—but if you find it too boring, you can always phone the CC again and ask for something else.”

“A job,” I say, trying the words out for sense. It's crazy, actually, but no more so than anything else in this world. “I didn't know I could get one.”

He shrugs. “It's not illegal or anything.” A sidelong look. “They just didn't set it up by default. It's another of those things we're allowed to game if we're smart enough to think of it.”

“And I'll meet people.”

“It depends where you work.” Sam looks uncertain for a moment. “Most jobs, there are zombies around—but they try to keep at least two humans in every workplace. And there are visitors. But it's pretty boring. I really didn't think you'd be interested.”

“It can't possibly be as mind-destroying as this!” I clench my hands.

“Don't bet on it.” He shakes his head. “Dark ages work was often meaningless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous to my sanity as not doing anything.”

“That's my Reeve.” Sam smiles, a brilliant expression that I don't often see and that makes me really envy the lucky woman he left behind outside the experiment. “I'll get you another drink, then go fix dinner. How about we eat out here instead of inside? Just for once.”

“I'd like that a lot,” I say fervently. “Just for once.”

IN
the early hours of the morning I'm awakened by one of my recurring nightmares.

I have several different bad dreams. What distinguishes this one is the quality of the imagery in it. I'm a neomorph, male again and roughly orthohuman in body plan, but extensively augmented with mechabolic subsystems from the cellular level up. Instead of intestines, I have a compact fusion gateway cell. I have three hearts to keep my different circulatory fluids moving, skin reinforced with diamond fiber mesh, and I can survive in vacuum for hours. These are all trappings of my role as a soldier in the service of the Linebarger Cats, because I am a tank.

But that's not what makes the dream a nightmare.

We're one-point-one megaseconds into the campaign, and even though we—my unit—don't normally sleep, we're all under the influence of fatigue poisons from nearly twelve consecutive diurns of high-speed maneuvers. Hostilities with this polity commenced as soon as High Command established the orbital elements on one of their better-connected real-space nodes. The Six Fingers Green Kingdom has been particularly tenacious in its attempts to hold on to its corrupt A-gates, which are still infected with Curious Yellow censorbots and contaminating everyone who passes through them. They're one of the last hold-outs on the losing side; they've survived long after the other censorship redoubts succumbed to our maneuvers by virtue of their fanatically obscurantist network topology and a cunning mesh of internal firewalls. But we've identified the real-space location of one of their main switches, and that means we've got a node with massive fan-out to exploit once we can get our people into it. My unit is on the sharp end.