Glasshouse (15 page)

I wake up sweating and sick with my heart pounding in the night, and there is no Sam. For a moment I feel defiant and angry at his absence, but then I think:
What have I done to my only friend here?
And I roll over and wash the pillow in bitter tears before dawn.

But the next day I start my new job.

THE
taxi that takes me to the Chamber of Commerce arrives about half an hour after Sam leaves for work. I'm ready and waiting for it but nervous about the whole idea. It seems necessary in some ways—to assert my independence from Sam, get an extra source of income, meet other inmates, break out of the lonely rut of being a stay-at-home wife—but in other respects it's a questionable choice. I have no idea what they're going to find for me to do, it's going to take up a large chunk of my time, it'll probably be boring and pointless, and although I'll meet new people, there's no way of knowing whether I'll hate them on sight. What seemed like a good idea at the time is now turning out to be stressful.

The taxi operator is no use, of course—he can't tell me anything. “Chamber of Commerce,” he announces. “Please leave the vehicle.” So I get out and head toward the imposing building on my right, with the revolving door made of wood and brass, hoping my uncertainty doesn't show. I march up to the clerk on the front desk. “I'm Reeve. I've got an appointment at, uh, ten o'clock with Mr. Harshaw?”

“Go right in, ma'am,” says the zombie, pointing at a door behind him with a frosted-glass window and gold-leaf lettering stenciled along the top. My heels clack on the stone floor as I walk over and open it.

“Mr. Harshaw?” I ask.

The room is dominated by a wide desk made out of wood, its top inlaid with a rectangle of dyed, preserved skin cut from a large herbivore. The walls are paneled in wood and there are crude still pictures in frames hanging from hooks near the top, certificates and group portraits of men in dark suits shaking hands with each other. A borderline-senescent male in a dark suit, his head almost bereft of hair and his waistline expanding, sits behind the desk. He half rises as I enter, and extends a hand.
Zombie?
I wonder doubtfully.

“Hello, Reeve.” He sounds relaxed and self-confident. “Won't you have a seat?”

“Sure.” I take the chair on the other side of the desk and cross my legs, studying his face. Sure enough there's a slight flicker of attention—he's watching me, aware of my body—which means he's real. Zombies simply aren't programmed for that. “How come I haven't seen you in Church?” I ask.

“I'm on staff,” he says easily. “Have a cigarette?” He gestures at one of the wooden boxes on his desk.

“Sorry, I don't smoke,” I say, slightly stiffly. I hate the smell, but it's not as if it's harmful, is it?

“Good for you.” He takes one, lights it, and inhales thoughtfully. “You asked about job vacancies yesterday. As it happens, we have one right now that would probably suit you—I took the liberty of looking through your records—but it specifically excludes smokers.”

“Oh?” I raise an eyebrow. Mr. Harshaw the staffer isn't what I expected, to say the least; I was winding myself up to deal with a dumb zombie fronting a placement database.

“It's in the city library. You'd only be working three days a week, but you'd be putting in eleven-hour shifts. On the plus side, you'd be the trainee librarian there. On the minus side, the starting salary isn't particularly high.”

“What does the job involve?” I ask.

“Library work.” He shrugs. “Filing books in order. Keeping track of withdrawals and issuing overdue notices and collecting fines. Helping people find books and information they're looking for. Organizing the
stacks and adding new titles as they come in. You'd be working under Janis from cohort one, who has been our librarian since the early days. She's going to be leaving, which is why we need to train up a replacement.”

“Leaving?” I look at him oddly. “Why?”

“To have a baby,” he says, and blows a perfect smoke ring up at the ceiling.

I don't understand what he's saying at first, the concept is so alien to me. “Why would she have to leave her job to—”

It's his turn to look at me oddly. “Because she's pregnant,” he says.

For a moment the world seems to be spinning around my head. There's a roaring in my ears, and I feel weak at the knees. It's a good thing I'm sitting down. Then I begin to integrate everything and realize just what's going on. Janis is
pregnant
—she's got a neonate growing inside her body like an encapsulated tumor, the way humans used to incubate their young in the wild, back before civilization. Presumably she and her husband had sex, and she was fertile. “She must be—” I say, then cover my mouth.
Fertile.

“Yes, she and Norm are very happy,” Mr. Harshaw says, nodding enthusiastically. He looks satisfied with something. “We're all very happy for them, even if it means we do have to train up a new librarian.”

“Well, I'd be happy to see, I mean, to try,” I begin, flustered, wondering,
Did she ask the medics to make her fertile?
Or, a sneaking and horrible suspicion,
Are we
already
fertile?
I know menstruation was some kind of metabolic sign that went with being a prehistoric female, but I didn't really put it all together until now. Having a child is hard—you have to actively seek medical assistance—and having one grow inside your body is even harder. The idea that the orthohuman bodies they've put us in are so ortho that we could
automatically
generate random human beings if we have sex is absolutely terrifying. I don't think the dark ages medics had incubators, and if I got pregnant I might actually have to go through a live childbirth.
In fact, if Sam and I had
—“Excuse me, but where's the rest room?” I ask.

“It's the second door through there, on the left.” Mr. Harshaw smiles to himself as I make a dash for it. He's still smiling five minutes later as I make my way back into his office, forcing my face into a mask
of composure, refusing to acknowledge the stomach cramps that took me to the stalls. “Are you all right?” he asks.

“I am, now,” I say. “I'm sorry about that, must be something I ate.”

“It's perfectly all right. If you'd like to come with me, perhaps we can visit the library and I can introduce you to Janis, see if you get along?”

I nod, and we head out front to catch a taxi. I think I'm doing pretty well for someone who's just had her worldview turned upside down and whacked on with a hammer. How long does a neonate take to grow, about thirty megs? It puts a whole new face on the experiment. I have a sinking sense that I must have implicitly agreed to this. Somewhere buried in the small print of the release I signed there'll be some clause that can be interpreted as saying that I consent to be made fertile and if necessary to become pregnant and bring to term an infant in the course of the study. It's the sort of shitty trick that Fiore and his friends would delight in slipping past us while we're vulnerable.

After a few minutes I realize that the oversight we were promised by an independent ethics committee isn't worth a bucket of warm—whatever. The extreme scenario would be for us females to
all
get pregnant and deliver infants, in which case the experimenters are going to be responsible for the care of about a hundred babies, none of whom gave their consent to be raised in a simulated dark ages environment without access to decent medical care, education, or socialization. Any responsible ethics oversight committee would shit a brick if you suggested running an experiment like that. So I suspect the ethics oversight committee isn't very ethical, if indeed it exists at all.

I'm thinking these thoughts as Mr. Harshaw tells our zombie driver to take us to the municipal library. The library is in a part of town I haven't visited before, on the same block as City Hall and what Mr. Harshaw points out to me as the police station. “Police station?” I ask, looking blank.

“Yes, where the police hang out.” He looks at me as if I'm very slightly mad.

“I would have thought the crime rate here was too low to need a real police force,” I say.

“So far it is,” he replies, with a smile I can't interpret. “But things are changing.”

The library is a low brick building, with a glass facade opening onto a reception area, and turnstiles leading into a couple of big rooms full of shelves. There are books—bound sheaves of dumb paper—on all the shelves, and there are a
lot
of shelves. In fact, I've never seen so many books in my life. It's ironic, really. My netlink could bring a million times as much information to me on a whim, if it was working. But in the informationally impoverished society we're restricted to, these rows of dead trees represent the total wealth of available human knowledge. Static, crude scratchings are all we're to be permitted, it seems. “Who can access these?” I ask.

“I'll leave it to Janis to explain the procedures,” he says, running his hand over his shiny crown, “but anyone who wants can withdraw—borrow—books from the lending department. The reference department is a bit different, and there's also the private collection.” He clears his throat. “That's confidential, and you're not supposed to lend it to anyone who isn't authorized to read it. That probably sounds dramatic, by the way, but it's actually not very romantic. We just keep a lot of the documentation for the project on paper, so we don't need to violate the experimental protocol by bringing in advanced knowledge-management tools, and we have to store the paper somewhere when it's not in use, so we use the library.” He holds the door open. “Let's go find Janis, shall we? Then we'll have lunch. We can discuss whether you want to work here, and if so, what your pay and conditions will be, and then if you take the job, we can work out when you'll start training.”

JANIS
is skinny and blond, with a haggard, worried-looking expression and long, bony hands that flutter like trapped insects as she describes things. After having to put up with Jen's machinations, she's like a breath of fresh air. On my first day I arrive at my new job early, but Janis is already there. She whisks me into a dingy little staff room round the back of one of the bookcases that I'd never suspected existed on yesterday's tour.

“I'm so glad you're here,” she tells me, clasping her hands. “Tea? Or coffee? We've got both”—there's an electric kettle in the corner and she switches it on—“but someone's going to have to run out and fetch some milk soon.” She sighs. “This is the staff room. When there's nobody about, you can take your breaks here or go out for lunch—we close between noon and one o'clock—and there's also a terminal into the library computer.” She points at a boxy device not unlike a baby television set, connected by a coiled cable to a panel studded with buttons.

“The library has a computer?” I say, intrigued. “Can't I just use my netlink?”

Janis flushes, her cheeks turning pink. “I'm afraid not,” she apologizes. “They make us use them just like the ancients would have, through a keyboard and screen.”

“But I thought none of the ancient thinking machines survived, except in emulation. How do we know what its physical manifestation looked like?”

“I'm not sure.” Janis looks thoughtful. “Do you know, I hadn't thought of that? I've got no idea how they designed it! It's probably buried in the experimental protocol somewhere—the nonclassified bits are all online, if you want to go looking. But listen, we don't have time for that now.” The kettle boils, and she busies herself for a minute pouring hot water into two mugs full of instant coffee granules. I study her indirectly while her back's turned. There's not much sign of her pregnancy yet, although I think there might be a slight bulge around her waist—her dress is cut so that it's hard to tell. “First, I want to get you started on how the front desk works, on the lending side. We've got to keep track of who's borrowed what books, and when they're due back, and it's the easiest thing to start you on. So”—she hands me a coffee mug—“how much do you know about library work?”

I learn over the course of the morning that “library work” covers such an enormous area of information management that back during the dark ages, before libraries became self-organizing constructs, people used to devote their entire (admittedly short) lives to studying the theory of how best to manage them. Neither Janis—nor I—is remotely qualified to be a real dark age librarian, with their esoteric mastery of
catalogue systems and controlled information classification vocabularies, but we
can
run a small municipal lending library and reference section with a bit of scurrying around and a lot of patience. I seem to have some historic skills in that direction, and unlike my experience with arc welding, I haven't erased all of them. I can remember my alphabet and grasp the decimal classification scheme immediately, and the way each book has a ticket in an envelope inside the front cover that has to be retained when it's loaned out makes sense, too . . .

It's only by midafternoon, when we've taken a grand total of five returns and had one visitor who borrowed two books (on Aztec culture and the care and feeding of carnivorous plants), that I begin to wonder why YFH-Polity needs anything as exotic as a full-time librarian.

“I don't know,” Janis admits over a cup of tea in the staff room, her feet stretched out under the rickety white-painted wooden table. “It can get a bit busy—wait until six o'clock, when most people are on their way home from work, that's when we get most of our borrowers—but really, they don't
need
me. A zombie could do the job perfectly well.” She looks pensive. “I suspect it's more to do with finding employment for people who ask for it. It's one of the drawbacks of the entire experiment. We don't exist in a closed-circuit economy, and if they don't constantly provide jobs for people, it'll all fall apart. So what we're left with is a situation where they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. At least until they merge the parishes.”