Glasshouse (17 page)

I
go to work the next day, and the one after that, and by the end of my third day I am exhausted. I mean,
shattered
. Library work doesn't
sound as if it should be hard, but when you're working for eleven hours with a one-hour break in the middle for lunch, it wears you down. The daytime is almost empty, but there's a small rush of custom every evening around six o'clock, and I have to scurry to and fro hunting for tickets, filing returned books, collecting fines, and getting things sorted out. Then in the morning I end up pushing a trolley loaded with books around the shelves, returning the borrowed items and sorting out anything that's been put back on a shelf out of sequence. If there's any time left over, I end up dusting the shelves that are due for cleaning.

“How do you know the books know when they're being read?” I ask Janis, halfway through my second morning. “I mean, take this one.” I heft it where she can see it, a big green clothbound sheaf of papers with a title like
The Home Vegetable Garden.

“Look.” Janis takes it from me and bends the cover back, so that the plastic protective sleeve on the spine bends.

I look. “Aha.” I can just see something like a squashed fly in there, two hair-fine antennae running up to the stitching atop the spine. “Those are . . . ?”

“Fiber optics. That's my guess.” Janis hums to herself as she closes the book and slides it back into the trolley. “I don't think they can hear you, but they can sense which page is open and track your eyeballs. The experimenters have been careful to give us all different faces, and we all have two working eyes. That's no accident. Not all the ancients had that. If you want to read a book secretly, you need mirrored sunglasses and a timer, so you turn each page after the same amount of time.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask admiringly. “You sound like a professional—” The word
spy
is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it with a little shiver.

“Before I checked into the clinic, I used to be a detective.” She gives me a long look. “It's a skill set I didn't ask them to erase. Thought it might come in handy in my new life.”

“Then what did you—” I stop myself just in time. “Forget I asked.”

“By all means.” She chuckles drily. “Listen, they tell me that it's
normal for me to check into hospital a week or two before the delivery, and to stay there for a couple of weeks afterward. Can I”—she sounds tentative—“ask a big favor of you?”

“What? Sure,” I say blankly.

“I figure I'm going to be in bed a lot of the time, bored out of my mind, and there's only so much television you can watch in a day, and Norm is working, so he can't keep me company. Would you mind visiting me and bringing me some library books? So I don't lose track?”

“Why, I'd be delighted to!” I say it with perfect sincerity, because I mean it. If
I
ever ended up in some kind of dark ages hospital for three or four cycles I'd want visitors. “You'll let me know what you want, all right?”

“Thank you.” Janis sounds grateful. “Now if you could just get the footstool, these go on the top shelf and I can't reach as high as you can.”

On my third day I'm due to meet up with Jen and Angel and Alice and do lunch. Jen's picked the Dominion Cafe as today's venue, and I walk there from the library, whistling tunelessly. I'm feeling unaccountably smug. I've found something new to do, I've got a source of income all of my own, I know things that the ladies who lunch haven't got a clue about, and if only I wasn't spending half my waking hours in fear of the future and wishing I could get out of this glass-walled prison and hook up with Kay again, I'd probably be quite happy.

The Dominion Cafe is a lot plusher than the name makes it sound, and I feel a bit underdressed as the maître d' ushers me to the booth where Jen is holding court. Here I am in a plain skirt and sweater, while Jen wears ever-more-exotic concoctions of spun bug spit and must spend three or four hours a day on her makeovers and hair. Angel isn't so much trying to ape her as getting tugged along in the undertow, and Alice looks a bit uncomfortable in their presence. But what do I care? They're people to talk to, and we're chained together by the mutual scorefile so I can't ignore them. This must be how the ancients used to feel about their families.

“Hello all,” I say, pulling out a chair. “And how are you today?”

Jen waves at a metal bucket on a stand, with some kind of cloth
draped over it. “Livin' large!” she announces. “Girls, a glass for Reeve. Won't you join us in a little Chateau Lafitte '59?”

“A little—” She whisks the cloth off the bucket, and I see it's full of ice packed around a green glass bottle.

“Champagne,” Alice says, a little apologetically. “Fizzy wine.”

“I wouldn't say no.” Angel holds out a fluted glass while Jen picks up the bottle and pours.

“Why, is there something in particular to celebrate?” Jen and Angel don't normally do their drinking before sunset. So I figure it must be good.

“Well.” Jen's eye sparkles wickedly. “You might think it was something to do with your correcting your last social shortcoming at long last.” I feel my face heating. “But that's not it.”
Bitch.
“It's just that this is Alice's last drink for some time.”

“Excuse me?” I say, unsure what's going on.

“About eight months to go,” Alice says, dabbing at her lips with a napkin. Her eyes flicker from me to Jen and back again, as if looking for an offer of help.

“I—” I stop. Lick my lips. “You're pregnant?”

“Yes.” Alice nods, a quick up and down. She doesn't look happy. Jen, however, looks ecstatic.

“Here's to Alice and her baby!” She raises a glass of bubbly, and I echo the gesture because it would be rude not to, but as I take a mouthful of the sweet, fizzy wine I catch Alice's eye, and it's like there's a static discharge—I can see exactly what she's thinking.

“To your very good health,” I tell her over the rim of my glass, and I'm pretty sure she gets the unspoken message because her shoulders slump slightly, and she takes a small sip from her own glass. I look at Jen. “And you?” I ask, before I can apply the brakes to my motor mouth.

Jen doesn't crack a smile. “Shouldn't be too long now,” she remarks, calmly enough. “Then you can buy me a bottle of champagne too, eh?”

I manage to summon up the ghost of a grin from somewhere. “You must want a baby badly.”

“Of course! And I'm not just going to stop at one.” Jen smiles at me
sympathetically. “Of course, I heard all about your job. It must be very difficult.”

“It's not so bad,” I manage, before retreating into the glass.
Bitch.
“You know Janis is pregnant, too?”
I'll bet you do
. “I'm training to be her replacement.”
What is this, let's all overload the life-support system week?
“It's going to mean more work for the rest of us.”

“Oh, you'll be next,” Jen says, with a casual, airy certainty that makes my blood run cold. “You'll see things differently when you've got one of your own. I say, waiter! Waiter! Where's our menu?”

TIME
passes fast, mostly because I spend the afternoon with my nose buried in the encyclopedia, trying to remedy my desperate ignorance of dark ages reproductive politics. Which I sense is putting me at a dangerous disadvantage.

The next day is the first of four days off. I sleep until well after Sam's departed for the office. Then I go downstairs and work out. Of the nine other houses on our stretch of road, one is now occupied by Nicky and Wolf—but Wolf has a job and Nicky, who is lazy beyond my wildest aspirations, sleeps in until noon. So I get in a good hour-long run, by the end of which I'm sweated up but not breathless or aching anymore. It's spring in our biome, and the trees and flowers are beginning to blossom. The air is full of the airborne seminiferous dust shed by the hermaphroditic vegetation. It tickles my nose, making me sneeze, but some of the scents that accompany it—attractants for insects—are nice.

After exercise I shower, dress in respectable clothes, and head downtown to the hardware store to spend some of my money. I feel better about spending it, knowing it's not Sam's money, even though I realize this is stupid because it's just meaningless scrip issued to keep the experiment working, not real currency. I come away from the store with a
brazing torch, flux, solder, lots and lots of copper wire, and some other odds and ends. Then I go shopping for domestic items.

I hit the drugstore first, armed with a shopping list of things I'd never heard of until yesterday—things the encyclopedia listed under sexual health. Unfortunately, just knowing what to ask for doesn't translate into being able to buy it, and I gradually figure out that the omissions make a pattern. I can understand them not having progestogen-based medications on general sale. But why are there no absorbent sponges? Or the plastic penile sheaths I read about? After about half an hour of searching I conclude that the drugstore is useless by design. I ran across a rather shocking article on religious beliefs about sex and reproduction, and it looks like our drugstore was stocked on the basis of instructions from eclecticist hierophants. Something tells me that the lack of contraceptives is not an accident. I'm just surprised I haven't already heard people grumbling about it.

I have better luck in the department store, where I buy a new microwave oven, some clip-on spotlights, and a few other items. Then I go hunting for a craft shop. It takes me a while to find what I'm looking for, but in the end I discover one tucked in a corner of the shop, inside a pulp carton—a small wooden loom, suitable for weaving cloth. I buy it along with a whole bunch of woolen thread, just so nobody raises any eyebrows. Then I catch a taxi home and install my loot in the garage, along with the unfinished crossbow and the other projects.

It's time to get things moving. It's time I stopped kidding myself that I can fight my way out of here, and time that I stopped kidding myself that they're going to let me go in (I checked the calendar) another ninety-four megaseconds. Forget the crossbow and the other toys I've been playing with. I've got a stark choice. I can conform like everyone else, go native in the pocket polity they've established, settle down and get on with the job of creating a generation of innocents who don't even know there's another universe outside. Who knows? After a gigasecond, will I even remember I had another life? It's not as if my presurgery self left me much to hold on to . . .

Or I can try to find out what's really going on. Fiore and his shadowy boss, Bishop Yourdon, are doing something with this polity, that
much is clear. This isn't just a straightforward experimental archaeology commune. Too many aspects of the setup turn out to be just plain wrong when you examine them closely. If I can figure out what they're trying to do, maybe I can discover a way out.

Which is why I spend a personal infinity laboriously stripping reel after reel of copper wire of its insulation and threading it onto the loom. The first step in figuring out what's going on is to get myself some privacy. I need a shoulder bag lined with woven copper mesh to accompany the bug-zapper (my repurposed microwave oven), and there's no way I could order a Faraday cage from one of the stores without setting off alarms.

It takes me nearly two weeks to weave a square meter of copper wire broadcloth, working in darkness by touch alone. It's really fiddly stuff to work with. The strands keep breaking or bending, it takes ages to strip the insulation, and besides, I've got a day job to go to.

Janis is complaining about minor back pains and spending a lot of time in the toilet each morning, coming out looking pale. There are fewer wisecracks and jokes from her, which is a shame. She's beginning to bulge around the waist, too. She's putting a brave face on it, but I think underneath it all she's terrified. The prospect of giving birth like an animal (with all the attendant risk and pain) is enough to scare anybody, even if it didn't come with the added horror of being chained down in this place for the indefinite hereafter, the product of your blood and sweat held hostage against your cooperation. What I want to know is, why isn't there a resistance movement? I suppose in a panopticon anyone organizing such a thing would have to be very quiet about it—or very naive—but I can't help wondering why I haven't seen any signs of even covert defiance.

I checked the YFH-Polity constitution in the library (there's a copy on a lectern out front, for everybody to read) and what's missing from it is as important as what's there. There's a bill of rights that explicitly includes the phrase “right to life” (which, if you read some dark ages histories, doesn't mean what a naive modern would think it means), and it goes on to explicitly waive all expectations of a right to privacy, which means they can enforce it against my will.
Ick.
The constitution
is a public protocol specification defining the parameters within which YFH's legal system operates. Before I came here, it seemed irrelevant, but now it terrifies me—and I notice that it says nothing about a commitment to freedom of movement. That's been an axiom for virtually all human polities, ever since the end of the censorship wars mopped up the last nests of Curious Yellow and the memetic dictatorships. Not that you'll find any such knowledge in our shelves; history stops in 2050, as far as your reading in this library goes, and anyway, everything after 2005 is accessible only via the computer terminals, using an arcane conversational text interface that I'm still fumblingly trying to explore.