Glasshouse (21 page)

Oh shit, indeed.
I feel wobbly, and Sam catches me under one arm as I see what's happening. There are no more screams, but that doesn't mean nothing's going on. The screaming is continuing, inside the privacy of my own skull. “They
planned
this,” I hear myself say, as if from the far end of a very dark tunnel. “They prepared for it. It's not spontaneous.”

“Yes.” Sam nods, his face whey-pale. There's no other explanation, crazy as it seems. “Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been a major cultural bonding feature in pretech cultures,” he mutters. “I wonder how long Fiore's been planning to introduce it?”

They've got two ropes over the branches of the poplars beside the Church, and two groups are busy heaving their twitching payloads up into the greenery. I blink. The ropes seem to curve slightly. It might be centripetal acceleration, but more likely it's because my eyes are watering.

“I don't care. If I had a gun, I'd shoot Jen right now, I really would.” I suddenly realize that I'm not feeling faint from fear or dread, but from anger: “The bitch needs killing.”

“Wouldn't work,” he says, almost absently. “More violence just normalizes the killing, it doesn't put an end to it: They're having a
party
and all you could do is add to the fun . . .”

“Yeah, I—but I'd feel better.” Jen had better have bars on her windows and sleep with a baseball bat under her pillow tonight, or she's in trouble. And she royally deserves it, the mendacious bitch.

“Me too, I think.”

“Can we do anything?”

“For them?” He shrugs. There's no more screaming, but a tone-deaf choir has struck up some kind of anthem. “No.”

I shiver. “Let's go home. Right now.”

“Okay,” he says, and together we start walking again.

The singing follows us up the road. I'm terrified that if I look back, I'll break down: There's absolutely nothing I can do about it, but I feel a filthy sense of complicity with them. As for Fiore . . . he's got it coming. Sooner or later I'll get him. But I'm going to bite my tongue and not say a word about that for now, because I've a feeling he staged this little show to teach us a lesson about the construction of totalitarian power, and right this moment all the spies and snitches are going to be wide-awake, looking for signs of dissent.

A
kilometer up the road and ten minutes away from the ghastly feeding frenzy, I tug at Sam's arm. “Let's slow down a little,” I suggest. “Catch our breath. There's no need to run anymore.”

“Catch our—” Sam stares at me. “I thought you were mad at me.”

“No, it's not you.” I carry on walking, but more slowly.

His hand on my arm. “We didn't join in.”

I nod, wordlessly.

“Three-quarters of the people there were as horrified as we were. But we couldn't stop it once it got going.” He shakes his head.

I take a deep breath. “I'm pissed at myself for not making a stand
while there was time. You can game a mob if you know what you're doing. But once people get moving in groups like that, it's really hard to contain them. Fiore didn't need to set that off. But he did, like pouring gasoline on a barbecue.” Both of which are items I've only lately become acquainted with. “And after that sermon and the score transfer, he couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted to.”

“You sound like you think it's a matter of choice.” I glance sidelong at him: Sam's not stupid, but he doesn't normally talk in abstractions. He continues: “Do you really think you could have stopped it? It's implicit in this society, Reeve. They set us up to make it easy to make people kill for an abstraction. You saw Jen. Did you really think you could have stopped her, once she got going?”

“I should have stuck a knife in her ribs.” I trudge on in silence for a few seconds. “I'd probably have failed. You're right, but that doesn't make me feel better.”

We walk slowly along the road, baking beneath the noonday heat of an artificial late-spring sun in our Sunday outfits. The invertebrates creak in the long, yellowing grass, and the deciduous trees rustle their leaves overhead in the breeze. I smell sage and magnolia in the warm air. Ahead of us the road dives into a cutting that leads to another of the tunnels with built-in T-gates that conceal the true geometry of our inside-out world. Sam pulls out his pocket flashlight, swinging it from his wrist by a strap.

“I've seen mobs before,” I tell him.
If only I could forget.
“They have a peculiar kind of momentum.” I feel weak and shaky as I think about it, about the look on Phil's face—I hardly knew him—and the hunger stalking the shadow of the crowd. Jen's malicious delight. “Once it gets past a certain point, all you can do is run away fast and make sure you have nothing to do with what happens next. If everybody did that, there wouldn't be any mobs.”

“I guess.” Sam sounds subdued as we walk into the penumbra of the tunnel. He switches his flashlight on. The cone of light bobs around crazily ahead of us as the road swings to the left.

“Even a sword-fighting fool of a hero can't divert a mob like that on their own once it gets going,” I tell him, as much for my own benefit as
anything else. “Not without battle armor and some heavy weaponry, because they're going to keep coming and coming. The ones behind can't see what's happening up front, and the fool who stands in the way without backup is going to end up a dead fool really fast, even if he kills a whole load of them. And anyway, your sword-fighting fool, he's no smarter than any of them in the mob. The time to stop the mob is before it gets started. To stand up in front of it first, and tell it no.”

We're walking into the dark curve of the tunnel, out of sight of either entrance. Sam sighs.

“I knew someone who'd do that,” he says wistfully. “The man I fell in love with. He wasn't a fool, but he'd know how to handle a situation like that.”

The
man
? Sam doesn't seem like the type to me—until I remember that I'm seeing him through gender-trapped eyes, the same way he's looking at me, and that I've got no way of knowing who or what Sam was before he volunteered for the experiment. “Nobody could do that,” I tell him gently.

“Maybe so. But I think I'd trust Robin's judgment before I'd trust—”

I stop as suddenly as if I have just walked into a wall. The hairs on the back of my neck are all standing on end, and my stomach is knotting up again as if I'm going to be sick.

“What's wrong?” asks Sam.

“The person on the outside you've been pining after,” I say carefully. “He's called Robin. Is that right?”

“Yes.” He nods. “I shouldn't have said, we'll get penalized—”

I grab his hand like it's a floatation aid and I'm drowning. “Sam, Sam.”
You idiot! Yes, you!
(I'm not sure which of us I mean.) “Did it ever occur to you to ask if maybe I
knew
Robin?”

“Why? What good would that have done?” His pupils are huge and dark in the twilight.

“You are the biggest—” I don't know what to say. Truly, I don't.
Stunned
is the mildest word that describes how I feel. “The name you gave Robin was Kay, right?”

“You—”

“Kay. Yes or no?”

He tenses and tries to pull his hand away. “Yes,” he admits.

“O-kay.” I don't seem to be able to get enough air. “Well, Sam, we are going to continue on our way home, now, aren't we? Because who we were before we came here doesn't make any difference to where we are now, does it?”

His expression is impossible to read in the darkness. “You must be Vhora—”

I nearly slap him. Instead, I reach out with the index finger of my free hand and touch his lips. “Home first. Then we talk,” I tell him, stomach still churning, aghast at my own stupidity and willful blindness.
Okay, so I walked right into this one.
And I think I just sprained my brain.
Now what?

He sighs. “All right.” He still doesn't use my name. But he turns to shine the flashlight ahead of us. And that's when I see the outline of the door in the opposite wall.

IT'S
funny how the more we travel the less we see.

Traveling via T-gates, we avoid the intervening points between the nodes because the gate is actually a hole in the structure of space, and in a very real sense there are no intervening points. And it's not much different in a car. You get in, you tell the zombie where to take you, and he steps on the gas. Not that there's a machine under the bonnet that clatteringly detonates liquid distilled from ancient fossilized biomass (just a compact gateway generator and a sound effects unit), but it feels the same, in terms of your interaction with your surroundings.

Meanwhile, outside the cars and the corridors and the gates and the head games we deny playing with each other, there's a real universe. And sometimes it smacks you in the face.

Like now. I have known all along, in an abstract kind of way, that we're living in a series of roughly rectangular terrain features laid out on the curved inner surface of several huge colony cylinders, spinning to
provide centripetal acceleration (a substitute for gravity), in orbit around who-knows-what brown dwarf stars. The sky is a display screen, the wind is air-conditioning, the road tunnels are a necessary part of the illusion, and if you go for a walk in the overgrown back lot you'll find a steep hill or cliff that you can't climb because it goes vertical only a few meters up. I haven't given much thought to how it's all stitched together, other than to assume there are T-gates in each road tunnel.
But what if there's another way out?

I clutch his hand. “Stop! Turn your flashlight back. Yes, there, right there.”

“What is it?” he asks.

“Let's see.” I tug him toward it. “Come on, I need the light.”

The tunnel walls are made of smoothly curved slabs of concrete set edge to edge, forming a hollow tube maybe eight meters in diameter. The road is a flat sheet of asphalt, its edges meeting the walls of the tube just under the halfway point up its sides. (Now that I think about it, what could be running under the road deck? It might be solid, but then again, there could be just about anything down there.) What I've noticed is a rectangular groove in the opposite wall. Close up I can see it's about a meter wide and two meters high, a plain metal panel sunk into one side of the tunnel. There's no sign of any handle or lock except for a hole a few millimeters in diameter drilled halfway up it, just beside one edge.

“Give me the flashlight.”

“Here.” He passes it without argument. I get as close to the wall as I can and shine the light into the crack. Nothing, no sign of hinges or anything. I crouch down and shine it into the hole. Nothing there, either. “Hmm.”

“What is it?” he asks anxiously.

“It's a door. Can't say more than that.” I straighten up. “We can't do anything about it right now. Let's go home and think about this.”

“But if we go home, we won't be able to talk!” In the dim light of the flashlight, his eyes look very white. “They'll overhear everything.”

“They don't see everything,” I reassure him. “Come on, let's go home. This afternoon I want you to mow the lawn.”

“But I—”

“The lawn mower is in the garage,” I continue implacably. “Along with other things.”

“But—”

“If they're not waiting for us when we get home, they're not monitoring the tunnels, Sam. Noticed your netlink recently? No? Well, we don't seem to have lost any points just now. There are gaps in the surveillance coverage. I think I know somewhere else they're not monitoring, and you ought to know we're not the only people who want out.”

I feel safe telling him that much, even though if they brainscoop me and feed me to Curious Yellow right now, it'll take down three of us: me and Sam and Janis. Kay may be in denial right now but she—
No, you've got to keep thinking of him as Sam,
I tell myself—isn't, I think, going to sell me to the bad guys. I am pretty sure I can read Sam well enough now to know what's bugging him. It's funny how I was in lust with Kay but couldn't tell if I trusted her. Now I trust Sam, but I doubt I'll ever fuck him again. Life is strange, isn't it? “You
do
want out, don't you?” I ask.

“Yes.” He sounds tremulous.

“Then you're going to have to trust me for a little bit longer because I don't have an escape plan yet.” I squeeze his hand. “But I'm working on it.”

Together, we walk toward the light.

THAT
afternoon Sam changes into jeans and a T-shirt and mows the lawn. I'm in the garage wearing overalls and safety goggles, because I've made a mold from the plaster of paris dies and I'm pouring solder into it, casting a lead copy of the key to Fiore's cabinet of curiosities. The lead key won't turn in the lock, but it'll do okay as a template for the engraving disk and the small bar of brass I've got waiting.