Glasshouse (26 page)

My hands keep tensing and kneading the handles of my bag as if they belong to someone else. There's a carving knife in the bag, and I've sharpened the blade. It's not much of a dagger, but I'm betting that Fiore isn't much of a knife fighter. With any luck he won't notice anything, or he'll assume Yourdon is the author of my little modification to the cellar and, therefore, leave it alone. The knife is for the worst case, if I think Fiore has realized what I'm up to. It's piss poor compared to the kit I used to work with, but it's better than nothing. So I sit behind this desk like a prim and proper librarian, entertaining mad fantasies about sawing off the Priest's head with a carving knife while I wait for him to emerge from the repository.

Sweat trickles down the small of my back as I look out across the
forecourt toward the highway, watching the pattern of light and shade cast by the leaves of the cherry trees on either side of the path shift and recombine on the concrete paving stones. My head hurts as I run through my fragmentary information again. Are my intermittent disconnects hiding things from me that I need to know?

Riddle me this: Why would three missing renegade psyops specialists from the chaos that followed the fall of the Republic of Is surface inside an experiment re-enacting an historical period about which we know virtually nothing? And why would the filing cupboard at the library contain what looks like a copy of the bytecode to Curious Yellow, printed on paper? Why can't I hear the spoken words “I love you,” and why am I suffering from intermittent memory blackouts? Why is there a stand-alone A-gate in the basement, and what is Fiore doing with it? And why does Yourdon want us to have lots and lots of babies?

I don't know. But there's one thing I'm absolutely clear about: These scumsuckers used to work for Curious Yellow or one of the cognitive dictatorships, and this is all something to do with the aftermath of the censorship war. I'm here because old-me, the Machiavellian guy with the pen whittled from his own thighbone, harbored deep suspicions along these very lines. But in order to get me in through the YFH firewalls he had to erase the chunks of his memories that would give him away—and those are the very pieces of me that I need in order to understand the situation!

It's frustrating. It's also immensely worrying because there's more at risk here than simple personal danger—whether from the experimenters or the other victims. I have a faint inkling of the pain and suffering Curious Yellow caused the first time it got out, and of the terrible struggle it took to chop up the worm's Chord-type network and sterilize every single assembler. It ruptured what was once an integrated interstellar civilization, smashing it into a mess of diamond-shard polities. How
did
we stop it . . . ?

Footsteps.
It's Fiore, looking curiously self-satisfied as he heads toward the library doors.

“Finished, Father?” I call.

“Yes, that is all for today.” He inclines his head toward me, a gesture that's evidently intended to be gracious but that comes over as a pompous bob. Then his eyebrows furrow in a frown. “Ah yes, Reeve.
You
were involved in the business last night, I believe?”

My left hand tightens on the knife handle inside my bag. “Yes.” I stare him down. “Do you know what Mick was doing to Cass?”

“I know that”—something seems to occur to him, and he changes direction in midsentence—“it is a most serious thing indeed to interfere in the holy relation between husband and wife. But in
some
circumstances it may be justifiable.” He stares at me owlishly. “She was pregnant, you know.”

“And?”

He must think my expression is one of puzzlement, because he explains, “If you hadn't intervened, she might have lost the child.” He glances at his watch. “Now, you must excuse me—I have an appointment. Good day.” And he's off through the door again like a shot, leaving me watching him from behind, mouth agape with disbelief.

Why is Fiore concerned with the health of a fetus, but not about its mother being assaulted, repeatedly raped, held prisoner for weeks, maimed in such a way that she may never walk again?
Why?
He's got all the human empathy of a zombie. What's wrong with him? And why did he suddenly change his tune? I'd swear he was about to denounce what we did last night, but then he moderated his line. Fear of what the Bishop might say if he incited another near riot over the way we rescued Cass, or something else?

They want us to have lots of children. But why is that important to them? Is it something to do with Curious Yellow?

I grind my teeth until Fiore is out of sight, then I hop down from my stool, hang up the CLOSED sign, and head for the lock-up. The secret basement downstairs is as I left it except for the assembler, which is chugging to itself and gurgling as it loads feedstock or coolant or something through pipes in the floor. I guess Fiore's set it running some kind of long batch job. But checking up on it isn't why I'm down here right now—I'm here to retrieve the video cartridge from the camcorder I left running on the equipment shelf.

The camcorder is a small metal box with a lens on one side and a screen covering the other. I don't know what's going on inside it. It certainly isn't an original dark ages artifact—I've seen pictures of them in the library books—but it does the same job. Along with all the other tech artifacts in this polity, some set designer probably slaved over it for hours trying to figure out how to give it the right functionality without adding too much. They got it wrong, but not
too
wrong. The original machines used things called “tapes” or “disks,” but this one just writes everything it sees onto a memory diamond the size of a sand grain that's good for a gigasec of events.

I go sit down on the sofa to play with the 'corder. Putting my bag down next to me, I poke at the display until I've zapped back an hour or three. Then I fast-forward through darkness until the light comes on and Fiore comes in. At triple normal speed I watch as he goes over to the bookshelves and leafs through a couple of folders. I pause and zoom in to see what he was reading:
POLICY ON SEXCRIME
, followed by a glance at
FAMILIAL STABILITY INDEX
, whatever that is. Next, he trots over to the A-gate and chatters to it, gesturing at the terminal. I don't see any sign of biometric authentication, no retinal scan or anything, but he may have used a password. The gate cylinder rotates around its long axis, and he steps inside.
Fast-forward
and about a kilosecond later he steps out again, blinking. So he's just backed himself up, has he?

Back at the control terminal Fiore issues some more commands, and the gate begins chugging to itself. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, it's still doing that—just some kind of long synthesis job. He heads for the staircase and—

Shit!
I whip round and reach for my bag. The A-gate cylinder is opening.

Knife in left hand, bag in right hand. Everything is crystal clear.
Fiore suspected.
He backed himself up, then set an ambush, and I've blown it. The cylinder turns and the interior cracks into view. White light, a smell of violets and some kind of weird volatile organics, a bit of steam. There's someone/something in there, moving.

I dart forward, bag raised, knife ready to block. They're sitting up, head turning. I'll only get one chance to do this. Heart pounding, I
upend the empty shoulder bag over the head, lank black hair—fat jowls wobbling indignantly hands coming up—and I shove the knife blade up against his throat and yell,
“Freeze!”

The duplicate Fiore freezes.

“This is a knife. If you move or make a sound or try to dislodge the bag over your head, I will cut your throat. If you understand, say yes.”

His voice is muffled, but sounds almost amused. “What if I say no?”

“Then I cut your throat.” I move the knife slightly.

“Yes,” he says hurriedly.

“That's good.” I adjust my grip. “Now let me tell you something. You are thinking you have a working netlink and you can call for help. You're wrong, because netlinks work via spread spectrum, and you're wearing a Faraday cage over your head, and although it's open at the bottom you're standing in a cellar. The signal's attenuated. Do you understand?”

Pause. “There's nobody there!” He sounds slightly panicky. Clever fellow.

“I'm glad you said that because if you hadn't, I'd have cut your throat,” I tell him. “Like I said earlier, if you try and lose the bag, I'll kill you immediately.”

He's shaking. Oh, I shouldn't be enjoying this, but I am.
For everything you've done to us I ought to kill you a hundred times over. What have I turned into?
I'm almost shaking with the intensity of—it's like hunger, the yearning. “Listen to these instructions. I will shortly tell you to stand up. When I do so, I want you to
slowly
rise, keeping your arms by your sides. If at any point you can't feel the knife, you'd better freeze, because if you keep moving, I'll kill you. When you're on your feet, you will step fifty centimeters forward, then slowly move your hands behind your back. You will then lace your fingers together. Now, slowly, stand up.”

Fiore, to give him his due, has a cool enough head to do exactly as I tell him with no hesitation and no hysterics. Or maybe he just knows exactly what he can expect if he doesn't obey. He can't be under any illusions about how hated he is, can he?

“Forward one pace, then hands behind back,” I say. He steps forward. I have to stretch to keep the knife around his neck, but I reach
down with my free hand and follow his right arm round. Now is the moment of danger—if he were to kick straight back while blocking with his left shoulder he could hurt me badly and probably get away. But I'm betting Fiore knows very little indeed about serious one-on-one physical mayhem, and the bag over his head should keep him disoriented long enough for me to do this. I step to one side, reach into my pocket with my right hand until I find what I'm after, then squeeze the contents of the tube over his hands and fingers. Cyanoacrylate glue—the librarian's field-expedient handcuffs. “Don't move your hands,” I tell him.

“What is it—” He stops. Of course he can't help moving his hands and the stuff flows into small cracks. It's less viscous than water but it polymerizes in seconds. I move the knife round to the side of his neck and examine my handiwork. He might be able to get his hands apart if he's willing to leave skin behind, but he won't be able to take me by surprise while he's doing it.

“Okay, we're now going to take three slow steps forward. Yes, you can shuffle. I'll tell you when to stop—easy, easy, stop!”

I stop him in the middle of an open patch of floor. I need to think. He's breathing hoarsely inside the improvised hood, and he stinks of fear-sweat. Any moment now, he'll realize that I can't let him live, then he'll be uncontrollable. I've got maybe twenty seconds—

“When my husband says * * * I can't hear him,” I say conversationally. “What does that mean?”

“It means you're infected with Curious Yellow.” He sounds oddly placid.

“You ran off a duplicate of yourself as a guard to see who was coming in here,” I tell him. “That was smart. Were you afraid I was using the A-gate?”

“Yes,” he says tersely.

“It's immune to the strain I'm infected with, isn't it?” I ask.

I can feel his muscles tensing. “Yes,” he says reluctantly.

“And Yourdon didn't insist it was locked to your netlinks?” I ask, tensing as I gamble everything on the right answer.

He doesn't give it to me verbally, but he grunts and begins to pull his hands apart and I
know
I'm right, but I also know I've got about three
seconds left. So I step in close behind him and run my right hand down his chest, caressing, and he freezes when I get to his crotch. A moment of relief—he's anatomically orthohuman, and male. I grab his balls and squeeze viciously. He jackknifes forward, speechless and gasping, almost knocking me over with the violence of it, and the bag goes flying. But that's okay, because a moment later I grab his hair and while he's preoccupied with the terrible breath-sucking pain, I pull his head up and run the knife blade smoothly through his carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, just below the hyoid bone.

See, the difference between me and Fiore is that I don't enjoy killing, but I know how to do it. Whereas Fiore gets off on control fantasies and watching his score whores lynch lovers, but it didn't occur to him to tell the assembler to restore him holding a weapon, and it took him almost twenty seconds to realize that I was going to have to kill him regardless of anything he did or said. Basically, Fiore is your bureaucrat-type killer who runs push-button experiments by remote control, while I'm—

I blank again.

THE
civil war lasts two gigasecs, nearly sixty-four years by the reckoning of long-lost Urth. It's probably still raging in some far-flung corners of human space. When the longjump network was shattered in an attempt to firewall the damage, it split the interstellar net into disjoint domains separated by lightspeed communications lag. Isolated pockets of Curious Yellow are probably still running, out beyond the liberated light cone, in the eternal darkness and cold—just as there may be outposts of free posthumanity who dropped off the net when the Republic of Is disintegrated. Redaction, the deletion of memory, is Curious Yellow's deadliest weapon—some of those polities might have been deliberately forgotten, their proximal T-gate endpoints dropped into stars and the memories of their existence erased from everyone who used an infected A-gate. The true horror of Curious Yellow is that we have no way of knowing how much we have lost. Entire genocidal wars could have been wiped from our memories as if they never happened. Perhaps this
explains the worm's peculiar vendetta against practicing historians and archaeologists. It, or its creator, is afraid we will remember something . . .