Glasshouse (40 page)

The score system and the experimental protocols are a real obstacle to us: For all we know, half the population of YFH-polity could be cell members of one faction or another, blundering around in the dark, unwilling to risk revealing themselves. But unless we can somehow kick over the superstructure of artifice that the cabal have established, we won't be able to link up with our potential allies and identify our real enemies. Divide and conquer: You know it makes sense.

I get home in due course, by way of the hardware store. Sam is absent, so I go straight into the garage to see what I can do. This isn't the time for recrimination, but I'm really pissed at myself. I was going to get rid of this stuff! If nothing else, I found making historic weapons fascinating. I may end up doing it as a hobby, when all this is over, if there's scope for such luxuries.

Still, I guess I won't be needing the crossbow now. Or the sword I was trying to temper. Sanni and I have got a sterile assembler with full military scope. We left it cooking last night, slowly and laboriously building a stockpile of polynitrohexose bricks. Making weapons by A-gate is a slow process, and the higher the energy density the longer it takes, so we compromised and opted for chempowered weapons. The first batch of machine pistols will be ready when we go in to work tomorrow. Which leads to the next logical question—where's my Faraday cage bag gotten to in this pile?

I'm hopping around on top of a pile of scattered steel bar stock and spilled screwdrivers, cursing up a blue streak and clutching my left foot when some change in the light alerts me to the fact that the garage door is open. “What the fuck—”

“Reeve?”

“Fuck!”
I howl. “Shit. Dropped my hammer and—”

“Reeve? What's going on?”

I force myself to calm down. “I dropped my hammer and it landed on this pile of bar stock and it bounced on my toe.” I hop some more. The pain is beginning to subside. “The hammer is evil and must be punished.”

“The hammer?”
He pauses. “Have you been drinking?”

“Not yet.” I lean against the wall and experimentally put my foot on the floor. “Ouch. I just decided to turn over a new—heh—leaf again. A girl needs a hobby and all that.” I raise an eyebrow.

He looks at me skeptically. “Bad day at the office?”

“It's always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place.”

He frowns. “What's this about a hobby?”

“Extreme metalworking, or something like that. Have you seen my
copy of
The Swordsmith's Assistant
? I was going to throw it out when I wasn't feeling myself, but I never got round to it.”

You can almost see the light come on above his head. “Reeve? Is that you?”

“I had a crap day at the office, too. Reading poetry out of boredom, you know? ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a big fat man who wasn't there; he wasn't there again today: inside my head he'll have to stay.' Ogden Nashville. Apparently, the ancients seem to have liked him for some reason. C'mon, let's go and round up some supper.”

Sam retreats back into the house ahead of me, lips moving soundlessly as he turns it over in his head. I
have
been reading poetry at work, I just hope my improvised doggerel gets through. (Poetry really gums up conversational monitoring systems. Parsing metaphor and emotional states is an AI-complete problem.)

We end up in the kitchen. “Were you thinking about cooking again?” Sam asks cautiously. Thinking back to days past, I suspect he wasn't too enthusiastic about being subjected to some of my experiments.

“Let's just order a pizza instead, hmm? And a flask of wine.”

“Why?” He stares at me.

“Do you have to turn every suggestion for what to do of an evening into an impromptu therapy session?”

He shrugs. “Just asking.” He begins to turn away.

I grab his shoulder. “Don't do that.”

He turns back sharply, looking surprised. “What?”

“ ‘Last night I met upon the stair, a big fat man who wasn't there; he wasn't there again today: inside my head he'll have to stay' . . . I haven't been myself lately, Sam, but I'm feeling
a lot better
today.” I frown at him, willing the words to sink in.

“Oh, you mean . . .”

“Shh!” I hold up a warning finger. “The walls have ears.”

Sam's eyes widen, and he begins to pull away from me. I grab at his shoulder, hard, then step in close and wrap my arms around him. He tries to push back, but I lean my face against his shoulder. “We need to talk,” I whisper.

“About what?” he whispers back. But at least he stops pushing.

“What's going on.” I lick his earlobe, and he jolts as if I've stuck a live wire in it.

“Don't
do
that!” he hisses.

“Why not?” I ask, amused. “Afraid you might enjoy it?”

“But we, they—”

“I'm going to order food. While we're eating, let's keep things light, okay? Afterward we'll go upstairs. I've got a trick or two to show you.
For avoiding eavesdroppers
.” I add in a whisper:
“Smile, please.”

“Won't it be obvious?” He's lowered his arms and is holding me loosely around the waist. I shiver because I've been wanting him to do that so badly for the past week—no, let's not go there.

“No it won't be. They use low-level monitors to track normal behavior. They call in high-end monitors only if we act funny. So don't act funny.”

“Oh.” I look up as he looks down for a startled instant, and I kiss him. He tastes of sweat and a faint, musty aroma of dust and paperwork. A moment passes, then he responds enthusiastically. “This is normal?” he asks.

“Whoa! Dinner first.” I laugh, pulling back.

“Dinner first.” He looks at me with a dark, serious expression.

I phone for a pizza and a couple of glass jars of wine, and while Sam heads for the living room, I try to catch my breath. Things are moving too fast for comfort, and I'm suddenly having to deal with a mass of conflicted emotions at a time when all I was wanting to do was recruit another dissatisfied inmate to the campaign. The thing is, Sam and I have too much history for anything between us to be simple—even though we haven't actually done very much together. We haven't had
time
, and Sam's got big body-image issues, and then she/me nearly fucked everything between us completely while under the influence of the pernicious Dr. Hanta—oh, hindsight is a wonderful tool, isn't it? Thinking about it, Sam's dissatisfaction and passivity has been a running sore between us, and I half suspect it took my apparent co-option to kick him into doing something about it.

I feel guilty as I remember what I was thinking at the time.
I can surrender
 . . . yes, and they'll make my life a living hell, won't they? Did I
really want to hand complete control over my life to the likes of Fiore, Yourdon, and Hanta? I don't think I explicitly intended to do that, but it amounted to the same thing. It feels like a moment of cowardice in my own past, a
voluntary
moment of cowardice, and I feel oddly dirty because of it. Because it's not far out of my normal character to feel that way inclined—Hanta didn't rebuild her/me, she just tweaked a few weightings in my mind map. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” in spades. And Sam got to see that side of me.
Ick.

The closet bings for attention and I take the pizza tray and wine out of it. On my way through to the living room I kick my shoes off, strewing them in the hallway. “Sam?” He turns round. He's nesting in the sofa again, the television turned to some sports channel. “Turn the volume up.”

He raises an eyebrow at me but does as I ask, and I sit down next to him. “Here. Garlic and tofu with deep-fried lemon chicken steak.” I open the box and pull out a slice, then hold it in front of his mouth. “Eat?”

“What is this?”

“I want to feed you.” I lean against him and hold the pizza in front of his face, just out of reach. “Go on. You're begging for it really, aren't you?”

“Gaah.” He leans forward and takes a bite at it—I try to pull my hand back, but I'm just too late and he gets a mouthful. I laugh and lean closer and find his arm is around my shoulders. Chewing: “You. Are. Intolerable.”

“Manipulative,” I suggest. “Annoying.”

“All of the above?”

“Yes, all of it by turns.” I feed him another mouthful, then change my mind about letting him have the whole slice and eat the rest of it myself.

“Every time I think I understand you, you change the rules,” he complains. “Give me another . . .”

“Not my fault. I don't make the rules.”

“Who does?”

I point a finger at the ceiling, waggle it about. “Remember our chat in the library?” After I came out to Janis, last Tuesday, she phoned Sam and asked him to come visit. He was very surprised to see me-as-Fiore,
almost as much as when we showed him the basement and the A-gate. “Remember my face?” He nods, looking dubious. “Janis and I sorted everything out. Settled the slight difference of opinions. I'm feeling a lot better now, and less inclined to give up on things.”

His arm tightens. Warm, comforting, presence. “But why?”

I take a deep breath and offer him another slice of pizza. Better keep it short. At this rate he's going to eat it all. “You don't want to live like this.”

“But I—” He stops.

“Do you?” I prod him.

He looks at me. “Watching you, this past week—” He shakes his head. “I'd
love
to be able to settle in like that.” He shakes his head again, underscoring the ironic tone in his voice. “What alternative is there?”

“We're not supposed to talk about where we came from.” I pause to chew for a moment. “And we can't go back.” I flick a warning glance his way. “But we can make ourselves more comfortable here if we rearrange our priorities.”
Will he get it?

Sam sighs. “If only we could do that.” He glances down at his lap.

“I've got a new priority for you,” I say, my heart beating faster.

“Really?”

“Yes.” I put the pizza box down and plaster myself against him. “We can start right here by you picking me up and carrying me upstairs to the bathroom.”

“The
bathroom
?”

“Yep.” I kiss him again, and suddenly I'm not sure this is a good idea at all. “Where we're going to get in the shower together, and wash each other, and talk. Can't go to bed smelling of office work, can we?”

“Shower—” His monosyllables aren't his most appealing attribute: I kiss him into silence, shivering with alarm at my own responses.

“Now.”

THINGS
do not go according to plan.

The plan seemed simple enough. Get Sam on board again. Doing that, holding a proper conversation with him, was another matter with the ever-present risk of being overheard. But if you disguise your
suspicious activities as something expected of you, while only the dumb listener bots are online, you've got a good chance of doing it undetected. The dumb listeners aren't good for much more than keyword monitoring, and the cabal is sufficiently short on spare bodies that they can't monitor everything we say all the time.

So call me naive, if you like. I figured that as a married couple, one of us pretending to seduce the other and then dragging them into a shower—lots of nice white noise to confuse audio tracking, sheets of water to make it hard to lip-read, and an excuse to stand really close together—would be a pretty good way of evading surveillance.

What I didn't consider was that when I stand too close to Sam my skin tingles, and I feel warm and needy in intimate places. And what I especially didn't consider is that Sam is horribly conflicted but has corresponding urges. He's human, too, and we both have certain needs, which we've been trying to ignore for much too long.

Sam does as I ask him, and about halfway up the stairs I realize that I'm going to lose control if we do this. I nearly tell him to stop, but for some reason my mouth doesn't want to open. He puts me down on the bathroom carpet and stands too close. “What now?” he asks, a quiet tension in his voice.

“We, um, undress.” Without realizing quite how, I find my hands are already working on his trouser belt. When I feel him begin to unbutton my blouse, I shudder, and not with fear. “Shower.”

“This isn't such a good—”

“Shut up.”

“You'll become, uh, pregnant.”

“Won't.”
Worry about it later
. I run my hand around his back, feeling the thin man-fur that runs up the base of his spine, and I lean closer. “Not worried anymore.”

“But.” I feel him unzip my skirt. Hands on my thighs. “Surely.”

I kiss him to make him stop. We're down to underwear. “Shower.
Now.
” My teeth are chattering with a rising tide of need that threatens to wreck what's left of my self-control.