Glasshouse (41 page)

We're in the shower cubicle, wearing our underwear, and I dial the pressure up to maximum and the temperature to fusion. His tongue—
garlic and honey and a hint of something else, of him. Arms around each other, we stand under the spray, and I feel the tension in his back. He's got an erection, of course. Why am I still wearing anything? Moments later I'm not. And a moment after that I'm crunched against the wall, my knees drawn up, gasping at the size of him inside me.

“You want to talk . . .”

The entire universe is in here. I wrap my arms around him and latch on to his lips, hungrily. I
want
to talk, but right now I've got higher priorities.

“Opening ceremony.”

“Yes?”

“On a MASucker. Yes!”

“Yes . . .”

“Only one T-gate out. Six gigs to next star system. If we break connection, bad guys can't pay up on scorefiles. Breaks carrot side of dictatorship, no payoff for compliance. Yes . . .”

“Overthrow the—the?”

He heaves like the wild sea. I'm lost on him, abandoned. At first when I was Reeve, the idea of pregnancy horrified me. Then Hanta tweaked something, and it was no big deal. Now I just don't
care
anymore: It's survivable, and if it's the cost of having Sam right now, I'll pay. I want to focus, to plan, but we've gotten carried away. Sam is pounding away with no subtlety, and he knows better, which means he's lost on the ocean, too. If we can find each other and cling together through the night, who knows? “Sam, I, I want you to—”

“Oh!” A moment later, a quieter “oh!” And a sensation of spreading warmth that drives me to grind against him until everything goes away, and I become the ocean for a few eternal seconds.

THINGS
don't go according to plan, but they go strangely well. After the first mad flush of lust, we collapse in the shower, then soap each other off thoroughly. Sam doesn't cringe away from my hands this time but seems quiet, thoughtful. I kiss him, and he responds. After a while I begin to feel as if my skin's about to fall off: I can barely see the
bathroom for steam. “Let's dry off and go to bed,” I suggest, feeling another little jolt of worry.

“Okay.” Sam turns the shower head to OFF and opens the cubicle door. It's cold out there. I shiver, and for a wonder he wraps his arms around me.

“Are you feeling comfortable?” I ask hesitantly. “I mean, with this?”

He thinks for a moment. “I'm comfortable with you.”

“But—”

He kisses the back of my head. “It's you. That makes it easier.”

There's nothing left to divide us: We know exactly how fucked up we are. We've had such disastrous misunderstandings already that there's nothing left to come. Sam freaks at the idea of being human and male and large? Yes. I have problems with the idea of pregnancy, and there're no contraceptives in YFH-Polity? Sure. We're past all that. It's all going to be very simple from now on.

So we towel each other dry and I take his hand and together we go to the bedroom, where presently we make love again, tenderly and slowly.

THE
next morning, I stumble downstairs late, disheveled and happy, to find there is a letter waiting for me on the front hall carpet. It's like a bucket of cold water in the face. I pick it up and carry the piece of paper into the kitchen and read it while the coffee machine gurgles and chugs to itself.

To: Mrs. Reeve Brown

From: The Polity Administration Committee

 

Dear Mrs. Brown

It is now four months since your arrival in YFH-Polity. In this time, numerous changes have taken place in our little community, and we will shortly be commencing Phase Two of the experiment in which you agreed to participate.

Accordingly, may I extend to you an invitation to our first Town Meeting, to be held at City Hall on Sunday morning in place of the
regularly scheduled Sunday Service. The meeting will explain the forthcoming Phase Two changes, and will be followed by a service of thanksgiving, to be conducted by the Very Reverend Dr. H. Yourdon in the cathedral.

 

Yours truly . . .

This puts a new perspective on things, doesn't it? I shake my head, then take the two coffee mugs back upstairs. On my way I snag the identical-looking letter with Sam's name on it.

“What do you think?” he asks, when he's had time to read it.

“I think it's exactly what it sounds like.” I shrug. “Things are getting bigger, new faces, new scenery—this ‘cathedral' they're opening! You can't run a town the way you run a parish of a couple of hundred people, can you? No way can everybody know each other. So they'll need a different intergroup score mechanism to keep people behaving themselves. To account for the anonymity of cities, the sight of familiar strangers.”

His cheek twitches. “I'm not sure I like the sound of that.”

“Oh, it can't be that bad,” I assure him, rolling my eyes.

“Can't it?”

I nod. “No.” A thought strikes me. “Listen, can you get away from the office for lunch?”

“What, you mean . . . ?”

“Yes. Drop by the library about one o'clock, and we'll go eat together.” I smile at him. “How does that sound?”

“You want me to—” He works it out. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Good.” I lean close and kiss him on the cheek. “Be seeing you.”

I arrive at work fifteen minutes early, clutching my bag—not, in and of itself, an unusual variation—but the place is unlocked because Janis is already in. “Janis?” I poke my head round the office door.

She's not there. I sigh and head for the depository.

Down in the basement I find Janis loading magazines into box files. “Give me a hand,” she says tensely. “If Fiore or Yourdon turns up while we're here . . .”

“Check.” The magazines are vaguely banana-shaped and don't fit very well, but I can get four or five in each file box before I put them back on the shelf. Janis has six machine pistols lined up before her on a chair, still in their synthesis gel capsules. “Did you get the letter?” I ask.

“Yes. So did Norm.” Her husband—I don't know much about him. “They're pulling things forward. Once they institutionalize the police and stop relying on isolation to do their work for them, we're in trouble.”

“Agreed.” I pause. “Ladies' sewing club?” That was my idea, when I was Robin, but Janis fronted it, and after my one meeting with them while I was being Reeve, I guess she's going to have to sort them out.

“I invited them here for lunch. Hurry up!” She's very twitchy this morning.

“Okay, I'm hurrying.” I get the last of the magazines stashed in box files on the shelves, for all the world looking like innocent hard copy files of Curious Yellow. “I invited Sam round. I think he's on message.”

“Oh, good. I was hoping you two would sort things out.” A brief smile. “Now let's go upstairs. We've got a library to open before we can overthrow the government.”

SUBTLETY
isn't going to get us very far at this point, so Janis orders up a delivery of sandwiches from a catering outfit working from the back of a cafe, and when the ladies' sewing circle and revolutionary command committee shows up, we lock the front door, hang out the
CLOSED
sign, and pile downstairs.

“We've got one day to organize this,” says Janis. “Reeve, you want to summarize the situation?”

Heads turn. From their expressions, I don't think they were expecting me to be here. I smile. “This place—this polity—was originally designed as a glasshouse, a military prison. It works too well; the YFH cabal figured that a prison doesn't just keep people
in
, it keeps other people
out
. So they set it up as a research lab, what we're now seeing.” She gestures at the shelves of box files on the back wall. “They're working on developing a new type of cognitive dictatorship, one spread via Curious Yellow, and they're breeding up a population of carriers for it. When we get to the end of the ‘experiment' time-scale they're planning on reintegrating everyone into general society—and using your children to spread it.” I see Janis's hand move unconsciously to her stomach. “Do you want to help them?”

A mutter goes round the room, growing quickly: “No!”

“I'm glad to hear that,” Janis says drily. “Now, this raises the question—what is to be done? Reeve and I have been working on an answer. Anyone want to guess?”

Sam sticks his hand up. “You're going to blow the longjump gate anchor frame,” he says calmly, “stranding us teraklicks from the nearest other human polity. And then you're going to hunt the cabal down and shoot them, find their backup networks and offline them, then jump up and down on the smoking wreckage.”

Janis smiles. “Not bad! Anyone else?”

El sticks her hand up. “Hold elections?”

Janis looks taken aback. “Something like that, I guess.” She shrugs. “But that's getting a little ahead of ourselves, isn't it? What haven't I mentioned?”

I clear my throat. “We know where the longjump gate is. Which is good news and bad news.”

“Why?” asks Helen. They're beginning to get involved, which is good, but could turn bad if Janis and I don't present them with a reasonable picture. They're not idiots, they must know that we wouldn't have brought them in on the cellar if the situation wasn't desperate.

“Reeve?” prompts Janis.

“Okay, here's the frame: We're on a MASucker that somehow got de-crewed during the censorship wars. At a guess, CY broke out during a scheduled crew shift change or something. Anyway, the polity we're in is actually a quilted patchwork of sectors spliced together by shortjump gates in all those road tunnels, but they're all in a single physical manifold aboard one ship rather than scattered across separate habs. That's why it was possible to turn it into a prison. There's only one longjump gate in or out of the MASucker, and it's stashed at one end of an armored pod on the outside of the hull with a shortjump gate at the other end of the tunnel—this is standard MASucker security, you understand. Someone outside could throw a nuke through at the ship and it would be expended outside the hull. Anyway, we first need to take and hold the shortjump gate leading to the longjump pod, then we need to trash the longjump pod.

“We need to sever communications between us and their base of operations in the surgeon-confessors' hall, then
make sure everybody knows
. Yourdon and Fiore have gotten away with running this existential dictatorship unopposed because they've got a sufficient proportion of us convinced that we're in line for a payback if we play along. Hanta gives them an ace in their hole. They don't need to worry about the payback; eventually she'll have time to just adjust everyone who drifts out of line. Once we're cut off from the outside, the cabal lose their backup and their social leverage, and we've got a straight fight. But if we don't succeed, they can just block the gates between parish sectors and mop us up in detail, one sector at a time.”

I pause to lick my lips. “I spent some time on a MASucker before the war. The door to the longjump pod was stashed near the bridge, uh, the administrative block—which would correspond to either the cathedral or City Hall in the new structure Yourdon is assembling. I did some snooping around last week, and I found where Yourdon lives. He's got a suite up on the top floor of City Hall, with security up to the eyeballs—I didn't get in, but I poked around the lower levels—and it turns out that City Hall bears a remarkable resemblance to the Captain's Lodge on the MASucker I was aboard. In which case, the T-gate to the longjump pod will be on the top floor, in a secure suite adjacent to the captain's quarters.”

I stop.

Janis stands up. “There you've got it, folks, so let's keep this simple. We all have invitations to the ceremony at City Hall the day after tomorrow. I propose that we go there. I've had the fab here”—she waves at the assembler—“turning out kits with shielded bags so you can carry them away without fear of surveillance. Reeve?”

I clear my throat. “Plan is, we take our kit along and cut loose as soon as Yourdon steps up to the front to address everyone. Team Green's job is to secure the hall, drop any armed support the bad guys have, and kill as many copies of Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta as we can find. They'll have backups or multiples running live, but if we do everything
fast
, we can stop the instances in City Hall getting word out. Meanwhile, Team Yellow will go up to the captain's—the Bishop's—quarters and blow the longjump pod right off the side of the ship. Any questions?”

Hands go up.

“Okay, here's what we'll do. El, Bernice, Helen, Priss, Morgaine, Jill, you're all on Team Green with Janis, who's in overall charge. Sam, Greg, Martin, and Liz are Team Yellow with me. I'm in charge. Team Yellow, hang around, and I'll brief you. Team Green, eat your lunch, then go back to work—come back to the library individually this afternoon or tomorrow, and Janis will sort you out, back you up, and brief you.”