Glasshouse

3. Nuclear

TAKING a backup is very easy—it's dealing with the aftereffects that's hard.

You need to find an A-gate with backup capability (which just means that it has a booth big enough to hold a human body and isn't specifically configured for special applications, like a military gate). There's one in every rehab apartment, used for making copies of furnishings and preparing dinner as well as deconstructing folks right down to the atomic level, mapping them, and reassembling them again. To make a backup snapshot you just sit down in the thing and tell your netlink to back you up. It's not instantaneous (it works by brute-force nanoscale disassembly, not wormhole magic), but you won't notice the possibly disturbing sensation of being buried in blue factory goop, eaten, digitized, and put back together again because your netlink will switch you off as soon as it starts to upload your neural state vector into the gate's buffer.

I'm nervous about the time gap. I don't like the idea of being offline for any length of time while an unknown party is trying to hijack my identity. On the other hand, not to make a backup, complete with my current suspicions, would be foolhardy—if they succeed in nailing me, I want my next copy to know exactly what the score is. (And to know about Kay.) There really isn't any way around it, so I take precautions. Before I get into the booth, I use the A-gate to run up some innocuous items that can be combined to make a very nasty booby trap. After installing it, I take a deep breath and stand still for nearly a minute, facing the open door of the booth. Just to steady my nerves, you understand.

I get inside. "Back me up," I say. The booth extrudes a seat, and I sit down, then the door seals and flashes up a WORKING sign. I just have time to see blue milky liquid swirling in through the vents at floor level before everything goes gray and I feel extremely tired.

Now, about those aftereffects. What should happen is that after a blank period you wake up feeling fuzzy-headed and a bit moist. The door opens, and you go and shower off the gel residue left by the gate. You've lost maybe a thousand seconds, during which time a membrane studded with about a thousand trillion robotic disassembly heads the size of large protein molecules has chewed through you one nanometer at a time, stripping you down to molecular feedstock, recording your internal state vector, and putting a fresh copy back together behind it as it scans down the tank. But you don't notice it because you're brain-dead for the duration, and when the door to the A-gate reopens, you can just pick up your life where you left it before the backup. You naturally feel a bit vague when you come up again, but it's still you. Your body is—

Wrong.

I try to stand up too fast, and my knees both give way under me. I slump against the wall of the booth, feeling dizzy, and as I hit the wall I realize I'm too short . I'm still at the stage of feeling rather than thinking. The next thing I know I'm sitting down again and the booth is uncomfortably narrow because my hips are too wide and I'm too short in the trunk as well. There's something else, too. My arms feel—odd, not wrong, just different. I lift a hand and put it in my lap, and my thighs feel too big, and then there's something else. Oh , I realize, sliding my hand between my legs, I'm not male. No, I'm female . I raise my other hand, explore my chest. Female and orthohuman .

This in itself is no big deal. I've been a female orthohuman before; I'm not sure when or for how long, and it's not my favorite body plan, but I can live with it for the time being. What makes me freak and stand upagain, so suddenly I get black spots in my visual field and nearly fall over, is the corollary. Someone tampered with my backup! And then the double take: I am the backup. Somewhere a different version of me has died.

"Shit," I say aloud, leaning against the frosted door of the cubicle. My voice sounds oddly unfamiliar, an octave higher and warmer. "And more shit."

I can't stay in here forever, but whatever I'm going to find out when I open the door can't be good. Steeling myself against a growing sense of dread, I hit the door latch. It's about then that I realize I'm not wearing anything. That's no surprise—my manifold jacket was made from T-gates, and T-gates are one of the things that an A-gate can't fabricate—but my leggings have gone, too, and they were ordinary fabric. I've been well and truly hacked, I realize with a growing sense of dread. The door slides open, admitting a gust of air that feels chilly against my damp skin. I blink and glance around. It looks like my apartment, but there's a blank white tablet on the low desk beside the chair, the booby trap has gone, and the door is back in the wall. When I examine it I see that it's the wrong color, and the chair isn't the one I ran up on the apartment gate.

I look at the tablet. The top surface says, in flashing red letters, READ ME NOW.

"Later." I glance at the door, shudder, then go into the bathroom. Whoever's got me is clearly not in any hurry, so I might as well take my time and get my head together before I confront them.

The bathrooms in the rehab suites are interchangeable, white ceramic eggs with water and air jets and directionless lighting that can track you wherever you go and drainage ducts and foldaway appliances that live in the walls. I dial the shower up to hot and high and stand under it, shivering with fear, until my skin feels raw and clean.

I've been hacked, and there's nothing I can do about it except jump through whatever hoops they've laid out for me and hope they kill me cleanly at the end or let me go. Resistance, as they say, is futile. If they've hacked my backup so deeply that they can force a new body plan on me, then they can do anything they want. Mess with my head, run multiple copies of me, access my private keys, even make a zombie body and use it to do whatever they want it to do while masquerading as me. If they can wake me up in the A-gate of another rehab apartment, then they've trapped my state vector. I could run away a thousand times, be tortured to death a hundredfold—and I'd still wake up back in that booth, a prisoner once more.

Identity theft is an ugly crime.

Before I leave the bathroom, I take a good look at my new body in the mirror. After all, I haven't seen it before, and I've got a nasty feeling it'll tell me something about the expectations of my captors.

It turns out that I'm orthohuman and female all right, but not obtrusively so. I think I'm probably fifteen centimeters shorter than I was, axisymmetrical, with good skin and hair. It's a pretty good-looking body, but they haven't forced exaggerated sexual characteristics on me—I'm not a doll. I've got wide hips, a narrow waist, breasts that are bigger than I'd have gone for, high cheekbones and full lips, skin that's paler than I like. My new forehead is clear and high, above Western-style blue eyes with no fold—they look oddly round and staring, almost kawaii—and brown hair that's currently plastered across my shoulders. My shoulders? It's that long. Why do I have long hair? My fingernails and toenails are short. I frown. It's oddly inconsistent. I stretch my arms up over my head and get a nasty shock. I'm weak —I've got no upper-body musculature to speak of. I probably couldn't hold a saber at arm's length for half a kilosec without dropping it.

So, in summary, I'm short and weak and unarmed, but cute if your sense of aesthetics centers on old-fashioned body plans. "How reassuring," I snarl at my reflection. Then I go back into the bedroom, sit down, and look at the tablet. READ ME NOW, it says. "Read to me," I tell it, and the words morph into new shapes:

Dear Participant

Thank you for consenting to take part in the Yourdon-Fiore-Hanta experimental polity project. (If you do not recall giving this consent, tap HERE to see the release form you signed after your last backup.) We hope you will enjoy your stay in the polity. We have prepared an orientation lecture for you. The next presentation will be conducted by Dr. Fiore in 1294 seconds. To assist with maintaining the correct setting, please attend wearing the historically authentic costume supplied (see carton under chair). There will be a cheese and wine reception afterward at which you will be given a chance to meet your fellows in the current intake of participants.

I blink. Then I reread the tablet, frantically searching for alternate meanings. I didn't sign that! Did I? Looks like I did—either that or I've been hacked, but my having signed the release is more likely. I tap the link, and it's there in black and white and red, and the sixteen-digit number works when I feed the fingerprint to my netlink. I signed a contract, and it says here I'm committed to living in YFH-Polity under an assumed identity, name of Reeve, for the next . . . hundred megaseconds? Three years? During which time my civil rights will be limited by prior mutual agreement—not extending to my core sentient rights, they're not allowed to torture or brainwash me—and I can't be discharged from my obligation without the consent of the experimenters.

I find myself hyperventilating, as I oscillate between weak-kneed relief that I'm not a victim of identity theft and apprehension at the magnitude of what I've signed up for. They have the right to unilaterally expel me (Well, that's all right, then, I just have to piss them off if I decide I want out) , and they have the right to dictate what body I can live in! It's a ghastly picture, and in among the draconian provisions I see that I also agreed to let them monitor my every action. Ubiquitous surveillance. I've just checked into a dark ages panopticon theme hotel! What can possibly have possessed me to—oh. Buried in the small print is a rider titled "Compensatory Benefits."

Aha.

Firstly, the Scholastium itself guarantees the experimenters against all indemnities and will back any claims. So if they violate the limited rights they've granted me, I can sue them, and they've got nearly infinitely deep pockets. Secondly, the remuneration is very satisfactory. I do a brief calculation and work out that what they've promised to pay me for three Urth years in the rat run is probably enough to see me in comfort for at least thrice that long once I get out.

I begin to calm down. I haven't been hacked; I did this to myself of my own free will, and there are some good sides to the picture. My other self hasn't completely taken leave of his senses. It occurs to me that it's going to be very hard for the bad guys, whoever they are, to get at me inside an experimental polity that's only accessible via a single T-gate guarded by a firewall and the Scholastium's shock troops.

I'm supposed to act in character for the historical period we're pretending to live in, wearing a body that doesn't resemble me, using an alias and a fake background identity, and not discussing the outside world with anyone else in the study. That means any assassin who comes after me is going to start with huge handicaps, like not knowing what I look like, not being allowed to ask, and not being able to take any weapons along. If I'm lucky, the me who isn't in here will be able to take care of business within the next hundred megs, and when I come out and we merge our deltas I'll be home free and rich. And if he doesn't succeed, well, I can see if they'll let me keep this assumed identity when I leave . . .

I pull the carton of clothes out from under the bed and wrinkle my nose. They don't smell bad or anything, but they're a bit odd—historically accurate, the tablet said. There's a strange black tunic, very plain, that leaves my arms and lower legs bare, and a black jacket to wear over it. For footwear there's a pair of shiny black pumps, implying a strongish grav zone, but with weird, pointed toes and heels that converge to a spike three or four centimeters long. The underwear is simple enough, but I take a while to figure out that the filmy gray hose go on my legs. Which, I notice, are hairless—in fact, I've got no hair except on my head. So my body's ortho, but not undomesticated. I shake my head.

The weirdest thing of all is that the fabric is dumb—too stupid to repel dirt or eat skin bacteria, much less respond to style updates or carry on a conversation. And the costume comes with no pockets, not even an inconspicuous T-gate concealed in the jacket lining. When did they invent them? I wonder. I'll have to find an outfit with more brains later. I put everything on and check myself out in the bathroom mirror. My hair is going to be a problem—I search the place, but all I can find is an elastic loop to pull it through. It'll have to do until I can cut it back to a sensible length.

Which leaves me with nothing to do now but go see this orientation lecture and "cheese and wine reception." So I pick up my tablet, open the door, and go.

THERE'S a wide but narrow room on the far side of the door. I've just come out of one of twelve doors that open off three of the walls, which are painted flat white. The floor is tiled in black and white squares of marble. The fourth wall, opposite my door, is paneled in what I recognize after a moment as sheets of wood—your actual dead trees, killed and sliced into planks—with two doors at either side that are propped open. I guess that's where the lecture is due to be held, although why they can't do it in netspace is beyond me. I walk over to the nearest open door, annoyed to discover that my shoes make a nasty clacking sound with every step.

There are seven or eight other people already inside a big room, with several rows of uncomfortable-looking chairs drawn up before a podium that stands before a white-painted wall. We—I've got to get used to the idea that I'm a voluntary participant, even if I don't feel like one right now—are a roughly even mix of orthohuman males and females, all in historical costume. The costume seems to follow an intricate set of rules about who's allowed to wear what garments, and everybody is wearing a surprising amount of fabric, given that we're in a controlled hab. Those of us who are female have been given one-piece dresses or skirts that fall to the knee, in combination with tops that cover our upper halves. The men are wearing matching jacket and trouser combinations over shirts with some sort of uncomfortable-looking collar and scarf arrangement at the neck. Most of the clothing is black and white or gray and white, and remarkably drab.

Apart from the archaic costume there are other anomalies—none of the males have long hair, and none of the females have short hair, at least where I can see it. A couple of heads turn as I walk in, but I don't feel out of place, even with my long hair yanked back in a ponytail. I'm just another anonymous figure in historic drag. "Is this the venue for the lecture?" I ask the nearest person, a tall male—probably no taller than I used to be, but I find myself looking up at him from my new low vantage—with black hair and a neatly trimmed facial mane.

"I think so," he says slowly, and shrugs, then looks uncomfortable. Not surprising, as his outfit looks as if it's strangling him slowly. "Did you just come through? I found a READ ME in my room after my last backup—"

"Yeah, me, too," I say. I clutch the tablet under my arm and smile up at him. I can recognize nervous chatter when I hear it and Big Guy looks every bit as uneasy as I feel. "Do you remember signing, or did you do that after your backup, too?"

"I'm not the only one?" He looks relieved. "I was in rehab," he says hastily. "Coming out of the crazy patch you go through. Then I woke up here—"

"Yeah, whatever." I nod, losing interest. "Me too. When is it starting?"

A door I hadn't noticed before opens in the white wall at the back and a plump male ortho walks in. This one is wearing a long white coat held shut with archaic button fasteners up the front, and he waddles as he walks, like a fat, self-satisfied amphibian. His hair is black and falls in lank, greasy-looking locks on either side of his face, longer than that of any of the other males here. He walks to the podium and makes a disgusting throat-clearing noise to get our attention.

"Welcome! I'm glad you agreed to come to our little introductory talk today. I'd like to apologize for requiring you to come in person, but because we're conducting this research project under rigorous conditions of consistency, we felt we should stay within the functional parameters of the society we are simulating. They'd do it this way, with a face-to-face meeting, so . . . if you would all like to take seats?"

We take a while to sort ourselves out. I end up in the front row, sitting between Big Guy and a female with freckled pale skin and coppery red hair, not unlike Linn, but wearing a cream blouse and a dark gray jacket and skirt. It's not a style I can make any sense of—it's vertically unbalanced and, frankly, a bit weird. But it's not that different from what they've given me to wear, so I suppose it must be historically accurate. Have our aesthetics changed that much? I wonder.

The person on the podium gets started. "I am Major-Doctor Fiore, and I worked with Colonel-Professor Yourdon on the design of the experimental protocol. I'm here to start by explaining to you what we're trying to achieve, albeit—I hope you'll understand—leaving out anything that might prejudice your behavior within the trial polity." He smiles as if he's just cracked a private joke.

"The first dark ages." He throws out his chest and takes a deep breath when he's about to say something he thinks is significant. "The first dark ages lasted about three gigaseconds, compared to the seven gigaseconds of the censorship wars. But to put things in perspective, the first dark ages neatly spanned the first half of the Acceleration, the so-called late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries in the chronology of the time. If we follow the historical record forward from the pretechnological era into the first dark age, we find we're watching humans who lived like technologically assisted monkeys—very smart primates with complex mechanical tools, but basically unchanged since the species first emerged. Then when we look at the people who emerged from the first dark age, we find ourselves watching people not unlike ourselves, as we live in the modern era, the ‘age of emotional machines' as one dark age shaman named it. There's a gap in the historical record, which jumps straight from carbon ink on macerated wood pulp to memory diamond accessible via early but recognizable versions of the intentionality protocols. Somewhere in that gap is buried the origin of the posthuman state."

Big Guy mutters something under his breath. It takes me a moment to decode it: What a pompous oaf. I stifle a titter of amusement because it's no laughing matter. This pompous oaf holds my future in his hands for the next tenth of a gigasec. I want to catch his next words.

"We know why the dark age happened," Fiore continues. "Our ancestors allowed their storage and processing architectures to proliferate uncontrollably, and they tended to throw away old technologies instead of virtualizing them. For reasons of commercial advantage, some of their largest entities deliberately created incompatible information formats and locked up huge quantities of useful material in them, so that when new architectures replaced old, the data became inaccessible.

"This particularly affected our records of personal and household activities during the latter half of the dark age. Early on, for example, we have a lot of film data captured by amateurs and home enthusiasts. They used a thing called a cine camera, which captured images on a photochemical medium. You could actually decode it with your eyeball. But a third of the way into the dark age, they switched to using magnetic storage tape, which degrades rapidly, then to digital storage, which was even worse because for no obvious reason they encrypted everything. The same sort of thing happened to their audio recordings, and to text. Ironically, we know a lot more about their culture around the beginning of the dark age, around old-style year 1950, than about the end of the dark age, around 2040."

Fiore stops. Behind me a couple of quiet conversations have broken out. He seems mildly annoyed, probably because people aren't hanging on his every word. Me, I'm fascinated—but I used to be an historian, too, albeit studying a very different area.

"Will you let me continue?" Fiore asks pointedly, glaring at a female in the row behind me.

"Only if you tell us what this has got to do with us," she says cheekily.

"I'll—" Fiore stops. Again, he takes a deep breath and throws his shoulders back. "You're going to be living in the dark ages, in a simulated Euromerican cultura like those that existed in the period 1950–2040," he snaps. "I'm trying to tell you that this is our best reconstruction of the environment from available sources. This is a sociological and psychological immersion experiment, which means we'll be watching how you interact with each other. You get points for staying in character, which means obeying the society's ground rules, and you lose points for breaking role." I sit up. "Your individual score affects the group, which means everyone. Your cohort—all ten of you, one of the twenty groups we're introducing to this section of the polity over the next five megs—will meet once a week, on Sundays, in a parish center called the Church of the Nazarene, where you can discuss whatever you've learned. To make the simulation work better, there are a lot of nonplayer characters, zombies run by the Gamesmaster, and for much of the time you'll be interacting with these rather than with other experimental subjects. Everything's laid out in a collection of hab segments linked by gates so they feel like a single geographical continuum, just like a traditional planetary surface."

He calms down a little. "Questions?"

"What are the society's ground rules?" asks a male with dark skin in a light suit from the back row. He sounds puzzled.

"You'll find out. They're largely imposed through environmental constraints. If you need to be told, we'll tell you via your netlink or one of the zombies." Fiore sounds even more smug.

"What are we meant to do here?" asks the redhead in the seat beside me. She sounds alert if a little vague. "I mean, apart from ‘obey the rules.' A hundred megs is a long time, isn't it?"

"Obey the rules." Fiore smiles tightly. "The society you're going to be living in was formal and highly ritualized, with much attention paid to individual relationships and status often determined by random genetic chance. The core element in this society is something called the nuclear family. It's a heteromorphic structure based on a male and a female living in close quarters, usually with one of them engaging in semi-ritualized labor to raise currency and the other preoccupied with social and domestic chores and child rearing. You're expected to fit in, although child rearing is obviously optional. We're interested in studying the stability of such relationships. You'll find your tablets contain copies of several books that survived the dark ages."

"Okay, so we form these, uh, nuclear families," calls a female from the back row. "What else do we need to know?"

Fiore shrugs. "Nothing now. Except"—a thought strikes him—"you'll be living with dark ages medical constraints. Remember that! An accident can kill you. Worse, it can leave you damaged: You won't have access to assemblers during the experiment. You really don't want to try modifying your bodies, either; the medical technology that exists is quite authentically primitive. Nor will you have access to your netlinks from now on." I try to probe mine, but there's nothing there. For a panicky moment I wonder if I've gone deaf, then I realize, He's telling the truth! There's no network here. "Your netlinks will communicate social scoring metrics to you, and nothing else. There is a primitive conversational internetwork between wired terminals here, but you aren't expected to use it.

"We've laid on a buffet outside this room. I suggest you get to know each other, then each pick a partner and go through that door"—he points to a door at the other side of the white wall—"which will gate you to your primary residence for in-processing. Remember to take your slates so you can read the quickstart guide to dark ages society." He looks around the room briefly. "If there are no more questions, I'll be going."

A hand or two goes up at the back, but before anyone can call out, he turns and dives through the door he came in. I look at Redhead.

"Huh, I guess that's us told," she says. "What now?"

I glance at Big Guy. "What do you think?"

He stands up. "I think we ought to do like he said and eat," he says slowly. "And talk. I'm Sam. What are you called?"

"I'm R-Reeve," I say, stumbling over the name the tablet said I should use. "And you," I add glancing at redhead, "are . . . ?"

"You can call me Alice." She stands up. "Come on. Let's see who else is here and get to know them."

OUTSIDE the lecture theatre there are two long tables heaped with plates of cold finger food, fruit and "cheese"—strong-smelling curds fermented from something I can't identify—and glasses of wine. Five of us are male and five of us are female, and we partition into two loose clumps at either table, at opposite sides of the room. Besides Alice the redhead there's Angel (dark skin and frizzy hair), Jen (roundish face, pale blond hair, even curvier than I am), and Cass (straight black hair, coffee-colored skin, serious eyes). We're all looking a little uncomfortable, moving in jerks and tics, twitchy in our new bodies and ugly clothes. The males are Sam (whom I met), Chris (the dark-skinned male from the back row), El, Fer, and Mick. I try to tell them apart by the color of their suits and neckcloths, but it's hard work, and the short hair gives them all a mechanical, almost insectile, similarity. It must have been a very conformist age, I think.

"So." Alice looks round at our little group and smiles, then picks a cube of yellowish ‘cheese' from her woodpulp plate and chews it thoughtfully. "What are we going to do?"

Angel produces her tablet from a little bag that she hangs over her arm. If I had one, I didn't notice it, and I kick myself mentally for not thinking of improvising something like that. "There's a reading list here," she says, carefully tapping through it. I watch over her shoulder as scrolls dissolve into facsimile pages from ancient manuscripts. "There's that odd word again. What's a ‘wife'?"

"I think I know that one," says Cass. "The, uh, family thing. Where there were only two participants, and they were morphologically locked, the female participant was called a ‘wife' and the male was called a ‘husband.' It implies sexual relations, if it's anything like ice ghoul society."

"We aren't supposed to talk about the outside," Jen says uncomfortably.

"But if we don't, we don't have any points of reference for what we're trying to understand and live in, do we?" I say, fighting the urge to stare at Cass. Is that you in there, Kay? It might just be a coincidence, her knowing something about ice ghouls—there was a huge fad for them about two gigasecs ago, when they were first discovered. Then again, the bad guys might have noticed Kay and sent a headhunter after me, armed with whatever they can extract from her skull for bait . . .

"I want to know where they got these books," I say. "Look, all they've got is publication dates and rough sales figures, so we'll know they were popular. But whether they're accurate indicators of the social system in force is another matter."

"Who cares?" Jen says abruptly. She picks up a glass and splashes straw-colored wine into it from a glass jug. "I'm going to pick me a ‘husband' and leave the other details for later." She grins and empties her glass down her throat.

"What diurn?" Cass's brow furrows as she grapples with the tablet's primitive interface. It's the nearest thing we've got to a manual, I realize. "Aha," she says. "We're on day five of the week , called ‘Thursday.' Weeks have seven days, and we are supposed to meet on day one, about two-fifty kilo—no, three days—from now."

"So?" Jen refills her glass.

Cass looks thoughtful. "So if we're supposed to mimic a family, we probably ought to start by pairing off and going to whatever dwelling they've assigned us. After a diurn or so of ploughing through these notes and getting to know each other, we'll be better able to work out what we're supposed to be doing. Also, I guess, we can see if the partnering arrangement is workable."

Jen wanders off toward the knot of males at the other side of the room, glass in hand. Angel fidgets with her tablet, turning it over and over in her hands and looking uncertain. Alice eats another lump of cheese. I feel quite ill watching her—the stuff tastes vile. "I'm not used to the idea of living together with someone," I say slowly.

"It's not so bad." Cass nods to herself. "But this is a very abrupt and arbitrary way of starting it."

Alice rests a hand on her arm, reassuring. "The sexual relationship is only implicit," she says. "If you pick a husband and don't get on, I'm sure you can choose another at the Church meeting."

"Perhaps." Cass pulls away and glances nervously at the group of males and one female, who is laughing loudly as two of the males attempt to refill her glass for her. "And perhaps not."

Alice looks dissatisfied. "I'm going to see what the party's about." She turns and stalks over toward the other group. That leaves me with Cass and Angel. Angel is busily scrolling through text on her tablet, looking distracted, and Cass just looks worried.

"Cheer up, it can't be that bad," I say automatically.

She shivers and hugs herself. "Can't it?" she asks.

"I don't think so." I pick my words carefully. "This is a controlled experiment. If you read the waivers, you'll see that we haven't relinquished our basic rights. They have to intervene if things go badly wrong."

"Well, that's a relief," she says. I look at her sharply.

"Look, we need to pick a ‘husband' each," Angel points out. "Whoever's last won't get much of a choice, and as it is we'll be stuck with whomever the others have rejected. For whatever reason." She looks between us, her expression guarded. "See you."

I stare at Cass. "What you said earlier, about the ice ghouls—"

"Forget it." She cuts me off with a chopping gesture. "Maybe Jen was right." She sounds downbeat.

"Did you know anyone else who was going into the experiment?" I ask suddenly, then wish I could swallow my own tongue.

Cass frowns at me. "Obviously not, or they wouldn't have admitted me to the study." Then she looks away, slowly and pointedly. I follow the direction of her gaze. There's an unobtrusive black hemisphere hanging from the ceiling in one corner. She sets her shoulders. "We'd better socialize."

"If you're worried about the implications of pair-bonding, I don't see why we couldn't share an apartment for a couple of diurns," I offer, heart pounding and palms sticky. Are you really Kay, Cass? I'm almost certain she is, but she won't talk where we might be being monitored. And if I ask and she isn't, I risk giving away my own identity to whoever's hunting me, if any of them have followed me in here.

"I don't think that would be allowed," she says guardedly. She makes a minute nod in my direction, then jerks her chin toward the others, who by now are making quite a buzz of conversation. "Shall we go and see who they've fixed us up with?"

On the other side of the room it turns out that Jen has broken the ice by insisting that all the males compete to demonstrate their merit, by pouring her a drink and presenting it to her elegantly. Needless to say she's stinking drunk but giggly. She seems to have settled on Chris-from-the-back-row as her target—he seems to be a little embarrassed by her antics, I think, but he can't get away because Alice and Angel have zeroed in on three of the others and are leaving him to Jen's clutches. Big Guy, Sam, is standing stiffly with his back to the wall, looking almost as uneasy as Cass. I glance at Cass, who's hanging back, then mentally shrug and approach Sam, bypassing Jen's raucous gaggle.

"Life of the party," I say, tipping my head at Jen.

"Er, yes." He's holding an empty glass and swaying a little. Maybe his feet are sore. It's hard to read his expression—the black mane of fur around his mouth obscures the muscles there—but he doesn't look happy. In fact, if the floor opens up beneath his feet and swallows him, he'll probably smile with relief.

"Listen." I touch his arm. As expected, he tenses. "Just come over here with me for a moment, please?"

He permits me to lead him away from the swarm of orthos trying to vector through the social asteroid belt.

"What do you make of this setup?" I ask quietly.

"It makes me nervous." His eyes glance between my face and the doors. Figures.

"Well, it makes me nervous, too. And Cass." I nod at the bunch across the room. "And, I think, even Jen."

"I've read part of the backgrounder." He shakes his head. "It's not what I expected. Neither was this—"

"Well." My lips have gone dry. I take a sip from my glass and look at Sam, calculating. He's bigger than I am. I'm physically weak (and wait until I get my hands on the joker who set that parameter up), but unless I'm misreading him badly he's well socialized. "We might as well make the best of things. We're expected to go set up a joint apartment with someone who is a different gender. Then we get settled in, read the briefings, do whatever they tell us to do, and go to the Church on Sunday to see how everyone else is doing. Do you think you can do that if you treat it as a vocational task?"

Sam puts his empty glass down on the table with fastidious precision and pulls out his tablet. "I could , but it says here that the ‘nuclear family' wasn't just an economic arrangement, there's sex involved, too." He pauses for a moment. "I'm not good at intimacy. Especially with strangers."

Is that why you're so tense? "That's not necessarily a problem." I take another sip of wine. "Listen"—I end up glancing at the camera dome (thank you, Cass )—"I'm sure none of these arrangements are going to end up permanent. We'll get a chance to sort out any mistakes at the meeting on First—uh, Sunday? Meanwhile"—I look up at him—"I don't mind your preference. We don't have to have sex unless we both want to. Is that okay by you?"

He looks down at me for a while. "That might work," he says quietly.

I realize I've just picked a husband. I just hope he isn't one of the hunters . . .

What happens next is anticlimactic. Someone's probably been watching the group dynamics through that surveillance lens, because after another few centisecs our tablets tinkle for attention. We're instructed to go through the doorway at the back of the lecture theatre in pairs, at least two seconds apart. We're already in YFH-Polity, in the administration subnet, beyond the longjump T-gate leading back to the Invisible Republic. There's some kind of framework with a bundle of shortjump gates behind the next door, ready to take us to our homes. So I take Sam's hand—it's enormous, but he holds mine limply, and his skin is a bit clammy—and I lead him over to the door. "Ready?" I ask.

He nods, looking unhappy. "Let's get this over with."

Step. "Over with? It's going to take"—step —"at least three years before it's over with!" And we're standing in a really small room facing another door, surrounded by the most unimaginable clutter, and he lets go of my hand and turns around, and I say, "Is this it ?" Ending on a squeak.