Glasshouse

7. Bottom

TIME passes glacially slowly. I don't say anything to Sam about the events in Church, not about Cass's black eye nor the Vorpal blade on the Church altar. Sam is comfortable to live with, happy to listen to my depressive chatter about the women's world, but there's always the worm of worry gnawing at the back of my mind: Can I trust him? I want to, but I can't be sure he isn't one of my pursuers. It's a horrible dilemma, the risk/trust trade-off. So I don't talk about what I do in the garage, or on the basement exercise machine, and he doesn't volunteer much information about what he does at work. A couple of the ladies who lunch are talking about organizing dinner parties, but if we invited ourselves into that kind of social circle they'd expect us to reciprocate and the stress would be—well, I don't think either of us is up to it. So we live our lonely lives in each other's back pockets, and I worry about Cass, and Sam reads a lot and watches TV, trying to understand the ancients.

When we get home after the abortive meeting in Church, I use my netlink to check our group's public points. Jen is leading on social connectedness, while Alice is second on that score—her helping me with clothes seems to be good for her. To my surprise I see that I'm at the bottom of the cohort. There's an activity breakdown and it looks like everyone else is having sex with their partner: Forming stable relationships is a good way to jack up your score, easy points. I backtrack a week or two and see that Cass is regularly active with Mick.

For some reason I find this unaccountably depressing. The others are watching, and I'm supposed to be involved with Sam, and I don't want to do anything that might give Jen any sense of satisfaction whatsoever. It's an immature attitude, but I'm really conscious of the fact that they're keeping an eye on my score, waiting for me to surrender. Waiting for me to give Sam what they think he ought to want. Too bad they don't really know us.

ABOUT two weeks later I finally reach the end of my tether. It's a hot, tiresome Tuesday evening. I've spent the morning exercising outdoors—there are still no neighbors, although a couple of families are due to move in when the next cohort arrives in a couple of weeks' time—and then worked in the garage all afternoon. I'm trying to relearn welding the hard way, and I'm lucky not to have burned my arm off or electrocuted myself so far.

I have vague recollections of having done this stuff a long time ago, in gigaseconds past, but it's so long ago that the memories are all second-hand and I've clearly forgotten almost everything I knew. There's something wrong with my technique, and the pieces of spring steel I'm trying to make into a single fabrication are going brittle around the weld. I try bending the last one in the vise and the join I've just spent an hour working on snaps and small fragments go flying. If I was standing a bit farther over to the left, I could have got one in the eye. As it is, I get a nasty shock and go inside to try to sort our dinner out, because Sam is usually back from work around now, and if left to his own devices, he'll flop down in front of the television rather than sorting out food for both of us.

So I'm in the kitchen all on my own, rummaging through the frozen packages in the freezer cupboard for something we both eat, and I manage to drop a pizza box on the floor. It splits open and the contents spill everywhere. It's one of those moments when the whole universe comes spinning down on the top of your head, and you realize how alone andisolated you are, and all your problems seem to laugh at you. Who do I think I'm kidding? I ask myself, and I burst into tears on the spot.

I'm trapped in a wholly inadequate body, with only patchy memories of whoever I used to be left to prod me along in search of a better life. I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs. Here I am, thinking I remember being in rehab, reading a letter written to myself by an earlier version—and how do I know I wrote the letter to myself? I don't even remember doing it! For all I know it's a confabulation, my own bored attempt to inject some excitement into a life totally sapped of interest. Certainly the rant about people who are out to kill me seems increasingly implausible and distant—outright unbelievable, if not for the man with the wire.

I can't remember any reasons why anyone would want me dead. And even a half-competent trainee assassin would find killing me a trivial challenge at best, right now. I can't even put a frozen pizza in a microwave oven without dropping it on the floor. I'm spending my spare hours in the garage trying to weld together a crossbow and busily planning to make myself a sword when the bad guys, if they're real, are running a panopticon—a total surveillance society—and have weapons like the one on the Church altar, edged with the laser-speckling strangeness of supercondensates, waveguides for wormhole generators. Knives that can cut space-time. They'll come for me in the clear light of day, and they'll be backed by the whole police state panoply of memory editors and existential programmers. There's nowhere for me to run, no way out except through the T-gates controlled by the experimenters, and no way in bar the same, and I don't even know if I've lost Kay, or if Kay is Cass or someone else entirely, and I'm not sure why I let Piccolo-47 talk me into coming here. All I've got are my memories, and I can't even trust them.

I feel helpless and lost and very, very small, and I stare at the pizza through a blurring veil of tears, and right then I hear the front door lock click to itself and footsteps in the front hall, and it's more than I can bear.

Sam finds me in the kitchen, sobbing as I fumble around for the dustpan.

"What's wrong?" He stands in the doorway looking at me, a bewildered expression on his face.

"I'm, I—" I manage to get the box into the trash, then drop the brush on top of it. "Nothing."

"It can't be nothing," he insists, logically enough.

"I don't want to talk about it." I sniff and wipe my eyes on the back of my sleeve, embarrassed and hating myself for this display of weakness. "It's not important—"

"Come on." His arm is around my shoulders, comforting. "Come on, out of here."

"Okay."

He leads me out of the kitchen and into the living room and over to the big glass windows. I watch, not really comprehending, as he opens one of them. Floor to ceiling, it forms a door in its own right, a door into the back garden. "Come on," he says, walking out onto the lawn.

I follow him outside. The grass is getting long. What do you want? I wonder.

"Sit down," he says. I blink and look at the bench.

"Oh, okay." I sniff again.

"Wait here," he says. He vanishes back into the house, leaving me alone with my stupid and stupefying sense of inadequacy. I stare at the grass. It's moist (we had a scheduled precipitation at lunchtime, water drizzling gently from a million tiny nozzles embedded in the sky), and a snail is inching its way laboriously up a stem, close to my feet. Not far away there's another one. It's a good time for mollusks, who haul their world around with them, self-contained. I feel a momentary flash of envy. Here I am, trapped inside the biggest snail shell anyone can imagine, a snail shell made of glass that exposes everything we do to the monitors and probes of the experimenters. And in my hubris I think I can actually crawl out of my shell, escape into my own identity—

Sam is holding something out to me. "Here, have a drink."

I take the tumbler. It's blue glass, with a fizz of bubbles trapped in the weighted base and a clear liquid half-filling it. I sniff a bouquet of bitters and lemon.

"Go on, it won't poison you."

I raise my glass and take a mouthful. Gin and tonic , some submerged ghost of memory tells me. "Thanks." I sniff. He pours himself one, too. "I'm sorry."

"What for?" he asks, as he sits down next to me. He's shed his jacket and necktie, and he moves as if he's weary, as if he's got my troubles.

"I'm a dead loss." I shrug. "It just got too much for me."

"You're not a dead loss."

I look at him sharply, then have to sniff again. I wish I could get my sinuses fixed. "Yes I am. I'm wholly dependent on you—without your job, what would I do? I'm weak and small and badly coordinated, and I can't even cook a pizza for supper without dropping it all over the floor. And, and . . ."

Sam takes another mouthful. "Look," he says, pointing at the garden. "You've got this. All day." He shakes his head. "I get to sit in an office full of zombies and spend my time proofreading gibberish. There's always more make-work for me, texts to check for errors. It makes my head hurt. You've at least got this." He looks at me, a guarded, odd look that makes me wonder what he sees. "And whatever it is you're doing in the garage."

"I—"

"I don't mean to pry," he says, looking away shyly.

"It's not secret," I say. I swallow some more of my drink. "I'm making stuff." I nearly add, It's a hobby , but that would be a lie. And the one person I haven't actively lied to so far is Sam. I've got a feeling that if I start lying to him now, I'll be crossing some sort of irrevocable line. With only myself for an anchor, and knowing how fallible my memories are, I won't be able to tell truth from fantasy anymore.

"Making stuff." He rolls his glass between his big hands. "Do you want a job to go to?" he asks.

"A job?" That's a surprise and a half. "Why?"

He shrugs. "To see people. Get out of the house. To meet people other than the score whores, I mean. They're getting to you, aren't they?"

I nod mutely.

"Not surprising." He stays tactfully silent while I drain my glass.

To my surprise, I feel a little better. Get a job! "How do I find a job?" I ask. "I mean, not being a man—"

"You phone the Chamber of Commerce and ask for one." He puts his glass down. I look at it, see the two snails climbing opposite sides of the same blade of grass, leaving their iridescent trails of slime. "It's as simple as that. They'll send a car to pick you up and take you somewhere with room for a body. They didn't run you through the induction course when you arrived, but it's easy enough. I don't know what they'll find for you or how much they'll pay you—I'd guess a lot less than they pay men, that seems to be how they did things in the dark ages—but if you find it too boring, you can always phone the CC again and ask for something else."

"A job," I say, trying the words out for sense. It's crazy, actually, but no more so than anything else in this world. "I didn't know I could get one."

He shrugs. "It's not illegal or anything." A sidelong look. "They just didn't set it up by default. It's another of those things we're allowed to game if we're smart enough to think of it."

"And I'll meet people."

"It depends where you work." Sam looks uncertain for a moment. "Most jobs, there are zombies around—but they try to keep at least two humans in every workplace. And there are visitors. But it's pretty boring. I really didn't think you'd be interested."

"It can't possibly be as mind-destroying as this!" I clench my hands.

"Don't bet on it." He shakes his head. "Dark ages work was often meaningless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous."

"Not as dangerous to my sanity as not doing anything."

"That's my Reeve." Sam smiles, a brilliant expression that I don't often see and that makes me really envy the lucky woman he left behind outside the experiment. "I'll get you another drink, then go fix dinner. How about we eat out here instead of inside? Just for once."

"I'd like that a lot," I say fervently. "Just for once."

IN the early hours of the morning I'm awakened by one of my recurring nightmares.

I have several different bad dreams. What distinguishes this one is the quality of the imagery in it. I'm a neomorph, male again and roughly orthohuman in body plan, but extensively augmented with mechabolic subsystems from the cellular level up. Instead of intestines, I have a compact fusion gateway cell. I have three hearts to keep my different circulatory fluids moving, skin reinforced with diamond fiber mesh, and I can survive in vacuum for hours. These are all trappings of my role as a soldier in the service of the Linebarger Cats, because I am a tank.

But that's not what makes the dream a nightmare.

We're one-point-one megaseconds into the campaign, and even though we—my unit—don't normally sleep, we're all under the influence of fatigue poisons from nearly twelve consecutive diurns of high-speed maneuvers. Hostilities with this polity commenced as soon as High Command established the orbital elements on one of their better-connected real-space nodes. The Six Fingers Green Kingdom has been particularly tenacious in its attempts to hold on to its corrupt A-gates, which are still infected with Curious Yellow censorbots and contaminating everyone who passes through them. They're one of the last hold-outs on the losing side; they've survived long after the other censorship redoubts succumbed to our maneuvers by virtue of their fanatically obscurantist network topology and a cunning mesh of internal firewalls. But we've identified the real-space location of one of their main switches, and that means we've got a node with massive fan-out to exploit once we can get our people into it. My unit is on the sharp end.

The assault vector is one end of a T-gate ten meters in diameter, boosted up to about thirty percent of c and free-falling through the icy outer limits of the cloud of debris orbiting the brown dwarf Epsilon Indi B. EI-B is not much bigger than a gas giant planet, and has a surface temperature of under a thousand degrees absolute—by the time you get out to its halo, whole light minutes away, the star is almost invisible. Cometary bodies orbit it in chilly isolation, as cold as the depths of interstellar space.

Our assault gate is unpowered and stealthy. It drifts through the perimeter defense field of the Six Fingers Green Kingdom orbital in a matter of seconds and skims past the huge cylinder at a range of under fifty kilometers, preposterously close yet very hard to spot. As it flashes by, my unit is one of several who make a high-speed insertion through the distal end of the wormhole. As far as the defenders are concerned, we appear out of empty space right on their doorstep. And as far as we're concerned, it's a death trap.

It takes us fifty seconds to cover the fifty kilometers to the habitat, decelerating all the way, mashed flat in our acceleration cages as our suits jink and dodge and shed penaids and decoys and graser bombs. We lose eighty percent of our numbers to point defense fire in that fifty-second period. It's absolute carnage, but even so we're lucky—the only reason any of us survive at all is because we're working for the Linebarger Cats, and the Cats specialize in applied insanity. Everyone knows that only a lunatic would attack across open space, so the Green Fingers have concentrated ninety percent of their firepower on the inside of their orbital, pointing at the proximal ends of their longjump T-gates, rather than outside on the hub, covering the barren real-space approaches.

I'm unconscious for most of the approach, my memories of it spooled by sensors on my suit and buffered for instant recall once my meatbody unvitrifies so I can take over. One moment I'm lying down and the suit is closing around me, and the next I'm standing in the wreckage of a compartment aboard the Green Finger orbital, memories of the insane charge alive in my mind as I pull out my sword, slave my blaster nodes to my eyeball trackers, exude more ablative foam, and head for the inhabited spaces.

Fast forward:

Dealing with the civilians once we've taken the polity is going to be difficult because they've all been censored by Curious Yellow—the original version carrying the censorship payload, not the later hacked tools of various inquisitions and cognitive dictatorships. The censorship payload doesn't just delete memories of forbidden things—it tends to leave spores in its victims' brains and a boot loader in their netlinks, and if they upload into a vulnerable A-gate it can wake up and infect the gate firmware. So we have to round up everyone on board the hab we've just ripped through with swords and blasters, and recycle them through our own crude decontamination gates.

Now, here's where the dreamlike logic kicks in. Their assembler gates are the advanced, elegant products of a mature techgnosis. But our A-gates are crude lash-ups, hand-built in a matter of tens of megaseconds using what knowledge we could salvage. We threw them together in a blind hurry when we realized how far the contamination extended—throughout all the A-gates of the Republic of Is, basically—and they're messy and inefficient and slow. What we've built works, but it isn't fast. So we're running our assault gates in half-duplex mode, disassembling and storing the citizens for subsequent virus scanning and reincarnation. And because we haven't secured all approaches, and because other nodes within the Six Fingers Green Kingdom are fighting back with vicious desperation, we have to move fast.

After about five thousand seconds of collecting struggling civilians and feeding them into the gates, Group Major Nordak calls me with new orders. "The bodies are slowing us up," she sends. "Just harvest the heads. We'll resurrect them all when we've got the situation under control."

There's a huge crowd of civilians in a holding square on Deck J, milling around in confusion and fear. Two of us are pulling people out of the crowd through a door, telling them it's for outbound processing. Some of them don't want to go, but arguing with tankies in full armor is futile, and they end up coming to us whether they want to or not, contusions and broken limbs the only difference it makes to their eventual fate. We take them through the inner set of doors that don't open until the outer ones are closed. Then all of them get reluctant, when they see Loral and me waiting on the other side of the inner door, with the assault gate and our swords and the pile of discards.

We take it in turns, alternating, because it's hard, stressful work. I grab a struggling victim, maybe a plump female orthohuman or a scrawny guy who really needs a new body—some of them have been living feral, refusing to go through the A-gates for fear of CuriousYellow, until they actually grow old —and I pinion the victims and lay them down on the slimy blood-slick floor of the room. They usually scream, and in many cases they piss themselves as Loral brings his Vorpal sword down on the back of their neck between the C7 and T1 vertebrae. A twitch on the power button and there's more blood squirting and splashing everywhere than you could imagine, and they stop screaming. Loral pulls her sword out and I get off the body and chase the head, which is usually soaking wet, the eyelids twitching with postamputation shock. I throw the head into the A-gate, low and fast as I can, and the gate swallows it and processes the skull and hopefully gets them logged before permanent depolarization and osmotically induced apoptosis can set in. Then Loral grabs the discarded body and slings it onto the heap in the corner, which one of our fellow special action troops carts away on a pallet loader every so often, while I flail at the floor with a broom in a losing battle to stop the blood puddling around our feet.

It's a disgusting and unpleasant job, and even though we've gotten into the swing of it and are working as fast as we can, we're only averaging one civilian every fifty seconds. We've been working for a hundred kiloseconds now, one of eight teams on the job—processing maybe sixteen thousand people a diurn between us. And it's just my bitter bad luck that when the doors open and the guys on the other side fling the next body at us, kicking and screaming at the top of their lungs, it's my turn to use the sword and Loral's to hold them down and I'm already raising the blade when I look at the terrified face and depending on which variation of the nightmare this is I see that it's my own, or worse—

—Kay's —

—and I'm sitting up swallowing a scream and someone is cradling me in his arms and I'm covered in chilly sweat and shuddering uncontrollably. I slowly realize I'm in bed, and I've just kicked off the comforter. There's moonlight outside the window, and I'm in YFH-Polity and no matter how bad things are by day, they can't hold a candle to how bad things get in my dreams, and I whimper softly in the back of my throat.

"It's all right now, you're awake, they can't hurt you." Sam strokes my shoulders. I lean against him and manage to turn the whimper into a sigh. My heart is pounding like one of the jackhammers they use to repair the roads, and my skin is clammy. His arm tightens around me. "Would you like to talk about it?" he murmurs.

"It's"—awful —"a recurring dream. Memories"—inadequately redacted, I think—"from an earlier life. What I wanted to be rid of, coming back to haunt me." I speak haltingly because my mouth feels musty, and I'm not entirely awake, just frightened out of sleep by the shadows of my own past. What's he doing in here?

"You were thrashing around, moaning and muttering in your sleep," he says. "I was worried you were having a seizure."

It's not unheard of, even in this age. I push myself up on one arm but don't pull away from him—instead I pull my right arm out from under the bedding and hold him tight.

"I lost a lot in surgery," I say slowly. "If this is part of it, I wish it would stay lost."

"It's gone now." He speaks soothingly, and I wrap my other arm round him and hold on tight. He's big, he's stable, he's serious, and he's solid. Serious Sam. I lean my face into the depression at the base of his throat and inhale deeply, once, twice. His arm around me feels good, secure. Security Sam. My ribs shake as I swallow a nervy chuckle. "What's that?" he asks.

"Nothing," I tell his throat. I'm awake enough now to realize that I'm not the only one in this house who sleeps naked. But I find that I don't care—I trust Sam not to try and overpower me, not to do anything I don't want. Sam has somehow stepped across the threshold from being a mistrusted stranger into a friend, and I never noticed it happening. And now I don't want to be left alone here, and it's the most natural thing in the universe to hold on to him and to run my hand up and down his spine and stick my face into the base of his throat and inhale his natural scent. "Do you mind staying? I don't want to be alone."

He tenses slightly, but then I feel his hand running down my back, caressing my spine. I lean into his embrace. He feels so alive , the antithesis of everything in my blood-drenched memory dream. I've been sleeping alone and not really touching anyone, much less fucking, for at least a month now, and therefore it doesn't surprise me in the slightest to find that I'm becoming aroused, sensual, needing more skin contact and more touch and more smell. I lick the base of his throat and move one hand between his legs, and what I find there is no surprise, because he's been living the same life of self-denial too.

"Don't—" he mutters, but I'm not listening. Instead, I'm running my face down his chest, kissing him as I fondle what's down below, giving the lie to his disinterest.

Sam's been holding back because of a lover stranded in the real world without him, and I've been holding back because of pride and the greedy eyes watching my social score. We'll probably regret this in the morning, but right now I'm drunk on touch. I rub my cheek against his thigh and lick him hungrily, feeling his hands in my hair—

"No." He sounds hesitant. I take him in my mouth as far as I can, and he sounds as if he's strangling. "No, Reeve, please don't—" I carry on sucking and licking and he draws breath to say something and instead gasps a little, and I finish him off with a sense of anticlimax. That was too fast, wasn't it? Then he's standing on the other side of the bed, his back turned and his shoulders hunched. "I asked you to stop," he says sullenly.

It's a while before I can talk. "I needed—" I stop. My mouth is acrid with the aftertaste. "I want you to be happy." If I'm going to give in and humiliate myself in front of the score whores, the least I can do is throw it back in their faces.

"Well, that's not the right way to do it." He's tense and defensive, as if I've hurt him. "I thought we had an understanding." He sidles around the bed and out the door before I can think of anything to say, refusing to meet my eyes, and a minute or so later I hear the shower come on.

I'm completely awake by now, so I pull on my bathrobe to go downstairs and make a mug of coffee by way of a substitute for mouthwash, because there's no way I'm going to go into the bathroom while Sam's busy trying to rinse my saliva away. I've got some pride left, and right now I don't think I could look at him without yelling, What about your self-control, eh? He moons incessantly over this amazing lover he met outside the polity, but he's not too proud to let me fellate him—until afterward, when suddenly I'm an un-person. I could really hate him for that. But instead I sit in the kitchen with my cooling coffee, and I wait for the noise of the shower to cease and the light upstairs to go out. Then I tiptoe back to my bed and lie brooding until near dawn, wondering what possessed me. In the end, I resolve not offer him any intimacies ever again, until I've had a chance to spit in his imaginary lover's face in front of him. Finally, I sleep.

THE next day I don't stir from bed until Sam has left for work. Once I'm up, I phone the Chamber of Commerce. The zombie who takes my call sounds only marginally sapient but agrees to send a taxi for me the next morning. I go outside and jog up and down the road until I'm exhausted—which takes a lot longer now—then take a shower. I spend the rest of the day in the garage trying to do some more work on the crossbow, which is not going well. I wonder why I'm bothering: It's not as if I'm going to shoot anyone, is it?

I leave Sam a half-defrosted pizza and a note explaining how to cook it in the kitchen. By the time I come indoors it's dark, Sam's holed up in the living room with the TV on, and I have no trouble sneaking upstairs and going to bed without seeing him. It's easy to do, now that we're both avoiding each other.

I am troubled in my sleep. It's a different bad dream, nothing like as vivid as the slaughterhouse nightmare, but even more disturbing in some ways. Imagine you're a detective, or some other kind of investigator. And you're looking for people, bad people who hide in shadows. They've committed terrible crimes but they've altered everyone's memories so that nobody can remember what they did or who they are. You don't know what they did or who they are, but it's your job to find them and bring them to justice in such a way that neither they, nor anyone else, can forget what they did and the consequences of their actions. So you're a detective, and you're walking through twilit polityscapes hunting for clues, but you don't know who you are or why you're charged with this mission. For all you know, you may even be one of the criminals. They've made everybody forget who they are and what they did. Who's to say that they didn't do it to themselves, too? You could be guilty of a crime so horrible that it has no name and everyone's forgotten it, and you'll find the irrevocable logic of detection drawing you to place yourself under arrest and hand yourself over to the courts of a higher power. And you'll be tried and sentenced for a crime you don't understand and don't remember committing, and the punishment will be beyond human comprehension and leave you walking the twilit polityscapes, a ghost shorn of most of your memories except for a faint indelible stain of original sin. And you'll be there because you've been sent looking for a master criminal by way of atoning for your past actions. And you'll be on their trail, and one day you will find them and, reaching out a hand to grab them by the shoulder, you'll find yourself looking at the back of your own head—

I wake up sweating and sick with my heart pounding in the night, and there is no Sam. For a moment I feel defiant and angry at his absence, but then I think: What have I done to my only friend here? And I roll over and wash the pillow in bitter tears before dawn.

But the next day I start my new job.