Glasshouse

8. Child Thing

THE taxi that takes me to the Chamber of Commerce arrives about half an hour after Sam leaves for work. I'm ready and waiting for it but nervous about the whole idea. It seems necessary in some ways—to assert my independence from Sam, get an extra source of income, meet other inmates, break out of the lonely rut of being a stay-at-home wife—but in other respects it's a questionable choice. I have no idea what they're going to find for me to do, it's going to take up a large chunk of my time, it'll probably be boring and pointless, and although I'll meet new people, there's no way of knowing whether I'll hate them on sight. What seemed like a good idea at the time is now turning out to be stressful.

The taxi operator is no use, of course—he can't tell me anything. "Chamber of Commerce," he announces. "Please leave the vehicle." So I get out and head toward the imposing building on my right, with the revolving door made of wood and brass, hoping my uncertainty doesn't show. I march up to the clerk on the front desk. "I'm Reeve. I've got an appointment at, uh, ten o'clock with Mr. Harshaw?"

"Go right in, ma'am," says the zombie, pointing at a door behind him with a frosted-glass window and gold-leaf lettering stenciled along the top. My heels clack on the stone floor as I walk over and open it.

"Mr. Harshaw?" I ask.

The room is dominated by a wide desk made out of wood, its top inlaid with a rectangle of dyed, preserved skin cut from a large herbivore. The walls are paneled in wood and there are crude still pictures in frames hanging from hooks near the top, certificates and group portraits of men in dark suits shaking hands with each other. A borderline-senescent male in a dark suit, his head almost bereft of hair and his waistline expanding, sits behind the desk. He half rises as I enter, and extends a hand. Zombie? I wonder doubtfully.

"Hello, Reeve." He sounds relaxed and self-confident. "Won't you have a seat?"

"Sure." I take the chair on the other side of the desk and cross my legs, studying his face. Sure enough there's a slight flicker of attention—he's watching me, aware of my body—which means he's real. Zombies simply aren't programmed for that. "How come I haven't seen you in Church?" I ask.

"I'm on staff," he says easily. "Have a cigarette?" He gestures at one of the wooden boxes on his desk.

"Sorry, I don't smoke," I say, slightly stiffly. I hate the smell, but it's not as if it's harmful, is it?

"Good for you." He takes one, lights it, and inhales thoughtfully. "You asked about job vacancies yesterday. As it happens, we have one right now that would probably suit you—I took the liberty of looking through your records—but it specifically excludes smokers."

"Oh?" I raise an eyebrow. Mr. Harshaw the staffer isn't what I expected, to say the least; I was winding myself up to deal with a dumb zombie fronting a placement database.

"It's in the city library. You'd only be working three days a week, but you'd be putting in eleven-hour shifts. On the plus side, you'd be the trainee librarian there. On the minus side, the starting salary isn't particularly high."

"What does the job involve?" I ask.

"Library work." He shrugs. "Filing books in order. Keeping track of withdrawals and issuing overdue notices and collecting fines. Helping people find books and information they're looking for. Organizing the stacks and adding new titles as they come in. You'd be working under Janis from cohort one, who has been our librarian since the early days. She's going to be leaving, which is why we need to train up a replacement."

"Leaving?" I look at him oddly. "Why?"

"To have a baby," he says, and blows a perfect smoke ring up at the ceiling.

I don't understand what he's saying at first, the concept is so alien to me. "Why would she have to leave her job to—"

It's his turn to look at me oddly. "Because she's pregnant," he says.

For a moment the world seems to be spinning around my head. There's a roaring in my ears, and I feel weak at the knees. It's a good thing I'm sitting down. Then I begin to integrate everything and realize just what's going on. Janis is pregnant —she's got a neonate growing inside her body like an encapsulated tumor, the way humans used to incubate their young in the wild, back before civilization. Presumably she and her husband had sex, and she was fertile. "She must be—" I say, then cover my mouth. Fertile.

"Yes, she and Norm are very happy," Mr. Harshaw says, nodding enthusiastically. He looks satisfied with something. "We're all very happy for them, even if it means we do have to train up a new librarian."

"Well, I'd be happy to see, I mean, to try," I begin, flustered, wondering, Did she ask the medics to make her fertile? Or, a sneaking and horrible suspicion, Are we already fertile? I know menstruation was some kind of metabolic sign that went with being a prehistoric female, but I didn't really put it all together until now. Having a child is hard—you have to actively seek medical assistance—and having one grow inside your body is even harder. The idea that the orthohuman bodies they've put us in are so ortho that we could automatically generate random human beings if we have sex is absolutely terrifying. I don't think the dark ages medics had incubators, and if I got pregnant I might actually have to go through a live childbirth. In fact, if Sam and I had —"Excuse me, but where's the rest room?" I ask.

"It's the second door through there, on the left." Mr. Harshaw smiles to himself as I make a dash for it. He's still smiling five minutes later as I make my way back into his office, forcing my face into a maskof composure, refusing to acknowledge the stomach cramps that took me to the stalls. "Are you all right?" he asks.

"I am, now," I say. "I'm sorry about that, must be something I ate."

"It's perfectly all right. If you'd like to come with me, perhaps we can visit the library and I can introduce you to Janis, see if you get along?"

I nod, and we head out front to catch a taxi. I think I'm doing pretty well for someone who's just had her worldview turned upside down and whacked on with a hammer. How long does a neonate take to grow, about thirty megs? It puts a whole new face on the experiment. I have a sinking sense that I must have implicitly agreed to this. Somewhere buried in the small print of the release I signed there'll be some clause that can be interpreted as saying that I consent to be made fertile and if necessary to become pregnant and bring to term an infant in the course of the study. It's the sort of shitty trick that Fiore and his friends would delight in slipping past us while we're vulnerable.

After a few minutes I realize that the oversight we were promised by an independent ethics committee isn't worth a bucket of warm—whatever. The extreme scenario would be for us females to all get pregnant and deliver infants, in which case the experimenters are going to be responsible for the care of about a hundred babies, none of whom gave their consent to be raised in a simulated dark ages environment without access to decent medical care, education, or socialization. Any responsible ethics oversight committee would shit a brick if you suggested running an experiment like that. So I suspect the ethics oversight committee isn't very ethical, if indeed it exists at all.

I'm thinking these thoughts as Mr. Harshaw tells our zombie driver to take us to the municipal library. The library is in a part of town I haven't visited before, on the same block as City Hall and what Mr. Harshaw points out to me as the police station. "Police station?" I ask, looking blank.

"Yes, where the police hang out." He looks at me as if I'm very slightly mad.

"I would have thought the crime rate here was too low to need a real police force," I say.

"So far it is," he replies, with a smile I can't interpret. "But things are changing."

The library is a low brick building, with a glass facade opening onto a reception area, and turnstiles leading into a couple of big rooms full of shelves. There are books—bound sheaves of dumb paper—on all the shelves, and there are a lot of shelves. In fact, I've never seen so many books in my life. It's ironic, really. My netlink could bring a million times as much information to me on a whim, if it was working. But in the informationally impoverished society we're restricted to, these rows of dead trees represent the total wealth of available human knowledge. Static, crude scratchings are all we're to be permitted, it seems. "Who can access these?" I ask.

"I'll leave it to Janis to explain the procedures," he says, running his hand over his shiny crown, "but anyone who wants can withdraw—borrow—books from the lending department. The reference department is a bit different, and there's also the private collection." He clears his throat. "That's confidential, and you're not supposed to lend it to anyone who isn't authorized to read it. That probably sounds dramatic, by the way, but it's actually not very romantic. We just keep a lot of the documentation for the project on paper, so we don't need to violate the experimental protocol by bringing in advanced knowledge-management tools, and we have to store the paper somewhere when it's not in use, so we use the library." He holds the door open. "Let's go find Janis, shall we? Then we'll have lunch. We can discuss whether you want to work here, and if so, what your pay and conditions will be, and then if you take the job, we can work out when you'll start training."

JANIS is skinny and blond, with a haggard, worried-looking expression and long, bony hands that flutter like trapped insects as she describes things. After having to put up with Jen's machinations, she's like a breath of fresh air. On my first day I arrive at my new job early, but Janis is already there. She whisks me into a dingy little staff room round the back of one of the bookcases that I'd never suspected existed on yesterday's tour.

"I'm so glad you're here," she tells me, clasping her hands. "Tea? Or coffee? We've got both"—there's an electric kettle in the corner and she switches it on—"but someone's going to have to run out and fetch some milk soon." She sighs. "This is the staff room. When there's nobody about, you can take your breaks here or go out for lunch—we close between noon and one o'clock—and there's also a terminal into the library computer." She points at a boxy device not unlike a baby television set, connected by a coiled cable to a panel studded with buttons.

"The library has a computer?" I say, intrigued. "Can't I just use my netlink?"

Janis flushes, her cheeks turning pink. "I'm afraid not," she apologizes. "They make us use them just like the ancients would have, through a keyboard and screen."

"But I thought none of the ancient thinking machines survived, except in emulation. How do we know what its physical manifestation looked like?"

"I'm not sure." Janis looks thoughtful. "Do you know, I hadn't thought of that? I've got no idea how they designed it! It's probably buried in the experimental protocol somewhere—the nonclassified bits are all online, if you want to go looking. But listen, we don't have time for that now." The kettle boils, and she busies herself for a minute pouring hot water into two mugs full of instant coffee granules. I study her indirectly while her back's turned. There's not much sign of her pregnancy yet, although I think there might be a slight bulge around her waist—her dress is cut so that it's hard to tell. "First, I want to get you started on how the front desk works, on the lending side. We've got to keep track of who's borrowed what books, and when they're due back, and it's the easiest thing to start you on. So"—she hands me a coffee mug—"how much do you know about library work?"

I learn over the course of the morning that "library work" covers such an enormous area of information management that back during the dark ages, before libraries became self-organizing constructs, people used to devote their entire (admittedly short) lives to studying the theory of how best to manage them. Neither Janis—nor I—is remotely qualified to be a real dark age librarian, with their esoteric mastery ofcatalogue systems and controlled information classification vocabularies, but we can run a small municipal lending library and reference section with a bit of scurrying around and a lot of patience. I seem to have some historic skills in that direction, and unlike my experience with arc welding, I haven't erased all of them. I can remember my alphabet and grasp the decimal classification scheme immediately, and the way each book has a ticket in an envelope inside the front cover that has to be retained when it's loaned out makes sense, too . . .

It's only by midafternoon, when we've taken a grand total of five returns and had one visitor who borrowed two books (on Aztec culture and the care and feeding of carnivorous plants), that I begin to wonder why YFH-Polity needs anything as exotic as a full-time librarian.

"I don't know," Janis admits over a cup of tea in the staff room, her feet stretched out under the rickety white-painted wooden table. "It can get a bit busy—wait until six o'clock, when most people are on their way home from work, that's when we get most of our borrowers—but really, they don't need me. A zombie could do the job perfectly well." She looks pensive. "I suspect it's more to do with finding employment for people who ask for it. It's one of the drawbacks of the entire experiment. We don't exist in a closed-circuit economy, and if they don't constantly provide jobs for people, it'll all fall apart. So what we're left with is a situation where they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. At least until they merge the parishes."

"Merge the—there are more?"

"So I'm told." She shrugs. "They're introducing us in small stages, so that we know who our neighbors are before we get linked into a large community and everything goes to pieces."

"Isn't that a bit of a pessimistic attitude?" I ask.

"Maybe so." She flashes me a rare grin. "But it's a realistic one."

I think I'm going to like Janis, her ironic sense of humor notwithstanding: I feel comfortable around her. We're going to work well together. "And the other stuff? The restricted archive? The computer?"

She waves it off. "All you need to know is, once a week Fiore comes and we unlock the closed room and leave him alone in it for an hour ortwo. If he wants to take any papers away, we log them and nag him until he brings them back."

"Anyone else?"

"Well." She looks thoughtful. "If the Bishop shows up, you give him access to all areas." She pulls a face. "And don't ask me about the computer, nobody told me much about how to use it, and I don't really understand the thing, but if you want to tinker with it during a slack period, be my guest. Just remember everything is logged." She catches my eye. "Everything," she repeats, with quiet emphasis.

My pulse quickens. "On the computer? Or off it?"

"Book withdrawals," she says. "Possibly even what pages people look at. You notice they're all hardcovers? You'd be surprised how small even the dark age technés could make a tracking device. You could build them into book spines, able to sense which pages the reader was opening the book to. All without violating protocol."

"But protocol—" I stop. The television doesn't look very complex, technically, but is it? Really? What goes into a machine like that? There must be either cameras or a really complex rendering system . . .

"The dark ages weren't just dark, they were fast. We're talking about the period when our ancestors went from needing an abacus to add two numbers together to building the first emotional machines. They went from witch doctors with poisonous chemicals—who couldn't even reattach a cleanly severed limb—to tissue regeneration, full control of the proteome and genome, and growing body parts to order. From using rockets to get into orbit to the first tethered lift systems. And they did all that in less than three gigs, ninety old-time years."

She pauses for a sip of tea. "It is very easy for us moderns to underestimate the dark age orthos. But it's a habit you'll shed after you've been here for a while, and to give them their due, the clergy—the experimenters—have been here longer than the rest of us. Even Harshaw, and he works for them." She pronounces his name with distaste, and I wonder what he's done to offend her.

"You think they've got more of a handle on this than we do?" I ask, intrigued.

"Damn right." (Yes, she says "damn": she's obviously getting into the spirit of things, speaking in the archaic slang the real old-timers would have used.) "I think there's more going on here than meets the eye. They've made a lot more progress toward stabilizing this society than you'd expect for just five megs of runtime." Her eyes flicker sharply toward a corner of the room right above the door, and I follow the direction of her gaze. "In part it's because they can see everything, hear everything, including this. In part."

"But surely that's not all?"

She smiles at me enigmatically. "Break's over, kid. Time to go back to work."

I get home late, bone-tired from filing returned books and standing behind a counter for hours. I have a gnawing sense of apprehension as I walk in the door. The lights are on in the living room and I can hear the television. I head for the kitchen first to get something to eat, and that's where I am when Sam finds me.

"Where've you been?" he demands.

"Work." I attack a tin of vegetable soup and a loaf of bread tiredly.

"Oh." Pause. "So what are you doing?"

He's put the butter in the refrigerator so it's as hard as a rock. "Training to be the new city librarian. Three days a week at present, but it's an eleven-hour day."

"Oh."

He bends over to put a dirty plate in the washing machine. I manage to stop him just in time—it's full of clean stuff. "No, you need to unload it first, okay?"

"Huh." He looks irritated. "So the city needs a new librarian?"

"Yes." I don't owe him any explanations, do I? Do I?

"Do you know Janis?"

"Janis—" He looks thoughtful. "No. I didn't even know we had a library."

"She's leaving in a couple of months, and they need someone to replace her."

He begins to remove plates from the bottom tray in the washing machine and stack them on the work-top. "She doesn't like the job? If it's so bad, why are you taking it?"

"It's not that." I finally get the soup out of the can and into a saucepan on the red-glowing burner. "She's leaving because she's pregnant." I turn round to watch him. He's focusing on the dishwasher, pointedly ignoring me. Still sulking, I suspect.

"Pregnant? Huh." He sounds a little surprised. "Why would anyone want to have a baby in—"

"We're fertile, Sam."

I manage to catch the plates he was unloading just in time. I straighten up, about half a meter from his nose, and he's too flustered to avoid my gaze.

"We're fertile ?"

"That's what Janis says, and judging by her state, I think she's probably got the evidence to prove it." I scowl at him for a moment, then turn back to the soup pan. "Got a bowl for me?"

"Ye-yes." The poor guy sounds genuinely shaken. I don't blame him—I've had a few hours to think about it, and I'm still getting used to the idea. "I'll just find one—"

"Think about it. We signed up to join the study knowing it would run for a hundred megs, yes? Funny thing about libraries: You can look things up in them. The gestation time for a human neonate in a host body is twenty-seven to twenty-eight megs. Meanwhile, we're all fertile, and we've been told we can earn points toward our eventual termination bonuses by fucking. The historical conception rate for healthy orthos having sex while fertile is roughly thirty percent per menstrual cycle. What does that sound like to you?"

"But I, I—I mean, you could have—" Sam holds a soup bowl in front of himself as if it's some kind of shield, and he's trying to keep me at bay.

I glare at him. "Don't say it."

"I—" He swallows. "Here, take it."

I take the bowl.

"I think I know what you thought I was going to say and you're right and I take it back even though I didn't say it. All right?" He says it very fast, running the words together as if he's nervous.

"You didn't say it."

I put the bowl down very carefully, because there really is no need to throw it at his head, and also because, once I calm down a fraction, I realize that in point of fact he's right, and he didn't say that if I'd fucked him the other night and become pregnant it would have been all my own fault. Smart Sam.

"It takes two to hold a grudge match." I lick my lips. "Sam, I'm very sorry about the other night." What comes next is hard to force out. "I shouldn't have taken advantage of you. I've been going through a bad patch, but that's no excuse. I'm not—I've never been—particularly good at self-restraint, but it won't happen again." And if it does, you won't get an apology like this, that's for sure. "Much as I like you, you're not big on poly and this, this shit—" My shoulders are shaking.

"You don't have to apologize," he says, and takes a step forward. Before I know what's happening he's hugging me, and it really is good to feel his arms around me. "It's my fault, too. I should have more self-control and I knew all along you were getting interested in me, and I shouldn't have put myself in a position where you might have thought—"

I sniff. "Shit!" I yell, and let go of him then spin round.

The soup is boiling over and there's a nasty smell from the burner. I kill the power and grab the handle to shift it somewhere safe, then hunt around for something to mop it up with. While I'm doing that Sam, like a zombie with a priority instruction, keeps methodically unloading the washing machine and transferring crockery to the cupboards. Eventually I get what's left of my soup into a bowl and pile my slices of bread on a plate, wondering why I didn't just use the microwave oven in the first place.

"By the time I get to eat this, it'll all be cold."

"My fault." He looks apologetic. "If I'd let you get on with it—"

"Uh-huh." We're apologizing to each other for breathing loudly, what's wrong with us? "Listen, here's a question for you. You know the contract you, uh, signed—do you remember if there was a maximum duration on participation?"

"A maximum ?" He looks startled. "It just said minimum one hundred megs. Why?"

"Figures." I pick up my plate and bowl and head toward the living room. "Human neonates hatched in the wild in primitive conditions took at least half a gigasec to reach maturity."

"Are you"—he's following me—"saying what I think you're saying?"

I put my bowl and plate down on the end table beside the sofa and perch on the arm, because if I sit on the sofa, it'll try to swallow me for good. "Why don't you tell me what you think I'm saying?"

"I don't know." Which means he doesn't want to say. He sits down at the other end of the sofa and stares at me. "We're being watched, aren't we? All the time. Do you think it's wise to talk about it?"

I blow on my soup to speed evaporative cooling. "No, but there's no point being paranoid, is there? There are going to be a hundred of us in here in time, at least. I suspect we outnumber the experimenters twenty to one. Are you telling me they're going to monitor the real-time take on everything we say to each other, as we say it? A lot of the netlink score incidents are preprogrammed—just events we happen to trigger. Someone has an orgasm in proximity to their spouse, netlink triggers. A bunch of zombies see someone damaging property or removing clothing in public, their netlinks trigger. It doesn't mean someone is sitting on the switch watching the monitors all the time. Does it?"

(Actually it's possible that this is the case, if we're in a panopticon prison run by spooks rather than half-assed academics, but I'm not going to tell them that I know this, assuming they exist. No way. Especially as I don't know why I know this.)

"But if we're being watched—"

"Listen." I put my spoon down. "We are here for a minimum of three years, maximum term unspecified, and we are fertile. That sounds to me like what they've got in mind involves breeding a population of genuine dark ages citizens. This is a separate polity, in case you'd forgotten, which means it has a defensible frontier—the assembler that generated these bodies we're wearing. Assemblers don't just make things, they filter things: They're firewalls. Polities are de facto independent networks of tightly connected T-gates defined by the firewalls that shield their edges from whatever tries to come in through their longjump T-gates. Their borders, in other words. But you can have a polity without internal T-gates; what defines it is the frontier, not the interior. We're functioning under YFH's rules. Doesn't that mean that anyone born into the place will be under the same rules, too?"

"But what about freedom of movement?" Sam looks antsy. "Surely they can't stop them if they want to emigrate?"

"Not if they don't know there's an outside universe to emigrate to," I say grimly. I take a spoonful of soup and wince, burning the roof of my mouth. "Ouch. We aren't supposed to talk about our earlier lives. What if they tighten the score system a bit more, so that mentioning the outside in front of children, or in public, costs us points? Then how are the nubes going to figure it out?"

"That's crazy." He jerks his head from side to side emphatically. "Why would anyone want to do that? I can understand the original purpose of the experiment, to research the social circumstances of the dark ages by experimental archaeology. But trying to create a whole population of orthos, stuck in this crazy dark ages sim and not even knowing it's a historical re-enactment rather than the real universe . . . !"

"I'm not sure yet," I say tiredly. "I'm not at all sure what it's about. But that's the point. We're missing essential data."

"Right, right." He looks pained. "Do you suppose it's anything to do with why they were picking people straight out of memory surgery?"

"Yes, that's got to be part of it." I gaze at him across a cold continental rift of sofa. "But that's only a part." I was going to say we have to get out of here, but that's not enough anymore. And despite what I've just said publicly, there's stuff that I'm not going to talk about. Like, I don't think we'll ever be allowed out. I don't know if this will ever end. If the child thing is true, they may be prepared to hold us here indefinitely, or worse. And that's leaving aside the most important questions: Why? And why us?

I go to work the next day, and the one after that, and by the end of my third day I am exhausted. I mean, shattered . Library work doesn't sound as if it should be hard, but when you're working for eleven hours with a one-hour break in the middle for lunch, it wears you down. The daytime is almost empty, but there's a small rush of custom every evening around six o'clock, and I have to scurry to and fro hunting for tickets, filing returned books, collecting fines, and getting things sorted out. Then in the morning I end up pushing a trolley loaded with books around the shelves, returning the borrowed items and sorting out anything that's been put back on a shelf out of sequence. If there's any time left over, I end up dusting the shelves that are due for cleaning.

"How do you know the books know when they're being read?" I ask Janis, halfway through my second morning. "I mean, take this one." I heft it where she can see it, a big green clothbound sheaf of papers with a title like The Home Vegetable Garden.

"Look." Janis takes it from me and bends the cover back, so that the plastic protective sleeve on the spine bends.

I look. "Aha." I can just see something like a squashed fly in there, two hair-fine antennae running up to the stitching atop the spine. "Those are . . . ?"

"Fiber optics. That's my guess." Janis hums to herself as she closes the book and slides it back into the trolley. "I don't think they can hear you, but they can sense which page is open and track your eyeballs. The experimenters have been careful to give us all different faces, and we all have two working eyes. That's no accident. Not all the ancients had that. If you want to read a book secretly, you need mirrored sunglasses and a timer, so you turn each page after the same amount of time."

"How do you know all this?" I ask admiringly. "You sound like a professional—" The word spy is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it with a little shiver.

"Before I checked into the clinic, I used to be a detective." She gives me a long look. "It's a skill set I didn't ask them to erase. Thought it might come in handy in my new life."

"Then what did you—" I stop myself just in time. "Forget I asked."

"By all means." She chuckles drily. "Listen, they tell me that it's normal for me to check into hospital a week or two before the delivery, and to stay there for a couple of weeks afterward. Can I"—she sounds tentative—"ask a big favor of you?"

"What? Sure," I say blankly.

"I figure I'm going to be in bed a lot of the time, bored out of my mind, and there's only so much television you can watch in a day, and Norm is working, so he can't keep me company. Would you mind visiting me and bringing me some library books? So I don't lose track?"

"Why, I'd be delighted to!" I say it with perfect sincerity, because I mean it. If I ever ended up in some kind of dark ages hospital for three or four cycles I'd want visitors. "You'll let me know what you want, all right?"

"Thank you." Janis sounds grateful. "Now if you could just get the footstool, these go on the top shelf and I can't reach as high as you can."

On my third day I'm due to meet up with Jen and Angel and Alice and do lunch. Jen's picked the Dominion Cafe as today's venue, and I walk there from the library, whistling tunelessly. I'm feeling unaccountably smug. I've found something new to do, I've got a source of income all of my own, I know things that the ladies who lunch haven't got a clue about, and if only I wasn't spending half my waking hours in fear of the future and wishing I could get out of this glass-walled prison and hook up with Kay again, I'd probably be quite happy.

The Dominion Cafe is a lot plusher than the name makes it sound, and I feel a bit underdressed as the maître d' ushers me to the booth where Jen is holding court. Here I am in a plain skirt and sweater, while Jen wears ever-more-exotic concoctions of spun bug spit and must spend three or four hours a day on her makeovers and hair. Angel isn't so much trying to ape her as getting tugged along in the undertow, and Alice looks a bit uncomfortable in their presence. But what do I care? They're people to talk to, and we're chained together by the mutual scorefile so I can't ignore them. This must be how the ancients used to feel about their families.

"Hello all," I say, pulling out a chair. "And how are you today?"

Jen waves at a metal bucket on a stand, with some kind of cloth draped over it. "Livin' large!" she announces. "Girls, a glass for Reeve. Won't you join us in a little Chateau Lafitte '59?"

"A little—" She whisks the cloth off the bucket, and I see it's full of ice packed around a green glass bottle.

"Champagne," Alice says, a little apologetically. "Fizzy wine."

"I wouldn't say no." Angel holds out a fluted glass while Jen picks up the bottle and pours.

"Why, is there something in particular to celebrate?" Jen and Angel don't normally do their drinking before sunset. So I figure it must be good.

"Well." Jen's eye sparkles wickedly. "You might think it was something to do with your correcting your last social shortcoming at long last." I feel my face heating. "But that's not it." Bitch. "It's just that this is Alice's last drink for some time."

"Excuse me?" I say, unsure what's going on.

"About eight months to go," Alice says, dabbing at her lips with a napkin. Her eyes flicker from me to Jen and back again, as if looking for an offer of help.

"I—" I stop. Lick my lips. "You're pregnant?"

"Yes." Alice nods, a quick up and down. She doesn't look happy. Jen, however, looks ecstatic.

"Here's to Alice and her baby!" She raises a glass of bubbly, and I echo the gesture because it would be rude not to, but as I take a mouthful of the sweet, fizzy wine I catch Alice's eye, and it's like there's a static discharge—I can see exactly what she's thinking.

"To your very good health," I tell her over the rim of my glass, and I'm pretty sure she gets the unspoken message because her shoulders slump slightly, and she takes a small sip from her own glass. I look at Jen. "And you?" I ask, before I can apply the brakes to my motor mouth.

Jen doesn't crack a smile. "Shouldn't be too long now," she remarks, calmly enough. "Then you can buy me a bottle of champagne too, eh?"

I manage to summon up the ghost of a grin from somewhere. "You must want a baby badly."

"Of course! And I'm not just going to stop at one." Jen smiles at me sympathetically. "Of course, I heard all about your job. It must be very difficult."

"It's not so bad," I manage, before retreating into the glass. Bitch. "You know Janis is pregnant, too?" I'll bet you do . "I'm training to be her replacement." What is this, let's all overload the life-support system week? "It's going to mean more work for the rest of us."

"Oh, you'll be next," Jen says, with a casual, airy certainty that makes my blood run cold. "You'll see things differently when you've got one of your own. I say, waiter! Waiter! Where's our menu?"