Glasshouse

10. State

SUNDAY dawns, cool and mellow. I groan and try not to pull the bedclothes over my head. By one of those quirks of scheduling, yesterday was a workday for me, tomorrow is another, and I'm feeling hammered by the prospect of two eleven-hour days. I'm not looking forward to spending half my day off in forced proximity to score whores like Jen and Angel, but I manage to force myself out of bed and rescue my Sunday outfit from the pile growing on the chair at the end of the room. (I need to take a trip to the dry-cleaners soon, and spend some time down in the basement washing the stuff I can do at home. More drudgery on my day off. Does it ever stop?)

Downstairs, I find Sam laboriously spooning cornflakes into a bowl of milk. He looks preoccupied. My stomach is tight with anxiety, but I force myself to put a pan of water on the burner and carefully lower a couple of eggs into it. I need to make myself eat: My appetite isn't good, and with the exercise regime I'm keeping up, I could start burning muscle tissue very easily. I glance inward at my mostly silent netlink to check my cohort's scores for the week. As usual, I'm nearly the bottom-ranked female in the group. Only Cass is doing worse, and I feel a familiar stab of anxiety. I'm nearly sure she isn't Kay, but I can't help feeling for her. She has to put up with that swine Mick, after all. Then my stomach does another flip-flop as I remember something I have to do before we go.

"Sam."

He glances up from his bowl. "Yes?"

"Today. Don't be surprised if—if—" I can't say it.

He puts his spoon down and looks out the window. "It's a nice day." He frowns. "What's bugging you? Is it Church?"

I manage to nod.

His eyes go glassy for a moment. Checking his scores, I guess. Then he nods. "You didn't get any penalties, did you?"

"No. But I'm afraid I—" I shake my head, unable to continue.

"They're going to single you out," he says, evenly and slowly.

"That's it." I nod. "I've just got a feeling, is all."

"Let them." He looks angry, and for a moment I feel frightened, then I realize that for a wonder it isn't me—he's angry at the idea that Fiore might have a go at me in Church, indignant at the possibility that the congregation might go along with it. Resentful. "We'll walk out."

"No, Sam." The water is boiling—I check the clock, then switch on the toaster. Boiled eggs and toast, that's how far my culinary skills have come. "If you do that, it'll make you a target, too. If we're both targets . . ."

"I don't care." He meets my gaze evenly, with no sign of the reticence that's been dogging him for the past month. "I made a decision. I'm not going to stand by and let them pick us off one by one. We've both made mistakes, but you're the one who's most at risk in here. I haven't been fair to you and I, I"—he stumbles for a moment—"I wish things had turned out differently." He looks down at his bowl and murmurs something I can't quite make out.

"Sam?" I sit down. "Sam. You can't take on the whole polity on your own." He looks sad. Sad? Why?

"I know." He looks at me. "But I feel so helpless!"

Sad and angry. I stand up and walk over to the burner, turn the heat right down. The eggs are bumping against the bottom of the pan. The toaster is ticking. "We should have thought of that before we agreed to be locked up in this prison," I say. I feel like screaming. With my extra-heavy memory erasure—which I have a sneaking suspicion exceeded anything my earlier self, the one who wrote me the letter and then forgot about it, was expecting—I'm half-surprised I got here in the first place. Certainly if I'd known Kay was going to dither, then pull out, I'd probably have chosen to stay with her and the good life, assassins or no.

"Prison." He chuckles bitterly. "That's a good description for it. I wish there was some way to escape."

"Go ask the Bishop; maybe he'll let you out early for bad behavior." I pop the toast, butter it, then scoop both eggs out of the water and onto my plate. "I wish."

"How about we walk to Church today?" Sam suggests hesitantly, as I'm finishing breakfast. "It's about two kilometers. That sounds a long way, but—"

"It also sounds like a good idea to me," I say, before he can talk himself out of it. "I'll wear my work shoes."

"Good. I'll meet you down here in ten minutes." He brushes against me on his way out of the kitchen, and I startle, but he doesn't seem to notice. Something's going on inside his head, and not being able to open up and ask is frustrating.

Two kilometers is a nice morning walk, and Sam lets me hold his hand as we stroll along the quiet avenues beneath trees suddenly exploding with green and blue-black leaves. We have to walk through three tunnels between zones to get to the neighborhood of the Church—there are no lines of sight longer than half a kilometer, perhaps because that would make it obvious that our landscapes are cut from the inner surfaces of conic sections rather than glued to the outside of a sphere by natural gravity—but we see barely anyone. Most folks travel to Church by taxi, and they won't be leaving their homes until we're nearly there.

The Church service starts out anticlimactic for me, but probably not for anyone else. After leading the congregation into a tub-thumping rendition of "First We Take Manhattan," Fiore launches into a longperoration on the nature of obedience, crime, our place in society, and our duties to one another.

"Is it not true that we were placed here to enjoy the benefits of civilization and to raise a great society for the betterment of our children and the achievement of a morally pure state?" he thunders from the pulpit, eyes focused glassily on an infinity that lurks just behind the back wall. "And to this end, isn't it the case that our social order, being the earthly antecedent of a Platonic ideal society, must be defended so that it has room to mature and bear the fruit of utopia?" A real tub-thumper , I realize uneasily. I wonder where he's going? People are shuffling in the row behind me; I'm not the only one with a guilty conscience.

"This being the case, can we admit to our society one who violates its cardinal rules? Must we forebear from criticizing the sins out of consideration for the sensibilities of the sinner?" He demands. "Or for the sensibilities of those who, unknowing, live side by side with the personification of vice incarnate?"

Here it comes. I feel a mortal sense of dread, my stomach loosening in anticipation of the denunciation I can feel coming. There's got to be more to this than a furtive library book, and I have a horrible sinking feeling that he's figured out the soap impression and the plaster of paris and the mold I'm preparing for the duplicate keys—

"No!" Fiore booms from the pulpit. "This cannot be!" He thumps the rail with one fist. "But it grieves me to say that it is —that Esther and Phil are not merely adulterating their souls by sneaking their vile intimacies behind the backs of their ignorant and abused spouses, but are adulterating the fabric of society itself !"

Huh? It's not me that he's going after, but the thrill of relief doesn't last long: There's a loud grumble of rage from the congregation, led by cohort three, whose members are the ones Fiore is accusing. Everyone else looks round and I turn round with them—not to go with the crowd could be dangerous right now—and see a turbulent knot a couple of rows back, where well-dressed churchgoers are turning on each other. A frightened female and a defensive-looking male with dark hair are looking around apprehensively, not making eye contact, but trying to—yes,they're looking for escape routes as Fiore continues. Something tells me they're too late.

"I would like to thank Jen in particular for bringing this matter to my attention," Fiore says coolly. My netlink dings, registering the arrival of more points than I'd normally rack up in a month, an upward adjustment I can blame on the fact that I'm in the same cohort as the little snitch. She's scored big-time with this accusation of adultery. "And I ask you, what are we going to do about the sickness in our midst?" Fiore scans the audience from his pulpit. "What is to be done to cleanse our society?"

My sick sense of dread is back with a vengeance. This is going to be a whole lot worse than anything I'd anticipated. Normally, Fiore singles a handful out for ridicule, laughter, the pointed finger of contempt—a minor humiliation for sneaking a library book out of the reference section would be nothing out of the ordinary. But this is big bad stuff, two people caught subverting the social foundations of the experiment. Fiore is on a roll of righteous indignation, and the atmosphere is getting very ugly indeed. A roar goes up from the back benches, incoherent rage and anger, and I grab Sam's hand. Then I check my netlink and freeze. He's fined cohort three all the points he's just given to Jen! "Let's get out of here before it turns nasty," I mutter into Sam's ear, and he nods and grips my hand back tightly. People are standing up and shouting, so I sidle toward the side of the aisle as fast as I can, using my elbows when I have to. I can see Mick on the other side, yelling something, the tendons on the sides of his neck standing out like cables. I don't see Cass. I keep moving. There's a storm brewing, and this isn't the time or place to stop and ask.

Behind me Fiore shouts something about natural justice, but he's barely audible over the crowd. The doors are open, and people are spilling out into the car park. I gasp with pain as someone stomps on my left foot, but I stay upright and sense rather than see Sam following me. I make it through the crush in the doorway and keep going, dodging small clumps of people and a struggling figure, then Sam catches up with me. "Let's go ," I tell him, grabbing his hand.

There are people in front of us, clustered around—it's Jen. "Reeve!" she calls.

I can't ignore her without being obvious. "What do you want?" I ask.

"Help us." She grins widely, her eyes sparkling with excitement as she spreads her arms. She's wearing a little black-silk number that displays her secondary sexual characteristics by providing just a wisp of contrast: her chest is heaving as if she's about to have an orgasm. "Come on!" She gestures at the dark knot near the Church entrance. "We're going to have a party!"

"What do you mean?" I demand, looking past her. Her husband, Chris, is conspicuously absent. Instead, she's acquired a cohort of her own, followers or admirers or something, Grace from twelve and Mina from nine and Tina from seven—all of them are from newer cohorts than our own—and they're watching her, looking to her as if she's a leader . . .

"Purify the polity!" she says, almost playfully. "Come on! Together we can keep everyone in line and hold everything together—and earn loads more points—if we make a strong enough statement right now. Send the deviants and perverts a message." She looks at me enthusiastically. "Right?"

"Uh, right," I mumble, backing away until I bump into Sam, who's come up behind me. "You're going to teach them a lesson, huh?"

I feel Sam's hand tightening on my shoulder, warning me not to go too far, but Jen's in no mood to pick up minor details like sarcasm: "That's right!" She's almost rapturous. "It's going to be real fun. I got Chris and Mick ready—"

There's a high-pitched scream from somewhere behind us. "Excuse us," I mumble, "I don't feel so good." Sam shoves me forward, and I stumble past Jen, still stammering out excuses, but the situation isn't critical. Jen doesn't have time to waste on broken reeds and moral imbeciles, and she's already drifting toward the group in the Church door, shouting something about community values.

We make it to the edge of the car park before I stumble again and grab hold of Sam's arm. "We've got to stop them," I hear myself saying. I wonder what that toad Fiore thought he was unleashing when he transferred so many points from one cohort to another. Doing that to the score whores is only going to have one result. At the very least, cohort three is going to rip the shit out of Phil and Esther—but now we've got Jen, trying to spin the whole thing as social cleansing in order to position herself at the head of a mob. I can see a hideous new reality taking shape here, and I want nothing to do with it.

"Not sensible." He shakes his head but slows down.

"I mean it!" I insist. I swallow, my throat dry. "They're going to beat Phil and Esther—"

"No, it's already gone past that point." There's an ugly quaver in his voice.

I dig my heels in and stop. Sam stops, too, of necessity—it's that, or shove me over. He's breathing heavily. "We've got to do something."

"Like. What?" He's breathing deeply. "There're at least twenty of them. Cohort three and the idiots who've gotten some idea that they can parade their virtue by joining in. We don't stand a chance." He glances over his shoulder, seems to shudder, then suddenly pulls me closer and speeds up. "Don't stop, don't look round," he hisses. So of course I stop dead and turn around to see what they're doing behind us.

Oh shit, indeed. I feel wobbly, and Sam catches me under one arm as I see what's happening. There are no more screams, but that doesn't mean nothing's going on. The screaming is continuing, inside the privacy of my own skull. "They planned this," I hear myself say, as if from the far end of a very dark tunnel. "They prepared for it. It's not spontaneous."

"Yes." Sam nods, his face whey-pale. There's no other explanation, crazy as it seems. "Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been a major cultural bonding feature in pretech cultures," he mutters. "I wonder how long Fiore's been planning to introduce it?"

They've got two ropes over the branches of the poplars beside the Church, and two groups are busy heaving their twitching payloads up into the greenery. I blink. The ropes seem to curve slightly. It might be centripetal acceleration, but more likely it's because my eyes are watering.

"I don't care. If I had a gun, I'd shoot Jen right now, I really would." I suddenly realize that I'm not feeling faint from fear or dread, but from anger: "The bitch needs killing."

"Wouldn't work," he says, almost absently. "More violence just normalizes the killing, it doesn't put an end to it: They're having a party and all you could do is add to the fun . . ."

"Yeah, I—but I'd feel better." Jen had better have bars on her windows and sleep with a baseball bat under her pillow tonight, or she's in trouble. And she royally deserves it, the mendacious bitch.

"Me too, I think."

"Can we do anything?"

"For them?" He shrugs. There's no more screaming, but a tone-deaf choir has struck up some kind of anthem. "No."

I shiver. "Let's go home. Right now."

"Okay," he says, and together we start walking again.

The singing follows us up the road. I'm terrified that if I look back, I'll break down: There's absolutely nothing I can do about it, but I feel a filthy sense of complicity with them. As for Fiore . . . he's got it coming. Sooner or later I'll get him. But I'm going to bite my tongue and not say a word about that for now, because I've a feeling he staged this little show to teach us a lesson about the construction of totalitarian power, and right this moment all the spies and snitches are going to be wide-awake, looking for signs of dissent.

A kilometer up the road and ten minutes away from the ghastly feeding frenzy, I tug at Sam's arm. "Let's slow down a little," I suggest. "Catch our breath. There's no need to run anymore."

"Catch our—" Sam stares at me. "I thought you were mad at me."

"No, it's not you." I carry on walking, but more slowly.

His hand on my arm. "We didn't join in."

I nod, wordlessly.

"Three-quarters of the people there were as horrified as we were. But we couldn't stop it once it got going." He shakes his head.

I take a deep breath. "I'm pissed at myself for not making a stand while there was time. You can game a mob if you know what you're doing. But once people get moving in groups like that, it's really hard to contain them. Fiore didn't need to set that off. But he did, like pouring gasoline on a barbecue." Both of which are items I've only lately become acquainted with. "And after that sermon and the score transfer, he couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted to."

"You sound like you think it's a matter of choice." I glance sidelong at him: Sam's not stupid, but he doesn't normally talk in abstractions. He continues: "Do you really think you could have stopped it? It's implicit in this society, Reeve. They set us up to make it easy to make people kill for an abstraction. You saw Jen. Did you really think you could have stopped her, once she got going?"

"I should have stuck a knife in her ribs." I trudge on in silence for a few seconds. "I'd probably have failed. You're right, but that doesn't make me feel better."

We walk slowly along the road, baking beneath the noonday heat of an artificial late-spring sun in our Sunday outfits. The invertebrates creak in the long, yellowing grass, and the deciduous trees rustle their leaves overhead in the breeze. I smell sage and magnolia in the warm air. Ahead of us the road dives into a cutting that leads to another of the tunnels with built-in T-gates that conceal the true geometry of our inside-out world. Sam pulls out his pocket flashlight, swinging it from his wrist by a strap.

"I've seen mobs before," I tell him. If only I could forget. "They have a peculiar kind of momentum." I feel weak and shaky as I think about it, about the look on Phil's face—I hardly knew him—and the hunger stalking the shadow of the crowd. Jen's malicious delight. "Once it gets past a certain point, all you can do is run away fast and make sure you have nothing to do with what happens next. If everybody did that, there wouldn't be any mobs."

"I guess." Sam sounds subdued as we walk into the penumbra of the tunnel. He switches his flashlight on. The cone of light bobs around crazily ahead of us as the road swings to the left.

"Even a sword-fighting fool of a hero can't divert a mob like that on their own once it gets going," I tell him, as much for my own benefit as anything else. "Not without battle armor and some heavy weaponry, because they're going to keep coming and coming. The ones behind can't see what's happening up front, and the fool who stands in the way without backup is going to end up a dead fool really fast, even if he kills a whole load of them. And anyway, your sword-fighting fool, he's no smarter than any of them in the mob. The time to stop the mob is before it gets started. To stand up in front of it first, and tell it no."

We're walking into the dark curve of the tunnel, out of sight of either entrance. Sam sighs.

"I knew someone who'd do that," he says wistfully. "The man I fell in love with. He wasn't a fool, but he'd know how to handle a situation like that."

The man ? Sam doesn't seem like the type to me—until I remember that I'm seeing him through gender-trapped eyes, the same way he's looking at me, and that I've got no way of knowing who or what Sam was before he volunteered for the experiment. "Nobody could do that," I tell him gently.

"Maybe so. But I think I'd trust Robin's judgment before I'd trust—"

I stop as suddenly as if I have just walked into a wall. The hairs on the back of my neck are all standing on end, and my stomach is knotting up again as if I'm going to be sick.

"What's wrong?" asks Sam.

"The person on the outside you've been pining after," I say carefully. "He's called Robin. Is that right?"

"Yes." He nods. "I shouldn't have said, we'll get penalized—"

I grab his hand like it's a floatation aid and I'm drowning. "Sam, Sam." You idiot! Yes, you! (I'm not sure which of us I mean.) "Did it ever occur to you to ask if maybe I knew Robin?"

"Why? What good would that have done?" His pupils are huge and dark in the twilight.

"You are the biggest—" I don't know what to say. Truly, I don't. Stunned is the mildest word that describes how I feel. "The name you gave Robin was Kay, right?"

"You—"

"Kay. Yes or no?"

He tenses and tries to pull his hand away. "Yes," he admits.

"O-kay." I don't seem to be able to get enough air. "Well, Sam, we are going to continue on our way home, now, aren't we? Because who we were before we came here doesn't make any difference to where we are now, does it?"

His expression is impossible to read in the darkness. "You must be Vhora—"

I nearly slap him. Instead, I reach out with the index finger of my free hand and touch his lips. "Home first. Then we talk," I tell him, stomach still churning, aghast at my own stupidity and willful blindness. Okay, so I walked right into this one. And I think I just sprained my brain. Now what?

He sighs. "All right." He still doesn't use my name. But he turns to shine the flashlight ahead of us. And that's when I see the outline of the door in the opposite wall.

IT'S funny how the more we travel the less we see.

Traveling via T-gates, we avoid the intervening points between the nodes because the gate is actually a hole in the structure of space, and in a very real sense there are no intervening points. And it's not much different in a car. You get in, you tell the zombie where to take you, and he steps on the gas. Not that there's a machine under the bonnet that clatteringly detonates liquid distilled from ancient fossilized biomass (just a compact gateway generator and a sound effects unit), but it feels the same, in terms of your interaction with your surroundings.

Meanwhile, outside the cars and the corridors and the gates and the head games we deny playing with each other, there's a real universe. And sometimes it smacks you in the face.

Like now. I have known all along, in an abstract kind of way, that we're living in a series of roughly rectangular terrain features laid out on the curved inner surface of several huge colony cylinders, spinning to provide centripetal acceleration (a substitute for gravity), in orbit around who-knows-what brown dwarf stars. The sky is a display screen, the wind is air-conditioning, the road tunnels are a necessary part of the illusion, and if you go for a walk in the overgrown back lot you'll find a steep hill or cliff that you can't climb because it goes vertical only a few meters up. I haven't given much thought to how it's all stitched together, other than to assume there are T-gates in each road tunnel. But what if there's another way out?

I clutch his hand. "Stop! Turn your flashlight back. Yes, there, right there."

"What is it?" he asks.

"Let's see." I tug him toward it. "Come on, I need the light."

The tunnel walls are made of smoothly curved slabs of concrete set edge to edge, forming a hollow tube maybe eight meters in diameter. The road is a flat sheet of asphalt, its edges meeting the walls of the tube just under the halfway point up its sides. (Now that I think about it, what could be running under the road deck? It might be solid, but then again, there could be just about anything down there.) What I've noticed is a rectangular groove in the opposite wall. Close up I can see it's about a meter wide and two meters high, a plain metal panel sunk into one side of the tunnel. There's no sign of any handle or lock except for a hole a few millimeters in diameter drilled halfway up it, just beside one edge.

"Give me the flashlight."

"Here." He passes it without argument. I get as close to the wall as I can and shine the light into the crack. Nothing, no sign of hinges or anything. I crouch down and shine it into the hole. Nothing there, either. "Hmm."

"What is it?" he asks anxiously.

"It's a door. Can't say more than that." I straighten up. "We can't do anything about it right now. Let's go home and think about this."

"But if we go home, we won't be able to talk!" In the dim light of the flashlight, his eyes look very white. "They'll overhear everything."

"They don't see everything," I reassure him. "Come on, let's go home. This afternoon I want you to mow the lawn."

"But I—"

"The lawn mower is in the garage," I continue implacably. "Along with other things."

"But—"

"If they're not waiting for us when we get home, they're not monitoring the tunnels, Sam. Noticed your netlink recently? No? Well, we don't seem to have lost any points just now. There are gaps in the surveillance coverage. I think I know somewhere else they're not monitoring, and you ought to know we're not the only people who want out."

I feel safe telling him that much, even though if they brainscoop me and feed me to Curious Yellow right now, it'll take down three of us: me and Sam and Janis. Kay may be in denial right now but she—No, you've got to keep thinking of him as Sam, I tell myself—isn't, I think, going to sell me to the bad guys. I am pretty sure I can read Sam well enough now to know what's bugging him. It's funny how I was in lust with Kay but couldn't tell if I trusted her. Now I trust Sam, but I doubt I'll ever fuck him again. Life is strange, isn't it? "You do want out, don't you?" I ask.

"Yes." He sounds tremulous.

"Then you're going to have to trust me for a little bit longer because I don't have an escape plan yet." I squeeze his hand. "But I'm working on it."

Together, we walk toward the light.

THAT afternoon Sam changes into jeans and a T-shirt and mows the lawn. I'm in the garage wearing overalls and safety goggles, because I've made a mold from the plaster of paris dies and I'm pouring solder into it, casting a lead copy of the key to Fiore's cabinet of curiosities. The lead key won't turn in the lock, but it'll do okay as a template for the engraving disk and the small bar of brass I've got waiting.

To confuse anyone who's watching, I've got some props sitting around—a wooden wall plaque purchased from the fishing store, a plate to engrave with some meaningless dedication. When I showed Sam what I was up to he blinked rapidly, then nodded. "It's for thewomen's freehand cross-stitch club," I said, pulling the explanation right out of my ass. There is no such club, but it sounds right, a backup explanation that will trigger a reflex in whatever watcher is scanning us for anomalous behavior.

We may be living in a glass jar with bright lights and monitors trained on us the whole time, but it's not likely that everything we do is being watched by a live human being in real time. We massively outnumber the experimenters, and they're primarily interested in our public socialization. (At least, that's the official story.) To monitor an intelligent organism properly requires observers with a theory of mind at least as strong as the subject. We subjects outnumber the experimenters by a couple of orders of magnitude, and I've seen no sign of strongly superhuman metaintelligences being involved in this operation, so I think the odds are on my side. If we are up against the weakly godlike, I might as well throw in the towel right now. But if not . . . You can delegate all you want to subconscious mechanisms, but you run the risk of them missing things. Sic transit gloria panopticon.

The Church services are almost certainly monitored in every imaginable way. But after Church, Fiore and his friends will be too busy re-running the lynching from every imaginable angle and trying to figure out how the social dynamics of a genuine dark ages mob operate. They won't be watching what I get up to in the garage until much later, probably just a bored glance at a replay to make sure I'm not fucking my neighbor's husband or weeping hysterically in a corner. Because they're used to using A-gates to fab any physical artifacts they need, they probably look at what I'm doing as some sort of dark ages hobby and view me as a slightly dull but basically well-adjusted wife. I even gained a couple of points last week for my weaving. I laboriously hand-wove a Faraday cage lining for my shoulder bag right under their noses, and they treated it as if I was diligently practicing a traditional feminine craft! There are gaps in their surveillance and bigger gaps in their understanding, and those gaps are going to be their downfall.

Concentrating on making the key and thinking about how much I am beginning to hate them is a good way for me to avoid confronting what happened outside the Church this morning. It's also a good distraction from the wall I walked into in my head, or the door in the tunnel, or any of the other troubling shit that's happened since I woke up this morning and thought it was going to be just another boring Sunday.

After what feels like a few infinitely tense minutes—but the lying clock insists it's been the best part of four hours—I emerge from the garage. The hot morning sunlight has softened into a roseate afternoon glow, and insects creak beneath a turquoise sky. It looks like I've missed an idyllic summer afternoon. I feel shaky, tired, and very hungry indeed. I'm also sweating like a pig, and I probably stink. There's no sign of Sam, so I go indoors and hit the bathroom, dump my clothes and dial the shower up to a cool deluge until it washes everything away.

When I get out of the shower I rummage around in my wardrobe until I find a sundress, then head downstairs with the vague idea of sorting out something to eat. A microwave dinner perhaps, to eat on the rear deck while the illusory sun sets. Instead, I run into Sam coming in through the front door. He looks haggard.

"Where've you been?" I ask. "I was going to sort out some food."

"I've been with Martin and Greg and Alf, down at the churchyard." I look at him, closer. His shirt is sweat-stained, and there's dirt under his fingernails. "Doing the burying."

"Burying?" For a moment I don't get what he's talking about, then it clicks into place and I feel dizzy, as if the whole world's revolving around my head. "The—you should have told me."

"You were busy." He shrugs dismissively.

I peer at him, concerned. "You look tired. Why don't you go have a shower? I'll fix you some food."

He shakes his head. "I'm not hungry."

"Yes you are." I take hold of his right arm and lead him toward the kitchen. "You didn't eat any lunch unless you sneaked a snack while I wasn't looking, and it's getting late." I take a deep breath. "How bad was it?"

"It was—" He stops and takes a deep breath. "It was—" He stops again. Then he bursts into tears.

I am absolutely certain that Sam has seen death before, up close and personal. He's at least three gigs old, he's been through memory surgery, he's experienced the psychopathic dissociation that comes with it, he's hung out with dueling fools like me in my postsurgery phase, and he's lived among pretech aliens for whom violent death and disease are all part of life's unpalatable banquet. But there's an enormous difference between the effects of a semiformal duel between consenting adults, with A-gate backups to make resurrection a minor headache, and cleaning up after a random act of senseless brutality in a Church parking lot.

Forget about no backups, no second chances, nobody coming home again scratching their heads and wondering what was in the two kiloseconds of their life that's just vanished. The difference is that it could have been you. Because, when you get down to it, the one thing you know for sure is that if the toad in the pulpit had got the wrong name, it would have been you up there in the branches, choking and twitching on the end of a rope. It could have been you. It wasn't, but that's nothing but an accident of fate. Sam's just back from the wars, and he's definitely got the message.

Maybe that's why we end up on the wooden bench on the back deck, me sitting up and him with his head in my lap, not crying like a baby but sobbing occasionally between gasping breaths. I'm stroking his hair and trying not to let it get to me either way—the jagged razor edge of sympathy, or the urge to tell him to pull himself together and get with the program. Judgment hurts, and he'll talk it out in his own way if I just lend him an ear. If not—

Well, I could have used a listener the other night, but I won't hold that against him.

"Greg rang while you were in the shed," he says eventually. "Asked if I'd help clean up. What I was saying this morning. Not letting them give me any shit. I figured part of that was, if I couldn't do anything at the time I could maybe do some good afterward." And he's off again, sobbing for about a minute.

When he stops, he manages to speak quietly and evenly, in thoughtful tones. It sounds as if he's explaining it to himself, trying to make sense of it. "I caught a taxi to Church. Greg told me to bring a shovel, so I did. I got there and Martin and Alf were there, along with Liz, Phil's—former wife. Mal is in hospital. He tried to stop them. They hurt him. The mob, I mean. There are other decent people here, but they're mostly too frightened to even help bury the bodies or comfort the widow."

"Widow." It's a new word in our little prison, like "pregnant" and "lynch mob." It's an equally unwelcome arrival. (Along with "mortal" if we stay here long enough, I guess.)

"Greg got a ladder from inside the Church hall, and Martin went up to cut down the bodies. Liz was very quiet when we got Phil down, but couldn't take it when he was lowering Esther. Luckily Xara showed up with a bottle of rye and sat with her. Then Greg and Martin and Alf and me started digging. Actually, we started on the spot, but Alf said it was Fiore's fault, and we should use the graveyard. So we did that, while Alf got some boards. I think we did it deep enough. None of us has ever done this before."

He goes silent for a long time. I stroke the hair back from the side of his face. "Twenty cycles," he says after a while.

"Seven months?"

"Without backups," he confirms.

It's a frightening amount of time to lose, that's for sure. Even more frightening is the fact that their last backups are locked up in the assembler firewall that isolates YFH-Polity from the outside world—while I'm not certain it's infected with Curious Yellow, I have my suspicions. (CY copies itself between A-gates via the infected victims' netlinks, doesn't it? And the suspiciously restricted functionality of our netlinks inside YFH worries me.) There might not be any older copies of Phil or Esther on file elsewhere. If that's the case, and if we can't phage-clean the infected nodes, we might lose them for good.

Sam is silent for a long time. We stay there on the bench as the light reddens and dims, and after a while I just rest my hands on his shoulder and watch the trees at the far end of the garden. Then, with absolutely no buildup, he murmurs, "I knew who you were almost from the beginning."

I stroke his cheek again, but don't say anything.

"I figured it out inside a week. You were spending all your time talking about this friend you were supposed to be looking out on the inside for. Cass, you thought."

I keep stroking, to calm myself as much as anything else.

"I think I was in shock at first. You seemed so dynamic and confident and self-possessed before—it was bad enough waking up in that room and finding I was this enormous bloated shambling thing, but then to see you like that, it really scared me. I thought at first I was wrong, but no. So I kept quiet."

I stop moving my hands around, leaving one on his shoulder and one beside his head.

"I nearly killed myself on the second day, but you didn't notice."

Shit. I blink. "I was dealing with my own problems," I manage to say.

"Yes, I can see that now." His voice is gentle, almost sleepy. "But I couldn't forgive you for a while. I've been here before, you know. Not here-here, but somewhere like here."

"The ice ghouls?" I ask, before I can stop myself.

"Yes." He tenses, then pushes himself upright. "A whole planet full of pre-Acceleration sapients who probably aren't going to make it without outside help because they took so long bootstrapping their techné that they ran out of easily accessible fossil fuels." He swings his legs round and sits upright, next to me but just too far away to touch. "Living and breeding and dying of old age and sometimes fighting wars and sometimes starving in famines and disasters and plagues."

"How long were you there, again?" I ask.

"Two gigs." He turns his head and looks straight at me. "I was part of a, a—I guess you'd call it a reproductive unit. A family. I was an ice ghoul, you know. I was there from late adolescence through to senescence, but rather than let them nurse me, I ran out onto the tundra and used my netlink to call for upload. Nearly left it too late. I was terminally ill and close to being nestridden." Sam looks distant. "All the pre-Acceleration tool-using sapients we've seen use K-type reproductive strategies. I'd outlived my partners, but I had three children, their assorted cis –mates and trans –mates, and more grandchildren than—"

He sighs.

"You seem to want me to know this," I say. "Are you sure about that?"

"I don't know." He looks at me. "I just wanted you to know who I am and where I come from." He looks down at the stones between his feet. "Not what I am now, which is a travesty. I feel dirty."

I stand up. He's gone on for long enough, I think. "Okay, so let me get this straight. You're a former xeno-ornithologist who got way too close to your subjects for your own emotional stability. You've got a bad case of body-image dysphoria that YFH failed to spot in their excuse for an entry questionnaire, you're good at denial—self and other—and you're a pathetic failure at suicide." I stare at him. "What am I missing?" I grab his hands: "What am I missing?" I shout at him.

At this point I realize several things at once. I am really, really angry with him, although that's not all I feel by a long way, because it's not the kind of anger you feel at a stranger or an enemy. And while I've been working out like crazy and I'm in much better physical shape than I was when I came here, Sam is standing up, too, and he has maybe thirty centimeters and thirty kilos on me because he's male, and he's built like a tank. Maybe getting angry and yelling in the face of someone who's that much bigger than I and who's shocky right now from repeated bad experiences isn't a very wise thing to do, but I don't care.

"* * *," he mumbles.

"What?" I state at him. "Would you care to repeat that?"

"* * *," he says, so quietly I can't hear it over the noise of the blood pounding in my ears. "That's why I didn't kill myself."

I shake my head. "I don't think I'm hearing you properly."

He glares at me. "Who do you think you are ?" he demands.

"Depends. I was a historian, a long time ago. Then there were the wars, and I was a soldier. Then I became the kind of soldier who needs a historian's training, then I lost my memory." I'm glaring right back at him. "Now I'm a ditzy, ineffectual housewife and part-time librarian, okay? But I'll tell you this—one day I'm going to be a soldier again."

"But those are all externals! They're not you. You won't tell me anything! Where do you come from? Did you ever have a family? What happened to them?"

He looks anxious, and suddenly I realize he's afraid of me. Afraid? Of me? I take a step back. And then I register what my face probably looks like right now, and it's like all my blood is replaced with ice water of an instant, because his question has dredged up a memory that was, I think, one of the ones my earlier self deliberately forgot before the surgery, because he knew it would surface again and forgetting it hurt but knowing it might be erased by crude surgical intervention was even worse. And I sit down hard on the bench and look away from him because I don't want to see his sympathy.

"They all died in the war," I hear myself saying woodenly. "And I don't want to talk about it."

WHEN I sleep, another horror story dredges itself up from my suppressed memories and comes to visit. This time I know it's genuine and true and really happened to me, and there's nothing I can do to change it in any detail—because that's what makes it so nightmarish.

The ending has already been written, and it is not a happy one.

In the dream, I am a gracile male orthohuman with long, flowing green hair and what my partners describe as a delightful laugh. I am a lot younger—barely three gigs—and I'm also happy, at least at first. I'm in a stable family relationship with three other core partners, plus various occasional liaisons with five or six fuckbuddies. We're fully bisexual, either naturally or via a limbic system mod copied from bonobos. My family has two children, and we're thinking about starting another two in half a gig or so. I'm also lucky enough to have a vocation, researching the history of the theory of mind—an aspect of cultural ideology that only became important after the Acceleration, and which goes in and out of fashion, but which I hold to be critically important. The history of my field, for example, tells us that for almost a gigasecond during the old-style twenty-third century, most of humanity-in-exile were zimboes, quasi-conscious drones operating under the aegis of an overmind. How that happened and how the cognitive dictatorship was broken is something I'm studying with considerable interest and not a few field trips to old memory temples.

One of these visits is the reason I am not at home with my family when Curious Yellow comes howling out of nowhere to erase large chunks of history, taking with it an entire interstellar civilization, and (to make things personal) my family.

I'm visiting a Mobile Archive Sucker in the full physical flesh when Curious Yellow first appears. The MASucker is a lumbering starship, effectively a mobile cylinder habitat, powered by plasma piped from the interior of a distant A0 supergiant via T-gate. It wallows along at low relativistic speeds between brown dwarf star systems, which in this part of the galaxy are spaced less than a parsec apart. During the multigigasecond intervals between close encounters, the crew retreats into template-frozen backup, reincarnating from the ship's assemblers whenever things get interesting. The ship is largely self-sufficient and self-maintaining (apart from its stellar tap, and a tightly firewalled T-gate to the premises of the research institute that created it centuries ago). Its internal systems are entirely offnet from the polity at large because it's designed for a mission duration of up to a terasecond, and it was envisaged from the start that civilization would probably collapse at least once within the working life of the ship. That's why I've come out here in person to interview Vecken, the ship's Kapitan, who lived shortly after the cognitive dictatorship and may have recollections of some of the survivors.

Now here's a curious thing: I can't remember their faces. I remember that Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual were not simply important to me, not just lovers, but in a very real way defined who I was. A large chunk of my sense of identity was configured around this key idea that I wasn't solitary: that I was part of a group, that we'd collectively adjusted our neuroendocrinology so that just being around the others gave us a mild endorphin rush—what used to be a haphazard process called "falling in love"—and we'd focused on complementary interests and skills and vocations. It wasn't so much a family as a superorganism, and it was a fulfilling, blissful state of affairs. I think I may have had a lonely earlier life, but I don't remember much of that because I guess it paled into insignificance in comparison.

But I can't remember their faces, and even now—a lifetime after the grief has ebbed—that bugs me.

Neual was quick with hands and feet, taking slyly sarcastic delight in winding me up. Lauro had perfect manners but lost it when making love with us. Iambic-18 was a radical xenomorph, sometimes manifesting in more than one body at the same time when the fancy took it. Our children . . .

Are all dead, and it is unquestionably my fault. The nature of Curious Yellow is that it propagates stealthily between A-gates, creating a peer-to-peer network that exchanges stegged instructions using people as data packets. If you have the misfortune to be infected, it installs its kernel in your netlink, and when you check into an A-gate for backup or transport—which proceeds through your netlink—CY is the first thing to hit the gate's memory buffer. A-gate control nodes are supposedly designed so that they can't execute data, but whoever invented CY obviously found a design flaw in the standard architecture. People who have been disassembled and reassembled by the infected gates infect fresh A-gates as they travel. CY uses people as a disease vector.

The original CY infection that hit the Republic of Is installed a payload that was designed to redact historical information surrounding some event—I'm not sure what, but I suspect it's an aftershock left by the destruction of one of the old cognitive dictatorships—by editing people as they passed through infected gates. But it only activated once the infection had spread across the entire network. So Curious Yellow appeared everywhere with shocking abruptness, after spreading silently for hundreds of megasecs.

In my memory-dream, I am taking tea in the bridge of the Grateful for Duration, which in that time takes the form of a temple to a lake kami from old Nippon. I'm sitting cross-legged opposite Septima (the ship's curator) and waiting for Kapitan Vecken to arrive. As I spool through some questions I stored offline, my netlink hiccups. There's a cache-coherency error, it seems—the ship's T-gate has just shut down.

"Is something going on?" I ask Septima. "I've just been offlined."

"Might be." Septima looks irritated. "I'll ask someone to investigate." She stares right through me, a reminder that there are three or four other copies of this strange old archivist wandering the concentric cylinder habs of the ship.

She blinks rapidly. "It appears to be a security alert. Some sort of intruder just hit our transcription airgap. If you wait here a moment, I'll go and find out what's going on."

She walks over toward the door of the teahouse and, as far as I can reconstruct later, this is the precise moment, when a swarm of eighteen thousand three hundred and twenty-nine wasp-sized attack robots erupt from the assembler in my family's home. We live in an ancient dwelling patterned on a lost house of old Urth called Fallingwater, a conservative design from before the Acceleration. There are doors and staircases and windows in this house, but no internal T-gates that can be closed, and the robots rapidly overpower Iambic-18, who is in the kitchen with the gate.

They deconstruct Iambic-18 so rapidly there is no time for a scream of pain or pulse of netlinked agony. Then they fan out through the house in a malignant buzzing fog, bringing rapid death. A brief spray of blood here and a scream cut short there. The household assembler has been compromised by Curious Yellow, our backups willfully erased to make room for the wasps of tyranny, and, although I don't know it yet, my life has been gracelessly cut loose from everything that gave it meaning.

After the executions, they eat the physical bodies and excrete more robot parts, ready to self-assemble into further attack swarms that will continue the hunt for enemies of Curious Yellow.

I know about this now because Curious Yellow kept logs of all the somatic kills it made. Nobody knows why Curious Yellow did this—one theory is that it is a report for CY's creators—but I have watched the terahertz radar map of the security wasps eating my family and my children so many times that it is burned into my mind. I'm one of the rare survivors among the millions targeted as somatic enemies, to be destroyed rather than edited. And now it's as if I'm watching it again for the first time, reliving the horror that made me plead with the Linebarger Cats to take me in and turn me into a tank. (But that was half a gigasecond later, when the Grateful for Duration made contact with one of the isolated redoubts of the resistance.)

I realize I'm awake, and it's still nighttime. My cheeks itch from the salty tracks of tears shed in my sleep, and I'm curled up in an uncomfortable position, close to one edge of the bed. There's an arm around my waist, and a breathing breeze on the back of my neck. For a moment I can't work it out, but then it begins to make sense to me. "I'm awake now," I murmur.

"Oh. Good." He sounds sleepy. How long has he been here? I went to bed alone—I feel a momentary stab of panic at the thought that he's here uninvited, but I don't want to be alone. Not now.

"Were you asleep?" I ask.

He yawns. "Must have. Dozed off." His arm tenses, and I tense, too, and push myself back toward the curve of his chest and legs. "You were unhappy."

"What I didn't tell you earlier." And I'm still not sure it's a good idea to tell him. "My family. Curious Yellow killed them."

"What? But Curious Yellow didn't kill, it edited—"

"Not everyone." I lean against him. "Most people it edited. Some of us it hunted down and murdered. The ones who might have been able to work out who made it, I think."

"I didn't know that."

"Not many people do. You were either directly affected, in which case you were probably dead, or it happened to someone else, and you were busy rebuilding your life and trying to make your struggling firewalled micropolity work without all the external inputs provided by the rest of Is-ness. A gig after the end of the war it was old news."

"But not for you."

I can feel Sam's tension through his arm around me.

"Look, I'm tired, and I don't want to revisit it. Old pains, all right?" I try and relax against the side of his body. "I've become a creature ofsolitary habits. Didn't do to get too close to anyone during the war, and since then, haven't had the opportunity."

His breathing is deep and even. Maybe he's already asleep. I close my eyes and try to join him, but it takes me a long time to drift off. I can't help wondering how badly he must have been missing contact with another human being, to share my bed again.