Glasshouse

15. Recovery

THE next morning starts badly, shattered into fragments like a dropped vase:

"More fugues. Reeve, you're getting worse."

His large hand enfolding my small one. Weak and pale. He strokes the back of my wrist with his thumb. I look into his eyes and see sadness there and wonder why—

Two liquid-metal snake-heads bite at my wrist, and I cry out, pulling away as they inject soothing numbness. The woman who carries them is a goddess, golden-skinned with burning eyes.

I'm a tank again, a regiment of tanks, dropping through the freezing night toward an enemy habitat—or did this come later? I disconnect from the virtch interface and shake my head, look around at the other players in the game arcade, and hear myself whisper, "But it wasn't like that—"

Scratch of a carved goose feather on rough paper, body of a pen made from a human bone. You will remember nothing at first. If you did, they could parse your experience vector and identify you as a threat.

"She's really bad this morning. The adjuvants have worked—that infection is definitely on the mend—but she's no use to us like this."

"What do you expect me to do? She's in danger of sliding into full-blown anterograde—"

A suffocating stench of bowels as I slide my rapier back out of his guts. He lies among the rosebushes in a dueling zone, beneath the shadow of a marble statue of an extinct species of flying mammal. A sudden stab of horror, because this is a man I could have loved.

"Fix her."

"I can't! Not without her consent."

Hand tightening around someone's wrist until it's almost painful. "She's in no condition to give it—look at that, what are you going to do if she starts to convulse?"

I'm a tank again, looping in a pool of horrors, blood trickling beneath my gridded toes as I swing my sword through the neck of another screaming woman while two of my other instances hold her down.

I'm flying, tumbling arse over wing as my thumb sings a keening pain of broken bone, and I smell the fresh water of the roaring waterfall beneath me.

"Make it stop," I hear someone mumble, and there's blood on my lips where I've almost bitten through them. It's me who's being held down by the tanks, facing a woman with burning eyes, and behind her is a man who loves me, if I could only remember what his name was.

The snakes bite again and drink deep, and the sun goes dark.

RESTART:

I become aware that someone is holding my right hand.

Then, a timeless period later, I realize that he's still holding my hand. Which implies he's very patient, because I'm still lying in bed, and it's very bright. "What time is it?" I ask, mildly panicky because I need to get to work.

"Ssh. It's around lunchtime, and everything's all right."

"If it's all right"—Sam squeezes my hand—"how long have you been sitting there?"

"Not long."

I open my eyes and look at him. He's on the stool beside my bed. I pull a face, or smile, or something. "Liar."

He doesn't smile or nod but the tension drains out of him like water and he sags as it runs away. "Reeve? Can you remember?"

I blink rapidly, trying to get some dust out of a corner of my left eye. Can I remember —"I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter. Just trying to sort it out makes my head hurt! I'm a tank: I'm a dissolute young bioaviator with a death wish: Maybe I'm a sad gamer case instead, or a deep-cover agent. But all of these possibilities are a whole lot sillier and less plausible than what everything around me is saying, which is that I'm a small-town librarian who's had a nervous breakdown. I decide I'll go with that version for the time being. I hold Sam's hand tight, like I'm drowning: "How bad was it?"

"Oh Reeve, it was bad." He leans across me, and hugs me and I hug him back as tight as I can. "It was bad as can be." He's shaking, I realize with a sense of growing awe. He feels for me that deeply? "I was afraid I was going to lose you."

I nuzzle into the base of his neck. "That would be bad." It's my turn to shudder with a frisson of existential dread at the thought that I could have lost him . Somewhere in the past week Sam has turned into my anchor, my refuge in the turbulent waters of identity. "I've got . . . well. Things are a bit jumbled today. What happened? When did you hear . . . ?"

"I came as soon as I could," he mumbles in my ear. "Last night they called but said I couldn't visit, it was too late." He tenses.

"And?" I prompt. I feel as if there should be something more.

"You were fitting." He's still tense. "Dr. Hanta said it's an acute crisis; you needed a fixative, but she couldn't do it without your permission. I told her to give it anyway, but she refused."

"A fixative? What for?"

"Your memories." He's even tenser. I let go of him, feeling cold.

"What does this fixative do?"

Dr. Hanta answers from behind me as I turn round to look at her. "Memory is encoded in a number of ways, as differential weightings in synaptic connections and also as connections between different nerves. The last excision and redaction you underwent was faulty. You began to experience breakthrough. In turn, that was triggering alerts in your enhanced immune system, and then you got yourself exposed to a mechanocytic infestation, which made things much worse. Whenever new associative traces would start integrating, your endogenous robophages would decide it was a mechanocyte signal and kill the nerve cells. You were well on your way to losing the ability to form new long-term associative traces—progressive brain damage. The fixative is normally used as the last step in redactive editing. I used it to renormalize, erase, the old memories that were breaking through. I'm sorry, but you won't be able to access them now—you keep those that you've already integrated, but the others are gone for good."

Sam has loosened his grip on me, and I lean against him as I stare at the doctor. "Did I give you permission to mess with my mind?" I ask.

Hanta just looks at me.

"Did I?" I echo myself. I feel aghast. If she did it against my will, that's —

"Yes," says Sam.

"What?"

"She—you were pretty far gone." He hunches over again. "She was describing the situation to you, and me, and I was asking her to do it, and she said she couldn't—then you were delirious. You began mumbling and she asked you, and you said yes."

"But I don't remember . . ." I stop. I think I do remember, sort of. But I can't be sure, can I? "Oh."

I stare at Hanta. I recognize the expression in her eyes. I stare at her for a long time—then I manage to make myself nod, just a quick jerk really, but it's enough to break contact, and I think we all breathe out simultaneously. Meanwhile I'm thinking, Shit, I'll never be able to figure out where I've come from now, will I? But it's not as bad as what was going to happen otherwise. I don't remember the attacks, exactly, but I remember what happened between them, the consequences—it's a consistent story. A new story of my life, I suppose. "I feel much better," I say cautiously.

Sam laughs, and there's a raw edge in it that borders on hysteria. "You feel better?" He hugs me again, and I hug him right back. Hanta is smiling, with what I think is relief at a difficult situation resolved. The suspicious paranoid corner of me files it away for future reference, but even my secret-agent self is willing to concede that Hanta might actually be what she seems, an ethically orthodox practitioner with only the best interests of her patients at heart. Which is a big improvement on Fiore or the Bishop, but at least one out of three isn't bad.

"So when can I go home?" I ask expectantly.

IT turns out that I'm stuck in hospital for the rest of the day and the next night, too. Hospital life is tedious, punctuated by the white-clad ghosts wheeling around trolleys of food and different things, instruments and dark age potions.

I still ache from the fever, and I feel weak, but I'm well enough to get up and go to the bathroom on my own. On my way back I notice that the curtains around the other occupied bed on the ward are drawn back. I glance around, but there are no nurses present. Steeling myself, I approach.

It is Cass, and she's a mess. Her legs are encased in bright blue polymer tubes from toe to thigh, and raised by wires so that the bedding dangles across her in a kind of valley. The bruises on her face have faded to an ugly green and yellow except around her eye sockets, which look simultaneously puffy and hollow, her eyelids sagging closed. She's still thin, and a translucent bag full of fluid is slowly draining into her wrist through a pipe.

"Cass?" I say softly.

Her eyes open and roll toward me. "Guuh," she says.

"What?" She flinches slightly. I hear footsteps behind me. "Are you all right?"

The nursing zombie approaches. "Please step away from the patient. Please step away from the patient."

"How is she?" I demand. "What have you done to her?"

"Please step away from the patient," says the nurse, then a different reflex triggers: "All questions should be addressed to medical authorities. Thank you for your compliance. Go back to bed."

"Cass—" I try a last time. Gross memory surgery falls through my mind like a snowflake, freezing everything it touches. I feel awful. "Are you there, Cass?"

"Go back to bed," says the nurse, a touch threateningly.

"I'm going, I'm going," I say, and I shuffle away from poor, damaged Cass. Cass who I thought was Kay, obsessing over her, when all the time Kay was sleeping in the next room, and Cass was living in a nightmare.

I have a problem with the ethics here, I think. Hanta's not bad. But she collaborates with Fiore and Yourdon. What kind of person would do that? I shake my head, wincing at the cognitive dissonance. One who'd perform illegal memory surgery then implant the recollection of giving informed consent in the victim's mind? I shake my head again. I don't really think Hanta would do that, but I can't be sure. If the patient agrees with the practitioner afterward, is it really abuse?

IT'S a bright, sunny Thursday morning when Hanta comes and sits by my bedside with a clipboard. "Well!" Her smile is fresh and approving. "You've done really well, Reeve. A splendid recovery. I think you're about well enough to go home." She uses her pen to scribble an annotation on her board. "You're still convalescent, so I advise you to take it very easy for the next few days—certainly you shouldn't go back to work until this time next week at the earliest, and ideally not until the Monday afterward. Take this note and give it to Janis when you return to work, it's a certificate of exemption from employment. If you feel at all unwell, or have another dizzy spell, I want you to telephone the hospital immediately, and we'll send an ambulance for you."

"Will the ambulance be much use if I'm incoherent or hallucinating?" I ask doubtfully.

Hanta shoves an unruly lock of hair back into place: "We're still populating the polity," she says. "The paramedics aren't due to arrive until next week. They have to have additional skill set upgrades to their implants. But in two weeks' time if you call an ambulance or see a nurse or need a police officer, you won't be dealing with a zombie." She glances along the ward. "Can't happen soon enough, if you ask me."

"I was meaning to ask . . ." I trail off, unsure how to raise the subject, but Dr. Hanta knows what I'm talking about.

"You did the right thing when you called the ambulance," she says firmly. "Never doubt that." She touches my arm for emphasis. "But zombies are no use for nonroutine circumstances." A little sigh. "It'll be much easier when I have human assistants who can learn on the job."

"How big is the polity going to grow?" I ask. "The original briefing said something about ten cohorts of ten, but if you're going to have police and ambulance crews, surely that's not enough?"

She looks surprised. "No, a hundred participants is just the size of the comparison set for score renormalization, Reeve, a single parish. We introduce participants to each other in a controlled manner, ten cohorts to a parish, but you're nearly all settled in now. Next week is when we open the manifold and link all the neighborhoods together. That's when YFH-Polity actually comes into existence! It's going to be quite exciting—you're going to meet strangers, and there'll be far fewer zombies."

"Wow," I say, my voice hollow and my head spinning. "How many, uh, neighborhoods, are you planning to link in?"

"Oh, thirty or so parishes. That's enough to form one small city, which is about the minimum for a stable society, according to our models."

"Keeping track of that must be a big job," I say slowly.

"You can say that again." Dr. Hanta stands up and straightens her white coat. "It takes at least three of me to keep track of everything!" Another errant curl gets tucked behind her collar. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to leave you. You're ready for discharge whenever you want to go home; just tell the nurse on the front desk that you're leaving. Is there anything else?"

"Yes," I say hastily. Then I pause for a moment. "When I was having my crisis, were you tempted to . . . you know, change anything? Apart from administering the fixative algorithm, that is?"

Hanta stares at me with her big brown eyes. She looks thoughtful. "You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else." She smiles at me, and her expression turns chilly. "And besides, what you're asking about is highly questionable behavior, ethically questionable, Mrs. Brown. To which I have two responses. Firstly, whatever I might think of a patient, I would never act in a manner contrary to their best interests. And secondly, I expected better of you. Good day."

She turns and stalks away. I've really put my foot in it now , I think, feeling sick with embarrassment. Me and my big mouth . . . I want to run after her and apologize, but that would be asking to compound the misunderstanding, wouldn't it? Idiot, I tell myself. She's right, they couldn't run the polity without having a medical supervisor who has the subjects' best interests in mind; and I've just pissed off the only member of the experimental team who might be on my side. She could have helped me figure out how to fit in better, and instead . . . Shit. Shit. Shit.

There's really nothing left to do here. I stand up and rummage through the carrier bag Sam left for me last night. There's underwear, a floral print dress, and a pair of strappy sandals, but he forgot my handbag. Oh well, he gets high marks for trying. I make myself decent then, after waiting long enough for Dr. Hanta to leave the ward, I head down to reception. On the way I pass the other ward, signposted MATERNITY. I guess it'll be getting busy in a few months, but right now it's depressingly empty. There's a spring in my step as I reach the front desk. "Checking out," I say.

The zombie on the desk nods. "Mrs. Reeve Brown leaving the institution of her own volition," she drones. "Have a nice day."

The hospital faces onto Main Street, sandwiched between a run of shops and a stretch zoned for offices. It's a sunny, warm day, and my spirits rise as I go outside. I feel airy and empty, light as a feather, not a care in the world! At least, not for now , a stubborn part of me mutters darkly. Then I get the impression that even the part of me that's always alert shrugs its shoulders and sighs. Still, might as well take the day off to recover. Fiore has actually let me off the hook, for which I can thank Dr. Hanta; so I've got an actual choice. I'm free to keep on kicking and struggling against the inevitable, or I can go home and relax for a few days, just play the game and settle down. (It'll avoid attracting unwelcome attention from Fiore or the score whores, and I can pretend I'm having fun while I'm about it; I'll treat it like a game. Plus, it occurs to me that if I want to get back at Jen, the best way to do it is to defeat her on her own terms. I can always go back to figuring out how to escape later.) Meanwhile, I really ought to try to sort things out with Sam because I don't like the way paranoia and dread seems to have been levering us apart.

It takes me three hours to catch a taxi home, mostly because I pass the Lady's Lodge Beauty Parlor and stop to get my hair tidied up, and then the department store. The staff in the salon and the store are still all zombies, which is annoying, but at least they don't get in the way. I need some more clothes, anyway—I have no idea what happened to what I was wearing the other day, plus, dressing à la mode is a good, easy way to boost your score, and I can use that right now—and in between buying a couple of new outfits I fetch up at the cosmetics counter. The store is deserted, and I figure I'll give Sam a surprise, so I wait while the zombie assistant applies a makeover with inhuman speed. Those dark ages folks may not have had much by way of reconstructive nano, but they knew a lot about using natural products to change they way they looked: I barely recognize myself in the mirror by the time she's finished.

I'm still not very well, and find myself flagging much sooner than I expected. So I finish off in the shop, arrange to have my purchases delivered, and catch a taxi home. Home is much as I expected—a mess. The cleaning service I commissioned when I got the library job has been round, but they only come once a week, and Sam has been letting the dirty dishes pile up in the kitchen and leaving the glasses in the living room. I try to ignore it and put my feet up, but after half an hour it's too much. If I'm going to settle down a bit, I need to take care of that—it's part of the role I'm playing—so I move everything to the kitchen and start cycling them through the dishwasher. Then I go and lie down for a while. But a pernicious demon of dissatisfaction has gotten into my head, so I get up and start on the living room. It comes to me that I really don't like the way the furniture is laid out, and there's something about the sofa that annoys me unaccountably. The sofa will have to go.In the meantime I can rearrange where everything is, and then I realize it's nearly six. Sam will be home soon.

I'm a very poor cook, but I manage to puzzle my way through the instructions on the cartons, and I'm just laying out the cutlery on the dining table in the dayroom when I hear the door rattle.

"Sam?" I call. "I'm home!"

"Reeve?" He calls back.

I step into the hall, and he does a double take. "Reeve?" He gapes at me: It's a priceless moment.

"I had a little accident at the cosmetics counter," I say. "Like it?"

He goes cross-eyed for a moment, then manages to nod. In addition to the makeover I'm wearing the sexiest, most revealing dress I could find. I'll take my praise where I find it. Sam's never been a great one for expressing his emotions, and this is going pretty far for him. Come to think of it, he looks tired, sagging inside his suit jacket.

"Hard day?" I ask.

He nods again. "I, uh"—he draws breath—"I thought you were ill."

"I am." I'm more tired than I want to admit in front of him. "But I'm glad to be home, and Dr. Hanta's given me the next week off work, so I figured I'd lay on a little surprise for you. Are you hungry yet?"

"I missed lunch. Didn't feel much like eating back then." He looks thoughtful. "That wasn't such a good idea, was it?"

"Come with me." I lead him into the dayroom and sit him down, then go back to the kitchen and switch on the microwave, then pick up the two glasses of wine I'd poured and take them back to the table. He doesn't say anything, but he's agog, eyes tracking me like an incoming missile. "Here. A toast—to our future?"

"Our . . . future?" He looks puzzled for a moment, then something seems to clear in his mind, and he raises his glass and finally smiles at me, surrendering some inner doubt. "Yes."

I hurry back to sort out our supper, and we eat. I don't taste much of the food because, to tell the truth, I'm watching Sam. I came so close to losing him that every moment feels delicate, like glass. A huge and complex tenderness is crystallizing in me. "Tell me about your day," I ask, to draw him out, and he mumbles through an incoherent story about missing papers for a deed of attainder or something, watching my face all the time. I have to prompt him to eat. When he's done, I walk round the table to fetch his plate, and I can feel the heat of his gaze on me. "We need to talk," I say.

"We need." His voice is congested with emotion. "Reeve."

"Come with me," I say.

He stands up. "Where? What is this about?"

"Come on." I reach out and take his necktie and gently tug. He follows me into the hallway. "This way." I take the steps slowly, going up, listening to his hoarse breathing deepen. He doesn't try to pull away until I reach the bedroom door.

"We shouldn't be doing this," he says hoarsely. "I don't know why you're doing this, but we mustn't."

"Come on." I give him a little tug and he follows me into the bedroom and I finally let go and turn to face him. I feel a looseness in my innards as I look up at his face, a warmth at my crotch. "Kay. Sam. Whoever you are. I love you."

I freeze, my eyes wide as I see his pupils dilate and he looks puzzled: I realize he didn't hear me! "The magic phrase, Sam." And I realize that I mean it. This isn't the stinger-ampoule side effect of Jen's malice, it's something more profound. "What you said to me the other day, I'm saying it right back to you." His expression clears. "Come here."

He looks confused, now. "But if we—"

"No buts." I reach over to him and tug at the knot on his necktie. It unclips from his collar, and I fumble at the top button. He chews his upper lip, and I can feel him trembling under my fingers, warm and immensely solid and reassuring. I take a step closer until I'm leaning up against him, and I feel through his clothes that he's as excited as I am. "I want you, Sam, Kay. I don't want to have any barriers between us, it hurts too much. I've nearly lost you twice now, I'm not going to lose you again."

His hands on my shoulders, huge and powerful. His breath on my cheek. "I'm afraid this isn't going to work, Reeve."

"Life's frightening." I get another button undone, then I look up to see his face above me, and I stop. I was about to stretch up to kiss him, but something about his expression isn't right. "What is it?"

"What's wrong with you?" he hisses. "This isn't like you, Reeve, what's happening?"

"I'm doing what I should have done last week." I wrap my arms around him and lean my forehead against his shoulder. But he's started a train of thought going, running on rails right through my lust simple: "I've had a bad experience. It put a lot of things into a new perspective, Sam. You ever had one of those? Done something stupid and crazy and maybe a bit evil and only realized afterward that you'd jeopardized everything you ever cared about? Been there, done that—more than once—most recently the day before yesterday, and I don't want to be defined by my mistakes. So I'm walking away from them. I want us to work, I don't want to—"

"Reeve, stop it. Stop this. You're scaring me."

Huh? I pull back and stare at him, offended. It's like a bucket of ice water in the face.

"This isn't you speaking, is it?" he asks. He sounds certain.

"Yes it is!" I insist.

"Really?" He looks skeptical. "You wouldn't have thrown yourself at me like this last week."

"Yes I would! In a moment, if I wasn't so conflicted." Then what he's trying to tell me without actually saying it in so many words sinks in, and I jam one hand across my mouth to keep from screaming in frustration.

"So you're not conflicted now," he says, gently leading me over toward the bed and pushing me down on the edge of it, sitting next to me so we're shoulder to shoulder. "But you were conflicted when you went into the hospital, Reeve. You've been conflicted as long as I've known you. So you'll pardon my momentary suspicion when, the moment you get home, you throw yourself at me? After swearing off sex entirely just a week ago."

It's there in front of me, a yawning abyss of my own making, no longer avoidable since Dr. Hanta applied her fixative. I am stuck with the me that I have become, unable to restore that which is missing. "I'm not who I was a week ago," I say tightly. "She fixed the memory leakage, for one thing. And I've acquired a restored sense of my own mortality from somewhere I don't want to talk about, except it's not anything that they did to me. I think." But a cynical corner of my mind says, You said "I love you," didn't you? Last time you did that, your CY-hack was triggered. Someone's tweaked your netlink, haven't they?

The cold horror that steals over you when you wake up unsure whether you died in the night has just stroked its bony hand along my spine. Somewhere between the cooling puddle of blood in the library basement and Dr. Hanta's sly consent, I seem to have lost something. Sam's right, old-me wouldn't be doing this. Old-me would be scared of different things, and rightly so—and I'm still scared of Fiore and Yourdon, and I still want out of their perverse managed society, but we're on board a MASucker, and I know what that means.

"I still want you," I tell him. Although a worm of doubt adds, "I'm just not sure I want you for the same reasons I wanted you last week."

"They've gotten to you."

I laugh shakily. "They got to me a long time ago. I just didn't notice until now." I clutch at him, but as much from terror as lust. "Why are you here, Kay? Why did you sign up for the experiment?"

"I followed you."

"Bullshit!" I can see it now. "That's not enough. And don't tell me it was to get away from your time with the ice ghouls. Why did you go there? What were you running away from?"

Sam is silent and unresponsive for a while. "If I tell you, you'll probably hate me."

"So?" I see an opportunity. Shuffling up onto the bed I pull my legs up under my dress and sit cross-legged with my hands in my lap. "If I listen to your story and I don't hate you afterward, will you let me fuck you?"

"I don't see what that's got to do with—"

"Let me be the judge of my motives, Sam." Even if they're contaminated. "You keep trying to second-guess me. It's getting to be a bad habit. Before, I didn't want to sleep with you for reasons that made sense at the time. Then when the reasons no longer apply, you say I'macting out of character. You don't give me credit for being able to change of my own volition."

He shakes his head.

"Have you any idea how insulting that is?"

"That's not what I meant—"

"I am capable of change, that's why I'm here!" I draw a deep breath. "I'm not who I was during the war, Sam, or before it, or even after it. I'm who I am now, which is the end product of all those other people becoming one another. They can put you into the dark ages, but they can't put the dark ages into you, not short of truncating your life expectancy to about three gigasecs or erasing so many memories you might as well be . . ." I trail off. I've got a strange feeling that I just realized something vitally important, but I'm not sure what.

He looks at me oddly. "You'll hate me," he says. "I did terrible things."

"So?" I shrug. "I did bad things, too. People out there wanted to kill me, Sam. I thought it was something to do with a mission I was on and had accidentally erased, but now I'm not so sure; maybe they were just after me because of, well, one of the people I used to be. A person who fought in the war. A combatant."

He rocks back and forth thoughtfully. "Nobody here but us war criminals," he says.

It is very interesting to discover that the phrase "my blood runs cold" actually reflects a physical sensation. It is much less pleasant to do so while sitting next to someone you love unconditionally and currently can't share a room with without needing a change of underwear, and who's just triggered that sensation in your head. And it's even worse when you realize that what he said applies to you, too. "Nobody here but us monsters," I say, trying to be flippant. "Or amnesiacs haunted by the ghosts of their past lives."

"Has it occurred to you that YFH-Polity might be very convenient for a certain type of person?" Sam asks slowly.

I'm getting impatient. "Are you going to lay me down on this bed and have sex with me after you finish lecturing me to death?"

He turns a funny color. "If we both still want to."

If we both still want to. Well, I guess you just have to work with what you've got. "I'm all ears," I say.

He shudders. "Don't say that."

"Well it's"—not literally —"true. Sort of."

"Where were you when the war broke out?" he asks.

Oops. I didn't expect him to ask that. Revealing that kind of thing would be a big no-no under normal circumstances—a breach of operational security that could allow an opponent to work out exactly who you are and thereby figure out all sorts of useful things about you, enough to endanger you operationally, because virtually everything you ever did in public is stored in a database somewhere. But—we're in the guts of a MASucker, and if I'm not mistaken, there's only one data channel in or out, and Sam isn't part of the cabal, and I reckon the current risk of our being eavesdropped on is low. Nor are these normal circumstances.

"I was aboard a MASucker, interviewing the crew," I admit. "We were cut off for more than a gig after the net went down." Sam makes a thoughtful noise. "Your turn," I prompt, trying to change the subject.

"I was an auditor." Sam is silent again. "That's why they drafted me."

"They?"

"The Solipsist Nation: Third Unforgivable Thoughtcrime Battalion, to be precise. They were doing a search and sweep for unsecured memory temples through the disconnected segment I was stranded in, less than a hundred kilosecs after Curious Yellow cut loose. I'd already been censored and compromised, and they just grabbed me and added me to their distributed denial of consciousness array. I spent the next couple of megs scrambling graveyards beyond retrieval, then they got around to actually in-processing me and assigned me to erasing archive trails."

Ugh. And I thought what I did in the Linebarger Cats was ugly? I must shiver or give some other cue because Sam pulls away from me slightly. "What clades did the Solipsist Nation align with?" I ask, trying to distract him.

"What clades?" He shakes his head. "It was us against everyone, Reeve. You think anybody in their right minds would ally themselves with an aggressively solipsistic borganism?"

"But you"—I force myself to lean closer as I ask; he's tense and unhappy—"you were just a component, weren't you?"

He shakes his head. "I had some degree of autonomy, by the time the war ended the Nation had taken to investing us with a modicum of free will. I was . . . well. Before the war, I looked pretty much the way you do right now. The Nation upgraded me, turned me into a combat ogre—and put me on occupation duty. You know what they called us? Rape machines. If you want to break someone's will to resist, you can go via the brain, but if the netlink's been fried by EMP, you have to get physical. They gave us penises with backward-facing spines, you know that? We did . . . terrible things. Eventually we were overrun—my segment was overrun—by a consortium of enemies, and they offlined us and when I woke up I was back to being me again, but a me with memories and a large chunk of the Nation wedged in my head. I spent half a meg in my cell disbelieving in the walls and floor before I realized that they had to exist for the same reason I had to exist. And while I was part of the Nation I did things." Deep breath. "Things that left me ashamed to be human. Or male."

"Yeah, but." I stall. "You weren't yourself. Right?"

"I wish I could believe that." He sounds forlorn. "I wouldn't do that kind of thing now, but then—I remember believing in what I was doing. That was part of why I did the ice ghoul thing, I didn't want to be part of a species that could dream something like the Solipsist Nation into existence. I wanted—we wanted—to think every thought in the human phase-space. Do you know what it's like to be hungry and always eating and never full? Solipsist Nation wrecked memory temples out of spite because they contained thoughts we hadn't originated. And I contributed to that. I enthusiastically optimized the processes. I did it because I wanted to." He takes a deep breath. "I killed people, Reeve. I killed people permanently."

"Then we're not so different."

"You?" He stares. "But you said you'd . . ."

"I started the war on a MASucker; I didn't stay there." I take a deep breath, because I don't think I can dodge this one. "I volunteered. Joined the Linebarger Cats, combat operations. Spent nearly a gigasec being an armored regiment. Ended up in Psyops."

"Well." His voice is shaky. "I didn't expect that ."

"What proportion of the people here do you think fought in the wars?"

"I haven't thought about it."

"People who were there don't want to remember it. Almost as soon as we'd got a local cease-fire established, people were slinking off to the surgeon-confessors."

"Yes." He pauses. "But Reeve, I'm a monster. There are things in my head—even after excision—that I don't like to visit. You don't want to get too close to me."

"Sam." I shift toward him. "I'm . . . There are things I tried to bury, too. I could say the same. Do you care?"

"What, about what you did?"

"Yes."

"No."

"Well, then." It's my turn to sound shaky. "What I said earlier stands. A bargain, and you agreed to it, hmm?"

He shrinks away. "I didn't know."

I swallow to try and clear my dry mouth. "I don't mean right now," I say. To my surprise, I mean it. "But I still want you, just as soon as you get used to the idea that I want you and I'm still me. You don't have to project your hatred of what you were forced to do onto me. And besides, I didn't see any barbs on your cock the other night."

"But you've changed too much!" He bursts out, like an iced-over air valve finally cutting loose. "Since Dr. Hanta saw you. Before that, you were you : You were moody and thoughtful, you were cynical, you were funny—I don't have the words for it. Whatever she did, it's changed you , Reeve. You'd refuse to do something just because it was expected of you; now you're trying to make me fuck you! Do you really want to get trapped in YFH for the foreseeable future? Trapped and pregnant, too?"

I think about it for a moment. "What's the problem?" Hanta is a more than conscientious doctor, and I'm confident I can survive a pregnancy—after all, every female mammal in my family tree did it before me, didn't they? How bad can it be?

"Reeve." Now he's looking at me as if I've morphed into battle-form, sprouting spikes and guns and armor before his eyes. I giggle. It's like he's seen a ghost! "What have they done to you?"

"Offered me a way out of having been a monster." I lean toward him hopefully. "Give me a kiss?"

DESPITE my best planning, we do not make love in the end.

In fact, when I finish the cleaning up and come to bed, Sam gets up and, with sleepy dignity, insists he's sleeping alone.

I am so angry and frustrated that I could cry. My problem is easily defined—it's the solution that eludes me. It's not that I've changed a lot, but—with or without Hanta's prompting—I've decided to take some time out of struggling, and the outward manifestation looks like a huge switch. Sam simply hasn't caught up with me yet. It's very disturbing to be around someone who seems to have inverted all their values and beliefs, and I know if it was Sam who'd been in hospital and come home glassy-eyed and different, I'd be incredibly upset. But I wish he wouldn't project his anxiety onto me—I'm all right, in fact I'm better than I've been at any time since I first woke up in the custody of the surgeon-confessors.

Yes, there's a problem here: Fiore and Yourdon are doing something very dubious with a serialized copy of Curious Yellow, they've figured out a way to defeat the security patch in everyone's implants; and they seem to be researching how to use social control rules installed via CY to create an emergent dictatorship. But—and this is the important question—why should I care? Haven't I been through enough already? I don't have to let myself be tortured by my own memories; I've already nearly killed myself trying to do what Sanni and the others in Security Cell Blue wanted. I've done my duty, and failed. And now . . .

My dirty little secret is that while I was in hospital I realized that I could give up. I've got Sam. I've got a job that has the potential to be as interesting as I want it to be. I can settle down and be happy here for a while, even though the amenities are primitive and some of the neighbors are not to my taste. Even dictatorships need to provide the vast majority of their citizens with a comfortable everyday life. I don't have to keep fighting, and if I give up the struggle for a while, they'll leave me alone. I can always go back to it later. Nobody will scream if I stop, except maybe Sam, and he'll adapt to the new me eventually.

All of which is great in theory, but it doesn't help when I'm crying myself to sleep, alone.