Glasshouse

5. Church

SAM picks up the phone and asks the Gatekeeper to connect him to Mick's household. I linger at the top of the stairs and listen to him, down in the front hall. It sounds like he's trying not to lose his temper. After a couple of cents, he puts the phone down hard and stomps back to the living room. I spend most of the rest of the evening avoiding him, instead worrying myself into a black depression at the possibility that I might have made things worse for Cass by getting Sam involved.

Points. Collective accountability. Stable couples. Peer pressure. My head's spinning. It's not that I'm unused to the idea of daily life having rules—at least, in peacetime—but it somehow seems indecent for them to make it so explicit. Societies cohere through tacit understanding, a nod and a wink and—very occasionally—a lookup in a legal database. I'm used to learning how things work as I go along and this experience, a headfirst collision with a fully formed set of rules to live one's life by, has given me a big shock.

I speculate that I'd be able to handle things better if I weren't trapped in a frankly inadequate body. I'm not normally conscious of my own size or strength, and I'm not interested in mesomorphic tinkering—but then again, I would never consciously choose to make myself small and frail. I'm borderline malnourished, too. When I go to the bathroom and use the mirror, I can almost see my ribs under a layer of subcutaneous fat. I'm not used to being a waif, and when I get my hands on whoever did this to me . . . Hah, but I won't be able to do anything to them, will I? "Assholes," I mutter darkly, then head for the kitchen to see if there are any high-protein options on offer.

Later on, I explore the basement. There are a bunch of machines down here that my tablet says are for household maintenance. I puzzle over the clothes washing machine. There's something very crude and mechanical about it, as if its shape is rigidly fixed. It's not like a real machine, warm and protean and accommodating to your needs. It's just a lump of ceramic and metal. It doesn't even answer when I tell it I need to clean my dress—it's really stupid.

Farther back in the basement there's something else, a bench with levers attached, for developing upper body muscle mass the hard way. I'm a bit skeptical, but the tablet says these people had to develop musculature by repeatedly lifting weights and other exercises. I find the manual for the exercise machine and after about a kilosecond I manage to reduce myself to a quivering, sweat-smeared jelly. It's like some kind of psychological torture, a lesson that rams home just how weak I am.

I stumble upstairs, shower, and collapse into an uneasy sleep, troubled by dreams of drowning and visions of Kay reaching toward me with all her arms outstretched, begging for something I don't understand. Not to mention faint echoes of something terrible, immigrants pushing and shoving under the gun, begging and screaming to be allowed through the gates of Hel. I startle awake and lie shivering in the darkness for half an hour. What's happening to me?

I'm trapped in another universe. It's true what they say: The past is another polity, but I don't think most people mean it quite like this.

THE next morning, I'm in the kitchen trying to puzzle out the instructions for using the coffeemaker when the phone rings. There's a terminal in the hall, so I go there to pick it up, wondering if something's wrong. "Call for Sam," buzzes a flat voice. "Call for Sam."

I stare at the handset for a moment, then look up the stairs. "It's for you!" I yell.

"I'm coming." Sam takes the staircase two steps at a time. I pass him the handset. "Yes?" He listens for a moment. "What is—I don't understand. Can you repeat that? Oh. Yes, yes, I will." Listening to a conversation on one of these old telephones has an eerie feel. They exist in a strange space, a half-duplex information realm devoid of privacy.

Sam continues to listen, looking puzzled then annoyed as the instructions continue. Finally, he puts the phone down. "Well!" He says emphatically.

"I'm trying to cook the coffee," I tell him. "Come and tell me about it."

"They're sending a taxi. I've got half an ‘hour'—that's nearly two kilosecs, isn't it?—to get ready."

"Who are ‘they'?" I ask. My stomach clenches with anxiety.

"I've been assigned a temporary job," says Sam. "They're picking me up for induction training. It's to show me how the labor system here works. I may be given a different job later."

"Huh." I turn back to the coffee machine so he won't see me frown. If that's the hydroxide tank, then this must be the venturi nozzle . . . the disassembled metal bits don't make any more sense to me than they did before I took it to pieces. "What am I supposed to do? Are they going to assign me a labor duty, too?"

"I don't think so." He pauses. "You can ask for a job, but they don't expect you to. This one, the manual says it's a starting point." He doesn't look too happy. "We get paid collectively," he adds after a few seconds.

"What? You mean they make you work, and I get half of it?"

"Yes."

I shake my head, then screw the machine back together. After a bit I get to the point where it's making gurgling whining noises and dribbling brown liquid. I stare at it, then wonder, Isn't it supposed to make a cup first? Silly me, no assemblers! I hastily rummage through the cupboards until I find a couple of cups and jam one under the nozzle. "Stupid, stupid," I mutter, unsure whether I'm describing myself or the long-dead designers of the machine.

A taxi shows up in due course, and Sam goes off to his work induction training. I wander around the house for a bit, trying to figure out where everything is and what it does. The washing machine apparently has physical switches you have to set to make it work. It runs on water, and you have to add something called detergent to the clothes, a substitute for properly designed fabrics. After I read about fabrics in the manual Designed for Living , I feel a bit queasy and resolve to only wear artificial ones. There's something deeply disturbing about wearing clothes made from dead animals. There's stuff called "silk" that's basically bug vomit, and the idea of it makes my skin crawl.

After a couple of hours I get bored. The house is deeply uncommunicative (if this was a real polity, I'd say it was autistic), and the entertainment resources are primitive, to say the least. I try the telephone, thinking I'll call Cass and see how she's doing—at a guess, Mick will be undergoing work induction, too, just like Sam—but the phone just makes that idiotic bleeping for a minute or so (I'm trying to adjust to the strange time units the ancients used). Maybe she's asleep, or shopping. Or could she be dead? For a moment I daydream randomly: After Sam's call, Mick hit her over the head with the handlebars from an exercise machine and chopped her up in the basement. Or he strangled her while she was asleep . . .

Why am I harboring these gruesome fantasies? Something is very wrong with me. I feel trapped, that's a large part of it. I'm isolated here, stuck alone in a suburban house while my husband goes to his assigned job. Which is all wrong because what's really going on is that there's an assassin or assassins looking for me because of—because of what? Something that happened before my memory surgery —and I'm isolated, stuck here floundering around in my ignorance.

I need to get out of here.

Ten minutes later I'm standing outside the conservatory, wearing my dress-code-violating boots and trousers and with a bag over my shoulder containing my wallet and an extremely sharp knife I found in the kitchen. It's absolutely pathetic, especially given the shape of my arm muscles (which feel as if I've been whacking on them with a hammer), but it's the best I can do right now. With any luck, the assassinswill be in the same situation, and I'll have time to prepare myself before they're ready to make their move.

Item number one on the checklist for the well-prepared fugitive: Know your escape routes.

I don't call a taxi. Instead, I walk to the side of the road and look up and down it. The neighborhood is peaceful, if a bit peculiar. Huge deciduous plants grow to either side, and the vegetation gets wild and out of control near the boundaries of the garden associated with our house. Hidden invertebrates make creaking, grating noises like malfunctioning machinery. I try to remember the direction the taxi took us in. That way. I turn left and walk along the side of the road, ready to jump out of the way if a taxi appears suddenly.

There are other houses along the road. They're about the same size as mine, clumps of rectangular boxes with glass-fronted openings in frames, sporting oddly tilted upper surfaces. They're painted a variety of colors but look drab and faded, like dead husks shed by enormous land-going arthropods. There's no sign of life in any of them, and I guess they're probably just part of the scenery. I've got no idea where Cass lives, and I wish I did. I could go and visit her: For all I know she's in the next house along from me. But I don't know, and directory services are only one of the netlink-mediated facilities that are missing here, and Sam is right about one thing—the ancients were incredibly territorial. If they can call the public security forces and detain people simply for wearing the wrong clothes in public, what might they do if I went into someone else's house?

A couple of hundred meters along the road, I come to a rise in the ground. The road continues on the level, descending into a deep trench, finally diving into a dark tunnel in the hillside. Looking up the sides I notice that something isn't quite right about the trees. Gotcha, I think. This must be the edge of a hab module. I can just barely imagine what's right beneath my feet—complex machinery locked within a skin of structural diamond, a cylinder kilometers long spinning in the void, orbiting in the icy darkness. Emptiness for a few tens of millions of kilometers, then a brown dwarf star little bigger than a gas giant planet, then tens of trillions of kilometers more to the nearest other star system. Scale is the first enemy.

I walk into the tunnel and see a bend ahead, beyond which it gets very dark. This is disturbing—I didn't notice it when I was in the back of the taxi, even though my attention was being grabbed by every weird thing I saw. But if there's a T-gate in here . . . Well, there's only one way to find out. I keep my right hand in contact with the tunnel wall as it curves round into darkness. I keep walking slowly ahead, and after maybe fifty meters it begins to bend the other way. I pass another curve, then there's light from the end of the tunnel, and I'm walking along a road where the buildings to either side are distinctly different in shape and size. There's a sign ahead that reads: WELCOME TO THE VILLAGE. (A village is a small community; a downtown is the commercial area of a village. At least, I think that's how it works.)

I've been doing my reading like a good citizen, and there are several places I need to go shopping, starting with a hardware store. The thing is, it seems to me that because these people couldn't simply order any design patterns they needed out of an assembler, they had to make things themselves from more primitive components. This means "tools," and it's surprisingly easy to convert a good basic toolkit into an arsenal of field-expedient weapons. I'm probably safe in here as long as I don't disclose my identity, but "probably" doesn't get you very far when the alternative is lethal, and I'm already lying awake at night worrying about it.

I spend about half an hour in the hardware store, during which time I discover that the operator zombies aren't programmed to stop females buying axes, crowbars, spools of steel wire, arc-welding rigs, subtractive volume renderers, or just about any other tool I can see. The kit I go for costs quite a bit and is bulky and very heavy, but they say they'll deliver and install them in our "garage," an externally accessible sub-building that I haven't explored yet. I thank them and add some billets of metal feedstock and some lengths of spring steel to the order.

Walking out of the store with a basic workshop on its way over to my house and an axe hidden in a workman's holster under my coat, I feel a lot better about the outlook for the near-term future. It's a bright, warm morning: small feathery dinosaurs are issuing territorial calls from the deciduous plants between the buildings, and for the first time since I arrived I am beginning to feel as if I'm in control of my own destiny.

Which is when I run into Jen and Angel, walking arm in arm along the sidewalk toward a rustic-looking building with a sign above the door saying, YE OLDE COFFEE SHOPPE.

"Why, hello there!" Jen gushes, spreading her arms to drag me into an embrace, while Angel stands back, smiling faintly. I yield to Jen's hug stiffly, hoping she won't feel the axe—but no such luck. "What's that you're wearing? And what have you got under your coat?" she demands.

"I've just been to the hardware store," I explain, forcing myself to smile politely. "I was buying some tools for Sam for the, the garden, and I didn't have room for them in my bag so I'm carrying them in the shoulder pouch he asked me to get." The lies flow easily the more I practice them. "How are you doing?

"Oh, we're doing really well!" Jen says expansively, letting go of me.

"We were just about to stop for a coffee," says Angel. "Would you like to join us?"

"Sure," I say. There doesn't seem to be any polite way to say no. Plus, I haven't had any human contact except Sam for the past hundred kilosecs, and I wouldn't mind a chance to pick their brains. So I follow them into Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe, and we sit down at a booth with shiny red vinyl seats and a bright white polymer-topped table while the waitrons attend to our needs.

"So how are you settling in?" asks Angel. "We heard you had some trouble yesterday."

"Yes, darling." Jen smiles brilliantly as she nods. She's wearing a bright yellow dress and some kind of hat that vaguely resembles a ballistic shuttlecraft. She's applied some kind of paint-powder to her face to exaggerate the color of her lips (red) and eyelashes (black), and something she's used on her skin has left her smelling like an explosion in a topiary. "I hope you're not going to make a habit of it?"

"I'm sure she won't," Angel chides her. "It's just a natural settling-in mistake. We can all expect to make a few, can't we?" She glances sideways at the waitron: "A double chocolate iced latte made with fair-trade beans and whipped cream, no sugar," she snaps.

"I'll have the same," I manage to say just as Jen starts rambling about the contents of the price board above the counter, changing her mind three times before she reaches the end of every sentence. I study Angel while I'm about it. Angel is wearing a jacket-and-skirt combination—a "suit," they call it, though it doesn't look like the version permitted to males—and while it's darker and drabber than Jen's outfit, she's got some shiny lumps of metal stuck to her earlobes. I can see it's meant to be jewelry, but it looks painful. "What's that on your ears?" I ask.

"They're called earrings," Angel tells me. "There's a salon up the road that'll pierce your ears, then you can hang different pieces of jewelry from them. Once the hole heals," she adds, with a slight wince. "They're still a little sore."

"Hang on, that's not glued onto your skin or properly installed? They shoved it through your ear rather than rebuilding your ear around it? And it's metal ?"

"Yes," she says, giving me an odd look. I don't know what to say to that, but luckily I don't have to because Jen finishes ordering her cafe americano and turns back to focus on us.

"I'm so pleased we ran into you today, darling!" She leans toward me confidingly. "I've been doing some research, and we're not the only cohort here—in fact, all six will be meeting at Church tomorrow, and we wouldn't want anyone to let the side down."

"I'm sorry?" I ask, taken aback.

"She means, we need to keep up appearances," Angel says, with another of those expressive looks that I can't decode.

"I don't understand."

A faint frown wrinkles the skin between Jen's eyebrows. "It's not just about yesterday ," she emphasizes. "Everyone's entitled to their little mistakes. But it turns out that in addition to our points being averaged within the cohort, each cohort in the parish gets to talk about what they've achieved in the preceding week, and the other cohorts rate them on their behavior before voting to add or subtract bonus points."

"It's an iterated prisoner's dilemma scenario, with collective liability," Angel cuts in, just as one of the operator zombies twiddles a knob on a polished metal tank behind the bar that makes a noise like a pressure leak. "Very elegant experimental design, if you ask me."

"It's an—" Oh shit. I nod, guardedly, unsure how much I can reveal: "I think I see."

"Yes." Angel nods. "We're going to have to defend your behavior yesterday, and the other groups can add points or subtract them depending on whether they think we deserve it and on whether they think we'll hold a grudge when it's their turn in the ring."

"That's really devious!"

"Yes." Angel again.

Jen smiles. "Which is why, darling, you're not going to show up the side by violating the dress code, and you'll be suitably remorseful about whatever the silly incident yesterday was about—no, I don't want to know all the sordid details—and we'll do our bit by backing you up and trying to bury the whole matter as deeply as we can under a pile of every other cohort's sins. Won't we?" She glances at Angel. "We're the new group, we can expect to be picked on. It's going to be bad enough with Cass, as it is."

"What's wrong with Cass?" I ask.

"She's not settling in," says Jen.

Angel looks as if she's about to open her mouth, but Jen waves her hand dismissively. "If you've been getting any silly phone calls from her, just ignore them. She's only doing it to get attention, and she'll stop soon enough."

I stare at Jen. "She told me Mick's threatening to hurt her," I say. The zombie delivers the first of our coffee cups.

"So?" Jen stares right back at me, and there's a cold core of steel behind her expression: "What business of ours is it? What's between a wife and her husband is private, as long as it doesn't threaten to drag our points down or get our whole cohort in trouble. Apart from the other thing, of course."

"What other—"

Angel cuts in. "You get social points for fucking," she says, her voice self-consciously neutral. Again, she gives me that odd look. "I thought you'd have figured it out by now."

"For sex ?" I must sound faintly scandalized, or shocked or something, because Jen's face relaxes into a mask of amusement.

"Only with your husband, darling." She sips her coffee and looks at me calculatingly. "That's something else we've noticed. I don't want to hurry you or anything, but . . ."

"Who I fuck is none of your business," I say flatly. My coffee arrives, but right now I'm not feeling thirsty. My mouth tastes as dry and acrid as if I've just chewed half a kilogram of raw caffeine. "I'll dress up for the Church meeting and say I'll be good and do whatever else you want me to do in public. And I'll try not to cost you any points. But." I tap the table in front of Jen's coffee cup, insultingly close. "You will not, ever , tell me whom I may associate with or what I will do with my chosen associates. Or with whom I have sex." The silence grows icicles. I take an unwisely large gulp of hot coffee and burn the roof of my mouth. "Do I make myself clear?"

"Quite clear, darling." Jen's eyes glitter like splinters of frozen malice.

I make myself smile. "Now, shall we find something civilized to talk about while we drink our coffee and eat our pastries?"

"I think that would be a good idea," says Angel. She looks slightly shaken. "After lunch, how about we buy you something suitable to wear to Church?" She asks me. "Just in case. Meanwhile, I was wondering if you've used your washing machine yet? It has some interesting features . . ." And she's off into an exploration of techniques for gaining points in the women's world, generated by game theory and policed by mutual scorefile surveillance.

BY the end of our lunch, I think I've got a handle on them. Angel means well but is too calculatedly fearful for her own good. She's afraid of stepping out of line, unwilling to jeopardize her score, and worried about what people will think of her. This combination makes her an easy target for Jen, who is flamboyant and aggressively extroverted on the outside, but uses it to conceal an insecure need for approval, which leads her to bully people until they give it to her. She's as ruthless as anyone I can recall meeting since my memory surgery, and I've met some hardcases around the clinic. The surgeon-confessors tend to attract such. (What's even more disturbing is that I have faint ghost-recollections of knowing similar people before, but with no details attached. Who they were or what they meant to me has sunk into the abyss where memories go when their owners no longer need them.)

The two of them, working by unspoken assent, appoint themselves as my personal shopping assistants for the afternoon. They're not crude about it, but they're very persistent and make no real attempt to conceal their desire to modify my behavior along lines compatible with their enhanced scorefiles.

After coffee and cakes (for which Angel pays), they escort me to a series of establishments. In the first of these I am subjected to the attentions of a hairstylist. Angel sits with me and chats interminably about kitchen appliances while Jen goes off somewhere to do something of her own, and the zombie immobilizes me and applies a fearsome array of knives, combs, chemical reagents, and compact machine tools to my head. Once I get out of the chair, I have to admit that my hair's different—it's still long, but it's several shades lighter, and whenever I turn my head it moves like a solid lump of foamed plastic.

"Perhaps we should get you some clothing for tomorrow," Jen says, smiling broadly. It's phrased as a suggestion, but the way she says it makes it an order. They lead me through a series of boutiques, where I am induced to present my credit card. She insists that I try on the costume, and while I'm showing her how it looks, Angel gets the store zombies to parcel up my stuff. I end up looking like one of them, the ladies who lunch. "We're getting there," Jen says, something almost like approval on her face. "You need a makeover, though."

"A what?"

They just laugh at me. Probably just as well; if they told me in advance, I'd try to escape. And, as I keep reminding myself (with an increasing sense of dread), I'll have nearly a hundred tendays—three years—in which to regret any mistakes I make today.

THE lights are turning red and sinking toward the tunnel at the edge of the world when the taxi we're crammed into stops outside my house, and the door opens. "Go on," says Angel, pushing my bag at me, "goand surprise him. He'll have had a long day and will need cheering up." I realize she's using the generic he —they don't care who he is, all they care about is the fact that he's my husband, and we can earn them points.

"Okay, I'm going, I'm going," I say, harassed. I take the bag, and as I turn, something bites me on the leg. "Hey!" I look round but the taxi is already pulling away. "Shit," I mumble. My leg throbs. I reach down and feel something lumpy stuck in it. I pull it out. It's some sort of lozenge with a needle coming out of one end. "Shit." I stumble up the path in the new shoes they insisted I buy—the heels are steeper and less comfortable than the first pair—and in through the door. I dump the bags and head for the living room, where the TV is on. Sam is lying in front of it, his eyes closed and his tie loosened, and I feel a stab of compassion for him. The injection point on my leg aches, a cold reminder.

"Sam. Wake up !" I shake his shoulder. "I need your help!"

"Whu—" He opens his eyes and looks at me. "Reeve?" His pupils dilate visibly. I probably smell weird—Jen and Angel tried half the contents of a scent bar on me, for no reason I can fathom.

"Help." I sit down next to him and hike up my skirt to show him the mark on my thigh. "Look." I hold up the ampoule where he can see it. "They got me. What in seven shades of shit is that stuff?" My crotch is unnaturally sensitive and I feel slightly dizzy, worryingly relaxed and unstressed in view of what's just happened.

"It's—" He blinks. "I don't know. Who did this to you?"

"Jen and Angel. They dropped me off from a taxi and I think Angel got me with this thing as I left." I lick my lips. I'm feeling distinctly odd. "What do you think? Poison?"

"Maybe not," he says, staring at me. Then he picks up his tablet and pokes at it. "There," he says, holding it for me. "Must be their idea of fun."

I thrust my hands between my thighs and clamp them together, my eyes blurring as I read. My crotch is tingling. "It's a—huh!" Fury washes over me. "The bitches!"

Sam shakes his head. "I've had a really tiring day, but it sounds like you've had an exciting one. Coming home dressed like a—and your friends, spiking you for sexual arousal." He raises an eyebrow. "Why did they do that, do you suppose?" Sam can remain analytical and composed in the most trying situations. I wish I had half his grace under pressure.

"I—" I force myself to move my hands. "Bitches."

"What's going on, Reeve? Is the peer pressure really that compelling?" He sounds concerned, sympathetic.

"Yes." I grit my teeth. He's sitting too close to me, but I don't want to risk moving. The drug is hitting me hard in warm, tingly waves, and I'm afraid of leaving a damp patch on the sofa. "It's the social points. We knew the points were shared with our cohort, but there are extra compulsion mechanisms we didn't know about. Jen and Angel told me about them, but I didn't . . . shit. And then you can score points for . . . other activities."

"What other activities?" he asks gently.

"Use your imagination!" I gasp, and bolt for the bathroom.

SAM knocks on the bathroom door once, tentatively, as I'm lying in the bottom of the shower cubicle in a daze of lust, letting waves of hot water sluice over me like a tropical storm—Since when do I know what a tropical storm on Urth felt like? —and trying to feel clean. Part of me wants to invite him in, but I manage to bite my lip and stay silent. I guess I can cross Jen and Angel off my list of possible assassins, but I find myself fantasizing in the shower, fantasizing about getting them alone and the myriad revenges I'll take. I know these are just fantasies—you can't kill somebody more than once in this place, and once you've killed them, they're out of reach—but something in me wants to make them hurt, and not just because they've destroyed any chance of my ever having honest sex with this curiously introverted, thoughtful, bear of a husband I've acquired. So I work my arms to exhaustion on the weight machine down in the basement, then go to bed alone and uneasy.

Sunday dawns bright and hot. I reluctantly put on the dress Jen and Angel made me buy and go to meet Sam downstairs. I have no pockets, don't know if I'm allowed to carry a bag, and I feel very unsafe without even a utility knife. Sam's wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie.Very monochrome. He looks solid, but going by his face he feels as unsure of himself as I am. "Ready?" I ask.

He nods. "I'll call the taxi."

The Parish Church is a big stone building some distance away from where we live. There's a tower at one end, as sharp and axisymmetrical as a relativistic impactor (if warships were made of stone and had holes drilled in their dorsal end with huge parabolic chimes hanging inside). The bells are ringing loudly, and the car park is filling with taxis and males and females dressed in period costume as we arrive. I see a few faces I know, Jen's among them. But I find I don't recognize most of the people in the crowd as we wait outside, and I hang on to Sam's arm for fear of losing him.

Internally, the Church contains of a single room, with a platform at one end and rows of benches carved from dead trees facing it. There's an altar on the platform, with a long naked blade lying atop it beside a large gold chalice. We file in and sit down. As soft music plays, a procession walks up the aisle from the rear of the building. There are three males, physically aged but not yet senescent, wearing distinctive robes covered in metallic thread. They climb the platform and take up set positions. Then the one at the front and right begins to speak, and I realize with a start that he's Major-Doctor Fiore.

"Dear congregants, we are gathered here today to remember those who have gone before us. Frozen faces carved in stone, the frozen faces of multitudes." He pauses, and everyone around us repeats his words back to him, a low rumbling echo that seems to go on and on forever.

Fiore continues to recite gibberish in portentous tones at an increasing pace. Every sentence or two he stops, and the congregation repeats his words back to him. I hope it's gibberish—some of it is not only baffling but vaguely menacing, references to being judged after our deaths, punishment for sins, rewards for obedience. I glance sideways but quickly realize everybody else is watching him. I mouth the words but feel deeply uneasy about it. Some folks seem to be getting worked up, shouting the responses.

Next, a zombie in an alcove strikes up a turgid melody on some sort of primitive music machine, and Fiore tells us to turn the paper books in front of us to a set page. People begin singing the words there, and clapping in time, and they don't make any sense either. The name "Christian" features in it repeatedly, but not in any context I understand. And the message of the sing-along is distinctly sinister, all about submission and conformity and reward feedback loops. It's as if I've got some sort of deep-rooted reflex that refuses to let me absorb propaganda uncritically: I end up reading the book with a frown on my face.

After half an hour or so, Fiore signals the zombie to stop playing. "Dearly beloved," he says, his tone unctuous and confiding. He leans forward on the lectern, searching our faces. "Dearly beloved." I add my own sarcastic mental commentary to the proceedings—Too dear for you to afford , I footnote him. "Today I would like you all to extend a warm welcome to our newest members, cohort six. We are a loving Church, and it behooves us"—He actually used the word "behooves," he actually said that! —"to gather them to our breast and welcome them fully into our family." He smiles ecstatically and clutches the lectern as if a zombie catamite hidden behind it is sucking his cock. "Please welcome our newest members, Chris, El, Sam, Fer, and Mick, and their wives Jen, Angel, Reeve, Alice, and Cass."

Everyone around me—except Sam, who looks as confused as I feel—suddenly starts smacking their hands together in front of them. It's some kind of welcoming ritual, I guess, and the noise is surprisingly loud. Sam catches my eye and begins to clap, tentatively, but then Fiore holds up a hand and everybody stops.

"My children," he says, gazing down at us fondly, "our new brethren have only been here for three days. In that time, they have had much to learn and see and do, and some of them have made mistakes. To err is human, and to forgive is also human. It is ours to forgive and to pardon. To pardon, for example, Mrs. Alice Sheldon of number six, for her difficulty with plumbing. Or to Mrs. Reeve Brown of number six, for her unfortunate public display of nudity the other day. Or to—"

He's drowned out by laughter. I look round and see that suddenly people are laughing at me and pointing. I feel a rush of embarrassment and anger. How dare he do this? But it's intimidating, too. There must be fifty people here, and some of them are staring as if they're trying to figure out what I look like without any clothes on. If I was me, if I was in my own self-selected body, I'd call him out on the spot—but I'm not. In the sick pit of my stomach I realize that they're never going to forget that I've been singled out, and that this makes me a target. After all, that's how peer pressure works, isn't it? That's what this is about. The experimenters can't expect to generate a workable dark ages society in just three years by dumping a bunch of convalescents in orthohuman bodies into the polity and letting them wander around. They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants—

"—Or to forgive Cass, for her tendency to oversleep. Such as today, when she seems to have forgotten to come to Church."

They're not looking at me anymore, but they're muttering, and there's a dark undercurrent of disapproval at work. I catch Sam's eye, and he looks frightened. He reaches out sideways, and I grab his hand and cling to it as if I'm drowning.

"I urge you all to give your sympathies to Mick, her husband, who has to support such a slothful wife, and to help her out when next you see her." And now I can follow everybody's gaze to Mick. He's short and wiry and has a big, sharp nose and dark, brooding eyes. He looks angry and defensive, for good reason. The bruising weight of a five-point infraction has left me feeling weak in the knees and frightened, and now he's getting it as a proxy for his wife's failure to get up in the morning—

Failure to get up in the morning? I feel like yelling at Fiore: It's an excuse, idiot, an excuse for not being seen in public!

Fiore moves on to discuss other people, other cohorts, stuff that's meaningless to me right now. My netlink comes up, insisting I vote on whether to add or subtract points to each of the other cohorts, with a list of sins and achievements tallied against each name. I don't vote for any of them. In the end our own cohort gets dumped on unanimously by the voters of the five older ones. We all lose a couple of points, signaled by the tolling of a sullen iron bell hanging in an archway near the back of the Church. Fiore signals the zombie to strike up the organ and leads us in another meaningless song, then it's the end of the service. But I can't run away and hide just yet because the auto-da-fé is followed by a social reception in honor of the new cohort, so we can smile brittle smiles and eat canapés under the magnolia trees while they politely sneer at us.

There are tables laid out in the ornamental garden called a graveyard that backs onto the Church. They're covered with white cloths and stacked with glasses of wine. We're led outside and left to fend for ourselves. Taxis don't run on Sunday during Church services. I find myself standing stiffly with my back as close to the churchyard wall as I can get, clutching a wineglass with one hand and Sam with the other. My shoes are pinching, and my face feels set in a permanent grimace.

"Reeve! And Sam!" It's Jen, dragging along Angel and their husbands, Chris and El, in her undertow. She looks a little less ebullient than she was yesterday, and I can guess why.

"We didn't do so well," El grunts. He spares me a lingering glance that hits me like a punch in the guts. It's really creepy. I know exactly what he's thinking, just not why he's thinking it. Is it because he thinks I cost him his points or because he's trying to imagine me with no clothes on?

"We could have done worse," says Jen, her words clipped and harsh-sounding. She's strangling her handbag in a death grip.

"On the outside." I take a deep breath. "I'd challenge Fiore if he made a crack like that at me in public."

"But you're not on the outside, darling," Jen points out. She smiles at Sam. "Is she like this at home, or only when she's got an audience?"

I am close, very close, to throwing the contents of my wineglass in her face and demanding satisfaction just to see if she'll crack, but my butterfly mind sees a distraction sneaking furtively past behind her—it's Mick. So instead of doing something stupid I do something downright foolhardy and march right over to him.

"Hello, Mick," I say brightly.

He jumps and glares at me. He's tense, wound up like a spring, positively fizzing. "Yes? What do you want?" he demands.

"Oh, nothing." I smile and inspect his face. "I just wanted to sympathize with you, having a wife who doesn't get up in the morning for Church. That's downright inconvenient. Will I see her here next week?"

"Yes," he grates. He's holding his hands stiffly by his sides, and they're clenched into fists.

"Oh, good! How marvelous. Listen, you don't mind me visiting to see her this afternoon, do you? We've got a lot to talk about, and I thought she'd—"

"No." He glares at me. "You're not seeing the bitch. Not today, or—whenever. Go away. Whore."

I'm not sure what the word means, but I get the general picture. "Okay, I'm going," I say tensely. If I'd had a few more days with the bench press and the weights, things might be difficult: But not right now. Not yet.

I turn and walk back over to Sam. He doesn't say anything when I lean against him, which is just as well because I don't trust myself to be tactful, especially not while we're in public, and I can't escape. My heart's pounding, and I feel sick with suppressed anger and shame. Cass is being treated as a virtual prisoner by her husband. I'm being publicly ridiculed and making enemies just for trying to maintain my sense of identity. This whole polity is rigged to try to make us betray our friends . . . but somewhere out there, people are looking for me with murder in mind. And if I don't keep a low profile, sooner or later they'll find me.