Glasshouse

6. Sword

AFTER Church we go home. Sam doesn't have to work on Sunday, so he watches television. I go and explore the garage. It's a flimsy structure off to one side of the house, with a big pair of doors in front. There's a workbench, and the hardware shop zombies have already installed all the stuff I bought yesterday. I spend a while tinkering with the drill press and reading the manual for the arc-welding apparatus. Then I go and work out on the exercise device in the basement, grimly pretending that it's a torture machine for transferring physical stress to the bones of a human victim and that Jen's on the receiving end of it. After I've squished her into a bloody lump the size of a shopping bag, I feel drained but happier and ready to tackle difficult tasks. So I go looking for Sam.

He's in the living room, staring blankly at the TV screen with the volume turned off. I sit down next to him, and he barely notices. "What's wrong?" I ask.

"I'm—" He shakes his head, mute and miserable.

I reach for his hand but he pulls it away. "Is it me?" I ask.

"No."

I reach for his hand again, grab it, and hang on. He doesn't pull away this time, but he seems to be tense.

"What is it, then?"

For a while I think he isn't going to say anything, but then, just as I'm about to try again, he sighs. "It's me."

"It's—what?"

"Me. I shouldn't be here."

"What?" I look around. "In the living room?"

"No, in this polity," he says. Now I get it, it's not anger—it's depression. When he's down, Sam clams up and wallows in it instead of taking it out on his surroundings.

"Explain. Try and convince me." I shuffle closer to him, keeping hold of his hand. "Pretend I'm one of the experimenters, and you're looking to justify an early termination, okay?"

"I'm—" He looks at me oddly. "We're not supposed to talk about who we were before the experiment. It doesn't aid enculturation, and it's probably going to get in the way."

"But I—" I stop. "Okay, how about you tell me," I say slowly. "I won't tell anyone." I look him in the eye. "We're supposed to be a monadic couple. There aren't any negative-sum game plays between couples in this society, are there?"

"I don't know." He sniffs. "You might talk."

"Who to?"

"Your friend Cass."

"Bullshit!" I punch him lightly on the arm. "Look, if I promise I won't tell?"

He looks at me thoughtfully. "Promise."

"Okay, I promise." I pause. "So what's wrong?"

His shoulders are hunched. "I've just come out of memory surgery," he says slowly. "I think that's where Fiore and Yourdon and their crowd found most of us, by the way. A redaction clinic must be a great place to find experimental subjects who're healthy but who've forgotten everything they knew. People who've come adrift from the patterns of life, and who have minimal social connections. People with active close ties don't go in for memory surgery, do they?"

"Not often, I don't think," I say, vaguely disturbed by a recollection of military officers briefing me: trouble in another life, urgent plotting against an evil contingency.

"Not unless they're trying to hide something from themselves."

I manage to fake up an amused laugh for him. "I don't think that's very likely. Do you?"

"I'd . . . well. I'm pretty narrowly channeled emotionally. Narrow, but deep. I had a family. And it all went wrong, for reasons I can't deal with now, reasons I could have done something about, maybe. Or maybe not. Whatever, that's the bare outline of what I remember. The rest is all third-person sketching, reconstructed memory implants to replace whatever it meant to me. Because, I'm not exaggerating, it burned me out. If I hadn't undergone memory redaction, I'd probably have become suicidal. I have a tendency toward reactive depression, and I'd just lost everything that meant anything to me."

I hold his hand, not daring to move, suddenly wondering what kind of emotional time bomb I casually selected over the cheese and wine table half a week ago.

After about a minute, he sighs again. "It's over. They're in the past, and I don't remember it too clearly. I didn't have the full surgery, just enough to add a layer of fuzz so that I could build a new life for myself." He looks at me. "Do you know?"

Know what? I think, feeling panicky. Then I understand what he's asking.

"I had memory surgery, too," I say slowly, "but it wasn't for the first time. And it was thorough. I've—" I swallow. "I had to read an autobiography I wrote for myself." And did I lie when I was writing it? Did that other me tell the truth, or was he spinning a pretty tapestry of lies for the stranger he was due to become in the future? "It said I was mated once, long-term. Three partners, six children, it lasted over a gigasec." I feel shaky as I consider the next part. "I don't remember their faces. Any of them."

In truth I don't remember any of it. It might as well have happened to someone else. According to my autobiography it did. The whole thing ended more than four gigasecs ago—over a hundred and twenty years—and I went through my first memory reset early in the aftermath, and a much more thorough one recently. For more than thirty years those three mates and six children meant more to me than, well, anything. But all they are today is background color to the narrative of my life, like dry briefing documents setting up a prefabricated history for a sleeper agent about to be injected into a foreign polity.

Sam holds my hand. "I had surgery to deal with the pain," he says. "And I came out of surgery, and I found I probably didn't need it in the first place. Pain is a stimulus, a signal that the organism needs to take some kind of evasive action, isn't it? I don't mean the chronic pain caused by nerve damage, but ordinary pain. And emotional pain. You need to do something about it, not avoid it. Afterward, it was distant, but I felt empty. Only half-human. And I wasn't sure who I was, either."

I stroke his hand. "Was it the dissociative psychopathology?" I ask. "Or something deeper?"

"Deeper." He sounds absent. "I had such a void that I—well, I made the mistake of falling in love again. Too soon, with somebody who was brilliant and fast and witty and probably completely crazy. And they asked me about the experiment while I was miserable, trying to figure out whether I really was in love or was just fooling myself. We discussed the experiment, but I don't think they were too keen on the idea. And in the end it all got too much for me: I signed up, backed myself up, and woke up in here." He looks at me unhappily. "I made a mistake."

"What?" I stare at him, not sure what to make of this.

"It's not that I don't like sex," he says apologetically, "but I'm in love with someone else. And I'm not going to see them until—" He shakes his head. "Well, there it is. You must think I'm a real idiot."

"No." What I think is, I really have to rescue Cass, Kay, from that scumsucker who's got her locked up. "I don't think you're an idiot, Sam," I hear myself telling him. I lean sideways and kiss him on the cheek in friendly intimacy. He starts, but he doesn't try to push me away. "I just wish we weren't this messed up."

"Me too," he says sadly. "Me too." I lean against him for a while, words seeming redundant at this point. Then, because I'm becoming uncomfortably aware of his body, I get up and head back out to the garage. There's still daylight, and I've got an idea or two in my head that I'd like to work on. If it turns out I have to rescue Kay from Mick and he's violent, I want to be properly equipped.

ON Monday Sam goes to work. And the next day, and the one after that—every day of every week, except Sunday. He's being trained as a legal secretary, which sounds a lot more interesting than it is, although he's getting a handle on the laws and customs of the ancients—some big legal databases survived the dark ages almost untouched, and City Hall has to process a lot of paperwork. One result is that he wears the same dark suits every day, except at home, where it turns out to be okay for him to wear jeans and open-necked shirts.

I begin to get used to him leaving most days, and settle into a routine. I get up in the morning and make coffee for us both. After Sam heads for work I go down to the cellar and work out until I'm covered in sweat and my arms are creaking. Then I have another coffee, go outside, and run the length of the road between the two tunnels several times—at first I make it six lengths, as it's half a kilometer, but I begin to increase it after Tuesday. When I'm staggering with near exhaustion, I go back home and have a shower, another cup of coffee, and either put on something respectable if I'm heading downtown or something disrespectable if I'm going to work in the garage.

There are other unpleasantnesses, of course. About two weeks into our residence, I wake up in the middle of the night with an unpleasant belly cramp. The next morning I'm disgusted to discover that I'm bleeding. I'd heard of menstruation, of course, but I hadn't expected the YFH-Polity designers to be crazy enough to reintroduce it. Most other female mammals simply reabsorb their endometria, why should dark ages humans have to be different? I clean up after myself as well as I can, then find I'm still leaking. It's a miserable time, but when I break down and phone Angel to ask if there's any way of stopping it, she just suggests I go to the drugstore and look for feminine hygiene supplies.

Supplies come from the stores in the downtown zone. I get to shop a couple of times a week. Food comes in prepacked meal containers or as raw ingredients, but I'm a lousy cook and a slow learner so I tend to avoid the latter. This week I pull my routine forward—like, urgently—because feminine hygiene means the drugstore, where they sell pads to wear inside your underwear. The whole business is revolting. What's going to happen next? Are they going to inflict leprosy on us? I grit my teeth and resolve to buy more underwear. And pain medication, which comes in small bitter-tasting disks that you have to swallow and which don't work very well.

Clothing I've more or less sorted out. I've taken to asking Angel or sometimes Alice to choose stuff for my public appearances. This insures me against making a wrong choice and getting on anyone's shit-list. Jen points out that I've got lousy fashion taste, an accusation that might actually carry some weight if there were enough of us in this snow globe of a universe to actually have fashions, rather than simply being on the receiving end of a fragmentary historical clothing database that's advancing through the old-style 1950s at a rate of one planetary year per two tendays.

Other supplies . . . I haunt the hardware shop. Sam probably thinks I'm spending all the money he's earning on makeovers and hairdos or something, but the truth is, I'm looking to my survival. If and when the assassins find me, I'm determined they're going to have a fight on their hands. I don't think he's even looked in the garage once since we moved in. If he had, he'd probably have noticed the drill press, welding kit, and the bits of metal and wood and nails and glue and the workbench. And the textbooks: The Crossbow, Medieval and Modern, Military and Sporting, Its Construction History and Management. It's funny what's survived.

Currently I'm reading a big fat volume called The Swordsmith's Assistant. There's method in my madness. While there's no obvious way I can get my hands on a blaster or other modern weaponry, and I'm not suicidal enough to play with explosives inside a pressurized hab without knowing its physical topology, it occurs to me that you can still raise an awful lot of mayhem with the toys you can build in a dark age machine shop. My main headache with the crossbow, in fact, is going to be knowing the axis of rotation in each sector, so that I can correct myaim for Coriolis force. Which is where the plumb bob and the laser distance meter come in.

In public, I'm working hard at being a different person. I don't want anyone to figure out that I'm building an arsenal.

The ladies of our cohort—which means Jen, Angel, me, and Alice, because Cass still isn't allowed out in public by her husband—meet up for lunch three times a week. I don't ask after Cass because I don't want Jen to get the idea that I'm interested in her. She'd peg it as a weakness and try to figure out how to exploit it. I don't want her to get any kind of handle of me, so I dress up and meet them at a restaurant or cafe, and smile and listen politely as they discuss what their husbands are doing or the latest gossip about their neighbors. The nine other houses on my road are standing vacant, waiting for the next cohorts of test subjects to arrive, but that's unusual—I gather the others live near to people from other cohorts, and there's a rich sea of gossip lapping around the tide pools of suburban anomie.

"I think we can make some mileage against cohort three," Jen says one day, over a Spanish omelet dusted with paprika. She sounds cunning.

"You do?" Angel asks anxiously.

"Yes." Jen looks smug.

"Do tell." Alice puts her fork down in the wreckage of her Caesar salad. She's trying to look interested, but she can't fool me. Jen casts her a sharp look, then stabs her omelet.

"Esther and Mal live at the other end of Lakeside View from me and Chris." A piece of omelet quivers on the end of her fork, impaled for our attention. Jen chews reflectively. "I've noticed Esther watching me from their garden, some mornings. So I called a taxi to go shopping, then had it circle round and drop me off just beyond the tunnel at the other end of the road. Funny who you see in the area." She smiles, exposing perfect raptor-sharp teeth.

"Who?" asks Alice, obliging her with an audience.

"She goes in, and about ten minutes later Phil turns up by taxi. He sends it away and rings the doorbell. Leaves an hour or two later."

Angel tut-tuts disapprovingly. Alice just looks faintly disgusted.

"Don't you see?" asks Jen. "It's not public. That gives us leverage." She spears a broccoli stem, dismembers it a branch at a time, tearing with her teeth. "There's a word for it. Adultery. It's not negatively scored as such, as long as it's secret. But if it comes out—"

"We know," Angel interrupts. "So why—"

"Because we're not part of cohort three. Esther and Mal and Phil are all in cohort three. The, ah, peer pressure has to be applied by your peers. So this gives us leverage over Esther and Phil. If we tell Mal, they lose points big-time."

"I don't feel so good," I say, putting my knife down and pushing my chair back from the table. "Need some fresh air."

"Was it something I said?" asks Jen, casually concerned.

I'm getting better at lying with a straight face. I don't think I used to be good at it, but spending too much time around Jen is giving me a crash course in mendacity. "Nothing to do with you—must be something I ate," I say as I stand up.

I'm trying not to stand out, trying not to offend Jen or the others, and trying not to look eccentric in public, but there are limits to what I will put up with. Being tacitly enlisted in a conspiracy to blackmail is too much. I'll have to smile at them tomorrow or the day after, but right now I want to be alone. So I go outside, where a gentle breeze is blowing, and I walk to the end of the block and cross the road. There's very little traffic (none of us real humans drive vehicles—it's far too dangerous), and the zombies are configured to give right of way to pedestrians, so I manage to get into the park reasonably fast.

The park is a semidomesticated biome. The grass is neatly trimmed, the large deciduous plants are carefully pruned, and the small stream of water that meanders through it is tamed and can be crossed by numerous footbridges. It has the big advantage that at this time of day it's nearly empty, except for the zombie groundsman and perhaps a couple of wives with nothing better to do with their time. I walk along the stone path that leads from the edge of the downtown block toward the small coppice on the edge of the boating lake.

I gradually calm down as I near the side of the lake. It's simulating a sunny day with a little high cloud and a lazy breeze, just occasionally getting up enough speed to cool my skin through my costume. Apart from the incessant machinelike twitter of the fist-sized dinosaurs in the trees, it's quite peaceful. Sometimes I can almost bring myself to forget the perpetual simmering sense of anger and humiliation that Jen seems to thrive on inducing in the rest of us.

However much I try to, I can't put myself in their shoes. It's as if they don't realize that you can game the system by ignoring it, by refusing to participate, as well as by going along with the overt rewards and punishments. They've all unconsciously decided to obey the arbitrary pressure toward gender partitioning, and they won't be content unless everyone else conforms and competes for the same rewards. Was it like this for real dark ages females, created as random victims of genetic determinism rather than volunteers in an experiment enforced by explicit rewards and penalties? If so, I'm lucky: I've only got another three years of it.

Being a wife is a lonely business. Sam and I lead largely independent lives. He goes to work in the morning, and I only see him in the evenings, when he's tired, or on Sundays. On Sundays we go to Church, bound together by our mutual fear of being singled out for opprobrium, and afterward we go home together and try to remind each other that the score whores—who slavishly chase after every hint of right behavior that Fiore drops—are not the most intelligent or reasonable people. We have an uphill struggle at times.

It's a shame Sam's a male, and a shame that the internal dynamics of this compressed community have set up this artificial barrier between us. I have a feeling that if we weren't under so much external pressure, I could get to like him.

And then there's Cass, who was at Church last Sunday.

We live in a really small, tightly constrained and controlled synthetic world, and there are some aspects of the way it's organized that make its artificiality glaringly obvious. For example, we don't have fashions, not in the sense of spontaneous design creativity that spawns waves of imitation and recomplication. (Creativity is a scarce resource at the best of times, and with barely a hundred of us living here so far, there just isn't enough to go round.) What we do have is a strangely frenetic ersatz fashion industry, in the form of whatever's in the shops. Somewhere there's a surviving catalogue of styles from the dark ages, probably compiled from a museum, and the shops change their contents regularly, compelling us to buy new stuff every few cycles or fall out of date. (It's another conformity-promoting measure: forget to update your wardrobe contents, leave yourself open to criticism.) This month hats are in fashion, ridiculous confections with wide brims and net veils that shadow the face. I can cope with hats, although I don't like the brims or the veils—I keep catching them on things, and they get in the way.

But let me get back to Cass, the subject of my hopes and worries . . .

I'm standing beside Sam as usual, holding the hymnbook and moving my lips, letting my eyes rove around the other side of the aisle. A new cohort arrived last week and the Church is packed—they'll have to extend it soon. I'm trying to pick out the newcomers because I don't want to get them mixed up with the older cohorts. Maybe it's a bit of Jen's calculated cynicism rubbing off on me, but I'm learning to guess someone's degree of alienation by how long they've been around. I have a feeling I might be able to make some allies among the new intake as long as I look for them early in the conditioning cycle, before the score whores get their claws in.

For some reason Mick is sitting with—standing among—the new folks this week, and I automatically glance at the woman to his left. I do a double take. She's wearing a long-sleeved blue dress with a high collar, and a hat with a black veil that covers her face. She's got lots of makeup smeared around her eyes. Her mouth is a red slash, and her cheeks are colorless. But it's definitely Cass, and she's holding the hymnbook as if she's never seen one before.

Is that you, Kay? I wonder, tantalized by her presence. I've been holding on to that promise Kay extracted from me—"You'll look for me inside, won't you?" And Cass . . . she knows ice ghoul society. If Mick wasn't so crazy with jealousy that he doesn't want her out in public, if —

Sam nudges me discreetly in the ribs. People are closing their hymnbooks and sitting down. I hastily follow suit. (Don't want anyone to notice me, don't want to attract unwanted attention.)

"Dearly beloved," drones Fiore, "we are a loving congregation, and today we welcome to our bosom the new cohort of Eddie, Pat, Jon"—and he names seven other fresh victims—"who I am sure you will take under your wings and strive to befriend in due course. We also offer a belated welcome to sleepyhead Cass, who has finally deigned to grace us with her fragrant presence . . ." He twitters on in like vein for some time, preaching a sermon of saccharine subordination illustrated periodically with some anecdote of misdoing. Vern, it seems, got falling-down drunk and vomited in Main Street two nights ago, while Erica and Kate had a stand-up fight so violent that it put Erica in hospital, along with Greg and Brook, who tried to pull Kate off her. Kate is now in prison, paying the price for her outburst in days on bread and nights on water, and by the time Fiore gets through excoriating her, there's an angry undercurrent of disapproval in the congregation. I glance sidelong at Cass, trying not to be too obtrusive about it. I can't make out her face—the veil shadows her expression effectively—but I'm pretty sure that if I could see her, she'd look frightened. Her shoulders are set, defensive, and she's hunched slightly away from Mick.

Once we go outside into the open air, I grab a glass of wine and down it rapidly, keeping close to Sam. Sam watches me, worried. "Something wrong?"

"Yes. No. I'm not sure." There are butterflies in my stomach. Cass is the most isolated of the wives in Cohort Four, the one who hasn't been allowed out anywhere—and could Sam stop me doing anything if I felt like it? Mick is poison, not the subtle social toxin of a Jen, but the forthright venom of a stinging insect, brutal and direct. "There's something I want to check out. I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?"

"Reeve—take care?"

I meet his eyes. He's concerned! I realize. Abashed, I nod, then slide away toward the front of the Church and the main entrance.

Mick is talking to a little knot of hard-looking men, wiry muscles and close-cropped hair—guys I see digging or operating incredibly noisy machinery, chewing up the roads then filling them in again—he's gesticulating wildly. A couple of the Church attendants stand nearby, and there're a couple of women waiting in the doorway. I sidle toward the front door and go inside. The Church has emptied out, and there's only one person still there, loitering near the back pew.

"Kay? Cass?" I ask.

She looks at me. "R-Reeve?"

It's dark, and I can't be sure but there's something about her heavy eye shadow that makes me think of bruising. Her dress would effectively conceal signs of violence if Mick's been beating her. "Are you all right?" I ask.

Her eyes turn toward the entrance. "No," she whispers. "Listen, he's—don't get involved. All right? I don't need your help. Stay away from me." Her voice quavers with a fine edge of fear.

"I promised I'd look for you in here," I say.

"Don't." She shakes her head. "He'll kill me, do you realize that? If he thinks I've been talking to anyone—"

"But we can protect you! All you have to do is ask, and we'll get you out of there and keep him away from you."

I might as well not have bothered talking to her: she shakes her head and backs toward the door, her shoes clacking on the stone floor. Behind the veil, her face isn't simply frightened, it's terrified. And the white powder on her cheek isn't quite enough to conceal the ivory stain of old bruising.

Mick is waiting outside. If he sees me emerging after Cass, he'll probably go nuts. And I'm beginning to wonder if I'm right about her. When I called her Kay, she showed no sign of recognition. But would she? Kay is an alias, after all, and with her being just out of memory surgery, and me not being Robin but Reeve in this hall of mirrors—if after these tendays someone called me Robin, would I realize they were talking to me at first?

I glance around frustratedly, wondering if there's a back exit. I'm alone in the Church nave. It's not my favorite place, you understand, but right now it lacks the almost palpable sense of hostility it exudes when we're all herded together in our Sunday best, wondering who's going to be today's sacrificial victim. Waiting for Mick to lose interest and leave, I walk around the front of the big room, trying to get a new perspective on things.

I've never been forward of the pews before. What does Fiore keep in his lectern? I wonder, walking toward the altar. The lectern, seen from behind, is quite disappointing—it's just a slab of carved wood with a shelf set in it. There are a couple of paper books filed there, but no robocatamite to account for Fiore's peculiar mannerisms. The altar is also pretty boring. It's a slab of smoothly polished stone, carved into neatly rectilinear lines. The symbols of the faith, the sword and the chalice, sit atop a metal rack in the middle of the purple-dyed cloth that covers the stone. I look closer, intrigued by the sword. It's an odd-looking thing. The blade is dead straight, with a totally squared-off tip, and it's about a centimeter thick. With no edge on it and no taper it looks more like a mirror-polished billet of steel than a blade. It's got a basket hilt and a gray, roughened grip, suggesting a functional design rather than a decorative one. Something nags at me, an insistent phantom memory stump itching where a real one has been amputated. I'm certain I've seen a sword like this before. There are faint rectangular grooves in the outer surface of the basket, as if something has been removed. And the flat "edge" of the blade isn't quite right—it shines with the luster of fine steel, but there's also a faint rainbow sheen, a diffractive speckling at the edge of my gaze.

I break out in a cold sweat. My blouse feels like ice against the chill of my skin as I straighten up and hastily head for the small door that's visible on this side of the organist's bench. I don't want to be caught here, not now! Someone is having a little joke with us, and I feel sick to my heart at the thought that it might be Fiore, or his boss, Yourdon the Bishop. They're playing with us, and this is the proof. Who can I tell? Most people here wouldn't understand, and those that did—we've got no way out, not unless the experimenters agree to release us early. But the exit leads straight back into the clinics of the hospitaler-confessors, and I have a horrible gut-deep feeling that they're involved in this. Certainly they're implicated.

I've got to get out of here , I realize, aghast. The thing is, I've seen swords like that before. Vorpal blades, they call them, I'm not sure why. This one's obviously decommissioned, but how did it get here? They don't rely on the edge or point to cut, that's not what they're for. They belonged to, to—Who did they belong to? I rack my brains, trying to find the source of this terrible conviction that I stand in the presence of something utterly evil, something that doesn't belong in any experimental polity, a stink of livid corruption. But my treacherous memory lets me down again, and as I batter myself against the closed door of my own history, I walk back into the light outside, blinking and wondering if I might be wrong after all. Wrong about Cass being Kay. Wrong about Mick being violent. Wrong about the sword and the chalice. Wrong about who and what I am . . .