Glasshouse

9. Secret

TIME passes fast, mostly because I spend the afternoon with my nose buried in the encyclopedia, trying to remedy my desperate ignorance of dark ages reproductive politics. Which I sense is putting me at a dangerous disadvantage.

The next day is the first of four days off. I sleep until well after Sam's departed for the office. Then I go downstairs and work out. Of the nine other houses on our stretch of road, one is now occupied by Nicky and Wolf—but Wolf has a job and Nicky, who is lazy beyond my wildest aspirations, sleeps in until noon. So I get in a good hour-long run, by the end of which I'm sweated up but not breathless or aching anymore. It's spring in our biome, and the trees and flowers are beginning to blossom. The air is full of the airborne seminiferous dust shed by the hermaphroditic vegetation. It tickles my nose, making me sneeze, but some of the scents that accompany it—attractants for insects—are nice.

After exercise I shower, dress in respectable clothes, and head downtown to the hardware store to spend some of my money. I feel better about spending it, knowing it's not Sam's money, even though I realize this is stupid because it's just meaningless scrip issued to keep the experiment working, not real currency. I come away from the store with abrazing torch, flux, solder, lots and lots of copper wire, and some other odds and ends. Then I go shopping for domestic items.

I hit the drugstore first, armed with a shopping list of things I'd never heard of until yesterday—things the encyclopedia listed under sexual health. Unfortunately, just knowing what to ask for doesn't translate into being able to buy it, and I gradually figure out that the omissions make a pattern. I can understand them not having progestogen-based medications on general sale. But why are there no absorbent sponges? Or the plastic penile sheaths I read about? After about half an hour of searching I conclude that the drugstore is useless by design. I ran across a rather shocking article on religious beliefs about sex and reproduction, and it looks like our drugstore was stocked on the basis of instructions from eclecticist hierophants. Something tells me that the lack of contraceptives is not an accident. I'm just surprised I haven't already heard people grumbling about it.

I have better luck in the department store, where I buy a new microwave oven, some clip-on spotlights, and a few other items. Then I go hunting for a craft shop. It takes me a while to find what I'm looking for, but in the end I discover one tucked in a corner of the shop, inside a pulp carton—a small wooden loom, suitable for weaving cloth. I buy it along with a whole bunch of woolen thread, just so nobody raises any eyebrows. Then I catch a taxi home and install my loot in the garage, along with the unfinished crossbow and the other projects.

It's time to get things moving. It's time I stopped kidding myself that I can fight my way out of here, and time that I stopped kidding myself that they're going to let me go in (I checked the calendar) another ninety-four megaseconds. Forget the crossbow and the other toys I've been playing with. I've got a stark choice. I can conform like everyone else, go native in the pocket polity they've established, settle down and get on with the job of creating a generation of innocents who don't even know there's another universe outside. Who knows? After a gigasecond, will I even remember I had another life? It's not as if my presurgery self left me much to hold on to . . .

Or I can try to find out what's really going on. Fiore and his shadowy boss, Bishop Yourdon, are doing something with this polity, that much is clear. This isn't just a straightforward experimental archaeology commune. Too many aspects of the setup turn out to be just plain wrong when you examine them closely. If I can figure out what they're trying to do, maybe I can discover a way out.

Which is why I spend a personal infinity laboriously stripping reel after reel of copper wire of its insulation and threading it onto the loom. The first step in figuring out what's going on is to get myself some privacy. I need a shoulder bag lined with woven copper mesh to accompany the bug-zapper (my repurposed microwave oven), and there's no way I could order a Faraday cage from one of the stores without setting off alarms.

It takes me nearly two weeks to weave a square meter of copper wire broadcloth, working in darkness by touch alone. It's really fiddly stuff to work with. The strands keep breaking or bending, it takes ages to strip the insulation, and besides, I've got a day job to go to.

Janis is complaining about minor back pains and spending a lot of time in the toilet each morning, coming out looking pale. There are fewer wisecracks and jokes from her, which is a shame. She's beginning to bulge around the waist, too. She's putting a brave face on it, but I think underneath it all she's terrified. The prospect of giving birth like an animal (with all the attendant risk and pain) is enough to scare anybody, even if it didn't come with the added horror of being chained down in this place for the indefinite hereafter, the product of your blood and sweat held hostage against your cooperation. What I want to know is, why isn't there a resistance movement? I suppose in a panopticon anyone organizing such a thing would have to be very quiet about it—or very naive—but I can't help wondering why I haven't seen any signs of even covert defiance.

I checked the YFH-Polity constitution in the library (there's a copy on a lectern out front, for everybody to read) and what's missing from it is as important as what's there. There's a bill of rights that explicitly includes the phrase "right to life" (which, if you read some dark ages histories, doesn't mean what a naive modern would think it means), and it goes on to explicitly waive all expectations of a right to privacy, which means they can enforce it against my will. Ick. The constitution is a public protocol specification defining the parameters within which YFH's legal system operates. Before I came here, it seemed irrelevant, but now it terrifies me—and I notice that it says nothing about a commitment to freedom of movement. That's been an axiom for virtually all human polities, ever since the end of the censorship wars mopped up the last nests of Curious Yellow and the memetic dictatorships. Not that you'll find any such knowledge in our shelves; history stops in 2050, as far as your reading in this library goes, and anyway, everything after 2005 is accessible only via the computer terminals, using an arcane conversational text interface that I'm still fumblingly trying to explore.

I see relatively little of Sam during this time. After our argument, indeed ever since the halfhearted reconciliation, he's withdrawn from me. Maybe it's the shock of learning about his reproductive competence, but he's very distant. Before that nightmare, before I messed up everything between us, I'd hug him when he got home from work. We'd have a laugh together, or chat, and we were (I'm sure of this) growing close. But since that night and our argument, we haven't even touched. I feel isolated and a bit afraid. If we did touch I'd—I don't know. Let's be honest about this: I have an active sex drive, but the thought of getting pregnant in here scares the shit out of me. And while there are other things we could do if we were inclined to intimacy, I find the whole situation is a very effective turnoff. So I can't really blame Sam for avoiding me as much as he can. The sooner he gets out of here the sooner he can rush off in search of his romantic love—assuming the bitch didn't give up on him and go in search of a poly nucleus to joyfully exchange bodily fluids with about five seconds after he joined the experiment. Sam broods, and, knowing his luck, he's fixated on someone I wouldn't give the time of day to.

That's life for you.

FOUR weeks into my new job, twelve weeks before Janis is due to go on maternity leave, I have another wake-up-screaming nightmare.

This time things are different. For one thing, Sam isn't there to hold me when I wake up. And for another, I know with cold certainty that this one is true. It's not simply a hideous dream, it's something that actually happened to me. Something that wasn't meant to be erased back at the clinic.

I'm sitting at a desk in a cramped rectangular room with no doors or windows. The walls are the color of old gold, dulled but iridescent, rainbows of diffraction coming off them whenever I look away from the desk. I'm in an orthohuman male body, not the mecha battlecorpse of my previous nightmare, and I'm wearing a simple tunic in a livery that I vaguely recognize as belonging to the clinic of the surgeon-confessors.

On the desk in front of me sits a stack of rough paper sheets, handwoven with ragged edges. I made the stuff myself a long time ago, and any embedded snitches in it have long since died of old age. In my left hand I hold a simple ink pen with a handle made of bone that I carved from the femur of my last body—a little personal conceit. There's a bottle of ink at the opposite side of the desk, and I recall that procuring this ink cost a surprising amount of time and money. The ink has no history. The carbon soot particles suspended in it are isotopically randomized. You can't even tell what region of the galaxy it came from. Anonymous ink for a poison pen. How suitable . . .

I'm writing a letter to someone who doesn't exist yet. That person is going to be alone, confused, probably very frightened indeed. I feel a terrible sympathy for him in his loneliness and fear, because I've been there myself, and I know what he's going through. And I'll be right there with him, living through every second of it. (Something's wrong. The letter I remember reading back in rehab was only three pages, but this stack is much thicker. What's happening? ) I hunch over the desk, gripping the pen tightly enough that it forms a painful furrow beside the first joint of my middle finger as I scratch laborious tracks across the fibrous sheets.

As I remember the sensations in my fingers, the somatic memory of writing, I get a horrible sense of certainty, a deep conviction that I really did send myself a twenty-page letter from the past, stuff I desperately needed to see—of which only three pages were allowed to reach me.

Dear self:

Right now you're wondering who you are. I assume you're over the wild mood swings by now and can figure out what other people's emotional states signify. If not, I suggest you stop reading immediately and leave this letter for later. There's stuff in here that you will find disturbing. Access it too soon, and you'll probably end up getting yourself killed.

Who are you? And who am I?

The answer to that question is that you are me and I am you, but you lack certain key memories—most importantly, everything that meant anything to me from about two and a half gigaseconds ago. That's an awfully long time. Back before the Acceleration most humans didn't live that long. So you're probably asking yourself why I—your earlier self—might want to erase all those experiences. Were they really that bad?

No, they weren't. In fact, if I hadn't gone through deep memory surgery a couple of times before, I'd be terrified. There's stuff in here, stuff in my head, that I don't want to lose. Forgetting is a little like dying, and forgetting seventy Urth-years of memories in one go is a lot like dying.

Luckily forgetfulness, like death, is reversible these days. Go to the House of Rishael the Exceptional in Block 54-Honey-September in the Polity of the Jade Sunrise and, after presenting a tissue sample, ask to speak to Jordaan. Jordaan will explain how to recover my latest imprint from escrow and how to merge the imprint block back into your mind. It's a difficult process, but it's stuff that belongs to you and brought you deep happiness when you were me. In fact, it's the stuff that makes me myself—and the lack of which defines who you are in relation to me.

Incidentally, one of the things you'll find in the imprint is the memory of how to access a trust fund with a quarter million écus in it.

(Yes, I'm a manipulative worm: I want you to become me again, sooner or later. Don't worry, you're a manipulative worm, too—you must be, if you're alive to read this letter.)

Now, the basics.

You are recovering from deep memory erasure surgery. You are probably thinking that once you recover you'll go and spend the usual wanderjahr looking for a vocation, find somewhere to live, meet friends and lovers, and set up a life for yourself. Wrong. The reason you are recovering from memory erasure surgery is that the people you work for have noticed a disturbing pattern of events centered on the Clinic of the Blessed Singularity run by the order of surgeon-confessors at City Zone Darke in the Invisible Republic. People coming out of surgery are being offered places in a psychological/historical research project aimed at probing the social conditions of the first dark age by live role-play. Some of these people have very questionable histories: in some cases, questionable to the point of being fugitive war criminals.

Your mission (and no, you don't have any choice—I already committed us to it) is to go inside the YFH-Polity, find out what's going on, then come back out to tell us. Sounds simple, doesn't it?

There's a catch. The research community has been established inside a former military prison, a glasshouse that was used as a reprogramming and rehabilitation center after the war. It was widely believed to be escape-proof at the time, and it's certainly a very secure facility. Other agents have already gone in. One very experienced colleague of yours vanished completely, and is now over twenty megs past their criticality deadline. Another reappeared eleven megaseconds late, reported to the prearranged debriefing node, and detonated a concealed antimatter device, killing the instance of their case officer who was in attendance.

I believe that both agents were compromised because they were injected into the glasshouse with extensive prebriefing and training. We have no idea what to expect on the other side of the longjump gate into YFH-Polity, but their security is tight. We expect extensive border firewalls and a focused counterespionage operation supported by the surveillance facilities of a maximum-security prison. There is likely to be stateful examination of your upload vector, and careful background checks before you are admitted. This is why I am about to undergo deep memory excision. Simply put, what you don't know can't betray you.

Incidentally, if you're experiencing lucid dreams about this stuff, it means you're overdue. This is the secondary emergent fallback briefing.I'm about to have these memories partially erased—unlinked, but not destroyed—before I go into the clinic in City Zone Darke. It's a matter of erasing the associative links to the data, not the data itself. They'll re-emerge given sufficient time, hopefully even after the surgeon-confessors go after the other memories that I'll be asking them to redact. They can't erase what I don't know I've already forgotten.

What is the background to your mission?

I can tell you very little. Our records are worryingly incomplete, and to some extent this is a garbage trawl triggered by the coincidence of the names Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta cropping up in the same place.

During the censorship wars, Curious Yellow infected virtually every A-gate in the Republic of Is. We don't know who released Curious Yellow, or why, because Curious Yellow appears to have been created for the sole purpose of delivering a psywar payload designed to erase all memories and data pertaining to something or other. By squatting the assemblers, Curious Yellow ensured that anyone who needed medical care, food, material provisions, or just about any of the necessities of civilization, had to submit to censorship. Needless to say, some of us took exception to this, and the subsequent civil war—in which the Republic of Is shattered into the current system of firewalled polities—resulted in a major loss of data about certain key areas. In particular, the key services provided by the Republic—a common time framework and the ability to authenticate identities—were broken. The situation was complicated, after the defeat of the Curious Yellow censorship worm, by the emergence of quisling dictatorships whose leaders took advantage of the Curious Yellow software to spread their own pernicious ideologies and power structures. In the ensuing chaos, even more information was lost.

Among the things we know very little about are the history and origins of certain military personnel conscripted into sleeper cells by Curious Yellow once the worm determined it was under attack by dissidents armed with clean, scratch-built A-gates. The same goes for the dangerous opportunists who took advantage of Curious Yellow's payload capability in order to set up their own pocket empires. Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta came to our attention in connection with the psychological warfare organizations of no less than eighteen local cognitive dictatorships. They are extraordinarily dangerous people, but they are currently beyond our reach because they are, to put it bluntly, providing some kind of service to the military of the Invisible Republic.

What we know about the sleeper cells is this: In the last few megasecs of the war, before the alliance succeeded in shattering and then sanitizing the last remaining networks of Curious Yellow, some of the quisling dictatorships' higher echelons went underground. It is now almost two gigaseconds since the end of the war, and most people dismiss the concept of Curious Yellow revenants as fantasy. However, I don't believe in ignoring threats just because they sound far-fetched. If Curious Yellow really did create sleeper cells, secondary pockets of infection designed to break out long after the initial wave was suppressed, then our collective failure to pursue them is disastrously shortsighted. And I am particularly worried because some aspects of the YFH-Polity experimental protocol, as published, sound alarmingly amenable to redirection along these lines.

My biggest reason for wanting you to have undergone major memory erasure prior to injection into YFH-Polity is this: I suspect that when the incoming experimental subjects are issued with new bodies, they are filtered through an A-gate infected with a live, patched copy of Curious Yellow. Therefore preemptive memory redaction is the only sure way of preventing such a verminiferous gate from identifying you as a threat for its owners to eliminate.

I watch myself writing this letter to myself. I can read it as clearly as if it's engraved in my own flesh. But I can't see any marks in the paper, because my old self has forgotten to dip his pen in the ink, and he's long since fallen to scratching invisible indentations on the coarse sheets. I seem to stand behind his shoulder although his head is nowhere in my field of vision, and I try to scream at him, No! No! That isn't how you do it! But nothing comes out because this is a dream, and when I try to grab the pen, my hand passes right through his wrist, and he keeps writing on my naked brain with his ink of blood and neurotransmitters.

I begin to panic, because being trapped in this cell with him has brought memories flooding back in, memories that he cunningly suppressed in order to avoid triggering Curious Yellow's redaction factories. It's a movable feast of horrors and exultation and life in the large. It's too much to bear, and it's too intense, because now I remember the rest of my earlier dream of swords and armor and the reversible massacre aboard a conditionally liberated polity cylinder. I remember the way our A-gate glitched and crashed at the end of the rescue as we threw the last severed head into its maw, and the way Loral turned to me, and said, "Well shit ," in a voice full of world-weary disgust, and how I walked away and scheduled myself for deep erasure because I knew if I didn't, the memory of it all would drag me awake screaming for years to come—

—And I'm awake , and I make it to the toilet just in time before my stomach squeezes convulsively and tries to climb up my throat and escape.

I can't believe I did those things. I don't believe I would have committed such crimes. But I remember the massacre as if it was yesterday. And if those memories are false, then what about the rest of me?

NOT entirely by coincidence, the next day is my first run with the shoulder bag. It started life as a rectangular green vinyl affair. It now sports a black nylon lining that I've stitched together with much swearing and sucking of pricked fingertips to conceal the gleaming copper weave glued to its inside. It looks like a shopping bag until I fold over the inner flap. Then it looks like a full shopping bag with a black flap covering the contents. Right now it contains a carton of extremely strong ground espresso, a filter cone, and several small items that are individually innocuous but collectively damning if you know what you're looking at. It's a good thing the bag looks anonymous, because unless I'm hallucinating all my memories, what I'm going to take home from work in that bag today will be a whole lot less innocuous than coffee beans.

I get in to work at the usual early hour and find Janis in the staff room, looking pale and peaky. "Morning sickness?" I ask. She nods. "Sympathies. Say, why don't you stay here, and I'll get the returnssorted out? Put your feet up—I'll call you if anything comes up that I can't handle."

"Thanks. I'll do just that." She leans back against the wall. "I wouldn't be here but Fiore's coming—"

"You leave that to me," I say, trying not to look surprised. I wasn't expecting him so soon, but I've got the bag, so . . .

"Are you sure?" she asks.

"Yes." I smile reassuringly. "Don't worry about me, I'll just let him in and leave him to get on with things."

"Okay," she says gratefully, and I go back out and get to work.

First I pile yesterday's returns on the trolley and push them around the shelves, filing them as fast as I can. It only takes a few minutes—most of the inmates here don't realize that reading is a recreational option, and only a handful are borrowing regularly. But then I skip the dusting and cleaning I'm supposed to do today. Instead, I grab my bag from behind the reception station, dump it on the bottom shelf of the trolley, and head for the shelves in the reference section next to the room where the Church documents are stored.

Into the bag goes a dictionary of sexual taboos, held in the reference shelves because some weird interpretation of dark age mores holds that libraries wouldn't lend such stuff out. It's my cover story in case I'm caught, something naughty but obviously trivial. Then I leave the trolley right where it is with the bag tucked away on the bottom shelf, where it's not immediately obvious. I head back to the front desk. My palms are sweating. Fiore is due to visit the archive, which means advancing my plans. Janis has always handled him before—but she's ill, I'm running the shop, and there's no point delaying the inevitable. I've got all my excuses prepared, anyway. I've barely been able to sleep lately for rehearsing them in my head.

Around midmorning a black car pulls up and parks in front of the library steps. I put down the book I'm reading and stand up to wait behind the counter. A uniformed zombie gets out of the front and opens the rear door, standing to one side while a plump male climbs out. His dark, oily hair shines in the daylight: The white slash of his clerical collar lends his face a disembodied appearance, as if it doesn't quite belong to the same world as the rest of his body. He walks up the steps to the front door and pushes it open, then walks over to the desk. "Special reference section," he says tersely. Then he looks at my face. "Ah, Reeve. I didn't see you here before."

I manage a sickly smile. "I'm the trainee librarian. Janis is ill this morning, so I'm looking after everything in her absence."

"Ill?" He stares at me owlishly. I look right back at him. Fiore has chosen a body that is physically imposing but bordering on senescence, in the state the ancients called "middle age." He's overweight to the point of obesity, squat and wide and barely taller than I am. His chins wobble as he talks, and the pores on his nose are very visible. Right now his nostrils are flared, sniffing the air suspiciously, and his bushy eyebrows draw together as he inspects me. He smells of something musty and organic, as if he's spent too long in a compost heap.

"Yes, she has morning sickness," I say artlessly, hoping he won't ask where she is.

"Morning sick—oh, I see!" His frown vanishes instantly. "Ah, the trials we have to suffer." His voice oozes a slug-trail of sympathy. "I'm sure this must be hard for her, and for you. Just take me to the reference room, and I'll stay out of your way, child."

"Certainly." I head for the gate at the side of the station. "If you'd like to follow me?" He knows exactly where we're going, the old toad, but he's a stickler for appearances. I lead him to the locked door in the reference section, and he produces a small bunch of keys, muttering to himself, and opens it. "Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?" I ask hesitantly.

He pauses and gives me the dead-fish stare again. "Isn't that against library regulations?" he asks.

"Normally yes, but you're not going to be in the library proper," I babble, "you're in the archive and you're a responsible person so I thought I'd offer—"

He stops being interested in me. "Coffee will be fine. Milk, no sugar." He disappears into the room, leaving his keys with the lock.

Now. Heart pounding, I head for the staff room. Janis is snoozing when I open the door. She sits up with a start, looking pale. "Reeve—"

"It's all right," I say, crossing over to the kettle and filling it up. "Fiore's here, I let him in. Listen, why don't you go home? If you're feeling ill, you shouldn't really be here, should you?"

"I've been thinking about thinking." Janis shakes her head. I rummage around for the coffee and filter papers and set the stand up over the biggest mug I can find. I scoop the coffee into the paper with wild abandon, stopping only when I realize that making it too strong for Fiore will be as bad as not getting him to drink it all. "You shouldn't think too much, Reeve. It's bad for you."

"Is it really?" I ask abstractedly, as I peel the foil wrapping from a small tablet of chocolate I bought at the drugstore and crumble half of it into the coffee grounds as the kettle begins to hiss. I wad the foil into a tight ball and flick it into the wastebasket.

"If you think about getting out of here," says Janis.

"Like I said, I'll call you a taxi—"

"No, I mean out of here. " I turn round and she looks at me with the expression of a trapped animal. It's one of those moments of existential bleakness when the cocoon of lies that we spin around ourselves to paper over the cracks in reality dissolve into slime, and we're left looking at something really ugly. Janis has got the bug, the same one I've got, only she's got it worse. "I can't stand it anymore! They're going to put me in hospital and make me pass a skull through my cunt, and then they're going to have a little accident and I'll bleed out and they'll give me to Hanta to fix with her tame censorship worm. I'll come out of the hospital smiling like Yvonne and Patrice, and there won't be any me left, there'll be this thing that thinks it's me and—"

I grab her. "Shut up !" I hiss in her ear. "It's not going to happen!" She sobs, a great racking howl welling up inside her, and if she lets it out. I'm completely screwed because Fiore will hear us. "I've got a plan."

"You've—what? "

The kettle is boiling. I gently push away her groping hands and reach over to turn it off. "Listen. Go home. Right now, right this instant. Leave Fiore to me. Stop panicking. The more isolated we think we are, the more isolated we become. I won't let them mess with your head." I smile at her reassuringly. "Trust me."

"You." Janis sniffles loudly, then lets go of me and grabs a tissue off the box on the table. "You've got—no, don't tell me." She blows her nose and takes a deep breath, then looks at me again, a long, hard, appraising look. "Should have guessed. You don't take shit, do you?"

"Not if I can help it." I pick up the kettle and carefully pour boiling water into the funnel, where it will damp down the coffee grounds, extract the xanthine alkaloids and dissolve the half tab of Ex-Lax hidden in the powder, draining the sennoside glycosides and the highly diuretic caffeine into the mug of steaming coffee that, with any luck, will give Fiore a strong urge to take ten minutes on the can about half an hour after he drinks it. "Just try to relax. I should be able to tell you about it in a couple of days if things work out."

"Right. You've got a plan." She blows her nose again. "You want me to go home." It's a question.

"Yes. Right now, without letting Fiore see you here—I told him you were at home, sick."

"Okay." She manages a wan smile.

I pour milk into the coffee mug, then pick it up. "I'm just going to give the Reverend his coffee," I tell her.

"To give—" Her eyes widen. "I see." She takes her jacket from the hook on the back of the door. "I'd better get out of your way, then." She grins at me briefly. "Good luck!"

And she's gone, leaving me room to pick up the mug of coffee and the other item from the sink side and to carry them out to Fiore.

THE simplest plans are often the best.

Anything I try to do on the library computer system will be monitored, and the instant I try to find anything interesting they'll know I know about it. It's probably there as a honeypot, to snare the overly curious and insufficiently paranoid. Even if it isn't, I probably won't get anywhere useful—those old conversational interfaces are not only arcane, they're feeble-minded.

To put one over on these professional paranoids is going to take skill, cunning, and lateral thinking. And my thinking is this: If Fiore and the Bishop Yourdon and their fellow experimenters have one weak spot, it's their dedication to the spirit of the study. They won't use advanced but anachronistic surveillance techniques where nonintrusive ones that were available during the dark ages will do. And they won't use informational metastructures accessible via netlink where a written manual and records on paper will do. (Either that, or what they write on paper really is secret stuff, material that they won't entrust to a live data system in case it comes under attack.)

The ultrasecure repository in the library is merely a room full of shelves of paper files, with no windows and a simple mortise lock securing the door. What more do they need? They've got us locked down in the glasshouse, a network of sectors of anonymous orbital habs subjected to pervasive surveillance, floating in the unmapped depths of interstellar space, coordinates and orbital elements unknown, interconnected by T-gates that the owners can switch on or off at will, and accessible from the outside only via a single secured longjump gate. Not only that, but our experimenters appear to have a rogue surgeon-confessor running the hospital. Burglar alarms would be redundant.

After I knock on the door and pass Fiore his coffee, I go back to the reference section and while away a few minutes, leafing through an encyclopedia to pass the time. (The ancients held deeply bizarre ideas about neuroanatomy, I discover, and especially about developmental plasticity. I guess it explains some of their ideas about gender segregation.)

As it happens, I don't have to wait long. Fiore comes barging into the office and looks about. "You—is there a staff toilet here?" he demands, glancing around apprehensively. His forehead glistens beneath the lighting tubes.

"Certainly. It's through the staff common room—this way." I head toward the staff room at a leisurely pace. Fiore takes short steps, breathing heavily.

"Faster," he grumbles. I step aside and gesture at the door. "Thank you," he adds as he darts inside. A moment later I hear him fumbling with the bolt, then the rattle of a toilet seat.

Excellent. With any luck, he'll be about his business before he looks for the toilet paper. Which is missing because I've hidden it.

I walk back to the door to the restricted document repository. Fiore has left his key in the lock and the door ajar. Oh dear. I pull out the bar of soap, the sharp knife, and the wad of toilet paper I've left in my bag on the bottom shelf of the trolley. What an unfortunate oversight!

I wedge my toe in the door to keep it from shutting as I pull the key out and press it into the bar of soap, both sides, taking care to get a clean impression. It only takes a few seconds, then I use some of the paper to wipe the key clean and wrap up the bar, which I stash back in the bag. The key is a plain metal instrument. While there's an outside chance that there's some kind of tracking device built into it in case it's lost, it isn't lost—it moved barely ten centimeters while Fiore was taking his ease. And I'm fairly certain there are no silly cryptographic authentication tricks built into it—if so, why disguise it as an old-fashioned mortise lock key? Mechanical mortise locks are surprisingly secure when you're defending against intruders who're more used to dealing with software locks. Finally, if there's one place that won't be under visual surveillance, it's Fiore's high-security document vault while the Priest is busy inside it. This is the chain of assumptions on which I am gambling my life.

I make sure my bag is well hidden at the bottom of the trolley before I slowly make my way back to the staff room. And I wait a full minute before I allow myself to hear Fiore calling querulously for toilet paper.

The rest of the day passes slowly without Janis to joke with. Fiore leaves after another hour, muttering and grumbling about his digestion. I transfer the soap bar to the wheezing little refrigerator in the staff room where we keep the milk. I don't want to risk its melting or deforming.

That evening, I lock up and go home with my heart in my mouth, sweat gluing my blouse to the small of my back. It's silly of me, I know. By doing this, I risk rapid exposure. But if I don't do it, what will happen in the longer term is worse than anything that can happen to me if they catch me with a library book from the reference-only collection and a distorted bar of soap. It won't be just me who goes down screaming. Janis knew about Curious Yellow and was afraid of surveillance. I don't know why, or where from, but it's an ominous sign. Who is she?

Back home, I head for the garage before I go indoors. It's time to power up the bug zapper in anger for the first time. The bug zapper is the cheap microwave oven I bought a few weeks ago. I've had the lid off, and I've done some creative things with its wiring. A microwave oven is basically a Faraday cage with a powerful microwave emitter. It's tuned to emit electromagnetic energy at a wavelength that is strongly absorbed by the water in whatever food you put inside. Well, that's no good for me, but with some creative jiggery-pokery, I've succeeded in buggering up the magnetron very effectively. It now emits a noisy range of wavelengths, and while it won't cook your dinner very well, it'll make a real mess of any electronic circuits you put in it. I open the door and shake my copper-lined bag's contents into it, then reach through the fabric to retrieve the bar of soap. I really don't want to fry that —Fiore might get suspicious if he got the shits every time he went to the library while I was on duty.

I drop the oven door shut and zap the book for fifteen seconds. Then I push a button on the breadboard I've taped to the side of the oven. No lights come on. There's nothing talking in the death cell, so it looks like I've effectively crisped any critters riding the book's spine. Well, we'll see when I take it back to the library, won't we? If Fiore singles me out in Church the day after tomorrow, I'll know I was wrong, but sneaking a dirty book out of the library for an evening isn't in the same league as stealing the keys to—

The plaster of paris! Mentally, I kick myself. I nearly forgot it. I tip the right amount into an empty yoghurt pot with shaky hands, then measure in a beaker of water and stir the mass with a teaspoon until it begins to get so hot that I have to juggle it from hand to hand.

Ten minutes pass, and I line a baking tray with moist whitish goop (gypsum, hydrated calcium sulphate). Hoping that it has cooled enough, I press both sides of the soap bar into it a couple of times. I have a tense moment worrying about the soap's softening and melting, and I make the first impression too early, while the plaster's so soft and damp that it sticks to the soap, but in the end I think I've probably got enough to work with. So I cover the tray with a piece of cheesecloth and go inside. It's nearly ten o'clock, I'm hungry and exhausted, tomorrow is my day off, and I am going to have to go in to work anyway to visit Janis and make sure she's all right. But next time Fiore visits the repository, I'm going to be ready to sneak in right after he's left. And then we'll see what he's hiding down there . . .