Glasshouse (25 page)

When we go downstairs, Greg phones a number I don't know about and calls an ambulance. Everyone is a bit the worse for wear, except for Greg and Tammy. Sam is going to have a beautiful black eye tomorrow, and Fer caught a kick in the ribs while he and Sam and Greg were taking down Mick. They've laid him out on the floor of the conservatory while we figure out what to do with him. I'm really regretting my earlier stand against lynching, but the first priority is to get Cass to safety. We'll have plenty of time to deal with Mick later, assuming he doesn't
choke on his own vomit while he's unconscious. That would make things easier all round.

“How is she?” asks Tammy. “I'd better—”

“No.” I stop her by standing in the way. “Trust me. We need to get her to the, the hospital. This isn't something you can do at home.”

“How bad?” Tammy demands.

“Hospital.”
I don't want her to see what Mick did to Cass's legs. I don't want to be responsible tonight.

The ambulance arrives within five minutes, a boxy white vehicle with stylized red crescents on it. Two polite zombies in blue uniforms come up to the front door. “This way,” I say, leading them upstairs. For once I'm glad there are zombies everywhere—they won't ask the kind of awkward questions someone with cognitive autonomy might raise. Sam is up there with Cass, and a minute later the zombies pile back downstairs to fetch a folding wheeled platform for her.

“Who is next of kin?” asks one of the zombies as they come down the stairs with Cass lying on the stretcher.

Fer begins to point toward Mick, and Tammy bats his hand away. “I am!” she says. “Take me with you.”

“Request approved,” says one of the zombies. “Ride up front, please.” They wheel Cass out toward the back of the vehicle, and Tammy follows them.

Greg watches her for a moment, then turns to look back at Mick. “What are we going to do with him?” he asks.

There's a hard expression on Fer's face. “Nothing,” I say quickly, before Fer can open his mouth and stick his foot in it. “Remember what we agreed? No lynching.” I pause. “What we do tomorrow is another matter.”

“Will the police do anything?” Fer asks after a moment.

“I don't think so,” says Sam, coming downstairs. He's holding a damp towel to his eye. “I really don't think they're programmed for this sort of thing. If we're unlucky, they'll come after us for trampling on the flower bed and breaking down the door, but I don't think you can really expect a zombie to cope with this sort of . . . thing.” He looks very sober as he stares at Mick's prostrate form.

“Let's go home,” I suggest. “How about we meet up tomorrow evening to talk about it?”

“That works for me,” says Greg. Sam nods.

I eye Mick's prostrate form. “If he tries to come after any of us, I think we should kill him.”

“You sound as if you're not certain.” That's Fer.

“Certain?” I stare at him: “Shit, I've got half a mind to cut his throat right here! Except, Sunday”—I swallow—“has kind of put me off.” I stare at him some more. “You kicked the shit out of him. Think he'll come back for more?”

Greg shakes his head. “I hope he tries something,” he says, a curious half smile on his lips. I shiver. Just for a moment he reminds me of Jen.

“Come on, let's go.” I take Sam's free hand. “Fer, would you call two taxis?

It's close to one in the morning when Sam and I get home, filthy and tired and bruised. “Go on in,” I say, pausing in the conservatory. “This shirt's going in the trash.” Sam nods wordlessly and goes indoors, leaving me to strip off under the cool moonlight. I feel numb and tired, but also satisfied with the night's work. I correct that—mostly satisfied. I unzip my trousers in case any of the crap on the bed rubbed off on them, then I follow him inside.

Sam's standing in the living room doorway, holding a bottle of vodka and two tumblers. He hasn't turned the lights on, but he's shed his shirt, and the moonlight shining through the tall glass windows outlines his bare shoulders in silver. “I do not want to dream tonight,” he says, holding the bottle out to me.

“Me neither.” I take one of the glasses, then brush past him into the living room. I'm tired, I realize, but I'm also wired with excitement and tension and apprehension about tomorrow, and a burning hot anger for Cass—
Why didn't I go round to see her before?
—and a fresh hatred for Fiore and Yourdon, and the faceless scum who created this nightmare and expect us to live in it. “What are you waiting for?” I drop onto the sofa and hold my glass out. Sam tips colorless spirit into it. “C'mon.”

He sits down next to me and fills his own glass, then caps the bottle. “I should have listened to you earlier,” he says, taking a mouthful.

“So?” I raise my glass. “I hope the hospital can help. She was—”

There's a long moment of silence. It's probably only a couple of seconds, but it feels like hours.

“I didn't know.”

“None of us did.” But these sound like feeble excuses to me right now, so I take another mouthful of vodka in order to have something else to occupy my mouth with.

“R-Reeve. There's something else I want you to know.” I look at him sharply. He's looking right back at me, and I'm suddenly conscious that I'm nearly naked. And he's not wearing that much either, now I allow myself to notice it.

“Go ahead,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral.

“I'm. Oh.” He looks away, looking pained. Inexpressive. “Yesterday I said some things I didn't really mean. Hurtful things, some of them. I want to apologize.”

“No apology needed,” I say, my heart beating painfully fast.

“Oh, but there is. You see, I didn't mean everything I said. But when I said * * * I was telling the—”

“Stop right there.” I raise a hand. “Those words. You, uh, oh
shit.
” My head's spinning. It's late at night, I've been through a lot, I've been drinking vodka, and Sam's saying words to me that my ears refuse to listen to. “I didn't hear you just now, and I know for sure you said the same thing before, and I didn't hear the words.” He looks puzzled, even offended. “I mean, I
heard
you speak, but I couldn't understand them.” I'm beginning to worry. “You used the same phrase, didn't you?
Exactly
the same words? Could there be something wrong with my—” He stands up and strides over to the sideboard to retrieve his tablet, which has been lying there gathering dust for some time. “What?”

He says something to it, then holds it up in front of me. Dim letters glow on the screen:

 

I LOVE YOU

 

“You
what
?” I say, “You're trying to say * * *—” And I
know
I'm saying the words, but I can't
hear
them. “Shit.” I shake my head. “It's me.
Sam, I'm so sorry.” I stand up and hug him. “* * *, too. It's just, there's something really flaky up with my language module. Is that what you've been trying to tell me?” I lean back far enough to see his face. “Is it?”

“Yes,” he admits. His face is a picture of worry. “I don't say that easily. And
I
can't hear it either, Reeve, I thought I was going nuts.”

“I guess not.” I'm close enough to feel his crotch. “And I guess you only say that to people you're serious about.” He nods. “And maybe you're close enough that I can tell you that I'm flattered, and very happy, and, and—” I pause. I feel as if I ought to know what this weird inability to understand those three happy words means, but I can't quite recall it. “We've got to get out of here.”

He nods. “I really don't like this,” he says, miserably, a wave of his hand encompassing everything from his body outward. “I've—they should have spotted it. I don't feel right when I'm big and slow and
fixed.
I mean, they can patch it temporarily but I don't like that, either, it's easier just not to be. Only they didn't even give me a, a—” He's breathing too fast.

I feel a stab of anger, not at Sam but at Fiore and the other idiots. “You've got a big-body dysphoria, haven't you?” He nods. “Figures.” Kay spent a whole lifetime as an alien, didn't she? And kept changing bodies, as if she couldn't quite settle on a form that she felt comfortable in. Doubtless it's fixable with therapy, but fixing people's problems isn't exactly what this polity is about. “Sam.” I kiss him on the cheek. “We've got to get out of here. Where's your tablet?”

“Over there.”

“I need to show you something.” I let go of him and fetch it, intending to point out to him the myriad ways in which the polity constitution turns us into victims of a biologically deterministic tyranny. “Here—” I page through it quickly. “Hey, I didn't see this before!”

“What?” He looks over my shoulder.

“List of revealed behavioral scores. Gender-based. Huh.” I stare. Sex with your partner gets five points for the very first occurrence, dropping off to one point each time after a while. In other words, it's a decay function. “Adultery,” that bad word, gets minus one hundred. There are some other crazy items. Getting pregnant brings fifty points,
bringing the baby to term brings another fifty. What's abortion? Whatever it is, it gets hammered as hard as adultery, which is what got Esther and Phil into—let's not go there. There are other things here, the most improbable activities, that get huge penalties. But rape isn't mentioned. Murder loses you just seventy points. What kind of sense does that make? It's ludicrous! “Either they're trying to generate a psychotic polity, or the people in the society they derived these scores from were off their heads.”

“Or possibly both.” Sam yawns. “Listen, it's late. We need to get some sleep. Why don't we go to bed and chew this over tomorrow? With the others?”

“Yes.” I put the tablet down, not mentioning that tomorrow I've got other plans because Fiore is visiting the library again. “Tomorrow is going to be a very interesting day.”

I
spend a long time lying in bed awake, fantasizing about what I'd like to do to Mick, about what I think he deserves to have done to him—but which isn't going to happen. I finally drift into sleep after a particularly brutal fantasy, and I dream again, but this time it's no nightmare. Rather, it's a flashback to how I started my life as a tank. I guess these flashbacks
would
be nightmarish, if they were still invested with any emotional impact—instead they're grisly and freighted with significance, but drained of immediacy by time and necessity.

I stay aboard the MASucker
Grateful for Duration
for almost a gigasecond as it crawls slowly through interstellar space. There's not really anything else I can do—we've been offlined by Curious Yellow, which appears to have targeted the ship for special treatment on the basis of its self-contained systems. Half-crazy with worry for my family, tempered by apprehension about my situation, I check myself into one of the ship's assemblers when it becomes clear that this isn't a temporary outage, that something vast and extremely ugly has overcome the Republic of Is and there's no way around it. We won't find out what's happening until the
Grateful for Duration
reaches its next destination, an obscure religious retreat in orbit around a small and very cold gas giant that orbits
a brown dwarf about thirty trillion kilometers away. I extract a promise from Kapitan Vecken that he'll unserialize me if anything interesting happens, then archive myself to backup storage for the duration.

When I blink and awaken in the A-gate, the universe has changed around me. I've been asleep for a gigasecond while we crawled across almost three Urth-style “light years,” then spent a megasec decelerating under high-gee conditions to a rendezvous with Delta Refuge. The contemplatorian monastery has been erased and filed in deep storage, bits and atoms reconfigured into the sinister angled constructs of a military-industrial complex. Kapitan Vecken is reluctant to lend his ship to the resistance cabal, but he's happy to run off a clone of his stand-alone A-gate to help speed their botched, jerry-built attempts at constructing a sterile, uninfected nano-ecosystem. And he's happy to put me ashore. So I meet the resistance.

At that time—when I first join them—the Linebarger Cats are an informal group of refugees, dissidents, and generally uncooperative alienists who resent any attempt to dictate their conscious phase space. They live in a few cramped habs with little attempt to conceal the artificiality of the environment. In my first few kiloseconds the close-lipped paramilitaries who insist on searching me as I climb out of the transfer pod explain what I've missed. The infection is a history worm. It infiltrates A-gates. If you go into an infected A-gate, it crudely deletes chunks of your memory (mostly at random, but if you remember anything from before the Republic of Is, you're likely to lose it). Then it copies its own kernel into your netlink. There are some bootstrap instructions. If you find an uninfected gate, there's a compulsion to put it into operator debugging mode, enter commands via the conversational interface, then upload yourself. At which point the A-gate executes the infected boot loader in your netlink, copies it into its working set, and—bang!—another infected gate.

Assemblers are an old established technology, and for many gigaseconds they've been a monoculture, best-of-breed, all using the same subsystems—if you want a new A-gate, you just tell the nearest assembler to clone itself. Where Curious Yellow got started we do not know, but once it was in the wild, it spread like an ideal gas, percolating through the network until it was everywhere.

It takes a while for a worm to overrun an A-gate network while in stealth mode, using human brains as the infective vector, but once the infection reaches critical mass, it's virtually impossible to stop it spreading throughout an entire polity.

Once the activation signal is sent, everything speeds up. Suddenly, there are privileged instruction channels. Infected A-gates sprout defenses, extrude secure netlinks to the nearest T-gates, and start talking to each other directly to exchange orders and information. Here's the fun thing about Curious Yellow—A-gates that are infected can send each other message packets, peer to peer. If you've got the right authentication keys, you can send a distant gate running Curious Yellow instructions to make things. Or modify things. Or change people as they pass through it. It's an anything box.

Fearful weapons appear, seemingly at random, engaged on search and destroy missions for who knows what. Someone, somewhere, is writing the macros, and the only way to stay clear is to sever all T-gate connections, shutting the rogue assemblers off from their orders. But the A-gates are still infected, still running Curious Yellow. And if you use them to make more A-gates,
those
will be infected, too, even if you write complete new design templates—Curious Yellow's payload incorporates a pattern recognizer for nanoreplicators and inserts itself into anything that looks even remotely similar. The only solution is to drop back to prereplicator tech, use the infected gates to make dumb tools, then try to rebuild a sterile assembler from the wreckage of post-Acceleration technosystems.

Or you can surrender to Curious Yellow and try to live with the consequences, as the Linebarger Cats explain to me in words of one syllable. Then they ask me what I intend to do, and I ask if I can sign up.

Which explains
how
I ended up as a tank, but not really
why.

I
wake up as the bright light of dawn crosses the edge of my pillow. I stretch and yawn and look at Sam sleeping beside me, and for a heart-stoppingly tender moment I long to be back on the outside, where I'm Robin and she's Kay and we're both properly adjusted humans who can
be whoever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. For a moment I wish I'd never found out who he was . . .

So I force myself to get out of bed. It's a library day, and I need to be there because I've got at least one customer to deal with—Fiore. I'm tired and apprehensive, wondering in the cold light of day if I've blown everything. The idea of going through a normal working cycle after what happened last night feels bizarre, the sort of thing a zombie would do—as if I'm entirely a creature of unconscious habit, obedient to the commands of an unknown puppeteer. But there's more to it than just doing the job, I remind myself. I've got a different goal in mind, something else that the day job is just a cover for. I'm still not entirely sure what's going on here, why I was sent, and who Yourdon and Fiore are, but enough stuff has surfaced that I can make an educated guess, and the picture I'm piecing together isn't pretty.

I'm fairly sure that from the outside YFH-Polity must appear to be a successful social psychology experiment. It's a closed microcosm community with its own emergent rules and internal dynamics that seem to be eerily close to some of the books I've been reading in my spare hours in the library. It's got to be providing great feedback on dark ages society for Yourdon and Fiore to wave under the noses of the academic oversight committee appointed by the Scholastium. But on the inside of the glasshouse, things are changing very rapidly. When Yourdon and Fiore and the mysterious Hanta announce a continuation, and say that all the inmates have agreed to extend their consent, nobody's going to look too deeply. By then, the experimental population will have nearly doubled. Half the inmates will be newborn citizens, unknown to the oversight committee on the outside. Maybe it's even worse than that—I ought to go to the hospital and visit Cass, nose around, and see what their maternity facilities are like. I'll bet they're pretty advanced for a dark ages facility. And that they're expecting plenty of multiple births.

There's also the question of the box files in the document repository. I figure they contain about a billion words of data, committed to a storage medium that is stable for tens of gigasecs, potentially even for hundreds.
Spores.
That's what they need the babies for, isn't it? I can't remember why we don't have repeated outbreaks of Curious Yellow
anymore, it's one of those memories that's buried too deeply for me to retrieve. But there's got to be a connection, hasn't there? The original Curious Yellow infection spread via human carriers, crudely editing them to insert its kernel code and making them issue debugger commands to load and execute on each assembler they found. It spread via the netlink. Our netlinks don't work properly, do they?
Hmm.
The new A-gates are different, but they're equally a monoculture, just one that's designed to resist Curious Yellow's infection strategy. I can't help thinking about that MilSpec assembler in the library basement. There's something I'm missing here, something I don't
quite
have enough data for—

I'm dressed for work, standing in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee, and I don't remember how I got here. For a moment I shudder, in the grip of an anonymous sense of abstract horror. Did I just get dressed, walk downstairs, and make coffee in an introspective haze as I tried to get to grips with the real purpose of this facility? Or is something worse happening? The way I can read the words “I love you” but hear them as “* * *” suggests something's not quite right in my speech center. If I'm suffering memory dropouts, I could be quite ill. I mean,
really
ill. The small of my back prickles with cold sweat as I realize that I might be about to unravel like a knit jumper hooked by a nail. I know my memory's full of gaps where associations between concepts and experiences have been broken, but what if too much has gone? Can the rest of me just disappear spontaneously, speech and memory and perceptions falling victim to an excess of editing?

Not knowing who you are is even worse than not knowing who you were.

I get out of the house as fast as I can (leaving Sam asleep upstairs in the bedroom) and walk to work. The weather is as hot as usual—we seem to be moving into a scheduled “summer” season—and I make good time even though I set off in the opposite direction from normal, intending to loop around the back way and come into the downtown district where the library is via a different road.

I open up the library. It's neat and tidy—when neither Janis nor I are there I guess there's probably a zombie janitor on staff duty. I head to
the back room to fortify myself with another coffee before Fiore arrives, and as I'm waiting for the kettle to boil I get a surprise.

“Janis! What are you doing here? I thought you were ill.”

“I'm feeling a lot better,” she says, summoning up a pale smile. “Last week I was getting sick a lot, and the lower back pain was getting to me, but I'm less nauseous now, and as long as I don't have to do a lot of bending or lifting, I should be all right for a while. So I thought I'd come in and sit in on the front desk for a bit.”

Shit.
“Well, it's been very quiet for the past few days,” I tell her. “You don't have to stay.” A thought strikes me. “You heard about Sunday.”

“Yes.” Her expression closes up. “I knew something bad was going to happen—Esther and Phil were too indiscreet—but I didn't expect anything like . . .”

“Would you like some coffee?” I extemporize, trying to figure out how to get her out of here while I do things that could get me into deep shit if they go wrong.

“Yes, please.” She's got that brooding look, now. “I could strangle the greasy little turd.”

“Fiore's visiting this morning,” I say, managing to pitch my voice as casually as I can, hoping to get her attention.

“He is, is he?” She looks at me sharply.

I lick my lips. “Something else happened last night. I—it would really help if you could do me a favor.”

“What kind of favor? If it's about Sunday—”

“No.” I take a deep breath. “It's about one of my cohort. Cass. Her husband, Mick, he's been, uh, well, some of us went round yesterday night, and we took her to the hospital. We're making sure he doesn't go anywhere near her, and meanwhile—”

“Mick. Short guy, big nose, eyes as mad as a very mad thing indeed. That him?”

“Yes.”

Janis swears, quietly. “How bad was it?”

I debate how much to tell her. “It's about as bad as it can get. If he finds her again, I'm afraid he'll kill her.” I stare at her. “Janis, Fiore
knew.
He had to! And he didn't do anything. I'm half-expecting him to nail us all for a ton of points next Sunday for intervening.”

She nods thoughtfully. “So what do you want me to do?”

I switch the kettle off. “Take today off sick, like you have for the past few days. Go to the hospital, visit Cass. If they've wired her jaw, she might be able to talk. We can't be with her all the time, but I think she'll need someone around. And someone who'll be there to call the police if Mick shows up. I don't know if the hospital zombies will do that.”

“Forget the coffee, I'm out of here.” As she stands up she looks at me oddly. “Good luck with whatever you're planning for Fiore,” she says. “I hope it's painful.” Then she heads for the door.

AFTER
Janis leaves, I go and wait behind the front desk. Fiore shows up around midmorning and pointedly ignores me. I offer him a coffee and get a fish-eye stare instead of a “yes”—he seems suspicious. I wonder if it's because of what happened last night? But he's here alone, with no police and no tame congregation of score whores to back him up, so he pretends he didn't see me at all, and I pretend I don't know anything's wrong. He heads for the locked door in the reference section, and I manage to hold back the explosive gulp of air my lungs are straining for until he's gone.