Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  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.

  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 an
ything, 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 fi
nd 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.