Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  —Kay’s—

  —and I’m sitting up swallowing a scream and someone is cradling me in his arms and I’m covered in chilly sweat and shuddering uncontrollably. I slowly realize I’m in bed, and I’ve just kicked off the comforter. There’s moonlight outside the window, and I’m in YFH-Polity and no matter how bad things are by day, they can’t hold a candle to how bad things get in my dreams, and I whimper softly in the back of my throat.

  “It’s all right now, you’re awake, they can’t hurt you.” Sam strokes my shoulders. I lean against him and manage to turn the whimper into a sigh. My heart is pounding like one of the jackhammers they use to repair the roads, and my skin is clammy. His arm tightens around me. “Would you like to talk about it?” he murmurs.

  “It’s”—awful—“a recurring dream. Memories”—inadequately redacted, I think—“from an earlier life. What I wanted to be rid of, coming back to haunt me.” I speak haltingly because my mouth feels musty, and I’m not entirely awake, just frightened out of sleep by the shadows of my own past. What’s he doing in here?

  “You were thrashing around, moaning and muttering in your sleep,” he says. “I was worried you were having a seizure.”

  It’s not unheard of, even in this age. I push myself up on one arm but don’t pull away from him—instead I pull my right arm out from under the bedding and hold him tight.

  “I lost a lot in surgery,” I say slowly. “If this is part of it, I wish it would stay lost.”

  “It’s gone now.” He speaks soothingly, and I wrap my other arm round him and hold on tight. He’s big, he’s stable, he’s serious, and he’s solid. Serious Sam. I lean my face into the depression at the base of his throat and inhale deeply, once, twice. His arm around me feels good, secure. Security Sam. My ribs shake as I swallow a nervy chuckle. “What’s that?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I tell his throat. I’m awake enough now to realize that I’m not the only one in this house who sleeps naked. But I find that I don’t care—I trust Sam not to try and overpower me, not to do anything I don’t want. Sam has somehow stepped across the threshold from being a mistrusted stranger into a friend, and I never noticed it happening. And now I don’t want to be left alone here, and it’s the most natural thing in the universe to hold on to him and to run my hand up and down his spine and stick my face into the base of his throat and inhale his natural scent. “Do you mind staying? I don’t want to be alone.”

  He tenses slightly, but then I feel his hand running down my back, caressing my spine. I lean into his embrace. He feels so alive, the antithesis of everything in my blood-drenched memory dream. I’ve been sleeping alone and not really touching anyone, much less fucking, for at least a month now, and therefore it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest to find that I’m becoming aroused, sensual, needing more skin contact and more touch and more smell. I lick the base of his throat and move one hand between his legs, and what I find there is no surprise, because he’s been living the same life of self-denial too.

  “Don’t—” he mutters, but I’m not listening. Instead, I’m running my face down his chest, kissing him as I fondle what’s down below, giving the lie to his disinterest.

  Sam’s been holding back because of a lover stranded in the real world without him, and I’ve been holding back because of pride and the greedy eyes watching my social score. We’ll probably regret this in the morning, but right now I’m drunk on touch. I rub my cheek against his thigh and lick him hungrily, feeling his hands in my hair—

  “No.” He sounds hesitant. I take him in my mouth as far as I can, and he sounds as if he’s strangling. “No, Reeve, please don’t—” I carry on sucking and licking and he draws breath to say something and instead gasps a little, and I finish him off with a sense of anticlimax. That was too fast, wasn’t it? Then he’s standing on the other side of the bed, his back turned and his shoulders hunched. “I asked you to stop,” he says sullenly.

  It’s a while before I can talk. “I needed—” I stop. My mouth is acrid with the aftertaste. “I want you to be happy.” If I’m going to give in and humiliate myself in front of the score whores, the least I can do is throw it back in their faces.

  “Well, that’s not the right way to do it.” He’s tense and defensive, as if I’ve hurt him. “I thought we had an understanding.” He sidles around the bed and out the door before I can think of anything to say, refusing to meet my eyes, and a minute or so later I hear the shower come on.

  I’m completely awake by now, so I pull on my bathrobe to go downstairs and make a mug of coffee by way of a substitute for mouthwash, because there’s no way I’m going to go into the bathroom while Sam’s busy trying to rinse my saliva away. I’ve got some pride left, and right now I don’t think I could look at him without yelling, What about your self-control, eh? He moons incessantly over this amazing lover he met outside the polity, but he’s not too proud to let me fellate him—until afterward, when suddenly I’m an un-person. I could really hate him for that. But instead I sit in the kitchen with my cooling coffee, and I wait for the noise of the shower to cease and the light upstairs to go out. Then I tiptoe back to my bed and lie brooding until near dawn, wondering what possessed me. In the end, I resolve not offer him any intimacies ever again, until I’ve had a chance to spit in his imaginary lover’s face in front of him. Finally, I sleep.

  THE next day I don’t stir from bed until Sam has left for work. Once I’m up, I phone the Chamber of Commerce. The zombie who takes my call sounds only marginally sapient but agrees to send a taxi for me the next morning. I go outside and jog up and down the road until I’m exhausted—which takes a lot longer now—then take a shower. I spend the rest of the day in the garage trying to do some more work on the crossbow, which is not going well. I wonder why I’m bothering: It’s not as if I’m going to shoot anyone, is it?

  I leave Sam a half-defrosted pizza and a note explaining how to cook it in the kitchen. By the time I come indoors it’s dark, Sam’s holed up in the living room with the TV on, and I have no trouble sneaking upstairs and going to bed without seeing him. It’s easy to do, now that we’re both avoiding each other.

  I am troubled in my sleep. It’s a different bad dream, nothing like as vivid as the slaughterhouse nightmare, but even more disturbing in some ways. Imagine you’re a detective, or some other kind of investigator. And you’re looking for people, bad people who hide in shadows. They’ve committed terrible crimes but they’ve altered everyone’s memories so that nobody can remember what they did or who they are. You don’t know what they did or who they are, but it’s your job to find them and bring them to justice in such a way that neither they, nor anyone else, can forget what they did and the consequences of their actions. So you’re a detective, and you’re walking through twilit polityscapes hunting for clues, but you don’t know who you are or why you’re charged with this mission. For all you know, you may even be one of the criminals. They’ve made everybody forget who they are and what they did. Who’s to say that they didn’t do it to themselves, too? You could be guilty of a crime so horrible that it has no name and everyone’s forgotten it, and you’ll find the irrevocable logic of detection drawing you to place yourself under arrest and hand yourself over to the courts of a higher power. And you’ll be tried and sentenced for a crime you don’t understand and don’t remember committing, and the punishment will be beyond human comprehension and leave you walking the twilit polityscapes, a ghost shorn of most of your memories except for a faint indelible stain of original sin. And you’ll be there because you’ve been sent looking for a master criminal by way of atoning for your past actions. And you’ll be on their trail, and one day you will find them and, reaching out a hand to grab them by the shoulder, you’ll find yourself looking at the back of your own head—

  I wake up sweating and sick with my heart pounding in the night, and there is no Sam. For a moment I feel defiant and angry at his absence, but then I think: What have I done to my only friend here? And I roll ove
r and wash the pillow in bitter tears before dawn.

  But the next day I start my new job.

  8

  Child Thing

  THE taxi that takes me to the Chamber of Commerce arrives about half an hour after Sam leaves for work. I’m ready and waiting for it but nervous about the whole idea. It seems necessary in some ways—to assert my independence from Sam, get an extra source of income, meet other inmates, break out of the lonely rut of being a stay-at-home wife—but in other respects it’s a questionable choice. I have no idea what they’re going to find for me to do, it’s going to take up a large chunk of my time, it’ll probably be boring and pointless, and although I’ll meet new people, there’s no way of knowing whether I’ll hate them on sight. What seemed like a good idea at the time is now turning out to be stressful.

  The taxi operator is no use, of course—he can’t tell me anything. “Chamber of Commerce,” he announces. “Please leave the vehicle.” So I get out and head toward the imposing building on my right, with the revolving door made of wood and brass, hoping my uncertainty doesn’t show. I march up to the clerk on the front desk. “I’m Reeve. I’ve got an appointment at, uh, ten o’clock with Mr. Harshaw?”

  “Go right in, ma’am,” says the zombie, pointing at a door behind him with a frosted-glass window and gold-leaf lettering stenciled along the top. My heels clack on the stone floor as I walk over and open it.

  “Mr. Harshaw?” I ask.

  The room is dominated by a wide desk made out of wood, its top inlaid with a rectangle of dyed, preserved skin cut from a large herbivore. The walls are paneled in wood and there are crude still pictures in frames hanging from hooks near the top, certificates and group portraits of men in dark suits shaking hands with each other. A borderline-senescent male in a dark suit, his head almost bereft of hair and his waistline expanding, sits behind the desk. He half rises as I enter, and extends a hand. Zombie? I wonder doubtfully.

  “Hello, Reeve.” He sounds relaxed and self-confident. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  “Sure.” I take the chair on the other side of the desk and cross my legs, studying his face. Sure enough there’s a slight flicker of attention—he’s watching me, aware of my body—which means he’s real. Zombies simply aren’t programmed for that. “How come I haven’t seen you in Church?” I ask.

  “I’m on staff,” he says easily. “Have a cigarette?” He gestures at one of the wooden boxes on his desk.

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke,” I say, slightly stiffly. I hate the smell, but it’s not as if it’s harmful, is it?

  “Good for you.” He takes one, lights it, and inhales thoughtfully. “You asked about job vacancies yesterday. As it happens, we have one right now that would probably suit you—I took the liberty of looking through your records—but it specifically excludes smokers.”

  “Oh?” I raise an eyebrow. Mr. Harshaw the staffer isn’t what I expected, to say the least; I was winding myself up to deal with a dumb zombie fronting a placement database.

  “It’s in the city library. You’d only be working three days a week, but you’d be putting in eleven-hour shifts. On the plus side, you’d be the trainee librarian there. On the minus side, the starting salary isn’t particularly high.”

  “What does the job involve?” I ask.

  “Library work.” He shrugs. “Filing books in order. Keeping track of withdrawals and issuing overdue notices and collecting fines. Helping people find books and information they’re looking for. Organizing the stacks and adding new titles as they come in. You’d be working under Janis from cohort one, who has been our librarian since the early days. She’s going to be leaving, which is why we need to train up a replacement.”

  “Leaving?” I look at him oddly. “Why?”

  “To have a baby,” he says, and blows a perfect smoke ring up at the ceiling.

  I don’t understand what he’s saying at first, the concept is so alien to me. “Why would she have to leave her job to—”

  It’s his turn to look at me oddly. “Because she’s pregnant,” he says.

  For a moment the world seems to be spinning around my head. There’s a roaring in my ears, and I feel weak at the knees. It’s a good thing I’m sitting down. Then I begin to integrate everything and realize just what’s going on. Janis is pregnant—she’s got a neonate growing inside her body like an encapsulated tumor, the way humans used to incubate their young in the wild, back before civilization. Presumably she and her husband had sex, and she was fertile. “She must be—” I say, then cover my mouth. Fertile.

  “Yes, she and Norm are very happy,” Mr. Harshaw says, nodding enthusiastically. He looks satisfied with something. “We’re all very happy for them, even if it means we do have to train up a new librarian.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to see, I mean, to try,” I begin, flustered, wondering, Did she ask the medics to make her fertile? Or, a sneaking and horrible suspicion, Are we already fertile? I know menstruation was some kind of metabolic sign that went with being a prehistoric female, but I didn’t really put it all together until now. Having a child is hard—you have to actively seek medical assistance—and having one grow inside your body is even harder. The idea that the orthohuman bodies they’ve put us in are so ortho that we could automatically generate random human beings if we have sex is absolutely terrifying. I don’t think the dark ages medics had incubators, and if I got pregnant I might actually have to go through a live childbirth. In fact, if Sam and I had—“Excuse me, but where’s the rest room?” I ask.

  “It’s the second door through there, on the left.” Mr. Harshaw smiles to himself as I make a dash for it. He’s still smiling five minutes later as I make my way back into his office, forcing my face into a mask of composure, refusing to acknowledge the stomach cramps that took me to the stalls. “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “I am, now,” I say. “I’m sorry about that, must be something I ate.”

  “It’s perfectly all right. If you’d like to come with me, perhaps we can visit the library and I can introduce you to Janis, see if you get along?”

  I nod, and we head out front to catch a taxi. I think I’m doing pretty well for someone who’s just had her worldview turned upside down and whacked on with a hammer. How long does a neonate take to grow, about thirty megs? It puts a whole new face on the experiment. I have a sinking sense that I must have implicitly agreed to this. Somewhere buried in the small print of the release I signed there’ll be some clause that can be interpreted as saying that I consent to be made fertile and if necessary to become pregnant and bring to term an infant in the course of the study. It’s the sort of shitty trick that Fiore and his friends would delight in slipping past us while we’re vulnerable.

  After a few minutes I realize that the oversight we were promised by an independent ethics committee isn’t worth a bucket of warm—whatever. The extreme scenario would be for us females to all get pregnant and deliver infants, in which case the experimenters are going to be responsible for the care of about a hundred babies, none of whom gave their consent to be raised in a simulated dark ages environment without access to decent medical care, education, or socialization. Any responsible ethics oversight committee would shit a brick if you suggested running an experiment like that. So I suspect the ethics oversight committee isn’t very ethical, if indeed it exists at all.

  I’m thinking these thoughts as Mr. Harshaw tells our zombie driver to take us to the municipal library. The library is in a part of town I haven’t visited before, on the same block as City Hall and what Mr. Harshaw points out to me as the police station. “Police station?” I ask, looking blank.

  “Yes, where the police hang out.” He looks at me as if I’m very slightly mad.

  “I would have thought the crime rate here was too low to need a real police force,” I say.

  “So far it is,” he replies, with a smile I can’t interpret. “But things are changing.”

  The library is a low brick building, with a glass fa
cade opening onto a reception area, and turnstiles leading into a couple of big rooms full of shelves. There are books—bound sheaves of dumb paper—on all the shelves, and there are a lot of shelves. In fact, I’ve never seen so many books in my life. It’s ironic, really. My netlink could bring a million times as much information to me on a whim, if it was working. But in the informationally impoverished society we’re restricted to, these rows of dead trees represent the total wealth of available human knowledge. Static, crude scratchings are all we’re to be permitted, it seems. “Who can access these?” I ask.

  “I’ll leave it to Janis to explain the procedures,” he says, running his hand over his shiny crown, “but anyone who wants can withdraw—borrow—books from the lending department. The reference department is a bit different, and there’s also the private collection.” He clears his throat. “That’s confidential, and you’re not supposed to lend it to anyone who isn’t authorized to read it. That probably sounds dramatic, by the way, but it’s actually not very romantic. We just keep a lot of the documentation for the project on paper, so we don’t need to violate the experimental protocol by bringing in advanced knowledge-management tools, and we have to store the paper somewhere when it’s not in use, so we use the library.” He holds the door open. “Let’s go find Janis, shall we? Then we’ll have lunch. We can discuss whether you want to work here, and if so, what your pay and conditions will be, and then if you take the job, we can work out when you’ll start training.”