Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  Mick, of all people, is the one playing the endless atonal carillon that summoned me. It is immediately obvious that his mastery of music is involuntary. He hangs from a bell-rope by the ankles, his head tracing an endless pendulous circuit across the floor in twin tracks of blood. Someone has taped his arms to his body, gagged him, and rammed hypodermic needles into each ear. The cannulae drip steadily, emptying what’s left of his blood supply from his purple and congested head. Loops and whorls and spirals of blood have trickled in a delicate filigree, but some unevenness in the ground leads the runnels to flow toward a pool on the inside of the door.

  I’m simultaneously appalled, dumbstruck with admiration for the artistic technique on display, terrified that whoever did it might still be lurking at the scene, and utterly nauseated at my satisfaction at Mick’s end. So I do the only sensible and socially expedient thing I can think of, and scream my lungs out.

  The first fellow to arrive on the scene—a couple of seconds after I get started—isn’t much use: He takes one look at the impromptu chandelier, then doubles over and adds his lunch to the puddle. But the second on the scene turns out to be Martin, one of the volunteer gravediggers. “Reeve? Are you all right?”

  I nod and manage to take a sobbing breath. I feel unstable, and my vision is watery. “Look.” I point. “Better get the . . . the . . . Fiore. He’ll know what to do.”

  “I’ll call the police.” Martin walks around the pool of blood and vomit carefully and picks up the telephone handset that’s fastened to the wall by the vestry entrance. “Hello? Operator?” He jiggles the switch on top of the handset. “That’s odd.”

  My brain is slowly beginning to work again. “What’s odd?”

  “The telephone. It’s not making any noise. It doesn’t work.”

  I snuffle, wipe my nose on the sleeve of my jacket, and stare at him. “That’s very odd.” Yes, a quiet corner of my mind reminds me, that’s odd, and not in a good way. “Let’s go outside.”

  Andrew—the guy who’s throwing up—has just about finished, and is down to making choking, sobbing noises. Martin pulls him up by one arm, and we walk outside together. There’s a growing crowd on the porch, curious to know what’s going on. “Someone call the police,” Martin shouts. “Get the Reverend if you can find him!” People are pushing past him to look inside the doorway, yelling in disbelief and coming back out again.

  Somebody is sending us, the congregation, a message, aren’t they? I stumble but make it down onto the grass. Sam’s there, looking concerned. “You were with me during the service,” I hiss. “You were next to me the whole time. You know where I was.”

  “Yes?” He looks puzzled. So do I. I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but . . .

  “I spoke to Jen briefly, then heard the bells and went to see. Then I screamed. I was only inside for a second on my own. Wasn’t I?”

  Sam gets it: His shoulders tense suddenly. “How bad is it?”

  “Mick.” I gasp quietly, then run out of words. I can’t continue just now because I had to look; I saw how his killer fastened him to the bell-rope by his ankles, cutting him and running the thick rope through the meaty gap between the bone and the thick tendon. I’m half-afraid that when they cut him down, they’ll discover he was raped first, while paralyzed, before his killer strung him up to drain like a slab of flesh. A moment later I’m leaning on Sam’s shoulder, sobbing. He doesn’t pull away, but holds me in silence while all around us the crowd throbs and chatters. I’ve seen many horrible things in my life, but there was a judicial deliberation implicit in what was done to Mick—a hideous moral statement, blindly confident in its own righteousness. I know exactly who did it, even though I spent the entire service next to Sam; because for hours on end I lay awake and fantasized about doing that to Mick, the night we took Cass away.

  “WELL, Mrs. Brown, how fascinating to see you here! Always in the thick of things, I see.”

  His Excellency smiles like a skeleton, jaw agape at some private joke. Sam shuffles next to me but holds his peace. You do not talk back to the Bishop, especially when it’s clear that his humor is a mercurial thing, a butterfly floating above a blast furnace of rage at the intrusion that has spoiled his Sunday.

  Fiore clears his throat. “She is not a suspect,” he says stiffly.

  “What?” Yourdon’s head whips round like a snake’s. The police zombies around us tense as if nervous, hands going to the batons at their belts.

  It’s been half an hour since I opened the door, and the cops have surrounded the churchyard. They’re not letting people go until Yourdon says so. He’s clearly in a foul mood. Cold-blooded murder isn’t something our community has had to deal with so far, and if we’re to stay in the spirit of the experiment, we must remember that to the ancients it was as grievous a crime as identity theft or relational corruption. It’s at this point that the deficiencies of our little parish become apparent. We have no real chief of police, no trained investigators. And so the Bishop is forced to tend his flock in person.

  “I saw her arrive with her husband, she was present throughout the service, and numerous witnesses saw her approach the door and go inside, then heard her scream. She was alone inside for all of ten seconds, and if you think she could have committed the offense in that space of time . . .”

  “I’ll ask for you to second-guess me when I can’t be bothered to make up my own mind.” Yourdon’s cheek twitches, then he switches his attention to Martin so abruptly I feel my knees weaken. An invisible pressure has come off my skull. “You. What did you see?”

  Martin clears his throat, and is stuttering into an account of finding me screaming before a corpse when a cop walks up to Fiore for a brief, mumbled conversation.

  Yourdon glares at his subordinate. “Will you stop that?”

  Fiore shuffles. “I have new information, Your Excellency.”

  “Yes? Well, out with it! I haven’t got all day.”

  Fiore—the bumptious, supercilious buffoon of a priest who likes nothing more than to lord it over his congregation—wilts like a punctured aerostat. “A preliminary forensic examination appears to have revealed DNA traces left by the killer.”

  Yourdon snorts. “Why did we wait to commission a squad of detectives? Come on, don’t waste my time.”

  Fiore takes a sheet of paper from the cop. “PCR amplification in accordance with—no, skip that—determines that the fingerprint on file is congruent with, uh, myself. And nobody else in YFH-Polity.”

  Yourdon looks furious. “Are you telling me that you strung him up to bleed out?”

  To his credit, Fiore holds his ground. “No, Your Excellency, I’m telling you that the murderer is playing with us.”

  I lean against Sam, feeling nauseous. But that was my fantasy, wasn’t it? About how to deal with Mick. And I never told anyone about it. Which means, I must be the killer! Except I didn’t do it. What’s going on?

  “That’s it.” Yourdon claps his hands together. “Action this day—you, Reverend Fiore, will coordinate with Dr. Hanta to select, train, and augment a chief police constable. Who in turn will be empowered and authorized to induct four citizens into the police force at the rank of sergeant. You will also discuss with me at a later date the selection of a judge, procedures for arraigning criminals before a jury, and the appointment of an executioner.” He glares at the priest. “Then you will, I trust, return your chapel to the pristine condition it was in before I entrusted it to you—and see to the pastoral care of your flock, many of whom are in dire need of direction!”

  The Bishop turns on his heel and sweeps back toward his long black limousine, trailed by a trio of police zombies bearing primitive but effective automatic weapons. I sag against Sam’s arm, but he keeps me upright. Fiore waits until the Bishop slams his door shut, then takes a deep breath and shakes his head lugubriously. “No good will come of this,” he grumbles in our direction—us, the proximate witnesses, and the zombies who discreetly hem us in. “Police: dismissed. Citizens,
you should attend to the state of your consciences. At least one of you knows exactly what happened here today, before the service, and staying silent will not be to your benefit.”

  The police zombies begin to disperse, followed by a gaggle of curious parishioners. I approach Fiore cautiously. I’m very disturbed, and I’m not sure this is the right time, but . . .

  “Yes, what is it, my child?” He narrows his eyes and composes his face in a smile of benediction.

  “Father, I, I wonder if I can have a word with you?” I ask hesitantly.

  “Of course.” He glances at a police zombie. “Go to the vestry, fetch a mop and bucket and cleaning materials, and begin cleaning up the floor of the bell tower.”

  “It’s about . . .” I trail off. My conscience really is pricking me, but I’m not sure how to continue. I feel eyes on me from across the yard, curious eyes wondering what I’m saying.

  “Do you know who did it?” Fiore demands.

  “No, I wanted to talk to you about Janis, she’s been very strange lately—”

  “Do you think Janis killed him?” Bushy elevated eyebrows frame dark eyes that stare down his patrician nose at me, a nose that doesn’t belong to the same face as those wattles of fatty tissue around his throat. “Do you?”

  “Uh, no—”

  “Some other time, then,” he says, and before I realize I’m dismissed, he’s calling out to another police zombie, “You! You, I say! Go to the undertaker depot and bring a coffin to the bell tower—” And a moment later he’s walking away from me, cassock flapping around his boots.

  “Come on,” says Sam. “Let’s go home right now.” He takes me by the arm.

  I screw up my eyes to keep from crying. “Let’s.”

  He leads me across the car park toward the waiting queue of taxis. “What did you try to tell Fiore?” he asks quietly.

  “Nothing.” If he wants to know so badly, he can talk to me the rest of the time, when I’m lonely.

  “I don’t believe you.” He’s silent for a minute as we get into a taxi.

  “Then don’t believe me.” The taxi pulls away from the curb without asking us where we want to go. The zombies know us all by sight.

  “Reeve.” I look at him. He stares at me, his expression serious.

  “What?”

  “Please don’t make me hate you.”

  “Too late,” I say bitterly. And right then, for exactly that moment, it’s true.

  17

  Mission

  IT’S raining when I wake up the day after the murder. And it rains—gently, lightly, but persistently—every day for the rest of the week, mirroring my mood to perfection.

  I’ve got the run of the house and doctor’s orders to take things easy—no need to go in to work in the library—so I should be happy. I made up my mind to be happy here, didn’t I? But I seem to have messed things up with Sam, and there are dark, frightening undercurrents at work around me—people who’ve made the opposite choice and who’ll pounce on me in an instant if I don’t tread a careful line. Now that I have time to think things through, I’m profoundly glad that Fiore wasn’t paying attention when I tried to tell him about Janis. Life is getting cheaper by the week, and there are no free resurrections here—no home assemblers to back up on daily.

  Am I really that worried?

  Yes.

  I manage to make it through to Thursday morning before I crack. I wake up with the dawn light (I’m not sleeping well at present), and I hear Sam puttering around the bathroom. I look out the window at the raindrops that steadily fall like a translucent curtain before the vegetation, and I realize that I can’t stand this any more. I don’t want another day on my own in the house. I know Dr. Hanta said to take the whole week off to recover, but I feel fine, and at least if I go in to work, there’ll be something to do, won’t there? Someone to talk to. A friend, of sorts, even if she’s behaving weirdly these days. And even if I feel uncomfortable about what I’ll say when I see her.

  I dress for work, then head downstairs and call a taxi, as usual. I’m half-tempted to walk, but it’s raining, and I’ve neglected to buy any waterproof gear. Rain aboard a starship, who’d have imagined it? I wait just inside the front porch until the taxi pulls up, then rush over to it and pile in on the backseat. “Take me to the library,” I gasp.

  “Sure thing, ma’am.” The driver pulls away, with a bit more acceleration than I’m used to. “Wonder when this weather will stop?”

  Huh? I shake myself. “What did you say?”

  “I heard from Jimmy at the public works department that they’re doing it because they discovered a problem with the drainage system—need to flush out the storm sewers. I’m Ike, by the way. Pleased to meet you.”

  I just about manage to recover gracefully: “I’m Reeve. Been driving cabs long?”

  He chuckles. “Since I got here. You’re a librarian? That’s a new one on me. I can get you downtown from here, but you’ll need to show me which block it’s on.”

  “The merger,” I manage to say.

  “Yeah, that’s the deal.” He taps a syncopated rhythm on the steering wheel, keeping time with the windscreen wipers, then hauls the cab through a sharp turn. “What does a librarian do all day?”

  “What does a cab driver do?” I counter, still shaken. Those are manual controls! They put one of us in charge of a machine like that . . . They must be serious about turning this into a functioning polity. Which means they probably figure they’ve got the scoring levels loaded into our implants just about right. “People come in and they ask for books and we help them find them.” I shrug. “There’s more to it than that, but that’s it in a nutshell.”

  “Uh-huh. Me, I drive around all day. Get a call on the wireless, go find the fare, take them where they want to go.”

  “Sounds boring. Is it?”

  He laughs. “Finding books sounds boring to me, so I guess we’re even! Downtown square, City Hall coming up. Where do you want to go from here?”

  It’s not raining in the downtown district. “Drop me off here and I’ll walk the rest of the way,” I offer, but he’s having none of it.

  “Naah, I need to learn where everything is, don’t I? So where is it?”

  I surrender. “Next left. Go two blocks, then take the first right and park. You’re opposite it.”

  I arrive at my workplace thoroughly shaken and not quite sure why. I already heard Yourdon talking about police sergeants and judges. Are we going to end up without any zombies at all, doing everything for ourselves? That would be how you’d go about running an accurate dark ages social simulation, I realize, but it means things are happening on an altogether larger scale than I’d imagined.

  I’m a little late—the library is already open—but there are no customers, so I walk straight up to the counter and smile at Janis, who is nose-down in a book. “Hi!”

  She jerks upright, then looks surprised. “Reeve. I wasn’t expecting you today.”

  “Well, I got bored sitting around at home. Dr. Hanta said I could come in to work today if I wanted to and, well, it beats watching the rain, doesn’t it?”

  Janis nods, but she looks unamused. She closes her book and puts it down carefully on the desk. “Yes, I suppose it does.” She stands up. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “Yes please!” I follow her back into the staff room. It feels really good to be back—this is where I belong. Janis is feeling low, but I can help sort that out. Then we’ve got a library to run! And what could be better than that? Ike can keep his smelly, dangerous cab.

  “Well then.” Janis switches the kettle on and looks me up and down critically. “I may have to go out for a couple of hours. You going to be all right running the place on your own?”

  “No problem!” I straighten my skirt. Maybe it was some lint?

  She winces, then rubs her forehead. “Please, not so much enthusiasm this early in the morning. What’s gotten into you?”

  “I’ve been bored!” I manage to keep myse
lf from squeaking. “It’s been boring at home, and it’s been raining all week long.” I pull out the other chair and sit down. “You can’t go shopping every day of the week, there’s only so much cleaning and tidying you can do in one house, the television is boring, and I should have stopped here to borrow some books but I thought . . .” I wind down. What have I been thinking?

  “I think I see.” A wan smile tugs at the corners of her eyes. “How’s Sam?”

  I tense. “What makes you ask?”

  The smile fades. “He was here yesterday. Wanted to talk about you, wanted to know my opinion . . . He doesn’t feel he can talk to you, so he has to let it out with someone else. Reeve, that’s not good. Are you all right? Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Yes, you can change the subject.” I say it lightly, but she just about freezes right up on the spot. “Sam’s taken offense to something I said, and we need to sort it out between us.” My stomach churns with anger and guilt, but I bite back on it. It’s not Janis’s fault after all, but Sam should know better, the pig. “We’ll sort it out,” I add, trying to reassure her.

  “I . . . see.” Janis looks as if she’s sucking on a slice of lemon. Right then the kettle comes to a boil, so she stands up and pours the hot water into two mugs, then scoops in the creamy powder and mixes it up. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Reeve, but you seem to have changed since you came out of hospital. You haven’t really been yourself.”

  “Hmm? What do you mean?” I blow on my coffee to cool it.

  “Oh, little things.” She raises an eyebrow at me. “You’ve gained a certain enthusiasm. You’re more interested in exteriors than interiors. And you seem to have lost your sense of humor.”

  “What’s humor got to do with it?” I glare at my mug, willing myself not to get angry. “I know who I am, I know who I was.”

  “Forget I said it.” Janis sighs. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m getting really bitchy these days.” She falls silent for a while. “I hope you don’t mind my leaving you for a few hours.”