The Green Maze is one of those rectilinear manifolds that was all the fashion about four gigasecs ago, right after the postwar fragmentation bottomed out. The framework consists of green corridors, all straight, all intersecting at ninety-degree angles and held together by a bewildering number of T-gates. Actually, it’s a sparse network, so you can go through a doorway on one side of the maze and find yourself on the far side, or several levels up, or even two twists, a hop, and a jump behind the back of your own head. Lots of apartment suites hang off it, including the back entrance to my own, along with an even more startling range of cubist-themed public spaces, entertainment nooks, eateries, resteries, entertainment venues, and a few real formal hedge mazes built in a style several tens of teraseconds older.
Needless to say, nobody knows their way around the Green Maze by memory or dead reckoning—some of the gates move from diurn to diurn—but my netlink knows where I’m going and throws up a firefly for me. It takes us about a third of a kilosec to walk there in companionable silence. I’m still trying to work out whether I can trust Kay, but I’m already sure I like her.
The tapas place is open plan, ancient cast-iron chairs and tables on a grassy deck beneath a dome under a pink sky streaked with clouds of carbon monoxide that scud across a cracked basalt wilderness. The sun is very bright and very small, and if the dome vanished, we’d probably freeze to death before the atmosphere poisoned us. Kay glances at the ornamental archway surrounding the T-gate, overgrowth with ivy, and picks a table close to it. “Anything wrong?” I ask.
“It reminds me of home.” She looks as if she’s bitten a durian fruit while expecting a mango. “Sorry. I’ll try to ignore it.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t.” A small, wry, smile. “Maybe I didn’t erase enough.”
“I’m worried that I erased too much,” I say before I can stop myself. Then Frita, one of the two proprietor/cook/designers wanders over, and we’re lost for a while in praise of his latest creations, and of course we have to sample the fruits of the first production run and make an elaborate business of reviewing them while Erci stands by strumming his mandolin and looking proud.
“Erased too much,” Kay prods me.
“Yes.” I push my plate away. “I don’t know for sure. My old self left me a long, somewhat vague letter. Written and serialized, not an experiential; it was encoded in a way he knew I’d remember how to decrypt, he was very careful about that. Anyway, he hinted about all sorts of dark things. He knew too much, rambled on about how he’d worked for a Power and done bad things until his coworkers forced him into excision and rehab. And it was a thorough job of assisted forgetting they did on me. I mean, for all I know I might be a war criminal or something. I’ve completely lost over a gigasecond, and the stuff before then is full of holes—I don’t remember anything about what my vocation was, or what I did during the censorship, or any friends or family, or anything like that.”
“That’s awful.” Kay rests a slim hand atop each of mine and peers at me across the wreckage of a remarkably good aubergine-and-garlic casserole.
“But that’s not all.” I glance at her wineglass, sitting empty beside the carafe. “Another refill?”
“My pleasure.” She refills my glass and raises it to my lips while taking a sip from her own without releasing my hands. I smile as I swallow, and she smiles back. Maybe there’s something to be said for her hexapedal body plan, although I’d be nervous about doing it to myself—she must have had some pretty extensive spinal modifications to coordinate all those limbs with such unconscious grace. “Go on?”
“There are hints.” I swallow. “Pretty blatant ones. He warned me to be on my guard against old enemies—the kind who wouldn’t be content with a simple duel to the death.”
“What are we talking about?” She looks concerned.
“Identity theft, backup corruption.” I shrug. “Or . . . I don’t know. I mean, I don’t remember. Either my old self was totally paranoid, or he was involved in something extremely dirty and opted to take the radical retirement package. If it’s the latter, I could be in really deep trouble. I lost so much that I don’t know how the sort of people he was involved with behave, or why. I’ve been doing some reading, history and so on, but that’s not the same as being there.” I swallow again, my mouth dry, because at this point she might very well stand up and walk out on me and suddenly I realize that I’ve invested quite a lot of self-esteem in her continued good opinion of me. “I mean, I think he may have been a mercenary, working for one of the Powers.”
“That would be bad.” She lets go of my hands. “Robin?”
“Yes?”
“Is that why you haven’t had a backup since rehab? And why you’re always hanging out in public places with your back to the most solid walls?”
“Yes.” I’ve admitted it, and now I don’t know why I didn’t say it before. “I’m afraid of my past. I want it to stay dead.”
She stands up, leans across the table to take my hands and hold my face, then kisses me. After a moment I respond hungrily. Somehow we’re standing beside the table and hugging each other—that’s a lot of contact with Kay—and I’m laughing with relief as she rubs my back and holds me tight. “It’s all right,” she soothes, “it’s all right.” Well, no it isn’t—but she’s all right, and suddenly my horizons feel as if they’ve doubled in size. I’m not in solitary anymore, there’s someone I can talk to without feeling as if I might be facing a hostile interrogation. The sense of release is enormous, and far more significant than simple sex.
“Come on,” I say, “let’s go see Linn and Vhora.”
“Sure,” she says, partly letting go. “But Robin, isn’t it obvious what you need to do?”
“Huh?”
“About your problem.” She taps her toe impatiently. “Or haven’t the therapists been giving you the hard sell, too?”
“You mean the experiment?” I lead her back into the Green Maze, cueing my netlink for another firefly. “I was going to say no. It sounds crazy. Why would I want to live in a panopticon society for ten or fifty megs?”
“Think about it,” she says. “It’s a closed community running in a disconnected T-gate manifold. Nobody gets to go in or comes out after it starts running, not until the whole thing terminates. What’s more, it’s an experimental protocol. It’ll be anonymized and randomized, and the volunteers’ records will be protected by the Scholastium’s Experimental Ethics Service. So—”
Enlightenment dawns. “If anyone is after me, they won’t be able to get at me unless they’re inside it from the start! And while I’m in it I’ll be invisible.”
“I knew you’d get it.” She squeezes my hand. “Come on, let’s find these friends of yours. Do you know if they’ve been approached, too?”
WE find Linn and Vhora in a forest glade, enjoying an endless summer afternoon. It turns out that they’ve both been asked if they’re willing to participate in the Yourdon study. Linn is wearing an orthohuman female body and is most of the way out of rehab; lately she’s been getting interested in the history of fashion—clothing, cosmetics, tattoos, scarification, that sort of thing—and the idea of the study appeals to her. Vhora, in contrast, is wearing something like a kawaii pink-and-baby-blue centaurform mechabody: she’s got huge black eyes, eyelashes to match, perfect breasts, and piebald skin covered in Kevlar patches.
“I had a session with Dr. Mavrides,” Linn volunteers diffidently. She has long, auburn hair, pale, freckled skin, green eyes, upturned nose, and elven ears: her historical-looking gown covers her from throat to floor. It’s a green that matches her eyes. Vhora, in contrast, is naked. Linn leans against Vhora’s flank, one arm spread lazily across her back to toy idly with the base of the fluted horn that rises from the center of Vhora’s forehead. “It sounds interesting to me.”
“Not my cut.” Vhora sounds amused, though it’s hard to judge. “It’s historical. Premorphic, too. Sorry but I don’t do ortho any
more, two lifetimes were enough for me.”
“Oh, Vhora.” Linn sighs, sounding exasperated. She does something with one fingertip near the base of the horn that makes the mecha tense for a moment. “Won’t you . . . ?”
“I’m not clear on the historical period in question,” I say carefully. To be perfectly truthful, I’d deliberately ignored the detailed pitch Piccolo-47 mailed me until Kay pointed out the advantages of disappearing into a closed polity for a few years, because I was totally uninterested in going to live in a cave and hunt mammoths with a spear, or whatever Yourdon and his coinvestigators have in mind. I don’t like being taken for a soft touch, and Piccolo-47’s attitude is patronizing at best. Mind you, Piccolo-47 is the sort of self-congratulatory, introspectively obsessed psych professional who’d take any suggestion that their behavior displayed contempt for the clients as projection, rather than treating it as an attempt to work around real social deficiencies. In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them. Hence my lack of information about the exact nature of the project.
“Well, they’re not telling us everything,” Linn apologizes. “But I did some digging. Historian Professor Yourdon has a particular interest in a field I know something about, the first postindustrial dark age—that would be from the mid-twentieth to mid-twenty-first centuries, if you’re familiar with Urth chronology. He’s working with Colonel-Doctor Boateng, who is really a military psychologist specializing in the study of polymorphic societies—caste systems, gender systems, stratification along lines dictated by heredity, astrology, or other characteristics outside the individual’s control. He’s published a number of reports lately asserting that people in most societies prior to the Interval Monarchies couldn’t act as autonomous agents because of social constraints imposed on them without consent, and I suspect the reason the Scholastium funds his research is because it has diplomatic implications.”
I feel Kay shiver slightly through my left arm, which is wrapped around her uppermost shoulders. She leans against me more closely, and I lean against the tree trunk behind me in turn. “Like ice ghoul societies,” she murmurs.
“Ice ghouls?” asks Vhora.
“They aren’t tech—no, what I mean is that they are still developing technologies. They haven’t reached the Acceleration yet. No emotional machines, no virtual or self-replicating toolsets. No Exultants, no gates, no ability to restructure their bodies without ingesting poisonous plant extracts or cutting themselves with metal knives.” She shudders slightly. “They’re prisoners of their own bodies, they grow old and fall apart, and if one of them loses a limb, they can’t replace it.” She’s very unhappy about something, and for a moment I wonder what the ice ghouls she lived with meant to her, that she has to come here to forget.
“Sounds icky,” says Linn. “Anyway, that’s what Colonel-Doctor Boateng is interested in. Polities where people have no control over who they are.”
“How’s the experiment meant to work, then?” I ask, puzzling over it.
“Well, I don’t know all the details,” Linn temporizes. “But what happens . . . well, if you volunteer, they put you through a battery of tests. You’re not supposed to go in if you’ve got close family attachments and friends, by the way; it’s strictly for singletons.” Kay’s grasp tightens around me for a moment. “Anyway, they back you up and your copy wakes up inside.
“What they’ve prepared for the experiment is a complete polity—the briefing says there are over a hundred million cubic meters of accommodation space and a complete shortjump network inside. It’s not totally uncivilized, like a raw planetary biome or anything. There are a couple of catches, though. There are no free assemblers, you can’t simply request any structure you want. If you need food or clothing or tools or whatever, you’re supposed to use these special restricted fabricators that’ll only give you what you’re entitled to within the experiment. They run a money system and provide work, so you have to work and pay for what you consume; it’s intended to emulate a pre-Acceleration scarcity economy. Not too scarce, of course—they don’t want people starving. The other catch is, well, they assign you a new orthohuman body and a history to play-act with. During the experiment, you’re stuck in your assigned role. No netlink, no backups, no editing—if you hurt yourself, you have to wait for your body to repair itself. I mean, they didn’t have A-gates back before the Acceleration, did they? Billions of people lived there, it can’t be that bad, you just have to be prudent and take care not to mutilate yourself.”
“But what’s the experiment about?” I repeat. There’s something missing; I can’t quite put my finger on it . . .
“Well, it’s supposed to represent a dark ages society,” Linn explains. “We just live in it and follow the rules, and they watch us. Then it ends, and we leave. What more do you need?”
“What are the rules?” asks Kay.
“How should I know?” Linn smiles dreamily as she leans against Vhora, fondling the meso’s horn, which is glowing softly pink and pulsing in time to her hand motions. “They’re just trying to reinvent a microcosm of the polymorphic society that’s ancestral to our own. A lot of our history comes out of the dark ages—it was when the Acceleration took hold—but we know so little about it. Maybe they think trying to understand how dark ages society worked will explain how we got where we are? Or something else. Something to do with the origins of the cognitive dictatorships and the early colonies.”
“But the rules—”
“They’re discretionary,” says Vhora. “To prod the subjects toward behaving in character, they get points for behaving in ways in keeping with what we know about dark ages society, and they lose points for behaving wildly out of character. Points are convertible into extra bonus money when the experiment ends. That’s all.”
I stare at the meso. “How do you know that?” I ask.
“I read the protocol.” Vhora manages an impish smirk. “They want to make people cooperate and behave consistently without being prescriptive. After all, in every society people transgress whatever rules there are, don’t they? It’s a matter of balancing costs with benefits.”
“But it’s just a points system,” I say.
“Yes. So you can tell if you’re doing well or badly, I suppose.”
“That’s a relief,” Kay murmurs. She holds me tight. The afternoon sunlight in the forest glade is soft and yellow, and while there’s a buzzing and rasping of insects in the background, the biome leaves us alone. Linn smiles at us again, a remarkably fey expression, and strokes that spot on top of Vhora’s head. There’s something unselfconsciously erotic about her gesture, but it’s not an eroticism I share. “Shall we be going?” Kay asks me.
“Yes, I think so.” I help her to her feet, and she in turn helps me up.
“Nice of you to visit,” purrs Vhora, shivering visibly as Linn tickles the base of the horn again. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay?”
“Thank you for the offer, but no,” Kay says carefully, “I have a therapy appointment in a kilosec. Maybe some other time.”
“Goodbye then,” says Linn. Vhora is working one-handed at the laces on the back of her gown as Kay and I leave.
“Too bad about the therapy session,” I say, once we’re through the first gate and round the first corner. I hold my hand out, and she takes it. “I was hoping we could spend some time together.”
Kay squeezes my hand. “What kind of therapy did you have in mind?”
“You mean you—”
“Hush, silly. Of course I lied! Did you think I was going to share you with ponygirl back there?”
I turn and back her against the wall, and suddenly she’s all around me, greedy hands grasping and stroking and squeezing. Her mouth tastes of Kay and lunchtime spices, indescribable and exotic.
SOMETIME later we surface in a privacy bower in a restery neither of us knows, somewhere in the Green Maze, sweaty and naked and tired and elated. I’ve had s
ex with Kay in her private naked orthobody before, but this is different. She can do things with those four cunning hands that make me scream with delightful anticipation, holding me on the razor-fine edge of orgasm for a timeless eternity. I wish I could do something back to her, something similar. Maybe one day I will, if I get it together to go xenomorphic myself. I don’t usually regret being tied to my self-image so strongly, but Kay’s giving my inhibitions a good stretch.
Afterward, she rolls away from me, and I cradle her in my arms.
“They don’t take couples,” she says quietly.
“You said I need to go.”
“That’s true.” She sounds tranquil about it. I don’t know, I haven’t asked—but is this simply an extended fling?
“I don’t have to go.”
“If you’re in danger, I’d rather you were safe.”
I cup her breast, one-handed. She shivers.
“I’d rather I was safe, too. But with you.”
“We’d be in different bodies,” she murmurs. “We probably wouldn’t even recognize each other.”
“Would you be all right like that?” I ask anxiously. “If you’re shy—”
“I can pretend it’s an extended disguise. I’ve done it before, remember.”
Oh. “We’d have to lie.” It slips out without my willing it.
“Why?” she asks. “We aren’t actually a couple”—my heart skips a beat—“not yet.”
“Are you mono? Or poly?” I ask.
“Both.” Her nipple tightens under my fingertips. “It’s easier to handle the emotional balance with just one partner, though.” I feel her back tense slightly. “Do you get jealous?”
I have to think hard about it. “I don’t think so, but I’m not certain. I don’t remember enough to be sure. But . . . back there, when Linn invited us. I don’t think I felt jealous then. As long as we’re friends.”
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