“Well, that’s a relief,” she says. I look at her sharply.
“Look, we need to pick a ‘husband’ each,” Angel points out. “Whoever’s last won’t get much of a choice, and as it is we’ll be stuck with whomever the others have rejected. For whatever reason.” She looks between us, her expression guarded. “See you.”
I stare at Cass. “What you said earlier, about the ice ghouls—”
“Forget it.” She cuts me off with a chopping gesture. “Maybe Jen was right.” She sounds downbeat.
“Did you know anyone else who was going into the experiment?” I ask suddenly, then wish I could swallow my own tongue.
Cass frowns at me. “Obviously not, or they wouldn’t have admitted me to the study.” Then she looks away, slowly and pointedly. I follow the direction of her gaze. There’s an unobtrusive black hemisphere hanging from the ceiling in one corner. She sets her shoulders. “We’d better socialize.”
“If you’re worried about the implications of pair-bonding, I don’t see why we couldn’t share an apartment for a couple of diurns,” I offer, heart pounding and palms sticky. Are you really Kay, Cass? I’m almost certain she is, but she won’t talk where we might be being monitored. And if I ask and she isn’t, I risk giving away my own identity to whoever’s hunting me, if any of them have followed me in here.
“I don’t think that would be allowed,” she says guardedly. She makes a minute nod in my direction, then jerks her chin toward the others, who by now are making quite a buzz of conversation. “Shall we go and see who they’ve fixed us up with?”
On the other side of the room it turns out that Jen has broken the ice by insisting that all the males compete to demonstrate their merit, by pouring her a drink and presenting it to her elegantly. Needless to say she’s stinking drunk but giggly. She seems to have settled on Chris-from-the-back-row as her target—he seems to be a little embarrassed by her antics, I think, but he can’t get away because Alice and Angel have zeroed in on three of the others and are leaving him to Jen’s clutches. Big Guy, Sam, is standing stiffly with his back to the wall, looking almost as uneasy as Cass. I glance at Cass, who’s hanging back, then mentally shrug and approach Sam, bypassing Jen’s raucous gaggle.
“Life of the party,” I say, tipping my head at Jen.
“Er, yes.” He’s holding an empty glass and swaying a little. Maybe his feet are sore. It’s hard to read his expression—the black mane of fur around his mouth obscures the muscles there—but he doesn’t look happy. In fact, if the floor opens up beneath his feet and swallows him, he’ll probably smile with relief.
“Listen.” I touch his arm. As expected, he tenses. “Just come over here with me for a moment, please?”
He permits me to lead him away from the swarm of orthos trying to vector through the social asteroid belt.
“What do you make of this setup?” I ask quietly.
“It makes me nervous.” His eyes glance between my face and the doors. Figures.
“Well, it makes me nervous, too. And Cass.” I nod at the bunch across the room. “And, I think, even Jen.”
“I’ve read part of the backgrounder.” He shakes his head. “It’s not what I expected. Neither was this—”
“Well.” My lips have gone dry. I take a sip from my glass and look at Sam, calculating. He’s bigger than I am. I’m physically weak (and wait until I get my hands on the joker who set that parameter up), but unless I’m misreading him badly he’s well socialized. “We might as well make the best of things. We’re expected to go set up a joint apartment with someone who is a different gender. Then we get settled in, read the briefings, do whatever they tell us to do, and go to the Church on Sunday to see how everyone else is doing. Do you think you can do that if you treat it as a vocational task?”
Sam puts his empty glass down on the table with fastidious precision and pulls out his tablet. “I could, but it says here that the ‘nuclear family’ wasn’t just an economic arrangement, there’s sex involved, too.” He pauses for a moment. “I’m not good at intimacy. Especially with strangers.”
Is that why you’re so tense? “That’s not necessarily a problem.” I take another sip of wine. “Listen”—I end up glancing at the camera dome (thank you, Cass)—“I’m sure none of these arrangements are going to end up permanent. We’ll get a chance to sort out any mistakes at the meeting on First—uh, Sunday? Meanwhile”—I look up at him—“I don’t mind your preference. We don’t have to have sex unless we both want to. Is that okay by you?”
He looks down at me for a while. “That might work,” he says quietly.
I realize I’ve just picked a husband. I just hope he isn’t one of the hunters . . .
What happens next is anticlimactic. Someone’s probably been watching the group dynamics through that surveillance lens, because after another few centisecs our tablets tinkle for attention. We’re instructed to go through the doorway at the back of the lecture theatre in pairs, at least two seconds apart. We’re already in YFH-Polity, in the administration subnet, beyond the longjump T-gate leading back to the Invisible Republic. There’s some kind of framework with a bundle of shortjump gates behind the next door, ready to take us to our homes. So I take Sam’s hand—it’s enormous, but he holds mine limply, and his skin is a bit clammy—and I lead him over to the door. “Ready?” I ask.
He nods, looking unhappy. “Let’s get this over with.”
Step. “Over with? It’s going to take”—step—“at least three years before it’s over with!” And we’re standing in a really small room facing another door, surrounded by the most unimaginable clutter, and he lets go of my hand and turns around, and I say, “Is this it?” Ending on a squeak.
4
Shopping
REEVE and Sam Brown—not their, our, real names—are a middle-class couple circa 1990–2010, from the middle of the dark ages. They are said to be “married,” which means they live together and notionally observe a mono relationship with formal approval from their polity’s government and the ideological/religious authorities. It is a publicly respectable role.
For purposes of the research project, the Browns are currently both unemployed but have sufficient savings to live comfortably for a “month” or thereabouts while they put their feet down and seek work. They have just moved into a suburban split-level house with its own garden—apparently a vestigial agricultural installation maintained for aesthetic or traditional reasons—on a road with full-grown trees to either side separating them from other similar-looking houses. A “road” is an open-walled access passage designed to facilitate ground transport by automobile and truck. (I think I have seen automobiles somewhere, once, but what’s a “truck”?) At this point the simulation breaks down, because although this environment is meant to mimic the appearance of a planetary surface, the “sky” is actually a display surface about ten meters above our heads, and the “road” vanishes into tunnels which conceal T-gate entrances, two hundred meters in either direction. There are cultivated barriers of vegetation to stop us walking into the walls. It’s a pretty good simulation, considering that according to the tablet it’s actually contained in a bunch of habitat cylinders (which orbit in the debris belts of three or four brown dwarf stars separated by a hundred trillion kilometers of vacuum), but it’s not the real thing.
Our house . . .
I step out of the closet Sam and I materialized in and look around. The closet is in some kind of shed, with a rough ceramic-tiled floor and thin transparent wall panels (called “windows,” according to Sam) held in a grid of white plastic strips that curve overhead. There’s stuff everywhere. Baskets with small colorful plants hanging from the wall, a door—made of strips of wood, cunningly interlocking around a transparent panel—and so on. There’s some kind of rough carpetlike mat in front of the door, the purpose of which is unclear. I push the door open, and what I see is even more confusing.
“I thought this was meant to be an apartment?” I say.
“They weren’t g
ood at privacy.” Sam is looking around as if trying to identify artifacts that mean something to him. “They had no anonymity in public. No T-gates either. So they used to keep all their private space at home, in one structure. It’s called a ‘house’ or a ‘building,’ and it has lots of rooms. This is just the vestibule.”
“If you say so.” I feel like an idiot. Inside the house itself I find myself in a passageway. There are doors on three sides. I wander from room to room, gawping in disbelief.
The ancients had carpet. It’s thick enough to deaden the annoying clack-clack of my shoes. The walls are covered in some sort of fabric print, totally static but not unpleasant to look at. Windows in the front room look out across a hump of land planted with colorful flowers, and at the back across an expanse of close-cropped grass. The rooms are all full of furniture, chunky, heavy stuff, made of carved-up lumps of wood and metal, and a bit of what I assume must be structural diamond. They were big on rectilinear geometry, relegating curves to small objects and the odd obscure piece of dead-looking machinery. There’s one room at the back with a lot of metal surfaces and what looks like an open-topped water tank in it, and there are odd machines dotted over the cabinet tops. There’s another small room under the staircase with a recognizable but primitive-looking high-gee toilet in it.
I prowl around the upstairs corridor, opening doors and trying to puzzle out the purpose of the rooms to either side. They separate rooms by function, but most of them seem to have multiple uses. One of them might be a bathroom, but it’s too large and appears to be jammed—all the hygiene modules are extended and frozen simultaneously, as if it’s crashed. A couple of the rooms have sleeping platforms in them, and other stuff, big wooden cabinets. I look in one, but there’s nothing but a pole extending from one side to the other with some kind of hooked carrier slung over it.
It’s all very puzzling. I sit down on the bed and pull out my tablet just as it dings for attention. What now? I ask myself.
The tablet’s sprouted a button and an arrow and it says, POINT AT OBJECT TO IDENTIFY.
Okay, so this must be the help system, I think. Relieved, I point it at the boxy cabinet and press the button.
WARDROBE. Storage cabinet for clothes awaiting use. Note: used clothing can be cleaned in the UTILITY ROOM in the basement by means of the WASHING MACHINE. As new arrivals, you have only one set of clothes. Suggested task for tomorrow—go downtown and buy new clothes.
My feet itch. I kick my shoes off impulsively, glad to be rid of those annoying heels. Then I shrug out of the black pocketless jacket and stash it in the wardrobe, using the hook-and-arm affair dangling from the bar. It looks lonely there, and I suddenly feel very odd. Everything here is overwhelmingly strange. How’s Sam taking it? I wonder, feeling concerned; he wasn’t doing so well in the reception session, and if this is as weird for him as it is for me . . .
I wait for my head to stop spinning before I go back downstairs. (A thought strikes me on the way. Am I supposed to wear the same outfit inside my ‘house’ as I do in public? These people have a marked public/private split personality—they probably have different costumes for formal and informal events.) In the end, I leave the jacket but, a trifle regretfully, put the shoes back on.
I find Sam slumped in one corner of a huge sofa in the living room, facing a chunky black box with a curved lens that shows colorful but flat images. It’s making a lot of indistinct noise. “What is that?” I ask him, and he almost jumps out of his skin.
“It’s called a television,” he says. “I am watching football.”
“Uh-huh.” I walk round the sofa and sit down halfway along it, close enough to reach out and take his hand, but far enough away to maintain separation if both of us want to. I peer at the pictures. Some kind of mecha—no, they’re ortho males, right? In armor—are forming groups facing each other. They’re color coded. “Why are you watching this?” I ask. One of them throws something alarmingly like an assault mine at the other group of orthos, who try to jump on it. Then they begin running and squabbling for ownership of the mine. After a moment someone blows a whistle and there’s a roaring noise that I realize is coming from the crowd watching the—ritual? Competitive-self-execution? Game?—from rows of seats behind them.
“It’s supposed to be a popular entertainment.” Sam shakes his head. “I thought if I watched it I might understand more—”
“What’s the most important thing we can understand?” I ask, leaning toward him. “The experiment, or how to live in it?”
He sighs and picks up a black knobby rectangle, points it at the box, and waits for the picture to fade to black. “The tablet said I ought to try it,” he admits.
“My tablet said we have to go and buy clothing tomorrow. We’ve only got what we’re wearing, and apparently it gets dirty and smelly really fast. We can’t just throw it away and make more, we have to buy it downtown.” A thought strikes me. “What do we do when we get hungry?”
“There’s a kitchen.” He nods at the doorway to the room with the appliances that puzzled me. “But if you don’t know how to use it, we can order a meal using the telephone. It’s a voice-only network terminal.”
“What do you mean, if you don’t know how?” I ask him, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m just repeating what the tablet says.” Sam sounds a little defensive.
“Here, give that to me.” He passes it and I rapidly read what he’s looking at. Domestic duties: the people of the dark ages, when living together, apparently divided up work depending on gender. Males held paid vocations; females were expected to clean and maintain the household, buy and prepare food, buy clothing, clean the clothing, and operate domestic machinery while their male worked. “This is crap!” I say.
“You think so?” He looks at me oddly.
“Well, yeah. It’s straight out of the most primitive nontech anthro cultures. No advanced society expects half its workforce to stay home and divides labor on arbitrary lines. I don’t know what their source for this rubbish is, but it’s not plausible. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve mistaken radical prescriptive documentation for descriptive.” I tap my finger on his slate. “I’d like to see some serious social conditions surveys before I took this as fact. And in any event, we don’t have to live that way, even if it’s how they direct the majority of the zombies in the polity. This is just a general guideline; every culture has lots of outliers.”
Sam looks thoughtful. “So you think they’ve got it wrong?”
“Well, I’m not going to say that for certain until I’ve reviewed their primary sources and tried to isolate any bias, but there’s no way I’m doing all the housework.” I grin, to take some of the sting out of it. “What were you saying about being able to request food using the ‘telephone’?”
DINNER is a circular, baked, bread-type thing called a pizza. There’s cheese on it, but also tomato paste and other stuff that makes it more palatable. It’s hot and greasy and it comes to us via the shortjump gate in the closet in the conservatory, rather than on a ‘truck.’ I’m a bit disappointed by this, but I guess the truck can wait until tomorrow.
Sam unwinds after dinner. I take off my shoes and hose and convince him he’ll feel better without his jacket and the thing called a necktie—not that he needs much convincing. “I don’t know why they wore these,” he complains.
“I’ll do some research later.” We’re still on the sofa, with open pizza boxes balanced on our laps, eating the greasy hot slices of food with our fingers. “Sam, why did you volunteer for the experiment?”
“Why?” He looks panicky.
“You’re shy, you’re not good in social situations. They told us up front we’d have to live in a dark ages society for a tenth of a gigasec with no way out. Didn’t it strike you as not being a sensible thing to do?”
“That’s a very personal question.” He crosses his arms.
“Yes, it is.” I stop talking and stare at him.
For a moment he looks so sad tha
t I wish I could take the words back. “I had to get away,” he mumbles.
“From what?” I put my box down and pad across the carpet to a large wooden chest with drawers and compartments full of bottles of liquor. I take two glasses, open a bottle, sniff the contents—you can never be sure until you try it—and pour. Then I carry them back over to the sofa and pass him one.
“When I came out of rehab.” He stares at the television, which is peculiar because the machine is switched off. Under his shoes he’s wearing some sort of short, thick hose. His toes twitch uneasily. “Too many people recognized me. I was afraid. It’s my fault, I think, but they might have hurt me if I’d stayed.”
“Hurt you?” Sam is big and has thick hair and isn’t very fast moving, and he seems to be very gentle. I’ve been thinking that maybe I lucked out with him—there’s potential for abuse in this atomic relationship thing, but he’s so shy and retiring that I can’t see him being a problem.
“I was a bit crazy,” he says. “You know the dissociative psychopathic phase some people go through after deep memory redaction? I was really bad. I kept forgetting to back up and I kept picking fights and people kept having to kill me in self-defense. I made a real fool of myself. When I came out of it . . .” He shakes his head. “Sometimes you just want to go and hide. Perhaps I hid too well.”
I look at him sharply. I don’t believe you, I decide. “We all make fools of ourselves from time to time,” I say, trying to hang a reassuring message on the observation. “Here, try this.” I raise my glass. “It says it’s vodka.”
“To forgetfulness.” He raises his glass to me. “And tomorrow.”
I wake up alone in a strange room, lying on a sleeping platform under a sack of fiber-stuffed fabric. For a few panicky moments I can’t remember where I am. My head’s sore, and there’s a gritty feeling in my eyes: If this is life in the dark ages, you can keep it. At least nobody’s trying to kill me right now, I tell myself, trying to come up with something to feel good about. I roll out of bed, stretch, and head for the bathroom.
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