Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  The ultrasecure repository in the library is merely a room full of shelves of paper files, with no windows and a simple mortise lock securing the door. What more do they need? They’ve got us locked down in the glasshouse, a network of sectors of anonymous orbital habs subjected to pervasive surveillance, floating in the unmapped depths of interstellar space, coordinates and orbital elements unknown, interconnected by T-gates that the owners can switch on or off at will, and accessible from the outside only via a single secured longjump gate. Not only that, but our experimenters appear to have a rogue surgeon-confessor running the hospital. Burglar alarms would be redundant.

  After I knock on the door and pass Fiore his coffee, I go back to the reference section and while away a few minutes, leafing through an encyclopedia to pass the time. (The ancients held deeply bizarre ideas about neuroanatomy, I discover, and especially about developmental plasticity. I guess it explains some of their ideas about gender segregation.)

  As it happens, I don’t have to wait long. Fiore comes barging into the office and looks about. “You—is there a staff toilet here?” he demands, glancing around apprehensively. His forehead glistens beneath the lighting tubes.

  “Certainly. It’s through the staff common room—this way.” I head toward the staff room at a leisurely pace. Fiore takes short steps, breathing heavily.

  “Faster,” he grumbles. I step aside and gesture at the door. “Thank you,” he adds as he darts inside. A moment later I hear him fumbling with the bolt, then the rattle of a toilet seat.

  Excellent. With any luck, he’ll be about his business before he looks for the toilet paper. Which is missing because I’ve hidden it.

  I walk back to the door to the restricted document repository. Fiore has left his key in the lock and the door ajar. Oh dear. I pull out the bar of soap, the sharp knife, and the wad of toilet paper I’ve left in my bag on the bottom shelf of the trolley. What an unfortunate oversight!

  I wedge my toe in the door to keep it from shutting as I pull the key out and press it into the bar of soap, both sides, taking care to get a clean impression. It only takes a few seconds, then I use some of the paper to wipe the key clean and wrap up the bar, which I stash back in the bag. The key is a plain metal instrument. While there’s an outside chance that there’s some kind of tracking device built into it in case it’s lost, it isn’t lost—it moved barely ten centimeters while Fiore was taking his ease. And I’m fairly certain there are no silly cryptographic authentication tricks built into it—if so, why disguise it as an old-fashioned mortise lock key? Mechanical mortise locks are surprisingly secure when you’re defending against intruders who’re more used to dealing with software locks. Finally, if there’s one place that won’t be under visual surveillance, it’s Fiore’s high-security document vault while the Priest is busy inside it. This is the chain of assumptions on which I am gambling my life.

  I make sure my bag is well hidden at the bottom of the trolley before I slowly make my way back to the staff room. And I wait a full minute before I allow myself to hear Fiore calling querulously for toilet paper.

  The rest of the day passes slowly without Janis to joke with. Fiore leaves after another hour, muttering and grumbling about his digestion. I transfer the soap bar to the wheezing little refrigerator in the staff room where we keep the milk. I don’t want to risk its melting or deforming.

  That evening, I lock up and go home with my heart in my mouth, sweat gluing my blouse to the small of my back. It’s silly of me, I know. By doing this, I risk rapid exposure. But if I don’t do it, what will happen in the longer term is worse than anything that can happen to me if they catch me with a library book from the reference-only collection and a distorted bar of soap. It won’t be just me who goes down screaming. Janis knew about Curious Yellow and was afraid of surveillance. I don’t know why, or where from, but it’s an ominous sign. Who is she?

  Back home, I head for the garage before I go indoors. It’s time to power up the bug zapper in anger for the first time. The bug zapper is the cheap microwave oven I bought a few weeks ago. I’ve had the lid off, and I’ve done some creative things with its wiring. A microwave oven is basically a Faraday cage with a powerful microwave emitter. It’s tuned to emit electromagnetic energy at a wavelength that is strongly absorbed by the water in whatever food you put inside. Well, that’s no good for me, but with some creative jiggery-pokery, I’ve succeeded in buggering up the magnetron very effectively. It now emits a noisy range of wavelengths, and while it won’t cook your dinner very well, it’ll make a real mess of any electronic circuits you put in it. I open the door and shake my copper-lined bag’s contents into it, then reach through the fabric to retrieve the bar of soap. I really don’t want to fry that—Fiore might get suspicious if he got the shits every time he went to the library while I was on duty.

  I drop the oven door shut and zap the book for fifteen seconds. Then I push a button on the breadboard I’ve taped to the side of the oven. No lights come on. There’s nothing talking in the death cell, so it looks like I’ve effectively crisped any critters riding the book’s spine. Well, we’ll see when I take it back to the library, won’t we? If Fiore singles me out in Church the day after tomorrow, I’ll know I was wrong, but sneaking a dirty book out of the library for an evening isn’t in the same league as stealing the keys to—

  The plaster of paris! Mentally, I kick myself. I nearly forgot it. I tip the right amount into an empty yoghurt pot with shaky hands, then measure in a beaker of water and stir the mass with a teaspoon until it begins to get so hot that I have to juggle it from hand to hand.

  Ten minutes pass, and I line a baking tray with moist whitish goop (gypsum, hydrated calcium sulphate). Hoping that it has cooled enough, I press both sides of the soap bar into it a couple of times. I have a tense moment worrying about the soap’s softening and melting, and I make the first impression too early, while the plaster’s so soft and damp that it sticks to the soap, but in the end I think I’ve probably got enough to work with. So I cover the tray with a piece of cheesecloth and go inside. It’s nearly ten o’clock, I’m hungry and exhausted, tomorrow is my day off, and I am going to have to go in to work anyway to visit Janis and make sure she’s all right. But next time Fiore visits the repository, I’m going to be ready to sneak in right after he’s left. And then we’ll see what he’s hiding down there . . .

  10

  State

  SUNDAY dawns, cool and mellow. I groan and try not to pull the bedclothes over my head. By one of those quirks of scheduling, yesterday was a workday for me, tomorrow is another, and I’m feeling hammered by the prospect of two eleven-hour days. I’m not looking forward to spending half my day off in forced proximity to score whores like Jen and Angel, but I manage to force myself out of bed and rescue my Sunday outfit from the pile growing on the chair at the end of the room. (I need to take a trip to the dry-cleaners soon, and spend some time down in the basement washing the stuff I can do at home. More drudgery on my day off. Does it ever stop?)

  Downstairs, I find Sam laboriously spooning cornflakes into a bowl of milk. He looks preoccupied. My stomach is tight with anxiety, but I force myself to put a pan of water on the burner and carefully lower a couple of eggs into it. I need to make myself eat: My appetite isn’t good, and with the exercise regime I’m keeping up, I could start burning muscle tissue very easily. I glance inward at my mostly silent netlink to check my cohort’s scores for the week. As usual, I’m nearly the bottom-ranked female in the group. Only Cass is doing worse, and I feel a familiar stab of anxiety. I’m nearly sure she isn’t Kay, but I can’t help feeling for her. She has to put up with that swine Mick, after all. Then my stomach does another flip-flop as I remember something I have to do before we go.

  “Sam.”

  He glances up from his bowl. “Yes?”

  “Today. Don’t be surprised if—if—” I can’t say it.

  He puts his spoon down and looks out the window. “It’s a nice day.” He frowns.
“What’s bugging you? Is it Church?”

  I manage to nod.

  His eyes go glassy for a moment. Checking his scores, I guess. Then he nods. “You didn’t get any penalties, did you?”

  “No. But I’m afraid I—” I shake my head, unable to continue.

  “They’re going to single you out,” he says, evenly and slowly.

  “That’s it.” I nod. “I’ve just got a feeling, is all.”

  “Let them.” He looks angry, and for a moment I feel frightened, then I realize that for a wonder it isn’t me—he’s angry at the idea that Fiore might have a go at me in Church, indignant at the possibility that the congregation might go along with it. Resentful. “We’ll walk out.”

  “No, Sam.” The water is boiling—I check the clock, then switch on the toaster. Boiled eggs and toast, that’s how far my culinary skills have come. “If you do that, it’ll make you a target, too. If we’re both targets . . .”

  “I don’t care.” He meets my gaze evenly, with no sign of the reticence that’s been dogging him for the past month. “I made a decision. I’m not going to stand by and let them pick us off one by one. We’ve both made mistakes, but you’re the one who’s most at risk in here. I haven’t been fair to you and I, I”—he stumbles for a moment—“I wish things had turned out differently.” He looks down at his bowl and murmurs something I can’t quite make out.

  “Sam?” I sit down. “Sam. You can’t take on the whole polity on your own.” He looks sad. Sad? Why?

  “I know.” He looks at me. “But I feel so helpless!”

  Sad and angry. I stand up and walk over to the burner, turn the heat right down. The eggs are bumping against the bottom of the pan. The toaster is ticking. “We should have thought of that before we agreed to be locked up in this prison,” I say. I feel like screaming. With my extra-heavy memory erasure—which I have a sneaking suspicion exceeded anything my earlier self, the one who wrote me the letter and then forgot about it, was expecting—I’m half-surprised I got here in the first place. Certainly if I’d known Kay was going to dither, then pull out, I’d probably have chosen to stay with her and the good life, assassins or no.

  “Prison.” He chuckles bitterly. “That’s a good description for it. I wish there was some way to escape.”

  “Go ask the Bishop; maybe he’ll let you out early for bad behavior.” I pop the toast, butter it, then scoop both eggs out of the water and onto my plate. “I wish.”

  “How about we walk to Church today?” Sam suggests hesitantly, as I’m finishing breakfast. “It’s about two kilometers. That sounds a long way, but—”

  “It also sounds like a good idea to me,” I say, before he can talk himself out of it. “I’ll wear my work shoes.”

  “Good. I’ll meet you down here in ten minutes.” He brushes against me on his way out of the kitchen, and I startle, but he doesn’t seem to notice. Something’s going on inside his head, and not being able to open up and ask is frustrating.

  Two kilometers is a nice morning walk, and Sam lets me hold his hand as we stroll along the quiet avenues beneath trees suddenly exploding with green and blue-black leaves. We have to walk through three tunnels between zones to get to the neighborhood of the Church—there are no lines of sight longer than half a kilometer, perhaps because that would make it obvious that our landscapes are cut from the inner surfaces of conic sections rather than glued to the outside of a sphere by natural gravity—but we see barely anyone. Most folks travel to Church by taxi, and they won’t be leaving their homes until we’re nearly there.

  The Church service starts out anticlimactic for me, but probably not for anyone else. After leading the congregation into a tub-thumping rendition of “First We Take Manhattan,” Fiore launches into a long peroration on the nature of obedience, crime, our place in society, and our duties to one another.

  “Is it not true that we were placed here to enjoy the benefits of civilization and to raise a great society for the betterment of our children and the achievement of a morally pure state?” he thunders from the pulpit, eyes focused glassily on an infinity that lurks just behind the back wall. “And to this end, isn’t it the case that our social order, being the earthly antecedent of a Platonic ideal society, must be defended so that it has room to mature and bear the fruit of utopia?” A real tub-thumper, I realize uneasily. I wonder where he’s going? People are shuffling in the row behind me; I’m not the only one with a guilty conscience.

  “This being the case, can we admit to our society one who violates its cardinal rules? Must we forebear from criticizing the sins out of consideration for the sensibilities of the sinner?” He demands. “Or for the sensibilities of those who, unknowing, live side by side with the personification of vice incarnate?”

  Here it comes. I feel a mortal sense of dread, my stomach loosening in anticipation of the denunciation I can feel coming. There’s got to be more to this than a furtive library book, and I have a horrible sinking feeling that he’s figured out the soap impression and the plaster of paris and the mold I’m preparing for the duplicate keys—

  “No!” Fiore booms from the pulpit. “This cannot be!” He thumps the rail with one fist. “But it grieves me to say that it is—that Esther and Phil are not merely adulterating their souls by sneaking their vile intimacies behind the backs of their ignorant and abused spouses, but are adulterating the fabric of society itself!”

  Huh? It’s not me that he’s going after, but the thrill of relief doesn’t last long: There’s a loud grumble of rage from the congregation, led by cohort three, whose members are the ones Fiore is accusing. Everyone else looks round and I turn round with them—not to go with the crowd could be dangerous right now—and see a turbulent knot a couple of rows back, where well-dressed churchgoers are turning on each other. A frightened female and a defensive-looking male with dark hair are looking around apprehensively, not making eye contact, but trying to—yes, they’re looking for escape routes as Fiore continues. Something tells me they’re too late.

  “I would like to thank Jen in particular for bringing this matter to my attention,” Fiore says coolly. My netlink dings, registering the arrival of more points than I’d normally rack up in a month, an upward adjustment I can blame on the fact that I’m in the same cohort as the little snitch. She’s scored big-time with this accusation of adultery. “And I ask you, what are we going to do about the sickness in our midst?” Fiore scans the audience from his pulpit. “What is to be done to cleanse our society?”

  My sick sense of dread is back with a vengeance. This is going to be a whole lot worse than anything I’d anticipated. Normally, Fiore singles a handful out for ridicule, laughter, the pointed finger of contempt—a minor humiliation for sneaking a library book out of the reference section would be nothing out of the ordinary. But this is big bad stuff, two people caught subverting the social foundations of the experiment. Fiore is on a roll of righteous indignation, and the atmosphere is getting very ugly indeed. A roar goes up from the back benches, incoherent rage and anger, and I grab Sam’s hand. Then I check my netlink and freeze. He’s fined cohort three all the points he’s just given to Jen! “Let’s get out of here before it turns nasty,” I mutter into Sam’s ear, and he nods and grips my hand back tightly. People are standing up and shouting, so I sidle toward the side of the aisle as fast as I can, using my elbows when I have to. I can see Mick on the other side, yelling something, the tendons on the sides of his neck standing out like cables. I don’t see Cass. I keep moving. There’s a storm brewing, and this isn’t the time or place to stop and ask.

  Behind me Fiore shouts something about natural justice, but he’s barely audible over the crowd. The doors are open, and people are spilling out into the car park. I gasp with pain as someone stomps on my left foot, but I stay upright and sense rather than see Sam following me. I make it through the crush in the doorway and keep going, dodging small clumps of people and a struggling figure, then Sam catches up with me. “Let’s go,” I tell him, gra
bbing his hand.

  There are people in front of us, clustered around—it’s Jen. “Reeve!” she calls.

  I can’t ignore her without being obvious. “What do you want?” I ask.

  “Help us.” She grins widely, her eyes sparkling with excitement as she spreads her arms. She’s wearing a little black-silk number that displays her secondary sexual characteristics by providing just a wisp of contrast: her chest is heaving as if she’s about to have an orgasm. “Come on!” She gestures at the dark knot near the Church entrance. “We’re going to have a party!”

  “What do you mean?” I demand, looking past her. Her husband, Chris, is conspicuously absent. Instead, she’s acquired a cohort of her own, followers or admirers or something, Grace from twelve and Mina from nine and Tina from seven—all of them are from newer cohorts than our own—and they’re watching her, looking to her as if she’s a leader . . .

  “Purify the polity!” she says, almost playfully. “Come on! Together we can keep everyone in line and hold everything together—and earn loads more points—if we make a strong enough statement right now. Send the deviants and perverts a message.” She looks at me enthusiastically. “Right?”

  “Uh, right,” I mumble, backing away until I bump into Sam, who’s come up behind me. “You’re going to teach them a lesson, huh?”

  I feel Sam’s hand tightening on my shoulder, warning me not to go too far, but Jen’s in no mood to pick up minor details like sarcasm: “That’s right!” She’s almost rapturous. “It’s going to be real fun. I got Chris and Mick ready—”

  There’s a high-pitched scream from somewhere behind us. “Excuse us,” I mumble, “I don’t feel so good.” Sam shoves me forward, and I stumble past Jen, still stammering out excuses, but the situation isn’t critical. Jen doesn’t have time to waste on broken reeds and moral imbeciles, and she’s already drifting toward the group in the Church door, shouting something about community values.