Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  “Oh, you mean . . .”

  “Shh!” I hold up a warning finger. “The walls have ears.”

  Sam’s eyes widen, and he begins to pull away from me. I grab at his shoulder, hard, then step in close and wrap my arms around him. He tries to push back, but I lean my face against his shoulder. “We need to talk,” I whisper.

  “About what?” he whispers back. But at least he stops pushing.

  “What’s going on.” I lick his earlobe, and he jolts as if I’ve stuck a live wire in it.

  “Don’t do that!” he hisses.

  “Why not?” I ask, amused. “Afraid you might enjoy it?”

  “But we, they—”

  “I’m going to order food. While we’re eating, let’s keep things light, okay? Afterward we’ll go upstairs. I’ve got a trick or two to show you. For avoiding eavesdroppers.” I add in a whisper: “Smile, please.”

  “Won’t it be obvious?” He’s lowered his arms and is holding me loosely around the waist. I shiver because I’ve been wanting him to do that so badly for the past week—no, let’s not go there.

  “No it won’t be. They use low-level monitors to track normal behavior. They call in high-end monitors only if we act funny. So don’t act funny.”

  “Oh.” I look up as he looks down for a startled instant, and I kiss him. He tastes of sweat and a faint, musty aroma of dust and paperwork. A moment passes, then he responds enthusiastically. “This is normal?” he asks.

  “Whoa! Dinner first.” I laugh, pulling back.

  “Dinner first.” He looks at me with a dark, serious expression.

  I phone for a pizza and a couple of glass jars of wine, and while Sam heads for the living room, I try to catch my breath. Things are moving too fast for comfort, and I’m suddenly having to deal with a mass of conflicted emotions at a time when all I was wanting to do was recruit another dissatisfied inmate to the campaign. The thing is, Sam and I have too much history for anything between us to be simple—even though we haven’t actually done very much together. We haven’t had time, and Sam’s got big body-image issues, and then she/me nearly fucked everything between us completely while under the influence of the pernicious Dr. Hanta—oh, hindsight is a wonderful tool, isn’t it? Thinking about it, Sam’s dissatisfaction and passivity has been a running sore between us, and I half suspect it took my apparent co-option to kick him into doing something about it.

  I feel guilty as I remember what I was thinking at the time. I can surrender . . . yes, and they’ll make my life a living hell, won’t they? Did I really want to hand complete control over my life to the likes of Fiore, Yourdon, and Hanta? I don’t think I explicitly intended to do that, but it amounted to the same thing. It feels like a moment of cowardice in my own past, a voluntary moment of cowardice, and I feel oddly dirty because of it. Because it’s not far out of my normal character to feel that way inclined—Hanta didn’t rebuild her/me, she just tweaked a few weightings in my mind map. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” in spades. And Sam got to see that side of me. Ick.

  The closet bings for attention and I take the pizza tray and wine out of it. On my way through to the living room I kick my shoes off, strewing them in the hallway. “Sam?” He turns round. He’s nesting in the sofa again, the television turned to some sports channel. “Turn the volume up.”

  He raises an eyebrow at me but does as I ask, and I sit down next to him. “Here. Garlic and tofu with deep-fried lemon chicken steak.” I open the box and pull out a slice, then hold it in front of his mouth. “Eat?”

  “What is this?”

  “I want to feed you.” I lean against him and hold the pizza in front of his face, just out of reach. “Go on. You’re begging for it really, aren’t you?”

  “Gaah.” He leans forward and takes a bite at it—I try to pull my hand back, but I’m just too late and he gets a mouthful. I laugh and lean closer and find his arm is around my shoulders. Chewing: “You. Are. Intolerable.”

  “Manipulative,” I suggest. “Annoying.”

  “All of the above?”

  “Yes, all of it by turns.” I feed him another mouthful, then change my mind about letting him have the whole slice and eat the rest of it myself.

  “Every time I think I understand you, you change the rules,” he complains. “Give me another . . .”

  “Not my fault. I don’t make the rules.”

  “Who does?”

  I point a finger at the ceiling, waggle it about. “Remember our chat in the library?” After I came out to Janis, last Tuesday, she phoned Sam and asked him to come visit. He was very surprised to see me-as-Fiore, almost as much as when we showed him the basement and the A-gate. “Remember my face?” He nods, looking dubious. “Janis and I sorted everything out. Settled the slight difference of opinions. I’m feeling a lot better now, and less inclined to give up on things.”

  His arm tightens. Warm, comforting, presence. “But why?”

  I take a deep breath and offer him another slice of pizza. Better keep it short. At this rate he’s going to eat it all. “You don’t want to live like this.”

  “But I—” He stops.

  “Do you?” I prod him.

  He looks at me. “Watching you, this past week—” He shakes his head. “I’d love to be able to settle in like that.” He shakes his head again, underscoring the ironic tone in his voice. “What alternative is there?”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about where we came from.” I pause to chew for a moment. “And we can’t go back.” I flick a warning glance his way. “But we can make ourselves more comfortable here if we rearrange our priorities.” Will he get it?

  Sam sighs. “If only we could do that.” He glances down at his lap.

  “I’ve got a new priority for you,” I say, my heart beating faster.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” I put the pizza box down and plaster myself against him. “We can start right here by you picking me up and carrying me upstairs to the bathroom.”

  “The bathroom?”

  “Yep.” I kiss him again, and suddenly I’m not sure this is a good idea at all. “Where we’re going to get in the shower together, and wash each other, and talk. Can’t go to bed smelling of office work, can we?”

  “Shower—” His monosyllables aren’t his most appealing attribute: I kiss him into silence, shivering with alarm at my own responses.

  “Now.”

  THINGS do not go according to plan.

  The plan seemed simple enough. Get Sam on board again. Doing that, holding a proper conversation with him, was another matter with the ever-present risk of being overheard. But if you disguise your suspicious activities as something expected of you, while only the dumb listener bots are online, you’ve got a good chance of doing it undetected. The dumb listeners aren’t good for much more than keyword monitoring, and the cabal is sufficiently short on spare bodies that they can’t monitor everything we say all the time.

  So call me naive, if you like. I figured that as a married couple, one of us pretending to seduce the other and then dragging them into a shower—lots of nice white noise to confuse audio tracking, sheets of water to make it hard to lip-read, and an excuse to stand really close together—would be a pretty good way of evading surveillance.

  What I didn’t consider was that when I stand too close to Sam my skin tingles, and I feel warm and needy in intimate places. And what I especially didn’t consider is that Sam is horribly conflicted but has corresponding urges. He’s human, too, and we both have certain needs, which we’ve been trying to ignore for much too long.

  Sam does as I ask him, and about halfway up the stairs I realize that I’m going to lose control if we do this. I nearly tell him to stop, but for some reason my mouth doesn’t want to open. He puts me down on the bathroom carpet and stands too close. “What now?” he asks, a quiet tension in his voice.

  “We, um, undress.” Without realizing quite how, I find my hands are alread
y working on his trouser belt. When I feel him begin to unbutton my blouse, I shudder, and not with fear. “Shower.”

  “This isn’t such a good—”

  “Shut up.”

  “You’ll become, uh, pregnant.”

  “Won’t.” Worry about it later. I run my hand around his back, feeling the thin man-fur that runs up the base of his spine, and I lean closer. “Not worried anymore.”

  “But.” I feel him unzip my skirt. Hands on my thighs. “Surely.”

  I kiss him to make him stop. We’re down to underwear. “Shower. Now.” My teeth are chattering with a rising tide of need that threatens to wreck what’s left of my self-control.

  We’re in the shower cubicle, wearing our underwear, and I dial the pressure up to maximum and the temperature to fusion. His tongue—garlic and honey and a hint of something else, of him. Arms around each other, we stand under the spray, and I feel the tension in his back. He’s got an erection, of course. Why am I still wearing anything? Moments later I’m not. And a moment after that I’m crunched against the wall, my knees drawn up, gasping at the size of him inside me.

  “You want to talk . . .”

  The entire universe is in here. I wrap my arms around him and latch on to his lips, hungrily. I want to talk, but right now I’ve got higher priorities.

  “Opening ceremony.”

  “Yes?”

  “On a MASucker. Yes!”

  “Yes . . .”

  “Only one T-gate out. Six gigs to next star system. If we break connection, bad guys can’t pay up on scorefiles. Breaks carrot side of dictatorship, no payoff for compliance. Yes . . .”

  “Overthrow the—the?”

  He heaves like the wild sea. I’m lost on him, abandoned. At first when I was Reeve, the idea of pregnancy horrified me. Then Hanta tweaked something, and it was no big deal. Now I just don’t care anymore: It’s survivable, and if it’s the cost of having Sam right now, I’ll pay. I want to focus, to plan, but we’ve gotten carried away. Sam is pounding away with no subtlety, and he knows better, which means he’s lost on the ocean, too. If we can find each other and cling together through the night, who knows? “Sam, I, I want you to—”

  “Oh!” A moment later, a quieter “oh!” And a sensation of spreading warmth that drives me to grind against him until everything goes away, and I become the ocean for a few eternal seconds.

  THINGS don’t go according to plan, but they go strangely well. After the first mad flush of lust, we collapse in the shower, then soap each other off thoroughly. Sam doesn’t cringe away from my hands this time but seems quiet, thoughtful. I kiss him, and he responds. After a while I begin to feel as if my skin’s about to fall off: I can barely see the bathroom for steam. “Let’s dry off and go to bed,” I suggest, feeling another little jolt of worry.

  “Okay.” Sam turns the shower head to OFF and opens the cubicle door. It’s cold out there. I shiver, and for a wonder he wraps his arms around me.

  “Are you feeling comfortable?” I ask hesitantly. “I mean, with this?”

  He thinks for a moment. “I’m comfortable with you.”

  “But—”

  He kisses the back of my head. “It’s you. That makes it easier.”

  There’s nothing left to divide us: We know exactly how fucked up we are. We’ve had such disastrous misunderstandings already that there’s nothing left to come. Sam freaks at the idea of being human and male and large? Yes. I have problems with the idea of pregnancy, and there’re no contraceptives in YFH-Polity? Sure. We’re past all that. It’s all going to be very simple from now on.

  So we towel each other dry and I take his hand and together we go to the bedroom, where presently we make love again, tenderly and slowly.

  THE next morning, I stumble downstairs late, disheveled and happy, to find there is a letter waiting for me on the front hall carpet. It’s like a bucket of cold water in the face. I pick it up and carry the piece of paper into the kitchen and read it while the coffee machine gurgles and chugs to itself.

  To: Mrs. Reeve Brown

  From: The Polity Administration Committee

  Dear Mrs. Brown

  It is now four months since your arrival in YFH-Polity. In this time, numerous changes have taken place in our little community, and we will shortly be commencing Phase Two of the experiment in which you agreed to participate.

  Accordingly, may I extend to you an invitation to our first Town Meeting, to be held at City Hall on Sunday morning in place of the regularly scheduled Sunday Service. The meeting will explain the forthcoming Phase Two changes, and will be followed by a service of thanksgiving, to be conducted by the Very Reverend Dr. H. Yourdon in the cathedral.

  Yours truly . . .

  This puts a new perspective on things, doesn’t it? I shake my head, then take the two coffee mugs back upstairs. On my way I snag the identical-looking letter with Sam’s name on it.

  “What do you think?” he asks, when he’s had time to read it.

  “I think it’s exactly what it sounds like.” I shrug. “Things are getting bigger, new faces, new scenery—this ‘cathedral’ they’re opening! You can’t run a town the way you run a parish of a couple of hundred people, can you? No way can everybody know each other. So they’ll need a different intergroup score mechanism to keep people behaving themselves. To account for the anonymity of cities, the sight of familiar strangers.”

  His cheek twitches. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

  “Oh, it can’t be that bad,” I assure him, rolling my eyes.

  “Can’t it?”

  I nod. “No.” A thought strikes me. “Listen, can you get away from the office for lunch?”

  “What, you mean . . . ?”

  “Yes. Drop by the library about one o’clock, and we’ll go eat together.” I smile at him. “How does that sound?”

  “You want me to—” He works it out. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Good.” I lean close and kiss him on the cheek. “Be seeing you.”

  I arrive at work fifteen minutes early, clutching my bag—not, in and of itself, an unusual variation—but the place is unlocked because Janis is already in. “Janis?” I poke my head round the office door.

  She’s not there. I sigh and head for the depository.

  Down in the basement I find Janis loading magazines into box files. “Give me a hand,” she says tensely. “If Fiore or Yourdon turns up while we’re here . . .”

  “Check.” The magazines are vaguely banana-shaped and don’t fit very well, but I can get four or five in each file box before I put them back on the shelf. Janis has six machine pistols lined up before her on a chair, still in their synthesis gel capsules. “Did you get the letter?” I ask.

  “Yes. So did Norm.” Her husband—I don’t know much about him. “They’re pulling things forward. Once they institutionalize the police and stop relying on isolation to do their work for them, we’re in trouble.”

  “Agreed.” I pause. “Ladies’ sewing club?” That was my idea, when I was Robin, but Janis fronted it, and after my one meeting with them while I was being Reeve, I guess she’s going to have to sort them out.

  “I invited them here for lunch. Hurry up!” She’s very twitchy this morning.

  “Okay, I’m hurrying.” I get the last of the magazines stashed in box files on the shelves, for all the world looking like innocent hard copy files of Curious Yellow. “I invited Sam round. I think he’s on message.”

  “Oh, good. I was hoping you two would sort things out.” A brief smile. “Now let’s go upstairs. We’ve got a library to open before we can overthrow the government.”

  19

  Longjump

  SUBTLETY isn’t going to get us very far at this point, so Janis orders up a delivery of sandwiches from a catering outfit working from the back of a cafe, and when the ladies’ sewing circle and revolutionary command committee shows up, we lock the front door, hang out the CLOSED sign, and pile downstairs.

  “We
’ve got one day to organize this,” says Janis. “Reeve, you want to summarize the situation?”

  Heads turn. From their expressions, I don’t think they were expecting me to be here. I smile. “This place—this polity—was originally designed as a glasshouse, a military prison. It works too well; the YFH cabal figured that a prison doesn’t just keep people in, it keeps other people out. So they set it up as a research lab, what we’re now seeing.” She gestures at the shelves of box files on the back wall. “They’re working on developing a new type of cognitive dictatorship, one spread via Curious Yellow, and they’re breeding up a population of carriers for it. When we get to the end of the ‘experiment’ time-scale they’re planning on reintegrating everyone into general society—and using your children to spread it.” I see Janis’s hand move unconsciously to her stomach. “Do you want to help them?”

  A mutter goes round the room, growing quickly: “No!”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Janis says drily. “Now, this raises the question—what is to be done? Reeve and I have been working on an answer. Anyone want to guess?”

  Sam sticks his hand up. “You’re going to blow the longjump gate anchor frame,” he says calmly, “stranding us teraklicks from the nearest other human polity. And then you’re going to hunt the cabal down and shoot them, find their backup networks and offline them, then jump up and down on the smoking wreckage.”

  Janis smiles. “Not bad! Anyone else?”

  El sticks her hand up. “Hold elections?”

  Janis looks taken aback. “Something like that, I guess.” She shrugs. “But that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves, isn’t it? What haven’t I mentioned?”

  I clear my throat. “We know where the longjump gate is. Which is good news and bad news.”

  “Why?” asks Helen. They’re beginning to get involved, which is good, but could turn bad if Janis and I don’t present them with a reasonable picture. They’re not idiots, they must know that we wouldn’t have brought them in on the cellar if the situation wasn’t desperate.