Glasshouse (19 page)

NOT
entirely by coincidence, the next day is my first run with the shoulder bag. It started life as a rectangular green vinyl affair. It now sports a black nylon lining that I've stitched together with much swearing and sucking of pricked fingertips to conceal the gleaming copper weave glued to its inside. It looks like a shopping bag until I fold over the inner flap. Then it looks like a full shopping bag with a black flap covering the contents. Right now it contains a carton of extremely strong ground espresso, a filter cone, and several small items that are individually innocuous but collectively damning if you know what you're looking at. It's a good thing the bag looks anonymous, because unless I'm hallucinating all my memories, what I'm going to take home from work in that bag today will be a whole lot less innocuous than coffee beans.

I get in to work at the usual early hour and find Janis in the staff room, looking pale and peaky. “Morning sickness?” I ask. She nods. “Sympathies. Say, why don't you stay here, and I'll get the returns
sorted out? Put your feet up—I'll call you if anything comes up that I can't handle.”

“Thanks. I'll do just that.” She leans back against the wall. “I wouldn't be here but Fiore's coming—”

“You leave that to me,” I say, trying not to look surprised. I wasn't expecting him so soon, but I've got the bag, so . . .

“Are you sure?” she asks.

“Yes.” I smile reassuringly. “Don't worry about me, I'll just let him in and leave him to get on with things.”

“Okay,” she says gratefully, and I go back out and get to work.

First I pile yesterday's returns on the trolley and push them around the shelves, filing them as fast as I can. It only takes a few minutes—most of the inmates here don't realize that reading is a recreational option, and only a handful are borrowing regularly. But then I skip the dusting and cleaning I'm supposed to do today. Instead, I grab my bag from behind the reception station, dump it on the bottom shelf of the trolley, and head for the shelves in the reference section next to the room where the Church documents are stored.

Into the bag goes a dictionary of sexual taboos, held in the reference shelves because some weird interpretation of dark age mores holds that libraries wouldn't lend such stuff out. It's my cover story in case I'm caught, something naughty but obviously trivial. Then I leave the trolley right where it is with the bag tucked away on the bottom shelf, where it's not immediately obvious. I head back to the front desk. My palms are sweating. Fiore is due to visit the archive, which means advancing my plans. Janis has always handled him before—but she's ill, I'm running the shop, and there's no point delaying the inevitable. I've got all my excuses prepared, anyway. I've barely been able to sleep lately for rehearsing them in my head.

Around midmorning a black car pulls up and parks in front of the library steps. I put down the book I'm reading and stand up to wait behind the counter. A uniformed zombie gets out of the front and opens the rear door, standing to one side while a plump male climbs out. His dark, oily hair shines in the daylight: The white slash of his clerical collar lends his face a disembodied appearance, as if it doesn't quite belong
to the same world as the rest of his body. He walks up the steps to the front door and pushes it open, then walks over to the desk. “Special reference section,” he says tersely. Then he looks at my face. “Ah, Reeve. I didn't see you here before.”

I manage a sickly smile. “I'm the trainee librarian. Janis is ill this morning, so I'm looking after everything in her absence.”

“Ill?” He stares at me owlishly. I look right back at him. Fiore has chosen a body that is physically imposing but bordering on senescence, in the state the ancients called “middle age.” He's overweight to the point of obesity, squat and wide and barely taller than I am. His chins wobble as he talks, and the pores on his nose are very visible. Right now his nostrils are flared, sniffing the air suspiciously, and his bushy eyebrows draw together as he inspects me. He smells of something musty and organic, as if he's spent too long in a compost heap.

“Yes, she has morning sickness,” I say artlessly, hoping he won't ask where she is.

“Morning sick—
oh,
I see!” His frown vanishes instantly. “Ah, the trials we have to suffer.” His voice oozes a slug-trail of sympathy. “I'm sure this must be hard for her, and for you. Just take me to the reference room, and I'll stay out of your way, child.”

“Certainly.” I head for the gate at the side of the station. “If you'd like to follow me?” He knows exactly where we're going, the old toad, but he's a stickler for appearances. I lead him to the locked door in the reference section, and he produces a small bunch of keys, muttering to himself, and opens it. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?” I ask hesitantly.

He pauses and gives me the dead-fish stare again. “Isn't that against library regulations?” he asks.

“Normally yes, but you're not going to be in the library proper,” I babble, “you're in the archive and you're a responsible person so I thought I'd offer—”

He stops being interested in me. “Coffee will be fine. Milk, no sugar.” He disappears into the room, leaving his keys with the lock.

Now.
Heart pounding, I head for the staff room. Janis is snoozing when I open the door. She sits up with a start, looking pale. “Reeve—”

“It's all right,” I say, crossing over to the kettle and filling it up. “Fiore's here, I let him in. Listen, why don't you go home? If you're feeling ill, you shouldn't really be here, should you?”

“I've been thinking about thinking.” Janis shakes her head. I rummage around for the coffee and filter papers and set the stand up over the biggest mug I can find. I scoop the coffee into the paper with wild abandon, stopping only when I realize that making it too strong for Fiore will be as bad as not getting him to drink it all. “You shouldn't think too much, Reeve. It's bad for you.”

“Is it really?” I ask abstractedly, as I peel the foil wrapping from a small tablet of chocolate I bought at the drugstore and crumble half of it into the coffee grounds as the kettle begins to hiss. I wad the foil into a tight ball and flick it into the wastebasket.

“If you think about getting out of here,” says Janis.

“Like I said, I'll call you a taxi—”

“No, I mean out of
here.
” I turn round and she looks at me with the expression of a trapped animal. It's one of those moments of existential bleakness when the cocoon of lies that we spin around ourselves to paper over the cracks in reality dissolve into slime, and we're left looking at something really ugly. Janis has got the bug, the same one I've got, only she's got it worse. “I can't stand it anymore! They're going to put me in hospital and make me pass a skull through my cunt, and then they're going to have a little accident and I'll bleed out and they'll give me to Hanta to fix with her tame censorship worm. I'll come out of the hospital smiling like Yvonne and Patrice, and there won't be any
me
left, there'll be this thing that
thinks
it's me and—”

I grab her. “Shut
up
!” I hiss in her ear. “It's not going to happen!” She sobs, a great racking howl welling up inside her, and if she lets it out. I'm completely screwed because Fiore will hear us. “I've got a plan.”

“You've—
what?
”

The kettle is boiling. I gently push away her groping hands and reach over to turn it off. “Listen. Go home. Right now, right this instant. Leave Fiore to me.
Stop panicking.
The more isolated we think we are, the more isolated we become. I won't let them mess with your head.” I smile at her reassuringly. “Trust me.”

“You.” Janis sniffles loudly, then lets go of me and grabs a tissue off the box on the table. “You've got—no, don't tell me.” She blows her nose and takes a deep breath, then looks at me again, a long, hard, appraising look. “Should have guessed. You don't take shit, do you?”

“Not if I can help it.” I pick up the kettle and carefully pour boiling water into the funnel, where it will damp down the coffee grounds, extract the xanthine alkaloids and dissolve the half tab of Ex-Lax hidden in the powder, draining the sennoside glycosides and the highly diuretic caffeine into the mug of steaming coffee that, with any luck, will give Fiore a strong urge to take ten minutes on the can about half an hour after he drinks it. “Just try to relax. I should be able to tell you about it in a couple of days if things work out.”

“Right. You've got a plan.” She blows her nose again. “You want me to go home.” It's a question.

“Yes. Right now,
without
letting Fiore see you here—I told him you were at home, sick.”

“Okay.” She manages a wan smile.

I pour milk into the coffee mug, then pick it up. “I'm just going to give the Reverend his coffee,” I tell her.

“To give—” Her eyes widen. “I see.” She takes her jacket from the hook on the back of the door. “I'd better get out of your way, then.” She grins at me briefly. “Good luck!”

And she's gone, leaving me room to pick up the mug of coffee and the other item from the sink side and to carry them out to Fiore.

THE
simplest plans are often the best.

Anything I try to do on the library computer system will be monitored, and the instant I try to find anything interesting they'll know I know about it. It's probably there as a honeypot, to snare the overly curious and insufficiently paranoid. Even if it isn't, I probably won't get anywhere useful—those old conversational interfaces are not only arcane, they're feeble-minded.

To put one over on these professional paranoids is going to take skill, cunning, and lateral thinking. And my thinking is this: If Fiore and
the Bishop Yourdon and their fellow experimenters have one weak spot, it's their dedication to the spirit of the study. They won't use advanced but anachronistic surveillance techniques where nonintrusive ones that were available during the dark ages will do. And they won't use informational metastructures accessible via netlink where a written manual and records on paper will do. (Either that, or what they write on paper really
is
secret stuff, material that they won't entrust to a live data system in case it comes under attack.)

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.