Glasshouse (31 page)

The Linebarger Cats emerged from the coalition with significant assets. To my surprise I received a credit balance that with careful management might mean I never need to work again—at least for a few gigasecs. It seems that warfare pays, if you're on the winning side and manage not to misplace your mind in the process.

When I left MilSpace (a convoluted process involving numerous anonymous remixer networks and one-way censorship gates to strip me of my military modules before my reintegration into civil society), I had myself reassembled as a louche young man in the Cognitive Republic of Lichtenstein. There's a lot to be said for being louche, especially after you've spent several hundred megaseconds with no genitals.

Lichtenstein is a vivid and cynical colony of artistic satirists, so sophisticated they've almost circled back into primitivism. By convention we use visual field filters that limn everything in dark strokes, filling our bodies with color. Life aspires toward a state of machinima. It's a strange way to be, but familiar and comfortable after the unsleeping hyperspectral awareness of a tankie. So I hang around in the galleries and salons of Lichtenstein, exchanging witty repartee and tall stories with the other habitués, and in my copious free time I pay frequent trips to the bathhouses and floataria. I make a point of never sleeping with the same person twice in the same body, although I discover that even such anonymous abandon doesn't protect me from my lovers' tears: It seems half the population have lost someone and are wandering, searching the world over.

My life is outwardly directionless for the first four or five megs. In private I work on something that might eventually turn out to be a memoir of the war—an old-fashioned serialized text provocatively promoting a single viewpoint, without any pretense at objectivity—while in public I live on my savings. DeMob gave me a reasonably secure cover identity as a playboy remittance man from a primogeniture polity, sent to while away his youth in less hidebound (and politically loaded) biomes, and it's not hard to keep up appearances. But deep down, the insignificance and lack of meaning of such a life chafes; I want to be doing something, and while the project I've been working on under Sanni's auspices for the past couple of years fits the bill, it is, perforce, anonymous. If I make a mark, it will be by my deeds, not my name. And so, as my debauch intensifies, I slip into a kind of melancholic haze.

Then one morning I am awakened by a brassy flare of trumpets from the bedside orrery, which announces that I have a visitor.

I
realize who and where I am—and that I am desperately sick—at the exact moment that Dr. Hanta presses a small, freezing cold brass disk against the bare skin between my breasts. “Ow!”

“Breathe slowly,” she orders, not unkindly, then blinks like a sleepy owl from behind her thick-lensed glasses: “Ah, back in the realm of the conscious, are we?”

By way of an answer I go into a hoarse coughing fit, my muscles locking in spasms that leave my ribs aching. Hanta recoils slightly, removing the stethoscope. “I see,” she says. “I'll just wait a moment—glass of water?”

I realize she's jacked the back of my bed up as the coughing subsides. “Yes. Please.” I'm shivery and weak but not freezing anymore. She holds out a glass, and I manage to accept it without spilling anything, although my hand shakes alarmingly. “What's wrong with me?”

“That's what I'm here to find out.” Hanta is a petite female, shorter than I am, her skin a shade darker, although not the aubergine-tinted brown of Fiore. Her short hair is dusted with the silver spoor of impending senescence, and there are laugh-lines around her face. She wears an odd white overcoat buttoned up the front and carries the arcane totems of her profession, the caduceus and stethoscope—the bell of the latter she rubs upon my chest. She looks friendly and open and trustworthy, the antithesis of her two clerical colleagues: but beauty is not truth, and some gut instinct tells me never to let my guard down in her presence. “How long have you been febrile?”

“Febrile?”

“Hot and cold. Chills, shivers, alternating with too hot. Night sweats, anything like that.”

“Oh, about—” I feel my forehead wrinkling. “What day is it? How long have I been in here?”

“You've been here six hours,” Dr. Hanta says patiently. “You were brought in around midafternoon.”

I shiver convulsively. My skin is icy. “Since an hour or two before then.”

“The Reverend Doctor Fiore tells me you were climbing.” Her tone is neutral, professional, with no note of censure.

I swallow. “Since then.”

“You're a lucky lady.” Hanta smiles enigmatically and moves her stethoscope to the ball of my left shoulder, pulling open my hospital gown to get at it. “I'm sorry, I'll be quick. Hmm.” She stares into the stethoscope's eye crystal and frowns. “It's a long time since I've seen that . . . sorry.” She straightens up. “It's not safe to climb around in the
walls here; some of the neighboring biomes aren't biomorphically integrated. There are replicators in the mass fraction reserve cells that will eat anything based on a nucleotide chassis that doesn't broadcast a contact inhibition signal, and you're not equipped for that.”

I swallow again—my mouth is unnaturally dry. “What?”

“Somehow or other you've managed to get yourself infected with a strain of
pestis mechaniculorum
. You're feverish because your immune system is still just about containing it. It's a good thing for you that we found you before mechanotic cytolysis set in . . . Anyway, I'll fix you up just as soon as I finish sequencing it.”

“Um.” I shudder again. “Oh, okay.”

“ ‘Okay' indeed. Do I have to tell you not to go climbing around inside the walls again?” I shake my head, almost embarrassed by my own fear of discovery. “Good.” She pats me on the shoulder. “At least if you're going to do it again, come to me first, please? No more unfortunate accidents.” She carefully disconnects the stethoscope and wraps it around her caduceus. It makes soft clicking noises as it fuses with the staff. “Now I'll just run you off a little antirobotic, and you'll be up and about in no time.”

Dr. Hanta hitches up her coat, then perches on a stool next to my bed. “Isn't this a bit out of character?” I ask her, throwing caution to the winds. I suspect if I asked Fiore or Yourdon that question, they'd bite my head off, but Hanta seems more approachable, if not more trustworthy.

“We all make mistakes.” It's that smile again: It's slightly fey and very sincere, as if she's laughing at a joke that I'd laugh along with, if I only knew what it was. “You leave worrying about the integrity of the experiment to me, dear.” She waves a dismissive hand. “Of course you worry about it when the priests' backs are turned. Of course people try to game the system—it's only to be expected. Probably some people don't even want to be here. Maybe they changed their minds after signing the waiver. All I can say is, we'll do our best to make sure they're not unhappy with the outcome.” She raises an eyebrow at me speculatively. “It's not easy to run an experiment on this scale, and we make mistakes, what else can I say? Some of us make more mistakes than others.” And
now she pulls an expression of mild distaste, which seems to say it all. She's inviting my agreement, and I find myself nodding along despite my better judgment.

“But those mistakes . . .” I stop, unsure if I should continue.

“Yes?” She leans forward.

“How's Cass?” I force myself to ask.

Dr. Hanta's face, which up until now has been open and friendly, closes like a trapdoor. “Why do you ask?”

I lick my lips again. “I need something to drink.” She slides off her stool and paces round my bed, pours what's left of the water jug into my cup, and hands it to me without a word. I swallow. “One of Fiore's little mistakes, I suppose.” I aim to say it lightly, but it comes out dripping with sarcasm.

“Oh yes.” Dr. Hanta looks round, toward the far end of the ward—at something hidden from me by the curtain. I shudder, and this time it's not from the fever chills. “I wouldn't say one of his
little
mistakes.” Her tone of voice is dry, but there's something behind it that makes me glad I can't see her face. But when she turns back to me, her expression is perfectly normal. “Cass will be all right, dear.”

“And Mick?” I prompt.

“That is under discussion.”

“Under discussion. Was what happened to Esther and Phil discussed ahead of time?”

“Reeve”—she actually has the gall to look upset—“no, it wasn't. Someone miscalculated badly. They've gone back to the primary sources and discovered that what, what Esther and Phil were doing wasn't so very unusual. And you're right, the weighting attached to, uh, what they did—Major Fiore misjudged the mood of the crowd. It won't happen again, we've learned from that experience, and from—” She swallows, then nods minutely at the curtain. “If a couple doesn't get on, there's going to be a procedure to go through to obtain formal social approval of the separation. We're not evil. We're in this for the long haul, and if you're unhappy, if everyone's unhappy here, the polity won't gel, and the experiment can't work.”

The experiment can't work.
I look at her and find myself wondering,
Does she mean it?
Fiore and Yourdon are so cynical I find myself startled to be in the presence of a member of their team who seems to believe in what she's doing. I'm suddenly appalled, as badly taken aback by her honesty as the police zombies are by a stripper. “Uh. I think I see.” I shake my head, then wince. My neck aches. “But as long as Mick stays here, some of us won't be happy at all.”

“Oh, Mick will be dealt with one way or another, dear.” Her caduceus trills for attention, and she fidgets with it as she talks. “I don't think the psychological damage is irremediable—we probably won't have to restore from backup, which is a good thing right now. But I'm going to have to redesign his motivational parameters from the ground up.” She frowns at the serpent heads but doesn't explain herself further. “Cass will be . . . well, I'm attending to the physical damage right now, and when she's better, I'll ask her who she wants to be.” She falls silent for a few seconds. “Most medical fraternities, confronted by a patient with this level of damage, would prescribe gross memory surgery—or simply terminate the instance and restore from backup. I don't believe in authorizing such a serious step without taking her wishes into account.”

She falls silent again. After a moment I realize she's staring at me. “What is it?”

“We need to talk about your blackouts.”

“My what?” I bite my tongue, but it's a bit late to play dumb.

Dr. Hanta raises one eyebrow and crosses her arms. “I'm not stupid, you know.” She looks away, as if she's speaking to someone else. “Everyone in here has been through redactive reweighting and experiential reduction before we recruit them. One of the reasons this polity needs a medical supervisor is to be ready for identity crises. Most people have some inkling of who they used to be and why they wanted memory surgery. Occasionally, we get someone who doesn't remember—there's something they wanted to bury so deep that they wouldn't even know what it was about. Something painful. But I don't normally see . . . well! You've gone into fugue twice since you were admitted to
this ward, did you know that? I checked with your husband during your last one, and he said you've been having them more frequently.”

She leans toward me, keeping her hands sandwiched in her armpits as if she's hugging herself. “I don't like to intrude where I'm not wanted, but by the sound of it, you need help very badly indeed. You seem to have had a bad reaction to the suppressants the clinic used on you, and while I can't be sure without making a detailed examination, there is a risk that you could be heading for some kind of crisis. I don't want to overstate things, but in the worst-case scenario you could lose . . . well, everything that makes you
you
. For example, if it's an autoimmune reaction—according to your file you've got a heuristic upgrade to your complement system, and sometimes the Bayesian recognizers start firing off at the wrong targets—you could end up with anterograde amnesia, a complete inability to lay down any new mnemostructures. Or it might just be a sloppy earlier edit bleeding through and triggering random integration fugues, in which case things will ease off after a while, although you won't enjoy the ride. But I can't tell you what to expect, much less treat you, if you won't even admit you've got a problem.”

“Oh.” It takes me a while to absorb this, but Hanta is remarkably patient with me and waits while I think about things. If I didn't know better, I'd swear she actually liked me. “A problem,” I echo, uncertain how much I can let slip, before a cold chill runs its icy fingers up my spine, and I shudder uncontrollably.

“Speaking of problems . . .” Hanta raises her caduceus: “This will hurt, but only momentarily and a lot less than being eaten alive by a mechaplague.” She smiles faintly as she points it at my shoulder, and I wince as the asps strike at me. There's a toothy little prickling as they begin pumping adjuvant patches into my circulation, upgrading my prosthetic immune system so that it can deal with the
pestis
. I try not to wince.