Glasshouse

Jen wanders off toward the knot of males at the other side of the room, glass in hand. Angel fidgets with her tablet, turning it over and over in her hands and looking uncertain. Alice eats another lump of cheese. I feel quite ill watching her—the stuff tastes vile. "I'm not used to the idea of living together with someone," I say slowly.

"It's not so bad." Cass nods to herself. "But this is a very abrupt and arbitrary way of starting it."

Alice rests a hand on her arm, reassuring. "The sexual relationship is only implicit," she says. "If you pick a husband and don't get on, I'm sure you can choose another at the Church meeting."

"Perhaps." Cass pulls away and glances nervously at the group of males and one female, who is laughing loudly as two of the males attempt to refill her glass for her. "And perhaps not."

Alice looks dissatisfied. "I'm going to see what the party's about." She turns and stalks over toward the other group. That leaves me with Cass and Angel. Angel is busily scrolling through text on her tablet, looking distracted, and Cass just looks worried.

"Cheer up, it can't be that bad," I say automatically.

She shivers and hugs herself. "Can't it?" she asks.

"I don't think so." I pick my words carefully. "This is a controlled experiment. If you read the waivers, you'll see that we haven't relinquished our basic rights. They have to intervene if things go badly wrong."

"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.