Glasshouse

THE next day I don't stir from bed until Sam has left for work. Once I'm up, I phone the Chamber of Commerce. The zombie who takes my call sounds only marginally sapient but agrees to send a taxi for me the next morning. I go outside and jog up and down the road until I'm exhausted—which takes a lot longer now—then take a shower. I spend the rest of the day in the garage trying to do some more work on the crossbow, which is not going well. I wonder why I'm bothering: It's not as if I'm going to shoot anyone, is it?

I leave Sam a half-defrosted pizza and a note explaining how to cook it in the kitchen. By the time I come indoors it's dark, Sam's holed up in the living room with the TV on, and I have no trouble sneaking upstairs and going to bed without seeing him. It's easy to do, now that we're both avoiding each other.

I am troubled in my sleep. It's a different bad dream, nothing like as vivid as the slaughterhouse nightmare, but even more disturbing in some ways. Imagine you're a detective, or some other kind of investigator. And you're looking for people, bad people who hide in shadows. They've committed terrible crimes but they've altered everyone's memories so that nobody can remember what they did or who they are. You don't know what they did or who they are, but it's your job to find them and bring them to justice in such a way that neither they, nor anyone else, can forget what they did and the consequences of their actions. So you're a detective, and you're walking through twilit polityscapes hunting for clues, but you don't know who you are or why you're charged with this mission. For all you know, you may even be one of the criminals. They've made everybody forget who they are and what they did. Who's to say that they didn't do it to themselves, too? You could be guilty of a crime so horrible that it has no name and everyone's forgotten it, and you'll find the irrevocable logic of detection drawing you to place yourself under arrest and hand yourself over to the courts of a higher power. And you'll be tried and sentenced for a crime you don't understand and don't remember committing, and the punishment will be beyond human comprehension and leave you walking the twilit polityscapes, a ghost shorn of most of your memories except for a faint indelible stain of original sin. And you'll be there because you've been sent looking for a master criminal by way of atoning for your past actions. And you'll be on their trail, and one day you will find them and, reaching out a hand to grab them by the shoulder, you'll find yourself looking at the back of your own head—

I wake up sweating and sick with my heart pounding in the night, and there is no Sam. For a moment I feel defiant and angry at his absence, but then I think: What have I done to my only friend here? And I roll over and wash the pillow in bitter tears before dawn.

But the next day I start my new job.

8. Child Thing

THE taxi that takes me to the Chamber of Commerce arrives about half an hour after Sam leaves for work. I'm ready and waiting for it but nervous about the whole idea. It seems necessary in some ways—to assert my independence from Sam, get an extra source of income, meet other inmates, break out of the lonely rut of being a stay-at-home wife—but in other respects it's a questionable choice. I have no idea what they're going to find for me to do, it's going to take up a large chunk of my time, it'll probably be boring and pointless, and although I'll meet new people, there's no way of knowing whether I'll hate them on sight. What seemed like a good idea at the time is now turning out to be stressful.

The taxi operator is no use, of course—he can't tell me anything. "Chamber of Commerce," he a

"Go right in, ma'am," says the zombie, pointing at a door behind him with a frosted-glass window and gold-leaf lettering stenciled along the top. My heels clack on the stone floor as I walk over and open it.

"Mr. Harshaw?" I ask.

The room is dominated by a wide desk made out of wood, its top inlaid with a rectangle of dyed, preserved skin cut from a large herbivore. The walls are paneled in wood and there are crude still pictures in frames hanging from hooks near the top, certificates and group portraits of men in dark suits shaking hands with each other. A borderline-senescent male in a dark suit, his head almost bereft of hair and his waistline expanding, sits behind the desk. He half rises as I enter, and extends a hand. Zombie? I wonder doubtfully.

"Hello, Reeve." He sounds relaxed and self-confident. "Won't you have a seat?"

"Sure." I take the chair on the other side of the desk and cross my legs, studying his face. Sure enough there's a slight flicker of attention—he's watching me, aware of my body—which means he's real. Zombies simply aren't programmed for that. "How come I haven't seen you in Church?" I ask.

"I'm on staff," he says easily. "Have a cigarette?" He gestures at one of the wooden boxes on his desk.

"Sorry, I don't smoke," I say, slightly stiffly. I hate the smell, but it's not as if it's harmful, is it?

"Good for you." He takes one, lights it, and inhales thoughtfully. "You asked about job vacancies yesterday. As it happens, we have one right now that would probably suit you—I took the liberty of looking through your records—but it specifically excludes smokers."

"Oh?" I raise an eyebrow. Mr. Harshaw the staffer isn't what I expected, to say the least; I was winding myself up to deal with a dumb zombie fronting a placement database.

"It's in the city library. You'd only be working three days a week, but you'd be putting in eleven-hour shifts. On the plus side, you'd be the trainee librarian there. On the minus side, the starting salary isn't particularly high."

"What does the job involve?" I ask.

"Library work." He shrugs. "Filing books in order. Keeping track of withdrawals and issuing overdue notices and collecting fines. Helping people find books and information they're looking for. Organizing the stacks and adding new titles as they come in. You'd be working under Janis from cohort one, who has been our librarian since the early days. She's going to be leaving, which is why we need to train up a replacement."

"Leaving?" I look at him oddly. "Why?"

"To have a baby," he says, and blows a perfect smoke ring up at the ceiling.

I don't understand what he's saying at first, the concept is so alien to me. "Why would she have to leave her job to—"

It's his turn to look at me oddly. "Because she's pregnant," he says.

For a moment the world seems to be spi

"Yes, she and Norm are very happy," Mr. Harshaw says, nodding enthusiastically. He looks satisfied with something. "We're all very happy for them, even if it means we do have to train up a new librarian."

"Well, I'd be happy to see, I mean, to try," I begin, flustered, wondering, Did she ask the medics to make her fertile? Or, a sneaking and horrible suspicion, Are we already fertile? I know menstruation was some kind of metabolic sign that went with being a prehistoric female, but I didn't really put it all together until now. Having a child is hard—you have to actively seek medical assistance—and having one grow inside your body is even harder. The idea that the orthohuman bodies they've put us in are so ortho that we could automatically generate random human beings if we have sex is absolutely terrifying. I don't think the dark ages medics had incubators, and if I got pregnant I might actually have to go through a live childbirth. In fact, if Sam and I had —"Excuse me, but where's the rest room?" I ask.