Glasshouse

"It's the second door through there, on the left." Mr. Harshaw smiles to himself as I make a dash for it. He's still smiling five minutes later as I make my way back into his office, forcing my face into a maskof composure, refusing to acknowledge the stomach cramps that took me to the stalls. "Are you all right?" he asks.

"I am, now," I say. "I'm sorry about that, must be something I ate."

"It's perfectly all right. If you'd like to come with me, perhaps we can visit the library and I can introduce you to Janis, see if you get along?"

I nod, and we head out front to catch a taxi. I think I'm doing pretty well for someone who's just had her worldview turned upside down and whacked on with a hammer. How long does a neonate take to grow, about thirty megs? It puts a whole new face on the experiment. I have a sinking sense that I must have implicitly agreed to this. Somewhere buried in the small print of the release I signed there'll be some clause that can be interpreted as saying that I consent to be made fertile and if necessary to become pregnant and bring to term an infant in the course of the study. It's the sort of shitty trick that Fiore and his friends would delight in slipping past us while we're vulnerable.

After a few minutes I realize that the oversight we were promised by an independent ethics committee isn't worth a bucket of warm—whatever. The extreme scenario would be for us females to all get pregnant and deliver infants, in which case the experimenters are going to be responsible for the care of about a hundred babies, none of whom gave their consent to be raised in a simulated dark ages environment without access to decent medical care, education, or socialization. Any responsible ethics oversight committee would shit a brick if you suggested ru

I'm thinking these thoughts as Mr. Harshaw tells our zombie driver to take us to the municipal library. The library is in a part of town I haven't visited before, on the same block as City Hall and what Mr. Harshaw points out to me as the police station. "Police station?" I ask, looking blank.

"Yes, where the police hang out." He looks at me as if I'm very slightly mad.

"I would have thought the crime rate here was too low to need a real police force," I say.

"So far it is," he replies, with a smile I can't interpret. "But things are changing."

The library is a low brick building, with a glass facade opening onto a reception area, and turnstiles leading into a couple of big rooms full of shelves. There are books—bound sheaves of dumb paper—on all the shelves, and there are a lot of shelves. In fact, I've never seen so many books in my life. It's ironic, really. My netlink could bring a million times as much information to me on a whim, if it was working. But in the informationally impoverished society we're restricted to, these rows of dead trees represent the total wealth of available human knowledge. Static, crude scratchings are all we're to be permitted, it seems. "Who can access these?" I ask.

"I'll leave it to Janis to explain the procedures," he says, ru

JANIS is ski

"I'm so glad you're here," she tells me, clasping her hands. "Tea? Or coffee? We've got both"—there's an electric kettle in the corner and she switches it on—"but someone's going to have to run out and fetch some milk soon." She sighs. "This is the staff room. When there's nobody about, you can take your breaks here or go out for lunch—we close between noon and one o'clock—and there's also a terminal into the library computer." She points at a boxy device not unlike a baby television set, co

"The library has a computer?" I say, intrigued. "Can't I just use my netlink?"

Janis flushes, her cheeks turning pink. "I'm afraid not," she apologizes. "They make us use them just like the ancients would have, through a keyboard and screen."

"But I thought none of the ancient thinking machines survived, except in emulation. How do we know what its physical manifestation looked like?"

"I'm not sure." Janis looks thoughtful. "Do you know, I hadn't thought of that? I've got no idea how they designed it! It's probably buried in the experimental protocol somewhere—the nonclassified bits are all online, if you want to go looking. But listen, we don't have time for that now." The kettle boils, and she busies herself for a minute pouring hot water into two mugs full of instant coffee granules. I study her indirectly while her back's turned. There's not much sign of her pregnancy yet, although I think there might be a slight bulge around her waist—her dress is cut so that it's hard to tell. "First, I want to get you started on how the front desk works, on the lending side. We've got to keep track of who's borrowed what books, and when they're due back, and it's the easiest thing to start you on. So"—she hands me a coffee mug—"how much do you know about library work?"

I learn over the course of the morning that "library work" covers such an enormous area of information management that back during the dark ages, before libraries became self-organizing constructs, people used to devote their entire (admittedly short) lives to studying the theory of how best to manage them. Neither Janis—nor I—is remotely qualified to be a real dark age librarian, with their esoteric mastery ofcatalogue systems and controlled information classification vocabularies, but we can run a small municipal lending library and reference section with a bit of scurrying around and a lot of patience. I seem to have some historic skills in that direction, and unlike my experience with arc welding, I haven't erased all of them. I can remember my alphabet and grasp the decimal classification scheme immediately, and the way each book has a ticket in an envelope inside the front cover that has to be retained when it's loaned out makes sense, too . . .

It's only by midafternoon, when we've taken a grand total of five returns and had one visitor who borrowed two books (on Aztec culture and the care and feeding of carnivorous plants), that I begin to wonder why YFH-Polity needs anything as exotic as a full-time librarian.

"I don't know," Janis admits over a cup of tea in the staff room, her feet stretched out under the rickety white-painted wooden table. "It can get a bit busy—wait until six o'clock, when most people are on their way home from work, that's when we get most of our borrowers—but really, they don't need me. A zombie could do the job perfectly well." She looks pensive. "I suspect it's more to do with finding employment for people who ask for it. It's one of the drawbacks of the entire experiment. We don't exist in a closed-circuit economy, and if they don't constantly provide jobs for people, it'll all fall apart. So what we're left with is a situation where they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. At least until they merge the parishes."