Glasshouse

I am absolutely certain that Sam has seen death before, up close and personal. He's at least three gigs old, he's been through memory surgery, he's experienced the psychopathic dissociation that comes with it, he's hung out with dueling fools like me in my postsurgery phase, and he's lived among pretech aliens for whom violent death and disease are all part of life's unpalatable banquet. But there's an enormous difference between the effects of a semiformal duel between consenting adults, with A-gate backups to make resurrection a minor headache, and cleaning up after a random act of senseless brutality in a Church parking lot.

Forget about no backups, no second chances, nobody coming home again scratching their heads and wondering what was in the two kiloseconds of their life that's just vanished. The difference is that it could have been you. Because, when you get down to it, the one thing you know for sure is that if the toad in the pulpit had got the wrong name, it would have been you up there in the branches, choking and twitching on the end of a rope. It could have been you. It wasn't, but that's nothing but an accident of fate. Sam's just back from the wars, and he's definitely got the message.

Maybe that's why we end up on the wooden bench on the back deck, me sitting up and him with his head in my lap, not crying like a baby but sobbing occasionally between gasping breaths. I'm stroking his hair and trying not to let it get to me either way—the jagged razor edge of sympathy, or the urge to tell him to pull himself together and get with the program. Judgment hurts, and he'll talk it out in his own way if I just lend him an ear. If not—

Well, I could have used a listener the other night, but I won't hold that against him.

"Greg rang while you were in the shed," he says eventually. "Asked if I'd help clean up. What I was saying this morning. Not letting them give me any shit. I figured part of that was, if I couldn't do anything at the time I could maybe do some good afterward." And he's off again, sobbing for about a minute.

When he stops, he manages to speak quietly and evenly, in thoughtful tones. It sounds as if he's explaining it to himself, trying to make sense of it. "I caught a taxi to Church. Greg told me to bring a shovel, so I did. I got there and Martin and Alf were there, along with Liz, Phil's—former wife. Mal is in hospital. He tried to stop them. They hurt him. The mob, I mean. There are other decent people here, but they're mostly too frightened to even help bury the bodies or comfort the widow."

"Widow." It's a new word in our little prison, like "pregnant" and "lynch mob." It's an equally unwelcome arrival. (Along with "mortal" if we stay here long enough, I guess.)

"Greg got a ladder from inside the Church hall, and Martin went up to cut down the bodies. Liz was very quiet when we got Phil down, but couldn't take it when he was lowering Esther. Luckily Xara showed up with a bottle of rye and sat with her. Then Greg and Martin and Alf and me started digging. Actually, we started on the spot, but Alf said it was Fiore's fault, and we should use the graveyard. So we did that, while Alf got some boards. I think we did it deep enough. None of us has ever done this before."

He goes silent for a long time. I stroke the hair back from the side of his face. "Twenty cycles," he says after a while.

"Seven months?"

"Without backups," he confirms.

It's a frightening amount of time to lose, that's for sure. Even more frightening is the fact that their last backups are locked up in the assembler firewall that isolates YFH-Polity from the outside world—while I'm not certain it's infected with Curious Yellow, I have my suspicions. (CY copies itself between A-gates via the infected victims' netlinks, doesn't it? And the suspiciously restricted functionality of our netlinks inside YFH worries me.) There might not be any older copies of Phil or Esther on file elsewhere. If that's the case, and if we can't phage-clean the infected nodes, we might lose them for good.

Sam is silent for a long time. We stay there on the bench as the light reddens and dims, and after a while I just rest my hands on his shoulder and watch the trees at the far end of the garden. Then, with absolutely no buildup, he murmurs, "I knew who you were almost from the begi

I stroke his cheek again, but don't say anything.

"I figured it out inside a week. You were spending all your time talking about this friend you were supposed to be looking out on the inside for. Cass, you thought."

I keep stroking, to calm myself as much as anything else.

"I think I was in shock at first. You seemed so dynamic and confident and self-possessed before—it was bad enough waking up in that room and finding I was this enormous bloated shambling thing, but then to see you like that, it really scared me. I thought at first I was wrong, but no. So I kept quiet."

I stop moving my hands around, leaving one on his shoulder and one beside his head.

"I nearly killed myself on the second day, but you didn't notice."

Shit. I blink. "I was dealing with my own problems," I manage to say.

"Yes, I can see that now." His voice is gentle, almost sleepy. "But I couldn't forgive you for a while. I've been here before, you know. Not here-here, but somewhere like here."

"The ice ghouls?" I ask, before I can stop myself.

"Yes." He tenses, then pushes himself upright. "A whole planet full of pre-Acceleration sapients who probably aren't going to make it without outside help because they took so long bootstrapping their techné that they ran out of easily accessible fossil fuels." He swings his legs round and sits upright, next to me but just too far away to touch. "Living and breeding and dying of old age and sometimes fighting wars and sometimes starving in famines and disasters and plagues."

"How long were you there, again?" I ask.

"Two gigs." He turns his head and looks straight at me. "I was part of a, a—I guess you'd call it a reproductive unit. A family. I was an ice ghoul, you know. I was there from late adolescence through to senescence, but rather than let them nurse me, I ran out onto the tundra and used my netlink to call for upload. Nearly left it too late. I was terminally ill and close to being nestridden." Sam looks distant. "All the pre-Acceleration tool-using sapients we've seen use K-type reproductive strategies. I'd outlived my partners, but I had three children, their assorted cis –mates and trans –mates, and more grandchildren than—"

He sighs.

"You seem to want me to know this," I say. "Are you sure about that?"

"I don't know." He looks at me. "I just wanted you to know who I am and where I come from." He looks down at the stones between his feet. "Not what I am now, which is a travesty. I feel dirty."

I stand up. He's gone on for long enough, I think. "Okay, so let me get this straight. You're a former xeno-ornithologist who got way too close to your subjects for your own emotional stability. You've got a bad case of body-image dysphoria that YFH failed to spot in their excuse for an entry questio

At this point I realize several things at once. I am really, really angry with him, although that's not all I feel by a long way, because it's not the kind of anger you feel at a stranger or an enemy. And while I've been working out like crazy and I'm in much better physical shape than I was when I came here, Sam is standing up, too, and he has maybe thirty centimeters and thirty kilos on me because he's male, and he's built like a tank. Maybe getting angry and yelling in the face of someone who's that much bigger than I and who's shocky right now from repeated bad experiences isn't a very wise thing to do, but I don't care.