Concentrating on making the key and thinking about how much I am beginning to hate them is a good way for me to avoid confronting what happened outside the Church this morning. Itas also a good distraction from the wall I walked into in my head, or the door in the tunnel, or any of the other troubling s.h.i.t thatas happened since I woke up this morning and thought it was going to be just another boring Sunday.

After what feels like a few infinitely tense minutesa"but the lying clock insists itas been the best part of four hoursa"I emerge from the garage. The hot morning sunlight has softened into a roseate afternoon glow, and insects creak beneath a turquoise sky. It looks like Iave missed an idyllic summer afternoon. I feel shaky, tired, and very hungry indeed. Iam also sweating like a pig, and I probably stink. Thereas no sign of Sam, so I go indoors and hit the bathroom, dump my clothes and dial the shower up to a cool deluge until it washes everything away.

When I get out of the shower I rummage around in my wardrobe until I find a sundress, then head downstairs with the vague idea of sorting out something to eat. A microwave dinner perhaps, to eat on the rear deck while the illusory sun sets. Instead, I run into Sam coming in through the front door. He looks haggard.

aWhereave you been?a I ask. aI was going to sort out some food.a aIave been with Martin and Greg and Alf, down at the churchyard.a I look at him, closer. His shirt is sweat-stained, and thereas dirt under his fingernails. aDoing the burying.a aBurying?a For a moment I donat get what heas talking about, then it clicks into place and I feel dizzy, as if the whole worldas revolving around my head. aThea"you should have told me.a aYou were busy.a He shrugs dismissively.

I peer at him, concerned. aYou look tired. Why donat you go have a shower? Iall fix you some food.a He shakes his head. aIam not hungry.a aYes you are.a I take hold of his right arm and lead him toward the kitchen. aYou didnat eat any lunch unless you sneaked a snack while I wasnat looking, and itas getting late.a I take a deep breath. aHow bad was it?a aIt wasa"a He stops and takes a deep breath. aIt wasa"a He stops again. Then he bursts into tears.

I am absolutely certain that Sam has seen death before, up close and personal. Heas at least three gigs old, heas been through memory surgery, heas experienced the psychopathic dissociation that comes with it, heas hung out with dueling fools like me in my postsurgery phase, and heas lived among pretech aliens for whom violent death and disease are all part of lifeas unpalatable banquet. But thereas 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, n.o.body coming home again scratching their heads and wondering what was in the two kiloseconds of their life thatas 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 wasnat, but thatas nothing but an accident of fate. Samas just back from the wars, and heas definitely got the message.

Maybe thatas 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. Iam stroking his hair and trying not to let it get to me either waya"the jagged razor edge of sympathy, or the urge to tell him to pull himself together and get with the program. Judgment hurts, and heall talk it out in his own way if I just lend him an ear. If nota"

Well, I could have used a listener the other night, but I wonat hold that against him.

aGreg rang while you were in the shed,a he says eventually. aAsked if Iad help clean up. What I was saying this morning. Not letting them give me any s.h.i.t. I figured part of that was, if I couldnat do anything at the time I could maybe do some good afterward.a And heas off again, sobbing for about a minute.

When he stops, he manages to speak quietly and evenly, in thoughtful tones. It sounds as if heas explaining it to himself, trying to make sense of it. aI 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, Philasa"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 theyare mostly too frightened to even help bury the bodies or comfort the widow.a aWidow.a Itas a new word in our little prison, like apregnanta and alynch mob.a Itas an equally unwelcome arrival. (Along with amortala if we stay here long enough, I guess.) aGreg 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 couldnat 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 Fioreas 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.a He goes silent for a long time. I stroke the hair back from the side of his face. aTwenty cycles,a he says after a while.

aSeven months?a aWithout backups,a he confirms.

Itas a frightening amount of time to lose, thatas for sure. Even more frightening is the fact that their last backups are locked up in the a.s.sembler firewall that isolates YFH-Polity from the outside worlda"while Iam not certain itas infected with Curious Yellow, I have my suspicions. (CY copies itself between A-gates via the infected victimsa netlinks, doesnat 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 thatas the case, and if we canat 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, aI knew who you were almost from the beginning.a I stroke his cheek again, but donat say anything.

aI 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. Ca.s.s, you thought.a I keep stroking, to calm myself as much as anything else.

aI think I was in shock at first. You seemed so dynamic and confident and self-possessed beforea"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.a I stop moving my hands around, leaving one on his shoulder and one beside his head.

aI nearly killed myself on the second day, but you didnat notice.a s.h.i.t. I blink. aI was dealing with my own problems,a I manage to say.

aYes, I can see that now.a His voice is gentle, almost sleepy. aBut I couldnat forgive you for a while. Iave been here before, you know. Not here-here, but somewhere like here.a aThe ice ghouls?a I ask, before I can stop myself.

aYes.a He tenses, then pushes himself upright. aA whole planet full of pre-Acceleration sapients who probably arenat going to make it without outside help because they took so long bootstrapping their techn that they ran out of easily accessible fossil fuels.a He swings his legs round and sits upright, next to me but just too far away to touch. aLiving and breeding and dying of old age and sometimes fighting wars and sometimes starving in famines and disasters and plagues.a aHow long were you there, again?a I ask.

aTwo gigs.a He turns his head and looks straight at me. aI was part of a, aa"I guess youad 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.a Sam looks distant. aAll the pre-Acceleration tool-using sapients weave seen use K-type reproductive strategies. Iad outlived my partners, but I had three children, their a.s.sorted cis-mates and trans-mates, and more grandchildren thana"a He sighs.

aYou seem to want me to know this,a I say. aAre you sure about that?a aI donat know.a He looks at me. aI just wanted you to know who I am and where I come from.a He looks down at the stones between his feet. aNot what I am now, which is a travesty. I feel dirty.a I stand up. Heas gone on for long enough, I think. aOkay, so let me get this straight. Youare a former xeno-ornithologist who got way too close to your subjects for your own emotional stability. Youave got a bad case of body-image dysphoria that YFH failed to spot in their excuse for an entry questionnaire, youare good at deniala"self and othera"and youare a pathetic failure at suicide.a I stare at him. aWhat am I missing?a I grab his hands: aWhat am I missing?a I shout at him.

At this point I realize several things at once. I am really, really angry with him, although thatas not all I feel by a long way, because itas not the kind of anger you feel at a stranger or an enemy. And while Iave been working out like crazy and Iam 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 heas male, and heas built like a tank. Maybe getting angry and yelling in the face of someone whoas that much bigger than I and whoas shocky right now from repeated bad experiences isnat a very wise thing to do, but I donat care.

a* * *,a he mumbles.

aWhat?a I state at him. aWould you care to repeat that?a a* * *,a he says, so quietly I canat hear it over the noise of the blood pounding in my ears. aThatas why I didnat kill myself.a I shake my head. aI donat think Iam hearing you properly.a He glares at me. aWho do you think you are?a he demands.

aDepends. I was a historian, a long time ago. Then there were the wars, and I was a soldier. Then I became the kind of soldier who needs a historianas training, then I lost my memory.a Iam glaring right back at him. aNow Iam a ditzy, ineffectual housewife and part-time librarian, okay? But Iall tell you thisa"one day Iam going to be a soldier again.a aBut those are all externals! Theyare not you. You wonat tell me anything! Where do you come from? Did you ever have a family? What happened to them?a He looks anxious, and suddenly I realize heas afraid of me. Afraid? Of me? I take a step back. And then I register what my face probably looks like right now, and itas like all my blood is replaced with ice water of an instant, because his question has dredged up a memory that was, I think, one of the ones my earlier self deliberately forgot before the surgery, because he knew it would surface again and forgetting it hurt but knowing it might be erased by crude surgical intervention was even worse. And I sit down hard on the bench and look away from him because I donat want to see his sympathy.

aThey all died in the war,a I hear myself saying woodenly. aAnd I donat want to talk about it.a WHEN I sleep, another horror story dredges itself up from my suppressed memories and comes to visit. This time I know itas genuine and true and really happened to me, and thereas nothing I can do to change it in any detaila"because thatas what makes it so nightmarish.

The ending has already been written, and it is not a happy one.

In the dream, I am a gracile male orthohuman with long, flowing green hair and what my partners describe as a delightful laugh. I am a lot youngera"barely three gigsa"and Iam also happy, at least at first. Iam in a stable family relationship with three other core partners, plus various occasional liaisons with five or six f.u.c.kbuddies. Weare fully bis.e.xual, either naturally or via a limbic system mod copied from bon.o.bos. My family has two children, and weare thinking about starting another two in half a gig or so. Iam also lucky enough to have a vocation, researching the history of the theory of minda"an aspect of cultural ideology that only became important after the Acceleration, and which goes in and out of fashion, but which I hold to be critically important. The history of my field, for example, tells us that for almost a gigasecond during the old-style twenty-third century, most of humanity-in-exile were zimboes, quasi-conscious drones operating under the aegis of an overmind. How that happened and how the cognitive dictatorship was broken is something Iam studying with considerable interest and not a few field trips to old memory temples.

One of these visits is the reason I am not at home with my family when Curious Yellow comes howling out of nowhere to erase large chunks of history, taking with it an entire interstellar civilization, and (to make things personal) my family.

Iam visiting a Mobile Archive Sucker in the full physical flesh when Curious Yellow first appears. The MASucker is a lumbering starship, effectively a mobile cylinder habitat, powered by plasma piped from the interior of a distant A0 supergiant via T-gate. It wallows along at low relativistic speeds between brown dwarf star systems, which in this part of the galaxy are s.p.a.ced less than a pa.r.s.ec apart. During the multigigasecond intervals between close encounters, the crew retreats into template-frozen backup, reincarnating from the shipas a.s.semblers whenever things get interesting. The ship is largely self-sufficient and self-maintaining (apart from its stellar tap, and a tightly firewalled T-gate to the premises of the research inst.i.tute that created it centuries ago). Its internal systems are entirely offnet from the polity at large because itas designed for a mission duration of up to a terasecond, and it was envisaged from the start that civilization would probably collapse at least once within the working life of the ship. Thatas why Iave come out here in person to interview Vecken, the shipas Kapitan, who lived shortly after the cognitive dictatorship and may have recollections of some of the survivors.

Now hereas a curious thing: I canat remember their faces. I remember that Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual were not simply important to me, not just lovers, but in a very real way defined who I was. A large chunk of my sense of ident.i.ty was configured around this key idea that I wasnat solitary: that I was part of a group, that wead collectively adjusted our neuroendocrinology so that just being around the others gave us a mild endorphin rusha"what used to be a haphazard process called afalling in loveaa"and wead focused on complementary interests and skills and vocations. It wasnat so much a family as a superorganism, and it was a fulfilling, blissful state of affairs. I think I may have had a lonely earlier life, but I donat remember much of that because I guess it paled into insignificance in comparison.

But I canat remember their faces, and even nowa"a lifetime after the grief has ebbeda"that bugs me.

Neual was quick with hands and feet, taking slyly sarcastic delight in winding me up. Lauro had perfect manners but lost it when making love with us. Iambic-18 was a radical xenomorph, sometimes manifesting in more than one body at the same time when the fancy took it. Our children . . .

Are all dead, and it is unquestionably my fault. The nature of Curious Yellow is that it propagates stealthily between A-gates, creating a peer-to-peer network that exchanges stegged instructions using people as data packets. If you have the misfortune to be infected, it installs its kernel in your netlink, and when you check into an A-gate for backup or transporta"which proceeds through your netlinka"CY is the first thing to hit the gateas memory buffer. A-gate control nodes are supposedly designed so that they canat execute data, but whoever invented CY obviously found a design flaw in the standard architecture. People who have been disa.s.sembled and rea.s.sembled by the infected gates infect fresh A-gates as they travel. CY uses people as a disease vector.

The original CY infection that hit the Republic of Is installed a payload that was designed to redact historical information surrounding some eventa"Iam not sure what, but I suspect itas an aftershock left by the destruction of one of the old cognitive dictatorshipsa"by editing people as they pa.s.sed through infected gates. But it only activated once the infection had spread across the entire network. So Curious Yellow appeared everywhere with shocking abruptness, after spreading silently for hundreds of megasecs.

In my memory-dream, I am taking tea in the bridge of the Grateful for Duration, which in that time takes the form of a temple to a lake kami from old Nippon. Iam sitting cross-legged opposite Septima (the shipas curator) and waiting for Kapitan Vecken to arrive. As I spool through some questions I stored offline, my netlink hiccups. Thereas a cache-coherency error, it seemsa"the shipas T-gate has just shut down.

aIs something going on?a I ask Septima. aIave just been offlined.a aMight be.a Septima looks irritated. aIall ask someone to investigate.a She stares right through me, a reminder that there are three or four other copies of this strange old archivist wandering the concentric cylinder habs of the ship.

She blinks rapidly. aIt appears to be a security alert. Some sort of intruder just hit our transcription airgap. If you wait here a moment, Iall go and find out whatas going on.a She walks over toward the door of the teahouse and, as far as I can reconstruct later, this is the precise moment, when a swarm of eighteen thousand three hundred and twenty-nine wasp-sized attack robots erupt from the a.s.sembler in my familyas home. We live in an ancient dwelling patterned on a lost house of old Urth called Fallingwater, a conservative design from before the Acceleration. There are doors and staircases and windows in this house, but no internal T-gates that can be closed, and the robots rapidly overpower Iambic-18, who is in the kitchen with the gate.

They deconstruct Iambic-18 so rapidly there is no time for a scream of pain or pulse of netlinked agony. Then they fan out through the house in a malignant buzzing fog, bringing rapid death. A brief spray of blood here and a scream cut short there. The household a.s.sembler has been compromised by Curious Yellow, our backups willfully erased to make room for the wasps of tyranny, and, although I donat know it yet, my life has been gracelessly cut loose from everything that gave it meaning.

After the executions, they eat the physical bodies and excrete more robot parts, ready to self-a.s.semble into further attack swarms that will continue the hunt for enemies of Curious Yellow.

I know about this now because Curious Yellow kept logs of all the somatic kills it made. n.o.body knows why Curious Yellow did thisa"one theory is that it is a report for CYas creatorsa"but I have watched the terahertz radar map of the security wasps eating my family and my children so many times that it is burned into my mind. Iam one of the rare survivors among the millions targeted as somatic enemies, to be destroyed rather than edited. And now itas as if Iam watching it again for the first time, reliving the horror that made me plead with the Linebarger Cats to take me in and turn me into a tank. (But that was half a gigasecond later, when the Grateful for Duration made contact with one of the isolated redoubts of the resistance.) I realize Iam awake, and itas still nighttime. My cheeks itch from the salty tracks of tears shed in my sleep, and Iam curled up in an uncomfortable position, close to one edge of the bed. Thereas an arm around my waist, and a breathing breeze on the back of my neck. For a moment I canat work it out, but then it begins to make sense to me. aIam awake now,a I murmur.

aOh. Good.a He sounds sleepy. How long has he been here? I went to bed alonea"I feel a momentary stab of panic at the thought that heas here uninvited, but I donat want to be alone. Not now.

aWere you asleep?a I ask.

He yawns. aMust have. Dozed off.a His arm tenses, and I tense, too, and push myself back toward the curve of his chest and legs. aYou were unhappy.a aWhat I didnat tell you earlier.a And Iam still not sure itas a good idea to tell him. aMy family. Curious Yellow killed them.a aWhat? But Curious Yellow didnat kill, it editeda"a aNot everyone.a I lean against him. aMost people it edited. Some of us it hunted down and murdered. The ones who might have been able to work out who made it, I think.a aI didnat know that.a aNot many people do. You were either directly affected, in which case you were probably dead, or it happened to someone else, and you were busy rebuilding your life and trying to make your struggling firewalled micropolity work without all the external inputs provided by the rest of Is-ness. A gig after the end of the war it was old news.a aBut not for you.a I can feel Samas tension through his arm around me.

aLook, Iam tired, and I donat want to revisit it. Old pains, all right?a I try and relax against the side of his body. aIave become a creature of solitary habits. Didnat do to get too close to anyone during the war, and since then, havenat had the opportunity.a His breathing is deep and even. Maybe heas already asleep. I close my eyes and try to join him, but it takes me a long time to drift off. I canat help wondering how badly he must have been missing contact with another human being, to share my bed again.

11.

Buried.

MONDAY is a working day, and itas also usually a lunch date, but Iam not about to break bread with Jen after yesterdayas events. I head for work with the bra.s.s key hidden in my security bag. Once inside I rip into the filing and cleaning immediately. Itas midmorning before I realize that Janis hasnat arrived yet.

I hope sheas all right. I donat remember seeing her yesterday, but if sheas heard about what happeneda"well, I donat know how close to the victims she was, but I can only imagine what she must be going through if she knew them well. She was feeling ill a couple of days agoa"how is she now?

I head for the front desk. Business is dead today, and I havenat had a single visitor, so I have no qualms about flipping the sign on the door to CLOSED for a while. In the staff room thereas a file of administrative stuff, and after leafing through it for a bit, I find Janisas home number. I dial it, and after a worryingly long time someone answers the telephone.

aJanis?a Her voice sounds tired, even through the distortion the telephone link seems to be designed to add. aReeve, is that you?a aYes. I was getting worried about you. Are you all right?a aIave been sick today. And to tell the truth, I didnat feel like coming in. Do you mind?a I look around. aNo, the place is dead as aa"a I stop myself just in time. aListen, why donat you take a couple of days off? You were going to be leaving in a couple of months anyway, thereas no point overdoing it. If you want, Iall drop round with some books on my next day off, day after tomorrow. How about that?a aThat sounds great,a she says gratefully, and after a bit more chat I hang up.

Iam just shifting the CLOSED sign back to OPEN when a long black limousine draws up at the curb outside. I manage a sharp intake of breatha"Whatas Fiore doing here today?a"before the Priest gets out, and then, uncharacteristically, holds the door open for someone else. Someone wearing a purple dress and a skullcap. I realize exactly who it must bea"the Bishop: Yourdon.

The Bishop turns out to be as cadaverously thin and tall as Fiore is squat and bulbous. A stork and a toad. Thereas a peculiarly sallow cast to his skin, and his cheekbones stand out like blades. He wears spectacles with thick hornlike rectangular frames, and his hair hugs his scalp in lank swatches the color of rotten ivory. He strides forward, skeletal-looking hands writhing together, as Fiore b.u.mbles along huffing and puffing to keep up in his wake. aI say, I say!a Fiore calls. aPleasea"a The Bishop pushes the library door open, then pauses. His eyes are a very pale blue, with slightly yellowish whites, and his gaze is icily contemptuous. aYouave f.u.c.ked up before, Fiore,a he hisses. aI do wish youad keep your little masturbatory fantasies to yourself in future.a Then he turns round to face me.

ah.e.l.lo?a I force a smile.

He looks at me as if Iam a machine. aI am Bishop Yourdon. Please take me to the doc.u.ment repository.a aAh, yes, certainly.a I hurry out from behind the desk and wave him toward the back.

Fiore harrumphs and breathes heavily as he waddles after us, but Yourdon moves with bony grace, as if all his joints have been replaced with well-lubricated bearings. Something about him makes me shudder. The look he gave Fiorea"I canat remember having seen such an expression of pure contempt on a human face in a very long time. I lead them to the room; the Grim Reaper stalking along behind me in angry silence, followed by a b.u.mbling oleaginous toad.

I stand aside as we reach the reference section, and Fiore fumbles with his keys, visibly wilting under Yourdonas fuming gaze. He gets the door open and darts inside. Yourdon pauses, and fixes me with an ice-water stare. aWe are not to be disturbed,a he informs me, afor any reason whatsoever. Do you understand?a I nod vigorously. aI, Iall be at the front desk if you need me.a My teeth are nearly chattering. What is it with this guy? Iave met misanthropes before, but Yourdon is something special.

Fiore and the Bishop hang out in the archive, doing whatever it is they do in there for almost three hours. At a couple of points I hear raised voices, Fioreas unctuous pleading followed by the Bishop hissing back at him like an angry snake. I sit behind the desk, forcing myself not to look over my shoulder every ten seconds, and try to read a book about the history of witch-hunts in preindustrial Europa and Merka. It contains disturbing echoes of whatas going on here, communities fractured into mutually mistrustful factions that compete to denounce one another to greedy spiritual authorities drunk on temporal power. However, I find it hard to concentrate while the snake and the toad in the back room are making noises like theyare trying to sting each other to death.

Itas well into my normal lunch hour when Fiore and Yourdon surface. Fiore looks subdued and resentful. Yourdon appears to be in a better mood, but if this is his good humor, Iad hate to see him when heas angry. When he smiles he looks like a skull someoneas stretched a sheet of skin over, colorless lips peeling back from yellowing teeth in a grin completely bereft of amus.e.m.e.nt. aYouad better get back to work then,a he calls to Fiore as he strides past my desk without so much as a nod in my direction. aYouave got a lot of lost headway to make up.a Then he barges out through the front door as the long black limousine cruises round the edge of the block, ready to convey its master back to his usual haunts.

A few minutes later Fiore b.u.mbles past me with a sullen glare. aIall be round tomorrow,a he mutters, then stomps out the door. No limousine for the Priest, who staggers off on foot in the noonday heat. My, how the mighty are fallen!

I watch him until heas out of sight, then walk over and flip the sign on the door to CLOSED. Then I lock up and take a deep breath. I wasnat expecting this to happen today, but itas too good an opportunity to miss. I go fetch my bag from the staff room, then head for the repository.

Itas time for the moment of truth. Less than a hundred seconds after Fiore left the building, I slide the laboriously copied key into the lock. My heart is pounding as I turn it. For a moment it refuses to budge, but I jiggle ita"the teeth arenat quite engaging with the pinsa"and something falls into position and it squeals slightly and gives way. I push the door wide, then reach for the light switch.

Iam in a small room with no windows, no chairs, no tables, one bare electric bulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling, bookshelves on three walls, and a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.

aWhat is this s.h.i.t?a I ask aloud, looking round.

There are box files on all the shelves, ma.s.ses of box files. But there are no t.i.tles on the spines of the boxes, just serial numbers. Everythingas dusty except the trapdoor, which has been opened recently. I inhale, then nearly go cross-eyed trying not to sneeze. If this is Fioreas idea of housekeeping, itas no wonder Yourdon was p.i.s.sed at him.

I look at the nearest shelf and pull down one of the files at random. Thereas a b.u.t.ton catch and I open it to find itas full of paper, yellowing sheets of the stuff, machine-smooth, columns of hexadecimal numbers printed in rows of dumb ink. Thereas a sequence number at the top of each sheet, and it takes me a few seconds to figure out what Iam looking at. Itas a serialized mind map, what the ancients would have called a ahex dump.a Pages and pages of it. The box file probably holds about five hundred sheets. If all the others I see contain more of this stuff, then Iam probably looking at about a hundred thousand sheets, each containing maybe ten thousand characters. Whatever is stored in this incredibly inefficient serial medium, it isnat very biga"about the same size as a small mammalas genome, maybe, once you squeeze out all the redundant exons. Itas three or four orders of magnitude too small to be a map of a human being.

I shake my head and put the box file back. From the level of dust on top of it, it hasnat been touched for quite a time. I donat know what this stuff is, but it isnat what Fiore and Yourdon came here to look at. Which leaves the trapdoor.

I bend down and grab the bra.s.s ring, then lift. The wooden slab hinges up at the back, and I see a flight of steps leading down. Theyare carpeted, and there are wooden handrails to either side. Okay, so thereas a secret bas.e.m.e.nt under the library, I tell myself, trying not to giggle with fear. What have I been working on top of?

Of course I go downstairs. After what Fiore did to Phil and Esther, Iam probably dead if they find me in the repository. Taking the next step is a logical progression, nothing more.

The steps go down into twilight, but they donat go down very far. The floor is three meters below the trapdoor, and thereas a light switch on the rail at the bottom. I flick it and glance around.

Guess what? Iam not in the dark ages anymore.

If I was still in the dark ages, this would be a musty bas.e.m.e.nt with brick walls and wooden lath ceiling, or maybe poured concrete and steel beams. They werenat big on structural diamond back then, and their floors didnat grow zebrastripe fur, and they used short-lived electrical bulbs instead of surfacing their ceilings with fluorescent paint. Thereas a very retro-looking lounger in a mode that Iam sure went out of fashion some time between the end of the Oort colonial era and the first of the conservationista republics, and some weird black-resin chairs that look like the skeletons of insects, if insects grew four meters tall and supported themselves with endoskeletons. Hmm. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, if Yourdon and Fiore were having a knockdown shouting match in here with the hatch open, I might just about have heard it at the front desk.

The other items in the bas.e.m.e.nt are a lot more disconcerting.

For starters, thereas something that I am almost certain is a full military A-gate. Itas a stubby cylinder about two meters high and two meters in diameter, its sh.e.l.l slick with the white opacity of carbonitrile armor. Thereas a ruggedized control workstation next to it, perched on a rough wooden plintha"you use those things in the field when youare operating under emission control, to make field expedient whatever it is you need in order to save your a.s.s. Got plutonium? Got nuke. Not that Iave got the authentication ackles to switch the thing ona"if I mess with it Iall probably set off about a billion alarmsa"but its presence here is as incongruous as a biplane in the bronze age.

For seconds, the walls are lined with racks of shelving bearing various pieces of equipment. Thereas what Iam fairly certain is a generator pack for a Vorpal sword, like the one on the Church altar. That brings back unpleasant memories, because I remember those swords and what you can do with thema"blood fountaining out into a room where the headless corpses are already stacked like cordwood beside the evacuation gatea"and it makes me feel nauseous. I take a quick breath, then I look at the shelves on the other side of the room. There are lots of them, some of them stacked with the quaint rectangular bricks of high-density storage, but most of the s.p.a.ce is given over to ring binders full of paper. This time, instead of serial numbers on the spines, there are old-fashioned human-readable t.i.tles, although they donat mean much to me. Like Revised Zimbardo Study Protocol 4.0, and Church Scale Moral Delta Coefficients, and Extended Host Selection Criteriaa"

Host selection criteria? I pull that one off the shelf and begin reading. An indeterminate time later I shake myself and put it back. I feel dirty, somehow contaminated. I really wish I didnat understand what it said, but Iam afraid I do, and now Iam going to have to figure out what to do with the knowledge.

I stare at the A-gate, speculating. Thereas a very good chance that itas not infected with Curious Yellow, because they wouldnat want to risk infecting themselves. But it still wonat help me escape, and it probably wonat work for me anyway unless I can hold a metaphorical gun to Fioreas head, threaten him with something even more frightening than the prospect of Yourdonas revengea"and if Iave got the measure of Yourdon, any revenge head bother to carry out would truly be a worse fate than death.

s.h.i.t. I need to think about this some more. But at least Iave got until tomorrow, when Fiore returns.

BUSINESS is dead, literally dead. After I go back up top and lock the repository, I flip the door sign to OPEN and sit at the front desk for a couple of hours, waiting tensely to see if the zombies are going to come and drag me off to prison. But nothing happens. I havenat tripped any alarms by my choice of lunchtime reading matter. With hindsight itas not too surprising. If thereas one place Fiore and Yourdon and the mysterious Hanta wonat want under surveillance, itas wherever theyare hiding their experimental tools. Their kind doesnat thrive in the scrutiny of the panopticon. Which, as it happens, gives me an idea.

Midway through the afternoon I lock up for half an hour and hit the nearest electronics shop for a useful gadget. Then I spend a nervous hour installing it in the cellar. Afterward, I feel smug. If it works, itall serve Fiore and Yourdon right for being overconfidenta"and for making this crazy simulation too realistic.

Business is so dead that I go home half an hour early. Itas a warm summer evening, and Iave got about two kilometers to walk. I barely see anyone. There are some park attendants out mowing the gra.s.s, but no ordinary folks. Did I miss a holiday or something? I donat know. I put one foot in front of the other until I hit the road out of the town center, follow it down into a short stretch of tunnel, then back into daylight and a quiet residential street with trees and a lazy, almost stagnant creek off to one side.

I hear voices and catch a faint smell of cooking food from one of the houses as I walk past. People are homea"I havenat mysteriously been abandoned all on my own. What a shame. I briefly fantasize that the academicians of the Scholastium have figured out that all is not well in YFH-Polity and arrived to evacuate all of us inmates while I waited behind the library counter. Itas a nice daydream.

Pretty soon I come to the next road tunnel linking hab segments. This time I pull out a flashlight as I pa.s.s out of sight of the entrance. Yes, just as I guesseda"thereas a recessed doorlike panel in one wall of the tunnel. I pull out a notepad and add it to my list. Iam slowly building up a map of the interrelated segments. It looks like a cyclic directed graph, and thatas exactly what it is, a network of nodes connected by lines representing roads with T-gates along their length. Now Iam adding in the maintenance hatches.

You canat actually see a T-gatea"itas just that one moment youare in one sector and the next moment youave walked through an invisible brane and youare in another sectora"but the positioning of the hatches can probably tell me something if Iam just smart enough to figure it out. Ditto the order of the network: if itas left-handed or right-handed, or if thereas a Hamiltonian path through it. In the degenerate case, there may be no T-gates at all; this might actually be a single hab cylinder, divided up by bulkheads that can be sealed against loss of pressure. Or all the sectors may be in different places, pa.r.s.ecs apart. Iam trying to avoid making a.s.sumptions. If you donat search with open eyes, you risk missing things.

I get home at about my usual time, tense and nervous but also curiously relieved. Whatas done is done. Tomorrow Fiore will either notice my meddling, or he wonat. (Or with any luck heall a.s.sume Yourdon did it, which I think is equally likely. Thereas no love lost between those two, and if I play my cards right, I can exploit their division.) Either way I should learn something. If I donat . . . well, I know too much to stop now. If they knew how much Iave figured out about their little game, theyad kill me immediately. No messing, no ritual humiliation in front of the score wh.o.r.es in Church, just a rapid brainsuck and termination. Fioreas playing with fire.

Sam is in the living room, watching TV. I tiptoe past him and head upstairs, badly in need of a shower. When I get to my room I shed my clothes, then go back to the bathroom and turn the water on, meaning to wash todayas stresses away.

Seconds after I get in I hear footsteps, then the bathroom door opening. aReeve?a aYeah, itas me,a I call.

aNeed to talk. Urgently.a aAfter I finish,a I say, nettled. aCanat it wait?a aI suppose.a Small torments add up; Iam now in a thoroughly bad mood. Whatas life coming to, when I canat even take a shower without interruption? I soap myself down methodically then wash my hair, taking care to rub the inefficient surfactant gel into my scalp. After a couple of minutes of rinsing, I turn off the water and open the door to reach for my towel, to be confronted by a surprised-looking Sam.

aPa.s.s me the bath sheet,a I tell him, trying to make the best of things. He complies hastily. Months of living in this goldfish bowl society have done strange things to my body-sense, and I feel surprisingly awkward about being naked in front of him. I think he feels it, too. aWhatas so important?a I step out of the shower as he holds the towel for me.

aPhone call,a he mumbles, trying to look awaya"his eyes keep drifting back toward me.

aUh-huh. Who from?a He folds me in the towel as if Iam a delicate treasure heas trying not to touch. I shiver and try to ignore it.

aFrom Fer. He and El, theyave heard something bad from Mick, and theyare talking about sorting it out.a aBad.a I try to concentrate. The water on my skin is suddenly cold. aWhat kind of bad?a aItas Ca.s.s, I think.a I tense up inside. aMick gave them some crazy story about hearing from Fiore. Said the Priest told him that one of the rules in here is, what was it, abe fruitful and exponentiate.a That you can get a gigantic score bonus for having children.a aThatas not good,a I say carefully, abut it might just be Mick acting in character.a aWell, yes, thatas what Fer said, but then Mick told El he was going to get that bonus whether or not Ca.s.s wanted it.a He sounds apprehensive. aEl wasnat sure what that meant.a My mind races. aCa.s.s wasnat at Church yesterday, Sam. Last time I saw her she wouldnat talka"she seemed afraid.a I have a nasty feeling that I know whatas going on. I really donat want it to be true.

aYes, well, Fer called me when El told him Mick had made some kind of joke about stopping Ca.s.s trying to escape for good. He wasnat sure just what it was but said it didnat sound right. Reeve, whatas going on? What are we going to do if it turns out heas been tying Ca.s.s up while heas been at work, or using physical force, or something?a For someone living in a dark ages sim, Sam can be heartbreakingly naive at times. aSam, do you know what the word arapea means?a aIave heard it,a he says guardedly. aI thought it had to involve strangers, and usually killing. Do you thinka"a I turn round. aWeave got to find out whatas going on, and weave got to get her out of there if itas true. I donat think we can count on the police zombies, or Fiore for that matter, to help. Fioreas messed up in the head anyway, even Yourdon thinks so.a I pause. aThis is very bad.a The thought of what Ca.s.s might be going through horrifies me, especially as I can guess how some of our cohort will react if we try to rescue her. Before last Sunday I might have been more hopeful, but now I know better than to expect anything but gruesome savagery from our neighbors if they think their precious points are at risk. aI think Janis would help, but sheas ill. Alice, maybe. Angel is scared but will probably follow if we approach her right. Jena"I donat want Jen around. What about you guys?a aFer agrees,a Sam says simply. aHe doesnat like the idea either. El, maybe not. I think if I ask, I can get Greg and Martin and Alf involved. A team.a He looks at me oddly.

aNo killing,a I say, warningly.

He shudders. aNo! Never. Buta"a aSomeoneas got to go find out if itas true, or if it was just Mick making a joke in bad taste. Right?a He nods. aRight. Who?a aIall do it,a I say flatly. aTonight. Iam going to get dressed. You get on the phone to people. Get them round here. I want to sort out what weare doing before I go in, that way there wonat be any nasty surprises. All right?a He nods then looks at me, an odd expression in his face. aAnything else?a aYes.a I lean forward and kiss him quickly on the lips. aGet moving.a THREE hours later, weare holed up in a vacant house on a quiet residential side street across the road from what we now know is Ca.s.s and Mickas home, thanks to an obliging zombie taxi driver. This street is still three-quarters unoccupied. We pile out of our three taxis at five-minute intervals and go to ground. Fer was among the first to arrive. He got us into the empty house with a crowbar. Thereas not a lot of furniture, and everything is dustya"not to mention dark, because we donat want to turn on the lights and risk alerting Micka"but itas better than trying to hide in the front garden for a couple of hours.

There are only five of usa"me, Sam, Fer, Greg, and Gregas spouse, Tammy. Tammy is determined and very quietly furiousa"I think itas because she didnat realize how bad things really were until Sam phoned Greg. Itas nearly midnight, and weare all tired, but I run through the plan once again.

aOkay, one more time. Iam going to go across the road and ring the doorbell. Iall ask to see Ca.s.s. Depending how Mick reacts, Sam and Fer, youall rush him or hang back. Iave got the whistle. One whistle means come in and get me, I need help. Two means get Mick.a I stop. aGreg, Tammy, you take the stockings, pull them over your heads. We donat want him to recognize you if you have to take Ca.s.s and look after her.a aI hope youare wrong about this,a Tammy says grimly.