Glasshouse - Charles Stross [1]
She shrugs. It’s an elaborate rippling gesture that ends with a wiggle of her hips. “Because I haven’t seen you here before, and I’ve been coming here most nights for the past twenty or thirty diurns. You can earn extra rehab credit by helping out. Don’t worry about the parole ring, most of us here have them. I had to warn people myself a while ago.”
I manage to force a smile. A fellow inmate? Further along the program? “Would you like a drink?” I ask, gesturing at the chair next to me. “And what are you called, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I’m Kay.” She pulls out the chair and sits, flipping her great mass of dark hair over her shoulder and tucking her skulls under the table with two hands as she glances at the menu. “Hmm, I think I will have an iced double mocha pickup, easy on the coca.” She looks at me again, staring at my eyes. “The clinic arranges things so that there’s always a volunteer around to greet nubes. It’s my turn this swing shift. Do you want to tell me your name? Or where you’re from?”
“If you like.” My ring tingles, and I remember to smile. “My name’s Robin, and you’re right, I’m fresh out of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth.” (A bit over ten planetary days, a million seconds.) “I’m from”—I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give her, ending up with an approximation of the truth—“around these parts, actually. But just out of memory excision. I was getting stale and needed to do something about whatever it was I was getting stale over.”
Kay smiles. She’s got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; she’s got bilateral symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face that’s a mirror of itself—and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. It’s tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.
“I haven’t been human for long,” she admits. “I just moved here from Zemlya.” Pause. “For my surgery,” she adds quietly.
I fiddle with the tassels dangling from my sword pommel. There’s something not quite right about them, and it’s bugging me intensely. “You lived with the ice ghouls?” I ask.
“Not quite—I was an ice ghoul.”
That gets my attention: I don’t think I’ve ever met a real live alien before, even an ex-alien. “Were you”—what’s the word?—“born that way, or did you emigrate for a while?”
“Two questions.” She holds up a finger. “Trade?”
“Trade.” I remember to nod without prompting, and my ring sends me a flicker of warmth. It’s crude conditioning: reward behavior indicative of recovery, punish behavior that reinforces the postsurgical fugue. I don’t like it, but they tell me it’s an essential part of the process.
“I emigrated to Zemlya right after my previous memory dump.” Something about her expression strikes me as evasive. What could she be omitting? A failed business venture, personal enemies? “I wanted to study ghoul society from the inside.” Her cocktail emerges from the table, and she takes an experimental sip. “They’re so strange.” She looks wistful for a moment. “But after a generation I got . . . sad.” Another sip. “I was living among them to study them, you see. And when you live among people for gigaseconds on end you can’t stop yourself getting involved, not unless you go totally post and upgrade your—well. I made friends and watched them grow old and die until I couldn’t take any more. I had to come back and excise the . . . the impact. The pain.”
Gigaseconds? Thirty planetary years each. That’s a long time to spend among aliens. She’s studying me intently. “That must have been very precise surgery,” I say slowly. “I don’t remember much of my previous life.”
“You were human, though,” she prods.
“Yes.” Emphatically yes. Shards of memory remain: