Glasshouse - Charles Stross [125]
I shake my head. It’s a lie, but what I need they can’t provide.
Eventually I doze off.
15
Recovery
THE next morning starts badly, shattered into fragments like a dropped vase:
“More fugues. Reeve, you’re getting worse.”
His large hand enfolding my small one. Weak and pale. He strokes the back of my wrist with his thumb. I look into his eyes and see sadness there and wonder why—
Two liquid-metal snake-heads bite at my wrist, and I cry out, pulling away as they inject soothing numbness. The woman who carries them is a goddess, golden-skinned with burning eyes.
I’m a tank again, a regiment of tanks, dropping through the freezing night toward an enemy habitat—or did this come later? I disconnect from the virtch interface and shake my head, look around at the other players in the game arcade, and hear myself whisper, “But it wasn’t like that—”
Scratch of a carved goose feather on rough paper, body of a pen made from a human bone. You will remember nothing at first. If you did, they could parse your experience vector and identify you as a threat.
“She’s really bad this morning. The adjuvants have worked—that infection is definitely on the mend—but she’s no use to us like this.”
“What do you expect me to do? She’s in danger of sliding into full-blown anterograde—”
A suffocating stench of bowels as I slide my rapier back out of his guts. He lies among the rosebushes in a dueling zone, beneath the shadow of a marble statue of an extinct species of flying mammal. A sudden stab of horror, because this is a man I could have loved.
“Fix her.”
“I can’t! Not without her consent.”
Hand tightening around someone’s wrist until it’s almost painful. “She’s in no condition to give it—look at that, what are you going to do if she starts to convulse?”
I’m a tank again, looping in a pool of horrors, blood trickling beneath my gridded toes as I swing my sword through the neck of another screaming woman while two of my other instances hold her down.
I’m flying, tumbling arse over wing as my thumb sings a keening pain of broken bone, and I smell the fresh water of the roaring waterfall beneath me.
“Make it stop,” I hear someone mumble, and there’s blood on my lips where I’ve almost bitten through them. It’s me who’s being held down by the tanks, facing a woman with burning eyes, and behind her is a man who loves me, if I could only remember what his name was.
The snakes bite again and drink deep, and the sun goes dark.
RESTART:
I become aware that someone is holding my right hand.
Then, a timeless period later, I realize that he’s still holding my hand. Which implies he’s very patient, because I’m still lying in bed, and it’s very bright. “What time is it?” I ask, mildly panicky because I need to get to work.
“Ssh. It’s around lunchtime, and everything’s all right.”
“If it’s all right”—Sam squeezes my hand—“how long have you been sitting there?”
“Not long.”
I open my eyes and look at him. He’s on the stool beside my bed. I pull a face, or smile, or something. “Liar.”
He doesn’t smile or nod but the tension drains out of him like water and he sags as it runs away. “Reeve? Can you remember?”
I blink rapidly, trying to get some dust out of a corner of my left eye. Can I remember—“I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter. Just trying to sort it out makes my head hurt! I’m a tank: I’m a dissolute young bioaviator with a death wish: Maybe I’m a sad gamer case instead, or a deep-cover agent. But all of these possibilities are a whole lot sillier and less plausible than what everything around me is saying, which is that I’m a small-town librarian who’s had a nervous breakdown. I decide I’ll go with that version for the time being. I hold Sam’s hand tight, like I’m drowning: “How bad was it?”
“Oh Reeve, it was bad.”