Glasshouse - Charles Stross [13]
Kay nods thoughtfully. “Plausible,” she agrees. Then she smiles. “I like the sound of your tapas. Shall we go and see how much we can eat? Then let’s meet these friends of yours.”
They’re not friends so much as nodding acquaintances, but I don’t tell her that. Instead, I pay up with a wave at the billpoint, and we head for the back door, out onto the beautiful silvery beach that the rehab club backs on to, then over to a rustic-looking door that conceals the gate to the green maze. Along the way, Kay pulls a pair of batik harem pants and a formally cut black-lace jacket out of her waist pouch, which is an artfully concealed gate opening on a personal storage space. Both of us are barefoot, for although there is a breeze and bright sunlight on our skin, we are fundamentally as deep indoors as it is possible for humans to get, cocooned in a network of carefully insulated habitats floating at intervals of light kiloseconds throughout a broad reach of the big black.
The Green Maze is one of those rectilinear manifolds that was all the fashion about four gigasecs ago, right after the postwar fragmentation bottomed out. The framework consists of green corridors, all straight, all intersecting at ninety-degree angles and held together by a bewildering number of T-gates. Actually, it’s a sparse network, so you can go through a doorway on one side of the maze and find yourself on the far side, or several levels up, or even two twists, a hop, and a jump behind the back of your own head. Lots of apartment suites hang off it, including the back entrance to my own, along with an even more startling range of cubist-themed public spaces, entertainment nooks, eateries, resteries, entertainment venues, and a few real formal hedge mazes built in a style several tens of teraseconds older.
Needless to say, nobody knows their way around the Green Maze by memory or dead reckoning—some of the gates move from diurn to diurn—but my netlink knows where I’m going and throws up a firefly for me. It takes us about a third of a kilosec to walk there in companionable silence. I’m still trying to work out whether I can trust Kay, but I’m already sure I like her.
The tapas place is open plan, ancient cast-iron chairs and tables on a grassy deck beneath a dome under a pink sky streaked with clouds of carbon monoxide that scud across a cracked basalt wilderness. The sun is very bright and very small, and if the dome vanished, we’d probably freeze to death before the atmosphere poisoned us. Kay glances at the ornamental archway surrounding the T-gate, overgrowth with ivy, and picks a table close to it. “Anything wrong?” I ask.
“It reminds me of home.” She looks as if she’s bitten a durian fruit while expecting a mango. “Sorry. I’ll try to ignore it.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“I know you didn’t.” A small, wry, smile. “Maybe I didn’t erase enough.”
“I’m worried that I erased too much,” I say before I can stop myself. Then Frita, one of the two proprietor/cook/designers wanders over, and we’re lost for a while in praise of his latest creations, and of course we have to sample the fruits of the first production run and make an elaborate business of reviewing them while Erci stands by strumming his mandolin and looking proud.
“Erased too much,” Kay prods me.
“Yes.” I push my plate away. “I don’t know for sure. My old self left me a long, somewhat vague letter. Written and serialized, not an experiential; it was encoded in a way he knew I’d remember how to decrypt, he was very careful about that. Anyway, he hinted about all sorts of dark things. He knew too much, rambled on about how he’d worked for a Power and done bad things until his coworkers forced him into excision and rehab. And it was a thorough job of assisted forgetting they did on me. I mean, for all I know I might be a war criminal or something. I’ve completely lost over a gigasecond, and the stuff before then is full of holes—I don’t remember