Glasshouse - Charles Stross [133]
“Then we’re not so different.”
“You?” He stares. “But you said you’d . . .”
“I started the war on a MASucker; I didn’t stay there.” I take a deep breath, because I don’t think I can dodge this one. “I volunteered. Joined the Linebarger Cats, combat operations. Spent nearly a gigasec being an armored regiment. Ended up in Psyops.”
“Well.” His voice is shaky. “I didn’t expect that.”
“What proportion of the people here do you think fought in the wars?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“People who were there don’t want to remember it. Almost as soon as we’d got a local cease-fire established, people were slinking off to the surgeon-confessors.”
“Yes.” He pauses. “But Reeve, I’m a monster. There are things in my head—even after excision—that I don’t like to visit. You don’t want to get too close to me.”
“Sam.” I shift toward him. “I’m . . . There are things I tried to bury, too. I could say the same. Do you care?”
“What, about what you did?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Well, then.” It’s my turn to sound shaky. “What I said earlier stands. A bargain, and you agreed to it, hmm?”
He shrinks away. “I didn’t know.”
I swallow to try and clear my dry mouth. “I don’t mean right now,” I say. To my surprise, I mean it. “But I still want you, just as soon as you get used to the idea that I want you and I’m still me. You don’t have to project your hatred of what you were forced to do onto me. And besides, I didn’t see any barbs on your cock the other night.”
“But you’ve changed too much!” He bursts out, like an iced-over air valve finally cutting loose. “Since Dr. Hanta saw you. Before that, you were you: You were moody and thoughtful, you were cynical, you were funny—I don’t have the words for it. Whatever she did, it’s changed you, Reeve. You’d refuse to do something just because it was expected of you; now you’re trying to make me fuck you! Do you really want to get trapped in YFH for the foreseeable future? Trapped and pregnant, too?”
I think about it for a moment. “What’s the problem?” Hanta is a more than conscientious doctor, and I’m confident I can survive a pregnancy—after all, every female mammal in my family tree did it before me, didn’t they? How bad can it be?
“Reeve.” Now he’s looking at me as if I’ve morphed into battle-form, sprouting spikes and guns and armor before his eyes. I giggle. It’s like he’s seen a ghost! “What have they done to you?”
“Offered me a way out of having been a monster.” I lean toward him hopefully. “Give me a kiss?”
DESPITE my best planning, we do not make love in the end.
In fact, when I finish the cleaning up and come to bed, Sam gets up and, with sleepy dignity, insists he’s sleeping alone.
I am so angry and frustrated that I could cry. My problem is easily defined—it’s the solution that eludes me. It’s not that I’ve changed a lot, but—with or without Hanta’s prompting—I’ve decided to take some time out of struggling, and the outward manifestation looks like a huge switch. Sam simply hasn’t caught up with me yet. It’s very disturbing to be around someone who seems to have inverted all their values and beliefs, and I know if it was Sam who’d been in hospital and come home glassy-eyed and different, I’d be incredibly upset. But I wish he wouldn’t project his anxiety onto me—I’m all right, in fact I’m better than I’ve been at any time since I first woke up in the custody of the surgeon-confessors.
Yes, there’s a problem here: Fiore and Yourdon are doing something very dubious with a serialized copy of Curious Yellow, they’ve figured out a way to defeat the security patch in everyone’s implants; and they seem to be researching how to use social control rules installed via CY to create an emergent dictatorship. But—and this is the important question—why should I care? Haven’t I been through enough already? I don’t have to