Glasshouse - Charles Stross [15]
“I had a session with Dr. Mavrides,” Linn volunteers diffidently. She has long, auburn hair, pale, freckled skin, green eyes, upturned nose, and elven ears: her historical-looking gown covers her from throat to floor. It’s a green that matches her eyes. Vhora, in contrast, is naked. Linn leans against Vhora’s flank, one arm spread lazily across her back to toy idly with the base of the fluted horn that rises from the center of Vhora’s forehead. “It sounds interesting to me.”
“Not my cut.” Vhora sounds amused, though it’s hard to judge. “It’s historical. Premorphic, too. Sorry but I don’t do ortho anymore, two lifetimes were enough for me.”
“Oh, Vhora.” Linn sighs, sounding exasperated. She does something with one fingertip near the base of the horn that makes the mecha tense for a moment. “Won’t you . . . ?”
“I’m not clear on the historical period in question,” I say carefully. To be perfectly truthful, I’d deliberately ignored the detailed pitch Piccolo-47 mailed me until Kay pointed out the advantages of disappearing into a closed polity for a few years, because I was totally uninterested in going to live in a cave and hunt mammoths with a spear, or whatever Yourdon and his coinvestigators have in mind. I don’t like being taken for a soft touch, and Piccolo-47’s attitude is patronizing at best. Mind you, Piccolo-47 is the sort of self-congratulatory, introspectively obsessed psych professional who’d take any suggestion that their behavior displayed contempt for the clients as projection, rather than treating it as an attempt to work around real social deficiencies. In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them. Hence my lack of information about the exact nature of the project.
“Well, they’re not telling us everything,” Linn apologizes. “But I did some digging. Historian Professor Yourdon has a particular interest in a field I know something about, the first postindustrial dark age—that would be from the mid-twentieth to mid-twenty-first centuries, if you’re familiar with Urth chronology. He’s working with Colonel-Doctor Boateng, who is really a military psychologist specializing in the study of polymorphic societies—caste systems, gender systems, stratification along lines dictated by heredity, astrology, or other characteristics outside the individual’s control. He’s published a number of reports lately asserting that people in most societies prior to the Interval Monarchies couldn’t act as autonomous agents because of social constraints imposed on them without consent, and I suspect the reason the Scholastium funds his research is because it has diplomatic implications.”
I feel Kay shiver slightly through my left arm, which is wrapped around her uppermost shoulders. She leans against me more closely, and I lean against the tree trunk behind me in turn. “Like ice ghoul societies,” she murmurs.
“Ice ghouls?” asks Vhora.
“They aren’t tech—no, what I mean is that they are still developing technologies. They haven’t reached the Acceleration yet. No emotional machines, no virtual or self-replicating toolsets. No Exultants, no gates, no ability to restructure their bodies without ingesting poisonous plant extracts or cutting themselves with metal knives.” She shudders slightly. “They’re prisoners of their own bodies, they grow old and fall apart, and if one of them loses a limb, they can’t replace it.” She’s very unhappy about something, and for a moment I wonder what the ice ghouls she lived with meant to her, that she has to come here to forget.
“Sounds icky,” says Linn. “Anyway, that’s what Colonel-Doctor Boateng is interested in.