Glasshouse - Charles Stross [155]
Accordingly, may I extend to you an invitation to our first Town Meeting, to be held at City Hall on Sunday morning in place of the regularly scheduled Sunday Service. The meeting will explain the forthcoming Phase Two changes, and will be followed by a service of thanksgiving, to be conducted by the Very Reverend Dr. H. Yourdon in the cathedral.
Yours truly . . .
This puts a new perspective on things, doesn’t it? I shake my head, then take the two coffee mugs back upstairs. On my way I snag the identical-looking letter with Sam’s name on it.
“What do you think?” he asks, when he’s had time to read it.
“I think it’s exactly what it sounds like.” I shrug. “Things are getting bigger, new faces, new scenery—this ‘cathedral’ they’re opening! You can’t run a town the way you run a parish of a couple of hundred people, can you? No way can everybody know each other. So they’ll need a different intergroup score mechanism to keep people behaving themselves. To account for the anonymity of cities, the sight of familiar strangers.”
His cheek twitches. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
“Oh, it can’t be that bad,” I assure him, rolling my eyes.
“Can’t it?”
I nod. “No.” A thought strikes me. “Listen, can you get away from the office for lunch?”
“What, you mean . . . ?”
“Yes. Drop by the library about one o’clock, and we’ll go eat together.” I smile at him. “How does that sound?”
“You want me to—” He works it out. “Yes, I can do that.”
“Good.” I lean close and kiss him on the cheek. “Be seeing you.”
I arrive at work fifteen minutes early, clutching my bag—not, in and of itself, an unusual variation—but the place is unlocked because Janis is already in. “Janis?” I poke my head round the office door.
She’s not there. I sigh and head for the depository.
Down in the basement I find Janis loading magazines into box files. “Give me a hand,” she says tensely. “If Fiore or Yourdon turns up while we’re here . . .”
“Check.” The magazines are vaguely banana-shaped and don’t fit very well, but I can get four or five in each file box before I put them back on the shelf. Janis has six machine pistols lined up before her on a chair, still in their synthesis gel capsules. “Did you get the letter?” I ask.
“Yes. So did Norm.” Her husband—I don’t know much about him. “They’re pulling things forward. Once they institutionalize the police and stop relying on isolation to do their work for them, we’re in trouble.”
“Agreed.” I pause. “Ladies’ sewing club?” That was my idea, when I was Robin, but Janis fronted it, and after my one meeting with them while I was being Reeve, I guess she’s going to have to sort them out.
“I invited them here for lunch. Hurry up!” She’s very twitchy this morning.
“Okay, I’m hurrying.” I get the last of the magazines stashed in box files on the shelves, for all the world looking like innocent hard copy files of Curious Yellow. “I invited Sam round. I think he’s on message.”
“Oh, good. I was hoping you two would sort things out.” A brief smile. “Now let’s go upstairs. We’ve got a library to open before we can overthrow the government.”
19
Longjump
SUBTLETY isn’t going to get us very far at this point, so Janis orders up a delivery of sandwiches from a catering outfit working from the back of a cafe, and when the ladies’ sewing circle and revolutionary command committee shows up, we lock the front door, hang out the CLOSED sign, and pile downstairs.
“We’ve got one day to organize this,” says Janis. “Reeve, you want to summarize the situation?”
Heads turn. From their expressions, I don’t think they were expecting me to be here. I smile. “This place—this polity—was originally designed as a glasshouse, a military prison. It works too well; the YFH cabal figured that a prison doesn’t just keep people in, it keeps other people out. So they set it up as a research lab, what we’re now seeing.” She gestures at the shelves of box files on the