Glasshouse - Charles Stross [159]
At the top of the staircase I think of a reply. “Perhaps. And perhaps you’re right, we did terrible things. But there was a war on, and it was necessary.”
She takes a deep breath. “I wish I had your self-confidence.”
I blink at her. My self-confidence? Until I found her frightened and alone here, I’d always thought Sanni was the confident one. But now the other conspirators have gone, she looks confused and a bit lost. “I can’t afford doubts,” I admit. “Because if I start doubting, I’ll probably fall apart.”
She produces a radiant smile, like first light over a test range. “Don’t do that, Robin. I’m counting on you. You’re all the army I need.”
“Okay,” I say. And then we go our separate ways.
I walk home, my mesh-lined bag slung over one shoulder. Today is not a day for a taxi ride, especially now that there’s some risk of running into Ike. Everything seems particularly vivid for some reason, the grass greener and the sky bluer, and the scent of the flower beds outside the municipal buildings overwhelmingly sweet and strange. My skin feels as if I’ve picked up a massive electrostatic charge, hair follicles standing erect. I am alive, I realize. By this time tomorrow I might be dead, dead and gone forever because if we fail, the YFH cabal will still have the T-gate, and their coconspirators won’t hesitate to delete whatever copies of us they have on file. I might be part of history, dry as dust, an object of study if there ever is another generation of historians.
And if do somehow manage to survive, I’ll be a prisoner here for the next three unenhanced lifetimes.
I have mixed emotions. When I went into combat before—what I remember of it—I didn’t worry about dying. But I wasn’t human, then. I was a regiment of tanks. The only way I could die would be if our side lost the entire war.
But I’ve got Sam, now. The thought of Sam’s being in danger makes me cringe. The thought of both of us being at the mercy of the YFH cabal makes me a different kind of uneasy. Bend the neck, surrender, and it will be fine: That’s the echo of her personal choice coming back to haunt me. I rejected her, didn’t I? But she’s part of me. Indivisible, inescapable. I can never escape from the knowledge that I surrendered—
Sanni has surrendered, I realize. Not to Yourdon and Fiore, but to the end of the war. She doesn’t want to fight anymore; she wants to settle down and raise a family and be a small-town librarian. Janis is the real Sanni now, as real as she gets. The glasshouse may have been subverted and perverted by the plotters, but it’s still working its psychological alchemy on us. Maybe that’s what Sanni was talking about. We’re none of us who or what we used to be, although our history remains indelible. I try to imagine what I must have looked like to the civilians aboard the habs we conquered through coup de main, and I find a blind spot. I know I must have terrified them, but inside the armor and behind the guns I was just me, wasn’t I? But how were they to know? No matter. It’s over, now. I’ve got to live with it, just the way we had to do it. It seemed necessary at the time: If you didn’t want your memories to be censored by feral software, or worse, by unscrupulous opportunists who’d trojaned the worm, you had to fight. And once you take the decision to fight, you have to live with the consequences. That’s the difference between us and Yourdon, Fiore, and Hanta. We’re willing to harbor doubts, to let go; but they’re still fighting to bring the war back to their enemies. To us.
These aren’t good thoughts to be thinking. They’re downright morbid, and I can live without them—but they won’t leave me alone, so as I walk I try to fight back by swinging my bag and whistling a jolly tune. And I try to look at myself from the outside as I go. Here’s a jolly librarian, outwardly a young woman in a summer dress, shoulder bag in hand, whistling as she walks home from a day at work. Invert the picture,