Glasshouse - Charles Stross [160]
Look, just stop, why don’t you?
That’s better.
When I get home, I stash the bag in the kitchen. The TV is going in the living room, so I shed my shoes and pad through.
“Sam.”
He’s on the sofa, curled up opposite the flickering screen as usual. He’s holding a metal canister of beer. He glances at me as I come in.
“Sam.” I join him on the sofa. After a moment I realize that he’s not really watching the TV. Instead, his eyes are on the patio outside the glass doors at the end of the room. He breathes slowly, evenly, his chest rising and falling steadily. “Sam.”
His eyes flicker toward me, and a moment later the corners of his mouth edge upward. “Been working late?”
“I walked.” I pull my feet up. The soft cushions of the sofa swallow them. I lean sideways against him, letting my head fall against his shoulder. “I wanted to feel . . .”
“Connected.”
“Yes, that’s it, exactly.” I can feel his pulse, and his breathing is profound, a stirring in the roots of my world. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too.” A hand touches my cheek, moves up to brush hair back from my forehead.
At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed human—an island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless milliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night. If I were half of who I used to be, and had my resources to hand—and if Sam, if Kay, wanted to—we could multiplex, and know each other a thousand times as deeply as this awkward serial humanity permits. There’s a poignancy to knowing what we’ve lost, what we might have had together, which only makes me want him more strongly. I move uneasily and clutch at his waist. “What took you so long?”
“I’m running away.” He finally turns his head to look at me sidelong. “From myself.”
“Me too,” Throwing caution to the wind: “Is that part of your problem? With being . . . this?”
“It’s too close.” He swallows. “To what they wanted me to be.”
I don’t ask who “they” were. “Do you want to escape? To leave the polity?”
He’s silent for a long while. “I don’t think so,” he says eventually. “Because I’d have to go back to being what I want not to be, if that makes sense to you. Kay was a disguise, Reeve, a mask. A hollow woman. Not a real person.”
I snuggle closer to him. “I know you wanted to grow into her.”
“Do you?” He raises an eyebrow.
“Look, why do you think I’m here?”
“Point.” He looks momentarily rueful. “Do you want to leave?”
We’re not really talking about staying or leaving, this is understood, but what he really means by that—“I thought I did,” I admit, toying with the buttons on the front of his shirt. “Then Dr. Hanta sorted me out, and I realized that what I really wanted was somewhere to heal, somewhere to be me. Community. Peace.” I get my hand inside his shirt, and his breath acquires a little hoarse edge that makes me squeeze my thighs together. “Love.” I pause. “Not necessarily her way, mind you.” His hand is stroking my hair. His other hand—“Do that some more.”
“I’m afraid, Reeve.”
“That makes two of us.”
Later: “I want what you described.”
I gasp. “Makes two. Of us. Oh.”
“Love.”
And we continue our conversation without words, using a language that no abhuman watcher AI can interpret—a language of touch and caress, as old as the human species. What we tell each other is simple. Don’t be afraid, I love you. We say it urgently and emphatically, bodies shouting our mute encouragement. And in the dark of the night, when we reach for each other, I dare myself to admit that it might work out all right in the end.
We aren’t bound to fail.
Are we?
BREAKFAST is an affair of quiet desperation. Over the coffee and toast I clear my throat and begin a carefully planned speech. “I need to go to the library before Church, Sam, I forgot my gloves.”
“Really?” He looks up, worry lines crisscrossing