Glasshouse - Charles Stross [30]
“There’s a kitchen.” He nods at the doorway to the room with the appliances that puzzled me. “But if you don’t know how to use it, we can order a meal using the telephone. It’s a voice-only network terminal.”
“What do you mean, if you don’t know how?” I ask him, raising an eyebrow.
“I’m just repeating what the tablet says.” Sam sounds a little defensive.
“Here, give that to me.” He passes it and I rapidly read what he’s looking at. Domestic duties: the people of the dark ages, when living together, apparently divided up work depending on gender. Males held paid vocations; females were expected to clean and maintain the household, buy and prepare food, buy clothing, clean the clothing, and operate domestic machinery while their male worked. “This is crap!” I say.
“You think so?” He looks at me oddly.
“Well, yeah. It’s straight out of the most primitive nontech anthro cultures. No advanced society expects half its workforce to stay home and divides labor on arbitrary lines. I don’t know what their source for this rubbish is, but it’s not plausible. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve mistaken radical prescriptive documentation for descriptive.” I tap my finger on his slate. “I’d like to see some serious social conditions surveys before I took this as fact. And in any event, we don’t have to live that way, even if it’s how they direct the majority of the zombies in the polity. This is just a general guideline; every culture has lots of outliers.”
Sam looks thoughtful. “So you think they’ve got it wrong?”
“Well, I’m not going to say that for certain until I’ve reviewed their primary sources and tried to isolate any bias, but there’s no way I’m doing all the housework.” I grin, to take some of the sting out of it. “What were you saying about being able to request food using the ‘telephone’?”
DINNER is a circular, baked, bread-type thing called a pizza. There’s cheese on it, but also tomato paste and other stuff that makes it more palatable. It’s hot and greasy and it comes to us via the shortjump gate in the closet in the conservatory, rather than on a ‘truck.’ I’m a bit disappointed by this, but I guess the truck can wait until tomorrow.
Sam unwinds after dinner. I take off my shoes and hose and convince him he’ll feel better without his jacket and the thing called a necktie—not that he needs much convincing. “I don’t know why they wore these,” he complains.
“I’ll do some research later.” We’re still on the sofa, with open pizza boxes balanced on our laps, eating the greasy hot slices of food with our fingers. “Sam, why did you volunteer for the experiment?”
“Why?” He looks panicky.
“You’re shy, you’re not good in social situations. They told us up front we’d have to live in a dark ages society for a tenth of a gigasec with no way out. Didn’t it strike you as not being a sensible thing to do?”
“That’s a very personal question.” He crosses his arms.
“Yes, it is.” I stop talking and stare at him.
For a moment he looks so sad that I wish I could take the words back. “I had to get away,” he mumbles.
“From what?” I put my box down and pad across the carpet to a large wooden chest with drawers and compartments full of bottles of liquor. I take two glasses, open a bottle, sniff the contents—you can never be sure until you try it—and pour. Then I carry them back over to the sofa and pass him one.
“When I came out of rehab.” He stares at the television, which is peculiar because the machine is switched off. Under his shoes he’s wearing some sort of short, thick hose. His toes twitch uneasily. “Too many people recognized me. I was afraid. It’s my fault, I think, but they might have hurt me if I’d stayed.”
“Hurt you?” Sam is big and has thick hair and isn’t very fast moving, and he seems to be very gentle. I’ve been thinking that maybe I lucked out with him—there’s potential for abuse in this atomic relationship thing, but he’s so shy and retiring that I can’t see him being a problem.
“I was a bit crazy,” he says. “You know the dissociative psychopathic phase some people go through