Glasshouse - Charles Stross [49]
Currently I’m reading a big fat volume called The Swordsmith’s Assistant. There’s method in my madness. While there’s no obvious way I can get my hands on a blaster or other modern weaponry, and I’m not suicidal enough to play with explosives inside a pressurized hab without knowing its physical topology, it occurs to me that you can still raise an awful lot of mayhem with the toys you can build in a dark age machine shop. My main headache with the crossbow, in fact, is going to be knowing the axis of rotation in each sector, so that I can correct my aim for Coriolis force. Which is where the plumb bob and the laser distance meter come in.
In public, I’m working hard at being a different person. I don’t want anyone to figure out that I’m building an arsenal.
The ladies of our cohort—which means Jen, Angel, me, and Alice, because Cass still isn’t allowed out in public by her husband—meet up for lunch three times a week. I don’t ask after Cass because I don’t want Jen to get the idea that I’m interested in her. She’d peg it as a weakness and try to figure out how to exploit it. I don’t want her to get any kind of handle of me, so I dress up and meet them at a restaurant or cafe, and smile and listen politely as they discuss what their husbands are doing or the latest gossip about their neighbors. The nine other houses on my road are standing vacant, waiting for the next cohorts of test subjects to arrive, but that’s unusual—I gather the others live near to people from other cohorts, and there’s a rich sea of gossip lapping around the tide pools of suburban anomie.
“I think we can make some mileage against cohort three,” Jen says one day, over a Spanish omelet dusted with paprika. She sounds cunning.
“You do?” Angel asks anxiously.
“Yes.” Jen looks smug.
“Do tell.” Alice puts her fork down in the wreckage of her Caesar salad. She’s trying to look interested, but she can’t fool me. Jen casts her a sharp look, then stabs her omelet.
“Esther and Mal live at the other end of Lakeside View from me and Chris.” A piece of omelet quivers on the end of her fork, impaled for our attention. Jen chews reflectively. “I’ve noticed Esther watching me from their garden, some mornings. So I called a taxi to go shopping, then had it circle round and drop me off just beyond the tunnel at the other end of the road. Funny who you see in the area.” She smiles, exposing perfect raptor-sharp teeth.
“Who?” asks Alice, obliging her with an audience.
“She goes in, and about ten minutes later Phil turns up by taxi. He sends it away and rings the doorbell. Leaves an hour or two later.”
Angel tut-tuts disapprovingly. Alice just looks faintly disgusted.
“Don’t you see?” asks Jen. “It’s not public. That gives us leverage.” She spears a broccoli stem, dismembers it a branch at a time, tearing with her teeth. “There’s a word for it. Adultery. It’s not negatively scored as such, as long as it’s secret. But if it comes out—”
“We know,” Angel interrupts. “So why—”
“Because we’re not part of cohort three. Esther and Mal and Phil are all in cohort three. The, ah, peer pressure has to be applied by your peers. So this gives us leverage over Esther and Phil. If we tell Mal, they lose points big-time.”
“I don’t feel so good,” I say, putting my knife down and pushing my chair back from the table. “Need some fresh air.”
“Was it something I said?” asks Jen, casually concerned.
I’m getting better at lying with a straight face. I don’t think I used to be good