Glasshouse - Charles Stross [50]
I’m trying not to stand out, trying not to offend Jen or the others, and trying not to look eccentric in public, but there are limits to what I will put up with. Being tacitly enlisted in a conspiracy to blackmail is too much. I’ll have to smile at them tomorrow or the day after, but right now I want to be alone. So I go outside, where a gentle breeze is blowing, and I walk to the end of the block and cross the road. There’s very little traffic (none of us real humans drive vehicles—it’s far too dangerous), and the zombies are configured to give right of way to pedestrians, so I manage to get into the park reasonably fast.
The park is a semidomesticated biome. The grass is neatly trimmed, the large deciduous plants are carefully pruned, and the small stream of water that meanders through it is tamed and can be crossed by numerous footbridges. It has the big advantage that at this time of day it’s nearly empty, except for the zombie groundsman and perhaps a couple of wives with nothing better to do with their time. I walk along the stone path that leads from the edge of the downtown block toward the small coppice on the edge of the boating lake.
I gradually calm down as I near the side of the lake. It’s simulating a sunny day with a little high cloud and a lazy breeze, just occasionally getting up enough speed to cool my skin through my costume. Apart from the incessant machinelike twitter of the fist-sized dinosaurs in the trees, it’s quite peaceful. Sometimes I can almost bring myself to forget the perpetual simmering sense of anger and humiliation that Jen seems to thrive on inducing in the rest of us.
However much I try to, I can’t put myself in their shoes. It’s as if they don’t realize that you can game the system by ignoring it, by refusing to participate, as well as by going along with the overt rewards and punishments. They’ve all unconsciously decided to obey the arbitrary pressure toward gender partitioning, and they won’t be content unless everyone else conforms and competes for the same rewards. Was it like this for real dark ages females, created as random victims of genetic determinism rather than volunteers in an experiment enforced by explicit rewards and penalties? If so, I’m lucky: I’ve only got another three years of it.
Being a wife is a lonely business. Sam and I lead largely independent lives. He goes to work in the morning, and I only see him in the evenings, when he’s tired, or on Sundays. On Sundays we go to Church, bound together by our mutual fear of being singled out for opprobrium, and afterward we go home together and try to remind each other that the score whores—who slavishly chase after every hint of right behavior that Fiore drops—are not the most intelligent or reasonable people. We have an uphill struggle at times.
It’s a shame Sam’s a male, and a shame that the internal dynamics of this compressed community have set up this artificial barrier between us. I have a feeling that if we weren’t under so much external pressure, I could get to like him.
And then there’s Cass, who was at Church last Sunday.
We live in a really small, tightly constrained and controlled synthetic world, and there are some aspects of the way it’s organized that make its artificiality glaringly obvious. For example, we don’t have fashions, not in the sense of spontaneous design creativity that spawns waves of imitation and recomplication. (Creativity is a scarce resource at the best of times, and with barely a hundred of us living here so far, there just isn’t enough to go round.) What we do have is a strangely frenetic ersatz fashion industry, in the form of whatever’s in the shops. Somewhere there’s a surviving catalogue of styles from the dark ages, probably compiled from a museum, and the shops change their contents regularly, compelling us to buy new stuff every few cycles or fall out of date. (It’s another conformity-promoting measure: forget to