Glasshouse - Charles Stross [61]
“It’s in the city library. You’d only be working three days a week, but you’d be putting in eleven-hour shifts. On the plus side, you’d be the trainee librarian there. On the minus side, the starting salary isn’t particularly high.”
“What does the job involve?” I ask.
“Library work.” He shrugs. “Filing books in order. Keeping track of withdrawals and issuing overdue notices and collecting fines. Helping people find books and information they’re looking for. Organizing the stacks and adding new titles as they come in. You’d be working under Janis from cohort one, who has been our librarian since the early days. She’s going to be leaving, which is why we need to train up a replacement.”
“Leaving?” I look at him oddly. “Why?”
“To have a baby,” he says, and blows a perfect smoke ring up at the ceiling.
I don’t understand what he’s saying at first, the concept is so alien to me. “Why would she have to leave her job to—”
It’s his turn to look at me oddly. “Because she’s pregnant,” he says.
For a moment the world seems to be spinning around my head. There’s a roaring in my ears, and I feel weak at the knees. It’s a good thing I’m sitting down. Then I begin to integrate everything and realize just what’s going on. Janis is pregnant—she’s got a neonate growing inside her body like an encapsulated tumor, the way humans used to incubate their young in the wild, back before civilization. Presumably she and her husband had sex, and she was fertile. “She must be—” I say, then cover my mouth. Fertile.
“Yes, she and Norm are very happy,” Mr. Harshaw says, nodding enthusiastically. He looks satisfied with something. “We’re all very happy for them, even if it means we do have to train up a new librarian.”
“Well, I’d be happy to see, I mean, to try,” I begin, flustered, wondering, Did she ask the medics to make her fertile? Or, a sneaking and horrible suspicion, Are we already fertile? I know menstruation was some kind of metabolic sign that went with being a prehistoric female, but I didn’t really put it all together until now. Having a child is hard—you have to actively seek medical assistance—and having one grow inside your body is even harder. The idea that the orthohuman bodies they’ve put us in are so ortho that we could automatically generate random human beings if we have sex is absolutely terrifying. I don’t think the dark ages medics had incubators, and if I got pregnant I might actually have to go through a live childbirth. In fact, if Sam and I had—“Excuse me, but where’s the rest room?” I ask.
“It’s the second door through there, on the left.” Mr. Harshaw smiles to himself as I make a dash for it. He’s still smiling five minutes later as I make my way back into his office, forcing my face into a mask of composure, refusing to acknowledge the stomach cramps that took me to the stalls. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“I am, now,” I say. “I’m sorry about that, must be something I ate.”
“It’s perfectly all right. If you’d like to come with me, perhaps we can visit the library and I can introduce you to Janis, see if you get along?”
I nod, and we head out front to catch a taxi. I think I’m doing pretty well for someone who’s just had her worldview turned upside down and whacked on with a hammer. How long does a neonate take to grow, about thirty megs? It puts a whole new face on the experiment. I have a sinking sense that I must have implicitly agreed to this. Somewhere buried in the small print of the release I signed there’ll be some clause that can be interpreted as saying that I consent to be made fertile and if necessary to become pregnant and bring to term an infant in the course of the study. It’s the sort of shitty trick that Fiore and his friends would delight in slipping past us while we’re vulnerable.
After a few minutes I realize that the oversight we were promised by an independent ethics committee isn’t worth a bucket of warm—whatever. The extreme scenario would be for us females to all get