Glasshouse - Charles Stross [67]
“How do you know the books know when they’re being read?” I ask Janis, halfway through my second morning. “I mean, take this one.” I heft it where she can see it, a big green clothbound sheaf of papers with a title like The Home Vegetable Garden.
“Look.” Janis takes it from me and bends the cover back, so that the plastic protective sleeve on the spine bends.
I look. “Aha.” I can just see something like a squashed fly in there, two hair-fine antennae running up to the stitching atop the spine. “Those are . . . ?”
“Fiber optics. That’s my guess.” Janis hums to herself as she closes the book and slides it back into the trolley. “I don’t think they can hear you, but they can sense which page is open and track your eyeballs. The experimenters have been careful to give us all different faces, and we all have two working eyes. That’s no accident. Not all the ancients had that. If you want to read a book secretly, you need mirrored sunglasses and a timer, so you turn each page after the same amount of time.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask admiringly. “You sound like a professional—” The word spy is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it with a little shiver.
“Before I checked into the clinic, I used to be a detective.” She gives me a long look. “It’s a skill set I didn’t ask them to erase. Thought it might come in handy in my new life.”
“Then what did you—” I stop myself just in time. “Forget I asked.”
“By all means.” She chuckles drily. “Listen, they tell me that it’s normal for me to check into hospital a week or two before the delivery, and to stay there for a couple of weeks afterward. Can I”—she sounds tentative—“ask a big favor of you?”
“What? Sure,” I say blankly.
“I figure I’m going to be in bed a lot of the time, bored out of my mind, and there’s only so much television you can watch in a day, and Norm is working, so he can’t keep me company. Would you mind visiting me and bringing me some library books? So I don’t lose track?”
“Why, I’d be delighted to!” I say it with perfect sincerity, because I mean it. If I ever ended up in some kind of dark ages hospital for three or four cycles I’d want visitors. “You’ll let me know what you want, all right?”
“Thank you.” Janis sounds grateful. “Now if you could just get the footstool, these go on the top shelf and I can’t reach as high as you can.”
On my third day I’m due to meet up with Jen and Angel and Alice and do lunch. Jen’s picked the Dominion Cafe as today’s venue, and I walk there from the library, whistling tunelessly. I’m feeling unaccountably smug. I’ve found something new to do, I’ve got a source of income all of my own, I know things that the ladies who lunch haven’t got a clue about, and if only I wasn’t spending half my waking hours in fear of the future and wishing I could get out of this glass-walled prison and hook up with Kay again, I’d probably be quite happy.
The Dominion Cafe is a lot plusher than the name makes it sound, and I feel a bit underdressed as the maître d’ ushers me to the booth where Jen is holding court. Here I am in a plain skirt and sweater, while Jen wears ever-more-exotic concoctions of spun bug spit and must spend three or four hours a day on her makeovers and hair. Angel isn’t so much trying to ape her as getting tugged along in the undertow, and Alice looks a bit uncomfortable in their presence. But what do I care? They’re people to talk to, and we’re chained together by the mutual scorefile so I can’t ignore them. This must be how the ancients used to feel about their families.
“Hello all,” I say, pulling out a chair. “And how are you today?”
Jen waves at a metal bucket on a stand, with some kind of cloth draped over it. “Livin’ large!” she announces. “Girls, a glass for Reeve. Won’t you join us in a little Chateau Lafitte ’59?”
“A little—” She whisks the cloth off the bucket, and I see it’s full of ice packed around