Glasshouse - Charles Stross [81]
Oh shit, indeed. I feel wobbly, and Sam catches me under one arm as I see what’s happening. There are no more screams, but that doesn’t mean nothing’s going on. The screaming is continuing, inside the privacy of my own skull. “They planned this,” I hear myself say, as if from the far end of a very dark tunnel. “They prepared for it. It’s not spontaneous.”
“Yes.” Sam nods, his face whey-pale. There’s no other explanation, crazy as it seems. “Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been a major cultural bonding feature in pretech cultures,” he mutters. “I wonder how long Fiore’s been planning to introduce it?”
They’ve got two ropes over the branches of the poplars beside the Church, and two groups are busy heaving their twitching payloads up into the greenery. I blink. The ropes seem to curve slightly. It might be centripetal acceleration, but more likely it’s because my eyes are watering.
“I don’t care. If I had a gun, I’d shoot Jen right now, I really would.” I suddenly realize that I’m not feeling faint from fear or dread, but from anger: “The bitch needs killing.”
“Wouldn’t work,” he says, almost absently. “More violence just normalizes the killing, it doesn’t put an end to it: They’re having a party and all you could do is add to the fun . . .”
“Yeah, I—but I’d feel better.” Jen had better have bars on her windows and sleep with a baseball bat under her pillow tonight, or she’s in trouble. And she royally deserves it, the mendacious bitch.
“Me too, I think.”
“Can we do anything?”
“For them?” He shrugs. There’s no more screaming, but a tone-deaf choir has struck up some kind of anthem. “No.”
I shiver. “Let’s go home. Right now.”
“Okay,” he says, and together we start walking again.
The singing follows us up the road. I’m terrified that if I look back, I’ll break down: There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it, but I feel a filthy sense of complicity with them. As for Fiore . . . he’s got it coming. Sooner or later I’ll get him. But I’m going to bite my tongue and not say a word about that for now, because I’ve a feeling he staged this little show to teach us a lesson about the construction of totalitarian power, and right this moment all the spies and snitches are going to be wide-awake, looking for signs of dissent.
A kilometer up the road and ten minutes away from the ghastly feeding frenzy, I tug at Sam’s arm. “Let’s slow down a little,” I suggest. “Catch our breath. There’s no need to run anymore.”
“Catch our—” Sam stares at me. “I thought you were mad at me.”
“No, it’s not you.” I carry on walking, but more slowly.
His hand on my arm. “We didn’t join in.”
I nod, wordlessly.
“Three-quarters of the people there were as horrified as we were. But we couldn’t stop it once it got going.” He shakes his head.
I take a deep breath. “I’m pissed at myself for not making a stand while there was time. You can game a mob if you know what you’re doing. But once people get moving in groups like that, it’s really hard to contain them. Fiore didn’t need to set that off. But he did, like pouring gasoline on a barbecue.” Both of which are items I’ve only lately become acquainted with. “And after that sermon and the score transfer, he couldn’t have stopped it even if he wanted to.”
“You sound like you think it’s a matter of choice.” I glance sidelong at him: Sam’s not stupid, but he doesn’t normally talk in abstractions. He continues: “Do you really think you could have stopped it? It’s implicit in this society, Reeve. They set us up to make it easy to make people kill for an abstraction. You saw Jen. Did you really think you could have stopped her, once she got going?”
“I should have stuck a knife in her ribs.” I trudge on in silence for a few seconds. “I’d probably have failed. You’re right, but that doesn’t make me feel better.”
We walk slowly along the road, baking beneath the noonday heat of an artificial late-spring sun in our Sunday outfits. The invertebrates creak in the long, yellowing grass, and the deciduous