Glasshouse - Charles Stross [82]
“I’ve seen mobs before,” I tell him. If only I could forget. “They have a peculiar kind of momentum.” I feel weak and shaky as I think about it, about the look on Phil’s face—I hardly knew him—and the hunger stalking the shadow of the crowd. Jen’s malicious delight. “Once it gets past a certain point, all you can do is run away fast and make sure you have nothing to do with what happens next. If everybody did that, there wouldn’t be any mobs.”
“I guess.” Sam sounds subdued as we walk into the penumbra of the tunnel. He switches his flashlight on. The cone of light bobs around crazily ahead of us as the road swings to the left.
“Even a sword-fighting fool of a hero can’t divert a mob like that on their own once it gets going,” I tell him, as much for my own benefit as anything else. “Not without battle armor and some heavy weaponry, because they’re going to keep coming and coming. The ones behind can’t see what’s happening up front, and the fool who stands in the way without backup is going to end up a dead fool really fast, even if he kills a whole load of them. And anyway, your sword-fighting fool, he’s no smarter than any of them in the mob. The time to stop the mob is before it gets started. To stand up in front of it first, and tell it no.”
We’re walking into the dark curve of the tunnel, out of sight of either entrance. Sam sighs.
“I knew someone who’d do that,” he says wistfully. “The man I fell in love with. He wasn’t a fool, but he’d know how to handle a situation like that.”
The man? Sam doesn’t seem like the type to me—until I remember that I’m seeing him through gender-trapped eyes, the same way he’s looking at me, and that I’ve got no way of knowing who or what Sam was before he volunteered for the experiment. “Nobody could do that,” I tell him gently.
“Maybe so. But I think I’d trust Robin’s judgment before I’d trust—”
I stop as suddenly as if I have just walked into a wall. The hairs on the back of my neck are all standing on end, and my stomach is knotting up again as if I’m going to be sick.
“What’s wrong?” asks Sam.
“The person on the outside you’ve been pining after,” I say carefully. “He’s called Robin. Is that right?”
“Yes.” He nods. “I shouldn’t have said, we’ll get penalized—”
I grab his hand like it’s a floatation aid and I’m drowning. “Sam, Sam.” You idiot! Yes, you! (I’m not sure which of us I mean.) “Did it ever occur to you to ask if maybe I knew Robin?”
“Why? What good would that have done?” His pupils are huge and dark in the twilight.
“You are the biggest—” I don’t know what to say. Truly, I don’t. Stunned is the mildest word that describes how I feel. “The name you gave Robin was Kay, right?”
“You—”
“Kay. Yes or no?”
He tenses and tries to pull his hand away. “Yes,” he admits.
“O-kay.” I don’t seem to be able to get enough air. “Well, Sam, we are going to continue on our way home, now, aren’t we? Because who we were before we came here doesn’t make any difference to where we are now, does it?”
His expression is impossible to read in the darkness. “You must be Vhora—”
I nearly slap him. Instead, I reach out with the index finger of my free hand and touch his lips. “Home first. Then we talk,” I tell him, stomach still churning, aghast at my own stupidity and willful blindness. Okay, so I walked right into this one. And I think I just sprained my brain. Now what?
He sighs. “All right.” He still doesn’t use my name. But he turns to shine the flashlight ahead of us. And that’s when I see the outline of the door in the opposite wall.
IT’S funny how the more we travel the less we see.
Traveling via T-gates, we avoid the intervening points between the nodes because the gate is actually a hole in the structure of space, and in a very real sense there are no