Glasshouse - Charles Stross [86]
He goes silent for a long time. I stroke the hair back from the side of his face. “Twenty cycles,” he says after a while.
“Seven months?”
“Without backups,” he confirms.
It’s a frightening amount of time to lose, that’s for sure. Even more frightening is the fact that their last backups are locked up in the assembler firewall that isolates YFH-Polity from the outside world—while I’m not certain it’s infected with Curious Yellow, I have my suspicions. (CY copies itself between A-gates via the infected victims’ netlinks, doesn’t it? And the suspiciously restricted functionality of our netlinks inside YFH worries me.) There might not be any older copies of Phil or Esther on file elsewhere. If that’s the case, and if we can’t phage-clean the infected nodes, we might lose them for good.
Sam is silent for a long time. We stay there on the bench as the light reddens and dims, and after a while I just rest my hands on his shoulder and watch the trees at the far end of the garden. Then, with absolutely no buildup, he murmurs, “I knew who you were almost from the beginning.”
I stroke his cheek again, but don’t say anything.
“I figured it out inside a week. You were spending all your time talking about this friend you were supposed to be looking out on the inside for. Cass, you thought.”
I keep stroking, to calm myself as much as anything else.
“I think I was in shock at first. You seemed so dynamic and confident and self-possessed before—it was bad enough waking up in that room and finding I was this enormous bloated shambling thing, but then to see you like that, it really scared me. I thought at first I was wrong, but no. So I kept quiet.”
I stop moving my hands around, leaving one on his shoulder and one beside his head.
“I nearly killed myself on the second day, but you didn’t notice.”
Shit. I blink. “I was dealing with my own problems,” I manage to say.
“Yes, I can see that now.” His voice is gentle, almost sleepy. “But I couldn’t forgive you for a while. I’ve been here before, you know. Not here-here, but somewhere like here.”
“The ice ghouls?” I ask, before I can stop myself.
“Yes.” He tenses, then pushes himself upright. “A whole planet full of pre-Acceleration sapients who probably aren’t going to make it without outside help because they took so long bootstrapping their techné that they ran out of easily accessible fossil fuels.” He swings his legs round and sits upright, next to me but just too far away to touch. “Living and breeding and dying of old age and sometimes fighting wars and sometimes starving in famines and disasters and plagues.”
“How long were you there, again?” I ask.
“Two gigs.” He turns his head and looks straight at me. “I was part of a, a—I guess you’d call it a reproductive unit. A family. I was an ice ghoul, you know. I was there from late adolescence through to senescence, but rather than let them nurse me, I ran out onto the tundra and used my netlink to call for upload. Nearly left it too late. I was terminally ill and close to being nestridden.” Sam looks distant. “All the pre-Acceleration tool-using sapients we’ve seen use K-type reproductive strategies. I’d outlived my partners, but I had three children, their assorted cis-mates and trans-mates, and more grandchildren than—”
He sighs.
“You seem to want me to know this,” I say. “Are you sure about that?”
“I don’t know.” He looks at me. “I just wanted you to know who I am and where I come from.” He looks down at the stones between his feet. “Not what I am now, which is a travesty. I feel dirty.”
I stand up. He’s gone on for long enough, I think. “Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re a former xeno-ornithologist who got way too close to your subjects for your own emotional stability. You’ve got a bad case of body-image dysphoria that YFH failed to spot in their excuse for an entry questionnaire, you’re good at denial—self and other