Glasshouse - Charles Stross [87]
At this point I realize several things at once. I am really, really angry with him, although that’s not all I feel by a long way, because it’s not the kind of anger you feel at a stranger or an enemy. And while I’ve been working out like crazy and I’m in much better physical shape than I was when I came here, Sam is standing up, too, and he has maybe thirty centimeters and thirty kilos on me because he’s male, and he’s built like a tank. Maybe getting angry and yelling in the face of someone who’s that much bigger than I and who’s shocky right now from repeated bad experiences isn’t a very wise thing to do, but I don’t care.
“* * *,” he mumbles.
“What?” I state at him. “Would you care to repeat that?”
“* * *,” he says, so quietly I can’t hear it over the noise of the blood pounding in my ears. “That’s why I didn’t kill myself.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I’m hearing you properly.”
He glares at me. “Who do you think you are?” he demands.
“Depends. I was a historian, a long time ago. Then there were the wars, and I was a soldier. Then I became the kind of soldier who needs a historian’s training, then I lost my memory.” I’m glaring right back at him. “Now I’m a ditzy, ineffectual housewife and part-time librarian, okay? But I’ll tell you this—one day I’m going to be a soldier again.”
“But those are all externals! They’re not you. You won’t tell me anything! Where do you come from? Did you ever have a family? What happened to them?”
He looks anxious, and suddenly I realize he’s afraid of me. Afraid? Of me? I take a step back. And then I register what my face probably looks like right now, and it’s like all my blood is replaced with ice water of an instant, because his question has dredged up a memory that was, I think, one of the ones my earlier self deliberately forgot before the surgery, because he knew it would surface again and forgetting it hurt but knowing it might be erased by crude surgical intervention was even worse. And I sit down hard on the bench and look away from him because I don’t want to see his sympathy.
“They all died in the war,” I hear myself saying woodenly. “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
WHEN I sleep, another horror story dredges itself up from my suppressed memories and comes to visit. This time I know it’s genuine and true and really happened to me, and there’s nothing I can do to change it in any detail—because that’s what makes it so nightmarish.
The ending has already been written, and it is not a happy one.
In the dream, I am a gracile male orthohuman with long, flowing green hair and what my partners describe as a delightful laugh. I am a lot younger—barely three gigs—and I’m also happy, at least at first. I’m in a stable family relationship with three other core partners, plus various occasional liaisons with five or six fuckbuddies. We’re fully bisexual, either naturally or via a limbic system mod copied from bonobos. My family has two children, and we’re thinking about starting another two in half a gig or so. I’m also lucky enough to have a vocation, researching the history of the theory of mind—an aspect of cultural ideology that only became important after the Acceleration, and which goes in and out of fashion, but which I hold to be critically important. The history of my field, for example, tells us that for almost a gigasecond during the old-style twenty-third century, most of humanity-in-exile were zimboes, quasi-conscious drones operating under the aegis of an overmind. How that happened and how the cognitive dictatorship was broken is something I’m studying with considerable interest and not a few field trips to old memory temples.
One of these visits is the reason I am not at home with my family when Curious Yellow comes howling out of nowhere to erase large chunks of history, taking with it an entire interstellar civilization, and (to make things personal) my family.
I’m visiting a Mobile Archive Sucker in the full physical