Glasshouse - Charles Stross [98]
“No apology needed,” I say, my heart beating painfully fast.
“Oh, but there is. You see, I didn’t mean everything I said. But when I said * * * I was telling the—”
“Stop right there.” I raise a hand. “Those words. You, uh, oh shit.” My head’s spinning. It’s late at night, I’ve been through a lot, I’ve been drinking vodka, and Sam’s saying words to me that my ears refuse to listen to. “I didn’t hear you just now, and I know for sure you said the same thing before, and I didn’t hear the words.” He looks puzzled, even offended. “I mean, I heard you speak, but I couldn’t understand them.” I’m beginning to worry. “You used the same phrase, didn’t you? Exactly the same words? Could there be something wrong with my—” He stands up and strides over to the sideboard to retrieve his tablet, which has been lying there gathering dust for some time. “What?”
He says something to it, then holds it up in front of me. Dim letters glow on the screen:
I LOVE YOU
“You what?” I say, “You’re trying to say * * *—” And I know I’m saying the words, but I can’t hear them. “Shit.” I shake my head. “It’s me. Sam, I’m so sorry.” I stand up and hug him. “* * *, too. It’s just, there’s something really flaky up with my language module. Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me?” I lean back far enough to see his face. “Is it?”
“Yes,” he admits. His face is a picture of worry. “I don’t say that easily. And I can’t hear it either, Reeve, I thought I was going nuts.”
“I guess not.” I’m close enough to feel his crotch. “And I guess you only say that to people you’re serious about.” He nods. “And maybe you’re close enough that I can tell you that I’m flattered, and very happy, and, and—” I pause. I feel as if I ought to know what this weird inability to understand those three happy words means, but I can’t quite recall it. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
He nods. “I really don’t like this,” he says, miserably, a wave of his hand encompassing everything from his body outward. “I’ve—they should have spotted it. I don’t feel right when I’m big and slow and fixed. I mean, they can patch it temporarily but I don’t like that, either, it’s easier just not to be. Only they didn’t even give me a, a—” He’s breathing too fast.
I feel a stab of anger, not at Sam but at Fiore and the other idiots. “You’ve got a big-body dysphoria, haven’t you?” He nods. “Figures.” Kay spent a whole lifetime as an alien, didn’t she? And kept changing bodies, as if she couldn’t quite settle on a form that she felt comfortable in. Doubtless it’s fixable with therapy, but fixing people’s problems isn’t exactly what this polity is about. “Sam.” I kiss him on the cheek. “We’ve got to get out of here. Where’s your tablet?”
“Over there.”
“I need to show you something.” I let go of him and fetch it, intending to point out to him the myriad ways in which the polity constitution turns us into victims of a biologically deterministic tyranny. “Here—” I page through it quickly. “Hey, I didn’t see this before!”
“What?” He looks over my shoulder.
“List of revealed behavioral scores. Gender-based. Huh.” I stare. Sex with your partner gets five points for the very first occurrence, dropping off to one point each time after a while. In other words, it’s a decay function. “Adultery,” that bad word, gets minus one hundred. There are some other crazy items. Getting pregnant brings fifty points, bringing the baby to term brings another fifty. What’s abortion? Whatever it is, it gets hammered as hard as adultery, which is what got Esther and Phil into—let’s not go there. There are other things here, the most improbable activities, that get huge penalties. But rape isn’t mentioned. Murder loses you just seventy points. What kind of sense does that make? It’s ludicrous! “Either they’re trying to generate a psychotic polity, or the people in the society they derived these scores from were off their heads.”
“Or possibly both.” Sam yawns. “Listen, it’s late. We need to get some sleep. Why don’t we go to bed and chew this over