"I've been bored!" I manage to keep myself from squeaking. "It's been boring at home, and it's been raining all week long." I pull out the other chair and sit down. "You can't go shopping every day of the week, there's only so much cleaning and tidying you can do in one house, the television is boring, and I should have stopped here to borrow some books but I thought..." I wind down. What have I been thinking?
"I think I see." A wan smile tugs at the corners of her eyes. "How's Sam?"
I tense. "What makes you ask?"
The smile fades. "He was here yesterday. Wanted to talk about you, wanted to know my opinion... He doesn't feel he can talk to you, so he has to let it out with someone else. Reeve, that's not good. Are you all right? Is there anything I can do to help?"
"Yes, you can change the subject." I say it lightly, but she just about freezes right up on the spot. "Sam's taken offense to something I said, and we need to sort it out between us." My stomach churns with anger and guilt, but I bite back on it. It's not Janis's fault after all, but Sam should know better, the pig. "We'll sort it out," I add, trying to reassure her.
"I... see." Janis looks as if she's sucking on a slice of lemon. Right then the kettle comes to a boil, so she stands up and pours the hot water into two mugs, then scoops in the creamy powder and mixes it up. "I hope you won't take this the wrong way, Reeve, but you seem to have changed since you came out of hospital. You haven't really been yourself."
"Hmm? What do you mean?" I blow on my coffee to cool it.
"Oh, little things." She raises an eyebrow at me. "You've gained a certain enthusiasm. You're more interested in exteriors than interiors. And you seem to have lost your sense of humor."
"What's humor got to do with it?" I glare at my mug, willing myself not to get angry. "I know who I am, I know who I was."
"Forget I said it." Janis sighs. "I'm sorry, I don't know what's gotten into me. I'm getting really bitchy these days." She falls silent for a while. "I hope you don't mind my leaving you for a few hours."
I manage a forced laugh. Janis's issues aren't my business, strictly speaking, but"What are friends for?"
She looks at me oddly. "Thanks." She takes a mouthful of her coffee and makes a face. "This stuff is vile, the only thing worse that I can think of is not having it at all." Her frown lengthens. "I'm running late. See you back around lunchtime?"
"Sure," I say, and she stands up, grabs her jacket from the back of the door, and heads off.
I finish my coffee, then go back to the front desk. There's some filing to do, but the cleaning zombies have been thoroughthey didn't even leave me any dusty top shelves to polish. A couple of bored office workers drop in to return books or browse the shelves for some lunchtime entertainment, but apart from that the place is dead. So it happens that I'm sitting at the front desk, puzzling over whether there's a better way to organize the overdue returns shelf, when the front door opens, and Fiore steps in.
"I wasn't expecting you," he says, pudgy eyes narrowing suspiciously.
"Really?" I hop off my stool and smile at him, even though all my instincts are screaming at me to be careful.
"Indeed not." He sniffs. "Is the other librarian, Janis, in?"
"She's out this morning, but she'll be back later." I get a horrible sense of dj vu as I look at him, like a flashback to a bad dream.
"Hmm. Well, if I can trouble you to turn your back, I have business in the repository." His voice rises: "I don't want to be disturbed."
"Ah, all right." I take an involuntary step back. There's something about Fiore, something not quite right, a feral tension in his eyes, and I'm suddenly acutely aware that we're alone, and that he outweighs me two to one. "Will you be long?"
His eyes flicker past my shoulder. "No, this won't take long, Reeve." Then he turns and lumbers toward the reference section and the secure document repository, not bothering to look at me. For a moment I don't believe my own instincts. It's a gesture of contempt worthy of Fiore, after all, a man so wrapped up in himself that if you spent too long with him, you'd end up thinking you were a figment of his imagination. But then I hear him snort. There's the squeak of the key in thelock, and a creak of floorboards. "You might as well come with me. We can talk inside."
I hurry after him. "In what capacity am I talking to you?" I ask, desperately racking my brains for an excuse not to join him. "Is it about Janis?"
He turns and fixes me with a beady stare. "It might be, my daughter." And that's pure Fiore. So I follow him through the door and down the steps into the cellar, a hopeless tension gnawing at my guts, still unsure whether I'm right to be worried or not.
Fiore pauses when we get to the strange room at the bottom of the stairs. "What exactly do you think of Dr. Hanta?" he asks me. He sounds tired, weighed down with cares.
I'm taken aback. What is this, some kind of internal politicking? "She's"I pause, biting my tongue, acutely aware who I'm talking to"refreshingly direct. She means well, and she's concerned. I trust her," I add impulsively, resisting the urge to add, unlike you . I manage to maneuver so my back is to the storage shelves on one wall. If I have to grab something
"That's not unexpected," Fiore says quietly. "What did she do to you?"
"She didn't tell you?"
"No, I want you to tell me in your own words." His voice is low and urgent, and something in my heart breaks. I can't pretend this isn't happening anymore, can I? So I play for time.
"I was having frequent memory fugues, and I picked up a nasty little case of gray goo up top in the ship's mass fraction tankage. That set my immune system off, and it began taking out memory traces. Dr. Hanta had to put me on antirobotics and give me a complete memory fixative in order to stop things progressing." I move my hands behind my back and slowly shuffle backward, away from him and toward the wall. "I'd say she's a surprisingly ethical practitioner, given the way everyone else here carries on in secret. Or do you know differently?"
"Hmm." Fiorefake-Fioreleans over the assembler console and taps in some kind of code. "Yes, as a matter of fact I do."
While he isn't watching I take another step back until I bump up against shelves. Good. I'm already mentally preparing what I need to do next.
Fiore continues, implacably. "One of your predecessors hereyes, they're still around in deep covergot it worked out. Dr. Hanta isn't her real name. She, or rather it, used to be a member of the Asclepian League." I give a little gasp. "Yes, you do remember them, don't you? She was a Vivisector, Reeve. One of the inner clade, dedicated to pursuing their own vision of how humanity should be restructured."
"Thanks for reminding me what I came here to get away from," I say shakily. "I'm going to be having nightmares about that for the next week."
He turns and glares at me. "Are you stupid, or" He stops himself. "I'm sorry. But if that's all it means to you, you really are beyond" He stabs at the console angrily. "Shit. I thought you'd be at least vaguely concerned for the rest of us in here."
I take a deep breath, trying to get my nausea under control. The Asclepians were another of the dictatorship cults, a morphological collective. Much worse than the Solipsist Nation. They restructured polities one screaming mangled body at a time. If Dr. Hanta is an Asclepian, and she's working with Yourdon and Fiore, the future they're trying to sculpt is a thing of horror. "She can't be. She just can't."
"And I suppose you think Major-Doctor Fiore is just a fat, egocentric psychiatrist?" He grins at me humorlessly. "Stop that, Reeve, I know what you're up to. Hanta fucked with your head really well, didn't she? Probably got you to give your consent first, too. They're hot on formalities, Asclepians. Fiore and Yourdon are war criminals, too. Shit, most of the people here did things so nasty they want to forget everything. Do you remember why this is an experimental polity?"