Look, just stop, why don't you?
That's better.
When I get home, I stash the bag in the kitchen. The TV is going in the living room, so I shed my shoes and pad through.
"Sam."
He's on the sofa, curled up opposite the flickering screen as usual. He's holding a metal canister of beer. He glances at me as I come in.
"Sam." I join him on the sofa. After a moment I realize that he's not really watching the TV. Instead, his eyes are on the patio outside the glass doors at the end of the room. He breathes slowly, evenly, his chest rising and falling steadily. "Sam."
His eyes flicker toward me, and a moment later the corners of his mouth edge upward. "Been working late?"
"I walked." I pull my feet up. The soft cushions of the sofa swallow them. I lean sideways against him, letting my head fall against his shoulder. "I wanted to feel..."
"Connected."
"Yes, that's it, exactly." I can feel his pulse, and his breathing is profound, a stirring in the roots of my world. "I missed you."
"I missed you, too." A hand touches my cheek, moves up to brush hair back from my forehead.
At moments like this I hate being an unreconstructed humanan island of thinking jelly trapped in a bony carapace, endless milliseconds away from its lovers, forced to squeeze every meaning through a low-bandwidth speech channel. All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night. If I were half of who I used to be, and had my resources to handand if Sam, if Kay, wanted towe could multiplex, and know each other a thousand times as deeply as this awkward serial humanity permits. There's a poignancy to knowing what we've lost, what we might have had together, which only makes me want him more strongly. I move uneasily and clutch at his waist. "What took you so long?"
"I'm running away." He finally turns his head to look at me sidelong. "From myself."
"Me too," Throwing caution to the wind: "Is that part of your problem? With being... this?"
"It's too close." He swallows. "To what they wanted me to be."
I don't ask who "they" were. "Do you want to escape? To leave the polity?"
He's silent for a long while. "I don't think so," he says eventually. "Because I'd have to go back to being what I want not to be, if that makes sense to you. Kay was a disguise, Reeve, a mask. A hollow woman. Not a real person."
I snuggle closer to him. "I know you wanted to grow into her."
"Do you?" He raises an eyebrow.
"Look, why do you think I'm here?"
"Point." He looks momentarily rueful. "Do you want to leave?"
We're not really talking about staying or leaving, this is understood, but what he really means by that"I thought I did," I admit, toying with the buttons on the front of his shirt. "Then Dr. Hanta sorted me out, and I realized that what I really wanted was somewhere to heal, somewhere to be me. Community. Peace." I get my hand inside his shirt, and his breath acquires a little hoarse edge that makes me squeeze my thighs together. "Love." I pause. "Not necessarily her way, mind you." His hand is stroking my hair. His other hand"Do that some more."
"I'm afraid, Reeve."
"That makes two of us."
Later: "I want what you described."
I gasp. "Makes two. Of us. Oh."
"Love."
And we continue our conversation without words, using a language that no abhuman watcher AI can interpreta language of touch and caress, as old as the human species. What we tell each other is simple. Don't be afraid, I love you. We say it urgently and emphatically, bodies shouting our mute encouragement. And in the dark of the night, when we reach for each other, I dare myself to admit that it might work out all right in the end.
We aren't bound to fail.
Are we?
BREAKFAST is an affair of quiet desperation. Over the coffee and toast I clear my throat and begin a carefully planned speech. "I need to go to the library before Church, Sam, I forgot my gloves."
"Really?" He looks up, worry lines crisscrossing his forehead.
I nod vigorously. "I can't go to Church without them, it wouldn't be decent." Decent is one of those keywords the watchers monitor. Gloves aren't actually a dress code infraction, but they're a good excuse.
"Okay, I suppose I'll have to come with you," he says, with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man facing the airlock. "We need to leave soon, don't we?"
"Yes, I'd better get my bag," I say.
"I have a new waistcoat to wear."
I raise an eyebrow. His clothing sense is even more artificial than my own. "It's upstairs," he explains. For a moment I think he's going to say something more, something compromising, but he manages to bottle it up in time. My stomach squirms queasily. "Take care, darling."
"Nothing can possibly go wrong," he says with studied irony. He rises and heads for the staircase to our bedroom. (Our bedroom. No more lonely nights.) My heart seems to catch an extra beat. Then it's time to clear up the detritus, put the plates in the dishwasher, and get my shoes on.
When Sam comes downstairs, he's dressed for Churchwith a many-pocketed vest under his suit jacket, and, in his hand, the briefcase we packed yesterday. "Let's, uh, go," he says, and casts me a wan grin.
"Yup," I say, then check the clock and pick up my extra-large handbag. "Let's roll."
We arrive at the library around ten o'clock, and I let us in. The door to the cellar is already open. I reach into my bag as I go down the steps, conscious that if someone's blown the operation, then the bad guys could be waiting for me. But when I get to the bottom I find Janis.
"Hi, Janis," I say slightly nervously.
"Hi yourself." She lowers her gun. "Just checking."
"Indeed. Sam? Come on down." I turn back to Janis. "Still waiting for Greg, Martin, and Liz."
"Right." Janis gestures at a pile of grayish plastic bricks sitting on one of the chairs. "Sam? I think it'll work better if you carry these."
"Sure." Sam ambles over and picks up a brick. Squeezes it experimentally, then sniffs it. "Hmm, smells like success. Detonators?"
"On the sofa." I spot the stack of spare magazines and take a couple, then check they're loaded properly. "Where are the cogsets?" I ask.
"Coming." Janis waves at the A-gate. "We need to synchronize our watches, too."
"Okay." This isn't going to work too well without headsets and cognitive radio transceivers, but they're last on our list of items to assemble because they're too obvious. They're easier to sabotage than metal plumbing and chemical explosives, and a lot likelier to tripwire the alarms in the A-gate than a collection of antiques. If the radios don't work, our fallback is crudemechanical wristwatches and a prearranged time to start shooting.
Sam stuffs bricks of Composition-C into his vest pockets, squeezing them to fit. The vest bulges around his waist, as if he's suddenly put on weight, and when he pulls his jacket on it hangs open. What he's doing reminds me of something I once knew, something alarming, but I can't quite remember what. So I shake my head and go upstairs to wait behind the front desk.
A few minutes later Martin and Liz arrive together. I send them down to the basement. I'm getting worried when Greg appears. We're running short of time. It's 10:42 and the meeting is due to start in just a kilosec or so. "What kept you?" I ask.
"I feel rough," he admits. I think he's been drinking. "Couldn't sleep properly. Let's get this over with, huh?"
"Yeah." I point him at the cellar. "Gang's down there."
T minus ten minutes. The door opens, and Janis comes out. "Okay, I'm off to start the show in the auditorium," she tells me. A fey smile. "Good luck."