"Yes." He nods. "I shouldn't have said, we'll get penalized"
I grab his hand like it's a floatation aid and I'm drowning. "Sam, Sam." You idiot! Yes, you! (I'm not sure which of us I mean.) "Did it ever occur to you to ask if maybe I knew Robin?"
"Why? What good would that have done?" His pupils are huge and dark in the twilight.
"You are the biggest" I don't know what to say. Truly, I don't. Stunned is the mildest word that describes how I feel. "The name you gave Robin was Kay, right?"
"You"
"Kay. Yes or no?"
He tenses and tries to pull his hand away. "Yes," he admits.
"O-kay." I don't seem to be able to get enough air. "Well, Sam, we are going to continue on our way home, now, aren't we? Because who we were before we came here doesn't make any difference to where we are now, does it?"
His expression is impossible to read in the darkness. "You must be Vhora"
I nearly slap him. Instead, I reach out with the index finger of my free hand and touch his lips. "Home first. Then we talk," I tell him, stomach still churning, aghast at my own stupidity and willful blindness. Okay, so I walked right into this one. And I think I just sprained my brain. Now what?
He sighs. "All right." He still doesn't use my name. But he turns to shine the flashlight ahead of us. And that's when I see the outline of the door in the opposite wall.
IT'S funny how the more we travel the less we see.
Traveling via T-gates, we avoid the intervening points between the nodes because the gate is actually a hole in the structure of space, and in a very real sense there are no intervening points. And it's not much different in a car. You get in, you tell the zombie where to take you, and he steps on the gas. Not that there's a machine under the bonnet that clatteringly detonates liquid distilled from ancient fossilized biomass (just a compact gateway generator and a sound effects unit), but it feels the same, in terms of your interaction with your surroundings.
Meanwhile, outside the cars and the corridors and the gates and the head games we deny playing with each other, there's a real universe. And sometimes it smacks you in the face.
Like now. I have known all along, in an abstract kind of way, that we're living in a series of roughly rectangular terrain features laid out on the curved inner surface of several huge colony cylinders, spinning to provide centripetal acceleration (a substitute for gravity), in orbit around who-knows-what brown dwarf stars. The sky is a display screen, the wind is air-conditioning, the road tunnels are a necessary part of the illusion, and if you go for a walk in the overgrown back lot you'll find a steep hill or cliff that you can't climb because it goes vertical only a few meters up. I haven't given much thought to how it's all stitched together, other than to assume there are T-gates in each road tunnel. But what if there's another way out?
I clutch his hand. "Stop! Turn your flashlight back. Yes, there, right there."
"What is it?" he asks.
"Let's see." I tug him toward it. "Come on, I need the light."
The tunnel walls are made of smoothly curved slabs of concrete set edge to edge, forming a hollow tube maybe eight meters in diameter. The road is a flat sheet of asphalt, its edges meeting the walls of the tube just under the halfway point up its sides. (Now that I think about it, what could be running under the road deck? It might be solid, but then again, there could be just about anything down there.) What I've noticed is a rectangular groove in the opposite wall. Close up I can see it's about a meter wide and two meters high, a plain metal panel sunk into one side of the tunnel. There's no sign of any handle or lock except for a hole a few millimeters in diameter drilled halfway up it, just beside one edge.
"Give me the flashlight."
"Here." He passes it without argument. I get as close to the wall as I can and shine the light into the crack. Nothing, no sign of hinges or anything. I crouch down and shine it into the hole. Nothing there, either. "Hmm."
"What is it?" he asks anxiously.
"It's a door. Can't say more than that." I straighten up. "We can't do anything about it right now. Let's go home and think about this."
"But if we go home, we won't be able to talk!" In the dim light of the flashlight, his eyes look very white. "They'll overhear everything."
"They don't see everything," I reassure him. "Come on, let's go home. This afternoon I want you to mow the lawn."
"But I"
"The lawn mower is in the garage," I continue implacably. "Along with other things."
"But"
"If they're not waiting for us when we get home, they're not monitoring the tunnels, Sam. Noticed your netlink recently? No? Well, we don't seem to have lost any points just now. There are gaps in the surveillance coverage. I think I know somewhere else they're not monitoring, and you ought to know we're not the only people who want out."
I feel safe telling him that much, even though if they brainscoop me and feed me to Curious Yellow right now, it'll take down three of us: me and Sam and Janis. Kay may be in denial right now but sheNo, you've got to keep thinking of him as Sam, I tell myselfisn't, I think, going to sell me to the bad guys. I am pretty sure I can read Sam well enough now to know what's bugging him. It's funny how I was in lust with Kay but couldn't tell if I trusted her. Now I trust Sam, but I doubt I'll ever fuck him again. Life is strange, isn't it? "You do want out, don't you?" I ask.
"Yes." He sounds tremulous.
"Then you're going to have to trust me for a little bit longer because I don't have an escape plan yet." I squeeze his hand. "But I'm working on it."
Together, we walk toward the light.
THAT afternoon Sam changes into jeans and a T-shirt and mows the lawn. I'm in the garage wearing overalls and safety goggles, because I've made a mold from the plaster of paris dies and I'm pouring solder into it, casting a lead copy of the key to Fiore's cabinet of curiosities. The lead key won't turn in the lock, but it'll do okay as a template for the engraving disk and the small bar of brass I've got waiting.
To confuse anyone who's watching, I've got some props sitting arounda wooden wall plaque purchased from the fishing store, a plate to engrave with some meaningless dedication. When I showed Sam what I was up to he blinked rapidly, then nodded. "It's for thewomen's freehand cross-stitch club," I said, pulling the explanation right out of my ass. There is no such club, but it sounds right, a backup explanation that will trigger a reflex in whatever watcher is scanning us for anomalous behavior.
We may be living in a glass jar with bright lights and monitors trained on us the whole time, but it's not likely that everything we do is being watched by a live human being in real time. We massively outnumber the experimenters, and they're primarily interested in our public socialization. (At least, that's the official story.) To monitor an intelligent organism properly requires observers with a theory of mind at least as strong as the subject. We subjects outnumber the experimenters by a couple of orders of magnitude, and I've seen no sign of strongly superhuman metaintelligences being involved in this operation, so I think the odds are on my side. If we are up against the weakly godlike, I might as well throw in the towel right now. But if not... You can delegate all you want to subconscious mechanisms, but you run the risk of them missing things. Sic transit gloria panopticon.
The Church services are almost certainly monitored in every imaginable way. But after Church, Fiore and his friends will be too busy re-running the lynching from every imaginable angle and trying to figure out how the social dynamics of a genuine dark ages mob operate. They won't be watching what I get up to in the garage until much later, probably just a bored glance at a replay to make sure I'm not fucking my neighbor's husband or weeping hysterically in a corner. Because they're used to using A-gates to fab any physical artifacts they need, they probably look at what I'm doing as some sort of dark ages hobby and view me as a slightly dull but basically well-adjusted wife. I even gained a couple of points last week for my weaving. I laboriously hand-wove a Faraday cage lining for my shoulder bag right under their noses, and they treated it as if I was diligently practicing a traditional feminine craft! There are gaps in their surveillance and bigger gaps in their understanding, and those gaps are going to be their downfall.