"Esther and Mal live at the other end of Lakeside View from me and Chris." A piece of omelet quivers on the end of her fork, impaled for our attention. Jen chews reflectively. "I've noticed Esther watching me from their garden, some mornings. So I called a taxi to go shopping, then had it circle round and drop me off just beyond the tunnel at the other end of the road. Funny who you see in the area." She smiles, exposing perfect raptor-sharp teeth.

"Who?" asks Alice, obliging her with an audience.

"She goes in, and about ten minutes later Phil turns up by taxi. He sends it away and rings the doorbell. Leaves an hour or two later."

Angel tut-tuts disapprovingly. Alice just looks faintly disgusted.

"Don't you see?" asks Jen. "It's not public. That gives us leverage." She spears a broccoli stem, dismembers it a branch at a time, tearing with her teeth. "There's a word for it. Adultery. It's not negatively scored as such, as long as it's secret. But if it comes out—"

"We know," Angel interrupts. "So why—"

"Because we're not part of cohort three. Esther and Mal and Phil are all in cohort three. The, ah, peer pressure has to be applied by your peers. So this gives us leverage over Esther and Phil. If we tell Mal, they lose points big-time."

"I don't feel so good," I say, putting my knife down and pushing my chair back from the table. "Need some fresh air."

"Was it something I said?" asks Jen, casually concerned.

I'm getting better at lying with a straight face. I don't think I used to be good at it, but spending too much time around Jen is giving me a crash course in mendacity. "Nothing to do with you—must be something I ate," I say as I stand up.

I'm trying not to stand out, trying not to offend Jen or the others, and trying not to look eccentric in public, but there are limits to what I will put up with. Being tacitly enlisted in a conspiracy to blackmail is too much. I'll have to smile at them tomorrow or the day after, but right now I want to be alone. So I go outside, where a gentle breeze is blowing, and I walk to the end of the block and cross the road. There's very little traffic (none of us real humans drive vehicles—it's far too dangerous), and the zombies are configured to give right of way to pedestrians, so I manage to get into the park reasonably fast.

The park is a semidomesticated biome. The grass is neatly trimmed, the large deciduous plants are carefully pruned, and the small stream of water that meanders through it is tamed and can be crossed by numerous footbridges. It has the big advantage that at this time of day it's nearly empty, except for the zombie groundsman and perhaps a couple of wives with nothing better to do with their time. I walk along the stone path that leads from the edge of the downtown block toward the small coppice on the edge of the boating lake.

I gradually calm down as I near the side of the lake. It's simulating a sunny day with a little high cloud and a lazy breeze, just occasionally getting up enough speed to cool my skin through my costume. Apart from the incessant machinelike twitter of the fist-sized dinosaurs in the trees, it's quite peaceful. Sometimes I can almost bring myself to forget the perpetual simmering sense of anger and humiliation that Jen seems to thrive on inducing in the rest of us.

However much I try to, I can't put myself in their shoes. It's as if they don't realize that you can game the system by ignoring it, by refusing to participate, as well as by going along with the overt rewards and punishments. They've all unconsciously decided to obey the arbitrary pressure toward gender partitioning, and they won't be content unless everyone else conforms and competes for the same rewards. Was it like this for real dark ages females, created as random victims of genetic determinism rather than volunteers in an experiment enforced by explicit rewards and penalties? If so, I'm lucky: I've only got another three years of it.

Being a wife is a lonely business. Sam and I lead largely independent lives. He goes to work in the morning, and I only see him in the evenings, when he's tired, or on Sundays. On Sundays we go to Church, bound together by our mutual fear of being singled out for opprobrium, and afterward we go home together and try to remind each other that the score whores—who slavishly chase after every hint of right behavior that Fiore drops—are not the most intelligent or reasonable people. We have an uphill struggle at times.

It's a shame Sam's a male, and a shame that the internal dynamics of this compressed community have set up this artificial barrier between us. I have a feeling that if we weren't under so much external pressure, I could get to like him.

And then there's Cass, who was at Church last Sunday.

We live in a really small, tightly constrained and controlled synthetic world, and there are some aspects of the way it's organized that make its artificiality glaringly obvious. For example, we don't have fashions, not in the sense of spontaneous design creativity that spawns waves of imitation and recomplication. (Creativity is a scarce resource at the best of times, and with barely a hundred of us living here so far, there just isn't enough to go round.) What we do have is a strangely frenetic ersatz fashion industry, in the form of whatever's in the shops. Somewhere there's a surviving catalogue of styles from the dark ages, probably compiled from a museum, and the shops change their contents regularly, compelling us to buy new stuff every few cycles or fall out of date. (It's another conformity-promoting measure: forget to update your wardrobe contents, leave yourself open to criticism.) This month hats are in fashion, ridiculous confections with wide brims and net veils that shadow the face. I can cope with hats, although I don't like the brims or the veils—I keep catching them on things, and they get in the way.

But let me get back to Cass, the subject of my hopes and worries . . .

I'm standing beside Sam as usual, holding the hymnbook and moving my lips, letting my eyes rove around the other side of the aisle. A new cohort arrived last week and the Church is packed—they'll have to extend it soon. I'm trying to pick out the newcomers because I don't want to get them mixed up with the older cohorts. Maybe it's a bit of Jen's calculated cynicism rubbing off on me, but I'm learning to guess someone's degree of alienation by how long they've been around. I have a feeling I might be able to make some allies among the new intake as long as I look for them early in the conditioning cycle, before the score whores get their claws in.

For some reason Mick is sitting with—standing among—the new folks this week, and I automatically glance at the woman to his left. I do a double take. She's wearing a long-sleeved blue dress with a high collar, and a hat with a black veil that covers her face. She's got lots of makeup smeared around her eyes. Her mouth is a red slash, and her cheeks are colorless. But it's definitely Cass, and she's holding the hymnbook as if she's never seen one before.

Is that you, Kay? I wonder, tantalized by her presence. I've been holding on to that promise Kay extracted from me—"You'll look for me inside, won't you?" And Cass . . . she knows ice ghoul society. If Mick wasn't so crazy with jealousy that he doesn't want her out in public, if —

Sam nudges me discreetly in the ribs. People are closing their hymnbooks and sitting down. I hastily follow suit. (Don't want anyone to notice me, don't want to attract unwanted attention.)

"Dearly beloved," drones Fiore, "we are a loving congregation, and today we welcome to our bosom the new cohort of Eddie, Pat, Jon"—and he names seven other fresh victims—"who I am sure you will take under your wings and strive to befriend in due course. We also offer a belated welcome to sleepyhead Cass, who has finally deigned to grace us with her fragrant presence . . ." He twitters on in like vein for some time, preaching a sermon of saccharine subordination illustrated periodically with some anecdote of misdoing. Vern, it seems, got falling-down drunk and vomited in Main Street two nights ago, while Erica and Kate had a stand-up fight so violent that it put Erica in hospital, along with Greg and Brook, who tried to pull Kate off her. Kate is now in prison, paying the price for her outburst in days on bread and nights on water, and by the time Fiore gets through excoriating her, there's an angry undercurrent of disapproval in the congregation. I glance sidelong at Cass, trying not to be too obtrusive about it. I can't make out her face—the veil shadows her expression effectively—but I'm pretty sure that if I could see her, she'd look frightened. Her shoulders are set, defensive, and she's hunched slightly away from Mick.