I'm fairly sure that from the outside YFH-Polity must appear to be a successful social psychology experiment. It's a closed microcosm community with its own emergent rules and internal dynamics that seem to be eerily close to some of the books I've been reading in my spare hours in the library. It's got to be providing great feedback on dark ages society for Yourdon and Fiore to wave under the noses of the academic oversight committee appointed by the Scholastium. But on the inside of the glasshouse, things are changing very rapidly. When Yourdon and Fiore and the mysterious Hanta announce a continuation, and say that all the inmates have agreed to extend their consent, nobody's going to look too deeply. By then, the experimental population will have nearly doubled. Half the inmates will be newborn citizens, unknown to the oversight committee on the outside. Maybe it's even worse than that—I ought to go to the hospital and visit Cass, nose around, and see what their maternity facilities are like. I'll bet they're pretty advanced for a dark ages facility. And that they're expecting plenty of multiple births.

There's also the question of the box files in the document repository. I figure they contain about a billion words of data, committed to a storage medium that is stable for tens of gigasecs, potentially even for hundreds. Spores. That's what they need the babies for, isn't it? I can't remember why we don't have repeated outbreaks of Curious Yellow anymore, it's one of those memories that's buried too deeply for me to retrieve. But there's got to be a connection, hasn't there? The original Curious Yellow infection spread via human carriers, crudely editing them to insert its kernel code and making them issue debugger commands to load and execute on each assembler they found. It spread via the netlink. Our netlinks don't work properly, do they? Hmm. The new A-gates are different, but they're equally a monoculture, just one that's designed to resist Curious Yellow's infection strategy. I can't help thinking about that MilSpec assembler in the library basement. There's something I'm missing here, something I don't quite have enough data for—

I'm dressed for work, standing in the kitchen holding a mug of coffee, and I don't remember how I got here. For a moment I shudder, in the grip of an anonymous sense of abstract horror. Did I just get dressed, walk downstairs, and make coffee in an introspective haze as I tried to get to grips with the real purpose of this facility? Or is something worse happening? The way I can read the words "I love you" but hear them as "* * *" suggests something's not quite right in my speech center. If I'm suffering memory dropouts, I could be quite ill. I mean, really ill. The small of my back prickles with cold sweat as I realize that I might be about to unravel like a knit jumper hooked by a nail. I know my memory's full of gaps where associations between concepts and experiences have been broken, but what if too much has gone? Can the rest of me just disappear spontaneously, speech and memory and perceptions falling victim to an excess of editing?

Not knowing who you are is even worse than not knowing who you were.

I get out of the house as fast as I can (leaving Sam asleep upstairs in the bedroom) and walk to work. The weather is as hot as usual—we seem to be moving into a scheduled "summer" season—and I make good time even though I set off in the opposite direction from normal, intending to loop around the back way and come into the downtown district where the library is via a different road.

I open up the library. It's neat and tidy—when neither Janis nor I are there I guess there's probably a zombie janitor on staff duty. I head to the back room to fortify myself with another coffee before Fiore arrives, and as I'm waiting for the kettle to boil I get a surprise.

"Janis! What are you doing here? I thought you were ill."

"I'm feeling a lot better," she says, summoning up a pale smile. "Last week I was getting sick a lot, and the lower back pain was getting to me, but I'm less nauseous now, and as long as I don't have to do a lot of bending or lifting, I should be all right for a while. So I thought I'd come in and sit in on the front desk for a bit."

Shit. "Well, it's been very quiet for the past few days," I tell her. "You don't have to stay." A thought strikes me. "You heard about Sunday."

"Yes." Her expression closes up. "I knew something bad was going to happen—Esther and Phil were too indiscreet—but I didn't expect anything like . . ."

"Would you like some coffee?" I extemporize, trying to figure out how to get her out of here while I do things that could get me into deep shit if they go wrong.

"Yes, please." She's got that brooding look, now. "I could strangle the greasy little turd."

"Fiore's visiting this morning," I say, managing to pitch my voice as casually as I can, hoping to get her attention.

"He is, is he?" She looks at me sharply.

I lick my lips. "Something else happened last night. I—it would really help if you could do me a favor."

"What kind of favor? If it's about Sunday—"

"No." I take a deep breath. "It's about one of my cohort. Cass. Her husband, Mick, he's been, uh, well, some of us went round yesterday night, and we took her to the hospital. We're making sure he doesn't go anywhere near her, and meanwhile—"

"Mick. Short guy, big nose, eyes as mad as a very mad thing indeed. That him?"

"Yes."

Janis swears, quietly. "How bad was it?"

I debate how much to tell her. "It's about as bad as it can get. If he finds her again, I'm afraid he'll kill her." I stare at her. "Janis, Fiore knew. He had to! And he didn't do anything. I'm half-expecting him to nail us all for a ton of points next Sunday for intervening."

She nods thoughtfully. "So what do you want me to do?"

I switch the kettle off. "Take today off sick, like you have for the past few days. Go to the hospital, visit Cass. If they've wired her jaw, she might be able to talk. We can't be with her all the time, but I think she'll need someone around. And someone who'll be there to call the police if Mick shows up. I don't know if the hospital zombies will do that."

"Forget the coffee, I'm out of here." As she stands up she looks at me oddly. "Good luck with whatever you're planning for Fiore," she says. "I hope it's painful." Then she heads for the door.

AFTER Janis leaves, I go and wait behind the front desk. Fiore shows up around midmorning and pointedly ignores me. I offer him a coffee and get a fish-eye stare instead of a "yes"—he seems suspicious. I wonder if it's because of what happened last night? But he's here alone, with no police and no tame congregation of score whores to back him up, so he pretends he didn't see me at all, and I pretend I don't know anything's wrong. He heads for the locked door in the reference section, and I manage to hold back the explosive gulp of air my lungs are straining for until he's gone.

My hands keep tensing and kneading the handles of my bag as if they belong to someone else. There's a carving knife in the bag, and I've sharpened the blade. It's not much of a dagger, but I'm betting that Fiore isn't much of a knife fighter. With any luck he won't notice anything, or he'll assume Yourdon is the author of my little modification to the cellar and, therefore, leave it alone. The knife is for the worst case, if I think Fiore has realized what I'm up to. It's piss poor compared to the kit I used to work with, but it's better than nothing. So I sit behind this desk like a prim and proper librarian, entertaining mad fantasies about sawing off the Priest's head with a carving knife while I wait for him to emerge from the repository.

Sweat trickles down the small of my back as I look out across the forecourt toward the highway, watching the pattern of light and shade cast by the leaves of the cherry trees on either side of the path shift and recombine on the concrete paving stones. My head hurts as I run through my fragmentary information again. Are my intermittent disconnects hiding things from me that I need to know?