Asimov's Science Fiction (4 page)

She waits for the aunts to drop out of sight—then she takes a deep breath, and activates the sniffer.

Nothing happens—at least, nothing that she can see, but she knows that outside the Memorial, something has come online in Lieutenant George's van—that her team is now assembling, ready to track the aunts; to make the arrest George hungers for, the one that will make the world a little safer for Perpetuates. Cam has done her part. She can turn back, and leave the Memorial much as she came into it—empty-handed, braced for the worst to happen to her.

And yet...

And yet she has to know. And yet, somehow, she finds herself walking after the aunts—hearing the same litany echo in her skull until it takes the place of everything else. She's in the Memorial. In a virtual universe with no set rules for death. There's nothing they can do to her; nothing that will terminate her existence or harm her for more than a few transitory moments. Nothing. Unless

... Unless they've managed to hack into it.

No. That's impossible. No one can....

But they're the aunts—whoever they are, they know everything, have access to all the files, to all the details of Cam's life. Surely, hacking into a virtual universe, even one so tightly circumscribed as the Memorial, isn't beyond their powers?

She walks in sunlight, into little alleyways filled with compartments—with houses that advertise their wares on battered holo-screens, past bots that scuttle into boltholes. A sleek aircar zooms by, stopping briefly to extrude a counter and dispense some crab noodle soup to a middle-aged woman.

This far into the simulation, Galactics are not there at all—there are only Rong, from the mechanic who carries bots slung over his shoulder to the seller of barbecued pork sandwiches; from the young man lost in his virtual games, to the old woman descending from an aircar, attended by her whole family.

The smell of food is overwhelming—of steamed rice and garlic and fish sauce, of broth simmering away in the myriad restaurants she walks by. Cam should be on her knees by now, gagging with the wrongness of it—but she's not.

Cam turns a corner, still struggling to work out what is wrong, what she's not seeing—and all but bumps into the aunts.

They have stopped—are waiting for her, their arms crossed over their chests. The eldest aunt is a little apart from them, holding out her hand, in which flashes a red light—George's tracker made manifest.

It's impossible—they shouldn't...

"Did you think we wouldn't see, child?" the eldest aunt asks. Her voice is deceptively mild; she might have been talking about the weather.

Cam stops—no use waiting for help, for it won't come. She's alone now, and in spite of the innocuous environment she's never been so frightened in her life. "I had no choice. I could come down with you, or I could follow their orders."

The eldest aunt peers into her hand, thoughtfully. "I see. Galactic police coding. Shoddy work—you can tell, it's full of corrupt packages."

Abruptly she's standing by Cam's side, pressing down on her shoulder with what seems like little strength; but it feels as though something is tearing inside her. The eldest aunt is only a small, diminutive woman; how can she be so strong—how can she —?

"You
know
I can't stand on your side." Cam forces the words out between clenched teeth—the eldest aunt is still pressing on her, and gradually her body is buckling, her knees giving way, bowing her closer to the ground. "For Heaven's sake, you buy Perpetuates to take them apart!"

"And you're nothing." The eldest aunt's voice is contemptuous. "You were happy enough to take our money, and ask no questions, and all of a sudden you decide to betray us? That won't do, child."

Cam is kneeling on the ground now, brought down by the weight of the eldest aunt's hands on her shoulder; and her breath comes in gasps and shudders. She's truly, desperately alone—Lieutenant George, even if she suspects something is wrong, won't react, won't do anything to save her—she's made it clear enough what she thinks of Cam's acts.

As Cam struggles for breath, for words, she sees everything with preternatural clarity—every detail of her surroundings, the bystanders throwing curious glances at the group stuck in the middle of the wide, paved street—the eldest aunt's robes, billowing in the breeze; every little stitch of the cloth, every cut of the scissors and every little embroidery on the hem of the sleeves—they're not Galactic patterns, but rather a thin chain of lotus flowers, going all the way around the hem like prayer beads.

Rong. They're Rong patterns.

And she sees, then—not with her eyes, but with her heart and mind. She sees that the aunts are wearing the clothes her grandmother wore, every day of her life—a melding of Galactic and Rong influences. Those are the clothes her friends' grandparents wore, the ones they brought from Moc Hau Tinh when the planet burnt in civil war.

And, around her...

She doesn't look around her. She doesn't need to. She knows that everyone she saw—the noodle soup seller, the seller of sandwiches, the housewives in the aircar— they all have the solidity of real, living people.

"You're Rong," she says. "You're all Rong."

"Of course we're Rong," the eldest aunt says. "What did you think we were, child?"

Cam kneels, breathing in the smell of garlic and fish sauce and all the myriad things of home. Everyone in the street seems to have gathered around them, a circle of pressed people that is making her dizzy—she catches bits and pieces, fragments of faces that look familiar and yet are not—

No.

She sees them. She sees all of them, clustered at the back of the crowd—Thanh Ha's grandmother, and Pham Huu Hieu's brother, and Le Thi Quoc's mother, and all the others she's bargained away from their families, given flesh and blood in the Memorial, a feat that should have been impossible.

"Perpetuates," she breathes, knowing that this, too, is true. "You're all Perpetuates."

"This is our home," the eldest aunt says. "The place we have made for ourselves." She's withdrawn from Cam; stands staring at the streets around her. Cam sucks in breath through burning lungs, struggling to make sense of what she's seen.

They... they have hacked the Memorial
from within.
They have hidden themselves in its codes and processes, and built their own enclave. They have...

They're not supposed to be here at all. No wonder they hide; no wonder they tell no one what they are or what they are doing. The Memorial is not a virtual universe open to Perpetuates. It is a museum: a place to visit, not a place to live in or be hosted—not a place where you're allowed to painstakingly build your own home city within the city, year after year—

The enormity of it shocks her—that Perpetuates should have the power and desire to take the Memorial back; to expand, layer after layer, into Steven Carey's masterwork, and claim it back for themselves.... That she should have helped in that, all the while thinking that she was helping the aunts take Perpetuates apart. That she...

That she sold the aunts out, just as she sold off the chips; gave them away with scarcely a thought to ensure her own, selfish future....

It's too much to take in all at once.

"I'm sorry," she whispers—in Rong, using the pronoun reserved for young, ignorant children. "I didn't know."

One of the middle-aunts speaks, in the growing silence, "Not so easy, is it, to find out what you have done?"

"I'm sorry," Cam says, again, knowing the words to be meaningless—cheaply bandied weapons, promises as brittle as burnt clay.

She stands, shivering, in bright sunlight in the city of Xuan Huong—not the quaint place of Steven Carey's fantasies, not the poverty-ridden, powerless victim of the war seen through Galactic eyes; but the home of Mother and Grandmother and all her ancestors; the bustling, multifaceted city that shaped her people and her family, the continuation of the history that she and Thuy carry with them, words and images carved into the grooves of their hearts.

And she knows, then, with a certainty she's never felt before in her life—she knows that she'll pay whatever price needs to be paid to preserve this; to make sure that the Memorial still contains that corner of living history; the thread, elusive and thin and yet more solid than any steel, which still binds the Rong to their homeland—the thread that is the truth of the war and the truth of their past.

Cam holds out her hand to the eldest aunt. "Let me make this right."

The eldest aunt turns, the sniffer glowing in the palm of her hand—the color of maple leaves and New Year's lanterns. "Let me help," Cam says, again. "If I take it from you—"

"Why should we trust you?" the eldest aunt asks. "You've amply demonstrated that you'll betray us, time and time again, when your own life hangs in the balance."

Betrayals—of the Rong, of the Rong Perpetuates, not once but many, many times—selling her people to what she thought was a criminal ring, time and time again—betrayals, and selfishness, and greed....

Cam spreads her hands—speechless, for once.

"What do you advocate?" the middle-aged aunt says.

"Isn't it obvious?" The eldest aunt is standing once more by Cam's side, one hand casually raised, only a few inches from her throat. With a mere gesture, she could crush Cam's windpipe—this deep into the Memorial, Cam doesn't doubt that she'd die for real. That Thuy would wait and wait, and raise a child on her own—and be unable to tell that child anything, anything at all about Cam that would be meaningful. "Silence is gold; and the only silence we can trust is that of the grave."

"She's Rong," the middle-aged aunt says.

"She's nothing. She lies and cheats for a living."

"We all do, don't we? We all lie and deceive and cheat, elder sister—as we did to this child."

"Not for selfish motives."

"Our own survival, you mean?" The middle-aged aunt's smile is bitter. "Tell me that's not selfish. Look me in the eye and tell me it's not."

The eldest aunt says nothing.

"Please," Cam says. "Else they'll come in and find you."

The eldest aunt's gaze turns to her; and it's Grandmother's gaze, dark and unfathomable, weighing every inch of Cam's life from beginning to end. "Do you know what you're asking for, child?"

Cam thinks of Lieutenant George; of re-education—and of Thuy and their child, and of each generation being less and more than the one that came before them. She had so many ideas of what she wanted; and all of them, after all, turned out to be wrong. For, when she does this—when she walks out of the Memorial with the sniffer still in the palm of her hand, looking properly downcast and ashamed and afraid for Lieutenant George—her life will once again revolve on lies; once again be shrouded in the half-truths and evasions she's become so good at.

What matters is this: they won't be the shadow lies, the worms eating at her from within, but the other kind of lies—the ones that give weight and heft and meaning to the secret part of her life.

"Yes. Of course I know what I'm doing." And, reaching out, she takes the eldest aunt's hand in her own, and stands in sunlight on the eve of the war, in the city of her ancestors—feeling the dried, gnarled flesh against hers like a fount of strength for the future.

Asimov's

Ron Collins comes about his love of numbers honestly. He's an "all application, no theory" engineer who's a son of an engineer, and he's married to an "all theory, no application" math major. He learned basic math as a kid armed only with a slide rule and the driving need to truly understand baseball. Give him a spreadsheet and a chart, and he'll be happy for hours. Ron tells us that the first paragraph of "Primes" came to him in that dream state that occurs "only in the process of waking up during the earliest of the early morning hours."

A prime number is one that cannot be represented as a product of two other numbers—excepting, of course, itself and the number 1. It is independent, unique. It is not a product of its environment.

If Jersey Jones were a prime number he would be seventeen. This is because he was seventeen when he lost his virginity to Pari Alderson, a friend at secondary school. Their tryst occurred in the back of his father's car while parked behind a convenience store. They met years before when Pari was seven—which is, of course, another prime. When they were finished, Pari was unhappy with him. He took her straight home, neither one speaking throughout the drive. They did not see each other after that fateful evening.

Today, Jersey Jones writes computer programs at InterTel, a company that exists to push advertisements through the neural interfaces of the average public citizen at that just-in-time moment before they might need the product at hand. Though he found parts of his job annoying, the work itself was interesting: link into people's nets, query their inventory, map their current location, brain activity, inferred physical motion into his clients' sites to create glide paths to the right store so smoothly they thought they got there all by themselves.

It was, of course, important the customer always felt they were in control. The customer is always right, and each needs to feel unique in its own way, like a prime. This was not true, of course. At the level InterTel spoke of them, customers were all the same. Like so many of us, they were fake primes. But when the illusion was complete, people got what they wanted and wanted what they got.

Jones liked working on people. He liked to imagine he was actually touching their interface and giving them these not-so-subtle commands. When he first hired on and was just learning the basics of interface construction, back when his co-workers still invited him to such things, he would sit in bars after work and conjure up things he might do with people—could he make the couple in the booth across the aisle get into a fight? Or could he have the brunette three seats away put down her drink and give him a smile? Looking back, this was the beginning of everything. At the time, though, he did it mostly to stay busy while his friends were hooking up or getting shot down in blazes of glory. The bar itself made him uncomfortable. Talking to women never seemed to go well for him because he never knew what they were going to say next.