Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (13 page)

Bill didn't know whether Shona had hidden the phone from him and Fari because she didn't trust them, because she was trying to protect them, or simply because her cogmod made her not want to think or talk about it. They'd known for a long time that the library likely still existed in some form, somewhere, maybe in multiple copies; the severity of her punishment meant that she must have given or sold a copy to someone. The only surprise was that she still had a copy herself, and that it was living on the same ancient piece of hardware that she'd made them think was destroyed.

The question was whether this was the only copy in the world, and whether it was recoverable. With a decade's perspective on his old job, he could see now what that would mean. They might be the custodians of the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. To salvage it, he'd need to find someone with the kind of illegal technical skills that had made it possible for Shona to copy it ten years before. A friend knew a history professor with radical politics at the university in Dar es Salaam. Bill made an appointment to visit him.

He prepared a cover story involving snorkeling on Zanzibar, and told it to Fari in view of a camera so that she could claim she wasn't involved. She didn't pay much attention—everyone was too busy talking about the war in California. Cameras were getting to be as common in the E.A.F. as in America, but eventually he maneuvered her into walking through the run-down old park on the way home from getting some new shoes printed.

"I don't think it was such a great idea to take this shortcut," she said. "It's getting dark."

A skinny old man with missing teeth was sitting next to a pile of plastic that he'd scavenged out of an open pit full of garbage. The man put out a palm with a green
mpesa
card in it, and Bill stopped to swipe a few thousand shillings onto it.

"
Asante, kaka.
"—"
Karibu, mzee.
"

"Really, sweetie, let's keep moving," she said.

Bill had been opening his mouth to spit out his illegal plan, but he looked at her impatient face and shut up. They walked on. Fari had always teased him about being a boy scout, but he was a different man now, the kind who worked out cover stories for the cops. Subconsciously he'd been imagining that when he told her about his mission, she'd approve. But the incident with the old man had erased that picture in his mind and clicked a new one into place. Fari's anarchism was devoted to self-preservation. She would have as little interest in the Library of Alexandria as in the old man. Bill decided that he would try to copy the library without telling his wife—the second time that its preservation had been hidden from her—and by doing so, he would put her in the same category as the Public Peace AI. Not a fellow merry trickster, as he'd hoped, but another hunting dog that had tracked the library like a rabbit from one side of the world to the other.

Professor Singh took Bill to a guy with a messy electronics shop who seemed like an amoral but competent criminal.

"Okay, easy solution," the copycat said, pulling a khat leaf through his teeth and tossing the stem into a pile on his workbench. "The guts inside are fine. The screen was the part that died. That's museum stuff, you know, LCD."

"It's amazing you can work with it," the professor said, stroking the hardware hacker's ego. "You're an artist." The professor was built like an aging wrestler, a big bull of a man with an incongruously squeaky voice.

The 'cat flashed a smile full of brown-stained teeth. "You got something you want me to put a copy on?"

"Two copies, please," the professor said, and produced two flat black-and-white handheld interfaces like the ones used at the orphans' school in Moshi.

The 'cat pulled on a pair of latex gloves before he accepted them. "Yeah, these handies are good. Built for kids to pound on, real bomber, should last a long time for you. Safer than an implant, 'cause you can dump it if you're gonna get busted, but remember about these finger interfaces, you leave prints all over it."

He put one under a magnifying screen and used a microwaldo to run a bead of liquid around the seam of the case. Its glued seal having been dissolved, the handy split open, exposing its carbon-nano board. He used a cable to connect the old phone to the handy, chewed some more khat, and then removed the cable and closed his patient back up.

"Now here's the important thing you watch out for. You do it slow and careful every single time, or
haraka haraka, haina baraka,
you got a police knocking. If I turn this fella on right now, he looks at those files I give him and sees if they're cryptographic sign you license them. He sees they're not sign by any publisher public key. So then he looks at the text you're making him show on the screen. It says whatever,
Mary had a little lamb,
so he does a net search. If he googs it and comes up someone owns it and you have no license, he screams for police. So here I got my Faraday cage." He indicated a cardboard box covered with aluminum foil. "This is our hole in the ether, shields out the net. I stick the handy inside and close the flap almost closed. You see how that light turns from green to red?" He made them both peer through the crack into the dark interior of the box where the little light shone. It reminded Bill of Venus. "That says no net connection. Now I turn it on, no problem. Whenever you want to use it, you got to be in a Faraday cage. You can put foil on the walls of a closet."

When the next call came from the cops, Fari was too preoccupied at first to pay attention. The fighting had spilled over from California into Brazil, apparently because of a soccer match, and she and Isaac, one of Bill's guides, were in the off ice watching a live feed of two mobs going at it on a boulevard in Manaus. At first the groups moved through each other in precise ranks and files, interpenetrating at an angle like dancers in a ballet, but then, at an invisible signal broadcast over the net, the scene broke down into a chaos of kicking and wrestling. Without the friend-foe tags that the fighters were seeing through their interfaces, it was impossible to tell which side was the home team and which was from L.A. Republic. It was like watching a battle between two armies of ants that knew their comrades only by the smell of the home nest. A man crawled across the asphalt, trying to shake off a skinny teenage girl on his back who had her thumbs dug into his bleeding eyes. A text banner scrolled across the bottom of the screen saying that Brazil had cut off tube travel, and both governments were calling for the fighting to stop.

Call from New England Regional Public Peace.

It went through its usual enraging pleasantries, and then: "Ms. Miraghaie, are you aware that your husband has been interacting with two individuals in Dar es Salaam who have criminal ties, a Sandeep Singh and a Bonaventure Lyimo?"

"How could you not have told me this?" Fari growled at Billy.

The three of them were all sitting around the same campf ire, and Fari's growl had been a pretty loud one as growls go, but Shona made herself perceive it as if it were far away. Her art was bringing in a lot of money, her money could pay for the best therapist (or at least one of the most expensive) in East Africa, and her therapist (who wanted Shona to call him Coach) had trained her up to an Olympic level of meditation, self-awareness, and biofeedback. Plus she was backing up the training with a signif icant but not disabling quantity of Tennessee whiskey.

"I didn't want to get you involved in anything illegal," Billy said, poking at the fire.

The word "illegal" was what Coach referred to as a trigger. Far away, where the word had come out of Billy's lips, it set off a tsunami of self-loathing. Shona examined the tsunami carefully, and before it could reach her she saw that it was actually only a tiny yellow ripple on the surface of her firelit whiskey. She took a tiny sip from the bottle and the feeling was gone. She offered the bottle to Fari.

"No, thanks. Oh, hell, sure, I'll have some." She took a big swig and passed the bottle on to Billy, who passed it back to Shona without drinking. "We have to destroy the handies. Both of them."

"We don't even own both of them," Shona said. "One of them is Singh's."

"He's got it in a tin-roof shack somewhere near Dar," Billy said. "His grad students have a coffee pot and mattresses on the floor. He doesn't go there himself, and he doesn't even know where it is."

"Come
on,
Bill, didn't you even think about this before you did it? A place like that could get robbed any day of the week, or the cops could track the grad students to the shack. I don't understand why you did this. There's no upside to this. It can only hurt us."

"It's not just about us," Shona said. "These two copies of the library could be the only ones in the world."

"You don't know that."

"Well, that's a good question," Billy said. "You're a lawyer. Can't we find that out? Shona and I both copied the library, and one of us got caught." Shona felt a wave of nausea. She visualized happy bunnies and took a mouthful of whiskey. "That's 50 percent. If a hundred people do the same crime this year, and fifty of them get caught, wouldn't that be a matter of public record? And wouldn't it also be news that you could find on the net? I mean, this is a pretty major crime, right, eleven million books? Isn't that news that would get reported?"

More triggers, strong ones. The happy bunnies weren't working. Shona got up and walked away from the campf ire, her slightly wobbly footsteps narrowly avoiding a water buffalo poop. The night was cold. She imagined that the dirt at her feet was a side-walk, and she spit on it. A terrible feeling washed over her. She was the kind of bad person who spit on sidewalks. She examined the feeling carefully, and she saw that it was very small. The exercise worked. She observed herself breathing in and out.

"You promised me you'd protect me," she heard Fari say from over by the fire. "I should have known I was the only one who could protect myself." Then, in a voice that Shona was probably not meant to hear: "I won't let them scramble my brains like they did to hers. I told you before, I'd rather—"

Bill interrupted in a lower voice, so Shona never got to hear what was on Fari's list of things she'd be willing to do to avoid a cogmod.

It was all Bill's fault for not being honest with Fari. The day the divorce was final he let Isaac and Shona get him thoroughly drunk. That was a good way to start letting go, but what helped him more was that R.J. got him to read one of the illegal books, called
A House for Mr. Biswas,
saying that it was about someone just like Bill who had made himself miserable by getting married. Bill hated the book. It was long and boring, the funny stuff wasn't very funny, and Mr. Biswas's life seemed not at all similar to his except in the one superf icial way that R.J. had pointed out. But the ten-year-old would always ask him questions, and Bill didn't want to let him down. "Did you get to the storm scene yet? Wasn't that great?" "The part about the doll house was really sad, wasn't it?" "You see how he's an exile, just like you?" They argued and disputed, and Bill was embarrassed to find that at least in the parts that a child could be expected to understand, R.J. often "got it" much better than he did. After a while he realized that even though he still hated the book, he was looking forward eagerly to their debates. Why hadn't they done anything like this in college? Bill had been a good student, assiduously watching
The Honeymooners
and
Friends
and writing down plot synopses while the other majors were out partying. He studied hard and remembered all the right answers on the tests. But it was completely different to think about a story and have to defend his opinions without knowing whether they were the answers the professor wanted.

Three weeks later, Bill took stock of himself before going to bed, and he decided that his life was good. He wasn't in prison, he had a job he loved, and if he got run over by a truck tomorrow, he'd have done at least one worthwhile thing in his life by preserving the library.

The next morning, his interface told him that eastern Brazil had been sterilized by a gamma-ray burst from a satellite controlled by L.A. Republic. He hadn't even been following the news recently, thinking that things were calming down. L.A. was mad because Brazil had kept its citizens from going home after the flashmob fights in Manaus. L.A. called them hostages, Brazil prisoners of war.

He took stock again, and then applied to emigrate to the space colony at L5. They made him write an essay, just like applying to college.

To be honest, I think I'll miss mountains and sky and snow. However, I think I'm well prepared for living in an artificial life-support environment, because I'm used to having my life depend on ropes and anchors, and used to not having a second chance if I mess them up. My job requires not just keeping myself safe, but other people, too.

L5 accepted him, and when he told R.J. what he was doing, the boy instantly said that he wanted to go too. They put it to Shona. Whenever she cussed these days, she got an intense look of concentration on her face. She said, "God, they'd never take me—I'm a... fuck-...-ing... criminal." But they had a special category for creative artists, and evidently her plea bargain on IP charges in Connecticut didn't look like a big crime from half a million kilometers away. She and R.J. were also accepted.

Fari would always remember Bill, Shona, and R.J.'s launch date, because it was the same day they gamma-bursted New York. Everyone had felt safe after the skirmishes in low-earth orbit ended with the destruction of the space-based bursters. The attack from the Brazilian sub caught them by surprise. That same evening there was a call from New England Public Regional Peace.

"I
do
hope I'm not calling at a bad time."

"Don't you have anything better to do? Like burying the whole goddamn population of western Connecticut?"

There was a slight pause, but Fari had no way of knowing whether it was because she'd scored a minor psychological victory or because it had been programmed to pause as a simulation of human behavior.