Asimov's SF, October-November 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Sam said, “You want to leave us with no weapon against you, while you still have the power to harm us."

  “We won't have that power for long. Once you know exactly what we're using, you'll find a way to block it."

  There was a long pause. Then, “Stop your attacks on us, and we'll consider your proposal."

  “We'll stop our attacks when you pull the border back to the point where our lives are no longer at risk."

  “How would you even know that we've done that?” Sam replied. I wasn't sure if the condescension was in his tone or just his words, but either way I welcomed it. The lower the far side's opinion of our abilities, the more attractive the deal became for them.

  I said, “Then you'd better back up far enough for all our communications systems to recover. When I can get news reports and see that there are no more planes going down, no power plants exploding, then we'll start the ceasefire."

  Silence again, stretching out beyond mere hesitancy. His icon was still there, though, the S unblinking. I clutched at my shoulder, hoping that the burning pain was just tension in the muscle.

  Finally: “All right. We agree. We'll start shifting the border."

  I drove around looking for an all-night convenience store that might have had an old analog TV sitting in a corner to keep the cashier awake—that seemed like a good bet to start working long before the wireless connection to my laptop—but Campbell beat me to it. New Zealand radio and TV were reporting that the “digital blackout” appeared to be lifting, and ten minutes later Alison announced that she had internet access. A lot of the major servers were still down, or their sites weirdly garbled, but Reuters was starting to post updates on the crisis.

  Sam had kept his word, so we halted the counter-strikes. Alison read from the Reuters site as the news came in. Seventeen planes had crashed, and four trains. There'd been fatalities at an oil refinery, and half a dozen manufacturing plants. One analyst put the global death toll at five thousand and rising.

  I muted the microphone on my laptop and spent thirty seconds shouting obscenities and punching the dashboard. Then I rejoined the cabal.

  Yuen said, “I've been reviewing my notes. If my instinct is worth anything, the theorem I mentioned before is correct: if the border is sealed, they'll have no way to touch us."

  “What about the upside for them?” Alison asked. “Do you think they can protect themselves against Tim's algorithm, once they understand it?"

  Yuen hesitated. “Yes and no. Any cluster of near-side truth values it injects into the far side will have a non-smooth border, so they'll be able to remove it with sheer computing power. In that sense, they'll never be defenseless. But I don't see how there's anything they can do to prevent the attacks in the first place."

  “Short of wiping us out,” Campbell said.

  I heard an infant sobbing. Alison said, “That's Laura. I'm alone here. Give me five minutes."

  I buried my head in my arms. I still had no idea what the right course would have been. If we'd handed over Campbell's algorithm immediately, might the good will that bought us have averted the war? Or would the same attack merely have come sooner? What criminal vanity had ever made the three of us think we could shoulder this responsibility on our own? Five thousand people were dead. The hawks who had taken over on the far side would weigh up our offer, and decide that they had no choice but to fight on.

  And if the reluctant cabal had passed its burden to Canberra, to Zurich, to Beijing? Would there really have been peace? Or was I just wishing that there had been more hands steeped in the same blood, to share the guilt around?

  The idea came from nowhere, sweeping away every other thought. I said, “Is there any reason why the far side has to stay connected?"

  “Connected to what?” Campbell asked.

  “Connected to itself. Connected topologically. They should be able to send down a spike, then withdraw it, but leave behind a bubble of altered truth values: a kind of outpost, sitting within the near side, with a perfect, smooth border making it impregnable. Right?"

  Yuen said, “Perhaps. With both sides collaborating on the construction, that might be possible."

  “Then the question is, can we find a place where we can do that so that it kills off the chance to use Tim's method completely—without crippling any process that we need just to survive?"

  “Fuck you, Bruno!” Campbell exclaimed happily. “We give them one small Achilles tendon to slice ... and then they've got nothing to fear from us!"

  Yuen said, “A watertight proof of something like that is going to take weeks, months."

  “Then we'd better start work. And we'd better feed Sam the first plausible conjecture we get, so they can use their own resources to help us with the proof."

  Alison came back online and greeted the suggestion with cautious approval. I drove around until I found a quiet coffee shop. Electronic banking still wasn't working, and I had no cash left, but the waiter agreed to take my credit card number and a signed authority for a deduction of one hundred dollars; whatever I didn't eat and drink would be his tip.

  I sat in the café, blanking out the world, steeping myself in the mathematics. Sometimes the four of us worked on separate tasks; sometimes we paired up, dragging each other out of dead ends and ruts. There were an infinite number of variations that could be made to Campbell's algorithm, but hour by hour we whittled away at the concept, finding the common ground that no version of the weapon could do without.

  By four in the morning, we had a strong conjecture. I called Sam, and explained what we were hoping to achieve.

  He said, “This is a good idea. We'll consider it."

  The café closed. I sat in the car for a while, drained and numb, then I called Kate to find out where she was. A couple had given her a lift almost as far as Penrith, and when their car failed she'd walked the rest of the way home.

  * * * *

  For close to four days, I spent most of my waking hours just sitting at my desk, watching as a wave of red inched its way across a map of the defect. The change of hue was not being rendered lightly; before each pixel turned red, twelve separate computers needed to confirm that the region of the border it represented was flat.

  On the fifth day, Sam shut off his computers and allowed us to mount an attack from our side on the narrow corridor linking the bulk of the far side with the small enclave that now surrounded our Achilles’ Heel. We wouldn't have suffered any real loss of essential arithmetic if this slender thread had remained, but keeping the corridor both small and impregnable had turned out to be impossible. The original plan was the only route to finality: to seal the border perfectly, the far side proper could not remain linked to its offshoot.

  In the next stage, the two sides worked together to seal the enclave completely, polishing the scar where its umbilical had been sheared away. When that task was complete, the map showed it as a single burnished ruby. No known process could reshape it now. Campbell's method could have breached its border without touching it, reaching inside to reclaim it from within—but Campbell's method was exactly what this jewel ruled out.

  At the other end of the vanished umbilical, Sam's machines set to work smoothing away the blemish. By early evening that, too, was done.

  Only one tiny flaw in the border remained now: the handful of propositions that enabled communication between the two sides. The cabal had debated the fate of this for hours. So long as this small wrinkle persisted, in principle it could be used to unravel everything, to mobilize the entire border again. It was true that, compared to the border as a whole, it would be relatively easy to monitor and defend such a small site, but a sustained burst of brute-force computing from either side could still overpower any resistance and exploit it.

  In the end, Sam's political masters had made the decision for us. What they had always aspired to was certainty, and even if their strength favored them, this wasn't a gamble they were prepared to take.

  I said, “Good luck with the future."r />
  “Good luck to Sparseland,” Sam replied. I believed he'd tried to hold out against the hawks, but I'd never been certain of his friendship. When his icon faded from my screen, I felt more relief than regret.

  I'd learned the hard way not to assume that anything was permanent. Perhaps in a thousand years, someone would discover that Campbell's model was just an approximation to something deeper, and find a way to fracture these allegedly perfect walls. With any luck, by then both sides might also be better prepared to find a way to co-exist.

  I found Kate sitting in the kitchen. I said, “I can answer your questions now, if that's what you want.” On the morning after the disaster, I'd promised her this time would come—within weeks, not months—and she'd agreed to stay with me until it did.

  She thought for a while.

  “Did you have something to do with what happened last week?"

  “Yes."

  “Are you saying you unleashed the virus? You're the terrorist they're looking for?” To my great relief, she asked this in roughly the tone she might have used if I'd claimed to be Genghis Khan.

  “No, I'm not the cause of what happened. It was my job to try and stop it, and I failed. But it wasn't any kind of computer virus."

  She searched my face. “What was it, then? Can you explain that to me?"

  “It's a long story."

  “I don't care. We've got all night."

  I said, “It started in university. With an idea of Alison's. One brilliant, beautiful, crazy idea."

  Kate looked away, her face flushing, as if I'd said something deliberately humiliating. She knew I was not a mass murderer. But there were other things about me of which she was less sure.

  “The story starts with Alison,” I said. “But it ends here, with you."

  Copyright (c) 2007 Greg Egan

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Short Story: AT SIXES AND SEVENS

  by Carol Emshwiller

  Carol Emshwiller's sixth novel, The Secret City, is just out from Tachyon Publications. It shares the same milieu as her first story for Asimov's, “Worlds of No Return,” which appeared in our January 2006 issue. In a new story for our slightly spooky October/November issue, she shows us that peril and confusion can reign when one lives next door to a witch, especially if we aren't too clear about which neighbor is the witch.

  Remember when this used to be an orchard? Some of the trees still live and still bear fruit. In the yard, the asparagus patch still pushes up stalks in among the weeds. If you're careful you can still climb the porch steps without breaking your neck.

  It used to be a nice farm. The old man worked it—mostly by himself. No sons, only a daughter. She's a strong one, though, small but wiry.

  Now that he's dead, she keeps it going by herself but she doesn't grow what we grow. She grows useless crops of nettles and thistles. Though I must admit, her strawberries are wonderful, small and flavorful. In certain seasons, I can smell them from here.

  Her Dad was peculiar. Kept to himself.

  Poor little motherless child ... she was. My husband and I wanted to help. Her father wouldn't let us. Took her wherever he went in a basket at first. Then made a little harness for her and tied her near him as if she was a dog. That can't be good, especially since we were right here, willing to help.

  Later on he put bells on her so he could keep track of where she was. As if she was the bellwether. Once we saw him climb up to take her down from the shed roof. Another time it was that big old cottonwood. Part of it split when he went to rescue her and he nearly broke his neck.

  Well, she did grow up, but it's a wonder.

  And a wonder she learned to talk. We never heard him say much more than grunts.

  He always said he home-schooled her. I'll bet!

  Even now that her dad's dead, she never comes to us for anything. All she has for company is that big old dog and her cat. Even when she broke her leg she didn't want our help. You could tell by the way she looked at us, though that time, she couldn't get along without us.

  When I take a rest from housework I take my tea up and watch her out my east side upstairs window. I can see her best when she's in her weedy vegetable garden. She talks as she works ... or at least I see her mouth moving. Singing would be one thing, but this looks more like jabber, jabber, jabber. What in the world can she be jabbering about? and who to?

  She's done that since she was a little girl—yapping to herself. Jumping about so you'd think she was a baby goat.

  I say it's her own fault if everything goes wrong. Though she wouldn't tell us if it did or didn't, and now that there's a drought things are going wrong for everybody.

  Though why should we care? I've only talked to her, face to face, a couple of times. She's one of those people that doesn't look you in the eye. All these years, I've lived next door, and I don't even know what color her eyes are. I can guess though. You can't have hair that light and fine and have dark eyes.

  We're the ones took her to the clinic to get a cast on her leg. We stayed the night in town and brought her back the next day. She had us ... let us, that is, set her up in her so-called living room on the so-called couch. (I wonder how many generations of cats have scratched at it. The one now is a marmalade tabby. A nasty male. He arched his back and spit at me. I can't help thinking that's what she wanted to do to me, too. Iris. Her name, not the cat's.)

  She actually did thank us. At least that. Though she didn't even look at me then. I left her with plenty of food and water. I didn't feed the tabby.

  I might not have seen her at all, down there behind her lilacs. She'd climbed up to fix an attic window. She didn't yell out for anybody. She just lay there. I went upstairs to my window to see what in the world she was doing now, and there she was, her legs sticking out from the bushes. And later that afternoon when I went up to see again, there they still were.

  I sort of wanted her to fall but I didn't think somebody like her, who used to climb everything in sight, ever really would.

  When I saw she had, I thought, well, she can't object to me going over to see what's wrong, so I did, and a good thing, too. But, as I keep saying, helping people is a thankless task.

  * * * *

  There's something wrong with her. All her dad's fault no doubt. I've been watching her more and more. Daniel says I'm not getting my chores done, but I want to see what she's up to. I tell him it might be important. I say, “What if she's a witch? What if this drought is her fault? What about that she dances in her backyard at midnight when there's a full moon?” (Or maybe even when there isn't except it's too dark to see.)

  He looks surprised when I tell him that. Not about the dancing, but as if he wonders why I'm looking out the window in the middle of the night.

  “It didn't look like any kind of dance I've ever seen before. Hopping and galumphing. Swinging her arms around. Far as I'm concerned, not much different than a four-year-old would do."

  All he says is, “Now that her leg is broke, I doubt she'll be doing much dancing."

  As if that would reassure me.

  But that broken leg is a good excuse for me keeping an eye on her. I'll bring things to her whether she wants me to or not. It's my Christian duty. Even Daniel can't say I shouldn't. I might be able to snoop around the other rooms some. There's never been a chance like this before. I want to take advantage of it.

  Daniel would say, “Let her be,” but he doesn't have to know.

  I bake a batch of gingerbread. I think of making lemonade, but, no, I'll see if I can pick up something over there. That'll be an excuse to look around. Not that I relish seeing all that scratched up furniture.

  Should I knock or just barge in?

  I'll barge in.

  * * * *

  I yell, “Yoo hoo, anyone to home?"

  It's the cat meets me at the door.

  Iris is right where I left her, potato chips all eaten, the water drunk. But I see signs that she's been up. There's two of her dad'
s old canes beside her and a little chair pulled up close by. There's an old army blanket thrown over the couch back. Days are so hot I forgot the nights are cold.

  I put the gingerbread down beside her. “Still warm,” I say. I unwrap it and the good smell fills the whole dusty, tomcat-smelling house.

  She actually looks right at me, and as if she's grateful. Her eyes.... I was wrong. How can such a wispy blond have brown eyes?

  “I'll get you something to drink."

  I march right into the tiny kitchen.

  She can't complain about me rattling around looking for things when it's all for her. Besides, what I find might be for the good of all of us. Maybe the whole village.

  I look around as fast as I can.

  Devil's claw, squaw tea, wild rose hips.... Acorns! Lots of dried lettucy sort of stuff. Things a witch would have.

  I take pinches of several of those things and put them in my apron pocket.

  The cat watches.

  I swear that nasty Tom looks at me like the Devil himself. Who ever said a witch's cat had to be black? Seems to me a marmalade color is just as bad.

  Dishes draining in the sink look clean enough. She's been up. I'm sure of it. Or somebody has.

  Cat dish on the floor is empty. I whisper, “Don't expect me to feed you. Go get yourself a mouse."

  I let the water run till it's cool so I have more time to snoop. (Not that the water's ever cool this time of year.) I bring her a glass and a pitcher of it.

  I say, “I'll get you another blanket and a sweater. Nights are cold.” And off I go before she can stop me.

  There are two small bedrooms across from each other. The dad's is still clearly his. It's been what? Four, five years since he died? Though why would she change it and who for? It smells odd. That old hound must be sleeping in here. I wouldn't ever let a dog like him inside my house let alone on a bed.