The Second Science Fiction Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Fergus blinked. “You cut yourself out of there with the cable you’re talking about?”

  “Not with the cable. With a thin fiber. With one of the hairlike fibers that makes up the cable. Did you ever cut cheese with a wire? In effect, that wire is a knife—a knife that consists only of an edge.

  “Or, another experiment you may have heard of. Take a block of ice. Connect a couple of ten-pound weights together with a few feet of piano wire and loop it across the ice block to that the weights hang free on either side, with the wire over the top of the block. The wire will cut right through the ice in a short time. The trouble is that the ice block remains whole—because the ice melts under the pressure of the wire and then flows around it and freezes again on the other side. But if you lubricate the wire with ordinary glycerine, it prevents the re-freezing and the ice block will be cut in two.”

  Tarnhorst nodded. “I remember. In school. They—” He let his voice trail off.

  “Yeah. Exactly. It’s a common experiment in basic science. Borazon fiber works the same way. Because it is so fine and has such tremendous tensile strength, it is possible to apply a pressure of hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch over a very small area. Under pressures like that, steel cuts easily. With silon covering to lubricate the cut, there’s nothing to it. As you have heard from the guards in your little hell-hole.

  “Hell-hole?” Tarnhorst’s eyes narrowed and he flicked a quick glance at Fergus. Morgan realized that Tarnhorst had known nothing of the extent of Fergus’ machinations.

  “That lovely little political prison up in Fort Tryon Park that the World Welfare State, with its usual solicitousness for the common man, keeps for its favorite guests,” Morgan said. His wolfish smile returned. “I’d’ve cut the whole thing down if I’d had had the time. Not the stone—just the steel. In order to apply that kind of pressure you have to have the filament fastened to something considerably harder than the stuff you’re trying to cut, you see. Don’t try it with your fingers or you’ll lose fingers.”

  Fergus’ eyes widened again and he looked both ill and frightened. “The man we sent…uh…who was found in your room. You—” He stopped and seemed to have trouble swallowing.

  “Me? I didn’t do anything.” Morgan did a good imitation of a shark trying to look innocent. “I’ll admit that I looped a very fine filament of the stuff across the doorway a few times, so that if anyone tried to enter my room illegally I would be warned.” He didn’t bother to add that a pressure-sensitive device had released and reeled in the filament after it had done its work. “It doesn’t need to be nearly as tough and heavy to cut through soft stuff like…er…say, a beefsteak, as it does to cut through steel. It’s as fine as cobweb almost invisible. Won’t the World Welfare State have fun when that stuff gets into the hands of its happy, crime-free populace?”

  Edway Tarnhorst became suddenly alert. “What?”

  “Yes. Think of the fun they’ll have, all those lovely slobs who get their basic subsistence and their dignity and their honor as a free gift from the State. The kids, especially. They’ll love it. It’s so fine it can be hidden inside an ordinary thread—or woven into the hair—or…” He spread his hands. “A million places.”

  Fergus was gaping. Tarnhorst was concentrating on Morgan’s words.

  “And there’s no possible way to leave fingerprints on anything that fine,” Morgan continued. “You just hook it around a couple of nails or screws, across an open doorway or an alleyway—and wait.”

  “We wouldn’t let it get into the people’s hands,” Tarnhorst said.

  “You couldn’t stop it,” Morgan said flatly. “Manufacture the stuff and eventually one of the workers in the plant will figure out a way to steal some of it.”

  “Guards—” Fergus said faintly.

  “Pfui. But even you had a perfect guard system, I think I can guarantee that some of it would get into the hands of the—common people. Unless you want to cut off all imports from the Belt.”

  Tarnhorst’s voice hardened. “You mean you’d deliberately—”

  “I mean exactly what I said,” Morgan cut in sharply. “Make of it what you want.”

  “I suppose you have that kind of trouble out in the Belt?” Tarnhorst asked.

  “No. We don’t have your kind of people out in the Belt, Mr. Tarnhorst. We have men who kill, yes. But we don’t have the kind of juvenile and grown-up delinquents who will kill senselessly, just for kicks. That kind is too stupid to live long out there. We are in no danger from borazon-tungsten filaments. You are.” He paused just for a moment, then said: “I’m ready to give you the details of the process now, Mr. Fergus.”

  “I don’t think I—” Fergus began with a sickly sound in his voice. But Tarnhorst interrupted him.

  “We don’t want it, commodore. Forget it.”

  “Forget it?” Morgan’s voice was as cutting as the filament he had been discussing. “Forget that Jack Latrobe was murdered?”

  “We will pay indemnities, of course,” Tarnhorst said, feeling that it was futile.

  “Fergus will pay indemnities,” Morgan said. “In money, the indemnities will come to the precise amount he was willing to pay for the cable secret. I suggest that your Government confiscate that amount from him and send it to us. That may be necessary in view of the second indemnity.”

  “Second indemnity?”

  “Mr. Fergus’ life.”

  Tarnhorst shook his head briskly. “No. We can’t execute Fergus. Impossible.”

  “Of course not,” Morgan said soothingly. “I don’t suggest that you should. But I do suggest that Mr. Fergus be very careful about going through doorways—or any other kind of opening—from now on. I suggest that he refrain from passing between any pair of reasonably solid, well-anchored objects. I suggest that he stay away from bathtubs. I suggest that he be very careful about putting his legs under a table or desk. I suggest that he not look out of windows. I could make several suggestions. And he shouldn’t go around feeling in front of him, either. He might lose something.”

  “I understand,” said Edway Tarnhorst.

  So did Sam Fergus. Morgan could tell by his face.

  * * * *

  When the indemnity check arrived on Ceres some time later, a short, terse note came with it.

  “I regret to inform you that Mr. Samuel Fergus, evidently in a state of extreme nervous and psychic tension, took his own life by means of a gunshot wound in the head on the 21st of this month. The enclosed check will pay your indemnity in full. Tarnhorst.”

  Morgan smiled grimly. It was as he had expected. He had certainly never had any intention of going to all the trouble of killing Sam Fergus.

  COMPANDROID, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Jeffry’s mother gave me to him on his sixth birthday. “Silvanus,” she said, as she tied a red bow around my arm,”there are already indications that Jeffry has intelligence deficits. You may have to do the thinking for both of you.” She gave me a look I was too new to interpret, but when I remembered it later, I recognized love and despair.

  At the time I had no perspective, having been so recently mind-wiped, but waketime brought ideas and information. I was a Silvanus Mark-VIII companion android, created for women of strong will and strange desires. I had no behavior pre-patterning for interaction with a small, defective boy. There was something strange going on.

  Nevertheless, Jeffry and I got along with each other. “Hit him, Silly,” was Jeffry’s most frequent instruction to me early on; he accompanied the instruction by pointing at some child who was bothering him. I always complied, though I had been patterned for selective disobedience and could easily have refused. Hitting was in my behavior catalog. I never caused lasting damage.

  By the time we reached second grade, Jeffry was the undisputed ruler of his class. None of the other children had compandroids any longer. They had outgrown their nandroids. I was tall, thin, and strong as a hydraulic press, and when Jeffry asked me to do something that would no
t harm him, I did it, except for his homework. His mother Chandra knew the secret key word that commanded absolute obedience from me, “iskandidar,” and using it, she forbade me to do any of Jeffry’s schoolwork.

  “This mainstreaming can only last so long,” she said at dinner one night. “He’ll have to get sorted into some department or class that takes care of these mental things. I don’t want you to help him escape that. He has to grow up and be whoever he is. He’ll do his own homework, and sooner or later his teachers will realize he needs help.”

  We were having our usual evening meal: we both had nutrient drinks. The alcove where we sat was pale and dim, the light coming from the central fixture in the kitchen workspace. Through the nearest wall I could hear the twin babies belonging to our neighbors on that side complaining in unison. Earlier I had fixed Jeffry’s supper, fed him, bathed him, and put him to bed, something else Chandra had ordained.

  “Did he tell you to do anything interesting in school today?” she asked. She always wanted to hear what Jeffry wanted me to do. She rarely did anything about it; she just wanted to know.

  “We had a quiet day,” I said.

  What about Ms. Stratford? She do anything interesting?”

  “She gave me back my homework.”

  Chandra smiled. She had a round face, brown as tea with milk in it, and long black hair. Often when I was with her, all my pre-patterned sexual responses woke, but she was not my primary care object; I sent them back to sleep. I felt curious about them. They would never see any use in my relationship with Jeffry. Maybe after my next mind-wipe I would get a chance to use them.

  “What grade did you get?” asked Chandra.

  “A ‘C.’ She said my composition lacked originality.” Ms. Stratford was Jeffry’s second-grade teacher. She had told me a week before that she was tired of having me hang around the classroom doing nothing, and if I was there, I might as well learn something. She tested me and we discovered I had learned to read in first grade just by being present. So Jeffry did his homework and I did mine.

  “That’s not fair,” Chandra said, her face clouding.”How can you be original when there’s so many things you can’t even think about?”

  “What do you mean?” I had the option to ask for clarification at any time, unless someone forbade it.

  “When I got you, the manual said you had limited capacity for originality, or something. It’s been a while. What did it say? Your pre-patterning was so complicated there wasn’t much room for new learned responses, but I could upgrade you with memory chips. Was that you, or the house computer? Anyway, how can she criticize the work of somebody who’s only two years old?”

  “It’s her job,” I said.

  “Can I see your paper?”

  I put down my drink and went to the front room, whereJeffry’s satchel was. I got my paper out of it. In second grade we were still using pencils. “You have to learn to write by hand,” Ms. Stratford said. “What if there’s a power outage and all the computers go down? Somebody has to know how to cope in times of no batteries.”

  I looked at my words on the blue lines that ran like highways the long way across the rough paper: a straight line, a stitched line, a straight line, a gap; a straightline, a stitched line…and my penciled letters. Ms. Stratford had given me six sheets of paper to practice on. My hands knew how to do a lot of things, but making letters hadn’t been one of them.

  I took the page back to the kitchen and set it in front of Chandra.

  She lifted it and read aloud. “‘My day, by Jeffry’s Silvanus. We get up. I fix cereal and C-mix for Jeffry. We wait for the hoverbus. We come to school. We go home. I fix dinner for Jeffry and put him to bed.’ Sil, you left out all sorts of things.”

  “I covered the front of the page.”

  She grinned at me. “Oh, yeah. I forgot that was the object in school. What’d Jeffry write for this assignment?”

  “He didn’t show me. He got a ‘D.’”

  She bit her lip. “Was he upset you got a bettergrade?”

  “No. I’m bigger.”

  She drank some of her drink. “It fries me that they never notice how badly he’s doing. Do I have to announce it in assembly or something?”

  I sat a long time, trying to figure out if I could ask questions not directly related to the needs of my primary care object. Somewhere in my patterning there was a program for spontaneous responses. I had been using it a lot more lately, with all these new demands on me. There was also a limited program for initiating contact. I imagined I could hook the two together, and found I could ask, after all. “Why don’t you tell someone?”

  “I told you.”

  “Why don’t you tell someone real?”

  She blinked. “Sil,” she said.

  “Why do you think he’s stupid, anyway?”

  “Well, he’s got to be. He’s just got to be, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  “Silvanus, don’t give me this ‘terrible twos’ stuff, all right?” Preoccupied, she touched my hand. She was still studying my paper. I felt a pattern trying to fall into place, and I aborted it. She stroked my hand and it happened again. I let myself take the next step, just to see what would happen. Jeffry was safe and comfortable, or he would have let me know. I didn’t know if I could satisfy the needs of someone not my primary care object. I turned Chandra’s hand over and ran the back of my fingernail along her palm.

  She stiffened and sat up, her black eyes widening.

  I lifted her hand and took her thumb into my mouth, watching her.

  “You remember,” she whispered.

  I licked the back of her hand. She moaned.

  I sucked on the first knickle of her index finger. She closed her eyes. Her mouth was half open. She was proceeding through her arousal cycle faster than my patterning suggested was natural for first initiation of contact.

  She sat up straight and stared at me. “You do remember, don’t you?”

  I smiled and took her index finger into my mouth.

  “Stop,” she said.

  I vibrated my tongue against the tip of her finger.

  “Iskandidar. Stop,” she said, and I froze in place. She retrieved her hand from me. “Sit up,” she said. I sat back. “Answer. Do you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “We used to—” She leaned toward me and looked into my eyes.

  I shook my head.

  “But that was my favorite thing. Your starting with my hand.”

  “Pre-patterning,” I said.

  “I thought we invented that together.”

  “Limited capacity for originality,” I said.

  She sighed. “I didn’t like to think of someone else inventing that, but I guess it’s true. You really don’t remember?”

  “I don’t remember anything before Jeffry.”

  “Probably best that way,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and studied me. “You are still care-bonded to Jeffry?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you could initiate with me?”

  “That was responsive. You initiated.”

  “I did? Must have been habit. Can you followthrough?”

  “I don’t know. As long as Jeffry doesn’t need me, maybe.”

  She stood up and took my hand. “Come,” she said, and led me to her bedroom.

  #

  Jeffry tugged my toe. I sat up out of the blankets, leaving the warmth of Chandra’s proximity, and looked at him. “Are you all right?”

  He was upset. Small brown face, light-brown hair, black eyes: Jeffry was small and stocky, thick-bodied and strong; his most frequent expression was a brooding frown. His eyes were open too wide for that now. He looked sad.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “You back with Mama now? You’re not mine anymore?”

  “I’m yours.”

  “We got to go to school, Silly.”

  I glanced at the digital alarm on Chandra’s side of the bed. Jeffry was right. Too late for breakfast
, even. That would never do. I got up and dressed. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t apologize to me.”

  “I made a mistake. I’m supposed to be up.” I tapped my head, wondering what had gone wrong with my patterning. I had a built-in alarm clock. What had turned it off?

  “Shut up. Come on.” He handed me his satchel and headed for the front door.

  “No. Breakfast first.”

  “We’re late, Silly.”

  “Breakfast first,” I said. He looked like he was going to protest, so I picked him up and carried him to the kitchen. I used to carry him around more when he was smaller. Chandra had set Jeffry-priorities in my patterning: care for his body first, his mind second. When Chandra first gave me to Jeffry, he had tested the limits often, hiding when it was time to go to school, ordering me to do things counter to his best interests, trying to hurt me. Things had steadied down after half a year.

  “I won’t eat,” Jeffry said as I put him in a chair. He sat with his arms crossed over his chest.

  I fixed hot cereal with raisins, cinnamon, and apples, his favorite. I poured milk on it, then looked at him. He pinched his mouth shut. He knew I knew a certain nerve stroke that would force him to open his mouth and swallow; my patterning was filled with obscure facts about the human body and how it responded to a broad catalog of touches. In the past I had just gone ahead and fed him; he knew resistance got him nowhere.

  I set the bowl of cereal on the table in front of him.”Why?” I said.

  He looked at me. A tear ran down his cheek. “She wants you back,” he said.

  “If my interaction with Chandra disturbs you, I won’t do it anymore.”

  “You can’t stop her.”

  “You are my primary care object, Jeffry.”

  “She can wipe that, the way she wiped you before she gave you to me.”

  I sat down and started eating his cereal. I didn’t know what was happening inside me; patterns had unraveled.

  “Silly!” Jeffry took the cereal away from me and ate it himself. He stopped when there was still some left, and gave it to me. I finished it a slow spoonful at a time, realizing that it tasted quite different from Balanced Science nutrition, which was my regular diet. Jeffry watched me eat. He looked worried.