Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (10 page)

"Wow. Was she okay?"

"No, permanently dead."

Bill started a search for the files while Fari talked the stone-age kitchen into making potato salad. They couldn't really get prison or a cogmod for inheriting pirated property, could they?

The front door creaked open and a voice came from the mud room—

"Billy?" The door slammed shut, and his cousin Shona walked into the living room with a flying harness slung over her shoulder.

"Hey, Shona." They hugged, a little tentatively on Bill's side, and he noticed that her jet was already cold. "Didn't hear you land." And she hadn't warned the house that she was coming, though of course she had as much right to be there as he did.

"Denver traffic control had exaggerated ideas of their own authority, so I came through the trees and then hiked up the creek bed."

"Fari, this is Shona."

"I know Shona, sweetie. We met before the wedding. Nice rig," she commented as Shona hung up her gear.

"Rich boyfriend. Won't last, though. They get bored when the thrill of the chase is over."

"Tell me about it. I got so desperate this morning I thought about raping Bill, but he's as big and hairy as a small mastodon, and he bites and scratches."

Shona tsked. "I remember when we were little. I showed him my skinny little scabby-kneed self, and then he chickened out and didn't want to drop his own pants and give me a peek."

"Timid," Fari said.

"Congenital."

Bill remembered the incident differently, but kept his mouth shut.

"But there is some hope for him," Fari said. "He's got a dangerous new hobby."

"The crawlie?"

"No, crime."

"Really?"

"Felony piracy."

"There's hope for you yet, Billy." She patted him on the butt. "Is that coffee I smell?"

Fari had used her jokes at Bill's expense to cover up her unease about Yuen's long-ago casual piracy. Her childhood hadn't been secure and orderly like her husband's, and she lacked his faith that an innocent legal misunderstanding could be cleared up. Her mother had always had the kind of boyfriends who had plenty of money, but not from sources they would talk about. Maybe that was why Fari got along so well with Shona—they shared an intuitive certainty that the universe played by its own dirty rules. Bill was naïve. He'd confessed to Fari that in second grade he'd fallen in love with his teacher, and had been crushed when she told him to stop being a tattletale about things that happened on the playground.

While the two cousins physically sorted china puppies and wool socks into boxes, she idly winked up her interface and studied the virtual yellow rectangles that popped up above the objects. What she found disturbed her, and she started walking around the house and investigating more systematically.

"Hey, let me show you guys something."

"You found my lost manhood? Now you guys have to find something else to taunt me about."

"House?" Fari said.

"Yes?"

"Find my toothbrush for me."

"It's in the silverware drawer."

They went in the kitchen, and Fari pulled it out of the drawer. "I palmed it and put it there as a test. It was tagged as mine when I bought it, and the house located it correctly. House, find the painting of the bighorn sheep." This was an acrylic on wood signed by Shona, done with energetic strokes with a broad brush.

"There is no such painting tagged."

"I wouldn't have bothered when I gave it to him," Shona said. "It's not the kind of commercial crap I do when I need to make a buck, no market value."

"I like it," Bill volunteered.

"Congratulations," Shona said, "you have your own opinions, unlike any person who actually spends money on art."

"And here it is," Fari said, lifting it out from behind a pile of boxes. "House, where is Yuen's bottle of cheap bourbon?"

"On the floor of his bedroom closet, to the left of his box of fishing tackle."

They went into the bedroom. Next to the blue tackle box was an old but fine looking pair of Chinese slippers embroidered with chrysanthemums. She stepped into the dead man's slippers and led the cousins back into the living room.

"House, where's the bottle now?"

"On or near your right foot."

"Can't it see through an eye that that's not what's there?" Bill asked.

"It's old and not real smart," Fari said.

"Maybe we should engage it in Socratic dialogue," Shona suggested. "Okay, so there's stuff that's intentionally mistagged?"

"Yep, lots of stuff."

"Why would he do that?" Bill asked.

Chaos and misdirection.
Fari remembered cops at the door, shoving questions at her mother.
Where's your boyfriend? How long since he's been here?

"Maybe a strange sense of humor," Shona said.

You know we can get a warrant right now on the phone if we have to.

Fari said, "There's some stuff like the painting that was never tagged in the first place, but there's also a bunch that would've been tagged to him when he bought it at the store. It just isn't tagged now. He'd have had to dig the tags out with a knife or tweezers."

"But why go to all that trouble to make it hard to prove something is yours?" Bill asked.

Lady, why not make it easy on yourself and the kid?

"To make it hard to prove it's yours," Fari said. "Not hard for you to prove, hard for anyone else."

Fari found the phone in the toolshed out back, under a carefully folded beach towel. It was obviously old, the plastic cracked and faded. Not as old as 2022, but Yuen wasn't a packrat, and it was definitely too old to have been kept around for any ordinary, practical purpose. There was an old-style battery compartment, empty, which she obviously wouldn't be able to fill with batteries. As a lawyer, she knew she should hand it over to the cousins, but that obviously wasn't the thing to do. Bill was big and strong and brave and sexy—and when you came right down to it, he was a child. Shona wasn't naïve like that, but she had a reputation for leaping out of frying pans and into fires. The drug-addled episode with the payboys at the bachelorette party hadn't exactly demonstrated good impulse control.

On a trip to town for supplies, Fari went to a public net booth, looked up an electrical adapter for antique electronics, and got one fabbed on a printer at the kind of pawn shop she'd visited so many times as a child. For an extra half-K the man working the counter ran the job under someone else's name. He wanted to charge her five times that, but she bargained him down on the theory that the adapter was legal—he didn't ask why she didn't want it tied to her name.

On the way back she pulled the rented two-seater over to the snow-dusted side of the road and plugged the phone into the adapter and the adapter into the car's dash board. The phone came on, complaining that it couldn't connect to the net, presumably because it hadn't had a paid-up account since decades ago, and was designed for the old open internet.

She winked to shut off her interface, but the implant was still in driving-safety mode, so it objected to the indignity, and she had to tell it again with a voice command, adding a couple of choice words that had no effect on the software but let off steam. Asleep now, it wouldn't pattern-match anything pirated that it saw through her eyes, causing it to squawk over the net to the cops.

The phone was loaded with pornography (exclusively hetero and with dialogue in incomprehensible English), pop music
(GENRE: Swahili guitar rumba),
and a very, very large collection of old text-only books in English. In the home folder was a text file named Bill.

BILL—REMEMBER HOW MAD TINA WAS ABOUT THE SLINGSHOT? GLAD SHE NEVER MAN-AGED TO CRUSH YOUR SPIRIT. HERE'S ANOTHER "SLINGSHOT," IN CASE YOU NEED ONE. YOU PROBABLY DON'T, IN WHICH CASE PLEASE FORGIVE THE IMPERTINENCE. WHEN YOU'RE MY AGE, GROWN MEN SEEM LIKE BOYS. THIS IS THE ONLY COPY, SO IF YOU DECIDE IT'S TOO HOT, JUST DELETE AND FORGET.—YUEN

That was the one thing she'd needed to know: that there wasn't another copy of the illegal library on some other gadget wedged in a crack at the cabin, tagged as a cotton T-shirt. She would erase the books, run over the phone with the car, and then erase the car's memory so that it wouldn't have incriminating video left from its interior safety cameras. Erasing the memory on your own house or car could be considered incriminating (Voorhis versus Todd, 2086), but it was a perfectly natural thing to do when you didn't want the clerk at the rental agency to ogle your cleavage after you returned the car.

Was the phone tagged? She popped up an interface, and a yellow rectangle appeared, hovering in the air above the old phone: SLINGSHOT.

Hell.

Fari hated the image of herself as Bill's mother, Tina, taking away his dangerous toy. The old battle-ax. If Lancelot had had a mother like her, he would have ended up as a nearsighted clerk.

Bill and Shona were surprised when Fari suggested a jaunt to Tanzania.

"Why?" Bill asked.

"It sounds interesting from Yuen's travel journal," Fari said. "We could see how it's changed since then."

"I've only been to Africa once," Bill said, "for that company picnic."

"Sure, why not?" Shona said. "We could be back in time to see the sun rise again here."

Before they left, Fari put the phone in her duffel bag.

The sign said Kilimanjaro Backpackers' Hotel. Bill and Shona looked dubious, but Fari insisted on going in and asking the price of a room. In the dimly lit little lobby, she put her bag down by the door next to a ratty sansevieria and stood in line at the counter, where the clerk was helping a couple of Japanese kids who looked like they needed a bath and were having the time of their lives. She winked up an interface and subvocalized to it to locate her bag.

HIS AREA DOES NOT HAVE A TAG NETWORK.

LOCATE VISUALLY.

NO EYE AVAILABLE IN THIS AREA.

Bingo, a completely dumb building.

After an hour in the transatlantic tube and another thirty minutes from Dakar to Mombasa, Shona felt like a sardine with a hangover. A gimlet in a plastic martini glass on the final leg to Moshi got her just a little pickled again, and she decided that the pickle jar was a much more comfy place than the sardine can. But by the time they were walking down the main drag, with Billy pointing out Kilimanjaro through the clouds, she felt as though she were pregnant with triplet baby pickles, who were doing jumping jacks on top of her bladder. The hotel Fari found was dirty and not air-conditioned, but Shona gave the thumbs up and rushed upstairs to her own room. The toilet seemed dumb as a brick, which was actually a bonus since she didn't know whether the xylecisan she'd popped the night before was illegal here.

Shortly, someone knocked. "Come in."

Billy entered with Fari in tow. Fari closed the door behind them, looking furtive. Furtive, that was promising. Billy usually had a tendency to be a boring boy scout.

"We've got something here you should see," Billy said, holding out a palm-sized plastic box.

Shona took it and looked it over. "What is it?"

"An old phone."

"Yuen's?" She tried to pop up her tag interface. NETWORK NOT FOUND. The building must be dumb. "It's got the files on it?"

"Yep. Eleven million books." Billy showed her how to work the old-fashioned touch interface, and she flipped randomly through some titles.

FRANCE TO SCANDINAVIA, FRANK G. CARPENTER, 1923

THE DRUNK IN THE FURNACE, W.S. MERWIN, 1958

"Nothing from later than about 1960," she observed.

"Yeah," Fari said, "we think it's every book published in English before 1962."

"Oh." Shona was relieved. "So the copyrights have all expired, right?"

"Nope, that's common misconception. Copyright Extension Act of 2187. Books as far back as
Huck Finn
and
Uncle Tom's Cabin
are in copyright again."

Fari talked like everyone had been to college and knew what
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was. But anyway Shona knew what book she wanted to find. She ran a search, and there it was:

HALF MAGIC, EDWARD EAGER, 1954

She showed Billy.

"Oh, no."

"C'mon, you enjoyed it."

"She made me play pretend with her girlfriends every summer."

"We needed a boy to be Mark."

"Every summer for five years."

"You must have enjoyed the attention from all those girls," Fari said.

"Maybe at the end."

"When Binti started getting boobs," Shona said.

"When I started caring about girls. You know, I tried to get you a view of
Half Magic
for your birthday."

"Really? That was sweet of you, but it's been forever since you could get it."

"I know. I thought maybe I could use my connections. Dreamworks-HarperCollins bought it because they thought they had a good treatment, but when they started roughing out the marketing, it didn't work. Not enough international appeal, and it's hard to sell a story that's fantasy and set in the twentieth century. There's contemporary fantasy and medieval, but this one didn't categorize well."

"Why didn't they just put out the original book?"

"Well, if you do that, it messes things up if you want to do other media later. You want one big splash. They wouldn't make enough on text-only to pay for my boss to take the principals to lunch at Urusawa and order the omakase menu. Text-only is never a big revenue stream, because it takes hours and hours to read, so people almost never pay for a second view. And realistically, you couldn't just release the original version."

He was condescending. Shona felt her temper rising. "Why not?"

"Like, remember how there was that thing in the book about roller skates, and we had to look up what they were? And even then we got it wrong. We thought they were motorized. Stuff like that has to be modernized."

"That's ridiculous!" She was shouting now. "You pay money to snap up the copyright, and then you just sit on it forever and don't use it at all, so nobody benefits."

"It's not me personally. I told you, this was Dreamworks-HC. Look, it's just economics. There's an opportunity cost, and limited eyeballs per year that you can market to, and then—"