Asimov's Science Fiction: September 2013 (14 page)

"I'm currently running on hardware in Johannesburg. I understand that you've been accepted by the E.A.F. bar. Congratulations."

The thing's pleasantries had always been bland and preprogrammed, not anything like this that could even potentially be interpreted as sincere or individualized. It was clearly a veiled threat.
We ruined your career in L.A. Republic, and we can do the same thing again.

"What do you want?"

"Yes, you see, I've been cooperating with the authorities in Dar es Salaam, and we detected an anomalous pattern in the datastream from a location in an extralegal housing settlement in the suburbs. It had to do with certain individuals, graduate students in the history department at Professor Singh's university. Geolocation data showed that they were entering a house and going into a specif ic, small area, about the size of a closet, where their net connections were cut off."

Fari decided to gamble by trying to draw the AI out. "It's not illegal to have spotty reception."

"No, but people usually make sure to fix such a problem if it occurs in a closet. It's inconvenient not to be able to locate a pair of shoes or a can of pineapple."

"You're talking about a shantytown here."

"Yes, you're doing a very competent job of making the same points the judge made when the local police asked for a warrant. But the pattern of the data was quite unusual. The students were taking turns going into the unconnected volume. As soon as one left, another would go in, and it was at specif ic times, as if there was a set schedule. We formed a strong suspicion that they were hiding something. This kind of thing is fairly common among criminals. It's known as a hole in the ether, or a Faraday cage."

"Why are you telling me this, and what do you want?"

"The police carried out a raid, in which I participated through a waldo. We found two of the students asleep and one in a closet with a claw hammer, a smashed handy, and some very incriminating notes written on wood-pulp pages with a pen. The closet's floor, walls, and ceiling were covered with aluminum foil. The reason I'm telling you this is that William Guerrero has been showing a similar pattern of behavior."

"We're not married anymore, and you should be talking to him about this, not me."

"In fact we did attempt to talk to him—that is, the police in Moshi did, but I'm afraid they did a sloppy job. Probably someone tipped someone off. Mr. Guerrero is presently unaccounted for, as is whatever device he was using in his Faraday cage, which was in an apartment owned by his cousin, Shona Reisner. Ms. Reisner and her son are currently at Nairobi Spaceport."

"Which is an extraterritorial concession where you and the E.A.F. don't have jurisdiction."

"Yes, and as a consequence, you are the only member of the conspiracy to whom we have access."

"I'd be a fool to continue this conversation without a good criminal defense lawyer."

"Yes, and your counsel would without a doubt tell you to stop communicating with me. But time is limited. Mr. Guerrero has a berth on a launch less than twenty-four hours from now, and if we can't detain him before that, you will be the only conspirator subject to prosecution. I
do
hope you understand that I'm a cop, not a prosecutor, but in my opinion you would be in a poor position at that point. The E.A.F. statute provides for both a cogmod and a prison term of three to five years. But if you agree to cooperate fully right now, the Kilimanjaro D.P.P. has a strong incentive to make a deal."

A cogmod. Her vow. At first she didn't realize that she'd spoken the words out loud: "I'll do anything."

Bill didn't know which part of his plan had sparked the other in his brain: his idea for safeguarding the library, or his wish to make one last visit to his favorite place on a dying planet.

All the tourists wanted to climb Kilimanjaro, but Mount Kenya was the real climber's mountain. It was the rainy season, and he seemed to have the south side to himself, as he'd hoped. He guided the crawlie up the Nithi Valley, invisible from the trail that ran above. He would have liked to scale the falls unaided, placing his nuts and cams by hand the old-fashioned way for one last time, but he decided regretfully that that would take too long. He sent the crawlie up and had it top-rope him.

It was now three in the afternoon, and, like clockwork, he heard thunder from the daily storm blowing in out of the west. He strapped himself back into the machine and sent it bounding over a col into the next valley, then up the scree toward the Austrian Hut below Point Lenana, where he and R.J. had gone climbing together half a year ago. The crawlie's safeties protested a few times, and he had to override. The rain reached them and began to wet the rocks. They slipped and tumbled a few times, but he was unhurt; each time he felt nervously to make sure that the handy was still zipped safely inside the front pocket of his pants. When they gained the crest of the ridge, he pulled it out and checked, and the green light was on, showing that it was turned off but getting a network signal.

Here was the hut, and nearby its solar collectors and the fancy new outhouse that made the old main building look shabby by comparison. The sky was nearly as dark as if the sun had already set, but as he'd expected there were no electric lights showing from inside the hut. It was almost always deserted at this time of year. The rain had turned to hail, and it would have been good to go inside and sleep on the soft mattresses that had supposedly been brought up by human porters in the twentieth century. Even better to cook a big pot of tea in the frigid hallway and talk shop all evening with another guide. But his purpose was secret, and that was why he hadn't come in along the trail and why he wouldn't unlatch the door or turn on a light. If he did, old David, the caretaker down at Mackinder's Camp to the west, would hear an electronic beep, and would walk up with his umbrella, even this late and in what was now becoming a nasty storm. He couldn't let good old David know he was here tonight. The only people who knew were Shona, Fari, and Isaac.

He lowered himself out of the guts of the crawlie and walked cautiously northward down across the jumble of ankle-breaking rocks sticking out of the snow, terrain on which his crampons and ice ax would be useless. At the lip of the precipitous slope he looked down at the vast glacier in the valley far below, cast in deep shadow by the ridge to the west. A hundred years ago, they'd said that the glaciers on Mount Kenya and Kili would be gone soon because of climate change, but the restoration project had been a success, and now the snow fields were as deep and wide as ever in human memory. In eight hours when the moon had risen high enough, Lewis Glacier would gleam white with fresh powder covering whatever dirt and dust had blown down on the older snow. He would rappel down, turn the handy on, bury it under a few inches of snow, and, if his luck held, ride the crawlie all the way to Nairobi Spaceport without getting stopped by the police.

The handy was too hot to handle right now, but in a year or two, when things had calmed down, Isaac would recover it using its tag signal, which he would be able to detect once he was down in the glacier's valley. He would get it to a bitter political opponent of Prof Singh's who was not under police suspicion and happened to share Prof 's ideas about preserving historical texts. Bill checked the handy, and as he'd expected, its red light was on, showing no reception. At the crest of the ridge, where the hut was, there was line of sight to Meru and Nairobi, but down here, he was in the same radio shadow that covered the whole glacier below.

It was going to be a long night. He sat down under the crawlie's chassis in hopes of keeping some of the snow off. With his insulating jacket and pants puffed up he would be warm enough for safety, if not for sleep. He spent some time being worried and afraid, and the last glow of sunset disappeared. It was too cloudy to let him occupy his mind with looking at the stars. And then it occurred to him to pull out the handy. Its light glowed red. He turned it on and brought up another book that R.J. had said was good.

Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

He dug into it and rapidly decided that he hated it, almost as much as he'd hated
Mr. Biswas.
He hated it while the lightning hit Nelion and then, deafeningly, nearby Point Lenana. While the snow turned to hail and then back to snow he rehearsed his explanation for R.J. of why the book was so lousy. The lightning stopped, but then the wind picked up and made his eyes tear up, and as the tears froze and he wiped the ice away from the corners of his eyes with his gloved fingers, he muttered indignantly to himself "cardboard characters" and "naked hippie commune." He could have made himself more comfortable by putting on his goggles, but even with minimum polarization they'd cut out too much light to let him read, and he wanted to find out what happened next.

The crunching sound of footsteps came from uphill in the direction of the hut. Bill switched off the handy, stashed it back in his pocket, and zipped the zipper. The sky had cleared, but the starlight was too dim to let him see anything. There were more footsteps, and then the creak of the hut's door opening. Somebody fumbled around, and the lights of the hut came on, blindingly bright even from twenty meters away. He caught a glimpse of the big, bipedal shape of a public peace waldo and averted his eyes a little to let them adjust to the light. He heard the waldo step inside onto the creaky, hundred-year-old floorboards and unlatch the door to one of the bunkrooms.

How had the cops found out he was here?

Quickly he strapped himself into the crawlie and brought it out of sleep mode. It was obvious what he had to do. Here low down on the edge of the ridge, he was in a radio shadow. The waldo was being operated by telepresence from somewhere else. If it tried to come down and get him, its radio contact would be broken, and it would freeze up.

Through the whistling wind, he listened to the machine systematically search through one bunkroom after another. There were eight mattresses, and he heard one after another woomphf back down after being lifted upward. To his surprise, he felt angry. Did the operator think he was cowering like a squirrel under a fucking mattress? Seven, eight... He primed himself, and then the damn thing went and opened the door to the fancy outhouse. Unbelievable. They thought their only opposition was from the kind of person who would hide in an outhouse. He suppressed an urge to charge and rip the monster to shreds. He could do no such thing. He had to stay calm. His crawlie was a heavy-duty climbing model, built to withstand falls and abuse, but it couldn't win a straight fight with a police waldo. Stick with the plan, the plan was good. Let it come down to him and then freeze up.

The waldo emerged from the outhouse, switched on a headlight, and turned to sweep three hundred and sixty degrees. The light passed him and came back.
Come and get it, you son of a bitch!
It walked toward him with maddening slowness. Step. Step.
Come on, here I am!
The slope was getting steeper. It slipped on an icy rock and had to catch itself with a humanlike hand.

It got to within five meters and stopped moving. Bingo! Bill charged forward, losing an agonizing second as the crawlie's feet lost traction on the icy rocks and then set themselves in a new position and got going again. Just as he was about to reach the waldo, he saw it move. It must still be outside the radio shadow, hadn't yet lost contact with its operator. The person had just stopped moving it for a second. He used a mandible to knock it off its feet and downslope. His enemy tumbled downhill and then got back up. Bill charged down at it, hoping to use his momentum to knock it farther down, to where either it would fall into the radio shadow or the slope would become too steep, and the scree too unstable, for anything with two legs to walk on.

He was sailing through space. He had a moment to realize that the waldo had used one of its hands to grab his crawlie, pulling him down after itself.

They rolled, flew, and bounced down the near-vertical slope for what seemed like a very long time, and hit the glacier in a cloud and confusion of snow. For a while Bill was stunned. Eventually he became aware of a sheet of blood coursing down over his face, and something terribly wrong with his right arm. He tried to think of what to do. The crawlie's right mandible was slaved to his right arm, so he couldn't use it. He gave the voice command to switch on the headlight, and it came on, but he was blinded by his own blood and couldn't see anything but a pink haze. Clumsily, he swept the left mandible around to try to find whether the waldo was still holding onto the crawlie, but he couldn't tell what the mandible was running into—maybe just the snow they seemed to be sunk into. He stopped moving and listened. There didn't seem to be any wind down here, and it was very quiet. He didn't hear any noise from his opponent. It must be out of net contact and helpless. He'd won.

First aid? He couldn't bandage his own head in the dark with one hand, but what about his right arm? He unslaved the mandible from his left arm and used his own left hand's fingers gingerly to make a survey. The arm was bent at an unnatural angle, and he felt a dagger of bone sticking out through the skin. He slaved the waldo back to his left arm and used the pincers to squeeze just below his right shoulder, tightened until it hurt worse than the injury itself, and then backed off on the pressure a little, hoping it would make a decent tourniquet.

Now what? It took his muddled mind a while to remember that this was a standard avalanche-rescue or crevasse drill. He asked the crawlie which way was up, and it told him he was on his side. He told it to dig its way to the surface. The motion set off a starburst of pain.

He must have blacked out for a while from the pain. There was still no sound of wind, and he knew now that this meant he was still buried. The crawlie had failed to dig itself out. He had it pull his ditty bag out of the top of his pack, managed by feel to extract an emergency-strength pain patch from the first-aid kit, used fingers and teeth to peel off the packaging, and stuck the patch on the skin of his cheek. It would take ten or fifteen minutes to work, and then he could try again to dig out.