Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001 Read online

  She stretches and pushes her goggles up. “Oui?”

  “I was just thinking.” He smiles. “Three days and you haven't told me what I should be doing with myself yet.”

  She pulls a face. “Why would I do that?”

  “Oh, no reason. I'm just not over—” he shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life: but not one he feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure; starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he's been effectively—voluntarily—dominated by his partners. Maybe the anti-submissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why this creative malaise? Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance?

  Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is love. “When are they due?” she asks, leaning over him.

  “Any—” the doorbell chimes.

  “Ah. I will get that.” She stalks away, opens the door.

  “You!”

  Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: but he wasn't expecting her to come in person.

  “Yes, me,” Annette says easily. “Come in. Be my guest.”

  Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. “Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in,” she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to contempt than to humor.

  Manfred rises: for a moment, he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his—mistress? conspirator?—side by side. The contrast is marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam would have turned him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he asks. “The party of the third part seems to be late.”

  “Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar,” twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: “I'm recording this, I'm sure you understand.”

  Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient: Pam is pretending she doesn't exist. “Well, well, well.” She shakes her head. “I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, Manny. And before the divorce's even settled.”

  “I'm surprised you're not in the hospital,” he says. “I gather post-natal recovery is outsourced these days?”

  “The employers.” She slips her long coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. “They subsidize everything when you reach my grade.” Pamela is tall, ash-blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored modeling career. She's wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: but to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he's completely unable to evaluate her gender: it's almost as if she's become a member of another species. “As you'd be aware if you'd been paying attention.”

  “I always pay attention, Pam,” he says: “it's the only currency I carry.”

  “Very droll, ha ha,” interrupts Glashwiecz, the lawyer. “You do realize that you're paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating by-play?”

  Manfred stares at him: “You know I don't have any money.”

  “Ah.” Glashwiecz smiles. “But you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken—all a lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly: somewhere at the bottom of that pile there's got to be something, hasn't there?”

  A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard: without being at all obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. Manfred heads for the sofa. “Your attack was rather elegant,” he comments, as Pam disappears into the kitchen.

  Glashwiecz nods. “The idea was one of my interns',” he says. “I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same.”

  “Uh-huh.” Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam re-appearing from the kitchen, her expression icy; a moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that moment one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.

  “So what's the scam?” Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. “Where's the money?”

  Manfred looks at him irritably: “There is no money,” he says. “The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained that?” His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Philippe Patek watch, his Java-enabled signet ring.

  “C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got bags of it stuffed away—just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?”

  Manfred snorts. “You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I—” The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his ear lobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again and he glances round to see Annette walking toward it.

  “You're making it hard on yourself,” Glashwiecz warns.

  “Expecting company?” Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction.

  “No—”

  Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like a cross between a digital sewing machine and a grenade launcher, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble nineteen-fifties space probes. “That's them,” Annette says clearly.

  “Mais oui.” The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam.

  “You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?” She snorts.

  “You're making a big mistake, lady,” Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.

  A burst of static from one of the troopers. “No,” Annette says distantly. “No mistake.”

  She points at Glashwiecz. “Are you aware of the takeover?”

  “Takeover?” The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards.

  “As of three hours ago,” Manfred says quietly, “I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants—they take explosive business plans and detonate them.” Glashwiecz is looking pale: whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. “Actually, Athene Accelerants are owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot one dot one's chief operations officer.”

  Pam looks annoyed. “Peurile attempts to dodge responsibility—”

  Annette clears her throat. “Exactly who
do you think you are trying to sue?” she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. “Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government.”

  “You wouldn't—”

  “I would.” Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. “Done yet?” he asks the suitcase.

  Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks: “Uploads completed.”

  “Ah, good.” He grins at Annette. “Time for our next... ?”

  On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers and the door opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room.

  “Which one of you is Macx?” snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. “Got a writ to serve.”

  “You'd be the CCAA?” asks Manfred.

  “You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order—”

  Manfred raises a hand. “It's not me you want,” he says. “It's this lady.” He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. “Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here.” He winks at Glashwiecz. “Except she doesn't control anything.”

  “Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?” Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: the larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously.

  “Well.” Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. “Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade; Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves any more. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were.”

  Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. “I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox—how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell-game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network—currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly—the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them any more. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here.”

  He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. “Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?” he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: “I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela—by the value these gentlemen place on them—is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees.”

  Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. “Is this true?” he demands. “This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble!”

  The second goon rumbles agreement: “Remember, dose MP3's, dey bad for you health!”

  Annette claps her hands. “If you would to leave my apartment, please.” The door, attentive as ever, swings open: “You are no longer welcome here!”

  “This means you,” Manfred advises Pam, helpfully.

  “You bastard!” she spits at him.

  Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. “I thought you wanted my assets? Are the encumbrances too much for you?”

  “You know what I mean! You and that two-bit euro-whore! I'll get you for child neglect!”

  His smile freezes. “Try it and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand.”

  Pam is taken aback by this. “You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?”

  Manfred stops smiling. “Divorce happened.”

  She turns on her heel and stalks out of his life, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class-action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz's shoulder and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slides shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.

  Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. “Think it will work?” she asks.

  “Well. The CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn't controlled by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: if he tries to take me on, he's got to be politically bulletproof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity.”

  “Profits.” Annette sighs. “I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with the singularity.”

  “Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music.”

  “But you didn't! You signed rights over—”

  “But first I uploaded the entire stash to Eternity and several other cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there'll be rampant piracy. But that's not the point. The point is abundance. The mafiya can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle—but I bet she can't; she still believes in classical economics, one minus one equals zero. Information doesn't work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music; instead of a Soviet central planning system I've turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property.”

  “Oh, Manfred. You hopeless idealist.” She strokes his shoulder. “Whatever for?”

  “It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats—”

  He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the trans-human explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him. But that's okay. He's still human, this decade. That, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex: and it drifts off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free.

  Copyright © 2001 by Charles Stross.

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  The Boy by Robert Reed

  The mass market paperback edition of the Robert Reed's latest novel, Marrow, is just out from Tor Books. Mr. Reed tells us the inspiration for the following story came from two sources. “At a flea market, my wife bought one of those Christ-with-the-flock-of-sheep prints. She claims that she only wanted the frame, but somehow the Savior remains in his home. Nicely combed and very long hair; almost feminine, in some ways.” He also had a tall adolescent boy come to the front door and ask if he could pick one of his flowers. Those two incidents got the author thinking about a simple what-if.

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Table of Contents]

  Dies Veneris.

  A throbbing finds Helena.

  It is warm and insistent, and in a small hard way, it feels angry.

  For a slippery instant, the sensation is her own. Her heart is thundering, or maybe a sick artery is pulsing deep within her brain. Then she finds herself awake, realizing that a lazy after-lunch nap must have ambushed her, and as she sits up in bed, breathing in quick sighs, the throbbing turns from something felt into a genuine sound, and the sound swells until the loose panes in her windows begin to rattle, and the air itself reverberates like the stubborn head of a beaten drum.

  A car passes. Smallish, and elderly. Nothing about it fast or particularly dangerous. But it is endowed with oversized speakers, their unlovely, thoroughly modern music making the neighborhood shiver.

  Helena watches the car as far as her lilacs.

  Then it vanishes, and the rude noise diminishes, and she lies back on her pillow, considering. Considering how much time she has, and her mood. Twenty minutes left in her lunch hour. A six-minute drive to work, if traffic cooperates. Her right hand tugs casually at her zipper. An after-lunch indulgence, she's thinking. She thinks about one man, then another. But the music returns, and her window glass rattles until it stops in mid-throb—a cessation of sound that startles in its own right.

  Helena takes a breath, and holds it.

  Through the windows, a person appears. A male person. On foot, strolling with purpose along her narrow driveway.

  Helena feels embarrassed for no good reason. She sits up, telling herself that nobody can see her. And even if they could, she was doing nothing but enjoying a dieter's lunch and an innocent nap.

  Her doorbell rings.