pressure was equalized she slid open the outer door and ran up the ramp. There was no sign of her father on the path back to Fowler. But as she followed the footprints away from the ramp, she spotted a figure in the distance heading out toward the hills.
Roz hurried after, skipping as fast as she could without lurching off onto the collectors.
When she caught up, he was on his knees in the shadow of a big rock, jerking about spasmodically. The strangeness of his motion alarmed her. She had never seen anyone move like that. Before she could reach him he slowed, stopped, and fell, slowly, onto his side. Calmly, quietly. Less like a fall, more like the drift of a feather. She rushed to his side, and saw that he had broken the seal on his helmet.
“No!” she screamed, and the sound of her voice echoed in her ears. Jack’s face was purple with broken blood vessels, his eyes bloody. He was dead.
High-G, they called her, and it was a good thing, as she carried her father’s body back to the Fabrication lab.
It was Roz’s idea to put Jack’s corpse into the assembler, to add the materials of his body to the atoms used to re-create Carey. There would be hell to pay with security, but Eva agreed to do it.
The assembly took seven days. When the others at the colony discovered what they were doing, there was some debate, but they let the process continue. At the end of the week the fluid supporting the nanomachines was drained off, revealing Carey’s perfect body. Carey shuddered and coughed, and they helped him out of the assembler.
To him it was six months earlier, and his mother had just completed his scan. It took him a long time to accept that he had not fallen into some dream only seconds after he had been placed in the marble, to awaken in this vat of warm fluid. He thought he was the original, not the copy. For all practical purposes he was right.
Later, as they were finding a pressure suit they could adapt to Carey’s size to take him home, he asked Roz, “Where’s Jack?”
The Juniper Tree All this happened a long time ago.
Nora Sobieski founded the Society of Cousins to free girls like Roz of the feeling that they must depend on their fathers or boyfriends for their sense of self, and incidentally to free boys like Carey of the need to prove themselves superior to other boys by owning girls like Roz. Girls still go through infatuations, still fall in love, still feel the influence of men as well as of women. But Roz and Eva in the end are actually in the same boat-a boat that does not contain Jack, or even Carey.
The young junipers stand ghostly gray in the night. The air smells fragrant with pinon. In the thin, clear starlight Roz can see wildflowers blooming beneath the trees-columbine, pennyroyal, groundsel. She sits on the slope and pulls Carey’s ring from her pocket. The ring is fashioned into the image of two branches that twine around each other, each with no beginning and no end, each eternally separate from the other.
Roz holds the ring in the middle of her palm, wondering if she should get rid of it at last, knowing that she can never give it back and maintain the mystery of who her father was and how he died.
Antibodies - Charles Stross
Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Gandhi, the Pope, Thatcher-if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians?
I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC , performing open heart surgery on a diseased network card, when the news about the traveling salesman theorem came in. Over on the other side of the office John’s terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail. A moment later my own workstation bonged.
“Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!”
I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt.
“Someone’s come up with a proof that NP - complete problems lie in P! There’s a posting incomp.risks saying they’ve used it to find an O*(n?2) solution to the traveling salesman problem, and it scales! Looks like April First has come early this year, doesn’t it?”
I dropped the PC’s lid on the floor hastily and sat down at my workstation. Another cubed-sphere hypothesis, another flame war in the math newsgroups-or something more serious? “When did it arrive?” I called over the partition. Soroya, passing my cubicle entrance with a cup of coffee, cast me a dirty look; loud voices aren’t welcome in open-plan offices.
“This just in,” John replied. I opened up the mailtool and hit on the top of the list, which turned out to be a memo from HR about diversity awareness training. No, next…they want to close the smoking room and make us a 100% tobacco-free workplace. Hmm. Next.
Forwarded e-mail: headers bearing the spoor of a thousand mail servers, from Addis-Ababa to Ulan Bator. Before it had entered our internal mail network it had traveled from Taiwan to Rochester NJ , then to UCB in the Bay Area, then via a mailing list to all points; once in-company it had been bounced to everyone in engineering and management by the first recipient, Eric the Canary. (Eric is the departmental plant. Spends all the day web-dozing for juicy nuggets of new information if you let him. A one-man wire service: which is why I always ended up finishing his jobs.) I skimmed the message, then read it again. Blinked. This kind of stuff is heavy on the surreal number theory: about as digestible as an Egyptian mummy soaked in tabasco sauce for three thousand years.
Then I poked at the web page the theorem was on.
No response-server timed out.
Someone or something was hitting on the web server with the proof: I figured it had to be all the geeks who’d caught wind of the chain letter so far. My interest was up, so I hit the “reload” button, and something else came up on screen.
Lots of theorems-looked like the same stuff as the e-mail, only this time with some fun graphics.
Something tickled my hindbrain then, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Next thing, I hit the print button and the inkjet next to my desk began to mutter and click. There was a link near the bottom of the page to the author’s bibliography, so I clicked on that and the server threw another “go away, I’m busy” error. I tugged my beard thoughtfully, and instead of pressing “back” I pressed “reload.”
The browser thought to itself for a bit-then a page began to appear on my screen. The wrong page. I glanced at the document title at the top and froze:
THE PAGE AT THIS LOCATION HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN.
Please enter your e-mail address if you require further information.
Hmm.
As soon as the printout was finished, I wandered around to the photocopier next door to the QA labs and ran off a copy. Faxed it to a certain number, along with an EYES UP note on a yellow Post-it. Then I poked my head
