Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 29

For the thousandth time, I wondered why I hadn't signed up for the archaeology course.

Archaeology always fascinated me because it was one area where culture and technology go hand in hand-indeed, before writing, culture and art are defined by technology-the Stone Age, the bronze age. While the "two cultures" are as old as the academic trivium and quadrivium, I saw the pathological split represented by Stevens as a modern invention; Jefferson and Franklin, for example, were both competent scientists of their age as well as competent writers and philosophers. And archaeology used all sorts of hard science techniques to study things-dendrochronology, radioisotope dating, spectroscopy, radar imagery-it was much more my kind of thing. But that was the problem; at the time, it seemed too close to a hard science, and my advisor thought I needed broadening.

Dear Old Lloyd College was into anything Welsh, of course, and music in particular was supposed to stir the souls of the Men and Women of Harlech. Well, that and poetry and politics. If it came out of the mouth, it was us. Besides, I had a crush on Felix Mendelssohn-never mind that he died a couple of centuries ago at the age of thirty-eight.

"Come to my concert," Stevens droned on, "and I will show you, or," he gave slight chuckle of phony self-deprecation, "try anyway. And listen to my Stradivarius, if not to me or to Schoenberg.

People have picked apart and tried to a.n.a.lyze his violins for over four centuries, and they can't duplicate them. No, they can't. Not all the a.n.a.lysis in the world will make another Stradivarius, and I'll give an A in this course to anyone who can prove otherwise!"

The bell released me from my music appreciation requirement to the more rational world of quantum mechanics. I bundled myself and books against the snow and the bitter Minnesota cold, stepped out into the tundra between the Fine Arts building and the Jobs Science Hall, and kicked the nearest ice chunk halfway to Minneapolis. Just because I knew all about endorphins and evolutionary behavioralism didn't mean I didn't have them.

I didn't need a "C" in anything this semester. My scholars.h.i.+p was in jeopardy. Mom's back didn't let her work anymore and Dad-well, lugging boxes around was about Dad's speed these days. Therapy make-work that robots could do better and cheaper. It hadn't always been that way, Mom tells me. If they could just get in his head and fix what that kid's bullet had done. If they could just fix the head of the kid with the gun. Who's "they?" I'd asked myself. Then I'd looked at myself in the mirror and chosen a major.

Maybe it was more than I could do. C-minus. I wanted a shoulder to cry on. Ted's.

As boyfriends went, Ted was about my speed. Charming, polite, and honest-about dating other girls and not being ready for an exclusive relations.h.i.+p. But we took cla.s.ses together, hung out together, and it was pretty generally conceded that we were an item. I hoped. He was, at least, a full inch taller than me, and while not a football player, he'd lettered in track and field-throwing the discus.

He made me do weights to fill out my chest with something and taught me to throw the discus, I threw one sixty meters, which was a mistake because he tried to get me to join the women's team. Doing the jock thing in public didn't fit my self-image-I didn't like being reminded that I had failed to become the delicate Eurasian beauty Dad had wanted.

I found Ted sitting on a cus.h.i.+oned bench in the hall just outside the nano lab with his head in a book.

"Hi, Teddy, got a moment?""Uh? Oh, Kay." He pushed a strand of jet-black not-too-clean hair from his brow. Since all the adults were wearing short hair in reaction to the previous generation, we were growing ours long again to make a statement to them. Silly, but style is style.

He looked into my eyes and knew. "Stevens again?"

"It was just too much, Teddy. He was ridiculing me and my ideas, and he's wrong! This whole idea that you can't understand how things work except by some mystical..." I sang an approximation of the Twilight Zone theme, "...comprehension is complete maximum nonsense that really only amounts to people getting their content-free arguments published by force of personality and politics and no one seems to know that particular emperor's not wearing any clothes!"

"That's heavy, Kay," he said with a grin.

I grimaced. "Well, thanks for listening, anyway. I just want to do something. But you can't prove anything to these people because the only proof they accept is how they feel and you know how that's going to come out!"

"Hmm."

When Ted starts going "hmm," I perk up. Another thing I like about Ted is that he shows signs of being an okay provider. I mean, I intend to handle my own affairs and break through the gla.s.s ceiling and all that, but it's good to have backup. And Ted is competent. When he says "hmm," things tend to happen. Excitement. Turn-on.

"What are you thinking, Teddy?"

"We're just about ready to test our replicator on something with a little more structure than a stainless steel fork. I think something organic is next."

"Yeah?" I'd worked on the nanotech replicator two semesters ago-mostly on the software to extract the molecular structure from non-destructive scanning with soft X-rays. The "conga line" of molecular placers was only a few million atoms long then, and not working very well. I'd kind of tried to keep up with it, but when Ted and I were together, there were, well, other matters to occupy our time.

"Maybe we could arrange a demonstration-show that even organic things, anyway, are entirely determined by where their atoms are. Drive another nail in the coffin of vitalism, so to speak."

"Could you replicate a mouse?"

"Yeah, I think so. But we'd have to freeze it first. That would get the fuzzy mafia all over us and besides, what would it prove?"

"What if the duplicate mouse remembered what its original knew?"

"Hmm, Kay, you're bright. Hadn't thought of that one. Actually, I was thinking something else..."

Terri Maraschino came by just then, a pet.i.te girl with big blue eyes and golden locks down to her a.s.s.

"Hi, guys," she said, raising an eyebrow at me. "Doc Andre's got your number, Kay, huh?"

Lloyd College only has about thirteen hundred students and word gets around fast.

"It's nothing. I just made a sign-up day mistake and I'll get my C, get out of there and go on with my life."

"Gotta watch the GPA, kid. Sometimes, you know, you just gotta go with the flow, Kay. Give 'em what they want. Then they give back. He's not so bad, off duty, so to speak."

"Oh?" Teddy said, tensing. Why would he care? I mean, sure, he dated Terri occasionally, but so did the whole world. He couldn't be jealous about her; it would be like being jealous about air.

"Not too." Terri shrugged her shoulders.

"He's got a little surprise coming," Ted said with a grin.

I had no idea of what kind of surprise, but when Ted grins like that, good things happen.

"Oh?" Terri asked with maybe feigned indifference.

"Yeah. Kay, can you come by the lab tomorrow evening, about ten?"

I looked at Terri and grinned. "Sure, Ted."

When I met Ted in the lab, he had two dishes of lime Jello waiting.

"Lime Jello for dinner? You're weird, Teddy. Nice, but weird."He gave me a spoon. "Taste one and then the other."

I got it, and did so. They both tasted like lime Jello.

"We made one of these the usual way in about ten minutes. The other took ten hours and most of the big Opticor as well as all of our homemade parallel processor. Can you tell which is which?"

I savored the Jellos again. They both had a fruity bouquet and a cool and rubbery start with just a little citric bite. Then syrupy sweetness melted in my mouth and slid down my throat. d.a.m.n it, they must have used real sugar. I pulled my stomach in, as if that would make any difference.

I shook my head in wonderment. "Can't tell the difference."

Ted grinned. "The replicated Jello is on the blue-bordered plate."

"Herr Doktor Professor Andre Stevens would, of course, claim there is some kind of ineffable difference to be elucidated by direct experience," I said.

"Let's call him on it."

"How would anyone get him to do a Jello taste test? Especially if he knew why? He's like any one of these hypocritical creeps with a made-up dogma-the last thing in the world he'd go for is an objective test of it. Teddy, we'd have to trick him, somehow."

Ted grinned. "Hmm. We could catch him in the cafeteria line. I know someone who works there-he could serve it to him-then we show up with cameras and say 'surprise!'"

"But he'd have to take the Jello, he'd have to eat it where we could get at him and he usually eats in the faculty lounge and we'd have to prove the Jello was replicated, and if we do it with Jello everyone's going to just laugh."

"I see. The Jello test is an interesting problem, but off target?"

"Yeah." It came to me just then what we had to duplicate. But it would be risky, risky as h.e.l.l-not to mention illegal. "To prove it to him, we gotta get him where he lives," I said.

"Yeah. Hmm."

The look in Ted's eyes told me we'd had the same thought. I waited expectantly, hopefully. It would be a lot better if this were Ted's idea.

"It's complicated, but...do you know where he keeps his Stradivarius?"

That's my Ted.

So there we were lying in the snow below Stevens' office window on a moonless night with the stars s.h.i.+ning down about as bright as they ever do in the middle of a two-million-person megalopolis, our skin-tight "moon colony" suits turned white as the snow to help keep our heat in with a black bag hidden under Ted. They were high-tech smart fabric and super-insulated but it was one of those Minnesota January nights where the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius starts to look academic. I was literally shaking in my boots.

As soon as the campus patrol car finished snow-crunching through the parking lot and headed toward the Broiler, we got up out of the snow and dusted ourselves off. While I admired my snow angel, Ted held his watch face up at the window and pressed a stud. We waited and shook.

Earlier, he'd put on a maintenance uniform and stuck a remote-control bypa.s.s on the window crank motor-if the departmental admin support person had recognized him, she'd said nothing. Several students moonlighted in maintenance, so it was likely no big deal. He spent some time in the other offices too, for cover.

I'd unlocked the window today just before closing. I'd brought Stevens a cup of coffee on my way to plead for my grade, and he'd taken it. The coffee, not the plea. A couple of minutes later, when he excused himself to the bathroom, I'd flipped the latch up. We hoped he'd not noticed.

He hadn't. The window cranked itself open smoothly.

The rope ladder caught on the second try, and up we scurried.

"Less than three minutes." Ted said, obviously pleased. "Now, where's the violin?"

The best-laid plans...

Fast forward to the last Sat.u.r.day of spring break after a twelve-inch snowstorm. As a certifiedscience nerd, I know why global warming means more snow and occasional cold records, too, but I still wonder at the paradox. Anyway, there'd been a concert that night at which Stevens had played, and we hoped against hope that, this time, he'd left the violin in his office. It was our seventh try.

I had not, however, made seven more appointments to see Stevens about my grades-even he would have suspected something was up if I'd done that. Fortunately, that had been unnecessary.

Now I know I could never sell this as fiction because no editor would believe that Stevens never checked the lock on his window for over two months. But that's knowing neither Stevens, who opens his office to fresh air about as often as he opens his mind to fresh ideas, nor Minnesota winters. Anyway, we checked with the remote every day before our attempts, and the window always opened.

The last fourteen weeks had been Chinese water torture, but we'd gotten into a routine and it had become sort of part of our lives. Nothing like a dose of repet.i.tive failure to keep your feet on the ground-as if I needed anything more than my first-semester grades. But maybe the delay was a good thing-in the meantime they'd made some improvements to the scanner.

We had faculty help, of course. Hard science people are a minority at Lloyd who often have to eat it off the academic Trivium, and Stevens' att.i.tude wasn't that popular with them. It was unpopular in particular with Dr. Gustaf Molar-a fitting name for a chemist, I thought, and another reason you know this isn't fiction. Anyway, he had time on the replicator for designer molecule work, and was kind enough to front for Ted's experiment-billed as an effort to demonstrate a.s.sembly of complex objects.

But when we told him how much time we needed, though, he was taken aback, and asked, "What is it? That's huge-I hope it's not someone's cat!"

"It's a violin," Ted told him.

I watched Dr. Molar's face frown, then break into a grin. I think he realized just then whose violin would get duplicated and why.

"You know," he said, "Democritus told us it was all just atoms. Two and a half millennia ago he'd figured out more than some people today will ever concede! Eliminating the fairies gave him a such a sense of inner peace that his contemporaries called him the laughing philosopher. So, yes, reproducing a so-called unique violin would be an appropriate jest. Quite appropriate." He laughed a little himself.

"Yes, a very good joke-and if you don't make any bad mistakes, I don't think there will be too much retribution. The whole college knows that particular balloon needs to be p.r.i.c.ked. But, of course, you will be very careful, and very discreet about my role in this?"

We'd both nodded.

Tonight, under cover of the blizzard, we didn't even have to lie in the snow. Everything went like clockwork. We had the violin in the scanner by midnight and back in Stevens' office by two A.M. And there was all day Sunday for the puddles of melted snow our boots left in his office to dry out.

Dr. Molar got us time on the replicator the first weekend in May. With exams and papers being written, there wasn't much demand. We started at eight P.M. Friday evening, and took s.h.i.+fts. I know Ted saw Terri on his first off-s.h.i.+ft because I smelled her perfume when he got back at five Sunday morning. One of those pheromone things, and they work because I got excited secondhand. When the scanner is just sitting there going ka-chunk, ka-chunk, there's not much else to do.

But E. M. Forster was running things that night-like in his story, the machine we depended on stopped. There was a little, tinny, thwack and a pleasantly synthesized woman's voice announced that the program had terminated due to error code seven-thirty-two.

It broke the mood, kind of. I disengaged from Ted and went over to take a look in the reconstruction tube. There, encased in a block of clear matrix to be dissolved later, was a half-finished violin, done just about to the bridge. Except the matrix wasn't completely clear anymore. There were cracks. "Teddy, there's something wrong with the violin."

"Huh?" He got up, pulled his pants on and came over to inspect the repro. "What's code 732?"

"That," the system answered, "is for motion detected on the reconstruction stage by an accelerometer."

"Motion?" he asked. "c.r.a.p. The tension. It's unstable."I realized what we were seeing. "The strings. We should have taken them off first."

"Yeah, they're under tension. As the rendering plane moves up, the strings get longer and just a little slippage anywhere along the string before they're complete...cascade...the matrix couldn't hold it any more."

I was silent for a bit. So near. Now we had to go through it all over again, maybe into next year! It had taken us fourteen weeks to get the Stradivarius long enough to replicate this time. We didn't have another fourteen weeks in the school year. h.e.l.l, we didn't have another fourteen days. I was furious and thought that way, coming up with nothing, of course.

"Maybe we could just continue and restring the replica." Ted said. But he didn't say "hmm" first, so I knew there had to be something wrong with that. It didn't take me long.

"It moved, Ted-that's why the program stopped. There was an acceleration. I don't care if it just moved a couple of nanometers-we'd end up with two halves of a Stradivarius."

He smiled and winced at once. "You're one bright lady, Kay. But just this once I wish you were wrong. I wish I could just reach into that scan pattern and...hmm."

"What, Ted? What is it?"

"If we rotate a virtual imaging plane so it's parallel with the strings-let's see, they bend at the bridge so there's eight string segments to worry about, but we could get two segments in each plane so that's four planes, maybe a few million molecules thick...If we make a software tool to erase just that part of those few million sections..."

He was going to do just that-reach in, and, in virtual reality, take the strings out of the pattern- then replicate what was left. "Wow, Ted, will it let you do that?"

"Let's ask it."

After half a day of very sophisticated machine-language persuasion, it let us, and we got going again on the brokenstring violin about two Sunday morning. But now we were really short of time. At normal speed, it wouldn't finish until noon Monday and the lab would be full of students and it would be impossible to keep a secret. And it had to be kept secret.

"Any ideas?"

"I'm too tired, Kay."

I put a hand on his shoulder and sighed. "Me too. Maybe next year." If I had a next year.