The shatan wouldn’t tolerate this. And the chieftain would know that it was inevitable the moment Dr. al-Baz told him what he’d learned. First, he’d order his warriors to kill both him and me. And then …

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the horrors to come. Wave upon wave of shatan warriors descending upon Rio Zephyria and the other colonies, hell-bent on driving the invaders from their world once and for all. Oh, we had superior weapons, this was true … but they had superior numbers, and it would only be a matter of time before they captured a few of our guns and learned how to use them. Ships from Earth would bring soldiers to defend the colonies, but history is unkind to would-be conquerors. Either we would be driven back, step by inexorable step, or we would commit genocide, exterminating entire tribes and driving the few survivors further into the wilderness.

  Either way, the outcome was inevitable. War would come to a world named for a god of war. Red blood would fell upon red sand, human and Martian alike.

  A storm was coming. Then I thought of a different storm, and knew what I had to do.

  * * *

  Two days later, I was found staggering out of the desert, caked with red sand from my hair to my boots save for raccoon-like patches around my eyes where my goggles had protected them. I was dehydrated and exhausted to the point of delirium.

  I was also alone.

  Ironically, the people who rescued me were another guide and the family from Minneapolis whom he’d escorted into the desert just outside Rio Zephyria. I remember little of what happened after I collapsed at their feet and had to be carried to the guide’s land rover. The only things I clearly recall were the sweet taste of water within my parched mouth, a teenage girl gazing down at me with angelic blue eyes as she cradled my head in her lap, the long, bouncing ride back into the city.

  I was still in my hospital bed when the police came to see me. By then, I’d recovered enough to give them a clear and reasonably plausible account of what had happened. Like any successful lie, this one was firmly grounded in truth. The violent haboob that suddenly came upon us in the desert hills. The crash that happened when, blinded by wind-driven sand, I’d collided with a boulder, causing my jeep to topple over. How Dr. al-Baz and I had escaped from the wreckage, only to lose track of each other. How only I had managed to find shelter in the leeside of a pinnacle. The professor becoming lost in the storm, never to be seen again.

  All true, every word of it. All I had to do was leave out a few facts, such as how I’d deliberately driven into the desert even though I knew that a haboob was on its way, or that even after we saw the scarlet haze rising above the western horizon, I’d insisted upon continuing to drive south, telling Dr. al-Baz that we’d be able to outrun the storm. The cops never learned that I’d been careful to carry with me a pair of sand goggles and a scarf, but refrained from making sure that the professor took the same precautions. Nor did they need to know that I’d deliberately aimed for that boulder, even though I could have easily avoided it.

  I broke down when I spoke about how I’d heard Omar al-Baz calling my name, desperately trying to find me even as the air was filled with stinging red sand and visibility was reduced to only arm’s length. That much, too, was true. What I didn’t say was that Dr. al-Baz had come within three meters of where I was huddled, my eyes covered by goggles and a scarf wrapped around the lower part of my face. And yet I remained silent as I watched his indistinct form lurch past me, arms blindly thrust out before him, slowly suffocating as sand filled his nose and throat.

  My tears were honest. I liked the professor. But his knowledge made him too dangerous to live.

  As an alibi, my story worked. When a search party went out into the desert, they located my overturned jeep. Omar al-Baz’s body was found about fifteen meters away, face-down and covered by several centimeters of sand. Our footprints had been erased by the wind, of course, so there was no way of telling how close the professor had been to me.

  That settled any doubts the cops may have had. Dr. al-Baz’s death was an accident. I had no motive for killing him, nor was there any evidence of foul play. If I was guilty of anything, it was only reckless and foolish behavior. My professional reputation was tarnished, but that was about it. The investigation was officially concluded the day I was released from the hospital. By then, I’d realized two things. The first was that I would get away with murder. The second was that my crime was far from perfect.

  Dr. al-Baz hadn’t taken the chieftain’s blood specimen with him when he’d left the hotel. It was still in his room, along with all his equipment. This included the computers he’d used to analyze the sample; the results were saved in their memories, along with any notes he might have written. In fact, the only thing the professor had brought with him was his room key … which I’d neglected to retrieve from his body.

  I couldn’t return to his hotel room; any effort to get in would have aroused suspicion. All I could do was watch from the hotel lobby as, a couple of days later, the bellhops wheeled out a cart carrying the repacked equipment cases, bound for the spaceport and the shuttle which would ferry them to a marsliner docked at Deimos Station. In a few months, the professor’s stuff would be back in the hands of his fellow faculty members. They would open the digital files and inspect what their late colleague had learned, and examine the blood specimen he’d collected. And then …

  Well. We’ll just have to see, won’t we?

  So now I sit alone in my neighborhood bar, where I drink and wait for the storm to come. And I never go into the desert any more.

  Zero for Conduct

  GREG EGAN

  Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and he is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and he is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the past few years he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “best of the year” series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella Oceanic. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, Zendegi, and Schild’s Ladder, and four collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, Our Lady of Chernobyl, and Crystal Nights and Other Stories. His most recent books are part of the Orthogonal trilogy, consisting of The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, and The Arrows of Time. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.netau/^gregegan/.

  In the story that follows he takes us to a repressive near-future Iran where a young girl makes a fundamental scientific discovery that could change the world. Which is when her troubles start.

  1

  Latifa started the web page loading, then went to make tea. The proxy she used convinced her internet provider that every page she accessed belonged to a compendium of pious aphorisms from uncontroversial octogenarians in Qom, while to the sites themselves she appeared to be a peripatetic American, logging on from Pittsburgh one day and Kansas City the next. Between the sanctions against her true host country and that host’s paranoia over the most innocent interactions with the West, these precautions were essential. But they slowed down her already sluggish connection so effectively that she might as well have been rehearsing for a flight to Mars.

  The sound of boiling water offered a brief respite from the televised football match blaring down from the apartment above. “Two nil in favor of the Black Pearls, with fifteen minutes left to play! It’s looking like victory for the home team here in Samen Stadium!” When the tea had brewed, she served it in a small glass for her grandfather to sip through a piece of hard sugar clenched between his teeth. Latifa sat with him for a while, but he was listening to the shortwave radio, straining to hear Kabul through the hum of interference and the breathless commentary coming through the ceiling, and he barely noticed when she left.

  Back in her room after fifteen minutes, she found the scratched screen of the laptop glistening with a dozen shiny ball-and-stick models of organic molecules. Reading the color coding of the atoms was second nature to her by now: white for hydrogen, black for carbon, cherry red for oxygen, azure for nitrogen. Here and there a yellow sulfur atom or a green chlorine stood out, like a chickpea in a barrel of candy.

  All the molecules that the ChemFactor page had assigned to her were nameless—unless you counted the formal structural descriptions full of cis-1,3-dimethyl-this and 2,5-di-tert-butyl-that—and Latifa had no idea which, if any of them, had actually been synthesized in a lab somewhere. Perhaps a few of them were impossible beasts, chimeras cranked out by the software’s mindless permutations, destined to be completely unstable in reality. If she made an effort, she could probably weed some of them out. But that could wait until she’d narrowed down the list of candidates, eliminating the molecules with no real chance of binding strongly to the target.

  The target this time was an oligosaccharide, a carbohydrate with nine rings arranged in pleasingly asymmetric tiers, like a small child’s attempt to build a shoe rack. Helpfully, the ChemFactor page kept it fixed on the screen as Latifa scrolled up and down through the long catalog of its potential suitors.

  She trusted the software to have made some sensible choices already, on geometric grounds: all of these molecules ought to be able to nestle reasonably snugly against the target. In principle she could rotate the ball-and-stick models any way she liked, and slide the target into the same view to assess the prospective fit, but in practice that made the laptop’s graphics card choke. So she’d learned to manipulate the structures in her head, to picture the encounter without fretting too much about precise angles and distances. Molecules weren’t rigid, and if the interaction with the target liberated enough energy the participants could stretch or flex a little to accommodate each other. There were rigorous calculations that could predict the upshot of all that give and take, but the equations could not be solved quickly or easily. So ChemFactor invited people to offer their hunches. Newcomers guessed no better than random, and many players’ hit rates failed to rise above statistical noise. But some people acquired a feel for the task, learning from their victories and mistakes—even if they couldn’t put their private algorithms into words.

  Latifa didn’t over-think the puzzle, and in twenty minutes she’d made her choice. She clicked the button beside her selection and confirmed it, satisfied that she’d done her best. After three years in the game she’d proved to be a born chemical match-maker, but she didn’t want it going to her head. Whatever lay behind her well-judged guesses, it could only be a matter of time before the software itself learned to codify all the same rules. The truth was, the more successful she became, the faster she’d be heading for obsolescence. She needed to make the most of her talent while it still counted.

  * * *

  Latifa spent two hours on her homework, then a call came from her cousin Fashard in Kandahar. She went out onto the balcony where the phone could get a better signal.

  “How is your grandfather?” he asked.

  “He’s fine. I’ll ask him to call you back tomorrow.” Her grandfather had given up on the shortwave and gone to bed. “How are things there?”

  “The kids have all come down with something,” Fashard reported. “And the power’s been off for the last two days.”

  “Two days?” Latifa felt for her young cousins, sweltering and feverish without even a fan. “You should get a generator.”

  “Ha! I could get ten; people are practically giving them away.”

  “Why?”

  “The price of diesel’s gone through the roof,” Fashard explained. “Blackouts or not, no one can afford to run them.”

  Latifa looked out at the lights of Mashhad. There was nothing glamorous about the concrete tower blocks around her, but the one thing Iran didn’t lack was electricity. Kandahar should have been well-supplied by the Kajaki Dam, but two of the three turbines in the hydroelectric plant had been out of service for more than a year, and the drought had made it even harder for the remaining turbine to meet demand.

  “What about the shop?” she asked.

  “Pedaling the sewing machine keeps me fit,” Fashard joked.

  “I wish I could do something.”

  “Things are hard for everyone,” Fashard said stoically. “But we’ll be all right; people always need clothes. You just concentrate on your studies.”

  Latifa tried to think of some news to cheer him up. “Amir said he’s planning to come home this Eid.” Her brother had made no firm promises, but she couldn’t believe he’d spend the holidays away from his family for a second year in a row.

  “Inshallah,” Fashard replied. “He should book the ticket early though, or he’ll never get a seat.”

  “I’ll remind him.”

  There was no response; the connection had cut out. Latifa tried calling back but all she got was a sequence of strange beeps, as if the phone tower was too flustered to offer up its usual recorded apologies.

  She tidied the kitchen then lay in bed. It was hard to fall asleep when her thoughts cycled endlessly through the same inventory of troubles, but sometime after midnight she managed to break the loop and tumble into blackness.

  * * *

  “Afghani slut,” Ghamzeh whispered, leaning against Latifa and pinching her arm through the fabric of her manteau.

  “Let go of me,” Latifa pleaded. She was pressed against her locker, she couldn’t pull away. Ghamzeh turned her face toward her, smiling, as if they were friends exchanging gossip. Other students walked past, averting their eyes.

  “I’m getting tired of the smell of you,” Ghamzeh complained. “You’re stinking up the whole city. You should go back home to your little mud hut.”

  Latifa’s skin tingled between the girl’s blunt talons, warmed by broken blood vessels, numbed by clamped nerves. It would be satisfying to lash out with her fists and free herself, but she knew that could only end badly.

  “Did they have soap in your village?” Ghamzeh wondered. “Did they have underwear? All these things must have been so strange to you, when you arrived in civilization.”

  Latifa waited in silence. Arguing only prolonged the torment.

  “Too stuck up to have a conversation?” Ghamzeh released her arm and began to move away, but then she stopped to give Latifa a parting smile. “You think you’re impressing the teachers when you give them all the answers they want? Don’t fool yourself, slut. They know you’re just an animal doing circus tricks.”

  * * *

  When Latifa had cleared away the dinner plates, her grandfather asked her about school.

  “You’re working hard?” he pressed her, cross-legged on the floor with a cushion at his back. “Earning their respect?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your heart is still set on engineering?” He sounded doubtful, as if for him the word could only conjure up images of rough men covered in machine oil.

  “Chemical engineering,” she corrected him gently. “I’m getting good grades in chemistry, and there’d be plenty of jobs in it.”

  “After five more years. After university.”

  “Yes.” Latifa looked away. Half the money Amir sent back from Dubai was already going on her school fees. Her brother was twenty-two; no one could expect him to spend another five years without marrying.

  “You should get on with your studies then.” Her grandfather waved her away amiably, then reached over for the radio.

  In her room, Latifa switched on the laptop before opening her history book, but she kept her eyes off the screen until she’d read half the chapter on the Sassanid kings. When she finally gave herself a break the ChemFactor site had loaded, and she’d been logged in automatically, by cookie.

  A yellow icon of a stylized envelope was flashing at the top of the page. A fellow player she’d never heard of called “jesse409” had left her a message, congratulating “PhaseChangeGirl” on a cumulative score that had just crossed twenty thousand. Latifa’s true score was far higher than that, but she’d changed her identity and rejoined the game from scratch five times so far, lest she come to the notice of someone with the means to find out who she really was.

  The guess she’d made the previous night had paid off: a rigorous model of the two molecules showed that the binding between them was stable. She had saved one of ChemFactor’s clients the time and expense of doing the same calculations for dozens of alternatives, and her reward was a modest fraction of the resources she’d effectively freed. ChemFactor would model any collection of atoms and molecules she liked, free of charge—up to a preset quota in computing time.

  Latifa closed her history book and moved the laptop to the center of her desk. If the binding problems were easy for her now, when it came to the much larger challenge she’d set herself the instincts she’d honed on the site could only take her so far. The raw computing power that she acquired from these sporadic prizes let her test her hunches and see where they fell short.