by Greg Egan
But what choice did she have?
She could leave the crucible behind and hunt for a replacement in the city. At the risk that, in the meantime, someone would take the vessel out to use it, find it soiled, and discard it. At the risk that she’d be caught trying to make the swap. And all of this for a gray lump that might easily be as worthless as it looked.
Latifa had bought a simple instrument of her own in the bazaar six months before, and she’d brought it with her almost as a joke – something she could try once she was out of danger, with no expectations at all. If the result it gave her was negative that wouldn’t really prove anything. But she didn’t know what else she could use to guide her.
She fished the magnet out of the pocket of her manteau. It was a slender disk the size of her thumbnail, probably weighing a gram or so. She held it in the mouth of the crucible and lowered it toward the bottom.
If there was any force coming into play as the magnet approached the gray material, it was too weak for her to sense. With a couple of millimeters still separating the two, Latifa spread her fingers and let the magnet drop. She didn’t hear it strike the bottom – but from such a height how loud would it have been? She took her fingers out of the crucible and looked down.
It was impossible to tell if it was touching or not; the view was too narrow, the angle too high.
Latifa could hear the woman with the mop approaching, getting ready to clean the chemistry lab. Within a minute or less, everything she did here would take place in front of a witness.
A patch of morning sunlight from the eastern window fell upon the blackboard behind her. Latifa grabbed an empty Erlenmeyer flask and held it in the beam, tilting it until she managed to refract some light down into the crucible.
As she turned the flask back and forth, shifting the angle of the light, she could see a dark circle moving behind the magnet. Lit from above, an object barely a millimeter high couldn’t cast a shadow like that.
The magnet was floating on air.
The door began to open. Latifa pocketed the crucible. She put the Erlenmeyer flask back on its shelf, then turned to see the cleaner eyeing her suspiciously.
“I’m all done now, thanks,” Latifa announced cheerfully. She motioned toward the staff entrance. “I’ll put the key back on my way out.”
Minutes later, Latifa strode out of the science wing. She reached into her pocket and wrapped her hand around the crucible. She still had some money Amir had given her last Eid; she could buy a replacement that afternoon. For now, all she had to do was get through the day’s lessons with a straight face, while walking around carrying the world’s first room-temperature superconductor.
2
Ezatullah was said to be the richest Afghani in Mashhad, and from the look of his three-story marble-clad house he had no wish to live down that reputation. Latifa had heard that he’d made his money in Saudi Arabia, where he’d represented the mujahedin at the time of the Soviet occupation. Wealthy Saudi women with guilty consciences had filed through his office day after day, handing him bags full of gold bullion to help fund the jihad – buying, they believed, the same promise of paradise that went to the martyrs themselves. Ezatullah, being less concerned with the afterlife, had passed on their donations to the war chest but retained a sizable commission.
At the mansion’s gate, Latifa’s grandfather paused. “I promised your mother I’d keep you out of trouble.”
Latifa didn’t know how to answer that; his caution came from love and grief, but this was a risk they needed to take. “Fashard’s already started things rolling on his side,” she reminded him. “It will be hard on him if we pull out now.”
“That’s true.”
In the sitting room Ezatullah’s youngest daughter, Yasmin, served tea, then stayed with Latifa while the two men withdrew to talk business. Latifa passed the time thinking up compliments for each rug and item of furniture in sight, and Yasmin replied in such a soft, shy voice that Latifa had no trouble eavesdropping on the conversation from the adjoining room.
“My nephew owns a clothing business in Kandahar,” her grandfather began. “Some tailoring, some imports and exports. But recently he came across a new opportunity: a chance to buy electrical cable at a very fair price.”
“A prudent man will have diverse interests,” Ezatullah declared approvingly.
“We’re hoping to on-sell the wire in Mashhad,” her grandfather explained. “We could avoid a lot of paperwork at the border if we packed the trucks with cartons labeled as clothing – with some at the rear bearing out that claim. My granddaughter could run a small shop to receive these shipments.”
“And you’re seeking a partner, to help fund this venture?”
Latifa heard the rustle of paper, the figures she’d prepared changing hands.
“What’s driven you to this, haji?” Ezatullah asked pointedly. “You don’t have a reputation as a businessman.”
“I’m seventy years old,” her grandfather replied. “I need to see my daughter’s children looked after before I die.”
Ezatullah thought for a while. “Let me talk to my associates in Kandahar.”
“Of course.”
On the bus back to the apartment, Latifa imagined the phone calls that would already be bouncing back and forth across the border. Ezatullah would soon know all about the new electrification project in Kandahar, which aimed to wire up a dozen more neighborhoods to the already-struggling grid – apparently in the hope that even a meager ration of cheap power would turn more people against the insurgents who bombed every convoy that tried to carry replacement parts to the hydroelectric plant.
International donors had agreed to fund the project, and with overhead cables strung from pole to pole along winding roads, some discrepancy between the surveyed length and the cable used was only to be expected. But while Fashard really had come to an agreement with the contractor to take the excess wire off his hands, with no family ties or prior connection to the man he had only managed to secure the deal by offering a price well above the going rate.
Latifa didn’t expect any of these details to elude their partner, but the hope was that his advisers in Kandahar would conclude that Fashard, lacking experience as a smuggler, had simply underestimated his own costs. That alone wouldn’t make the collaboration a bad investment: she’d structured the proposal in such a way that Ezatullah would still make a tidy return even if the rest of them barely broke even.
They left the bus and made their way home. “If we told him the truth—” her grandfather began as they started up the stairs.
“If we told him the truth, he’d snatch it from our hands!” Latifa retorted. Her words echoed in the concrete stairwell; she lowered her voice. “One way or another he’d get hold of the recipe, then sell it to some company with a thousand lawyers who could claim they’d invented it themselves. We need to be in a stronger position before we take this to anyone, or they’ll eat us alive.” A patent attorney could do a lot to protect them before they approached a commercial backer, but that protection would cost several thousand euros. Raising that much themselves – without trading away any share in the invention – wasn’t going to be easy, but it would make all the difference to how much power they retained.
Her grandfather stopped on a landing to catch his breath. “And if Ezatullah finds out that we’ve lied to him—”
His phone buzzed once, with a text message.
“You need to go to the house again,” he said. “Tomorrow, after school.”
Latifa’s skin prickled with fear. “Me? What for?” Did Ezatullah want to quiz her about her knowledge of retail fashion for the modern Iranian woman – or had his digging already exposed her other interests?
“Most of the money’s going straight to Fashard, but we’ll need some cash at our end too,” her grandfather explained. “He doesn’t want me coming and going from the house, but no one will be suspicious if you’ve struck up a friendship with his daughter.”
#
For the first hour she’d killed time by sweeping; now she paced the bare wooden floor, optimistically surveying her new fiefdom. Finding the factory had been a huge stroke of luck; it had originally produced ceramic tableware, and when the tenants went out of business the owner of the premises had taken possession of the kilns. He’d been on the verge of selling them for scrap, and had parted with them for a ridiculously low price just to get her grandfather to sign the lease. The location wasn’t perfect, but perhaps it was for the best that it wasn’t too close to the shop. The separation would make it less likely that anyone would see her in both places.
When the electricians finally arrived they ignored Latifa completely, and she resisted the urge to pester them with odd questions. What would you do if you cut into an overhead power line and found that its appearance, in cross-section, wasn’t quite what you were used to?
“Delivery for Bose Ceramics?” a man called from the entrance.
Latifa went to see what it was. The courier was already loading one box, as tall as she was, onto his trolley. She guided him across the factory floor. “Can you put it here? Thank you.”
“There are another two in the truck.”
She waited until the electricians had left before finding a knife and slicing away the cardboard and styrofoam – afraid that they might recognize the equipment and start asking questions of their own. She plugged in one of the cable winders and put it through a test sequence, watching the nimble motorized arms blur as they rehearsed on thin air.
One machine would unpick, while the other two wove – and for every kilometer of cable that came into the factory, two kilometers would emerge. With half as many strands as the original, the new version would need to be bulked out from within to retain the same diameter. The pellets of ceramic wound in among the steel and aluminum wouldn’t form a contiguous electrical path, but these superconducting inclusions would still lower the overall resistance of the cable, sharing the current for a large enough portion of its length to compensate for the missing metal.
So long as the cable was fit for use, the Iranian contractors who bought it would have no reason to complain. They’d pocket the difference in price, and the power grid would be none the worse for it. Everyone would get paid, everyone would be happy.
Latifa checked her watch; she’d missed another two classes. All she could do now was write the whole day off and claim to have been sick. She needed to chase down the heat-resistant molds that would give the ceramic pellets their shape, and try again to get a promise from the chemical suppliers that they could deliver the quantities she was going to need to keep the kilns going day after day, week after week.
#
“Do you have this in size sixteen?” the woman asked, emerging from the changing room. Latifa looked up from her homework. The woman was still wearing the oversized sunglasses that she hadn’t deigned to remove as she entered the shop, as if she were a famous singer afraid of being mobbed by fans.
“I’m sorry, we don’t.”
“Can you check your storeroom? I love the colors, but this one is a bit too tight.”
Latifa hesitated; she was certain that they didn’t stock the blouse in that size, but it would be impolite to refuse. “Of course. One moment.”
She spent half a minute rummaging through the shelves, to ensure that her search didn’t seem too perfunctory. It was almost six o’clock; she should close the shop and relieve her grandfather at the factory.
When she returned to the counter, the customer had left. The woman had taken the blouse, along with two pairs of trousers from the rack near the door. Latifa felt a curious warmth rising in her face; most of all she was annoyed that she’d been so gullible, but the resentment she felt at the brazen theft collided unpleasantly with other thoughts.
There was nothing to be done but to put the incident out of her mind. She looked over her unfinished essay on the Iran-Iraq war; it was due in the morning, but she’d have to complete it in the factory.
“Are these goods from your shop?”
A policeman was standing in the doorway. The thief was beside him, and he was holding up the stolen clothes.
Latifa could hardly deny it; the trousers were identical to the others hanging right beside him.
“They are, sir,” she replied. He must have seen the woman emerging, hastily stuffing everything into her bag. Why couldn’t she have done that out of sight?
“This lady says she must have dropped the receipt. Should I look for it, or will I be wasting my time?”
Latifa struggled to choose the right answer. “It’s my fault, sir. She must have thought I’d given her the receipt along with the change – but she was in a hurry, she didn’t even want one of our bags…”
“So you still have the receipt?”
Latifa pointed helplessly at the waste-paper basket beside the counter, full to the brim with discarded drafts of her essay. “I couldn’t leave the shop and chase after her, so I threw it in there. Please forgive me, sir, I’m just starting out in this job. If the boss learns what I’ve done, he’ll fire me straight away.” It was lucky that the thief was still wearing her ridiculous glasses; Latifa wasn’t sure how she would have coped if they’d had to make eye contact.
The policeman appeared skeptical: he knew what he’d seen. Latifa put the back of her hand to her eyes and sniffed.
“All right,” he said. “Everyone makes mistakes.” He turned to the woman. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.”
“It’s nothing.” She nodded to Latifa. “Good evening.”
The policeman lingered in the doorway, thinking things over. Then he approached the counter.
“Let me see your storeroom.”
Latifa gestured to the entrance, but stayed beside the cash register. She listened to the man moving about, rustling through discarded packaging, tapping the walls. What did he imagine he’d find – a secret compartment?
He emerged from the room, stony faced, as if the lack of anything incriminating only compounded his resentment.
“ID card.”
Latifa produced it. She’d rid herself of her accent long ago, and she had just enough of her father’s Tajik features that she could often pass as an Iranian to the eye, but here it was: the proof of her real status.
“Ha,” he grunted. “All right.” He handed back the ID. “Just behave yourself, and we’ll get along fine.”
As he walked out of the shop, Latifa began shaking with relief. He’d found an innocent explanation for her reticence to press charges: the card entitled her to remain in the country at the pleasure of the government, but she wasn’t a citizen, and she would have been crazy to risk the consequences if the woman had called her a liar.
Latifa wheeled her bicycle out of the storeroom and closed the shop. The factory was six kilometers away, and the traffic tonight looked merciless.
#
“I had a call from Ezatullah,” Latifa’s grandfather said. “He wants to take over the transport.”
Latifa continued brushing down the slides from the superconductor hopper. “What does that mean?”
“He has another partner who’s been bringing goods across the border. This man has a warehouse in Herat.”
Herat was just a hundred kilometers from the border, on the route from Kandahar to Mashhad. “So he wants us to make room for this other man’s merchandise in our trucks?” Latifa put the brush down. It was an unsettling prospect, but it didn’t have to be a disaster.
“No,” her grandfather replied. “He wants us to bring the wire across in this other man’s trucks.”
“Why?”
“The customs inspectors have people coming from Tehran to look over their shoulders,” her grandfather explained. “There’s no fixing that with bribes, and the clothes make too flimsy a cover for the re
al cargo. This other man’s bringing over a couple of loads of scrap metal every week; hiding the wire won’t be a problem for him.”
Latifa sat down on the bench beside the winders. “But we can’t risk that! We can’t let him know how many spools we’re bringing in!” Ezatullah had kept his distance from their day-to-day operations, but the black market contacts to whom they passed the altered wire had long-standing connections to him, and Latifa had no doubt that he was being kept apprised of every transaction. Under-reporting their sales to hide the fact that they were selling twice as much wire as they imported would be suicidal.
“Can we shift this work to Kandahar?” her grandfather asked.
“Maybe the last part, the winding,” Latifa replied. So long as they could double the wire before it reached Herat, there’d be no discrepancies in the numbers Ezatullah received from his informants.
“What about the kilns?”
“No, the power’s too erratic. If there’s a blackout halfway through a batch that would ruin it – and we need at least two batches a day to keep up.”
“Couldn’t we use a generator?”
Latifa didn’t have the numbers she needed to answer that, but she knew Fashard had looked into the economics of using one himself. She texted him some questions, and he replied a few minutes later.
“It’s hopeless,” she concluded. “Each kiln runs at about twenty kilowatts. Getting that from diesel, we’d be lucky to break even.”
Her grandfather managed a curt laugh. “Maybe we’d be better off selling the rest of the wire as it is?”
Latifa did a few more calculations. “That won’t work either. Fashard is paying too much for it; we’d be making a loss on every spool.” After sinking money into the factory’s lease and other inputs to the doubling process, any attempt to get by without the benefits of that doubling would leave them owing Ezatullah more cash than the remaining sales would bring in.
“Then what choice is left to us?”