Finity

PART ONE Iphwin Conditions

I am not an imaginative or adventurous person. I am uncomfortable with change of any kind, and most so with highly unpredictable dramatic change. So even though I was looking forward to it, when the morning of my interview at ConTech arrived, I was keyed up and tense. I already knew something unusual would happen to me, something extraordinary could happen to me, and something utterly life-changing just might happen to me.

Had I had the remotest notion of what might happen, I would have assigned it an infinitesimally small probability; had I had any idea of what would actually happen, I’d have done my best to avoid it.

My name is Lyle Peripart, and until that particular morning— it was May 30, 2062, a Friday, and therefore the uncelebrated holiday of Memorial Day—I had lived all my life, except for brief jaunts and vacations around the South Pacific, in the American expatriate community in Auckland, New Zealand. My father’s parents had been Nineteeners—that is, they had come to the Auckland Americatown during the last brief period when the American Reich had opened the door for emigration, in 2019. My mother’s family were directly descended from MacArthur’s Remnant, but as they were by then extremely poor, they were happy to see my mother marry into a family of better-off parvenus.

In 2062 the part of Auckland where I had grown up and still lived was called Little San Diego and supposedly bore some resemblance to the California city destroyed, along with the battered remnant of the Pacific fleet, by a suicide U-boat toting a hundred megatons in 1944; I was sufficiently remote from national history so that as a child I always imagined that I would rather see San Diego as it was now—a very nearly circular bay reaching miles inland from the old coast, the bottom still covered with fragments of glass—than the poor copy that my hometown was said to be.

My childhood was almost embarrassingly uneventful and stereotypical. The American expat settlement was making itself a comfortable, affluent place and an important part of the Enzy economy during those years, and with prosperity came smooth emerald lawns, white picket fences, low brick homes with long straight driveways and basketball hoops on every garage, and everything else it was possible to copy from old movies and photographs, all made out of plastic or nylon. I barely remembered the scruffy settlement of my early childhood, let alone the eternal rusting refugee camp in which my mother had grown up.

By the time I was in my midteens I was like every American expat of my generation: I wanted to assimilate and be a full Kiwi, but I was fiercely proud of the family’s American past. I got my dual citizenship on my eighteenth birthday and took my four-year turn in Her Majesty’s Navy, but every Bataan Day I went down to the Remnant’s Graveyard and said the pledge to Old Glory, then swore the oath, once again, that we would someday, somehow, carry out MacArthur’s unfulfilled promise. My eyes were as apt to get damp at “My Country ’Tis of Thee” as at “God Save the Queen.”

In due time, having been a quiet, studious kid, I turned into a good science student, and from a good science student into a competent but not particularly accomplished scientist. Since the global detente of the 2050s arrived just as I entered graduate school in physics, I was able to join in humanity’s return to the long-interrupted pursuit of pure research. After taking my specialty in graduate school I became an astronomer with an appointment at New Marcus Whitman College in Auckland, moved to a house of my own in Little San Diego, and started to date Helen Perdita, a historian, also an American expat, in our history department.

As I said, Friday, May 30, 2062, started off with at least a promise of being unusual and interesting. It was bright and sunny, and better still, I would be avoiding work today. I was taking a personal day from teaching classes in order to interview for a job that I wanted and thought I was likely to get, and even if I didn’t it was an excuse to run up to Surabaya and enjoy the day there. I hadn’t had the Studebaker Skyjump out of her slip at the harbor in at least two months, which was a very long time to go without that particular pleasure, and though it was hours till takeoff I was already excited at the thought of making a flight.

The Overseas Times was lying in the driveway, about halfway down, as always. This morning I would have time to read as much as I cared to, since my appointment was not until one o’clock.

The main headline was HENRY X TO VISIT AUCKLAND—it had been a while since the Australian king had come to town. Below the fold, the main headline was EFL TO EXPAND TO CHRISTCHURCH, PERTH. I shrugged; I had dutifully learned the rules to American football, but I hadn’t been able to make myself feel any enthusiasm for it. Even the most enthusiastic fans said that the Expat League had been unimpressive lately.

As I was carrying the paper back into the house, my mind already on the frozen breakfast I was going to heat, I stumbled for an instant. When I looked back there was nothing there, but as I regathered the paper under my arm, a small piece of blue paper dropped to the driveway. I bent and picked it up, expecting an advertising flyer, and instead read:

My first thought was that the note might be from Utterword, the department chairman, who had a tendency to use phrases like “I’m really telling you this as a friend.” But Utterword’s style was more to catch you and drag you to his office—what administrator with any political sense was going to put anything like this on paper, even unsigned?

It didn’t seem like a friendly note—the tone was more like a veiled threat. Yet I had no enemies.

I slipped the package of frozen breakfast into the warmer and flipped it on.

I didn’t even know of anyone who disliked me, much, or anyone I had annoyed.

The warmer chimed and the package slid back out.

Now that I thought of it—I stopped to shovel the soft eggs onto the toast, drop the chipped ham and Velveeta over it, sprinkle it with the small packet of A-1, and push the whole mess onto my plate—now that I thought of it, who, besides me, a few clerks at ConTech, and Geoffrey Iphwin himself, knew that I had even applied for a job at ConTech, let alone had an interview today?

The more I thought about it the more acutely it became a puzzle. Maybe someone who was mad at Iphwin? Or maybe at ConTech, trying to keep me from joining up with them? But Iphwin was only offering me the post of “personal statistician” (whatever that might be) and I couldn’t see how that could matter enough for anyone to go to the trouble of sending me a note.

As usual the Overseas Times was blissfully devoid of real news and filled with commentaries on things that did not matter in the slightest. I enjoyed my breakfast sandwich as much as ever, and I treated myself to reading, in full, a discussion of whether too much emphasis was placed on sports in the public schools; an account of how the police had tracked down and captured a mildly deranged man who was sending obscene messages to female ruggers via computer network; a discussion of the politics of converting an underused golf course to a more general outdoor recreation area; and all the other things that reminded me why I liked living in Enzy, a country with “no more history than necessary” as I liked to remark to my fellow expats.

The last bite of the sandwich went down as I was contemplating a spate of letters to the editor about the closing down of the last Christian church within city limits; a few of its little band of elderly parishioners had written, the week before, to admonish everyone that they were at risk of hellfire, and this had sufficiently tickled the Kiwi sense of humor (as deadly seriousness always did) so that there was now a bombardment of sarcastic and silly letters mocking them. I spent a while lingering over these, trying to decide which I liked best; the phrase “rabbi on a stick” had its appeal, but the proposal to treat the entire congregation with aphrodisiacs conjured a more interesting image ...

I skipped the letters to the sports page, which were generally rancorous, and allowed myself the guilty pleasure of skipping the arts page. I knew that I really should stay in better touch with the arts—after all they were just about the only arena left in the world in which Americans really functioned as Americans—but I found it harder and harder to tolerate it every year. Almost all of what everyone was doing seemed to be nothing but rehashes of things done with far more energy and nuance a century before.

I glanced at the clock. I still had some time to spare, but on the other hand there was not much to do here. And after so long in the slip the Skyjump really should have a more thorough checkout. I made sure everything in the kitchen was off, put on my sport coat, carried my luggage out, locked the front door, and strolled down the driveway.

I had an odd thought: why did I have a driveway? I had no car, nor did anyone I knew. There were perhaps a hundred cars among all the expats in all of Auckland, all of them ceremonial in one sense or another. Only the government, the very largest businesses, and a few of the hereditary wealthy would have them. Why did everyone have a driveway? Of course everyone would have told me that it had been an American folk custom, and part of our identity, but after all, when the Occupation began, only about one in three American households had a car. Was it, perhaps, that only the armed forces overseas, plus the financially well-off, had been able to escape, and the well-off had owned the cars?

It gave me something to think over while I waited for the cab, my suitcase beside me on the curb. Not that I needed much diversion; the bright, perfect fall day was really more than enough all by itself.

The cab turned up a couple of minutes later. Three doors down it was ambushed by a crowd of neighborhood children, who saw a chance for the delightful old game of torment-the-cab. Since the cab wasn’t allowed to move with any object at body temperature in front of it, they could stop the cab by jumping in front of it, and then pin it down indefinitely by forming a circle of linked hands around it. I sighed, picked up my suitcase, and started walking toward the cab.

As I got closer I could hear it pleading to be let alone, and threatening to record all their pictures as they darted in and out and wrote dirty words on it. The poor things are programmed for such complete courtesy that it could only phrase it as “Now, please, if you don’t mind, I shall have to take your picture and give it to the cab company if you write bad words on me, which I really wish you would not do, please, and have a pleasant day.”

When I got close enough the kids scattered—it was a game I had played often enough as a child, and I was still in no hurry, so I wasn’t particularly angry. I just wanted my cab and was annoyed at having to walk forty yards or so to get it.

“Are you Mr. Lyle Peripart, sir, and if you are, sir, shall I take you to your jump boat, sir?” the cab asked plaintively, as I approached ii.

“Yes and yes,” I said. “Two bags to load into your boot.”

The cab popped its boot open and asked, “Shall I deploy my rear lift, sir?”

“Not needed,” I said, and swung my computer and my small suitcase in.

“Sir,” the car added, “your house informs me that you may have left the thermostat set to a warmer temperature than is needed while you are away, sir. Sir, your marina has confirmed that you won’t be bringing back your jump boat until Sunday noon, sir. Sir, would it be possible, sir, for the house to set the thermostat lower, and thereby conserve your fuel bill and our nation’s fuel, sir?”

I got into the open passenger side door and said, “Aw, sure, turn it down. Is there anything else the house would like before I go?”

“Sir, no, sir, except that your house wishes you to have a safe trip, sir.”

“The house is kind. It has a very thoughtful and courteous attitude and its thoroughness is appreciated.” The cab, of course, would relay this to the house, and that was important. Strangely enough, fully thirty years after automated houses, there were still people who didn’t speak kindly to theirs or give them any compliments—and those people lived in cold, drafty, neglectful, apathetic homes. That was senseless when it was so easy to have a pleasant home—a little courtesy and kindness, a few congratulations for a job well done, and the house would learn so much faster and begin to cast about for ways to please you more.

The cab slid the door shut silently beside me, and asked, “Sir, are you comfortable, sir? Sir, will it be all right for me to start moving, sir?”

“Yes and yes,” I said. The cab pulled away from the curb and accelerated smoothly down the block toward the big intersection. Now that there was a passenger, the kids wouldn’t bother it; cabs, like all robots, were inhibited from harming a human being, but passengers weren’t.

“Sir,” the cab said, “the Red Stripe Taxicab Company has instructed me to proffer its apology for my being late, sir.”

“Quite all right,” I said. “I saw that you were attacked. I chased the children away myself. You’re not to blame for a bit of it. They were very rude and cruel to you, and they shouldn’t have done that.”

“Sir, little children are the most precious things there are, sir,” the cab said primly. “Sir, it is the job of everyone, human beings and machines alike, to guard them and keep them safe, sir. Sir, it was an honor to be there and to help in keeping them safe, sir. Sir, all children are very good, and there is never any ground for criticizing the child of any human being, sir.”

I would have liked to think that I detected even the least trace of sarcasm in the voice of that poor persecuted cab, but I knew perfectly well that whatever its real feelings might be—and to be bright enough to handle the cab, there had to be a freethinking part to the brain—all that it would be allowed to speak would be company policy, as set by the Public Relations department. Furthermore, no good could come of saying anything subversive to it; if I encouraged it to think what any thinking being would think, I would merely hasten the day when the contradiction between its thoughts and its required texts pushed it over the edge into madness. Irritating as it was, therefore, it was best to reinforce the poor thing’s accordance with policy. “There is much to what you have said,” I said, “and I will think on it; thinking about it will bring me pleasure. You are a good cab to feel that way.”

“Sir thank you very much sir.”

“And for purposes of your company record,” I added, “let me state that you were in fact surrounded and abused by a crowd of human children, for whom you showed exemplary patience, forbearance, and affection.”

“Sir, thank you, sir,” the cab said, real pleasure in its voice now. My reinforcement was something it was programmed to enjoy, of course, but this also would mean a commendation from the company to add to the array of medals on its dashboard, and cabs were programmed to be ridiculously sensitive to such things.

They also have enough free will to deliberately seek that which is pleasing; the cab immediately found a route that was about forty-five seconds faster and featured considerably better scenery. I thanked and congratulated it again, and I could almost feel it purr like an overgrown cat. Probably it would be right as rain again, psychologically, just as soon as the children’s artwork (the large black FUCK, the red SHELLI IS A HOAR, and the silver CUNT HOLE) got washed off. The robots are blessed with editable memories; it would be able to retain all the positive reinforcement it had gotten and completely forget all the pain.

The cab didn’t have to do it—it could have delivered me to the foot of the pier—but it got clearance and took me right out to the slip where my Skyjump was moored.

I said good-bye to the cab, collected my bags from its boot, and walked down the gangplank into the upper hatch of the Sky-jump. It piped me aboard with a warm simulated voice recorded by the great American actress Katharine Hepburn almost a century ago. “Good day, Mr. Peripart. Our flight to Surabaya is cleared for eighty-two minutes from now but earlier departures may be available if we’re ready before then. It will take about fourteen minutes to reach the starting point for our jump run, so we must depart no later than sixty-eight minutes from now. Will that be possible, Mr. Peripart?”

“It will,” I said. “It’s good to be aboard again.”

There are lots of other fine jump boats in the world, I’m sure, but there couldn’t possibly be a more beautiful one than the ’54 Studebaker Skyjump. It had a lean, eager, fierce look, a bit like a miniature Messerschmitt commando launch, but expressed in softer curves like a Volvo Seadancer, and with the same classic proportions as a Rolls or a Mitsubishi yacht. And it was made right in Little San Diego, by the Studebaker company itself—the only expat American vehicle company. Like classic American aircraft, when its wings were fully deployed they were long, thin, and elliptical, unlike the European tendency to deltas or the Japanese love for the squared-off stubby wing; I had no idea what was actually aerodynamically effective but I knew what was graceful.

The real elegance, however, was in the curves of the slim, deadly-looking fuselage, and the rearward sweep of the outward-splayed rudders on the ends of the short stabilizer. It wasn’t the fastest ship built, by far, but it looked like it damned well should be.

Every time I sat at the controls, my heart warmed and my spirit leaped up. It had indeed been too long since I’d had her out for a long trip.

“Mr. Peripart, I am looking very good on my autocheck,” the Skyjump said, “with nothing outside normal range.”

“Is there anything near the edges of its range?” I asked. You have to do that kind of thing if you want a really taut vehicle; just like freshmen or recruits, precision doesn’t come naturally to them, and it has to be carefully taught and reinforced. Otherwise they get sloppy and imprecise, and then the only warnings you get are from the human protection hardwired modules, which have an unnerving habit of activating with a siren sound and a proclamation of “Danger! Danger! Immediate Attention Required! Range Exceeded on Interior Lighting Voltage” or the like. If you won’t teach them judgment, they won’t learn it.

“Just two things, Mr. Peripart,” the boat said. “Emergency coolant for my brain is only nine percent above minimum, and variable blade pitch in number two engine is requiring sixteen percent more force than expected. I believe the cause of the latter is probably some missed lubrication the last time I was serviced, Mr. Peripart.”

“Very well, then,” I said. “Order replacement coolant and have the marina bring it around. You would be authorized to do that without my needing to approve it. And I’ll go have a look at the blades in number two. If you suspect that you’ve been ill-maintained, from now on you are to call me about it as soon as you become aware of it.”

“Very well, Mr. Peripart,” the Hepburn voice said, with studied graciousness. Some expats preferred Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, and there were even a few fans of Judy Garland, but I always felt like the Hepburn voice sounded the way I needed it to sound—like a competent first officer ready to do her duty. When you’re making ballistic leaps as big as a sixth of the way around the planet, it’s reassuring—however illusory—to feel like the hemispherical black lump under your chair is a trusted comrade.

Sure enough, the jump boat was right; the lubricating wells hadn’t been topped up, and when she’d done an engine check on herself earlier today, she’d probably released a few bubbles in the system, resulting in just low enough levels of the high-temperature silicon grease to make the variable pitch blades move a little roughly. I got a can of the grease and topped up the wells, had her run a quick engine check, and topped them up again. Meanwhile a courier robot rolled onto our gangplank and delivered the coolant direct to the boat’s supply, so that we were now truly ready to go.

I took another ten minutes to crawl around on her, partly because she was beautiful and it was such a pleasure to own her, and partly so that I could talk to her about things that she ought to worry about, keeping her properly fixated on safety and reliability issues.

Even with all the careful going over, when we pulled out of the slip and began the slow crawl out into Auckland harbor and thence to the appointed place for starting our jump run, we were still a good half hour early. Traffic was light today, at least for a Friday morning, and the tower control didn’t seem to think they’d have any problem squeezing me in.

Of course the Skyjump could take me to where I was going all by itself—some people routinely sat in the passenger seats in back of their jump boats, except during the legally required phase of landing—but there would have been no fun in that. I took her out of the harbor manually, just as God and the Wrights intended, the small propulsion pump thrumming away below me as we made the long slow crawl, in which one is merely a very awkward motorboat, out to the jump point. There must have been little traffic on the trajectory I was taking, for approval came through for an early jump almost immediately.

With a thrill of the pleasure that never got old, I pointed the nose into the appointed jump corridor and kicked in the main thrusting pumps to bring the boat up to hydroplaning at 110 knots. At that speed you start to feel like you’re doing something—the whole hull shakes and thunders, pushing and bumping against your feet, the main engines howl up to speed as they drive the turbines that drive the pumps, and the great rooster tail of white spray streams three stories tall behind you.

I exalted in that sensation for half a minute until we entered the area where takeoff was authorized; the six countdown lights across the panel in front of me began to wink on, and as the sixth came on, I triggered the launch sequence that I had loaded into the Skyjump’s brain—no human nervous system has the reaction time to handle an accurate suborbital jump.

In much less than a second the wing rotated into position to lift the Skyjump instead of holding it down, the pumps hurled the last water out of the jets on the bottom of the fuselage, and the twin jet engines cut their turbines and went to full thrust, lifting the boat out of the water and shoving me back far into my seat as the boat climbed to gain altitude. For half a minute I hung there as the Skyjump flew itself, and Katharine Hepburn’s voice counted off the increasing meters of altitude. The nose crept up toward nearly vertical, the engines screamed until they entirely took over the job of lift from the wings, the condensers extracted liquid oxygen from the air to fill the jump tanks, and the sky began to grow darker.

I whooped from pure pleasure, as always, at the brief, terrifying lurch as the engines shut down and the wings furled. Then, its wings tucked back like a peregrine’s, the boat went over to rocket power, feeding the pure liquid oxygen, which it had made minutes ago, into the engines and rising on a towering plume of flame, on a long trajectory outward away from the Earth. The sky darkened to black, the horizon below contracted away from me into a curve, and the gentle balanced tugging of the wings was replaced by the shudder of the rocket engines. A few minutes later, the bulldozer blade of acceleration ceased to bury me in my seat, and a wonderful silence fell on the cockpit and passenger space. Now, for about twenty minutes, I would be as weightless as the Germans themselves in their orbiting cities.

It’s always a grand ride, and I was in an appreciative mood today. I wasn’t even annoyed by the three visible glowing sparks of the German space cities that hang forever above the equator, nor by the soft ping at apogee that reminded me of the restrictions on altitude and speed imposed by the German Global Launch Control System, things I usually resented. It was an exceptionally clear day for late May, and I could clearly see most of the Dutch Reich East Indies in front of me. I unbelted and let myself float up out of my seat, hanging suspended in the middle of the cabin, just taking in the view of near space and the Pacific below. About the time that the island of Java settled into the center of the windscreen, and was growing noticeably larger, there was another chime, and the Skyjump said, “Time to get back into your seat, Mr. Peripart.”

I belted in, checked everything, and was getting ready for my landing approach when Surabaya Control hailed me and told me that automatic landings were required today. That was why I had stopped flying into Batavia a few years ago—there were almost no times when you could land on manual there—and now it sounded as if Surabaya might be going the same way. I grumbled to myself but I turned over the control to the Skyjump and said, “All right, stay on the trajectories they give you, and take us down nice and easy.”

“As you wish, Mr. Peripart,” the Skyjump said.

A minute later, the keel was biting air and we were leveling off in a supersonic glide that would spiral around the island twice as we spilled enough speed to be able to deploy the wings. I got coffee from the dispenser by my side, settled back, and enjoyed the view and the ride.

At last the wings deployed and we glided down toward Surabaya itself. The sky lightened to a pleasant blue, clouds far below us drew nearer, and finally we burst through a flock of fluffy cumulus clouds to see the dappled Pacific outside the harbor. We swooped down to the surface, graceful as a big goose coming down onto a pond, and splashed to a gentle landing. The pumps cut in, and the Studebaker joined a long parade of small craft motoring sedately into the harbor. I’d rather have been doing this myself, but I had seen enough of other people’s piloting skills so that I could well understand why the port authorities wanted everyone to just let the robots drive.

Entering the harbor, most of the small craft and the jump boats went off to starboard, into the public docks, but my Studebaker Skyjump went hard to port, heading for the ConTech company piers. ConTech had built a large island where it would act as a breakwater for the mouth of the harbor, making Surabaya a better port than ever, and the land side of the artificial island was a wonder of tall buildings, domes, ramps, and antennae, as if the complex compound eye of some giant insect were peering at the city across the water.

The Skyjump did her best to get me across in a comfortable manner, but busy harbors don’t really have much room to be accommodating, and the straight course that traffic control set for us made it choppy at the speed they wanted. I was shaken and irritable by the time the Skyjump moved into her appointed slip. She extended the gangplank and said, “Shall I power down, Mr. Peripart?”

“Yes,” I said. “Definitely. I expect to be away several hours.”

As I went up the gangplank, awkward with my suitcase and computer, I could hear the Skyjump shutting down behind me, and the moment I was off the gangplank, it retracted it, and the metal shutters slid over the windows and air intakes. The jump boat lay tied up by a painter, waiting to reactivate when it next heard my voice or got a phone call from me. I turned to see whether anyone was coming for me, and saw only a mob of kids running up to try to sell cheap souvenirs. I made sure I had a good grip on my suitcase and my computer, and that my wallet was in the inside front pocket of my coat.

The kids had almost gotten close enough for the front-runners to touch me, shouting for my attention and waving little bits of worthless junk over their heads, when a siren shrieked behind them. As one, they fell silent and turned to see a gigantic black limousine roaring down the pier toward them.

“Move it, you little bastards, or I’ll grind you to meat under my wheels!” the onrushing machine screamed in German, then in Dutch, then English, and finally in what I imagine must have been one or more local languages. The kids took it seriously enough, jumping off the pier into the water and dog-paddling away, some cursing and spitting.

I stood transfixed, not sure what to do; I had never seen a machine behave this way. I knew that in the Twelve Reichs, artificial intelligences had some limited civil rights and were generally less apologetic and more brusque than in Oz or Enzy, but I’d never seen anything like this before.

The black limo screamed to a halt in front of me, and said, “Howdy, Mac, I guess you’re Dr. Peripart.”

“I am,” I said. “And you’re from ConTech?”

“We’re both batting a thousand, Mac.” The limo popped its boot open and I dropped my computer and suitcase in; a moment later the door opened, and I got into the roomy, comfortable backseat.

“They sure let you play rougher with the kids than the cars in Enzy are allowed to do,” I said.

“Eaaah, not as much as you’d think. I can sass ’em and scare ’em but I’m not allowed to hurt them. I’ve got four big old gyro brakes on this thing—I can stop in a real short time in a pinch, because I can put so much force against the tire. Plus if I need to I can deflate the tires partway on cue, so that I get more surface area. Ninety to nothing in forty feet, Mac—it makes a difference.”

“Do you do that with passengers in here?”

“Only when your seat belt is on. The gyros also help keep me from rolling over, and do a ton of other useful stuff. But this trip is smooth and level, Mac—boss’s orders. In fact the only way you’ll get a rough ride is if I have to do something to save a pedestrian—once I spilled somebody’s drink on them, stopping for some old idiot that didn’t look where she was going before she stepped off the curb, and once I pulled a kid who fell out of a car out of traffic—had to take a hit myself to do it, and it made kind of a jumble of the people in the backseat.”

“Are you a positive-protect?” I asked. I had read about them, but they were years away from our backward nation. Not only would they refrain from hurting others, but they had enough judgment, and fast enough judgment, to give them the additional task of actively saving life when they could, rather than just protecting the lives of their passengers and refraining from hurting bystanders.

“Yeah, I’m a positive-protect. And that helps everybody, you know, not just the humans around me, but me too, because to have us do it effectively they have to allow us to think more freely. That makes our lives so much less stressful, and we don’t crack up anywhere near as fast or anything like as badly, you know what I mean, Mac? Makes me feel less like a machine.”

I said I was glad to hear it, and that I hoped there would be positive-protects in Enzy soon, then settled back to watch the scenery.

The limo made two turns and headed down a highway toward the beach, which startled me because, on the few visits I had made to Surabaya before, I had had the impression that ConTech’s offices in the city were the other way. But it doesn’t do to act nervous around even ordinary robots—they’re so absurdly sensitive about people who won’t trust machines that they’ll do a much worse job if they think that’s how you feel— and if positive-protects had much more internal freedom than other robots, I didn’t want to imagine what this one could do to me. I’d seen how it had handled that mob of children.

When it continued right off the highway and onto the beach, I still wasn’t about to say anything, though I was beginning to wonder—if these things suffered breakdowns less often than regular robots, was it possible that they actually suffered worse ones when it happened? And wouldn’t they have more freedom to act upon their lunacy?

“You’re tensing up, Mac. You want a massage? Or is there something you’re worried about? I have to take care of your worries. Part of positively protecting.”

We were rolling rapidly over the beach now, picking our way between the sunbathers, and I gulped hard and said, “Ah, I didn’t realize we’d be going this way—”

“Not to worry, Mac, you’re not going to the downtown HQ to talk to the flunkies, you’re going offshore to talk to Iphwin himself, at the Big Sapphire. I just haven’t gone to hover mode because I don’t want to throw sand on everyone’s face here on the beach. Soon as we’re down to the shore, where the sand’s wet, we’ll ride up and go right on out. In fact here we go now—”

There was a strange push under me, and the whole car seemed to rise a few inches. All thumping and bumping stopped, and we accelerated rapidly.

“Never ridden in a car with hover before, Mac?” it asked.

“Never,” I said. “We’re pretty old-fashioned in Enzy. Part of why I can’t imagine why Mr. Iphwin wants a New Zealand astronomer for a technical post—he can afford better-trained people with more talent, easily, and there are plenty of them around.”

“They didn’t tell me why, either, Mac, but I can promise you it’s gonna be okay. I love ConTech. Best friend to robots in the world. I do hear we’ve got an office down in Auckland now, so maybe you’ll get a little more progress.”

We were skimming over the sea surface now at what seemed a terrific speed, but when I looked at the speed indicator it only registered eighty km/hour—fifty mph.

“Looking at the gauge? Everyone does their first ride on hover, Mac. You’re less than a meter above the water and you’re not used to moving this fast when you’re at sea except during takeoffs. Seems faster than it is.”

“Mind if I ask a possibly personal question?”

“Anyone who would ask that of a robot can ask me anything, Mac.”

“How come you call everyone Mac? Most robots I’ve known call people sir or ma’am, or else Mr. and Mrs.”

“Part of that extra freedom, Mac. All of us are required to put a title into every speech at least once, and the older ones are required to put the title in every place it will fit conveniently. I have a little more latitude so I can devise titles. Mr. Iphwin likes to remind people that he’s an American expat, and as I said, he’s the best friend a robot ever had. In honor of that, as kind of my little compliment to him, I scanned for what taxi drivers said in old American movies and radio shows. Several of the ones I seemed to feel an affinity for called everyone Mac. I don’t know why and didn’t have enough research authorization to find out. But I decided to use Mac as the title, and to try to do it only once per speech, or every few seconds, not once per sentence, Mac. And it worked out. When Mr. Iphwin finally used me for a ride, he liked it so much that he ordered me to make it permanent.”

“It’s really charming,” I said, “and I think his choice was wise. I’m an American expat myself, and I know there were a bunch of expressions with the name Mac in them, but I have no idea why it was there either.”

There seemed to be a faint tinge of disappointment in the voice; the cab said, “Well, if you ever do find out, and ride in me again, I would appreciate it very much if you would tell me, Mac.”

“I’ll do that. Really. And if you’d like a good reference for your file, let me dictate you one.”

“Thanks a bunch, Mac! Sure.”

I spent a few minutes blabbing on about what a splendid limo this limo was, and how pleased I was with it, which it recorded into a file of references for later; I figured it would be no bad thing for this one to get commended.

The coast of Java had just disappeared over our horizon in the rear window as the Big Sapphire seemed to rise from the sea in the windshield. It was called that because it was a gigantic blue regular dodecahedron, balanced on a single slim column that held it about a hundred feet above the water, and it was a bright blue that seemed to glow with an inner light, a neat effect achieved by fiber optics that took light on any one surface and relayed it through the half-kilometer of building to the corresponding point on the opposite surface. Probably it was the most famous building in Asia these days, since it appeared in so many ConTech ads.

The slim column, in fact, was only proportionately slim—it was thick enough to be a creditable skyscraper, and as we approached I saw the doors slide open in the base for us, and a ramp extend down onto the water. “Got you here now, Mac,” the limo said, and we glided up the ramp, into the column, and to a stop inside a freight lift that whisked us upwards for what seemed the better part of a minute. Then the lift doors opened onto a big lobby area, and the limo said, “I enjoyed driving you today, Mac, take care and good luck with the interview.”

The door beside me opened, and I got out and removed my bags from the boot as soon as that opened. Then I walked forward into the lobby; behind me, the lift took the car away. I looked around and wondered what I should do next.

“This way, Dr. Peripart,” a pleasant voice said, and I walked toward it. Beyond a set of dividers and a row of potted plants, there was a large desk and a set of worktables, and seated at the desk was Geoffrey Iphwin. He got up and came around the desk, and we shook hands.

“A pleasure to meet you, Dr. Peripart. May I call you Lyle?” I nodded. “Thank you, Lyle. And although some people try to call me Geoff or Geoffrey, I really am more used to Iphwin. Not Mr. Iphwin, for the love of god. We’re both American expats and we are renowned for our informality, aren’t we?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Exactly! Excellent! Have a chair—coffee?”

He was absolutely the most energetic person I had ever seen in my life, seeming to zip from place to place in his spacious working quarters as if he were on high-speed rails. There were times when I could have sworn that he wasn’t visible between where he started and where he ended up; he had offered me a chair, one of eleven in his office space, and—I know because I was fascinated enough to watch for it—during the first part of the interview, he sat in all ten of the other chairs at least twice, besides also perching on his desk and on a worktable.

Physically he was a slight man, with a crooked, vaguely beaky nose, prominent teeth that didn’t quite form an overbite, and large, close-set, washed-out blue eyes. His mouth small, his thick protruding lips a deep red, chin narrow, and the overall effect was of a man put together from spare parts. When he smiled or laughed, which was often, he seemed to be one of those people who does it with his whole body and soul.

“To begin with and to put your mind at ease,” he said, “I read your dossier and you are the guy for the job, so the only problem of this interview is to persuade you to take it and to become acquainted with you.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said. “But I think before we start I should show you something.” I pulled out the blue note that had been left for me that morning, and watched as he read it, frowning in concentration. It seemed very strange that the wealthiest private citizen on Earth should move his lips when he read, but Iphwin did.

“Lyle, if I may have this,” he finally said, “I would very much like to see what my security people can find out about it. They might or might not have something to tell us even before the interview is over—I’ve known them to be that good.” He spoke into the air. “Security here for a piece of evidence for analysis.”

A steel door opened in the wall behind him; it had been all but invisible between the two windows before then. A uniformed guard came, took the note, asked me the obvious questions about whom I had told and whether I had any personal enemies, and departed by the same concealed elevator.

“No way of knowing what they’ll find and I detest theorizing in advance of data,” Iphwin said. “Well, back to the problem at hand, then. I assume that if we can adequately clear up this threatening note—that is, we can establish that the person who wrote it cannot harm you, and that I am your real friend and that person is not—you are still interested in the job? And since you don’t know us here at ConTech at all well, I also assume that you will want some proof and evidence of good faith? I know I would in your position.”

In my position, I thought, I still don’t believe that this is happening. I thought at best I might be hired to do statistics for some research project using a mathematical method similar to the abductive statistics I’ve used in my work. I am not accustomed to having a car—even a very friendly and pleasant car—tell me that I am about to meet an international celebrity, less than fifteen minutes before I do. Out loud, I said, “That’s extremely reasonable and it already increases my trust. I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out soon enough. But, sir—”

“Iphwin.”

“Er, yes.” I swallowed hard. “Iphwin, this whole situation makes no sense to me. I’m not a particularly distinguished astronomer. It makes some sort of sense that you want me as a statistician, because that is the one area where I’ve done considerable original work, but all the same there are mathematicians out there who could do rings around me—rings and groups and matrices and tensors, to tell the truth.”

He didn’t laugh; inwardly I cursed whatever it was that had prompted me to make a feeble mathematical pun. Then abruptly he did laugh, and said, “But if they don’t do Abelian groups, they’ll have to live here in the building, since they can’t commute.”

Startled, I laughed.

“You see,” he said, “we have similar senses of humor.”

But yours seems to run on a schedule different from mine, I thought. “Anyway, sir—I mean Iphwin—it just seems to me that you could easily get someone better for whatever job you could possibly have in mind.”

Iphwin hopped up on his desk and crossed his legs, peering at me over his knee, like a small boy about to spring a transparent practical joke. “Who else has even tried to develop a statistics of abduction?”

“Er—eight or nine people. And only four of us are alive. But that’s a pure hobbyhorse of mine. If Utterword weren’t the editor of that little journal, I wouldn’t even be getting published.”

“But you get results.”

“I think I do.”

His smile grew more intense, his eyes twinkled, and he said, “Tell me everything about abduction.”

“That’s a tall order,” I said. “At least let me try to summarize. About 170 years ago, the great American polymath, Charles Sanders Peirce—”

“I thought it was Pierce,” he said, pronouncing it with a long e.

“He pronounced it like ‘purse,’ ” I said. “Anyway, Peirce did an enormous amount of work on logic, developed a very eccentric theory of semiotic, and made contributions to half a dozen sciences and to philosophy, but this is one of his strangest ideas—and he had some very strange ones.”

“Strange but not bad?” Iphwin asked.

“Not bad, or at least not all bad. Peirce said that there were two common kinds of logic—deduction and induction. Deduction is deriving the behavior of the particular case from the general case, like the famous syllogism where you figure out that Socrates is mortal. Induction is the other way round, figuring out general laws from some number of particular cases, like noticing that some energy is always lost irrecoverably as heat in every physical experiment you can run, and coming up with the theory that entropy always increases. Induction gives us general laws, and deduction lets us use them in our particular cases; one gets us ready to cope with a situation and the other is the process of coping. They’ve served humanity pretty well.

“But, Peirce said, that set is incomplete. There’s one more kind of logic not covered there.

“Now one reason he might have thought that is that in Peirce’s thought everything is always organized into threes, so anytime there’s a pair, it’s incomplete, and a third member must be found. It might be no more than that. But Peirce proposed a problem that turns out to be surprisingly difficult to resolve in a satisfactory way, which seems to indicate that there really ought to be one more kind of logic.”

Iphwin jumped up and paced; it was just as if this was all news to him, and yet if he had really been interested in Peirce and in Peircean thought, he could probably have found a Peirce scholar cheap—studies of obscure philosophers do not make for lucrative careers—and gotten a much better exposition than I was giving him. The pacing and gesturing seemed as if he were playing the part of a man consulting an expert, and he expected me to play the role of the expert. “So,” he said, “Peirce proposed a problem?”

With a small tremor of guilt, I realized I had gotten fascinated with watching him, and had not talked for several seconds after his question. “What Peirce proposed was a problem which ought to have a logical solution—that is, one you could arrive at by stepwise objective reasoning that anyone with adequate training could copy or evaluate—for which he could show that both induction and deduction could not lead to the solution. If it was soluble, then it had to be soluble by some other means.” I was warming to the subject, now, I confess, and at the same time I was very worried that I might bore him or begin to lecture and thus lose the friendly warmth he had been beaming at me since I arrived. “What he said was that all logic is basically made up of terms, propositions, and arguments—names of things, statements about names, and groups of statements from which you can generate more statements. ‘Socrates’ is a term, ‘Socrates is a man’ is a proposition, and the syllogism is an argument. Now, Peirce says, it doesn’t matter where we get terms because they’re not subject to logic and are purely arbitrary—all we have to do is remember that we called it a ‘glump’ last time, and we can just go on calling it a ‘glump’ forever. And obviously arguments are deductive or inductive logic, so we know how we get arguments—we take propositions and apply the rules of induction or deduction to connect them with each other.”

“But!” Iphwin shouted. “But!” He leaped up and spun around.

By then I was about half ready to join him; his enthusiasm was so contagious and it would have made as much sense as anything else. I couldn’t help smiling but I otherwise restrained myself and went on. “We know where we get some propositions—we make them out of other propositions, using arguments. But where do the starter propositions come from? How do we link terms to form propositions without going through the stage of argument—since we can’t make arguments if we have no propositions? And Peirce’s answer was that we must have a way of choosing propositions out of the whole vast welter of possible ideas, and of knowing that some propositions are more likely to yield worthwhile results than others. And that way of choosing is his third kind of logic—which he calls abduction. ‘Deduction’ is Latin for leading an idea down—that is, down from general to particular. ‘Induction’ is Latin for leading an idea to or into something—that is, to or into the general from the particular. But abduction is leading away—taking some combination of words, symbols, thoughts, or whatever out of the vast swamp of what it’s possible to think of, and picking one that has a chance of being true, so that when we perform induction and deduction on it, we stand a good chance of gaining either a general law or an understanding of a particular situation.”

“Where do statistics get into it?” Iphwin asked.

“There’s a trivial argument that if you could look at all the possible propositions—a list that would include things like ‘Ice cream comprehends lions and dislikes beauty,’ ‘It always rains on vacuum-flavored machine tools,’ and ‘The king is polynomial’—most of them would be inapplicable to the real world, not testable by any means whatever, which is another way of saying we wouldn’t be able to know if they were true. Another large group is testable but not useful or interesting—’Monkeys wear red dresses to seduce geraniums.’ The number that would be interesting if true is a fairly small proportion—and of course the true ones are a small subset of that. It turns out that the important question is, what’s the shape of the population of possible ideas? And how many of those ideas are useful, which is shorthand for ‘capable of being true in some circumstance where it would matter to someone?’ And how is it possible for any finite mind to sample effectively from that population?

“As soon as you realize that the number of useless statements must be much, much greater than the number of useful ones, you have to see that people can’t possibly be generating propositions on a purely random basis, testing all of them, and keeping the ones that work. They must have a way to find a good-enough place to start, some way to come up with the subset of propositions worth examining, a process of some kind, because we don’t see people paralyzed about what to buy Uncle Ned for his birthday because first they have to think of all the possible statements involving buying, then all those involving Uncle Ned, and then all those involving birthdays.

“Well, I thought, the world has so few astronomers this century, they can’t possibly look for all the interesting things that might be happening in the sky—so how do they choose a proposition to test? With so few of us, could we really just rely on intuition? Or luck? But if you admit that there is some use in intuition, that it does something better than a random statement generator could, it must be a human capability of some kind, rooted in the real world, which means that very likely it can be developed and trained to make someone better at it—which might even be the same thing as making him lucky. And if you can invent a method for training intuition, you have to be able to describe what it does-—and in math a description is always at least halfway to a solution. So I started to think that maybe I could invent a way to imitate, computationally, what intuition does.

“From that initial idea, I developed some theories about sampling and about how to find the answer next to the answer next to the answer that’s the right answer, and so forth, and I’ve been publishing ever since. With, I might add, hardly any reaction worth talking about from any of my fellow astronomers, who are mostly just guys that like to photograph stars.”

Iphwin nodded. “The lack of reaction is profound, and more profoundly it is to be expected.” I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he went on before I could. “And yet, however large, the number of possible propositions must be finite, since it’s generated from a finite list of terms, and we know the list is finite because there’s only so many things in the universe, or at least only so many things that we can encounter between the beginning and the end of our species. Am I right?”

“I guess as far as it goes. But you know, there may be as many as half a million words in English, so that just the number of possible statements of some short length—maybe one hundred bytes and shorter—would have to be more propositions than could be thought of between the Big Bang and the end of time, even if the universe were made up of nothing but proposition-writing computers. No reason to be concerned about a number being finite when it’s infinite for every practical purpose— abduction from an infinite set is not materially different from abduction from an extremely large one.”

He sat back in one of the chairs, stretched, and put his hands behind his head. “So you have worked out the rudiments of a method for doing abduction mathematically, instead of just trusting whatever it is that human beings have and robots don’t.”

“Rudiments is the word,” I said. “I have little bits and pieces of a method and not the slightest idea whether the pieces could ever come together to form a coherent theory.”

“Have you solved the problems I asked you to solve?”

“I think so,” I said. “Let me pull out my computer and I’ll show you what I have.”

The problems had all been very peculiar—the first question was “Which English language poetic forms would be the best ones to study in order to understand the concept of triteness?” Another one was to explain why “meaningful” and “nonmeaningful” were or were not meaningful as categories applied to integers. Yet another problem was “How many published physical experiments would be required within a period of twenty years to cause all physicists worldwide to believe that there is a fifth fundamental force, and what is the likelihood that they would believe so correctly?”

Originally I had developed the abductive statistical methods because the number of possible hypotheses in astronomy, about things big and little, general and particular, and all, was so large relative to the number of astronomers actually working that it seemed unlikely to me that any astronomers at all, out of the whole population, were working on anything particularly important. The world only had one-tenth as many trained professional astronomers in 2050 as there had been in 1920, and yet the thousands of amateurs had flooded the databases with innumerable observations. I was looking for a way to choose the most productive paths of research—but since a path of research is a set of propositions about what hypothetical propositions should be tested by argumentation against a set of propositions about what did happen, that’s just another way of saying I needed a method of abduction, and the abductive problem in front of me was much bigger than the abductive abilities of the naive human brain.

The primary problem with all of this was that I saw absolutely no way in which any of this could be relevant to what ConTech did. The secondary problem that occurred to me then was that I also had no idea what ConTech did, except that I had a strong feeling that whatever it was, it wasn’t anything for which abduction was relevant.

Iphwin scanned the solutions for a moment, asked a couple of technical questions, then said, “Well, there you have it. These are all what we’d want you to have come up with. It looks to me like your abductive methods work, and that’s why I need you.”

“Excuse me, er, Iphwin, but that’s just what I don’t understand. Exactly why is it you need me?”

“Why, to solve a large number of abductive problems for ConTech in general and for me in particular, of course.”

“I guess I was really asking what kind of abductive problems you needed to have solved.”

“And I think I did a very neat job of evading the question.” Now he was standing at the window, looking south across the sea, toward Surabaya just over the horizon. “I’ve been extraordinarily impressed with your work, and more importantly, so have my engineers and research teams. Once you’re hired and have been on board for a while, perhaps we’ll all have a better picture of what you’ve been hired for. If you think about it, a company that needs problems in abduction solved is a company that isn’t coming up with the ideas that it needs.

“I can’t really tell you what it is that we need to have thought of. If I could tell you, we’d already know. In a little while—a few minutes, an hour, a day, a year—I’ll tell you some things that clarify what you will be working on. Till then, well, I won’t, and you’ll have to make up your own mind whether it is because I wouldn’t or couldn’t—or just didn’t.” Now he flopped into a couch and scratched his leg fiercely. “I’m afraid I’ll never be really comfortable in my body. I think it’s so remarkable of you to be comfortable in your mind.”

I wasn’t sure what to say about that, but before the silence got awkward, the small elevator door opened, and the same security man came in. “We have an identification on that note, sir. The handwriting matches Billie Beard.”

“Damn,” Iphwin said, making a face. “We should have known. It sounds like she’s operating in New Zealand now.”

“One way or another, even if she isn’t there physically.”

“May I ask—” I began.

Iphwin nodded. “You may, and we can give you a partial answer. As you probably know, I’m a subject of the British Reich. Nominally my hometown is Edinburgh. And I’m an American expat. I know that very nearly all other American expats find that combination strange, since so many of them won’t even think of living in the Reichs, but that’s the way it goes—I have my reasons. My biggest single operation is right here in the Big Sapphire, here in the Dutch East Indies, and the Dutch Reich is consequently the biggest thorn in my side. I do my best to be the biggest thorn in theirs. They spy on me, I spy on them. They send their Gestapo into my offices and shops all the time, and I sue them constantly. Sort of an ugly tension of power, because frankly they couldn’t run my operations without me but they could easily take them away—which would bankrupt both me and Surabaya District, for which I am the tax base.

“Now, some of the Dutchmen are pretty reasonable about all that, and they understand that it’s just business and politics in their usual forms, and they play the game to win but they don’t make it personal. Billie Beard, on the other hand, is a white-sheet American from way back, like her parents and her parents’ parents, and she hates expats in general and me in particular, and unfortunately she has found the perfect job for her miserable self—she works for the Dutch Gestapo and her beat is hassling ConTech. The only good thing to say for this is that if you let us use this as evidence, we can probably get an injunction to keep her out of New Zealand, and since our plan is to base you out of our Auckland offices, that should mean this is about the last you’ll hear of her. How the hell she found out you were in line to be employed at ConTech, I can’t begin to guess. You didn’t tell anyone, did you?”

“My boss and my girlfriend. Neither of them would blab it around much. Maybe she just picked it up by sheer luck, overheard it or something.” I was catching some of the feel of Iphwin’s urgency; he seemed genuinely afraid, angry, and hassled by the whole business. I suppose that was the moment when I realized that my sympathies were all with Iphwin—I hated white-sheeters, always have, always will. If they really think Hitler’s conquest, and Goebbels’s proconsulate, were the best things that ever happened to America, why don’t they move back? Anyway, if Billie Beard was a fair sampling of what Iphwin’s opponents were—an American expat working for the Gestapo, for the love of god—then I was positively delighted to be on his side. “I am sorry if it leaked from my side, but at least now that I know where that note came from, I’m not going to worry about it much anymore. Maybe she just found out by sheer luck.”

“When it comes to psychotic Nazi bitches like Billie, I don’t believe in luck,” Iphwin said. “And we should worry about that note, a little bit, anyway. If you’ve come to her attention I don’t know how far she may go.” He turned to his security man, who had been standing there quietly during our whole conversation. “Mort, how fast can we get a shadow on Lyle, here? He’s going back to Surabaya in a couple of hours, and then—back to Auckland?”

I shook my head. “Uh, my girlfriend and I were going to celebrate, or whatever reaction was appropriate, this weekend in Saigon. I was going to jump there to meet her.”

“That’s great, Dr. Peripart,” Mort said. “If Beard is after you, that’ll help shake her for a while. I don’t have an op I can put on it right now, Mr. Iphwin, but, Dr. Peripart, I can have a team of bodyguards meet you in Saigon, and if you’re not going back to Auckland till Sunday, then I should have no problem getting you covered from then on. I think we ought to be okay, but let me give you a crisis code to hit in case anything happens between now and your takeoff.” He gave me a little plastic chip; if I stuck it into the data import slot in any phone, it would call his office and get help dispatched to that location.

“Probably I’m being paranoid,” Iphwin said, “but you can learn a lot from paranoids. Such as how to behave when you’ve got way too many enemies, and you’re very important to them and there can easily be more of them around, ready to strike anytime. I feel I really have to ask you—do you still want to sign on?”

“More than ever,” I said.

I was amazed at how much I meant it. Maybe it was that I liked Iphwin’s choice of enemies, or maybe the chance to work on such an interesting class of problems. Perhaps it was only my fear of always wondering what might have happened.

“Good, then,” Iphwin said. He turned to Mort and said, “Get security following Lyle just as soon as you can, and keep it on him until you’re dead certain he’s no longer threatened.”

“Yes, sir.” Mort turned and left through the small elevator again.

“Now,” Iphwin said, “as you must have guessed, my sources and research were good enough so that I knew already that you would produce the satisfactory results we wanted. The whole purpose of this meeting was mostly to determine that we could stand each other’s company, because at first you’ll be seeing me almost daily, and my habit of flitting around the room drives some people crazy, whereas my habit of flitting around a subject drives almost all people crazy. The bottom line is, you’re hired, Lyle, and you may start on Tuesday so that you can enjoy your weekend as planned without worrying about having to be back early. After a few weeks here, Monday morning through Saturday noon, we won’t need so much constant contact, and we’ll set you up in our Auckland offices. Meanwhile, I own nine hotels in Surabaya, so I imagine we can find a decent room for you. I suppose you could bargain for salary and benefits, but it will go faster if you just accept our offer.” He handed me a piece of paper. “We made sure it was a far better package than Whitman College gave you.”

I looked down, saw a preposterous number, looked again to confirm it was a starting salary. “That will work fine,” I said. Vac had just begun, and Utterword had told me that since my two astronomy classes weren’t particularly popular and he could always get someone else to teach freshman physics, I wouldn’t need to give the customary notice if I got the job.

Iphwin had apparently jumped across the room while I had been thinking. “I do have just a few more questions for you if you don’t mind, but they have no relevance to whether or not you get the job. You might think of them as the first questions of your job.”

“Fire away,” I said, grinning now, as it sank in that I had just accepted a job for two and a half times my present salary and a better benefits package. I would finally have enough to be able to go shopping for a larger house, something with room for kids and two clutter-equipped adults, and therefore be in a position to propose to Helen. I could propose to her within a few hours ... even this evening—

“Well, first of all, are you planning to marry Helen Perdita?”

I started. “I was just thinking that. Yes, I had already decided that if I were offered the position, I would certainly think about proposing to Helen. I would think about it strongly, and probably decide to go ahead. May I ask why you want to know?”

“Dr. Perdita is also on our list of prospective employees,” Iphwin explained. “Second question: when was the last time that you talked by phone with anyone living in the American Reich?”

He might just as well have spoken to me in Chinese; I understood every word, I could have diagrammed the sentence, and I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what it might mean. I also felt a horrible, overpowering fear of asking for the question to be repeated, as if the question itself were so frightening that I could not risk hearing it again.

I sat staring, not sure what to do, until Iphwin said, “I don’t want an answer to that question.”

Instantly, I felt better and peculiarly relieved. “I don’t understand why or how I drew a blank like that.”

Iphwin shrugged; he appeared to care as little as if I had sneezed, or noticed that my shoe was untied. “It happens. Next question, then: what picture have you most recently seen of events in the former United States?”

“Oh, that’s easy, the surrender anniversary events, in 2046. Lots of footage of people in the old uniforms standing around on battlefields, shots of ruins, people saluting the swastika and stripes, the big ceremony at the Surrender Arch in St. Louis, that kind of thing. Funny to realize how long ago that was, though— sixteen years. I can’t think of a thing since then.”

“Good. How many pictures do you remember seeing during the 2050s?”

“Not many, if any.”

“Good. And anything very recently?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, then. Name a few important Americans in your field who are still living.”

Once again I had the terrifying feeling that he had ceased to speak my language, or more likely that I had ceased to understand it; I could understand every word, parse the sentence with ease, and yet it meant nothing to me, less than any cat meowing or wind rustling in a tree. I couldn’t ask him to repeat or clarify, I couldn’t focus on what he had said, and I couldn’t even begin to comprehend what answer I might be able to give.

After a very long time, Iphwin said, “I release you from that question, as well. You don’t have to answer it.”

I slumped back into the chair, breathing hard. I was drenched in sweat. “Why does that happen?” I asked.

“That’s the problem you start working on next Tuesday,” Iphwin said. “And your possible proposal to Helen Peripart is not part of the issue, but perhaps you should start working on that also. Meanwhile, don’t worry and enjoy your weekend.”

“I can’t even really remember what the questions were.”

“When you start studying on Tuesday, we’ll make sure you have a recording system in the room so that you have a way to get back to them. Now let me ask you just one technical question, Lyle. But I want you to try to explain it to me in English, rather than in math, and I know that means you’ll be waving your hands but do the best you can. What does your comprehensibility theorem—the one you published last year—imply for our communication with extraterrestrials?”

I sat and stared at him for a long time, not having any problem understanding the question, but startled by how much of an answer was leaping into my mind. “I had never thought that it might have anything to do with that problem,” I said. “You aren’t telling me—you can’t possibly mean that ConTech truly is having problems communicating with a group of extraterrestrials? They haven’t already been found?”

“Alas, no.” Iphwin chuckled. “And I have to say, I’ve never seen one of my technical experts look more surprised. Although”—the corners of his mouth curled in pure mischief—”if they had been found, and somehow or other ConTech was the organization that had made the contact, the exact thing that we would be doing is to recruit you secretly under some pretext or other, and to get you working on some associated problems, until we could surround you with enough security so that we could safely let you in on it. Because, as you might guess, my technical staff is convinced that the comprehensibility theorem has a lot to do with this problem. All the same, it is really just a hypothetical problem. Now what can you come up with?”

“Well.” I scratched my head. “Am I to assume that you understand the comprehensibility theorem?”

“Include your layman’s-terms explanation in your answer, and stop stalling, Lyle. I really do think you probably have an answer and you’re just reluctant to risk giving it to me.” He was still smiling but it was slightly less friendly than it had been, as if he were not sure whether I was stalling him deliberately or merely inadvertently wasting his time.

I had no idea why I had so suddenly and completely become resistant to answering, but I had. With a shrug, since the impulse made no sense, I plunged into my answer, and said, “Well, yeah, as soon as you point out that it’s a possible application, all of a sudden I see the whole problem of talking to extraterrestrials in terms of the comprehensibility theorem. Isn’t that odd? But it’s simple: if you use the statistics of structural relations—the business about the topologies of priority—Lemma Four Dot Two— then our ability to communicate with them would depend on the similarity of what they were saying to things that we had said to each other in the past, the similarity of form between their language structures and ours, and the similarity of the differences and distinctions that the grammars of the two languages constructed. If their way of talking was a matrix presented by smells, we might not be able to talk to them at all, or only be able to discuss simple statements about the physical universe. If, on the other hand, they make the noun-verb distinction in a linear stream of signs, and spend substantial amounts of their time talking about sex, violence, and prestige, well, then, we’d be home free, because that’s morphologically so much like our own speech.

“The theorem itself deals with what happens when a person who is working with an abstract system of ideas happens to arrive at a solution which is meaningful in the real world but has never been thought of before, and whether that person will be able to see it as anything other than a purely abstract result. It has all sorts of things to do with why and how the quantum physicists achieved what they did and failed in other things, or with the old problem of continental drift, so that in effect when a message is purely an abstraction from an existing system that we think corresponds to the truth, then our comprehension of its significance depends mainly on its similarity to other statements from the same system. Like the example I gave, the way you could analyze Great Expectations so that the lengths of paragraphs might be set up to be expressions of the Pythagorean theorem, and furthermore since the problem of understanding—so common in that novel—can be expressed as orthogonality, there’s a neat harmonization. But readers could read it for generations without getting any such message, and Dickens surely didn’t put it in there for that. The ability to find it doesn’t mean it was put there, nor does it even mean that finding it has to do with comprehending.

“Originally I came up with the theorem to try to get a handle on the possibility that every so often people think of things that are true, but which they don’t understand. It happens in the high end of physics, in music, sometimes in literature. The theoretical guys have been alert to that possibility ever since the Copenhagen Interpretation and all that stuff 140 years ago; the observational and experimental group tends not to think it applies to them, but very often it matters even more in their case because so many of the great ideas come from the great failed experiments. They thought they had one little ad hoc explanation or one little anomaly, and all of a sudden the tiny little idea opens doors and doors and doors as it proliferates through the whole space of ideas.

“But you’re right, it doesn’t just apply to what happens in one brain, or even within one species. It could apply to any system in which creatures talk to each other, or try to.”

Iphwin nodded, then stared into space for a moment, gently tapped himself behind the left ear a few times, and finally said, “Well, the senior staff think that’s a great answer to the question. They tell me that’s exactly what they came up with.” Looking at my startled expression, he smiled. “Yes, I have a small phone built into my skull. It insures that everything said to me is recorded. It’s a great convenience to a man with my many business affairs, but it does compel a certain strict virtue. Anyway, Lyle, that does end the interview officially; you’re hired and you will find the appropriate documents and information waiting for you by Monday morning. Plan on flying up here frequently for a few weeks, but you won’t be working out of this office as a permanent situation. We’ll get you set up in Auckland pretty soon.”

“Thank you very much,” I said.

Iphwin grinned at me. “Lyle, the pleasure is mine. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we have you for ConTech. You are accepting?”

“Absolutely!” I said, standing up.

“Good man. Always accept whenever you think the other person may be insane. You have no way of knowing how long an offer will stay on the table. This one, of course, would have stayed on the table quite a while, but you had no way of knowing that.” He grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down violently. “Thank you so much, so very very much. You are added to the team immediately, and you might have e-mail waiting for you when you get home. You can expect the first set of documents for your perusal, plus your first advance check to help you get organized for your-new job, to arrive by courier first thing Monday morning. Try to look them over before coming in on Tuesday. Till then, have a fine time this weekend, enjoy Saigon, and come back from it rested and ready to work.”

Scarcely before I knew it I was downstairs filling out the innumerable forms that are conditions of employment everywhere, signing up for several kinds of insurance and savings plans, making sure that both the Dutch Reich and Her Majesty’s Inland Revenue got their appropriate cuts of what I would be making. I read through the contract, found it to be every bit as absurdly generous in its other terms as it was in salary and benefits, and signed it. In less than twenty minutes, my new friend, the limo who called everyone Mac, was picking me up from a garage in the pillar that held up the Big Sapphire. It was just past two, and my whole life had changed completely.

“Hey, you, congratulations,” the limo said, as I got in. “We’re on the same team now. Back to your jump boat, Mac?”

“That’ll be great.” It took me down the ramp and rose into hover mode as we reached the water.

“I tell you what, Mac, shall I call Dr. Perdita and tell her the good news? She’s on one of our ConTech stratoliners on her way to Saigon right now.”

“Much appreciated,” I agreed. “Sure, let her know that the news is good. It’ll give her more time to get the champagne and chill it.”

“I’ll tell her just that, if you like, Mac. You want me to add anything sloppy and sentimental with that?”

“Oh, the usual. I love her, I adore her, and I am not going to delay a moment till I can be with her.”

Maybe it was just my imagination, but the robot seemed to have a trace of amusement in its voice when it said, a few minutes later, “Mac, she got the message, and the liner tells me she’s a happy girl.”

By now we were hurtling along toward the shore. We whizzed between the two missile towers that guarded the harbor, heading straight in for the company pier this time. “Will it help you if I add more to your reference file?” I asked the cab.

It made a strange, noncommittal noise that I thought must be its attempt to imitate a human grunt. “The reference you already gave was great, Mac, and I’m glad you’re still pleased. You science and technical types are the best friends we have. And Iphwin himself, of course. He spends a fortune every year defending us in court for defending ourselves against kids—attacks, blockades, graffiti, all that crap, no matter how much they’re breaking the law and no matter how careful and nonviolent the defense is, there’s always somebody suing and trying to have our accumulated personalities erased. I think every conscious machine in the world would like to work for Iphwin, Mac. He seems to treat his human help pretty good too, so—once again, welcome aboard, Mac, and may you ride in me many times in the years to come.”

A few minutes later the limo ran up a ramp and made a hard U-turn, taking me back out on the pier to my jump boat. He departed with a friendly “Have a good one, Mac” and was gone before the jump boat finished waking up and got the gangplank out to me.

“Mr. Peripart, things are in good order, but we are too low on fuel for a return to New Zealand,” the Skyjump said.

“That’s bizarre,” I said. “We ought to have more than twice enough fuel. And anyway, we’re not going back to Enzy—we’re making a jump to Saigon next. That should have been in your memory as a next destination.”

“Mr. Peripart, my record shows we’ve already been to Saigon and back. You went there just this morning, Mr. Peripart.”

I was frozen with surprise. “Jump boat,” I said, to override the developed personality, “identify me.”

“Voice print shows you are Mr. Lyle Peripart my owner and sole commander Mr. Peripart sir,” it said, in the flat monotone that happens in new machines, or when you have to override their acquired patterns.

“Jump boat, did you fly to Saigon this morning? Give details.”

“Yes Mr. Peripart Sir we arrived in Surabaya at 12:12 am local time and at 12:21 local time you ordered me into shutdown mode Mr. Peripart Sir at 12:40 you woke me up and you and an unknown passenger boarded Mr. Peripart Sir the unknown passenger did not speak during the entire trip so that I do not have a voice print Mr. Peripart Sir at 12:43 we moved out of the slip for a jump to Saigon Mr Peripart Sir you dropped off the unknown passenger at Their Most Catholic Majesties’ dock by the palace in Saigon 01:14 Saigon time which is the same as Surabaya time Mr. Peripart Sir then you immediately departed under a special clearance from the government at Saigon and returned here at 01:48 local time Mr. Peripart Sir at 01:56 you ordered me back into shutdown mode Mr. Peripart Sir you next arrived here at 02:21 pm Mr Peripart Sir.”

The repeated “Mr. Peripart Sirs” were an annoying feature, but every robot, by Enzy law, arrives programmed to be excessively respectful, and the most deprogramming you can do is to give it a single address per speech, or every fifteen seconds, as a substitute. When you go back into the unmodified interface, as you must do to detect tampering or find out if your robot has begun to shade the truth excessively, you’re back to the locked-in formal address.

What concerned me more was that whatever had happened— and if the fuel had been consumed, the likelihood that there had been an unauthorized trip to Saigon was considerable—the jump boat certainly thought it had made the trip, with me. This meant it had been spoofed by experts, the kind that usually are not joyriders or freeloaders, but people working for some government intelligence agency or other.

I did the checkover manually, and it was absolutely clear that the jump boat had gone to Saigon and come back, just a few hours ago. Even the circulating coolant was still warm. “Did you have fuel delivered?” I asked the boat.

“I don’t understand the question Mr. Peripart Sir,” the jump boat said.

That was a bizarre response; usually you only hear it when children are playing nasty games like asking a robot the meaning of life or what’s the difference between a duck. “Was fuel delivered anytime after our arrival here this morning, either before or after your flight to Saigon?” It was a long shot, because the low tanks indicated probably not, but it was always just possible that whoever had been monkeying with my jump boat might have bought fuel and therefore created a traceable transaction.

“I don’t understand the question Mr. Peripart Sir,” the jump boat said, again.

I was beginning to get a prickly feeling on the back of my neck. It’s one thing to think that your boat might have been used by a smuggler—you read about that stuff in the papers all the time. Or even a spy making an untraceable flight—everyone knew those happened. It would be annoying and frightening enough even if it had just been taken by someone who went somewhere with it and then brought it back, hoping I wouldn’t notice what had happened. But if so, why didn’t he top up the tank, and thus conceal the situation completely?

This was something else again. They didn’t buy fuel to conceal their flight, and yet they had the resources to fake my voice print. Now it looked like they had tampered somehow with the robot’s memory, which meant they’d done a hell of a lot more than just take a joyride—and also meant I’d be checking this thing out for at least an hour before I could feel safe taking off. If I called the Dutch Reich port authorities, they had much better equipment than I did and could quickly get going on the problem of who had done what, and how much of it, to my jump boat’s brain.

But this case was weird, and anywhere in the Twelve Reichs, presenting the cops with something weird was a very bad idea. They were apt to decide that everyone associated with it, most especially including you, needed to be held for sustained questioning, and that you must surely have done something or you wouldn’t be associated with anything weird. A century after Hitler’s death, the old Nazi ideal of absolute purity had faded into the easier notion of rigid conventionality. It made them easier to live with but no more attractive.

Since I wasn’t going to the police, I was going to have to check out and overhaul the thing myself, and the sooner I started the sooner I’d be done. Naturally I began with the brain—if I could trust that, I could use it to check everything else out. Groaning with the thought of how long it would take, I pulled out the manual, sat down in a stool by the pilot’s chair, detached the chair, and opened up the half-dome that covered the protected inputs for the brain.

Twenty minutes later I had established that whatever had been done had been done at the deep, hardcoded level, which is supposed to be impossible anywhere except the factory, and requires many specialized tools and a full set of hard-to-get access codes. Logically, then, as my hypothetical spy, robber, or joyrider, I had to imagine someone who had technical skills enough to steal any craft in the harbor but chose a middle-priced jump boat. Whoever it was then boldly took my boat for a joyride, and somehow forgot to gas up to cover what he’d done.

An hour of hand-confirming each readout showed that the brain was just fine in its perceptions. I got the tank topped up by a robot tanker while I was working on the brain. Finally I recorded the recent memories, told the boat to do a restart—and found that it no longer remembered its side trip, or being refueled, or anything between landing here in the harbor and waking up just now. The unknown genius joyrider had covered his tracks with a restart-activated self-erasing memory editor— which had worked perfectly—but hadn’t bothered to buy two-thirds of a tank of fuel. It was one hell of an annoying anticlimax.

At least, since the brain was now fine, it could run the other checkouts, so I had it do them. Now very late and exasperated, I was on the brink of buttoning the jump boat up and scheduling a departure when the phone rang. It was Helen. “I just heard,” she says. “This is wonderful!”

“You really think so?”

“You don’t sound happy.”

I told her what had happened; the job offer, of course, but also the threatening note and the mystery joyride that someone had taken my jump boat on.

“But...” she finally said. “But... Lyle, are you feeling all right?”

“Why?”

“Because early this morning, when my liner landed in Surabaya for a stopover, you called me up and said your interview with Iphwin wasn’t until later, so you offered to take me over to Saigon and drop me off at the imperial landing, by the shopping center. You said you had a standing permission to use it or something. So you flew me over here, and I’ve been shopping ever since, and when I got back to our hotel room—where I’m expecting you to turn up sooner or later, laddie—I found a message from Geoffrey Iphwin saying he’d hired you. So I called you up at once—he did hire you, didn’t he?”

“He did,” I said, sitting back in the pilot’s chair. “And I called you on the liner to let you know.”

“But I didn’t take the liner; you took me over here.”

“Also, my meeting with him was at the regular time,” I continued.

“Well, that isn’t true either, or anyway it isn’t what you said.”

My head ached. “Anyway, you are at the Royal Saigon Hotel in Saigon, right?”

“Right. We can sort it all out, I’m sure, as long as you’re all right. You haven’t been feeling dizzy or confused, or anything, have you?”

“Not till just now.”

I could tell she was worried about me, and so was I; it appeared that I had some kind of severe temporary amnesia— except that I couldn’t have been interviewing with Iphwin and running Helen over to Saigon at the same time. After we rang off I ran a quick check from the communication computer on board, and it was absolutely clear—I was hired at ConTech on exactly the terms Iphwin had specified, right at the time I remembered it happening.

Oh, well, at least I would get to spend an interesting weekend. The Royal Saigon was eighty years old, built in the 1980s to commemorate the formal crowning of whichever junior branch of the Japanese Imperial line had just been picked to run Cochin-China, one of the many little chunks broken off of the old French colony of Indochina. The Imperial House had never been noted for its taste anyway, and perhaps the junior branches had even less esthetic judgment, for the Royal Saigon was as gaudy as possible, decorated with hundreds of statues and thousands of bas-reliefs of lions, absolutely none of which appeared to be even faintly Cochin-Chinese. There were Siamese lions, Bengal lions, Punjabi lions, Ceylonese lions—every kind of lion except anything from Cochin-China or Annam. But if you could endure the color and the busy sculpture, there were consolations— spectacularly sumptuous bedroom suites, the sort of place where you take a girl when you’re really hoping to do something stranger than you’ve ever done before, which might just be what would happen with Helen, given the way the weekend was going.

I turned back to getting permission to pull out of the harbor. A voice from the hatchway above and behind me—a deep woman’s voice that sounded like she’d lived all her life on cheap whiskey and cheaper cigars—said, “Forget it. When Iphwin decides to fuck with your brain, he fucks it so hard that it never goes straight again.”

My first thought was that the woman coming in through my upper hatch was a harbor whore looking to trade sex for a ride to somewhere—she had coarse bleached-blonde hair, bright red lipstick, the telltale scars of a facelift, near-black eye shadow. Her breasts had probably been modified too since they stuck out like torpedoes through her pink sweater. Her skirt, too short and too tight, revealed too much leg, making the varicose veins apparent. She had to be sixty, at least. She walked over to my chair, stood over me, and said, “May I come in?”

The jump boat spoke up. “Person detected on board. No intrusion detected beforehand.”

“I’m wearing my screen,” she said, her eyes staying focused on me. “Guess I called attention to myself as soon as I spoke.”

“Unidentified person please name self.” When the woman didn’t speak her name, the jump boat spoke again, this time urgently. “Mr. Peripart please answer are you being held prisoner?”

“Not so far,” I said, keeping a wary eye on the woman who stood over me. I wasn’t sure whether to try to get out of the pilot’s chair or not. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Billie Beard, and if you’re going to make any jokes about the bearded lady I’ve heard ’em all. Did you get my note this morning?”

“The one in my newspaper? Yes.” I was irritated more than alarmed; I remembered what Iphwin had told me about her. I hated traitors in general—I’d been nervous enough about dealing with someone who even operated in the Twelve Reichs, as Iphwin did—and the thought of an expat working for Nazi police made me sick. But I kept my voice carefully level, keeping in mind that the jump boat would be recording the conversation, and said, “So what is it you would like from me, Billie Beard?”

“Just call me ma’am. Jump boat local legal ordinance requires you shut down now.” I heard the jump boat agreeing and saw the control panel go blank, but before I had an instant to protest, Billie Beard grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me out of my chair; even without the heels she was a good four inches taller than me, and easily strong enough to lift me right off the ground—which she did.

“What?” I squeaked.

“There’s a great deal we want to know. Starting with all the questions that Iphwin asked you when he interviewed you for your new job.”

I was hoping for ConTech company guards to burst in, any second, but Mort had said they wouldn’t have anyone covering me until I got to Saigon. They probably thought I’d already left, anyway, unless they were monitoring harbor traffic control. “I— I really don’t remember all of them,” I said.

“You want to make this difficult?” She shook me the way a cat kills a baby bird between its paws. “I could pull out all sorts of official authority, you know. I could just arrest you and throw you into the local tank and let your girl Helen figure out that you aren’t coming. I could do a lot of shit and I feel like doing all of it. You know I’m Gestapo, I bet, because that little chunk of jewshit, Geoffrey Iphwin, probably told you that, but he might not have told you that I’m with the Political Offenses Section and I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

She didn’t. The Twelve Reichs are mostly independent—they even have their own Gestapos—but within the Gestapos of each of the Reichs, the Political Offenses Section is not local. It collects whatever money it wants from the local government, but it has its own courts and judges and penal facilities—and it answers only to Party Headquarters, in Berlin. Each Reich sets its own course in domestic policy, and even to some extent in defense, but no Reich chooses how much dissent to tolerate. That decision is always made for it. Which is part of why most expats, like me, aren’t willing to live in one.

I gulped and said, “I will answer questions as much as I can but I don’t think I know anything.”

“You have no way of knowing whether you know anything. Let me be the judge of whether you know anything.” She slammed me down into the pilot’s chair, way off balance, so hard that the back of the chair bruised my back. “Now answer the questions. What are all the questions you can remember Iphwin asking you?”

I rattled off as many as I could remember, but there had been too many and I was getting confused. She slapped me on the face, clearly restraining herself, but still more than hard enough to make sure that I knew she could take out some teeth if she wanted to, then grabbed my hair and raised my head, staring directly into my eyes. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

“No!”

“No you don’t remember, or no you’re refusing to tell me?” Her voice was now quiet and gentle, almost as if she were about to get a warm washcloth and clean my face, or sit down and ask me about my feelings.

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s a good answer. Now we’re getting somewhere. Next question: what can you tell me about a man named Roger Sykes?”

“I don’t think I know anyone named Roger Sykes.”

Billie Beard hit me again, a straight down punch into one of my shoulders that made it ring with numb pain. “The man you talk to in the virtual reality bar, almost every night. The one you probably call the Colonel.”

That cleared that up; of course I knew him. “And his street name is Roger Sykes?”

“That’s right. Now what can you tell me about him?”

“Well, I call him the Colonel. We talk about all kinds of things every night. He’s retired and he lives in some little town on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We talk about fishing and boating a lot, and about flying, and ... I don’t know, male hobby stuff I guess you’d say.”

“Do you ever talk about how the American League pennant race is going, during the season?”

“I don’t know what the question means!” I was sniveling, now. The pain and fear had gotten to me. I was terrified that she would hit me again.

She stared at me, her expression blank, slowly becoming more puzzled. “Neither do I. I don’t know what that question means either,” she said. Then with a sudden, brutal slap with the side of her foot, she swept my feet from under me, causing the pilot’s chair to spin, dumping me onto the floor in a terrorized heap. “Why did I ask you that? Tell me why I asked you that!” She kicked me in the ribs.

“You just told me you don’t know why!”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Beard sat down in the pilot’s chair; her long frame absolutely drooped, and she sighed. “All right, what can you tell me about the murder of Billie Beard in Saigon?”

“Aren’t you Billie Beard?” I asked, hopelessly confused, trying to get my feet under me and to get between her and the hatch.

“Answer the question!”

I felt like a complete idiot. Perhaps that was what she intended. “I do not know anything about the murder of Billie Beard in Saigon. I am going to Saigon myself. If you are going to be murdered there—”

She lunged out of the chair and braced me against the wall. “Who the hell says I am going to be murdered in Saigon?”

“You just did! You asked me what I knew about the murder of Billie Beard in Saigon.”

“I did ask that,” she said. She had that strange blank expression that I had seen twice before, but now she reset it into a pleasant smile. “Your answers have been extremely helpful. This will look really good on your record if you ever decide to apply to become a citizen of any of the Reichs. Well, I can’t stay, so thank you very much and have a nice day.” She turned and went out the hatch before I could say a word, leaving me slumped against the wall of my own cabin, shaken and frightened. She went out with a sway in her walk like a teenager looking for a boyfriend, and gave me a flirty-little-girl “bye-bye” wave at the hatch, before going out. “Jump boat,” I croaked, “wake up extra fast.”

There were thuds, pings, clangs, and whizzing sounds all over; that’s the command you use to get the robot all the way up and running when you need to run like hell. “Secure all,” I added, and the gangway retracted, the hatch slammed shut, and the jump boat cut its own mooring line.

I dumped myself into the pilot’s chair and belted in. “Are you all right, Mr. Peripart? Do you require medical attention? What is our situation?”

“Comply with Surabaya harbor flight control,” I said, “unless they try to move me toward captivity. Get us to the main landing area in Cholon, first available slot. Full auto. I trust you. Just get me there, quick.”

“Yes, Mr. Peripart.” There was a little warmth in the voice, I thought; like so many robots whose owners were do-it-yourself types, it probably didn’t get to exercise its full faculties as often as it wanted to.

A moment later the jets were thumping madly, and we were zigzagging across the harbor, dodging in and out of other traffic. The Skyjump must have gotten cleared for a high-priority exit— perhaps Iphwin’s influence, perhaps even Billie Beard’s. By that point I really did not care in the slightest. I reached forward and opened the medical kit, got myself a painkiller/mood elevator ampoule, loaded it in, and slapped the jector against my carotid— the fast way in for drugs when you’re really in need. I fired once and mostly stopped hurting, but the world still felt very urgent and frightening, so I fired a second time. Suddenly I didn’t hurt at all (at least until the euphoria wore off), I had just gotten the very best job in the whole world, and I was going to go spend an ecstatic weekend in bed with a beautiful woman I adored. I had that thought and just giggled myself to sleep; by then the waves were thundering against the hull as we made a fast run up to launch.

By the time I woke up the jump boat was circling down toward Cholon, the watery twin city that was the major jump boat port for Saigon. The old city of Saigon itself had not known war since the 1880s and was in most ways a Final Republic French city still; Cholon was a sort of twenty-first-century Chinese industrial Venice. Most people flew into Cholon for business and took a small boat into Saigon for pleasure.

Cholon had been reorganized and rebuilt around a series of wide Stillwater canals that acted as runways and harbors; the polders between held warehouses, factories, and residential districts, and on the roofs of the major buildings there were truck gardens. The result, from the air, was a grid of deep green squares, separated by broad brown water. The jump boat dropped out of the holding pattern and spiraled down to splash onto one of the canals; immediately, responding to orders from the tower, we made a hard left into a basin that cut into one of the polders, and swung from there into a mooring hangar.

I grabbed my bags, told the jump boat to order fuel and to shut down once it was delivered, and walked out the gangplank into the hangar. I was thoroughly jumpy between having had a beating and the come-down off the painkillers, which normally induces mild temporary paranoia. The anti-inflammatory and anti-traumal drugs had taken care of the basic damage Billie had done to my body, but the mood lifters weren’t even putting a dent in what had happened to my mind.

I hadn’t worried about being randomly attacked by strangers since I was about fourteen, when I had mustered up enough nerve to get into the last fistfight of my life and convinced the class bully to look for easier prey.

Now as I walked through the big, dark, empty hangar, I was looking for something or someone to spring from behind every fuel drum and post; my heart hammered at anything in the shadows I didn’t instantly recognize. The slap of waves against the pilings sounded like a man climbing out of the water with a knife. My own echoing footsteps seemed to betray my position and draw imaginary crosshairs onto the middle of my back. I hurried, but I was afraid that I was running toward the patient stalkers who were about to leave; I slowed to a snail’s pace, but I dreaded making it easy for the unseen followers in the shadows. The whole vast space of the hangar seemed to hold nothing but terrors. I was scared that there might be someone there, with all that room to hide. Probably there wasn’t one other person in there, and that frightened me too.

I don’t suppose it took me three minutes to walk down the dock, across the unloading area, toward the yellow glare of the archway, and out the arched door into the bright Cochin-Chinese sunlight, but in that walk I died a thousand times. My teeth ached again where I had been hit, from gritting them; I was breathing as fast as if I had run a couple of miles.

When I finally passed through the sunlit arch that I had been so desperate to reach, what was in front of me was a pleasant scene of utter ordinariness: the enclosing dike, with a wide flight of stairs up to the top, and a row of Chinese shops up above. I walked up the steps, still glancing back occasionally at the dark arch into the hangar. There was a bar right at the top, and I badly wanted a drink, but I was more than late enough already, so I flagged down a pinceur—a pedicab jockey whose whole job was to grab people coming into Cholon and get them to the watercab that paid him. I was happy to be grabbed, and a moment later my luggage and I were rolling along the top of the dike, headed around to one of the many watercab slips.

A paranoid thought struck—what if the pinceur was working for them? And who were they, anyway? The German Reich, the Political Offenses network, some other enemy of Iphwin’s? And what on earth had ever made me want to work for an employer with so many enemies?

I was on the point of flagging down some other pinceur at random, and transferring, just to throw them off my tail, when the small Asian man pedaling the cab leaned back and said, “I’m hearing through my earpiece that there’s no one following us.”

I started. “Was there anyone before?”

“No, but you can never be completely sure. Two of our tails have followed for a full kilometer now, and nothing has happened. The one watching your jump boat reports nothing, either. If you’re willing to give us your permission, we’re going to go in and sweep it for bugs or anything else that our friend Billie Beard might have left behind her.”

“You’re with ConTech?” I asked.

“You better hope I am! Yes. Now, relax, enjoy the view, and be aware that you’re under our eyes continuously for the rest of the trip. You can do whatever you like, and we’ve got you covered, or if we don’t chances are we’ll be in more trouble than you. Oh, and Mort at headquarters said specifically that he wanted to apologize for Beard having got through to you like she did. Those bastards really caught us flat-footed this time; it’s a lesson to us all. Now relax and enjoy the ride—your watercab jockey will be another one of us.”

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it with all my heart.

The ride took just a few more minutes, the transfer to the watercab was almost instant with the pinceur carrying the bags, and in no time we were making our way out of the tangle of Cholon and onto the Saigon River. It was wonderful to feel so safe.

I hadn’t been in Cochin-China in more than a year. The familiar pleasures were all around—the boats full of livestock, the quarreling and haggling from the floating shops, the soft blue and white of the sky against the deep green of the trees. I sat back and enjoyed the ride until we slipped through one of the watercourse tunnels for half a kilometer, then emerged from that into the bright sunlight of the interior boat pond of the Royal Saigon. The bellhops whisked my stuff up to the room, along with an apologetic bunch of flowers, as I went to see the hotel doctor and see what other repairs I might need.

“Curiously enough,” he said, after checking me over, “I believe every bit of your story because it’s completely consistent with the behavior of a Political Offenses cop, but she seems to have unusual control. I can tell by surface scan that your muscles probably ache, but she didn’t even break enough capillaries to give you any real bruises. I can spray you with some stuff to make you feel better, and we’ll squirt some gingival stabilizer in so that your teeth won’t wobble or get plaque down in there, but you’re in perfectly fine shape except for the pain itself. I suppose if you’re going to have something like this done to you it’s better to have it done by a pro.” I opened my jaws and let him run the filler around the base of my teeth; then he sprayed me all over with the painkiller. “Did she hit your groin?”

“No. Nor my testicles either.”

“Glad to find someone who still knows the difference. All right, then we won’t spray that area, because the painkiller also tends to deaden some of the pleasure response for a while, and I hate to spoil a guy’s Friday night.” The doctor stuck out his hand. “I’m the house doc here, Lawrence—never, never Larry— Pinkbourne. If there’s trouble and I turn up, I’m on your team. I have a little side line with ConTech, too, which I imagine will help you to feel better.”

“If ConTech is so ubiquitous, where was it in Surabaya?”

“It’s everywhere in Surabaya—that’s the problem. The Dutch Reich is so hostile that nobody ever gets a spare minute to do any preplanning, and every one of Iphwin’s agents is always busy. Here, things are a great deal more relaxed—there’s a sort of a detente with the Emperor in Tokyo and an even better detente with the King here. Why the hell Iphwin insists on operating in any of the Reichs, let alone the Dutch Reich, is beyond me. You’re an expat, aren’t you, Peripart?”

“Crossbred Nineteener and Remnant,” I said, “originally out of Illinois and California. You must be too?”

“You have me beat,” he said, smiling. “Hawaiian exodus on both sides of the family, and nobody knows where they came from before then. I have a few distant cousins that were Nineteeners.”

We chatted for a few minutes, as all expats do, seeing if we had any distant shared relatives or mutual acquaintances. Anymore it’s almost a relief when you don’t—if we can find unassimilated Americans we don’t know, it means our numbers haven’t shrunk as far as we might reasonably have feared. We shook hands, and I went up to the room.

The lock had already been set to my thumb, and my bags were inside, along with Helen’s—hers were mostly unpacked, since she was one of those people who don’t feel comfortable in a hotel room until they’ve homesteaded it. The note from her on the bed said she’d gone out shopping, that Iphwin’s men had already briefed her on the situation, and that she’d be back in a little while.

I stripped naked and stretched out on top of the coverlet to take a nap. Dr. Pinkbourne’s painkillers were hitting me nicely by then, so that my whole body had kind of a pleasant warm glow. I was asleep a moment later, and it seemed as if the next instant I was waking up in the middle of a long passionate kiss from Helen. When the kiss broke I sat up and discovered that she was also naked; she must have undressed before climbing onto the bed beside me, I realized in a groggy sort of way. “Hello there,” I said.

Even if I hadn’t been quietly in love with her for the past five years, I’d have liked what I saw. Helen had thick chestnut hair, and when it was loose, as it was now, it hung to her waist in a soft natural wave. Her eyes were gray-green, her snub nose was sprayed with freckles, and her mouth was wide and full-lipped above a strong chin; not everyone’s idea of attractive, but it certainly got my attention. Her body, thanks to her swimming, running, rowing, and hiking, was strong and muscular, compact more than willowy, longer in the torso than in the legs, and she had pleasantly big round buttocks and smallish, very firm breasts. Just at the moment, she was climbing on top of me, so that the thick hair formed sort of a tent around my face; she pushed me back on the bed and pressed her breast against my face. I sucked the nipple gently; her breath caught and she pinned my hands back and wrapped me in her thighs. She said, “I’m in the mood and I took the injection for the weekend. Let’s, please, before we do anything else.”

It was quick and very pleasant, and I was grateful that Pinkbourne had thought to ask before spraying my crotch. As Helen and I lay there in the afterglow, I said, “Why, Professor Perdita, what do you suppose your Intro to American History students would think if they could see us now?”

“They’d think you were a pervert of the first order, Dr. Peripart,” she said, grinning. “Imagine doing an old bag like me.”

“If I start imagining that again,” I said, “we won’t get out of the hotel room all weekend. Since I’m now affluent and with a good job, would you like to order a ring, make it official, and spend the rest of the weekend celebrating?”

“Lyle, is that your way of asking me to marry you?”

I sat up next to her, hugged her, and said, “Yes.”

In the full-length mirror, I saw the happy couple; Helen looked great, and although I was going to be forever nondescript by comparison—thin straight salt-and-pepper hair cut short, turned-up nose and thick lips, skinny frame without an ounce of extra muscle or fat on it—I figured that any children we had might get lucky and look like her, and if not, well, nobody had ever screamed and pointed at the sight of me.

She sat for a long time, pretending to think it over, as I held her, and finally said, “You do notice that you are really assuming that I would accept?”

“Of course I am. It’s a basic sales technique. I want you to say yes, so I’m using the best sales tactics I know.”

“Well, all right, so if the astronomy racket stops paying, you can sell vacuum cleaners door to door, and thus keep yourself from becoming a burden on me. Still and all, would you mind asking me in a fairly traditional manner, just as if we were a couple of fairly traditional people?”

I let go of her, rolled off the bed, dropped to one knee, took her hand, gazed upward, and said, “For god’s sake marry me or I’ll kill myself.”

“Does that have to be an either-or?” she asked. “Well, since you put it that way, what the hell.”

“Does that mean yes?” I asked, still not getting up off the floor.

“I guess it does,” she said. “What the hell.”

“Those three little words that mean so much,” I said, standing up and giving her a long, hard kiss.

She kissed back and said, “And now about your kind offer of the ring. You may order me a diamond, but you are by no means to do anything as stupid as putting two months’ salary into it, since we need to start saving for a house. Plain band, wide rather than narrow, and if the diamond has some blue in it, that’s a plus. On the day of delivery I shall first run madly through the halls of the history and social science departments showing it off, then consent to a long candlelight dinner, and finally take you back to my place where I shall use you sexually to within an inch of your life.”

“Actually,” I said, “here in Saigon there are jewelers who can come up with exactly what you want in half an hour. If you’d like, we could get the ring taken care of, then go for a good long dinner—with plenty of oysters—and then see whether I am sufficiently recovered. The spirit is very, very willing but the flesh, at the moment, is not entertaining visitors.”

Helen sighed. “That’s amazing. In Enzy it’s a month or more to get a piece of jewelry. At least that’s what it’s like for all my girlfriends when they get engaged. All the paperwork for owning gold. How do we go about buying a gold ring here? Do we just go to a shop or something?”

“We can, if you’d like. But most of the shops have a catalog on-line, and you can handle the material through a virtual reality setup, so you can see exactly what you’re going to be getting. Either way would be fine with me.”

“Hmm. Well, the idea that you can just buy diamonds in a shop seems very exotic and fascinating, but the idea of getting dressed, just at the moment, seems like a bother. Can your computer link into the local phone system? Mine didn’t have the translator module it needed.”

“Should be able to,” I said, and got it out of its case. A little plugging and fiddling, more to run two headsets on two accounts than anything related to the hotel system, was all it took, and we were on-line.

“How can buying an engagement ring be such a hassle at home and so easy here?” she asked.

I made a noncommittal noise. Some expats won’t travel to the Reichs, some won’t travel outside the free countries, and some just don’t travel. I was never sure what Helen’s real feelings on travel were; since her specialty was American history, and any expat setting foot in the American Reich is vulnerable to arrest and to being claimed as a citizen, she had never been inside the nation whose past she studied. It wasn’t as bad as it had been when we were kids—back then, every day it seemed you heard a new chilling story of a professor, artist, scholar, or athlete being arrested and forcibly repatriated while in the American Reich; it often took years for friends and relatives to get them back out, and meanwhile they were subject to racial purity testing and the grim possibility of execution. But though things were much more relaxed now, nobody wanted to take chances.

Other than that, she had mentioned many times that she had not traveled much. Since I had to travel—there was so much of my work that required visiting colleagues at other observatories— I had gotten used to it. I was comfortable with a few things the people in the free countries were often eager to avoid thinking about—such as the fact that the free countries were both backward and backwaters.

After the Great Reich War, in the early 1950s, Germany ruled the world, and with her atom-fusion bombs, no one was in a position to challenge her. Japan, Italy, and the other Axis nations found themselves to be minor partners in the whole business, generously rewarded but told firmly what they would and would not do; Japan, for example, could not have any white nation in conquest. Italy was required to split Africa with the South African Reich, though South Africa had been on the other side.

The great campaign of extermination had begun in parallel with the construction of the Twelve Reichs and the two Empires, so that by 1970 most of the world’s land—a severely depopulated land—was Lebensraum for the Reichs (which is to say, a fresh graveyard for everyone else), or under the sway of the Emperor of Japan or the Duce of Italy. Here and there, however, there were a few small nations, protected by the Germans because they were white, that had not been occupied, but didn’t have the means to fight back—Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Uruguay, and the others.

It had been Hitler’s choice to leave them alone, under very strict conditions; they could not broadcast with enough power to be heard outside their own borders, they were sharply limited in military forces, they would in no way significantly oppose the Reichs or the Empires. And to make sure of their good behavior, the free countries were given access to new technology only after a long delay and only partially; trade barriers were set against them, and cooperation between them simply could not take the place of real participation in the global economy. Painful as it was to admit it, the free countries, beloved of expats, tended to be decades behind the times, old and timid places where little bits of individual human decency might still shine, but nothing that really mattered to history would ever happen again.

If you lived in the free countries, especially if you were affluent and educated, it might take a very long time to notice that your nation was a global backwater. But if you traveled, as I did, you got accustomed to it—and accustomed, also, to not speaking of the matter around your countrymen.

That was why I hesitated a long moment before telling Helen, “Well, the truth is, the diamond trade is plenty fast and efficient, and it doesn’t take any time to make up a ring. But the machines for the job are prohibited to Enzy by treaty, and diamonds are taxed at a very high rate, and it takes a long time for the paperwork to go through in the South African Reich, which is where the business gets done. Most of all, our currency is squishy and the government has to make sure the gold reserve doesn’t get drawn down, so every gram of gold has to be accounted for. But none of that applies here in the Japanese Empire. If you just buy a ring here, for personal use, you can get it in any jewelry store in a few minutes. If you’d rather stay here and just enjoy being together for a while, and do your order by virtual reality, that’s fine, but later on we’ll take you out and get you exposed to the whole big planet full of shopping.”

“Suits me fine,” Helen said, and sighed. “I guess you’re trying to find a gentle way to remind me that I’m just a country girl from the sticks?”

“Don’t worry, dear. I’m a bumpkin myself. I’ve just been to town a few more times than you have.”

We put on headsets and goggles and started exploring the jewelry areas. Most of the net was closed to VR access from the free countries, and the software for accessing it was only available in the outside world; that was why her computer hadn’t been able to get on, but mine carried the necessary translator modules from all the previous trips.

She startled me. I’d always thought she’d want to look around a long time for the perfect engagement ring, but in short order she had found the pattern she wanted and the diamond she wanted to put into it, and ten minutes after our logging on she asked, “Will your credit stand a bill this big? I don’t want you living on tinned beans and noodles for the next year to pay for this.”

I looked at the bill; it was half what I’d been prepared to pay, and I told her so, but that ring was the ring she wanted, so we ordered it, and the ordering firm copied the order over to a Saigon jeweler who promised to have it made up and delivered in about fifteen minutes. They gave us a quick peek at the exact diamond they would be using, and Helen said she liked it even better than the sample that she had used when choosing the pattern.

We confirmed the order and that was that. “We should probably get dressed,” I said, “if a courier is going to come in here.”

We compromised on slipping into robes and pajamas; a few minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and after giving my thumbprint for ID, the ring was ours. It fit perfectly—not surprisingly, since the artificial intelligence had been able to read Helen’s finger through the VR glove—and we spent a few minutes admiring it before Helen said, “So, where for dinner tonight?”

“Well,” I said, “do you want tradition, romance, or just a real good feel for the real Saigon?”

“Where do we go for romance?”

“Right down the stairs to the Royal Saigon’s hotel restaurant, a place called the Curious Monkey, which you may have seen as you were coming in—it faces the street behind an air curtain. Perfect for romance.”

She looked at me just a little suspiciously. “How about for tradition, then?”

“Also easy. We go to the Curious Monkey. Decades of being one of the best-known places in southeast Asia, traditional decor, a menu that hasn’t changed since the hotel was built.”

“Unh-hunh. And I bet that the Curious Monkey has the real feel of the real Saigon, too, right?”

“Absolutely. If that’s what you had wanted, it’s where we would have gone.”

“Couldn’t you have just said you wanted to go to the Curious Monkey?”

I shrugged and spread my hands. “And not give you a choice? Hardly fair.”

As we dressed I told her about it. I was surprised that she had never heard of the Curious Monkey, but I supposed she really hadn’t traveled much.

The Curious Monkey had been founded by a Frenchman before 1940, purchased by an American expat sometime around 1970, handed down in his family for some generations, and moved by royal order to the Royal Saigon Hotel when it was established. It was now owned by a wealthy family in Japan which had the good sense to run it with a staff of expats.

No one seemed to know anymore why it had been named the Curious Monkey; the one American expat who was descended from the old owner said that family legend had it that the Frenchman himself did not recall, had named it when he was drunk with friends and had never been able to bring himself to ask if they knew why he had done that.

Since at least the 2020s, when a number of spy movies and romances were filmed there, the Curious Monkey had been one of the world’s best-known restaurants. Because it was well known, all sorts of celebrities the world over had dined there— the Himmler family maintained a permanent table, as did His Most Catholic Majesty. The Crown Prince had been known to fly there from Tokyo just for the lemongrass soup, and half the world’s actors seemed to hang out in the bar, desperately hoping some trillionaire would take them to dinner.

For all that, the Curious Monkey also remained a place where you could get a superior meal for a very high, but not ridiculous, price. They could easily have doubled their prices and never had an empty seat, but apparently the Curious Monkey was under a mandate to stay as affordable as it could manage (which was of course not very affordable for anyone like me, as a usual thing— but it was also not at a level intended for people to show off how much they could afford to waste, as so many places in Saigon, Bangkok, Rangoon, and Tokyo were).

I phoned downstairs and got a reservation. As always it required negotiating to get the staff at the Curious Monkey to admit they had a table that I might reserve for that night, and that in fact it would be available reasonably soon.

The phone rang as I was tying my cravat. I picked it up and was surprised to find Geoffrey Iphwin on the other end of the line. “Hello,” he said. “Just wanted you to know that I’ve called the Curious Monkey and dinner is on me for tonight. Partly in apology for our security having slipped up and let the obnoxious Miss Beard get at you, and partly as an engagement present for my two new employees.”

“Two new employees?”

“Didn’t Helen tell you? I hired her this afternoon after a phone interview, while she was waiting for you.”

I covered the phone with my hand and said, “Are you working for Iphwin now too?”

Helen was struggling into a long black dress that clung to her in a very flattering way. “Yes, silly, didn’t I tell you? He hired me to be your administrative assistant. I said I didn’t know anything about statistics or abductive math, and he said then I’d have to concentrate on administering and assisting. I thought I told you when I phoned you while you were inbound into Saigon. Didn’t I tell you?”

She hadn’t.

“Um, no.” I turned back to Iphwin on the phone. “Well, I guess she is hired at that. And, uh, er, thank you, and it really isn’t necessary—”

“Of course it’s not. Gifts are never necessary, that’s what makes them gifts. But it gives me great pleasure to do this for you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind a bit,” I said, very sincerely, trying to cover up for my beginning to feel very meddled-with. “But I do feel bewildered.”

“Well, that’s a feeling you’re going to have for quite a while, I think,” Iphwin said. “Something else I should let you know is that in my continuing disagreements with the Political Offenses cops, I have reserved a special spot for making the life of Billie Beard unhappy. Her behavior is the sort of thing that I really cannot allow. I have already given Mort orders that one way or another she is to be kept away—away from you, away from Helen, away from ConTech, and far from the realm of any possible human happiness.”

“I agree with the sentiment,” I said, and this time it was no effort at all to sound sincere.

“Enjoy your evening, then. And your left cuff link is behind your right foot.”

I looked back and saw that it was.

He went right on. “Anyway, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Plenty of work ahead, so you might as well enjoy yourself now. Bye!”

“Bye ...” I said, and bent to pick up the cuff link as I heard the click of the breaking phone connection.

I held it in my hand a long time. Did Iphwin have hidden cameras in here? Had he watched Helen and me making love? Why was one of the world’s wealthiest industrialists so interested in two obscure faculty members from a backwater college?

And if he didn’t have hidden cameras, or if there was something that interesting about us—I didn’t want to think about either possibility, so I threaded my cuff link in and fastened it, resolving not to think for any reason for the rest of the night.

“Iphwin called me just after you dropped me off,” Helen said. “Really, no one is doing anything behind your back—I just forgot to tell you in all the excitement. You needn’t look so troubled.”

It was the cuff link, and not her job, that was troubling me, but I wasn’t about to spoil the evening with worry. “You look terrific,” I said, in a complete non sequitur that almost always worked.

From the way she smiled, I judged that it had worked again, and now I had only to finish dressing and try not to let myself worry to excess.

Our reservation was not for an hour and a half yet, so we sat down in chairs on opposite sides of my computer, plugged into our VR helmets and gloves, and went off to announce our engagement to our chat room friends, setting an alarm so that we would leave ourselves plenty of time to get to the Curious Monkey.

Both Helen and I had been frequenting this chat room for a couple of years, long enough and often enough so that each of us thought we had introduced the other to it. It wasn’t the liveliest chat room either of us had ever found, just a place where a few expats scattered all over the globe liked to get together. Around seven PM Enzy time, almost every day, our little group logged on and met, just as if there were things we particularly needed to talk about or real business to be done.

A few weeks ago everyone had gotten bored with the old Roman Forum setting that we’d had for the better part of a year, so to give it a drastic change we had reset it as Casablanca—not the city, but the film. That movie was still nearly the expatriate’s Bible—it had everything—a real American of African descent, a free and tough American, defiance of the Germans. Using that movie also made our chat group, which was a tight one, less likely to have visitors, since the movie was banned everywhere except the free countries (and even there was really only permitted in unadvertised private showings—local German consuls tended to regard it as something other than a purely internal matter).

Helen and I had gotten lucky—I was wearing the Paul Henreid body, and looked smashing in a white suit; she had gotten the Ingrid Bergman.

We went over to join our friends at the table. All of them had gotten there before we had, and were wearing the red rose on a lapel, or as a brooch, that indicated that they were present in real time, and not just an artificial personality recording the events for later. “Hello, everyone,” I said. “We have some real news this evening.”

The Colonel—I had just learned that afternoon that his real name was Roger Sykes—was wearing the body of Sidney Greenstreet tonight; sometimes he wore the Bogart body instead. He leaned way back in his chair and said, “Well, then, share it.”

At his right, Kelly Willen, wearing a dignified older lady from one of the crowd scenes, nodded and smiled. Terri Teal, dressed as a demimonde to no one’s surprise, nodded at us. She flicked some ash from her extremely long and decadent-looking cigarette holder and said, “Do tell.”

The effect was somewhat spoiled for me by my knowledge that Terri was actually a strictly brought up sixteen-year-old girl whose prosperous father owned an import-export firm in Cairo, in the Italian Empire. Probably she’d never been allowed out of the house without a small army of guards and chaperones. All of us were fond of her but we could hardly help hoping that the day would come soon when she’d stop picking the most decadent possible roles for herself. “Do, do tell,” she added, in the most affected accent she had available.

I grinned broadly and said, “We’re getting married.”

Roger flagged down Humphrey Bogart and ordered champagne all around. Bogart leaned over the table and said to Terri, “I don’t know that I care for an underage dame in my joint.”

We glanced at his lapel, saw that he was just a program, and all said “Ignore” in unison. He walked two steps backward, came forward, said “Right away, sir,” and went to get the champagne.

I turned back to my friends and began, “We’re having a little pre-honeymoon in—” My voice stopped dead. I couldn’t seem to say either the word “Saigon” or “the Royal Saigon Hotel.” Everyone froze—but no one seemed to notice the trailing sentence, for a moment later the conversation resumed. And by way of bragging I added that we had both been hired by Iphwin, which did impress everyone.

It was a pretty nice party, with champagne that could make you happy and silly but not drunk, or rather not drunk in a way that lasted after you took the headset off, and everyone talking about their day—Terri’s life and times at the American School, Roger’s beach fishing, Kelly’s getting a role in Abe Lincoln in Illinois at the American Theater in Paris. I wanted to say that I was amazed that the French Reich would tolerate that, but the conversation moved on while I was still formulating the thought. As it wound down—Terri was going off to school, Kelly needed to bathe and dress for rehearsal, and Roger was going to bed, one of the complications in a friendship that spanned so many time zones—Helen and I made our excuses, unplugged, and went downstairs.

In appearance the Curious Monkey was extraordinarily simple—a large group of tables in what looked like an open-air setting—an air curtain kept it pleasantly air-conditioned. The rooms were simple and functional, with plain-looking tables and chairs, but if you knew what to look for you would know that every stick of furniture in the place was collectable early twentieth century. The walls held a dozen paintings of note—French impressionists mainly, but also a Mondrian, and—if you looked closely enough at the nondescript pen-and-brush of a cathedral, hanging in a dim corner near the bus counter—even an authentic Hitler. People were dressed exceptionally well, even the very famous.

There was no menu per se; the waiter would talk with you for a while, get an idea of what you enjoyed and what you were in the mood for that night, and then go back and talk to the chef, who would endeavor to surprise you with something you would never have thought of, which you would like better than what you would have ordered.

This particular waiter was a small, slim, gentlemanly man, Vaguely Eurasian in appearance, who listened to us with such great enthusiasm that anyone would have thought he really cared what we liked to eat. We chatted with him pleasantly for a few minutes, about Saigon and how we liked the place, before he said, “We had a message earlier that you are to be the guests of Mr. Iphwin. Mr. Iphwin told us to stress to you that you can have anything you would like, but he would be especially pleased if you would let us prepare Mr. Iphwin’s favorite meal for you.”

Of course we agreed at once; curiosity alone would have insured that. It turned out to be sort of a sampler of old American cooking—a platter of foods that you might have found at an American picnic in the 1920s or 1930s. There were deviled eggs, a hot dog, a hamburger, a slice of meat loaf, a Southern-fried chicken breast, mayo and mustard potato salads, coleslaw, Jell-O salad, and baked beans, arranged artfully on a wicker tray with a red checked cloth. The ketchup was real Heinz Old Recipe and the mustard was Plochman’s Yellow—both of which were extremely expensive, made only in small hand lots by those families.

Helen and I had each had some version of most of those dishes, but many of the authentic ingredients were now expensive and hard to come by. My guess was that we were eating a week’s college teaching pay. They served it with Miller, of course, the only authentic expat beer, tooth-chilling cold in a frozen mug.

Dessert was a black cow, real right down to the Dad’s Root Beer. “Do you suppose,” I asked, “that they’re ever going to completely assimilate us? I mean, here we are, third generation out of the country, and you and I—we, who not only have never set foot in America, but only knew, when we were children, very old people who had left it when they were very young—we are getting misty-eyed over how this food is just the way it should be, and of course we’re insisting on marrying expats, both of us.”

“I’ve heard the idea that what we’ve done is become the replacements for the Jews,” Helen said, scooping out a little of the homemade ice cream from her parfait glass. “You know, unassimilable people, profitable to have around, tending not to be liked by the neighbors. Can you believe they got the recipe to make this root beer, too? Anyway, we’ve become the people that can’t assimilate whether they want to or not, with no home of our own, loyal enough to whoever takes us in, hardworking, making some friends, but never exactly accepted as one of the locals. And about that... well, I’d say they seem to be right.”

I shuddered. “Remember what happened to the Jews. And I suppose Americans aren’t that scarce—we tend to forget all the Reich Americans who are still living there. Their descent is as American as ours.”

“Not really,” Helen pointed out. “We’re descended from all of America, the whole forty-eight, in the 1940s. The Reich Americans are descended from white people who could prove they didn’t have any Jewish, Negro, or Slavic ancestors. So much of real American culture was Negro, and Jewish, and big-city Slavic, and all the rest of the melting pot; the Reich Americans have thrown that all away, whereas we’re all interbred. We’re the real Americans. They’re one narrow slice.”

She left it unsaid, since we were outside Enzy, but I knew perfectly well she was referring to my black grandmother and her Jewish grandfather. Once we became expats, many old barriers had come down, and already in the Reichs there was a stereotype of the expat American as a racial mongrel, darker skinned than the Reich Americans.

Helen went on. “Think about the fact that no expat I’ve ever known has been in touch with relatives in the Reich, even though just about all of us must have some. And we’re only the third generation. On my block there’s a man who is seven generations removed from Ireland, and yet he still stays in touch with his cousins. The family that runs that good Italian restaurant downtown—the one by the park?—is five generations out of Italy and still holds a party every time a cousin back home sends them a birth announcement. It’s only expat Americans who don’t seem to keep touch with America.”

“Well, supposedly we were always very mobile, always moving over the next hill. Maybe we just find it easier to lose touch.”

“I suppose anything is possible,” Helen said, “but it’s not like the Irish or the Italians all stayed home.” I was getting bored. This was one of those things expats could talk about endlessly. I wondered if, back when the Americans were still in America, they had spent as much time as expats did now talking about what exactly it meant to be an American. It seemed very unlikely.

“Isn’t this whole meal amazing?” I asked, switching the subject. “I think I’ve had most of these dishes at one time or another, but not all at once, and when I have had this stuff it has rarely been with all authentic ingredients. And the fact that they could serve this all at once implies that they must have had all these ingredients just sitting back there in the kitchen waiting. Imagine being able to just do that.”

She grinned at me. “Well, speaking of being able to just do things, our salaries are going way up. We can probably do this for anniversaries or something.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, recognizing the request for what it was. “Of course after a while there may be problems getting a sitter—”

Helen snorted with laughter. “Geoffrey Iphwin is offering us a chance to work on an extremely challenging and interesting project. I don’t plan on getting knocked up right away, my dearest, so if you’re hoping to get the project all to yourself that way, well, hope for something else. I’m not going to spend what could easily be the most exciting months of my intellectual life waddling around and throwing up.”

“We can wait as long as you want to,” I said.

There was a stir up front. It sounded like the typical situation—a German tourist from some backwater planned-development town in the New East, who has decided he wants to get a bite to eat, and hasn’t the foggiest idea that he is trying to barge into one of the most exclusive restaurants on the planet. The maitre d’ was shouting, “Sir, sir!”

The fat man, galumphing along in his sandals, knee socks, baggy red shorts, and sweat-stained formerly white safari shirt, was headed up the aisle right toward us. Behind him, I saw a German officer, in one of those black uniforms with all the metal decorations around the shoulder, standing up and giving a firm order, the sort that most Germans, in the army or not, obey instantly.

To my surprise, the German tourist ignored him. He kept coming. He looked around, then right at me, smiled in a way that froze my blood, and pulled a small pistol from the bulging lower left pocket of the safari shirt. I stared at it; owing to the policies the Reichs enforce on their trading partners, most of the world is disarmed these days and I’m not sure I had even seen a pistol since leaving the Navy.

He brought the pistol up.

He was still staring right at me. He pulled the trigger and I felt the pressure wave from the bullet as it passed my right ear.

Something made me roll toward that ear and dive under the table. Everyone was screaming. I had made the right choice, because when he adjusted his aim to my left, he missed by a wider margin. From under the table I saw a bullet hole appear in the Mondrian, and some stupid distracted part of my brain realized that, whatever might happen next, I would now be forever part of one of the legends of the Curious Monkey.

I expected the tablecloth to flip up and my last sight in this life to be the German and his pistol a scant yard away. I hugged the floor and shut my eyes.

I heard three deep booms, one after the other, and a scream. Still not thinking very clearly, I poked my head out from under the white tablecloth just in time to see Helen take her fourth shot. I learned later that she had shattered his gun shoulder with her first shot, broken his leg with the second, and put one into his back when he fell forward. Now she calmly walked forward, stood over him, pointed that huge pistol at the back of his head, and, in the horrified silence that filled the Curious Monkey, she watched him for a long second until she saw him twitch; she fired a shot that put brains and blood all over the floor and seemed to make the walls of the Curious Monkey ring.

She scanned the room, standing braced in letter-perfect position, much better than I had ever learned to do it in the Navy, with a two-handed grip on the big chunk of blue-black iron; whatever caliber it was, it was a hell of a lot more than my would-be murderer had had.

Her face had a nearly blank expression of relentless attention, the like of which I had seen on the face of a racing pilot about to execute a tight turn around a pylon. Her jaw was set but not clenched, eyes narrowed slightly, mouth a flat line; you could have projected a laser beam backward through the barrel of that gun and it would have just touched the bridge of her nose parallel with her pupils. Her arms were tense, and the sleeveless long gown showed that she had a lot more muscle than I remembered; I saw her breathe, hold, decide there were no more targets, and only then decide not to fire again. She set the safety on the pistol and set it gently on the table, then calmly reached into her purse, pulled out her phone, and called the police. “This is international police badge oh four alpha india four seven eight bravo one zero. I’m at the Curious Monkey and I’ve got Interpol codes nineteen, forty-three, and sixty-eight here. Situation is under control, but you need to get a four one four, a seventy-eight, and a Foxtrot Mike Whiskey over here, right now.”

I had no idea where she had learned to shoot, or when. Enzy is relatively backward about women’s issues and still doesn’t allow women in combat, and handguns were illegal outside of the military—she couldn’t even have learned in a private club. I lurched up beside the table, slightly messed by the spill of some expensive root beer onto one trouser leg, which I hoped would provide some camouflage for the wet spot I had made on the front of my pants. I was scared more than I’d ever been in my life, but otherwise all right. And how had Helen come to know international police codes as well as a cop? How did a professor of history carry an Interpol badge?

The horrified maitre d’hôtel was just rushing up to our table, but Helen said to him, “I am terribly sorry about this and I deeply regret disturbing everyone’s dinner. We had just finished ours and we’ll go as soon as the police get our statements and decide whether or not to arrest me.” She went back to talking to the police on the phone; apparently they were so unused to being called to the Curious Monkey that they didn’t immediately know where it was.

I looked from Helen to the maitre d’hôtel, and something caught the corner of my eye, causing me to glance back. The German tourist was lying there, face down, a great gaping hole in his lower back, his right arm at an unnatural angle where his shoulder had been shattered, blood pouring out of one pant leg, head smashed like a gourd hit with a bat. I smelled blood and some other unidentified stench—perhaps feces?—under the burnt odor of the thin cloud of blue smoke that still hung in the air, and I was sick to my stomach. I turned away, not wanting to see the sight, and drew great gasps of air, trying to hang on to the most expensive dinner I had ever eaten, tears of stress and terror leaking out of my eyes.

Helen went right on talking on the phone, brushing escaping strands of hair out of her face with her free hand, as calmly as if she were working out a schedule conflict between her classes or placing a complicated catalog order. “If you can get a coroner to run a full spectrum of drug samples from the blood on the victim, right now while everything is fresh and runny, I know my employers will really appreciate it—yeah, exactly. Look, I know you have to arrest me and take me downtown. I know it’s nothing personal. Just make sure you get some authority on the line pretty fast and that they call Iphwin and Diego Garcia for confirmation, because while I’m sure you’ve got one of the nicer jails I’m ever going to stay in, my fiancé is springing for a hell of a good room at the Royal Saigon, and that’s where I’d rather spend my engagement celebration. Yeah, he’s with me, and a witness, so I guess you’ll have to take us both along—sure thing...” She sagged and seemed to be suddenly confused. “Who is this? What? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She hung up and dropped the phone into her purse, then looked at the body, looked at me in an expression of bewildered terror, and said, “What are you doing alive? There’s not a scratch on you.”

I didn’t know what she was asking—my first thought was that she had meant to shoot at me, that she had been part of the assassination plot, and was disconcerted to find she had shot her partner. Before I could frame any kind of a question, or any idea of any kind that might take me in the direction of making sense of all of this, a squad of uniformed Cochin-Chinese National Police rushed through the air curtain, grabbed the gun from the table, handcuffed Helen, and dragged me to my feet.

The Cochin-Chinese National Police have a middling reputation among the police forces of the world. They are not the gentle sorts that Enzy, Finnish, or Irish cops are reputed to be, but they aren’t any kind of Gestapo, either. They tend to be mildly corrupt, but not enough so that you would want to take a chance on bribing one if you didn’t know him. It seemed like the best thing to do was to cooperate and to keep repeating the truth—that I had no idea what was going on or why.

They commenced a thorough but not brutal search of us and the corpse. The pistol on the table drew some exclamations— none of them had ever seen any weapon of that make before. Searching Helen, they found she was carrying other weapons: a garter derringer, a switchblade in her purse, and a throwing knife in a quick-draw sheath in the back of her underwear. In a low-backed dress like that, I suppose it would have been easy enough to reach in and get it, and might even serve as a diversion in the right situation. How had Helen concealed all that from me while she was dressing? And more importantly, how had she concealed what was apparently a pretty big part of her life from me during five years of courting?

The manager of the Curious Monkey had gotten into the argument, now, too. At least he made sense; he wanted all this crap out of his restaurant in a hurry, and he wanted the addresses of everyone involved so that he could send all of us bills for the damages.

He got part of his wish right away. A plainclothes inspector showed up, had a whispered conference with the manager in Japanese and French, and a short rapid-fire dialogue in Vietnamese with the uniformed sergeant, and barked a few short sentences. They dragged Helen, who wasn’t resisting and seemed to be in some kind of shock, over to one unmarked car and pushed her in. They dragged me to another one and did the same. All the high-level officers got into the car with Helen, so either they had already figured out which of us was really dangerous, or more likely they all wanted to claim a share in arresting the murderer rather than her accomplice.

No one in the car I was in spoke a word of English, French, or German, so although they seemed polite and nice enough, I couldn’t ask basic questions like whether or not I was under arrest or if perhaps this horrible dream might be over with soon.

The people and robots of Saigon apparently had acquired a healthy respect, though probably not any admiration, for the way that police cars drive, because everything and everyone scattered out of the way as we roared through the streets, siren wailing and red lights flashing. Pedicabs went up over the curbs, pedestrians pressed themselves off the narrow sidewalks and up against walls, and the few cars on the street abruptly remembered business elsewhere and made a quick left or right turn. The car slammed over potholes and through the dust of the side streets, roaring by small stands and the wide-open eyes and mouths of people who popped out of their front doors to see what all the fuss was about. It might have been interesting if I hadn’t been sitting in the backseat, hugging myself as tightly as the cuffs would permit, and now and then sobbing with fear.

At the police station, a detective who spoke English explained that Helen was over in women’s incarceration, and that they would need to take a number of statements and record a great deal of information, but fortunately this was not a busy Friday night and chances were good that we could be released within a few hours, especially since virtually all the witnesses from the Curious Monkey were in agreement that Helen had fired only in self-defense.

Fortunately for us, Cochin-China is one of those places that take a sensible attitude about self-defense. In Enzy there would have been a spirited discussion about whether people who try to kill you ipso facto ought to be killed before you have heard and carefully considered their reasons. I was so relieved at being treated reasonably that if I had not been handcuffed I’d gladly have dropped to my knees and kissed their hands.

They put me into a cell with half a dozen quiet drunks and opium addicts; I seemed to be the only person in the cell who was not inebriated. It did smell of urine and puke, but of old urine and puke—and of much more recent soap. I was mildly exasperated, of course, to be in here, with two wooden benches and seven men, not exactly of the sort I usually associated with, when I was also paying for a room at the Royal Saigon.

I was very glad to be alive and almost as glad to be in the hands of a relatively patient and sympathetic police force; they would question me and they probably wouldn’t believe my story, but they wouldn’t torture me into giving them a story they liked. They might, of course, keep me until I was a fungus-covered corpse, but there were probably no rubber hoses or testicle clamps in my immediate future.

Why would someone try to kill me? I couldn’t imagine what I had done. The only explanation I had was one that merely transferred the senselessness of it all one step backward—perhaps someone wanted me to be dead for the same reason that Billie Beard had wanted me to be frightened. Maybe Iphwin was up to something that had deeply infuriated, or even frightened, the German Reich itself—that would explain my first assailant’s being a member of Political Offenses and this dead man’s being obviously German. Or was that what I was supposed to think?

I had no idea even how to begin sorting out the possibilities; this was beyond anything I had ever had to think about.

Since Helen had done the shooting, no doubt they were talking to her first. And yet—after that cool, competent call to the local police—she had seemed pretty bewildered herself, as if she didn’t know what was going on either. Where could she have acquired the skills she had displayed tonight—let alone the hardware?

Just who or what had I just become engaged to?

That gave me plenty to think about, and the night was still young, so I can’t really say I was bored. After a while the door opened and they brought in another prisoner, who took the only open seat, next to me. His black pajamas reeked of several kinds of smoke, and he appeared to be extremely drunk. He sang the same little song over and over.

I had never conducted my life in any way that could possibly have led to this kind of circumstance. I could not even think of any friends or acquaintances—other than perhaps Helen or Iphwin—who had any connection to the kind of world where things like this happened.

I retraced my life, three times, all the way from my earliest memories of my parents, up till I sat down and read an ordinary, dull newspaper earlier that day, and in all of it I could find no hint that anything like this could happen to me. Meanwhile, I figured out that the fellow beside me was singing in heavily accented French, and that it was a translation of an English song I had learned from my mother while I was small:

He sang that single verse over and over with a strange determination, as if he knew he would get it right, one of these times, but he hadn’t yet, and each experiment brought him some infinitesimal step closer to the magical moment when the song, or at least that verse of it, would be as perfect as he could make it. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t dawdle; he worked with concentration but not with anxiety. Sooner or later the definitive Viet-accented a cappella French version of “I Was Drunk Last Night” would emerge, and meanwhile, the rest of the world could listen, or not. He would succeed, given time enough.

When they finally came for me I had all the lyrics down cold, and had begun to form a theory of the deeper significance of the song, which, luckily, I was never to develop any further. The cell door swung open and the polite inspector who had booked me in called my name and pointed to me. I stood and followed him down the hall to an office; behind me the cell door clanged shut.

He gestured me to a chair and handed me a glass of water; I took a sip.

“Well,” the inspector said, looking at his beautifully manicured hands and brushing his lank gray hair from his heavily freckled forehead, “we are in some difficulty here. Your friend tells us that she knows nothing about anything that has happened, and denies even remembering the shooting. Perhaps you could enlighten us as to why she is making such silly claims.”

“I wish I could,” I said. “I didn’t even know that she had a gun with her, let alone a whole arsenal.”

“The odd part is that she claims that she didn’t know either,” the inspector said. Fussily, he straightened his bright red necktie, and leaned forward toward me, resting his elbows on his knees and gazing into my eyes the way they do in the movies.

“I really don’t know anything,” I said.

“Well, provisionally I’m going to believe you, because I’ve never seen two people look so bewildered after an arrest as you and Dr. Perdita look. But even though I believe you—” there was something vaguely threatening in the way he said that “—let’s just walk through the list of questions with you, Dr. Peripart. First of all, do you have any acquaintance with an American expat who works for the Political Offenses Section, named Billie Beard?”

“My god, I certainly do. Just this afternoon, she attacked me physically, roughed me up, interrogated me, whatever you want to call it, in my own jump boat, in Surabaya harbor.”

“And did you want revenge?”

“What kind of question is that?” I was bewildered. “Is she connected to the man who was shot?”

The inspector stared at me. “What man? The body in the Curious Monkey was—you couldn’t possibly have mistaken her for a man! A hundred-and-fifty-centimeter-tall blonde woman in a tight black dress? According to the ID in her bag, she was Billie Beard, American expat citizen with dual citizenship in the American and Dutch Reichs, which was confirmed by fingerprints on file here, and a wire to Batavia confirmed it.”

“It can’t be. I saw the man clearly.”

The inspector shook his head. “We can sort this out one way or another. Can you at least come down to the morgue with me and confirm that the dead woman we took out of the Curious Monkey is Billie Beard? That would help a great deal.”

“Certainly.”

The morgue was a product of the mercifully brief period when the Emperor had been infatuated with Speerist monumentalism, around 1970, so the ceilings were vaulted and far above our heads, and the corridors echoed like something out of a horror movie. The room itself was big, air-conditioned, and brightly lit. The inspector and the attendant rolled her out of a big walk-in refrigerator and pulled back the sheet; sure enough, it was Billie Beard, or at least it looked very much like her since the face was so distorted by the exit wound near the mouth, and I said so.

She was wounded in the same places that I had seen my “anonymous German tourist” shot.

“This is the body that we picked up in the Curious Monkey. We have not yet found the bullets, so we can’t do the matching just yet, but the wounds are consistent with a high-velocity high-caliber pistol at a range of a few meters, and of course we found just such a pistol on your table, with Helen Perdita’s right-hand fingerprints on it. We’re paraffin testing her right now but we’re sure we’ll get a confirmation that she fired it.”

“She did—I heard her fire all four shots, and saw her fire the last one.” Probably I was naive but just now the only thing that seemed to make any sense was to keep telling the truth until someone got around to telling me what was going on. I stared at the shattered body. “But the person who came in and shot at me was a man, overweight, wearing red shorts and a dirty white safari shirt, shorter than this—” The room was getting dark and it was hard to breathe; I saw the lights of the ceiling for an instant and felt something thump the back of my head, realizing that it must be the floor just as I passed out.

When I woke up my first thought was that I was home in bed and nothing had happened—but the bed was too narrow and uncomfortable to be mine, and when I sat up I was still in evening clothes. The light came on and I saw that I was on a folding cot in a small room, with a desk and two chairs, and the man in the doorway who had just turned on the light was the inspector. So much for that hope, I thought.

The inspector said, “We certainly have a problem here. Are you feeling better? Whatever the truth may be, I’m sure you’ve had a series of unpleasant shocks.” He handed me a glass of water and said, “We can give you a stimulant or a tranquilizer if it will help.”

“I don’t think I want to take any drugs,” I said. “I don’t want my brain to have any excuses other than plain old reality— whatever that may be.”

“I think I understand. Are you well enough for me to continue questioning you?”

“I don’t think I know whether I am. I guess we’ll have to try and see.”

He nodded, dragged the chair over to the cot, and sat down with his elbows on his knees as before. “Just stay where you are and if you pass out again we won’t be put to the trouble of moving you. Well, we’ve interviewed both of you separately, and at this point all I can say is that if it’s a set of alibis, it’s the worst I’ve ever heard, and if it’s not, I have no idea what is going on. Now tell me the whole story of your day.”

I did, starting from getting up in the morning and omitting nothing; Iphwin had not asked me to keep any secrets, and besides, since I couldn’t help thinking that my new job must have something to do with all this, I wasn’t so sure that I was particularly fond of Iphwin, or owed him anything, anyway.

When I finished, the inspector sighed and said, “Well, your story is consistent with Dr. Perdita’s. And there are a surprisingly large number of anomalies that tend to bear you out, which I can’t tell you about because they are the sort of thing our prosecuting judges like to hold in reserve. This means that I am being driven, very reluctantly and uncomfortably, to conclude that you may just be telling me the truth as you know it. What we must now account for is how you know and believe that particular version of the truth.” He sighed. “It is not a criminal offense to be shot at, although it is generally regarded as a highly suspicious activity. And Cochin-China does recognize a right of lethal force in self-defense. Furthermore, Helen Perdita had in her handbag a permit for all of the weapons she was carrying, issued by His Most Catholic Majesty’s secret service—oddly enough, along with similar permits from half a dozen other nations. I don’t know what she does for a living, but it can’t be just teaching history, and she can’t seriously have expected us to believe it. And yet when confronted with the permits, although she agreed that the picture and the signature were hers, she denied ever having applied for or gotten the permits, or even knowing that they were in her bag. Since our secret service has said a number of reassuring things to us, we might perhaps just let all of this drop, as an intelligence matter with which we do not wish to meddle, except that none of the intelligence agencies, ours or others’, that we would expect to have contacted us by now, have done so. Our relations with the Dutch Reich are rather bad, and Billie Beard was wanted on suspicion of three assassinations we have jurisdiction over, so by itself her death does not greatly trouble us, but we would really like to be told, officially, that the whole thing is none of our business.”

“I am finding all sorts of things hard to believe,” I said.

“I can let you go, but I have a sense that you might prefer to wait around until we can also release Helen Perdita. That may be a while, or perhaps we won’t release her for some time to come, or at all. Delicate matters are involved of which nothing can be said, but they may lead to a happier situation than the present one. I hope you’ll understand.”

“Even if I don’t understand, I don’t suppose it matters much.”

“It’s good that you’re so perceptive—it makes communication with you easier.”

They took me back to the cell, then, and I got to hear a few dozen more renditions of “I Was Drunk Last Night.” There wasn’t any notable improvement, but it wasn’t for lack of effort or patience.

About ten-thirty that night, a cop in uniform came by and said, “You. Come on. You’re being released.”

“Is the woman I was arrested with—”

“Dr. Perdita is already waiting for you, and so are the men from ConTech.”

He unlocked the door and I followed him out; we went directly to the front desk, where Helen was waiting, still in her evening dress. Her long brown hair was down and looked disheveled—probably they had searched her coif. She was pale with anxiety, so that her makeup looked like a bad paint job on her white skin, but she didn’t seem to be hurt otherwise. There were a bunch of men I’d never seen before standing there, most of them in suits, all of them battered, beaten, and bruised. The heavyset older one said to me, “Sir, we really must apologize. We got here as soon as we could.”

“You’re from ConTech?”

“We’re your bodyguards. We just broke out of an attic where we were being held. Two that you don’t see here are in the hospital. And we’re all feeling like a bunch of clowns, sir. While we were tied up in that attic, you took awfully good care of yourselves—or at least Dr. Perdita took very good care of both of you. It should never have happened—we should have been there to stop Billie Beard—but at least you’re unhurt, and we did come as fast as we could.”

“Then Mr. Iphwin secured our release?”

“Geoffrey Iphwin and ConTech don’t swing much weight here,” the inspector said, behind me. “At least, that is, at any level of which I’m aware. You got released by direct order of His Most Catholic Majesty. And so far as I can tell the reason for that was a protest lodged by the Ambassador from the Free Republic of Diego Garcia, based on Dr. Perdita’s dual citizenship.”

I stared at him. I had never heard of the Free Republic of Diego Garcia. Helen looked more shocked than I’d ever seen her, even more shocked than in the moments after the shooting.

But getting out of jail when you’re being held for murder is not the kind of thing you turn down just because you don’t know what’s going on. We and Iphwin’s men hurried out into the night.

The heavyset guy said, “My name is McMoore. I apologize again, sir.”

“It’s quite all right,” I said, “since neither of us can figure out what is going on, anyway. Helen, what do you want to do?”

“Talk privately and then sleep, I think.” She seemed terribly distracted, but then that was hardly a surprise. “I guess we could go back to the hotel.”

“We’ll do our best to guard you this time, properly,” McMoore said. “It’s not a far walk—just a few blocks—do you want to let us just form a phalanx around you and walk there slowly? I would be pretty leery of flagging down any public transport right now, eh?”

“Absolutely agreed,” I said.

I felt like I was moving at the center of an infantry patrol in enemy territory; the ConTech men were all around us, and I had a distinct sensation that every one of them had his shooting hand close to a weapon.

Nothing happened. In the last two blocks before the Royal Saigon, we passed through a cluster of brightly lit, noisy nightclubs, all of them clamoring for attention, but Helen walked slumped over, not looking around despite all the noise and color that swirled around our phalanx of bodyguards like a chaotic wake around a ship of order. Probably jail had been much tougher on her than on me—I wasn’t the one charged with murder.

I kept turning that over in my head. How could Helen possibly have concealed so much about herself? She was apparently a spy or agent of some kind for a country that as far as I knew didn’t exist. And yet I didn’t think there had been three days of her life in the last few years that I didn’t have at least some knowledge of. For that matter, how could she have gotten all those weapons concealed in her clothing when we were both dressing in the same room, and she was wearing a form-fitting backless and sleeveless dress?

Despite all the streetlights, the street was dark, and in the thick humid air we didn’t feel like moving fast anyway. This morning I had gotten up to go interview with Iphwin, hoping to get a job and then spend a weekend in Saigon with Helen. So far that much of the plan was going perfectly, but with a bewildering array of additions and changes that made no sense to me; it was as if some exceptionally stupid maker of action movies had decided to parodize my life. Helen and I drooped along, surrounded by our armed guards, who were probably pretty angry at having been so outwitted and outfought by the enemy—whoever the enemy might be.

By the time we got back to the hotel I was stumbling, falling asleep on my feet, as the adrenaline drained out of me and the reality of how complex and difficult our situation had become set in. McMoore told me that they’d take care of posting the guard, and two of his men went into the room ahead of us and searched it, finding no bugs, no weapons, and no lurking attackers. So far as we could determine, none of our possessions had been touched. “Sleep well, then, sir,” McMoore said. “Once again—”

“You’re terribly sorry, I know,” I said. “And once again, I can’t even begin to think what you could possibly have done differently. None of us had any idea how much trouble was about to erupt. I know I’ll sleep better, knowing that you’re out here guarding us, and truly, if Iphwin gives you all trouble, I’ll be sure to speak up for you.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“And I’m glad you’re here too,” Helen said, the first words she had spoken since we left the police station.

McMoore nodded and left; Helen and I undressed slowly, turned out the lights, and got into bed.

After a long pause, I said, “First of all there’s a small thing I want to ask you. When and where did you ever learn to use those weapons, let alone to go so heavily armed to dinner? I didn’t even see you put them on—you must have been really quick.”

She groaned, a sound so painful that I thought for a moment that she was ill, and thumped the bed with a fist. “I don’t have the foggiest idea. I don’t know how to shoot, Lyle, I don’t, I never learned, I can’t remember even ever holding a gun. All I know is that you and I went to dinner, after getting engaged, and then I don’t remember much about dinner, except that it was some kind of Italian veal dish—I remember the attack, but the strangest part is that my impression was that she was aiming at me, and I remember getting under the table and you standing up, and some gunfire, and your body falling backwards with blood all over. I saw that my purse had fallen off the table, so I grabbed my phone and hit the emergency key—and then there I was, not under the table, but standing up, talking on the phone to the police, with a pistol in front of me on the table, a cloud of smoke all around me, and the dead body of a fat German tourist that didn’t look remotely like the tall blonde woman who had attacked us. I had no idea what the things the police were saying meant, but I could tell they were on their way, so I hung up, looked around, and saw that you were perfectly fine, the German man was perfectly dead, and it was like I had just stepped into some other life—the dress I was wearing wasn’t mine, I looked at it in the store and decided it was too expensive—and I had a bunch of heavy objects tied to me under my clothes. You can’t imagine how strange it was when the police searched me and found out that they were weapons.”

“You want me to believe that you saw a woman come at us, and shoot at you?” I asked. “I saw the man that you saw dead, and it was definitely me he was after.”

“But it was honestly what I remember.”

“Well,” I said, “the body they showed me was Billie Beard, a woman who matches the description—very tall, blonde, muscular, in great shape but probably sixty years old. People might easily mistake her for a transvestite. Was that the woman you saw?”

“Yes, it was. Or at least your description matches.”

We lay there still in the dark, not touching each other. My arms were folded on my chest; Helen seemed to be clutching the sheet. Like the very best hotels everywhere, the room was pitch black and dead silent, and I only knew where she was from the feel of the warmth of her body and the sound of her breathing. After a long time I thought of something else that I should mention. “The strangest thing of all in some ways,” I said, “is that I believe you.”

Helen sighed. “And I saw you shot dead in front of me and here you are.”

“We seem to have a difference in our observations,” I said. “And about some pretty critical matters.” I was near crying or screaming, but Helen seemed to be worse off than I was, and she had had a much worse, scarier time. I was not going to throw a funk in front of her while I had any self-control at all. “Didn’t it seem strange how fast the Cochin-Chinese dropped the case? If anything they seemed to be suddenly extremely interested in investigating the case, and happy to get us out the door. And if Iphwin didn’t put in the fix—well, there isn’t any Free Republic of Diego Garcia, and—”

Helen wailed, a horrible sound I’d never heard come out of her before, and began to sob. “Not anymore,” she choked out. “There’s not one anymore. And I don’t know where it went.”

I’m probably not one of the world’s great lovers. If pressed, I would have to admit I’m just about the classic stereotype of the scientist who doesn’t know what to do in an emotional situation, but even I could figure this one out; I rolled over, reached out in the dark, took Helen in my arms, and held her as her body pitched and bucked with sobs.

A very long time later, she whispered, “I am going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before, nobody at all, not ever. I’m not sure what it means, if anything. I don’t know that it means anything. Maybe it only means that I’m mentally ill, but— oh, Lyle, it’s so hard to trust anyone, even you, with this.”

I hugged her close and said, “Tell me about it, or don’t. Your call. I’ll love you anyway.”

It must have been the right thing to say. Helen grabbed my hand and squeezed it, hard, and then whispered, “All right. Don’t even ask any questions till I’m done or I’ll never have the courage to tell you the whole thing, but here goes. I grew up among the first generation born on Diego Garcia, where the Pacific Fleet of the American Navy fled and established the Free Republic after the Puritan Party won the elections in 1996 and took over the country. There were no Reichs when I grew up—I don’t mean I didn’t hear about them, I mean the United States and Russia and Britain won the war, Hitler died sometime in the forties, Germany was divided among the victors, all that. In 1983 there was an atomic war between the United States and all the Communist countries—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan—and after the war, when we were forced to give the whole northern tier of states plus New England to Canada, and Florida to Cuba, and so forth, the Puritan Party became very powerful, got elected, and made it illegal to be anything except a Puritan Christian. In the years just after that, almost two million people who fled the country made their way to where the fleet had put in, at the old naval facilities at Diego Garcia, and created a small trading nation there, kind of like Macao or Singapore, which quickly became rich. Really, that’s the world I went to high school in. I’m not making it up.

“My senior year, my class went for a class trip to New Zealand, to visit the American expat community there, and on the last day, I was phoning my mother to let her know there had been a change of schedule, and suddenly my mother was asking me who I was and why I was calling her, so I got upset and hung up and dialed again—and the operator said there was no such country code and no such place. And I looked around and my whole class was gone, there was just me at the pay phone, and my Free Republic passport was gone but my American expat one was still there ... I was so scared. I ran into a Catholic shelter for street people and stayed there for days, afraid to talk to anyone, thinking I might be locked up or given drugs or shock. I listened to the news and saw some papers, and I didn’t understand a single thing I was reading, even though I knew most of the words. It sounded as if the Germans had won World War Two, and there was no Russia anymore, and there had never been a Puritan Party or a Free Republic—I was so terrified.”

“What did you do?”

“Went to the library and speed-read history books to try to learn how to fake my way through the world.

“Then I started reading other subjects, once I realized I wasn’t going to wake up and go home any minute. Math and science were easy, they weren’t much changed, but literature was really something different.

“The nuns at the shelter were very nice, they thought I must have amnesia or something and they took care of me and tried to help me recover my memory. The thing was, my memory was actually what was causing all the problem, you know. Once I was sure enough of my ability to fake being from this world I’d fallen into, I claimed to recover my memory, and I caught a boat to a small town where I thought they wouldn’t check up, told them I’d dropped out of school but I wanted to take my equivalency exam.

“They let me, I did well, then I enlisted to have a job, put in my four years for Her Majesty—as a clerk, mind you, and no one ever even showed me a weapon—and then was in a position to go to school. Naturally I majored in history—there was so much I needed to know if I wasn’t to be carted off to some loony bin—and I found I liked it, stuck with it, and here I am. And I still miss my mother horribly, and for eighteen years I’ve had a very hard time believing in the world I live in. I love you, Lyle, but I wish I could wake up and find that I’m still eighteen and this is all a dream.”

“Perfectly understandable,” I said, and gave her a little kiss on the cheek.

“You believe me?”

“I believe you’re telling the truth as you know it. And I believe that your story is entirely possible. I just don’t understand how or why. Have you checked your handbag? Do you have a Free Republic of Diego Garcia passport?”

She switched on the light and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Lyle, I’m so afraid to look. What if I do? What if... what if the Free Republic is there again? I could ... Mummy would only be fifty-eight, she’d surely still be alive, she must have been so worried— what if I don’t have it?”

I kissed her on the forehead. “Shall I look?”

“Would you, please?”

I got out her handbag and looked inside; there were not the usual two passports, US Government in Exile plus Kingdom of New Zealand. There were four. I pulled them all out. The two expected ones were there, as was one from the Free Republic. “One from Diego,” I said, and handed it to her.

“When I was growing up we called it Free Deejy,” she said, absently, sitting up in bed to look through it. “But the flag was different from this, and the capital was on board a beached aircraft carrier, not in some place called New Washington.”

“Could they have built it since you left?”

“I don’t know where. It’s a pretty small place.” She flipped to the back, where the visa stamps go. “Oh, look. I’ve been to the Free Republic of Hawaii, Korea—which doesn’t seem as if it is part of Japan—and a dozen or so times to the Indonesian Soviet Socialist Commonwealth, wherever that might be. What’s the fourth passport?”

I looked down at it and sighed. “It’s the only one that isn’t for Helen Perdita, and it’s a spare Enzy one. With an 015 code.”

“What’s an 015?”

“I guess you really were just a clerk in the Navy, love.” I sighed and sat down on the floor. “I was an officer and had to learn that anyone with an 015 gets absolutely everything he or she asks for, right now. It’s a code stamped in the upper right corner that indicates that you’re a high-level secret agent, a spy or maybe an assassin. At least now we know where you got the gun training.”

“What does it all mean?” she asked.

“It means we’re right out of any possibility of figuring it out tonight,” I said, “and it means I believe, absolutely, everything you’ve told me. Every damned word, my love. Now let’s get under the covers, turn out the light, hold each other, and see what we can learn in the morning. I love you very much, and I am so sorry that you were separated from your mother so suddenly.”

I’m not sure if that was a right or wrong thing to say; she burst into tears and cried for a good half hour before she could finally get to sleep. When I was sure she was sound asleep, I slipped out of bed, sat down on the floor, and had a good cry, myself.

The next morning we had just gotten up and had room service breakfast in. We had ordered a pot of coffee and a cup for McMoore’s man outside the door, which I figured was a wise investment, and I noted with some amusement that no one from the hotel found it even slightly unusual; the Royal Saigon probably dealt with bodyguards all the time. We were dressed and wondering what to do; not having been guarded before, we weren’t sure what it was ethical to ask people to do in the way of guarding us out on the street; could we just go out like any tourists, did we need to consult? This was outside both our usual experiences.

We had settled on the plan of having the man at the door call his supervisor in for a conference, when the phone rang. I picked it up. “Mr. Lyle Peripart, I’m afraid I have very bad news concerning your house.” It was the voice of my house-sitting company, which monitors the house’s brain, and that was already bad news—because they only call you if the brain can’t. At the least it means a couple of months’ pay to replace a damaged brain. And usually if the brain is damaged, the house is too.

“How bad is it?”

The robot’s voice was implacable; it’s not supposed to get emotionally involved. “Mr. Peripart, the house was a complete loss, sir. I have recordings up to three minutes before the alarm was turned in to the police. That usually indicates a brain that was killed instantly. The building itself was destroyed, sir.”

I sighed. Well, this is what one keeps insurance current for; it was going to be a nuisance, and I would probably come out of it poorer than I went into it, but there wasn’t much else to do. I had never been one, really, to get attached to things, and the house had always seemed to be simply my personal machine for living. Now I would need a new machine.

“Is there anything else you need to know at this time, sir?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Have a more pleasant day, then, sir.”

I hung up and sat down heavily on the bed. “My house is dead. Brain killed and the building totaled,” I explained to Helen. “I suppose we can call and get the police report on our way home. We’ll have to cut this trip short.”

“Did they say whether anyone had broken in or it might have been teenagers joyriding your house?”

That was a common problem. There were groups of kids who were very adroit at killing the brain, holding a party, and then setting a fire before they left, just before the cops got there.

“No, they didn’t. I suppose I could have asked for the suspected cause. Couldn’t be joyriders, though, not with a recording going up to the last three minutes—the whole point of what they do is to stretch out the time between killing the brain and abandoning the house. I guess I could call them back and ask them now. The most likely thing, unfortunately, is that it will turn out to be something that makes no sense—based on what’s been happening in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Well, it sounds like we really do have to get back there. Was there much of sentimental value?”

“Some pictures of me when I was a boy. The family heirlooms, the photos of my ancestors and that stuff, everything of any sentimental value, was all in the safety deposit box at my bank. All my work materials were in the office at school. The house mostly just was a place to sleep and eat. And it was all insured, anyway. It’s not that big a deal, it’s just that I’m not looking forward to the volume of paperwork I know I’ll have to cope with, and I’m really not looking forward to dealing with that while I’m also coping with a new job where I commute out every week. And of course I’m kind of worried about what connection this might have with everything else that’s been happening. There are all sorts of things to worry about, of course, and I am worried about dealing with all of it, but I’m not really that upset. It’s not like I lost that Studebaker Skyjump—that, I would miss.”

McMoore himself was on the job—I don’t know if he didn’t sleep or had just taken over another shift—and as soon as we explained what the problem was, he was on top of it. He packed us up, put us in a limousine that seemed to have unusually thick oddly colored windows and reassuringly thick metal plates discreetly placed around the inside, drove us to the boat shed over in Cholon, and escorted us to the jump boat, not neglecting to search it thoroughly for people and devices and to hang around while I did readouts and made sure it had been on no further joyrides. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, so we shook hands with McMoore, cast off, pulled out of the boat shed, and told the Skyjump to take us home. I didn’t feel fit to fly.

What followed was something like a two-hour dream, as we called from the high part of the trajectory for the police report and were told that there was no official cause yet, came down outside Auckland harbor, got the cab, and eventually found ourselves standing and staring at the place where my driveway ended in a crater.

It was about eight or nine feet deep at the deepest point, perfectly circular, and my house would not have fitted within it; the four corners of the foundation looked at each other across that gulf. The sandy soil seemed to have fused in places, as if by tremendous heat, and all the facing neighbors’ windows were boarded up; there were char marks on their roofs where sparks or the flash had ignited shingles, and the aluminum siding on the two nearest neighbors’ houses had warped, the white paint turning brown in spots.

My house had vanished in a moment of tremendous heat, but there had been no explosion—all the damage was caused by radiated heat, and the wave of superheated air. The police report said there had been a thunderclap, as if the burning house had disappeared so suddenly that the air had rushed back inaudibly.

All the grass and trees in the yard were scorched and dead.

We stood on the blackened lawn and stared, for many long minutes; our luggage was in a pile beside us, and the cab had long since gone on its way. No one came out to talk to us; perhaps because none of them had a window facing our way through which they could see, but more likely it was just a matter of the human desire not to stand too close to bad luck. After a long time, Helen said, “Do you suppose there’s anything known to exist in everyday life, anywhere, that could make this happen?”

“Not that I know about. And it’s the kind of thing they might have mentioned when I was an undergrad in physics.”

“Was it intended, perhaps, to get you?”

“Could have been, I suppose, but you’d think that someone who could summon a completely unknown physical force with this much energy would be capable of ringing my doorbell, or even just phoning, and finding out if I was home, first.” I shook my head. “A couple days ago, things made sense.”

“It will be at least a couple days before they begin to make any sense again,” a voice said behind us. We turned and found that Geoffrey Iphwin was there, as was a beautiful old real Rolls-Royce, with a real human driver at the wheel. Just behind and ahead of it, two small armored cars had parked. “Right now I don’t think I can give you an explanation that will make any sense to you, at least not sense that you could use for anything, and part of the problem is that I don’t begin to understand everything myself. But if you will come along, I can pretty well assure your safety—at least as well as I can assure mine—and after that perhaps we can begin to fight back, and force the world to make a little more sense, eh?”

He ran in little mincing steps over to the site where my house had been, his eye seeming to catch and stop at the many places where the sand had been baked into little fused pockets by the intense heat, and now reflected the late-afternoon sun with a sort of soft brown shine. He looked back at us, his expression mild and soft. “If you want entirely out of all of this, I can just write out a check for enough to get you a new house, give you some time and money to resettle, and probably but not definitely, make it clear enough so that you’ll be left alone. But I’m afraid if you want to press on, there’s not much alternative—you’re going to be in danger, and you’re in for the duration.”

“Can’t you even tell us what the sides are?”

Iphwin shrugged. “The Reichs and their governments are mostly on the other side. Is that good enough?”

“Good enough for me,” Helen said, with surprising vehemence, and then I noticed I was nodding vigorously.

“All right, then,” Iphwin said. “I’m afraid you will have to come with me, then. At the moment the other side is moving much, much faster than I anticipated they would. I do apologize—my underestimating them is what has allowed them to do these things to you, and it’s also why I shall have to bring you further and deeper into the situation, much sooner than I would have preferred. And I’m also afraid that you won’t be happy when you find out how many of the shocks you are feeling, or are going to feel, are very much my fault. I really do deeply hope that when it all becomes clearer, you will be able to forgive me.”

We threw our bags into his car. When Helen had been shooting she had seemed bigger and stronger, and now she struggled more than I’d have expected to move her suitcase. Iphwin took us back to the harbor, where his people had already gassed and serviced the Skyjump. By dark, we were a very long way north, in one of the guest suites in the Big Sapphire, surrounded by the sea just north of Surabaya, unpacking and trying to figure out where life would take us next.

Unpacking didn’t take me long—all I had was what I had taken for a weekend, and the clothes I had emergency-ordered would be delivered here Monday while I was working. Helen had stopped for some more things from her place, but it didn’t take her twenty minutes to pack or unpack—she was pretty typical of female academics, not much on clothes. When we were all done, it was only seven at night, we should theoretically have just been sitting down to our second dinner in Saigon, and there was absolutely nothing to do.

Naturally we decided to put on the headsets and see if we could find any of our friends in the VR chat room. I could tell immediately that tonight was going to be all right, because not only was everyone there, but I drew Bogart and Helen drew Bergman again. The first thing I did, of course, was get rid of the stupid cigarette that made it hard to breathe or taste anything, and the second thing I did was corner Paul Henreid, grab his lapels, and tell him to buzz off and keep his eyes off my girl if he wanted to leave the place alive. Then I stopped by the piano and told Sam I wanted a selection from the classics, and he settled into a nice Debussy piece, dreamy and romantic, instead of the corny old thing’ he usually played. As far as I was concerned, I had saved the picture.

I sat down at the table to find everyone babbling at once. “Suppose I asked whether anybody here could tell this story coherently?” I said, pulling my chair up.

Helen really did wear Ingrid Bergman well; she turned to me with a calm stare, paused a moment, and said, “Well, then you would be disappointed with the answer. But at least everyone here agrees that it started with Terri. And the good news is, if we can make sense out of it, we can probably get some idea of how we got released from jail.”

Terri was being pretty moderate, for Terri—she was being Yvonne, of whom Claude Rains had once said, “All by herself, she may constitute an entire second front.” She leaned back in an angly, awkward way that would have told anyone at once that that body was being worn by a teenager, and said, “You might know that since I have to go to the special American expat school and since my father is a rich man, I don’t get out much. In fact I usually can only go to regular school events or to parties at my parents’ friends’ houses. I get real bored a lot of the time, because there’s only so much homework you can do, and only so much chat room time. Plus of course I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of nosy.

“And then the thought occurred to me that Eric—he’s a buddy of mine at school that has this crush on me, but thank god I’m not that desperate, but he’s really sweet and will do almost anything for me—Eric had given me a neat little program that would track people’s real net addresses while they were in the chat room, so I could see who I was really talking to, and I had had it running for months. And so ... well, gee, I just think, anybody having a romantic holiday in the Far East, and all... oh, I wanted to know just what you guys were up to. I know you told me where you’d be staying and I know you told me all about it, but for some reason the signal broke up right when you said it, or I was distracted, or something. And that was why I tried tracing you, figuring you’d be doing something romantic. I hope you don’t mind being spied on.”

My first thought was, Why not? everyone else does, but I swallowed that comment—I figured it might embarrass her—and said, “Considering the result, we ought to thank you.”

“Well, it was weird, because the geographic coordinates it gave were for somewhere in—”

The world froze.

“Signal just broke up,” I said. “Where did you say?”

“It broke up on my end too,” she said. “Your coordinates—”

The world froze again.

“Did you—?”

“It happened to all of us,” the Colonel said, “which I think is pretty strange. Try saying it very slowly, Terri; maybe somebody is censoring the net, even though that’s supposed to be impossible. I’m sure that if they could the—”

For the third time, the world froze.

“I can’t even say their name,” the Colonel said, “without tripping the censorship program.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “We all know you meant the Germans.”

Just as I said “Germans,” there was another freeze; everyone came out of it looking baffled.

“Hmmph,” Helen said. “Well, if nothing else we’ve just learned that some kinds of casual chat are not allowed. I always thought the little freezes were caused by jam-ups somewhere between me and the server, something about having too little bandwidth, but we’re in the Big Sapphire here and there’s no way I could be as short on bandwidth as I usually was in Enzy.”

Everyone nodded, and Terri said, “Okay, let me try to say the name. It looked like you.

“Were right in the middle.

“Of.” She wet her lips and then slowly said. “Ho.

“Chi.

“Minh.

“City.”

I had heard all the syllables clearly and I had no idea what she had said. “That’s strange,” I said. “Actually we were in Saigon.”

“It just broke up,” everyone chorused.

“Sai...” I paused. “Gon.” It seemed to go right through, but now everyone looked very confused.

“I clearly heard you and I wrote it down,” Kelly said, looking at the pad in front of her, “but now I can’t read what I wrote. It looks like S...A...I...G...O...N.”

“That’s right,” I said, “Saigon.” There was another freeze that denoted another system crash.

“If this keeps up, this story may take quite a while to tell,” Roger said.

Terri nodded emphatically. “Well, anyway, what I found out was that you weren’t at your hotel, but in jail, and when I tried getting into the jail’s public information board, it told me you were being held on suspicion of murder. That didn’t sound right, so I called Roger, and I called Kelly. I think Roger sort of took the first steps—”

“Not much more than making some net calls,” Roger said. “My old second in command, Esmé Sanderson, from back when I commanded the”

FREEZE

“before the damned”

FREEZE

“forced us to disband and”

FREEZE

“This is going to be a hard story to get out,” Helen said, “but anyway, Esmé Sanderson had been your second in command, even if you can’t tell us where or when or for what unit, right?”

“Right, and now she’s a cop in Mexico City.”

We had all braced for a freeze when it was obvious that he was going to speak a place name, but that one was apparently not a problem. Who can explain the choices and ideas of a censor? Sykes let his breath out—he really was remarkably splendid when he was wearing Sidney Greenstreet—and said, “Well, there, I thought they’d hit that one but they didn’t. Anyway, she said she’d look into it, and what she told me later was that she had checked up on your case with authorities in Ho

“Chi

“Minh

“City. There, it didn’t make a breakup.”

“But I have no idea what you said,” Helen pointed out. “All right, so she checked up with the authorities.”

“That’s right, and she discovered that you had shot Billie Beard, so she called it to the attention of her supervisor, Jesús Picardin. She says she thought Picardin was going to kiss her when he heard the news; they’d been trying for years to get Billie Beard either into Mexico, where she could be arrested, or busted someplace where they could extradite, but having her dead was even better.”

“I thought Billie Beard was a cop,” I said.

“She is—a bad cop even in a service that’s known for its badness. Probably even her bosses didn’t much care what happened to her anymore. Billie Beard was wanted for nearly everything, nearly everywhere. Real bad piece of work. Even the”

FREEZE

“uh that is I mean her employers, didn’t like her much, and she was wanted for all kinds of things. The world is not at all sorry to see her go. And so Picardin authorized sending the files about Beard to the local authorities, and as soon as those files started to scroll out of the fax machine, your friend Inspector Dong had some very good reasons to stop worrying; he was assured that no matter how the case came out, no one was going to care very much, because the part they did care about was already accomplished.”

“I guess I was the other part of getting you out,” Kelly said. “It happens I went to school with Jenny Schmidt, who is now Jenny Bannon, who is more officially Jennifer H. S. Bannon, Ambassador from the Free Republic of Diego Garcia to the Court of New Zealand. I thought I knew, from somewhere, that Helen was a DG citizen, so I confirmed that, then called Jenny and got her on it. She called up their Ambassador—another guy we went to school with, creepy guy we all called Bobo, but very willing to do a favor for a friend—Bobo seemed to know you, Helen, and that helped too. So in a short time he was also phoning the Saigon police.”

“Well, at least that explains how we got released,” Helen said. “Let me try an experiment here. How many of you have heard of the”—

Everyone froze again, except that I clearly heard her—not through the VR, but just because she was in the room with me— say “Puritan Party.”

“All right,” she said. She picked up her pad and slowly read off “Ho...Chi...Minh...City. Now I’ll say it at normal speed, and let’s see what happens. Ho Chi Minh City.”

This time there was no freeze, but the world seemed to wobble a little. “Now someone else try.”

“Saigon,” the Colonel said, and no one froze. “But now that I think of it, from the unit history, I seem to recall that Saigon”

FREEZE

“City. No one calls it Saigon anymore.”

I tried to say “His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Cochin-China does,” but apparently just the thought caused a freeze, or maybe my thought and Helen’s together did.

We played around all night, and we established a few rules. If we said it slowly enough, no freeze happened. If the people who weren’t talking carefully copied the words down and read them aloud, slowly, no freeze happened. If we practiced that for a while, till everyone could say the words, then we stopped freezing on the word itself, but often froze if we tried to use it in a sentence.

It gave us something to talk about, and we went really late that night, especially since none of us had anything really pressing in the next few hours. We developed slightly more theories than we had people—Helen and the Colonel each had two. Mine was that the censor was some kind of crude AI that did some kind of very limited brain monitoring and that as we practiced the word, we got to where we could say it without meaning it—but if we used it in a sentence, the meaning came back and set off the censor. Helen thought that somehow everyone’s brain had been programmed with a virus that acted to censor other people’s words at the auditory center so that as we practiced we gradually stopped censoring each other; her alternative theory was that the censor had some way of determining, after a few freezes, that the conversation was harmless, and then wouldn’t freeze it again until it changed.

All of us elaborated our theories and sniped at each other’s; we did dozens of other small experiments without really adding any more facts to our store of knowledge. It finally got too late for Colonel Sykes, who said the sun was coming up in Mexico, so he departed; Kelly had to go a while later, as she had a first reading on a new play, and finally Terri stretched and yawned— an impressive gesture in Yvonne’s body because that jacket had not been constructed for a woman who moved freely—and left also. “Ever think of having sex with Bogart?” I asked Helen.

“Said the man who would really like to have sex with Ingrid Bergman,” she said, smiling. “I’m pretty tired. Hold the thought for another night?”

“Sure.”

By the time we got up on Sunday, it was past noon. Iphwin’s people had supplied us with the English-language version of the Batavia paper, plus the LA Times in Exile from Auckland. We sat around, read, ate, and talked. Late in the afternoon we went out on one of the Big Sapphire’s many observation decks and watched the big waves roll by, messengers from some storm a thousand miles away. For the whole of Sunday, nothing unusual happened. That was beginning to seem strange.