by Ben Bova
* * *
The compartment she found for Kieu was small, and every piece of furniture in it was jammed together, from the narrow bed to the console. Typical Celestial Spires; typical Tai Menh. Kieu missed her own, much roomier compartment already; but she’d worked in much worse environments than this, and this was just more evidence she and Huong Giang were a long way from getting along.
Not that she cared. Huong Giang held no power or authority over her, not any longer, and if Kieu had her way, would soon be part of the distant past.
Kieu pulled up a battered chair, connected her implants to the Celestial Spires network, and looked at the image overlaid on her vision: the man, sitting on the bed, staring at the ceiling as if it held some great vision or source of enlightenment.
In the short walk to the room, Kieu had downloaded and reviewed all available materials on Simalli Fargeau—glorying in the rush of data as it filled her mind, in the heady feeling of constructing her correlation matrices, that heightened awareness that gave her the impression of knowing every heartbeat of Simalli’s life. She’d dissected every movement he made, every reaction he’d had in his interactions with Rong people—all the little gestures and words that combined to build a probabilistic model of him, with enough prior knowledge to compare against the new observations and performing goodness-of-fit tests. The Sea and Mulberry would also be doing the same, though as a mindship he would be using alternate models and paying attention to different factors—doing likelihood-ratio tests using independent algorithms, as required for a strong authentication.
The next step would have been an interview with Simalli Fargeau. But Kieu always delayed interviews—because nothing was as sweet, as pleasurable as the collection of data, the slow buildup of inferences and tests of hypotheses, that exquisite feeling that the information she sought was just at her fingertips, that everything was a hairsbreadth away from making sense.
In those moments, she felt truly alive, truly connected to everyone and everything else—in a way she’d never done since the purges had taken away her remaining family.
“What do you think?” she asked The Sea and Mulberry.
The ship had been uncannily silent so far, only interjecting to control Kieu’s outbursts—of course, he abhorred any kind of conflict, and liked to believe he could find a peaceful solution to everything. “I don’t like this.”
“Because of the off-world factor?”
The ship’s holo wobbled. “Not only. Because there’s too much tension around, Kieu. We should—”
“Leave? No way.” She wasn’t going to let Huong Giang have any kind of last word with her. “It’d be a severe black mark on our records.”
“By my records, Simalli Fargeau has spent more than eighteen years off-world,” The Sea and Mulberry said. “That’s quite enough time to make authentication … challenging.”
Eighteen years. That silenced her. She looked at her data again; at the old, outdated observations. “At least he didn’t go through the purges.” That had seriously dented authenticators, necessitating the storage of thousands of hours of optical-stims to make sure everyone was in the system once more.
The Sea and Mulberry said nothing. He didn’t need to; even she knew that uniform continuity was the basis of authentication—the premise that over small periods, human behavior didn’t change that much, and that any large changes would be recorded by the authentication system. Eighteen years without any kind of records, though …
“Look,” she said. “We can try, at least.”
“If we can get enough data on what happened to him off-world, we might possibly refine our model enough to offer a reasonable authentication.”
“Seventy percent?” Kieu asked.
“Maybe a little more,” The Sea and Mulberry said. “It would help, of course, if we had people who knew him.” He projected a stim from eighteen years ago: Simalli Fargeau on the arm of a woman in a tight-fitting red ao dai who looked vaguely familiar to Kieu, like a distant image that refused to coalesce into meaning.
“His mistress?”
“His wife. Pham Thi Dao. She went off-world with him when he left.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. But she isn’t with him, and she’s not back in the authentication system either.”
“Dao.” Kieu tasted the name on her tongue, like the peach the woman had been named after. She looked at the woman—who was turned slightly away from the camera, diffidently smiling at her husband—and then back at the man who sat on the bed, one leg crossed over the other in a typically Galactic fashion. His face was that of a smooth, unmarked twenty-year-old, and she wondered, then, how much of what he’d gone through had been erased by multiple body-changes.
The Sea and Mulberry was right: it wasn’t going to be an easy task to authenticate him.
* * *
Huong Giang steeled herself before entering the guest room. Kieu had disapproved of her seeing Simalli—had said it would be better if she waited until the results of the authentication were complete, but she’d also said it would take several weeks of repeated observations before they could build a satisfactory model and test for goodness of fit—amidst a flood of technical terms Huong Giang had barely understood. She couldn’t wait, and neither could the Poetry Circle—not if he still had his key-fragment.
Simalli turned when Huong Giang entered—in a composed, thought-out gesture that reminded Huong Giang so much of bygone times it made her feel angry and betrayed all over again. “Huong Giang.” He’d always been good at languages, and he spoke her name properly, with all the stresses—he might have sounded like a native if not for the fact that he didn’t behave right—every gesture of his tinged with foreign, alien intensity. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
About time he apologized—but she couldn’t say that, not the angry way it’d come out. She didn’t want to antagonize him, not now. “It’s been a long time.”
“I know,” Simalli said. “You look well.”
She didn’t, and they both knew it. “You’re the one who looks well,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. How could he stand here, so healthy, so serene—how could he still go on with his memories cut off? But of course she knew the answer: he’d never cared overmuch about the Poetry Circle; had never treated it as more than a source of amusement. Not remembering everything would be but a minor inconvenience for him.
“I … I’m glad to see you still here.”
He didn’t mention the purges. He didn’t need to; it lay in the air between them, a blade that nothing would ever shatter. “You always were so bad with words,” she said. “Why are you here, Simalli?”
Simalli blushed. He wore a simple, almost pre-Exodus body, with freckles on his star-tanned face, and hair the deep red shade of wedding dresses. “And you always were such a blunt person.” He kept his gaze on the holos on the walls—it was disconcerting to see him adopt Rong ways of respect. The man she’d known had stared people in the face and had stated his opinions bluntly, proud of being frank and open, as if honesty would get him anywhere. “If you must know … I came back here to apologize.”
Huong Giang kept her voice cold, though it cost her. “You’re aware no apology will change what you have done.”
“I know. I know, God help me. I know.” His hands came up, as if he wanted to bury his face in them, but then he lowered them with an effort, and said nothing more.
“You came alone,” Huong Giang said. “What about Dao?”
He looked at her, then, the red of his hair splayed on his corneas. “She’s dead.” It seemed as though he would say, “I’m sorry” (and she’d have lost her calm then, screamed at him about everything apologies couldn’t do), but then he thought better of it. “Huong Giang. Elder aunt…”
Dao. In her mind’s eye, Huong Giang was seeing her niece—telling her she worried too much and that the Heavens would always provide. Dao. For years and years Huong Giang had sustained herself with the knowledge that Dao had
survived, that she’d lived a long and happy life—not like Huong Giang, who woke up at night remembering what had happened in the jails, the ten thousand pains and aches that ran through her bodies, wearing them out one after the other. Years and years of hope, casually destroyed.
She’d been wrong. Whoever he really was—whether he was Simalli or someone else with enough knowledge to pass off as him, cruel enough to raise hopes they couldn’t fulfill—she couldn’t do this. “I have to leave,” she said, but what he said stopped her.
“I still have it, you know.”
“The key-fragment.” That was all she could say without betraying herself.
“Yes. It’s why I had to come back. I had to give it back to you. Huong Giang…”
She forced herself to look at him; to show nothing of what she felt, inside. But he saw; he had to, unless he was as oblivious as ever. “Would you give it to me, then?”
Simalli grimaced. “It’s yours. I had no right to keep it.” He extended a hand; a little holo hovered over it, displaying a stream of numbers that flashed by too fast for her to read it. The key-fragment. His part of the decryption algorithm—the secret they’d all spread within the Poetry Circle, the one that required enough component parts to become whole. A foolproof system, Vu had said; for the government would never have enough key-fragments to decrypt.
At the time, it had seemed like the only way to survive—to lock in their own minds the memories of what they’d done, of what they’d uncovered in their casual studies of Tai Menh’s literature and history—to leave no evidence that could be used against them. It …
Her hands shook again, remembering needles driven into them, the fire that had spread through her veins. It had worked—to a point. They’d survived, with nothing that the government could pin on them. They’d survived, and they’d still lost everything when Simalli took his key-fragment away from Tai Menh.
She felt weary—emptied, her purpose since long locked away in her mind, an old, aching wound papered over until she could no longer touch it or even be aware of its nature.
“Why, Simalli? Why? You didn’t have to come back. You didn’t have to return your key-fragment.” He’d shown, all too well, that he was a Galactic. That he might dabble in forbidden activities to amuse himself, but that he could leave at any time—as he had done, in the end.
Simalli sighed. “Would you believe I had a change of heart?”
“No.”
“I did.” Simalli bit his lip. “I was wrong. I was wrong to keep Dao away from Tai Menh—it killed her. And I can’t keep the key-fragment, Huong Giang. It burns me. It leaves me no rest, and eats at my sleep—it’s something that should be returned to its proper place.”
It sounded … so much like everything she’d hoped Simalli would say. And that made it all wrong. If she’d learned one thing during the purges, it was that wishes never came true. That people didn’t magically change their minds or heroically return.
“Take it,” Simalli said.
“I can’t.” It would decode nothing, or the wrong things altogether: the encryption was in their own minds, and using the wrong key might just tear their thoughts apart; might just turn their vacant pasts into a morass of lies and delusions. It was only the real key that would give them back what they’d hidden. Simalli’s offer was a government trap to catch her again, to lead her back to jail; to render her terminally insane … “Simalli…”
Before she could react, he’d pressed his hand to hers—his touch was surprisingly dry, as if his new body barely secreted any sweat. Huong Giang withdrew, shocked, but it was too late: the tingle on the back of her hand testified that the transfer had happened, and the numbers that had scrolled over Simalli’s outstretched palm were now part of her own memory—waiting to be accessed, to be recombined into the proper shape.
“No,” she whispered. And then, stronger and angrier, “You have no right.”
He was watching her, his head slightly bent—she had an unbearably sharp memory of him sitting in a chair a lifetime ago, listening to one of Vu’s poems and nodding as each syllable fell into place. But, for all she knew, it could be a lie; it could be her, grasping for connections in her faulty memory, clinging on to the hope that he really had come back.
“You’ve learned nothing, have you—you just do what seems right or proper to you, without once asking for anyone’s opinions—”
“Huong Giang…” He was reaching for her, but she’d had enough this time.
“I shouldn’t have come here,” she said, and turned away and left.
How she wished it was that easy to erase what he’d given her from her body.
* * *
Kieu sat down in the chair, watching the man named Simalli Fargeau. Too young, she thought—too young for everything that might have happened off-world to him, the ten thousand pains and heartaches eighteen years could encompass. Huong Giang was by her side—had insisted on coming even though her presence wasn’t necessary. Something seemed to be eating at her; some preoccupation that she wouldn’t open to Kieu. No matter; it had never been any of Kieu’s business.
She couldn’t wait to be gone. By now, everything in the orbital rubbed her the wrong way. Every day or so, she’d see a woman walk by who smelled like her mother, and bite her lip not to call out to her—every day or so, she’d walk into a restaurant without Galactic food, and endure yet another dish of lemongrass chicken or shrimp toast redolent of the stink of fish sauce, while the wall-screens projected overmannered operas that sounded like the whine of slaughtered pigs.
She had to leave before she went mad.
It was Kieu’s and The Sea and Mulberry’s third interview with Simalli Fargeau; by then they knew all the steps of the dance and the way it was going to play out.
“Tell me again how long you lived in Celestial Spires.”
“From…” He hesitated. “The year of the Yin Earth Rooster to the year of the Yang Water Rat. Four years.”
“How did you meet your wife?” She was going through the motions, asking variations on questions they’d already asked nine times already—making sure that his answers were consistent across several interviews.
“She was at one of the embassy’s parties.” He looked thoughtful for a moment—his eyes dark, his mouth pinched in a little grimace.
“This makes you sad,” Kieu said.
“Of course. She’s dead.” Flat, expressionless. Angry, Kieu’s a posteriori models suggested. He was a true Galactic, a man who would seize opportunities rather than meekly and stupidly submitting to the decrees of Heaven. But it didn’t sound like anger; more like weary resignation, as if accepting that the wound she’d left in the world would never heal.
“How did she die?”
“She … faded away. Like an orchid taken away from tropical climes … I was a fool. I thought love would keep us whole.”
“It never does.” Huong Giang’s voice was harsh.
Simalli inclined his head. “No. It doesn’t. Neither does friendship, or trust. Everything can strain and break and leave you desolate. I know this now.”
The Sea and Mulberry cut in before Huong Giang could answer. “We have examined your medical records.” Simalli had been most forthcoming, providing a list of traumatic events that had been integrated in the transition model, coloring every observation they had of him. “Is there anything else you wish to add to this?”
Simalli shook his head. “I have provided all you need for your authentication.”
“You’re familiar with our authentication system,” The Sea and Mulberry said.
“Of course.” He smiled, tightly and without joy. “I lived here once.”
There was something about him—some current of unease that she couldn’t quite pick up. She glanced at The Sea and Mulberry—the mindship was picking apart something in the medical data, making the odd noise of interest as he found a particularly juicy tidbit. Huong Giang was staring at her hands as if unsure what to do—an odd sight, for Kieu had never se
en the older woman so disconcerted. “I need to clarify a few things. You’ve been on Celestial Spires for a while,” she said. “And yet you only contacted Huong Giang now. Why is that?”
Simalli shrugged. “I … wanted to take a look at the orbital. To see what had happened to it.”
Kieu had optical-stims of him in the orbital—admiring the fish sauce vats, the grounds of White Horse Temple—wandering down the smaller cramped corridors and stopping as if uncertain of where he was going. Through it all his face was the desperate one of someone looking for something, for anything he’d recognize. It was all the behavior she’d expect of Simalli Fargeau—even down to the habit he had of fingering a pendant around his neck, a smooth golden medal with an image of some Galactic saint.
“It’s changed since you last came here.” Huong Giang’s voice was bitter. “Assuming you’re even Simalli.”
Simalli looked as though he was going to say something, but he didn’t speak. Kieu’s personality model indicated he was more likely to assert himself forcefully when challenged; she’d asked her first few questions hoping to do that, but so far nothing had happened. Not impossible, but rather improbable. Still … still, there was that eighteen-year gap in the data.
“I’ve seen the optical-stims,” she said, pitching her voice high and almost out of control. “They don’t really put you at an advantage. You married a local woman and settled here, and when things became too hot to handle you turned tail and ran.”
“I’m not proud of what I’ve done.” His voice was shaking—it was shame rather than anger, though, without the bite she’d expected.
“But you won’t deny it?” The Sea and Mulberry asked.
“Why should I? It’s all in your stims, as you say.”
Huong Giang’s face was unreadable. She was looking at her hands again, as if trying to come to a decision.
Kieu glanced at the medical history—a depression following his wife’s death, a change of bodies, children that had become as strangers to him—it was all drearily familiar, for all that he was a Galactic. She reviewed her self-perception and mortality awareness marginal models, biting her lips. He all but matched, and he had impeccable knowledge of Simalli’s past life, but still … Still, she had that feeling something was missing. The forgotten memories Huong Giang had mentioned, perhaps? But no, it wasn’t that, it couldn’t be that …