by John Barnes
“I like him already,” Helen said.
“Me too, and all we knew about him before was that Billie Beard was interested in him. Anyway, the fact that he showed up in your case in that way is extremely interesting. Especially since Jenny Bannon, who was the other leg of the process leading to your release, was also being shadowed by Billie Beard at one time, and furthermore it turns out that she and Picardin belong to the same VR chat group. Somehow or other this is turning out to be a very small world.”
“And she’s from a country that I thought was entirely imaginary, or some kind of delusion,” Helen said. “She’s from that confusing part of my memory.”
Iphwin looked blank and stood stock-still. I’d never seen that happen before. Helen quickly sketched in what she’d told me. She seemed to gain confidence this time and though her lip sometimes trembled when she spoke of her mother, she didn’t cry.
“That’s one place she’s from. But one of our employees met her at a reception and got a business card, and though there is no such country as the Free Republic of Diego Garcia, nor any such street as the one its embassy is on, nor any such phone exchange in Auckland as the one listed—when we dial that number, we get the embassy, and if she’s not too busy, Jenny Bannon answers the phone. And obviously enough, since your friend Kelly went to school with her and still calls her, and you can call Kelly— well, you see what I mean by discrepancies.
“Now, aside from the intellectually interesting question of how you all arrived in such a small world with each other, the other thing that is interesting to me is that exactly the same people who appear to be trying to track down and kill the remaining American Resistance, and who seem to be associated with, and perhaps arranging, the many coincidences and lapses of causality that have been doing so much damage to ConTech, are the people who have been trying to kill this small knot of chat rooms and acquaintances.
“Furthermore, they seem to have been foiled largely by accident, which is not only odd in a professional organization, but makes many of my investigative team wonder, intensely, whether we ourselves might be being attacked by one group or force, and supported by another, neither of which we know anything about. If the enemy of the enemy is my friend, why won’t my friend introduce himself? But in any case, anyone that the enemy is out to eliminate—such as you two, or Jenny Bannon, or Jesu Picardin—is probably a good person to keep alive and well, if we possibly can. Hence our interest in you.”
Through all this long conversation, Iphwin hadn’t sat still for as long as five seconds, but had bounced from place to place, sitting on desks and shelves, leaning against walls, and rocketing around the room like a man who has lost something valuable. “And honestly, according to the research group, that is as much as I can safely tell you at this point. I will tell you more, eventually everything, I hope, just as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. For the moment, though, what I specifically want you to do is to conduct an investigation into an area that we don’t have anyone assigned to yet—an area where we have a single puzzling piece of information that makes no sense that we are aware of, but ought to make some kind if we only knew what kind, and we’d like to see what you can do with it.
“That piece of information is this: ask most people on the street questions about the past, either elementary history or events in their own lifetime, and we get a pretty conventional story, with minor errors that we could just as easily ascribe to bad memory, bad teaching, or sheer random perversity as anything else. But whenever we try interviewing people who seem to be of interest to the enemy, or whose research interests look particularly relevant to the investigation, when we ask what those special people remember of the past, we find all sorts of fundamental disagreements, such as the argument we just had about General Grant, or like Helen’s experience of suddenly finding all of history was different from what she remembered.
“Neither of you is a policeman or secret agent—as far as I know, though the Saigon police have a different opinion about you, Helen, and are absolutely convinced that you must have been a top-level agent for years. Based on what you did, it seems as if briefly you were not a relatively mild-mannered history professor—but then, while you weren’t, who were you? Anyway, the one thing we know is that these wildly inconsistent memories have something to do with the problem—so your job, the historian and the abductive mathematician, is to arrive at some explanation for the phenomenon.”
“That’s the job, then?” I asked. “To figure out why people linked with this mysterious attack on ConTech have memories so different from everyone else’s?”
Iphwin nodded, and then sat down cross-legged on the floor, like a small child. As he spoke he used his finger to draw some complex, incomprehensible diagram on the floor. “My company has been attacked many times since I founded it. We’ve been leaned on by organized crime, by various kinds of secret police, by underground political organizations, and by religious cults. No surprise in all that—if you get big enough, you get leaned on. But in every case before, I’ve been able to fight it off, with some combination of bribes and force. This one concerns me more.
“It looks like a general assault on causality, happening all around ConTech. Perhaps they have discovered some way of altering causality and are using it to make ordinary attacks and blackmail more effective. Or maybe someone with a power beyond anything we know simply has an agenda too different from anything any of us would have for any of us to understand it. Whatever the case, if it’s possible to know, I don’t just want to know who they are and why they did it, but how.”
He jumped up from the floor and said, “Each of you has an interview with a psychiatrist in ten minutes. Don’t worry, it’s not because I think you are crazy.” Then he lunged out the door before either of us could say anything, and when we looked at the computer terminals on our desk we saw that each of us had to report to a room on the same floor in ten minutes’ time.
I thought a while. “ConTech must have tracked the whole network of our friends, for Iphwin to have such a clear understanding of how we got out of jail. And yet with so many of them watching us, the party of bodyguards could still get ambushed in Saigon, and somehow or other Billie Beard could still get through to beat me up. And someone impersonating me managed to pick you up in my jump boat and take you to Saigon, before returning the boat, and not bothering to do anything to cover it up.” I sat down and stared into space. “There’s an amazing amount of power somewhere behind Iphwin. And whoever the bad guys are, there’s at least that much power behind them.”
“Always assuming that Iphwin and the bad guys aren’t the same people.”
“Always assuming.” I stood up and straightened my clothes. “Well, off to the psychologists. The funny thing is, the only thing that I’m pretty sure of is that I’m not losing my mind.”
“Mine might be misplaced but I’m sure I still have it somewhere,” Helen said, also standing and smoothing her skirt. She stretched and yawned. I liked the way she stepped forward and straightened my tie as if I were her prize cat. “And you’re not a professor anymore, so you don’t get to be absentminded. All right, let’s go see the nice shrinks and see what they want to do with us.”
In a short while I was sitting in a small room in a comfortable leather armchair, watching a quiet little man with a dark ring beard take notes on everything I said. He began by asking, “Who is Mickey Mouse?”
I answered, and he asked, “What was the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution? What coach introduced the forward pass? When was the World’s Fair in St. Louis? Who won the Second Canadian War?”
Some of the questions, like the St. Louis World’s Fair, referred to things I had never heard of—the city had never been rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1885 because the rivers no longer ran by it. Some were insanely trivial and easy. Every so often one of the questions would be completely unintelligible on first hearing, and after hearing it again slowly I would realize it was rooted in assumptions that were so different from mi
ne that I had to think about it a couple of times. I pointed this out to the shrink, and he nodded vigorously the way all shrinks do. Also the way they all do, he asked me, “How does it make you feel when a question is so far off base that you can’t figure out how to answer it?”
“A little tense, I guess. Not worse than that.”
“When was the last time you saw an article in a professional journal by an American astronomer? Not an expat or dual citizen, like yourself, but someone living and working in the American Reich?”
“Oh, well, that would be—” My mind went blank.
“Do you see?”
“See what?”
“My session was just the same,” Helen said at lunch. We were eating in a company cafeteria, but since we knew no one, no one had said hello, and we were left very much by ourselves, a long way from any other group of workers. ConTech was always full of surprises, and this time the surprise was that the food was exceptionally good and the furniture and silverware would not have been out of place in a good restaurant. I sat back in my chair, sipped my coffee, and tried to think about everything that had happened so far.
“Why do you suppose Iphwin is so focused on these attacks on ConTech?” Helen asked. “From what he’s described, and from what’s in the folders, the whole thing isn’t costing him very much, at least not yet.”
“Well, my guess is that he’s alarmed because he has no idea who is doing it, or for what reason, and he doesn’t know how they’re doing it. It’s one thing to be robbed in broad daylight by someone who wants your money. It’s another thing to get up in the morning and find your furniture was rearranged while you slept. The objective harm may be smaller but the mystery is more threatening.”
“I suppose.” She pushed her brown bangs up her forehead and said, “I wonder if there’s a hair salon anywhere in the Big Sapphire. I suppose there must be, since there’s a good five thousand people living in here.” We watched the waves roll by, half a mile below, in the bright equatorial sunlight outside the big windows; even with the dark blue tint, it was still uncomfortably bright and the glare was dazzling. “Even granting what you say, it still doesn’t make sense for Iphwin to be taking a personal interest in these matters, not to this extent. Iphwin controls more economic resources than most independent nations; he’s probably bigger than the Scandinavian and the Hungarian Reichs put together. That’s a huge quantity of money and power. And yet he wants us to believe that he’s worried about these pinprick attacks on his periphery, some of which could be just pure coincidence. ConTech is so big that they could be draining him for fifty years and he’d never feel it. He doesn’t seem like a miser type, and his security forces are supposed to be really good— even if they’re not, he could hire good ones in a heartbeat—so why is he fretting about this? Why doesn’t he just delegate it to some security types and just read their report when they’ve caught the bad guys? This is as bizarre as mopping his own floors or working in his own ticket booths would be. And haven’t you noticed how much of this whole huge business empire seems to run entirely on his personal whim? How can he possibly be making so many small day-to-day decisions, and have time to meet with us for hours, apparently just to shoot the breeze? Lyle, the whole thing looks as if somehow all of the vast resources of ConTech—more than you can find in most nations—are being used solely to support this little peripheral project.” She was staring me as if she really expected me to know the answer.
I thought. I knew nothing. “Put that way, it does seem pretty strange—a panic over a pinprick. I wonder how Iphwin thinks that anyone could seriously knock him down with anything on the scale we’ve been looking at? Isn’t he too big to worry?”
“Maybe you’re never too big to worry,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. “Or it could be that the effects he’s getting— mutually incompatible events, effects happening before their causes—in small affairs out in the periphery, are more threatening because he doesn’t know if they can scale them up. Look at the case of that warehouse in Buenos Aires. They sent out a railcar of crates of ball bearings, bound for Valparaiso, and the minute the train was out of sight, another train pulled in returning the shipment. And when they checked the electronic mail, they found they had gotten a message the day before complaining about having the same shipment sent twice. Now, so far, ConTech effectively lost one customer but gained a whole carload of ball bearings; but what if it had gone the other way, and with every shipment instead of just one? What if the time travel or duplication or whatever it is starts to happen when they send out electronic funds transfers? You could drain a bank account pretty fast that way. I suppose the more of nature you own, the more you have to worry about keeping the laws of nature working—and who’s ever had to worry about that before?”
That afternoon, back in our office, we tried to figure out how to investigate the phenomenon we’d been assigned. Supposedly our shrinks were going to confer with each other and write a report for us, but we would not see that for at least a day. “Why do you suppose they asked us all those trivial questions, anyway?” Helen asked.
“Trivial or nonsensical. Though I suppose it might be they were just asking a wide range of questions about all the possible things that some people remember. And I wonder which ones we each thought were nonsensical?”
“Good point.” She glanced at her monitor screen, and then said, “Hey, there’s a task list for this afternoon. It starts with making a bunch of phone calls.”
I looked over her shoulder; for some reason it was a task for both of us. “Does that mean we each call all those people and record what they tell us, or does it mean we call them together in a conference call?”
“Since I have no idea what it’s about or what is supposed to happen,” she said, “my vote is that one of us calls and the other one watches the one making the call, just in case anything too crazy starts to happen.”
First on the list was Clarence Babbit, of Chicago, Illinois. I lost the coin flip, so I dialed. I heard the phone ring, and then I was sitting there with my hand on the hung-up phone. “Did I make the call?” I asked Helen.
“You dialed and then hung up, and you’ve been sitting perfectly still for almost a full minute. Well, it did say to note anything unusual that happened, so I guess we should write that down.” She took a long moment, and did. “You have no memory of the call?”
“Nope. Should I try Mr. Babbit, again, or do we go on to the next one?”
“Try Babbit again.”
I dialed, got the phone ring at the other end, and a moment later, I was sitting there with my hand on the receiver.
The list was entirely numbers within the American Reich, so we dialed our way through, taking turns. When Helen would dial, I’d watch her hit the buttons, hear the ring start at the other end, and hang up, then remain perfectly stationary for the better part of a minute before waking up with no memory of what had happened. When I’d dial, she’d observe the same thing. We used the computer’s camera to film it, so we could watch ourselves going through the whole strange procedure, and by doing that we confirmed that our behavior was identical.
“Well,” I said, when the last one had finished, “that was very interesting and completely not informative. And if there’s anyone home at those numbers, I bet they’re getting really annoyed at the phantom rings.”
“I wonder if, when we get phantom rings, it’s because people in the American Reich are trying to call us?” Helen asked.
My head ached for a second and I said, “What did you just say?
“I just said ... I can’t remember. Do we have a recorder on at the moment to see what it was?”
We did—it’s SOP in most business offices in the Dutch Reich, as a form of political CYA, to record all conversation in offices unless it’s specifically switched off. We pulled back the last couple of minutes of sound recordings from our office, and listened to the question together. “I wonder if, when we get phantom rings, it’s because people in the American Reich are t
rying to call us?”
My head hurt. Helen’s head hurt. And neither of us could seem to get our minds around the question. We played it again and transcribed it, and then read it aloud several times. “This works a lot like the forbidden words on-line,” Helen said, abruptly. “After all the practice, now I can ask the question, and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that radical—but at the same time it doesn’t seem like it has an answer we can get. But you know, most of us get phantom rings much, much more often than we dial a wrong number and hang up, don’t we?”
“Certainly I do. I kind of think everyone does, too. Do you suppose maybe, if there’s a forbidden zone for phone calls or something ... but who’s forbidding it? And why control our behavior, if that’s what they’re doing, rather than just tell us the number is unavailable?”
Helen sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, obviously thinking hard. “There are several great big assumptions we’re making, aren’t there, Doctor Abduction? And wouldn’t your method be to look at what they all have in common?”
“That would be it. We assume that we exist in the real world and we’re not in VR at the moment,” I said. “That’s a big assumption that we ought to be able to check, somehow. If we are in VR, it’s got the biggest bandwidth ever seen, because it’s perfectly smooth, with none of the little glitches that are always there in VR.”