Finity

by John Barnes

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.