Asimov's Science Fiction (2 page)

These days, entrance to the Memorial is free, its upkeep funded by donations from rich Galactic families. Cam joins the queue of Galactics at the entrance—not many Rong there, she might as well be the only one. It's early morning on a day like any other; not the anniversary of any significant battle or the remembrance of any atrocities; and there are few people, all of them disinclined to make conversation.

Good, for Cam doesn't know if she could stand to speak.

In the physical reality, the Memorial isn't much: a squat building crouching above the servers that keep it alive—like a toad over treasure. Inside, a long spiral wends its way to the access chambers—as the virtual reality gradually asserts itself, the Memorial reminds visitors of the war and the Rong exodus. It starts as images on wall-screens, and, by the end, has become full three-dimensional representations that presage the virtual universe. This serves two purposes: to place the Memorial in "proper" context, and to transition the visitors from physical reality to virtual universe in a soft, non-intrusive manner.

Both are failures.

The context, like everything else, has been provided by Galactics, and they so gracefully elide their own part in setting off tinder to the war between the Western and Eastern Continent, presenting themselves as heroes who failed to save the benighted locals, and deploring the exodus even as they hide their part in causing it, or the atrocities their own troops committed on Moc Hau Tinh, under the pretense of keeping the peace.

The transition, if one isn't paying attention to the context, is anything but seamless, the virtual universe replacing reality in a series of jerks; and, at the last, the slimy, cold feeling of electrodes being fitted over one's head by bots; the uncomfortable sensation of every muscle crumpling at once, as if one were a tree that had just been felled.

And, at last, Cam stands in the Memorial, shivering and shaking and attempting to bring numbed muscles back to wakefulness. Around her, the other visitors are straightening: carrying flowers or paper cards in their hands, little keepsakes bought from the online vendors as they wended their way upstairs; offerings to honor the dead veterans, the innocent victims of the exodus—dead children, Cam's history teachers used to say, as if dead children were somehow more worthy of remembrance and pity than everyone else who perished in the fall of Xuan Huong, in the invasion of the Eastern Continent.

Cam's hands, as usual, are empty. She leaves the arrival area without a backward glance, heading deeper and deeper into the Memorial.

In a way, the Memorial is Xuan Huong—it's the city on the eve before the war, its streets crisscrossed by a flood of aircars and private shuttles, its buildings rearing upward, like gilded spears held against the Heavens—and the shadow of the orbitals overhead, the houses of the rich and powerful looking down on the planetary bustle with amusement.

In so many ways, it's not Xuan Huong.

It's not the city that Cam's grandmother waxed lyrical about, not the memories that her mother carried away when she left as a child in her parents' arms. It's a city of fashionable, glitzy hotels frequented by the Galactic expatriates; of quaint and exotic temples, with Buddhist rituals described by someone who couldn't understand what it means to believe in the bodhisattva Quan Am, in the weight of one's sin and in reincarnation. Its family feasts are seen through the eyes of Galactics, who cannot comprehend the value of food or of filial piety; even its small alleyways are sordid and unclean instead of being families' beloved homes—in every way it's subtly and jarringly wrong, a travesty of what the Rong deem precious.

He meant well,
is what the Rong will say about Steven Carey when they feel charitable. He genuinely thought that his project would help the Rong exiles, that it would bring their plight to the knowledge of the world (as if their plight wasn't real until the world learnt all about it, all its sordid details and secrets shrouded in grief).

Cam walks up Le Loi Street, with its overblown temple to the God of War Quan Vu; and its ghostly Galactic women shadowed by their Rong attendants—toward her meeting with the aunts.

They're always in the same place: in a small alley behind the old Galactic Ansible Station, seated on plastic chairs in the small, battered stall of a food-seller, with bowls of steaming soup in front of them—the food smells of beef and anise star, the only thing within the Memorial that doesn't feel processed through a Galactic mindset. They're squat and dark-skinned, with the reassuring solidity of visitors to the Memorial—not the ghostly, shimmering avatars that are part of the virtual universe.

Of course, they're not aunts—probably not Rong, and maybe not even women. The Memorial, like all virtual universes, comes with avatar options, and it's an easy enough thing to color f lesh differently, give a different timber to a voice or even change one's species entirely and appear as a winged horse or a lion, though Cam has never seen the point of any of it.

"Child," the eldest aunt says. "Sit down."

Cam doesn't. It's such a small, pathetic gesture, such a doomed attempt to assert her authority to them. "I left it in a holding box at the shuttleport. Number 868."

"As usual." The eldest aunt smiles, an expression that doesn't quite reach her eyes.

"Well done. You're worth every credit we pay you, child." She gestures again to the chair, the only one unoccupied—it's red, the color of good fortune and good news, an uncomfortable reminder of New Year's Eve and family reunions. "Won't you sit down? The soup is good."

"Which can't be said of many things here," a younger aunt says, her face set in a frown.

"Now, now, ssh," the eldest aunt says. "This child doesn't need to hear old women complaining, she's too young."

Cam isn't young anymore—past the age to contract a marriage, past the age to straighten her life—past the age where she'd swallow lies, unthinkingly. But she says nothing of that.

"I trust everything went well?" the eldest aunt inquires, conversationally, with the same casualness Cam's own aunts use when asking about her work.

Cam thinks back to Pham Thi Thanh Ha—to the expression on her face as she handed over her grandmother's chip against Cam's payment—that face twisted halfway between guilt and fear—knowing Cam, in spite of her sweet words, couldn't be trusted. "It went as expected. There was no particular trouble."

"About payment..." Cam says.

They smile at this, as if they knew exactly how she felt inside—all twisted up and nauseous, taking that kind of pay because she has no choice. One of the middle-aged aunts opens her hand, presenting to her a sheaf of paper notes: the old ones with the image of the president stamped upon them—a sharp-faced man, wrinkled and bowed with the knowledge of the impending war. "All there," the middle-aged aunt says. "A million credits, as we agreed."

It's good money—very good money, when Rong struggle to make even a hundredth of this—when so many of them own dingy restaurants in dingy parts of Prime, or work as private cooks for the richer exiles, saving every single credit to make their children's lives better than their own. It's hers, under two conditions: that she do her job, and keep her mouth shut about the aunts.

Both of which, of course, are getting harder and harder.

Cam reaches out for it, closes her hand over it—feeling, for a second, the coolness of the aunt's skin against her own, as dry as the scales of a snake. The notes melt like sugar onto her skin, and she doesn't need to connect to the network to know it's gone into her bank account.

"Don't thank us," the middle-aged aunt sounds amused. "Now, we have another job coming up, but it won't be for a week at least, which should please you. Time for you and your girlfriend to enjoy yourselves with your family."

Cam isn't surprised—of course they would keep a tight watch on her and her life. Of course they have other agents, to pick up the chips from the holding boxes. Of course they'll know about Thuy; that the day after tomorrow is her grandmother's death anniversary; that, like every year, Cam and Thuy are headed toward her family's home in Greenhaven, to pay their respects at the ancestral altar.

What comes next, though...

"And the baby," one of the younger aunts says. "Don't forget the baby!"

The baby. How do they know—?The baby is a secret; something not even Cam's mother knows about, a fragile promise, a prayer for a better future. Cam's hands clench, a movement she can't control. "How—how do you know?"

"It's all in your files, dearie," the middle-aged aunt says. "Don't worry, we won't tell anyone."

They'll hold this, hoard it like a tool they might use—they'll feed on anything, any scrap of Cam's life that they can turn against her. "I know you won't tell," Cam says, dryly, fighting back anger.

The middle-aged aunt laughs, a rasping sound like leather tearing itself apart. She gestures toward the soup. "You should eat that, before it grows cold." Another of the aunts is noisily slurping noodles from her bowl, with an expression of satisfaction; it would make Cam hungry, in other circumstances.

"I don't want soup," Cam says.

"Oh yes, I forget," the middle-aged aunt says. "You're always angry after your jobs."

"I'm not angry," Cam says.

"Leave the child alone." The eldest aunt frowns. "Forgive us. You know the old can be... intrusive. Of course, we have no lives of our own anymore, so we take what distractions we can, child."

"I see."

A ghostly waiter brings three-color dessert pudding in glass cups—the mixture sports a lurid, aggressive green, nothing like the appetizing color of pandanus leaves, and even its red beans are the dark color of blood. The smell is... off, somehow, though Cam would be hard pressed to pinpoint why; and, as the bowls of soup are swept up, only that sense of wrongness remains.

Not for the first time, she curses Steven Carey and all his work.

The eldest aunt dips a spoon in the cup, twirls it around an invisible axis. Cam hears a sound like ice cubes crushed together, though it's impossible anyone could have such strength. "You don't see," the eldest aunt says. The colors of the pudding are melding and running together, the green fracturing into a dozen disharmonious threads, reminding Cam of nothing so much as network cables cut off at the root. "But never mind, child. I'll tell you about this next job, it'll keep your mind nice and sharp."

"I don't—" Cam starts, and then stops, aghast at what words might come out of her mouth.
I don't want my mind sharp. I don't want to hear about this next job. I want to be rid of you.

The eldest aunt is watching her, and so are the others—cruelly amused, like birds of prey watching a mortally wounded tiger stumble and pick itself up, time and time again.

No. She can't afford to antagonize them. Slowly, carefully, she says, "Fine. Tell me about the next job."

Cam leaves late for Greenhaven—not a surprise, as the meeting with the aunts took more time than she'd planned. She'd expected Thuy to still be around in the flat, but she's gone, leaving a message on the console that she hitched a ride with Cam's mother, and telling Cam not to forget the basket of fruit they special-ordered from the spaceport.

Cam is past the Lynbrook Bridge and into Westborough province before she notices the police shuttle trailing her. At first, she thinks nothing of it; traffic is dense, and the police are everywhere. As she veers upward, onto the high-speed lane, Cam sees the shuttle do the same; and when she lowers her altitude again, to catch a bite at a rest area halfway up a skyscraper, the shuttle is still there.

It's nothing unusual—Cam has been stopped more times than she can count, simply because she looks different, because she's driving a new, expensive car that most Rong shouldn't be able to afford. Mother always hunched over when that happened—speaking in short, heavily accented sentences; consumed by the fear that Prime would send her back. Cam isn't afraid; or she wouldn't be, if she were at ease. If she didn't know in her heart of hearts that she walks enshrouded in lies, every word that she utters lengthening the shadows under her feet.

She sits at the terrace of the skyscraper, watching the dance of aircars below her— dense traffic toward Landfall, as always, people going to their jobs, to the Festival of Arts in Lynbrook, to white-walled, disinfectant-clean supermarkets where the smell of bleach overpowers that of meat or fish.

"Excuse me, miss?"

Towering over her is the figure of a police officer—one and a half times her size, easily, with flaming hair and a spattering of freckles, with skin so pale and translucent it's tinged with the red of blood vessels. Her heart leaps in her throat—remains stuck halfway there, beating at a frantic rhythm. "Yes, Officer?"

The policewoman—who introduces herself as Lieutenant George—sits down, putting her coffee cup by Cam's right hand. Cam inhales the sickening, bitter smell of the coffee at the table, stifling an urge to retch or run away.

"What do you want, Lieutenant George?"

"To speak of Perpetuates."

"I don't know what you mean." Cam has been lying for long enough not to let anything she feels show on her face.

Lieutenant George's eyes narrow. "Let's not be coy with each other, Miss Nguyen. I am speaking of Rong Perpetuates—rare and precious by the standards of those who trade in memories." She smiles. "I'm sure you know what I'm speaking of."

It's a dance that's all too familiar to Cam—she's done it so many times she knows it all by heart. But knowing doesn't help, doesn't do anything save make the ending more inevitable—for, in the end, this is no bluff—this is all about who holds power over whom.

She forces herself to sip at her tea—sip after sip after sip, burning her lips and her tongue, the bitter taste sliding down her stomach.

Lieutenant George says, "Rong Perpetuates, as you can imagine, are eagerly sought after—they fetch high prices on the black market, and I'm sure you're well aware many of the recent releases in sim-vids were enhanced by Rong, especially the older generation. There's something about the anguish of war that makes them... irresistible."