“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.