“You want me to believe that you saw a woman come at us, and shoot at you?” I asked. “I saw the man that you saw dead, and it was definitely me he was after.”
“But it was honestly what I remember.”
“Well,” I said, “the body they showed me was Billie Beard, a woman who matches the description—very tall, blonde, muscular, in great shape but probably sixty years old. People might easily mistake her for a transvestite. Was that the woman you saw?”
“Yes, it was. Or at least your description matches.”
We lay there still in the dark, not touching each other. My arms were folded on my chest; Helen seemed to be clutching the sheet. Like the very best hotels everywhere, the room was pitch black and dead silent, and I only knew where she was from the feel of the warmth of her body and the sound of her breathing. After a long time I thought of something else that I should mention. “The strangest thing of all in some ways,” I said, “is that I believe you.”
Helen sighed. “And I saw you shot dead in front of me and here you are.”
“We seem to have a difference in our observations,” I said. “And about some pretty critical matters.” I was near crying or screaming, but Helen seemed to be worse off than I was, and she had had a much worse, scarier time. I was not going to throw a funk in front of her while I had any self-control at all. “Didn’t it seem strange how fast the Cochin-Chinese dropped the case? If anything they seemed to be suddenly extremely interested in investigating the case, and happy to get us out the door. And if Iphwin didn’t put in the fix—well, there isn’t any Free Republic of Diego Garcia, and—”
Helen wailed, a horrible sound I’d never heard come out of her before, and began to sob. “Not anymore,” she choked out. “There’s not one anymore. And I don’t know where it went.”
I’m probably not one of the world’s great lovers. If pressed, I would have to admit I’m just about the classic stereotype of the scientist who doesn’t know what to do in an emotional situation, but even I could figure this one out; I rolled over, reached out in the dark, took Helen in my arms, and held her as her body pitched and bucked with sobs.
A very long time later, she whispered, “I am going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before, nobody at all, not ever. I’m not sure what it means, if anything. I don’t know that it means anything. Maybe it only means that I’m mentally ill, but— oh, Lyle, it’s so hard to trust anyone, even you, with this.”
I hugged her close and said, “Tell me about it, or don’t. Your call. I’ll love you anyway.”
It must have been the right thing to say. Helen grabbed my hand and squeezed it, hard, and then whispered, “All right. Don’t even ask any questions till I’m done or I’ll never have the courage to tell you the whole thing, but here goes. I grew up among the first generation born on Diego Garcia, where the Pacific Fleet of the American Navy fled and established the Free Republic after the Puritan Party won the elections in 1996 and took over the country. There were no Reichs when I grew up—I don’t mean I didn’t hear about them, I mean the United States and Russia and Britain won the war, Hitler died sometime in the forties, Germany was divided among the victors, all that. In 1983 there was an atomic war between the United States and all the Communist countries—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan—and after the war, when we were forced to give the whole northern tier of states plus New England to Canada, and Florida to Cuba, and so forth, the Puritan Party became very powerful, got elected, and made it illegal to be anything except a Puritan Christian. In the years just after that, almost two million people who fled the country made their way to where the fleet had put in, at the old naval facilities at Diego Garcia, and created a small trading nation there, kind of like Macao or Singapore, which quickly became rich. Really, that’s the world I went to high school in. I’m not making it up.
“My senior year, my class went for a class trip to New Zealand, to visit the American expat community there, and on the last day, I was phoning my mother to let her know there had been a change of schedule, and suddenly my mother was asking me who I was and why I was calling her, so I got upset and hung up and dialed again—and the operator said there was no such country code and no such place. And I looked around and my whole class was gone, there was just me at the pay phone, and my Free Republic passport was gone but my American expat one was still there ... I was so scared. I ran into a Catholic shelter for street people and stayed there for days, afraid to talk to anyone, thinking I might be locked up or given drugs or shock. I listened to the news and saw some papers, and I didn’t understand a single thing I was reading, even though I knew most of the words. It sounded as if the Germans had won World War Two, and there was no Russia anymore, and there had never been a Puritan Party or a Free Republic—I was so terrified.”
“What did you do?”
“Went to the library and speed-read history books to try to learn how to fake my way through the world.
“Then I started reading other subjects, once I realized I wasn’t going to wake up and go home any minute. Math and science were easy, they weren’t much changed, but literature was really something different.
“The nuns at the shelter were very nice, they thought I must have amnesia or something and they took care of me and tried to help me recover my memory. The thing was, my memory was actually what was causing all the problem, you know. Once I was sure enough of my ability to fake being from this world I’d fallen into, I claimed to recover my memory, and I caught a boat to a small town where I thought they wouldn’t check up, told them I’d dropped out of school but I wanted to take my equivalency exam.
“They let me, I did well, then I enlisted to have a job, put in my four years for Her Majesty—as a clerk, mind you, and no one ever even showed me a weapon—and then was in a position to go to school. Naturally I majored in history—there was so much I needed to know if I wasn’t to be carted off to some loony bin—and I found I liked it, stuck with it, and here I am. And I still miss my mother horribly, and for eighteen years I’ve had a very hard time believing in the world I live in. I love you, Lyle, but I wish I could wake up and find that I’m still eighteen and this is all a dream.”
“Perfectly understandable,” I said, and gave her a little kiss on the cheek.
“You believe me?”
“I believe you’re telling the truth as you know it. And I believe that your story is entirely possible. I just don’t understand how or why. Have you checked your handbag? Do you have a Free Republic of Diego Garcia passport?”
She switched on the light and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Lyle, I’m so afraid to look. What if I do? What if... what if the Free Republic is there again? I could ... Mummy would only be fifty-eight, she’d surely still be alive, she must have been so worried— what if I don’t have it?”