The world froze again.
“Did you—?”
“It happened to all of us,” the Colonel said, “which I think is pretty strange. Try saying it very slowly, Terri; maybe somebody is censoring the net, even though that’s supposed to be impossible. I’m sure that if they could the—”
For the third time, the world froze.
“I can’t even say their name,” the Colonel said, “without tripping the censorship program.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “We all know you meant the Germans.”
Just as I said “Germans,” there was another freeze; everyone came out of it looking baffled.
“Hmmph,” Helen said. “Well, if nothing else we’ve just learned that some kinds of casual chat are not allowed. I always thought the little freezes were caused by jam-ups somewhere between me and the server, something about having too little bandwidth, but we’re in the Big Sapphire here and there’s no way I could be as short on bandwidth as I usually was in Enzy.”
Everyone nodded, and Terri said, “Okay, let me try to say the name. It looked like you.
“Were right in the middle.
“Of.” She wet her lips and then slowly said. “Ho.
“Chi.
“Minh.
“City.”
I had heard all the syllables clearly and I had no idea what she had said. “That’s strange,” I said. “Actually we were in Saigon.”
“It just broke up,” everyone chorused.
“Sai...” I paused. “Gon.” It seemed to go right through, but now everyone looked very confused.
“I clearly heard you and I wrote it down,” Kelly said, looking at the pad in front of her, “but now I can’t read what I wrote. It looks like S...A...I...G...O...N.”
“That’s right,” I said, “Saigon.” There was another freeze that denoted another system crash.
“If this keeps up, this story may take quite a while to tell,” Roger said.
Terri nodded emphatically. “Well, anyway, what I found out was that you weren’t at your hotel, but in jail, and when I tried getting into the jail’s public information board, it told me you were being held on suspicion of murder. That didn’t sound right, so I called Roger, and I called Kelly. I think Roger sort of took the first steps—”
“Not much more than making some net calls,” Roger said. “My old second in command, Esmé Sanderson, from back when I commanded the”
FREEZE
“before the damned”
FREEZE
“forced us to disband and”
FREEZE
“This is going to be a hard story to get out,” Helen said, “but anyway, Esmé Sanderson had been your second in command, even if you can’t tell us where or when or for what unit, right?”
“Right, and now she’s a cop in Mexico City.”
We had all braced for a freeze when it was obvious that he was going to speak a place name, but that one was apparently not a problem. Who can explain the choices and ideas of a censor? Sykes let his breath out—he really was remarkably splendid when he was wearing Sidney Greenstreet—and said, “Well, there, I thought they’d hit that one but they didn’t. Anyway, she said she’d look into it, and what she told me later was that she had checked up on your case with authorities in Ho
“Chi
“Minh
“City. There, it didn’t make a breakup.”
“But I have no idea what you said,” Helen pointed out. “All right, so she checked up with the authorities.”
“That’s right, and she discovered that you had shot Billie Beard, so she called it to the attention of her supervisor, Jesús Picardin. She says she thought Picardin was going to kiss her when he heard the news; they’d been trying for years to get Billie Beard either into Mexico, where she could be arrested, or busted someplace where they could extradite, but having her dead was even better.”
“I thought Billie Beard was a cop,” I said.
“She is—a bad cop even in a service that’s known for its badness. Probably even her bosses didn’t much care what happened to her anymore. Billie Beard was wanted for nearly everything, nearly everywhere. Real bad piece of work. Even the”
FREEZE
“uh that is I mean her employers, didn’t like her much, and she was wanted for all kinds of things. The world is not at all sorry to see her go. And so Picardin authorized sending the files about Beard to the local authorities, and as soon as those files started to scroll out of the fax machine, your friend Inspector Dong had some very good reasons to stop worrying; he was assured that no matter how the case came out, no one was going to care very much, because the part they did care about was already accomplished.”
“I guess I was the other part of getting you out,” Kelly said. “It happens I went to school with Jenny Schmidt, who is now Jenny Bannon, who is more officially Jennifer H. S. Bannon, Ambassador from the Free Republic of Diego Garcia to the Court of New Zealand. I thought I knew, from somewhere, that Helen was a DG citizen, so I confirmed that, then called Jenny and got her on it. She called up their Ambassador—another guy we went to school with, creepy guy we all called Bobo, but very willing to do a favor for a friend—Bobo seemed to know you, Helen, and that helped too. So in a short time he was also phoning the Saigon police.”
“Well, at least that explains how we got released,” Helen said. “Let me try an experiment here. How many of you have heard of the”—
Everyone froze again, except that I clearly heard her—not through the VR, but just because she was in the room with me— say “Puritan Party.”
“All right,” she said. She picked up her pad and slowly read off “Ho...Chi...Minh...City. Now I’ll say it at normal speed, and let’s see what happens. Ho Chi Minh City.”
This time there was no freeze, but the world seemed to wobble a little. “Now someone else try.”
“Saigon,” the Colonel said, and no one froze. “But now that I think of it, from the unit history, I seem to recall that Saigon”
FREEZE
“City. No one calls it Saigon anymore.”
I tried to say “His Most Catholic Majesty the King of Cochin-China does,” but apparently just the thought caused a freeze, or maybe my thought and Helen’s together did.
We played around all night, and we established a few rules. If we said it slowly enough, no freeze happened. If the people who weren’t talking carefully copied the words down and read them aloud, slowly, no freeze happened. If we practiced that for a while, till everyone could say the words, then we stopped freezing on the word itself, but often froze if we tried to use it in a sentence.
It gave us something to talk about, and we went really late that night, especially since none of us had anything really pressing in the next few hours. We developed slightly more theories than we had people—Helen and the Colonel each had two. Mine was that the censor was some kind of crude AI that did some kind of very limited brain monitoring and that as we practiced the word, we got to where we could say it without meaning it—but if we used it in a sentence, the meaning came back and set off the censor. Helen thought that somehow everyone’s brain had been programmed with a virus that acted to censor other people’s words at the auditory center so that as we practiced we gradually stopped censoring each other; her alternative theory was that the censor had some way of determining, after a few freezes, that the conversation was harmless, and then wouldn’t freeze it again until it changed.
All of us elaborated our theories and sniped at each other’s; we did dozens of other small experiments without really adding any more facts to our store of knowledge. It finally got too late for Colonel Sykes, who said the sun was coming up in Mexico, so he departed; Kelly had to go a while later, as she had a first reading on a new play, and finally Terri stretched and yawned— an impressive gesture in Yvonne’s body because that jacket had not been constructed for a woman who moved freely—and left also. “Ever think of having sex with Bogart?” I asked Helen.