“I like him already,” Helen said.
“Me too, and all we knew about him before was that Billie Beard was interested in him. Anyway, the fact that he showed up in your case in that way is extremely interesting. Especially since Jenny Bannon, who was the other leg of the process leading to your release, was also being shadowed by Billie Beard at one time, and furthermore it turns out that she and Picardin belong to the same VR chat group. Somehow or other this is turning out to be a very small world.”
“And she’s from a country that I thought was entirely imaginary, or some kind of delusion,” Helen said. “She’s from that confusing part of my memory.”
Iphwin looked blank and stood stock-still. I’d never seen that happen before. Helen quickly sketched in what she’d told me. She seemed to gain confidence this time and though her lip sometimes trembled when she spoke of her mother, she didn’t cry.
“That’s one place she’s from. But one of our employees met her at a reception and got a business card, and though there is no such country as the Free Republic of Diego Garcia, nor any such street as the one its embassy is on, nor any such phone exchange in Auckland as the one listed—when we dial that number, we get the embassy, and if she’s not too busy, Jenny Bannon answers the phone. And obviously enough, since your friend Kelly went to school with her and still calls her, and you can call Kelly— well, you see what I mean by discrepancies.
“Now, aside from the intellectually interesting question of how you all arrived in such a small world with each other, the other thing that is interesting to me is that exactly the same people who appear to be trying to track down and kill the remaining American Resistance, and who seem to be associated with, and perhaps arranging, the many coincidences and lapses of causality that have been doing so much damage to ConTech, are the people who have been trying to kill this small knot of chat rooms and acquaintances.
“Furthermore, they seem to have been foiled largely by accident, which is not only odd in a professional organization, but makes many of my investigative team wonder, intensely, whether we ourselves might be being attacked by one group or force, and supported by another, neither of which we know anything about. If the enemy of the enemy is my friend, why won’t my friend introduce himself? But in any case, anyone that the enemy is out to eliminate—such as you two, or Jenny Bannon, or Jesu Picardin—is probably a good person to keep alive and well, if we possibly can. Hence our interest in you.”
Through all this long conversation, Iphwin hadn’t sat still for as long as five seconds, but had bounced from place to place, sitting on desks and shelves, leaning against walls, and rocketing around the room like a man who has lost something valuable. “And honestly, according to the research group, that is as much as I can safely tell you at this point. I will tell you more, eventually everything, I hope, just as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. For the moment, though, what I specifically want you to do is to conduct an investigation into an area that we don’t have anyone assigned to yet—an area where we have a single puzzling piece of information that makes no sense that we are aware of, but ought to make some kind if we only knew what kind, and we’d like to see what you can do with it.
“That piece of information is this: ask most people on the street questions about the past, either elementary history or events in their own lifetime, and we get a pretty conventional story, with minor errors that we could just as easily ascribe to bad memory, bad teaching, or sheer random perversity as anything else. But whenever we try interviewing people who seem to be of interest to the enemy, or whose research interests look particularly relevant to the investigation, when we ask what those special people remember of the past, we find all sorts of fundamental disagreements, such as the argument we just had about General Grant, or like Helen’s experience of suddenly finding all of history was different from what she remembered.
“Neither of you is a policeman or secret agent—as far as I know, though the Saigon police have a different opinion about you, Helen, and are absolutely convinced that you must have been a top-level agent for years. Based on what you did, it seems as if briefly you were not a relatively mild-mannered history professor—but then, while you weren’t, who were you? Anyway, the one thing we know is that these wildly inconsistent memories have something to do with the problem—so your job, the historian and the abductive mathematician, is to arrive at some explanation for the phenomenon.”
“That’s the job, then?” I asked. “To figure out why people linked with this mysterious attack on ConTech have memories so different from everyone else’s?”
Iphwin nodded, and then sat down cross-legged on the floor, like a small child. As he spoke he used his finger to draw some complex, incomprehensible diagram on the floor. “My company has been attacked many times since I founded it. We’ve been leaned on by organized crime, by various kinds of secret police, by underground political organizations, and by religious cults. No surprise in all that—if you get big enough, you get leaned on. But in every case before, I’ve been able to fight it off, with some combination of bribes and force. This one concerns me more.
“It looks like a general assault on causality, happening all around ConTech. Perhaps they have discovered some way of altering causality and are using it to make ordinary attacks and blackmail more effective. Or maybe someone with a power beyond anything we know simply has an agenda too different from anything any of us would have for any of us to understand it. Whatever the case, if it’s possible to know, I don’t just want to know who they are and why they did it, but how.”
He jumped up from the floor and said, “Each of you has an interview with a psychiatrist in ten minutes. Don’t worry, it’s not because I think you are crazy.” Then he lunged out the door before either of us could say anything, and when we looked at the computer terminals on our desk we saw that each of us had to report to a room on the same floor in ten minutes’ time.
I thought a while. “ConTech must have tracked the whole network of our friends, for Iphwin to have such a clear understanding of how we got out of jail. And yet with so many of them watching us, the party of bodyguards could still get ambushed in Saigon, and somehow or other Billie Beard could still get through to beat me up. And someone impersonating me managed to pick you up in my jump boat and take you to Saigon, before returning the boat, and not bothering to do anything to cover it up.” I sat down and stared into space. “There’s an amazing amount of power somewhere behind Iphwin. And whoever the bad guys are, there’s at least that much power behind them.”
“Always assuming that Iphwin and the bad guys aren’t the same people.”
“Always assuming.” I stood up and straightened my clothes. “Well, off to the psychologists. The funny thing is, the only thing that I’m pretty sure of is that I’m not losing my mind.”
“Mine might be misplaced but I’m sure I still have it somewhere,” Helen said, also standing and smoothing her skirt. She stretched and yawned. I liked the way she stepped forward and straightened my tie as if I were her prize cat. “And you’re not a professor anymore, so you don’t get to be absentminded. All right, let’s go see the nice shrinks and see what they want to do with us.”
In a short while I was sitting in a small room in a comfortable leather armchair, watching a quiet little man with a dark ring beard take notes on everything I said. He began by asking, “Who is Mickey Mouse?”