The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

We toured the villa, and she let me photograph everything, even their bedroom. Huge canopied bed, carved chests, jars of plum blossoms. Chou, or some PR spinner, had decided that a Chinese political partner should appear neither too austere nor too American. China’s past was honored in her present, even as she looked toward the future-that was clearly the message I was to get out. I recorded everything. Kyra said nothing as we toured, usually not even looking at me. She combed her hair in front of her ornate carved mirror, fiddled with objects, sat in deep reverie. It was as if she’d forgotten I was there.

Kyra’s silence broke only as she escorted me to the gate. Abruptly she said, “Amy… do you remember Carter Falls High? The V-R Gala?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously.

“You and I and our dates were in the jungle room. There was a virtual coconut fight. I tossed a coconut at you, it hit, and you pretended you didn’t even see it.”

“Yes,” I said. Out of all the shunning I’d done to her in those horrible, terrified, cruel teenage years, she picked that to recall!

“But you did see it. You knew I was there.”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Kyra.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, with such a glittering smile that all at once I knew who her anger was directed at. She had given me this interview out of old family ties, or a desire to show off the superiority of our relative positions, or something, but she was angry at me. And always would be.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, with spectacular inadequacy. Kyra didn’t answer, merely turned and walked back toward her tiny Forbidden City.

My story was a great success. The Times ran it in flat-screen, 3-D, and V-R, and its access rate went off the charts. It was the first time anyone had been inside the Chou compound, had met the American girlfriend of an enigmatic general, had seen that particular lifestyle up close. Kyra’s mysterious encounter with aliens sixteen years ago gave it a unique edge. Even those who hated the story-and there were many, calling it exploitative, immoral, decadent, symptomatic of this or that-noticed it. My message system nearly collapsed under the weight of congratulations, condemnations, job offers.

The next day, Kyra Lunden called a press conference. She denied everything. I had been admitted to the Chou villa, yes, but only as a relative, for tea. Our agreement had been no recorders. I had violated that, had recorded secretly, and furthermore had endangered Chinese-American relations. Kyra had tears in her eyes. The Chinese Embassy issued an angry denunciation. The State Department was not pleased.

The Times fired me.

Standing in my apartment, still surrounded by the masses of flowers that had arrived yesterday, I stared at nothing. The sickeningly sweet fragrances made me queasy. Wild ideas, stupid ideas, rioted in my head. I could sue. I could kill myself. Kyra really had been altered by the aliens. She was no longer human, but a V-R-thriller simulacrum of a human, and it was my duty to expose her.

All stupid. Only one idea was true.

Kyra had, after all these years, found a way to get even.

2027

In the second year of the war, the aliens came back.

David told me while I was bathing the baby in the kitchen sink. The twins, Lucy and Lem, were shrieking around the tiny apartment like a pair of banshees. It was a crummy apartment, but it wasn’t too far from David’s job, and we were lucky to get it. There was a war on.

“The Blanding telescope has picked up an alien ship heading for Earth.” David spoke the amazing sentence flatly, the way he speaks everything to me now. It was the first time he’d initiated conversation in two weeks.

I tightened my grip on Robin, a wriggler slippery with soap, and stared at him. “When… how…”

“It would be good, Amy, if you could ever finish a sentence,” David said, with the dispassionate hypercriticism he brings these days to everything I say. It wasn’t always like this. David wasn’t always like this. Depression, his doctor told me, unfortunately not responding to available medications. Well, great, so David’s depressed. The whole country’s depressed. Also frightened and poor and gray-faced with anxiety about this unpredictable war’s bio-attacks and Q-bomb attacks and EMP attacks, all seemingly random. We’re all depressed, but not all of us take it out on the people we live with.

I said with great deliberation, “When did the Blanding pick up the aliens, and do the scientists believe they’re the same aliens that came here in July of 2002?”

“Yesterday. Yes. You should either bathe Robin or not bathe him, instead of suspending a vital parental job in the middle like that.” He left the room.