*
You hear them negotiating in the background – it’s tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen’s onslaught. It’s all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and this body cue, nudging you this way and that – you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband – and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.
You feel, all the while, the Rong girl’s gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won’t move away from you, and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn’t think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the colour of cinnamon – no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a colour you’ve seen all your life.
‘You have to take it off,’ she says. You don’t move, but you wonder what she’s talking about.
Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?
The immerser.
Abruptly, you remember – a dinner with Galen’s friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language, that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn’t remove it. And then… and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed – saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labelled for you. Then…
Then it all slid down, didn’t it? You couldn’t program the network anymore, couldn’t look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen’s compartment, wandering into the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself – as if you’d already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then… then the immerser wouldn’t come off, anymore.
*
‘What do you think you’re doing, young woman?’
Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy – his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. ‘We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.’ It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic, and he sounded like a stranger to her – an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood – whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.
‘I apologize,’ Quy said, meaning none of it.
‘That’s all right,’ Galen said. ‘I didn’t mean to…’ he paused, looked at his wife. ‘I shouldn’t have brought her here.’
‘You should take her to see a physician,’ Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.
‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’ His voice was bitter. ‘I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t…’ He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. ‘Who knows if she’d come back?’
Quy felt herself blush. ‘I’m sorry.’ And she meant it this time.
Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. ‘So we’re agreed?’ Galen asked Second Uncle. ‘For a million credits?’
Quy thought of the banquet, of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavours. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, again, but no one was listening, and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart – with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.
*
‘I’m sorry,’ the girl says. She stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel a tearing inside, as if something within you is struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.
But they’re all shaking hands, smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck – like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you, giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.
Please don’t go.
It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalizing smells of food – of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make – you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly and from a distance, and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast – you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room, and you follow her inside.
They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in, and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at – both
