Free This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams Page A

for various kinds of bananas, but there were still a range of breads, steamed rice and fried rice, vegetables, and a wide variety of sauces.
    The meal was starch-heavy, but Dagmar ate a lot of it.
    The Sumatran businessman was talkative and asked a great many questions: Where are you from? Where are you going? How many brothers and sisters do you have? What do you do for a living?
    Dagmar was suspicious at first, Zan’s warnings about kidnapping fresh in her mind. But the Tippels answered freely, and Dingwangkara was so cheerful, and so clearly what he claimed to be, that Dagmar found herself answering.
    “My father died a few years ago,” she said.
    He had finally succeeded in his life’s ambition of drinking himself to death.
    To her surprise she found tears stinging her eyes. She hadn’t wept for her father during his cirrhosis or anytime thereafter.
    She supposed she wasn’t crying for him now, not really, but for the victims, those who had lost their life savings, who were killed in the riots and the demonstrations, those who had their homes burned out from under them or who were trapped in the burning hotel.
    Dingwangkara looked at her with a gentle expression.
    “My parents are both alive,” he said, and then he added, “Inshallah.”
    “Inshallah,” Dagmar repeated, and she blinked away her tears.
    “They always want to know about your family,” said Cornelis Tippel after Dingwangkara departed. “They’ll ask any damn question they please.”
    “Their culture came from the kampungs,” said Anna, “the long houses where they all lived together. They believe it’s normal for everyone to know about everyone else.”
    Dagmar remembered the young policeman turning to her and asking her about her work. I always take the MAC-10.
    She wondered how you were supposed to know when they were just asking questions, and when they were kidnappers trying to decide if you were worth a ransom.

FROM: BJSKI
SUBJECT: Re: Jakarta
     
    Holy cripes! I had no idea you were even out of the country!
     
    What can I do? Can I send you a care package? A gun? A helicopter?
    Can I fly out there and help you somehow? Only problem is, I’m so broke you’d have to buy the ticket. But I’ll come!
     
    Let me know!
     
    Hearts,
     
    BJ
     
    After breakfast, Dagmar found it too depressing to wander around the lower hotel, with its looted shops, boarded windows, and frightened employees, so she returned to her room. She didn’t dare open the curtains to watch the burning Palms, so she kept the drapes drawn and watched the catastrophe on television. The talking heads on CNN discussed 9/11 and speculated about the ideological or religious motivations of whoever had set the fire, chatted about how whoever had constructed the hotel had obviously ignored a lot of building codes, and spoke of a well-known American lawyer who was jetting with his team to Singapore in hopes of signing up as many survivors as possible in order to file a class-action suit for damages.
    Dagmar hoped her own hotel was up to spec.
    When desperate people started throwing themselves off the burning building, Dagmar turned off the television and opened her laptop. She found she had dozens of emails from practically everyone who knew she was in Jakarta, some of them writing more than once, to all of the three email addresses she currently maintained. They’d seen the burning hotel on television, and they were desperate to know whether she was all right.
    She answered one email and CC’d anyone else who had queried, so that everyone would have an answer in as short a space of time as possible.
    When she was finished, she sat back in her chair while a slow sense of wonder rose in her, wonder at the sheer number of people who cared for her. Some of those who had sent email were people whom she hadn’t seen in person for years and with whom she maintained only a tenuous form of contact.
    Dagmar hadn’t realized so many people cared.
    She was used to the way interest