It was, Tukana Prat thought, one of the Austrian delegates who first began slapping his hands together, but he was almost immediately joined by dozens, then hundreds, of others, and soon all the delegates were on their feet, making enthusiastic noises with their palms and mouths.

Incompetent? thought Tukana, beaming out at the crowd, thrilled with what she’d begun here today. Incompetent, my hairy ass…

“We’ve only got one day here in Washington before the conference begins,” said Mary, “and there’s so much I want to show you. But I wanted to start with this. Nothing else says more about this country, and about what it means to be human—my kind of human.”

Ponter looked at the strange vista in front of him, not understanding. There was a scar in the grass-covered landscape, a deep welt that ran for eighty paces then met, at an obtuse angle, another similar scar.

The scars were black and reflective—a…what was that word again? An ox-uh-mor-on, that was it; a contradiction in terms. Black, meaning it absorbed all light; reflective, meaning it bounced light back.

And yet that’s precisely what it was, a black mirror, reflecting Ponter’s face, and Mary’s, too. Two kinds of humanity—not just female and male, but two separate species, two different iterations of the human theme. Her reflection showed what she called a Homo sapiens and he called a Gliksin: her strange upright forehead, minuscule nose, and—there was no word in Ponter’s language for it—her chin.

And his reflection showed what she called a Homo neanderthalensis and he called a Barast, the word for “human” in his language: a Neanderthal’s broad countenance, with a doubly arched browridge and a proper-sized nose extending across a third of his face.

“What is it?” asked Ponter, staring at the oblong blackness, at their reflections.

“It’s a memorial,” said Mary. She looked away from the black wall and waved her hand at objects in the distance. “This whole mall is filled with memorials. The pair of walls here point at two of the most important ones. That spire is the Washington Monument, a memorial to the first U.S. president. Over there, that’s the Lincoln Memorial, commemorating the president who freed the slaves.”

Ponter’s translator bleeped.

Mary let out a sigh. Evidently there was still more complexity, more—what had she called it?—more dirty linen to be aired.

“We’ll visit both those memorials later,” said Mary. “But, as I said, I wanted to start here. This is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.”

“Vietnam is one of your nations, is it not?” said Ponter.

Mary nodded. “In southeast Asia—southeast Galasoy. Just north of the equator. An S-shaped bit of land”—she drew the letter with a finger in the air so that Ponter would understand—“on the Pacific seaboard.”

“We call the same place Holtanatan. But on my version of Earth it is very hot, very humid, rainy, full of swamps, and overrun by insects. No one lives there.”

Mary lifted her eyebrows. “Over eighty million people live there in this reality.”

Ponter shook his head. The humans of this version of Earth were so…so unrestrained.

“And,” continued Mary, “a war was fought there.”

“Over what? Over swamps?”

Mary closed her eyes. “Over ideology. Remember I told you about the Cold War? This was part of that—but this part was hot.”

“Hot?” Ponter shook his head. “You are not referring to temperature, are you?”

“No. Hot. As in a shooting war. As in people died.”

Ponter frowned. “How many people?”

“In total, from all sides? No one really knows. Over a million of the local South Vietnamese. Somewhere between half a million and a million North Vietnamese. Plus…” She gestured at the wall.

“Yes?” said Ponter, still baffled by the reflecting blackness.

“Plus fifty-eight thousand, two hundred and nine Americans. These two walls commemorate them.”

“Commemorate them how?”

“See the writing engraved in the black granite?”

Ponter nodded.

“Those are names—names of the confirmed dead, and of those missing in action who never came home.” Mary paused. “The war ended in 1975.”

“But this is the year you reckon as”—and Ponter named it.

Mary nodded.

Ponter looked down. “I do not think the missing are coming home.” He moved closer to the wall. “How are the names arrayed?”

“Chronologically. By date of death.”

Ponter looked at the names, all in what he’d learned were known as capital letters, a small mark—a bullet, isn’t that what they called it, one of their many words that served double duty?—separating each name from the next.

Ponter couldn’t read English characters; he was only beginning to grasp this strange notion of a phonetic alphabet. Mary moved in beside him, and, in a soft voice, read some of the names to him. “Mike A. Maksin. Bruce J. Moran. Bobbie Joe Mounts. Raymond D. McGlothin.” She pointed at another line, apparently chosen at random. “Samuel F. Hollifield, Jr. Rufus Hood. James M. Inman. David L. Johnson. Arnoldo L. Carrillo.”

And another line, farther down. “Donney L. Jackson. Bobby W. Jobe. Bobby Ray Jones. Halcott P. Jones, Jr.”

“Fifty-eight thousand of them,” said Ponter, his voice as soft as Mary’s.

“Yes.”

“But—but you said these are dead Americans?”

Mary nodded.

“What were they doing fighting a war half a world away?”

“They were helping the South Vietnamese. See, in 1954, Vietnam had been divided into two halves, North Vietnam and South Vietnam, as part of a peace agreement, each with its own kind of government. Two years later, in 1956, there were to be free elections throughout both halves, supervised by an international committee, to unify Vietnam under a single, popularly elected government. But when 1956 rolled around, the leader of South Vietnam refused to hold the scheduled elections.”

“You taught me much about this country, the United States, when we visited Philadelphia,” said Ponter. “I know how highly Americans value democracy. Let me guess: the United States sent troops to force South Vietnam to participate in the promised democratic election.”

But Mary shook her head. “No, no, the United States supported the South’s desire not to hold the election.”

“But why? Was the government in the North corrupt?”

“No,” said Mary. “No, it was reasonably honest and kind—at least up until when the promised election, which it wanted, was canceled. But there was a corrupt government—the one in the South.”

Ponter shook his head, baffled. “But you said that the South was the one the Americans were supporting.”

“That’s right. See, the government in the South was corrupt, but capitalist; it shared the American economic system. The one in the north was Communist; it used the economic system of the Soviet Union and China. But the northern government was much more popular than the corrupt southern one. The United States feared that if free elections were held, the Communists would win and control all of Vietnam, which in turn, would lead to other countries in southeast Galasoy falling to Communist rule.”

“And so American soldiers were sent there?”

“Yes.”

“And died?”

“Many did, yes.” Mary paused. “That’s what I wanted you to understand: how important principles are to us. We will die to defend an ideology, die to support a cause.” She pointed at the wall. “These people here, these fifty-eight thousand people, fought for what they believed in. They were told to go to war, told to save a weaker people from what was held to be the great Communist threat, and they did so. Most of them were young—eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. For many, it was their first time away from home.”