Safe House

2

For Maj, the previous evening had pretty much been routine. Maj’s mom and dad left at eight-thirty for the PTA dinner, with Maj’s mother bearing before her an astonishingly detailed and complete medieval castle rendered in sugar plate, right down (or up) to small spun-sugar banners flying from toothpicks fixed in the battlements. The Muffin went off to play in virtual space until bedtime, and Maj sat at the kitchen table for a good while, snacking on a pomegranate while going through her piled-up e-mail and occasionally looking out of her own work space through a “side door” she had installed into Muffin’s virtual “play area,” a large green woodland meadow which at the moment was populated by a number of deinonichuses, iguanas, and very small stegosaurs. In the middle of this pastoral landscape the Muffin was sitting on a large smooth rock and reading to the assorted saurians, very slowly, carefully sounding out the words. “…And the great serpent said, ‘What has brought thee to this island, little one? Speak quickly, and if thou dost not ac-quaint me with something I have not heard, or knew not before, thou shalt van-…vanish like a flame—’”

Maj smiled and turned her attention back to the electronic mail that “lay” all over the kitchen table, or bobbled around in the air in front of her in the form of various brightly colored three-dimensional icons. A lot of it was in the form of shiny black spheres about baseball-size, with the number 7 flashing inside it — mail from her friends in that wildly assorted loose association, the “Group of Seven.” There were actually a lot more than seven of them, now, but as a group they were too lazy to bother changing the number every time someone new joined. They had other things to think about — one of them, at the moment, being the new sim that presently had a lot of other people on the Net interested as well.

Maj and the other members of the Group had originally started getting together on a regular basis because they were all interested in designing their own “sims”—simulated realities, “playrooms” or “pocket universes” based in the Net, where you could lose an hour or a week engaged in conversation, or combat, with other people — a few of them or thousands. For a lucky few with the necessary talent and perseverance, it could become a career, an incredibly lucrative one, and some of the Group of Seven had this kind of future in mind for themselves. They designed sims and let the rest of the Group play with them, “test-driving” them and working out the kinks. It was “practicing for the real world” for these kids. Others, like Maj, just liked to play “inside” small custom-designed sims rather than the big glossy ones, which tended to be expensive.

But every now and then one came along that caused an unusual amount of interest. Cluster Rangers was one of these. It was a space sim — the latest of what, over the course of the life of the Net, had probably been thousands of space-oriented games, puzzles, and virtual environments. But there was something rather special about this one. It wasn’t just that Mihail Oranief, the sim designer, had taken incredible care over the details of it, which by itself was hardly unusual. It was a big, juicy, complex game, full of interesting solar systems, weird alien races, and interesting characters having interesting (and occasionally fatal) conflicts with one another.

Cluster Rangers had a couple of additional attractions that had seemed to drop out of a lot of space sims, or were never in them at all. For one thing, it was very interactive. Not just in the obvious sense, that you got into it and lived it for hours at a time. But Oranief had seen fit to release his “interface code,” the “modular” programming which would allow players to design their own spacecraft, space stations, even their own planets, and “plug them into” the Cluster Rangers universe.

This by itself was both a courtesy and a challenge — the sign of a very assured and confident programmer who was willing to let people come into his universe and make it better than even he had thought to. And that had powerfully attracted Maj and most of the rest of the Seven — all eleven of them. For some weeks now they had jointly been engaged in the design of a small squadron of fighter craft which would make their debut at the upcoming Battle of Didion, presently scheduled for tomorrow night.

All of them were determined to make a splash, and they had come up with what they considered the ultimate small fighter craft for exploiting the laws of science as the sim designer had laid them down. There were some big differences there from the average virtual universe. Light speed was much lower, and the human body could stand more G’s, but to Maj’s mind, the most amusing change was that, though vacuum there was vacuum, it also was allowed to conduct sound — and when you blew something up, you heard the BOOM! without breaking any rules. There were people who despised this warping of conventional physical reality as excessive whimsy. For her own part, Maj was willing to cut the sim designers a small amount of slack. She liked the booms.

But ship design was what was primarily occupying her and the rest of the Group at the moment. All these mails now piled up on Maj’s “desk” involved last-minute changes to the craft — suggestions and alterations, ideas picked up and immediately discarded, rude remarks about other people’s ideas (or one’s own), bad jokes, fits of nervousness or excitement, and various expressions of scorn, panic, or self-satisfaction. The Group had picked a side to align itself with in the Battle, had made some new friends and some new enemies, and was, Maj judged, pretty much ready to get out there now and go head-to-head with some of the Archon’s “Black Arrow” squadrons. Their own “Arbalest” ships were both effective and handsome — a point about which, considering the quality of the rest of the game, Maj had had some concern.

Most designers who simply adapted astronomical photos from the Hubble and Alpher-Bethe-Gamow Space Telescopes for their scenarios wound up, despite the sometimes spectacular nature of the images, with backgrounds that looked hard and cold. Maj wasn’t sure what Oranief had done to his “exteriors,” but they somehow looked hard and warm. It was an unusual distinction, this ability to make space, already beautiful enough, look even more so, to make blackness more than just black, but also dark and mysterious, and either threateningly so-so that you looked over your shoulder nervously while you were flying — or kindly so, so that you hung there in the darkness with a feeling that something approved of you being there. However Oranief did it, the effect of Cluster Rangers, the sense of depth in a game, of it all meaning more somehow than it looked as if it did, was like nothing else on the Net, and people had been flocking to join the sim as a result. Maj was glad that she and the Group had gotten in early, since there was talk of the designer closing down admissions soon and limiting the number of users to those who had already signed up.

She sighed and put the last mail aside, a panicky voice-mail from Bob, who had been complaining that he wasn’t sure the camber of the wings on the Arbalest craft was deep enough. Maj recognized this for what it was — last-minute nerves. “Mail routine,” she said.

“Running, boss,” said her work space in a pleasant, neutral female voice.

“Start reply. Bobby, baby,” Maj said, “if you think I for one am going to support you in yet another change of design the day before the balloon goes up, you’re out of your mind. We have a beautiful ship. We are going to beat the butts off the Black Arrows when they come after us.” When—the thought made the hair on the back of Maj’s neck prickle a little, for there was something inhumanly nasty about the way the Black Arrows flew — too quick to be affected by G’s, too merciless in the aftermath of an attack. There were rumors in the game that the Black Arrow craft were flown by the undead…and it was equally rumored that Free Fighter squadrons should do anything to avoid being taken alive by their enemies, lest they get that way themselves. Not that we’ve seen that many squads survive an attack by them in the first place, she thought. “So just weld your spinal vertebrae together for the time being and play the man. We’re going to be fine. Signed, Maj. End mail.”

“Queue or immediate send?” said Maj’s workspace.

“Send.” She sighed, glanced up. “Time?”

“Nine sixteen P.M.”

“Oh, gosh, and the Muf is still up,” Maj said to herself. She got up, plucked the icon-sphere of the last e-mail from Bob out of the air, picked up the remaining ones from where they lay on the table, and strolled over to the “filing cabinet” where she kept the Cluster Rangers material — a virtual “box” the shape of an Arbalest fighter. She pulled up the canopy of the fighter and stuffed the little message spheres down into it, then closed the canopy and took one last look at the fighter’s design. The beautifully back-slanted wings were perfect, even though they were more often than not superfluous. The fighter spent most of its time in deep space. Still, the group had designed into the ship the ability to go atmospheric if necessary — it was intended to be an ace-in-the-hole. Not many designers retained that capability, opting instead to use shuttlecraft or transporter platforms for their on-planet work. In the upcoming Battle, conditions were ripe to exploit the ship’s versatility.

“‘Camber,’” she muttered. “Bob needs his head examined.”

She turned toward the “door” into the Muffin’s space and headed through it. Muffin was still sitting on her rock and reading to the dinosaurs — one particularly large stegosaur was looking over her shoulder, while chewing a mouthful of grass.

Do they really eat grass? Maj wondered.

“And the woodcutter said—”

Maj peered over the Muffin’s shoulder briefly. “Come on, you,” she said. “Bedtime.”

There was a general groan of annoyance from the dinosaurs. Way up above her, a tyrannosaur bent down and most expressively showed its teeth. “Yeah, you, too,” Maj said, unimpressed, waving a hand expressively in front of her face. “Wow, when did you brush last?”

“It’s not my fault,” the tyrannosaur said. “I eat people.”

“Yeah, well, you could try flossing in between meals,” said Maj, wondering once more who was doing the programming for these creatures. They were somebody’s sim and theoretically came from someone who had been qualified to write sims for small children, though at moments like this Maj wondered exactly what those qualifications looked like. At any rate, she doubted they were doing the Muffin any particular harm. Her little sister was in some ways unusually robust.

“I didn’t finish the story,” the Muffin said, annoyed.

“Okay,” Maj said. “Finish it up. Then bedtime.”

The Muffin opened her book. The dinosaurs leaned down again. “And the woodcutter chopped the wolf open, and Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother fell out. Then the woodcutter took great stones and put them in the wolf’s belly, and sewed the wolf up again, and threw it in the lake, and it never came back up. And the kindly woodcutter took Red Riding Hood home to her mother and father, who cried and laughed when they saw her, and made her promise never to go into the woods alone by herself again.”

The Muffin closed the book, and the dinosaurs stood up around her with a kind of sigh of completion. “Good night,” Muffin said to them, and there was a chorus of grunts and hoots and growls, and they all stalked off among the trees, where darkness began to fall.

Maj suddenly began to wonder why she had been bothering to worry about the saurians. Chopping wolves open, stuffing them with stones, and throwing them in lakes—?! I don’t remember that being in the story I read. But then it had been a long time ago…. “All done?” she said to the Muffin, picking her up.

“All done,” said Muffin. The virtual landscape faded away, replaced by Maj’s little sister’s bedroom.

Maj got the Muffin into her pajamas and put her in bed. “What did you make of that story, small stuff?” Maj said.

“I didn’t make it. It was there.”

“I mean, what do you think it meant?”

“That you shouldn’t go into the forest by yourself, or talk to strangers,” the Muffin said. “Unless you’re a grown-up, or you have an ax. And it’s very bad to kill people, or eat people. Unless you’re a dinosaur and can’t help it.”

Maj blinked. “And that last bit, about the stones?”

“The wolf had it coming,” said the Muffin.

Maj choked on a laugh. “Oh,” she said. “You want a drink of water?”

“No.”

“Okay, honey. You have a good sleep.”

“Night night,” said the Muffin, and turned over and snuggled down among the covers.

Maj softly shut the door to her room and decided that she didn’t have to bother worrying about her sister’s relationship with the virtual dinosaurs. The Brothers Grimm, though, might be another matter, though in this area as well the Muffin seemed to be handling things her own way, calmly and with a certain panache.

She chuckled and made the rounds of the house, checking the locks before turning in. She had an early morning coming up, and then there would be this new kid, Nick, to deal with as well. As long as his being here doesn’t interfere with the sim, she thought, everything should be fine….

Six in the morning came all too early. It was not Maj’s idea of a normal time to get up, but some of the Group of Seven were on the Pacific Coast, and this was the time of day and/or night when it was easiest to get everyone together.

All the same, she was not going to go virtual at such an hour without at least a little preparation. She strolled out to the kitchen in her bathrobe, rubbing her eyes, and put the kettle on, then went back down the hall, hearing a voice — her mother’s, she thought.

By her mother’s office door she stopped and listened. No sound — the voice she had heard was coming down the hall from the master bedroom.

Some early morning Net show, she thought. Her father was addicted to news and talk shows and might be caught listening to them at any hour of the day or night.

However, a little light seeped under her mother’s office door. Maj knocked softly — no answer. She opened the door very quietly, peeked in.

Her mother was leaning back in her implant chair, her eyes closed. The chair began to hum as she stood there, going into a “massage” cycle to keep her mother’s muscles from getting cramped up while she worked.

Maj backed out and shut the door. As late as they had been out last night, there was no keeping her mother away from her work, even on a weekend. “When I sell a system, honey,” her mother kept saying, “I sell service, too. That’s why they keep coming back to me.” And indeed Maj knew her mother’s systems were well thought of in the DC area. She had at least one small government contract, which she didn’t discuss, and many other contracts for various firms in the District and the tristate area. I just wish these people wouldn’t screw their systems up after Mom installs them, Maj thought, so that she has to keep fixing them….

She headed on down to the bathroom. Her brother’s bedroom door, which she passed on the way, was open just a crack. She could hear a faint snore coming from inside.

Another late night for him, Maj thought. But this time of year, that was normal. He and his curling buddies often didn’t finish a “weekend” training session until midnight, after which they would go to one of the all-night diners down in Alexandria and eat and drink until two or sometimes three. Her brother claimed that it was amazing the way curling took the energy out of you. It was all mindwork, he claimed — nothing to do with the mere physical exertion involved, which mostly involved scooting up and down a lane of ice, brushing it with brooms and shouting occasionally off-color suggestions to a large polished rock. Maj had her doubts about the “mindwork” aspects of this sport, or how much energy it took out of you. But she didn’t bother voicing them to her brother, who sometimes claimed that there couldn’t possibly be any energy expended while playing a viola. Like he has the slightest idea…

She brushed her teeth while waiting for the kettle to go off, and as she finished and came out of the bathroom, she caught that murmur of sound again, from the main bedroom…Not a show. Her father’s voice. He was using the “repeater” in the bedroom to hook into the main Net computer in his study, and talking to somebody. At this hour? But then again, in Europe it was lunchtime. If it was something to do with their new guest…

Maj started to turn away, then paused. She was not a big eavesdropper, normally, but there was something about the timbre of her father’s voice that made her stop and stand still right where she was, straining to hear better without going any closer.

“…Yes. Yes, I know, but I didn’t feel that I had much choice. He’s a friend, Jim. If you don’t help your friends when they need it badly, then there’s not much point in the concept of friendship to begin with.”

Maj had been about to step away from the door, rather embarrassed at her own eavesdropping, until she heard the name “Jim.” There were only two people whom her father addressed that way. One was an uncle in Denver, his brother. The other was James Winters, the Net Force Explorers liaison. Considering what time it was in Denver, Maj thought she could guess which one it was.

“Yes, I know. Well, it’s a done deal. He’s about to arrive. I would have liked to give you more warning, but by the time this particular movement had to start happening, any more communication between him and me might have tipped off the very people he was trying to avoid. And then I couldn’t get you last night.”

A long silence. “Of course we will,” her father said. “Maj is good that way.” And another pause. “Yes, around ten. We should have gotten him home by then, assuming the traffic’s not too bad. Right. Till then.”

She blushed and moved off quietly down the hall. Bad enough to hear yourself being complimented while you were being a sneak and listening to people’s private conversations, or half of them.

But this kid coming in, this Nick, is one of our relatives. Why would Dad be talking to James Winters about him…?

She went back up the hall toward the kitchen, listening for the kettle. It was grumbling to itself, not ready to whistle yet. At the door of her dad’s study Maj paused, was briefly overcome by one more yawn, then wandered in to look at some of the books and paperwork piled up on the worktable in vast quantities, as usual. Some of them were quite old—“Eastern European studies” stuff, bound magazines in various East European languages, some in Cyrillic lettering and some in Roman, some of them fifty, maybe sixty years old. Somehow Maj started to get the idea that all this stuff was not anything to do with coursework.

She wandered back out again and into the kitchen, where the kettle’s grumbling and rumbling was getting louder, and thought about her relatives. The Greens had relations all over the Western part of Europe — Ireland, mostly, and some in France and Spain and Austria. She had been surprised to find that some of them had married into the famous Lynch winemaking family, Irish emigrants who had settled in Bordeaux in the 1800s and had been deep in viticulture ever since. Eastern Europe, though, Maj thought, putting the kettle on. No one ever mentioned before that we had anybody out that way. Weird….

Unless we don’t really have anyone out that way.

The kettle began to whimper, preparatory to breaking into full cry, and Maj reached up to open one of the cupboards and get a teabag of the Japanese green tea with roasted rice that she favored, then she got a mug off the mug tree. That her father was on the link to James Winters was in itself odd enough. Not that she didn’t know that they were friends. Apparently they had been at school together at some point. But why would her dad be discussing their visitor with him…?

Unless this new kid is Net Force business somehow—Which made it, as far as Maj was concerned, her business as well…especially when it turned up in her own household.

The kettle started to shriek. Maj pulled it hurriedly off the burner and poured the boiling water onto her teabag, then killed the burner and took the cup over to the table, sat down with it. A moment later her mother came scuffing in, also wearing that slightly beat-up “work bathrobe” she favored for these early morning work sessions, a garish multicolored thing she had brought back from Covent Garden in London after a consulting trip. “These people,” she muttered, making for the same cupboard Maj had opened, and taking out a one-shot coffee dripper from it. “I build them a system that works like a dream, but can they leave it alone? Noooo. They have to tinker with it, and attach new programs to it, and they don’t debug the programs, and then they wonder why the whole thing crashes….”

“Morning, Mom,” Maj said.

“Morning, honey,” her mother said. “Thank you for not saying ‘good.’”

Maj was itching to ask her mother why her dad would be on the phone to James Winters…but that would reveal that she had been eavesdropping.

“Daddy up yet?” her mother said.

“I think so. Sounded like he was on the link or something.”

“The man just won’t rest.”

“Neither will you.”

“And what are you doing up this hour?” her mother said. “Before you accuse us of being incorrigible workaholics.”

“Oh, our big space battle’s tonight. Prebriefing.”

“That serious?” her mother said, pouring water into the prepacked coffee filter.

“Well, we’ve spent a lot of time on development,” Maj said. “We don’t want to get immediately dead because we didn’t discuss what we were going to do with what we developed.”

“Mmm,” her mother said then. “No argument there…”

They sat in companionable silence for a while and drank their tea and coffee respectively. After a few moments, there came a faint tick! from one side of the kitchen. Maj’s mom cocked her head. “Aha,” she said, for the tick! had come from the water heater. “He’s in the shower, then.”

Maj’s father would have lived in the shower if he was allowed to. He claimed he got his best ideas there. Maj’s thought was that it was probably best that he had a day job which kept him out of the shower occasionally. Otherwise he would now quite likely rule the world. “I’m in no rush,” she said. “I was going to go to this meeting first.”

“Good.” Her mother had another slurp of coffee. “Honey, about our little guest…”

“Mmmh?”

“You do realize that he’s—”

“Mommy, Mommy, look what I found!”

The Muffin, horribly awake for this hour of the day, came charging into the kitchen, waving a tattered picture book. Maj sighed. Whatever the manufacturers said about these books being “childproof,” they had not yet run them past the Muffin.

“—thirteen,” her mother said after a moment, looking slightly bemused.

“Oh, yeah, Mom, it’s no problem,” Maj said. “I’ll manage.”

“It was lost,” the Muffin said, “and I found it under my bed.” She waved the book under her mother’s nose. It had an earnest-looking dinosaur on the cover.

“That’s where most things go,” said Maj, who had previous experience in this regard with her little sister. The Muffin regarded “under the bed” as a storage area of infinite flexibility.

“Will you read it to me, Mommy?”

“But you can read it yourself, sweetie,” her mother said, wearily taking another swig of coffee.

“It’s good to read to people,” the Muffin insisted. “I read to my dinosaurs. It makes them smarter.”

Maj and her mother gave each other an amused look. “Well, honey,” her mother started to say, and then the phone rang.

“Now, who can it be at this hour?” her mother said, looking up. “They’d better not be expecting imagery, because they’re not going to get it. Hello?” she said.

The Muffin looked annoyed and wandered over to the other side of the table with the book, where she climbed up on a chair, slapped the book down on the table and began to read aloud to herself.

“No,” Maj’s mother said to the air over the recitation of dinosaur names, “he’s not available at the moment; may I take a message for him? — Yes, this is Mrs. Green. — Oh.—Oh. And it’s landing where?”

There was a pause. “Seven-fifteen? There wasn’t any problem with the plane, was there?”

Maj’s eyebrows went up. “—Oh, well that’s good,” her mother said. “No problem. Yes, we’ll be there. Thank you! Bye now!”

She blinked, “hanging up,” and turned to Maj. “So much for the virtues of getting up early and having half an hour to relax,” she muttered, and glanced at the Muffin. “They’ve diverted our young cousin’s flight to Dulles.”

“Isn’t that good for us, though? We don’t have to go all the way down to BWI.”

“It would be good if he wasn’t landing in three-quarters of an hour,” her mother said, getting up and swigging down the rest of her coffee at a rate that made Maj wonder one more time if her mother had an ablative-tile throat. “Better get dressed, honey, we’ve got a plane to meet.”

“Ohmigosh,” Maj said. “My meeting with the Group—!”

“You’re going to have to abort it,” her mother said. “This is family stuff, hon, sorry…I think you’re needed. Tell them you’ll talk to them later.”

“It wasn’t just a talk, it was—!”

But her mother was already on her way down the hall, and a second later she was banging on the bathroom door, shouting, “Sweetie, the sky is falling, better come out of there!”

Maj heard a strangled noise come through the faint sound of rushing water. Reluctantly she got up and went off to get dressed, after which she would have to rush to commandeer enough time on the computer to tell the Group she was going to have to miss out on the briefing. They’re going to be furious. Come to think of it, I think I’m furious.

So much for this little Niko not interfering with anything, Maj thought as she stalked off down the hallway. What a wonderful time we’re going to have together….

Fortunately, it being the awful hour of the morning it was, the traffic into Dulles wasn’t too bad. Maj could almost have wished it was a little worse, in that there would have been more time for her to lose her bad mood completely. The reaction of the Group, when she had stuck her head into Chel’s work space and announced that she couldn’t stay for the meeting, was all too predictable, especially from those who had stayed up late. “Look, I’ll meet you all early here tonight,” Maj had said as she turned to go, and Shih Chin, usually so good-tempered, had actually growled, “Miss Madeline, if you’re late tonight…we’re going without you. The battle starts at six central—”

“I know, I know, I won’t be….” Maj had said, unnerved by the mutter of annoyance coming from the others. She had fled, then, intent on getting into the bathroom for at least a few minutes before she would have to get dressed and pile into the car with the rest of the crowd. Now here she sat, feeling rather hot and bothered, insufficiently showered, and altogether not caring whether she made any kind of good first impression on anybody.

Yet she was still distracted by the one connection she couldn’t put together. James Winters…and Dad. Talking about him. Maj sighed. I’m going to have to cut him some kind of slack, I guess, no matter how annoyed I am.

The Muffin was oblivious to all this, and to everything else, as the car pulled out of the fast-speed “lanes” and chimed at her father for him to take control back to do local approach. She was singing “We have a cousin, we have a cousin!” at the top of her none-too-small lungs as Maj’s dad slipped into the airport parking approach and brought the car around into the access circle, where once again the local remote control computers took it off his hands and guided it into the parking facility. Nothing was allowed to randomly circle within a kilometer from the airport center. There were too many things cycling through the neighborhood at the best of times to allow parking-place anarchy in, too.

“We’re running early,” Maj’s mother said, somewhat surprised, from the other front seat, as the car settled gently into the parking place that the local space control had assigned it.

“Welcome to Dulles International Aerospace Port,” said a pleasant male voice through the car’s entertainment system. “To better serve our visitors, please note that parking rates in short-term are now thirty dollars per hour. Thank you for your cooperation in keeping our airport running smoothly.”

Her father grunted, a sound which Maj knew concealed a comment that would have been much more vigorous if the Muffin hadn’t been in the car. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get in there and fetch our guest before we have to go into escrow to get out again.”

A couple of rows from their space was the shelter for the maglev car that ran to the main terminals, and they all made their way to it, wincing a little at the sound of cars all around them parking or winding up their engines to take off again. Maj looked with some dry amusement at the poster inside the shelter as they climbed into the maglev car which almost immediately slid up to meet them — GROWING AGAIN TO SERVE YOU BETTER! This was Dulles’s third “refit” in the last twenty years, almost finished — so the airport kept promising — now that the fifth runway, the one for the aerospaceplanes, was finished, and the additional wing to Terminal C was almost done being extended and overhauled to service it. It wasn’t entirely ready, though, and so it came to pass that the place where they met Niko looked more like a building site than a terminal.

And Maj, all too ready to be annoyed with him, caught the first sight of the youngster standing over near the “designated meeting” area with the AA flight services lady, and immediately felt all her annoyance drop off her in embarrassment. It was impossible to be angry at anyone who looked so small and lost and scared, and who was trying so valiantly to hide it.

He really was kind of small for his age, his dark jeans and sober sweatshirt and plain dark jacket like something left over from a school uniform, suggesting that he had somehow been trying to avoid notice, and indeed he looked uncomfortable, standing there out in the open, as if he would have preferred to be invisible.

Maj’s dad made straight for him, and Maj hung back a little, watching the kid’s face as he registered this tall, balding man heading in his direction, waiting to see his reaction. The boy looked at her father with dark, assessing eyes. He was himself shadowy — dark hair, a little bit olive of complexion, and had sort of a Mediterranean look, though with high cheekbones. As Maj’s dad came up and paused there, towering over him, the slightest sign of a smile appeared, and it was a relieved smile.

“Martin Green,” her father said to the flight services lady. “And this would be Niko. Grazé, cousin.”

“Grazé…” said the boy as Maj and her mother and the Muffin came along behind her dad.

“Professor Green, can I get you to look into this, please?” said the flight services lady, holding up a “little black box” with an eyepiece.

“No problem.” He took it from her, took off his driving glasses, and fitted the eyepiece to his eye. Then, “Ow,” he said, and handed the box back. “Can they make that light any brighter?”

The flight services lady laughed, turning the box over to check the LCD readout as it came up. “Probably not. That’s fine, Professor. Can I get you to sign this, please?” She held out an electric “pad” and a stylus to him.

He scribbled his name, handed the pad back. “Thanks, ma’am. Where’s his luggage?”

“There wasn’t any,” said the flight services lady, glancing down at Niko. “Some kind of problem with the onload from the train at Zurich…The baggage people are trying to track it down. They have your number. They’ll deliver it to your house as soon as it’s found.”

“Oh, my gosh, that’s awful,” said Maj’s mother immediately. “What an awful way to have a trip start! We’ll sort something out for you. Welcome, Niko, I’m Rosilyn. And this is Madeline. Maj, we call her. And this is Adrienne—”

“I’m not Adrienne, I’m Muffin!” said the Muf in defiance, and then — apparently startled out of her wits by having actually spoken to her “cousin”—the Muffin did the impossible and came down with an acute case of the shys. She actually hid behind Maj’s mother and looked around the side of her, as if she were a tree. “Hi,” she whispered, and hid her face in Maj’s mother’s trousers.

Her mother and father looked at her in astonishment. Maj took the moment to hold her hand out. Niko reached out and shook it. “Hello,” he said, and then looked up at her father and mother. “Thanks for letting me stay with you.”

“No problem at all,” said Maj’s father. “Look, if your luggage is lost en route, there’s no point in us standing around here trying to second-guess these people. Let’s get home and have some breakfast. Or lunch, or dinner, or whatever your body clock is up for…”

They headed out of the torn-up terminal, past the posters with pictures of how it would look when it was finished, and Maj noticed that her father seemed to be rather more in a hurry than usual. Normally he liked poring over the details of new construction when they came across it. Then again, there was always the possibility that thirty dollars an hour for short-term parking was on his mind.

On their way back to the parking lot, Maj noticed how politely Niko seemed to be trying to pay attention to everything her mother and father said, while at the same time looking at absolutely everything around him as if he had never seen anything like it before. The Muffin was beginning to get over her shyness and had made her way around her mother, while the maglev car was in transit, to sit closer to Niko. He had noticed this and was smiling at her while he answered Maj’s mom’s questions about how things were in Hungary, the weather and so forth. By the time they got to the car and started to get in, the Muffin had apparently decided that there was no further need for shyness, and insisted on being belted in beside Niko.

“I thought Hungry was something you got,” said the Muffin as the car lifted off.

Maj rolled her eyes in amusement, listening with one ear as Niko tried to explain the difference between a country and something that happened in your stomach. With the other ear she was amused to hear her mother going with unusual speed into full maternal mode.

“That’s terrible about his clothes,” she said. “And we haven’t kept anything of Rick’s that would fit him. And God knows when his luggage will arrive, or what continent it’s on at this point. Never mind that. Maj, when we get in, why don’t you take him over to GearOnline and pick up a few things for him? Jeans and so on. Put it on the house charge, and we’ll sort it out later.”

“Sure, Mom.” This raised some interesting questions for Maj, as she had never taken a boy clothes shopping before and wasn’t sure if the online protocols were the same as they were for girls. Next to her, the Muffin’s conversation was rapidly gaining in speed and volume as the car fed itself into the traffic stream heading back toward Alexandria. “Our car is old,” the Muffin said. “Mommy says it’s an antique. It’s a big car. Is your car like this one?”

Maj saw Niko’s glance out the window — a casual one, though his face seemed to her to be fixed in an expression of quiet amazement. “Oh, no,” he said, and Maj caught just a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he turned away from the windows. “We don’t have cars where I come from.”

This news astonished the Muffin almost into silence, but she quickly recovered. “What do you have?”

“We have cows,” Niko said, and he glanced at Maj just for a second as he said it, so that there was no mistaking the wicked humor. “We ride them when we need to travel.”

Maj kept her face straight. The Muffin was hanging on every word he said, her mouth open, her eyes big and round. For his own part, Niko had eyes for none of the rest of them at the moment. “And we ride them everywhere. Even to the airport.”

“They would poop in the road,” the Muffin said after a moment.

Niko looked at Maj again, his eyes eloquent of laughter being held under absolute control. “‘Poop’—”

“Uh, excrete,” Maj said. “Defecate.”

“Absolutely they poop,” Niko said to the Muffin. “But it doesn’t matter, because we do not just ride the cows; we make them carry our things as well. The cows we ride have little carts behind them. And between the cows and the carts, we put canvas slides with buckets at the end, and the poop goes down the slides into the buckets.”

“What do you do with the buckets?” the Muffin whispered, absolutely riveted.

“Empty them over people’s rosebushes,” Niko said.

“That’s it,” said Maj’s mother. “You’re moving in with us for at least a year. Someone who understands what rosebushes need is welcome in our house for as long as he cares to stay.”

They were only in transit for another fifteen minutes or so, but Maj found them some of the funniest fifteen minutes she had ever heard, as Niko kept spinning absurd stories about “Hungry” for the Muffin. Her mother, though, once glanced back at her, and Maj found herself knowing exactly what her mother was thinking — that Niko’s funniness had an edge to it, and somehow felt very purposeful — as if he was trying to distract himself.

And who knows, I might do the same thing, Maj thought. Arriving in a strange country, meeting strangers, not even having my luggage with me…And, something at the back of her mind added, not having the slightest idea what was going to happen to me next….

They landed at home, and the Muffin was practically the first one out, pulling on Niko’s arm and demanding, “Come and see my room!”

“He’ll come in a while, honey,” Maj’s mother said. “Right now you have to have your breakfast.” The look she threw over her shoulder at Maj added, And give this poor kid five minutes to breathe!

“I’m not hungry!”

“Yes, you are,” Maj’s mother said with serene certainty. “Maj, honey, show Niko the guest room, and where the bathroom is…”

“Come on,” Maj said to him, and led him down the hallway, pushing the guest room door open. It had been her mother’s office once before the “new wing” had been built onto the end of the house several years back. Now it had a comfy old sofa in it, and a single bed, and a beat-up chest of drawers that had been in Rick’s room, and bookshelves…lots of bookshelves, all full, mostly of “overflow” books from her father’s study. Niko looked around at it all. “You read a lot,” he said, as if he approved.

“Not as much as I wish I had time to,” Maj said, and sighed a little. “Here’s the closet…not that you have anything to hang up in it at the minute! Look, take a few minutes to get yourself sorted out, and we’ll go online and get you some clothes. Come on, here’s the bathroom….”

She showed it to him, and Niko disappeared into it with a grateful look. Maj dodged into her dad’s study, woke the Net machine up out of standby mode, and “told” the implant chair there that it was going to have a new implant to add to its list of authorized users. When Niko appeared again, Maj pointed him at the chair and said, “I’ll access it from the kitchen and show you the way…we have a doubler in there. Sit yourself down, get comfortable…”

He sat down, wriggling a little as the chair got used to him and molded itself to his body. “It’s very strange,” he said. “Mine does not do that….”

Maj grinned at him. “For a moment there I thought you were going to tell me you sat on cows for this, too.”

He grinned back. After a moment he said, “When does it start? I do not see anything.”

“Uh-oh,” Maj said. “Mom?”

Her mother appeared a moment later at the study door. “Problems?”

“He should be in my work space by now. But he’s not getting anything.”

Her mother looked bemused. She came around to stand behind the chair in which Niko sat, and lined up her own implant with the Net computer, then blinked. “It doesn’t recognize his implant,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “The story of my life. Why they can’t just get everyone to agree to standardize these things….”

For a moment more Maj’s mother stood still. “Okay, I see,” she said then. “It’s just a different protocol…. We don’t use that one much over here. Let me just tell the machine what it should do instead….”

A moment’s silence. “Okay, Niko,” her mother said then. “Try that and see how it works.”

He tilted his head a little to one side, then straightened it again. “Oh!” he said.

“It’s a jury-rig,” Maj’s mother said, not sounding entirely happy. “Your implant had a bandwidth limiter written into the code. I just circumvented it. It can be put back the way it was whenever you like. Are the visuals okay now?”

“Yes…!”

“Okay. Maj, check the sales area. It’s getting to be the time of year when they’ll be reducing prices on some of the spring boys’ wear…and this is just for casual wear anyway. Niko doesn’t have to worry about being a fashion plate at the moment. His luggage will be here in a while anyway. If you want to use the machine in my office, go ahead, I won’t need it for an hour or so….”

“Okay, Mom, thanks. Stay there, Niko, I’ll be with you in a minute….”

She went around to her mom’s office and settled into the chair there. A moment later she was in her work space, and Niko was standing there, looking around him in astonishment. “This is…very sophisticated,” he said after a moment.

“A poor thing, but my own,” said Maj. “Computer…”

“Yes, boss?” said her work space.

“GearOnline, please. Boys’ wear.”

“Enter, please.”

“Through here, Niko,” Maj said, and opened the door at the back of her work space, between the bookshelves. Niko went over to it, peered through.

“Bozhe moi,” he said softly.

“I know,” Maj said. They walked through the door together. “I don’t shop here a lot anymore. It’s too easy to get confused….”

The sheer “acreage” of the place always bewildered her a little; the designers had apparently decided to make this space a direct virtual descendant of the old snail-mail catalogs from the distant past, so that every single thing the chain stocked was out here, arranged on a “floor” which Maj guessed was probably roughly equivalent to the area of the surface of the moon.

“Come on over here,” she said, and led him over to what looked like a single changing room, standing there by itself in the middle of the vast floor full of clothes hanging up on racks and stacked up folded on shelves. “I don’t see why we should wander around in all this and get lost. See this grid?” Maj pointed to a lighted square on the floor, all crisscrossed with grid lines. “Just stand here….”

Niko stepped onto it, bemused.

“Store computer, please…” Maj told it.

“Ready to be of service, ma’am. And thank you for shopping GearOnline!”

“Yeah, sure. Please do a measurement template for this gentleman. Niko, hold still, the thing’ll get confused if you twitch.”

The grid of light-lines peeled itself up off the “floor” and wrapped itself around Niko, molding itself to him. He held quite still, but Maj could understand his slightly alarmed look — the template’s feel could be rather snug.

“Don’t freak. It’s getting the readings off the sensors in the chair,” Maj said. “By the way, that was great, in the car…the story you were telling the Muffin, about the cows.”

He gave her a slightly rueful look. “You mean you don’t believe it, then.”

“That you ride cows to work?” She had to laugh. “Have you ever ridden a cow?”

He laughed, too, then. “They are bony.”

“And they dump you off and step on you,” Maj said. “I tried it once when I was little and my folks took me to a farm. Once was enough. Riding horses, though, that’s another matter.”

“You ride—” There was a pause while he got rid of one set of gridwork, tried on another. “Funny.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Why would it be funny?”

“Oh. Your name.”

Maj blinked.

“In my language, Maj might be short for amajzonu. Amazon. A woman who rides.”

She grinned a little. “Well,” Maj said, “the name is really Madeline, but we don’t use it much.”

“A little cake? I think amazon is better.”

The grid of light walked off Niko and stood to one side, a Niko-shaped webwork, glowing green. Niko brushed himself down and stared at it. “Now what do we do?”

“Go crazy trying to figure out what we want,” Maj said. “Chair, please.”

A chair appeared. She sat down. “You want to sit?” Maj said.

“Uh, no, it’s all right,” Niko said. “I was sitting a long time today.”

“Okay. Store program,” Maj said.

“Ready to be of service, ma’am, and—”

“Boy, I wish it wouldn’t do that…. What kinds of things do you want to wear, Niko?”

“Uh — jeans would be fine. Maybe a shirt.”

“Jeans,” Maj said. Instantly a pair of them appeared on the wireframe model of Niko. “How do they look?”

He walked around the model. “And these will fit—”

“Real closely. The company will pull the closest match off the rack in the warehouse and van them over. They have a delivery run out this way a few times a day.”

“Do they have to be blue?” he said.

“You want a different color?”

“Uh…” He smiled, a very small shy smile. “I always wanted black ones.”

“Black, absolutely,” said Maj, and the color of the jeans on the wireframe figure changed. She grinned at him. “Black’s back in this year. Want the shirt that color, too? It’ll look good on you.”

“Yes!”

The heck with the sale stuff. “Formshirt, black,” said Maj. One of the tight-fitting shirts that were coming in right now appeared on the wireframe. “How about that?”

His smile said it all.

“Great,” said Maj. “Store program. Select both, purchase both.”

“Account confirmation.”

“Eighteen twelve,” Maj said.

“Thank you. Pick up or send?”

“Send.”

“Thank you. Your purchases will be dispatched from our Bethesda warehouse at ten A.M.”

“That’s it,” Maj said, and got up. “Can you think of anything else you need?”

“Anything…” Niko looked out across that huge space of clothes, across which Maj sometimes thought one should be able to see the curvature of the Earth. “No,” Niko said, and sounded shy again. “But thank you.”

She patted him on the shoulder. He jumped a little, as if taken by surprise. “It’s okay,” Maj said. “Come on, let’s climb out of here, my mom’s going to want her machine back.”

“It is…a Sunday? And still your mother works?”

Maj rolled her eyes. “It’s more like no one can stop her working. Come on…”

“And thank you for shopping at—” the system shouted after them, rather desperately, as they deactivated their implants.

Maj snickered as the two of them headed back into the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” Maj said.

“Uh…” He paused to look out the window at the backyard, which Maj’s mother’s tomatoes and rosebushes were threatening to take over, just as they always did this time of year. “Something to drink, maybe.”

“Tea? Milk? Coffee?”

Niko didn’t answer. He was leaning against the windowsill, apparently lost in thought. “Niko?” Maj said.

No response.

“Niko?!”

He jumped as if he had been shot, and turned around in a hurry. “Uh, sorry, yes…”

“Do you want some tea, or coffee, or—”

He stared at her…then relaxed, all over, so obvious a gesture that it practically shouted, I thought you were going to do something terrible to me…but it’s all right now. “Um,” he said then. “Coffee, that would be good.”

“How do you like it?”

“A lot of milk.”

“Fine. We’ll steal Mom’s coffee — it’s the best in the house.” She got out one of her mother’s single-pack drip coffee containers, put it on a mug, put the kettle on, and went to the fridge, opening it and rummaging around. “Let’s see…Oh, here it is.” She pulled out a quart of milk past the door scanner.

“That’s the last liter,” said the fridge. “Do you want more?”

“Jeez,” Maj muttered, “the way we go through this stuff. My brother must just pour it over his—” As she turned, she saw that Niko was staring at the fridge, completely stunned.

“Your refrigerator talks?” he said.

Maj blinked at that. “Oh. Yeah. Mostly to complain.” She made an amused face, pulled the door open to show him the little glass plate set in it. “See, there’s a scanner here, you run everything in front of it when you put things in after you go shopping. It keeps track of everything by the bar codes, and then when you run out, it orders more. It has a little Net connection inside, and it calls the grocery store. The delivery van comes around in the mornings and replaces what you’ve used up.” She shook the liter carton, made a face. “It may not be soon enough, the way my brother drinks this stuff.” She turned back to the door, waved the carton in front of it again.

“Ordering more,” said the refrigerator.

Maj closed the door. “The new ones don’t even ask,” she said, “they just do it — they estimate your needs and update their own order lists. This one’s kind of an antique, but there’s something about the door handles my mother likes, and she won’t get rid of it.”

Niko sat down with a wry look. “Our refrigerators aren’t…quite so talkative.”

“Believe me, it might not be a bad thing,” Maj said, sitting down across the table. “This one’s always bugging me about using too much butter. My brother keeps enabling the ‘dietary advice’ function just to annoy me, and I have to keep turning it off.” She made a face.

The kettle, which her mother must just have boiled, shrieked with very little waiting time. Maj poured the coffee first, then the tea, so they would come out together, then put them both on the table. Niko was already sitting down there.

“Niko—” she said.

This time there was something almost deliberate about the way he responded. “Yes.”

“You look completely wrecked,” Maj said.

He stared at her…and his face sagged, as if being confronted with his own weariness made it all right to reveal it. “Yes,” he said. “Tired, you mean?”

“Tired, yes. Wasted. Utterly paved. Do you want to take a nap? Get some rest, I mean?”

“For a while,” he said, “I would not mind.”

“Have your coffee, first. There’s no rush. You’re—” She stopped herself, for her intention had been to say, You’re safe here. Then she realized that she had no idea why she was going to say it. Except that he had been carrying himself very much like someone who was not safe, someone who was seriously afraid.

Time to get this sorted out, Maj thought.

“You’re among family,” she said. “You don’t have to sit up and be polite around us. You’re jet-lagged, you look like you could use some rest. You rest as much as you want. When you feel like getting up, get up. Maybe later this evening. I have some Net stuff to do…. If you want to come along, you’d be welcome.”

I can’t believe I’m saying this, she thought. But he needs a friend right now, poor kid…and virtuality is one thing, but reality is another. Reality takes precedence.

At the mention of the Net, his eyes lit up. “I would like that,” he said. “Very much!”

“Yeah,” Maj said. “Look, take your coffee with you…go on, get your rest. I’ll wake you up around five, and you can come see what I’m up to. It’s pretty neat.”

He nodded and got up with his coffee cup. “It was the fourth room down?”

“Fourth room down. If the Muffin tries to bother you, just throw her out.”

“She would not bother me,” he said, and grinned briefly, and just for the moment looked much less tired. “She is very — cute?”

“Cute. You got that right,” Maj said. “Welcome to America, kiddo. Go get some sleep.”

He vanished down the hall. Maj waited about fifteen minutes, and then went to find her father.