Safe House

5

Maj woke surprisingly early. It was what her mother referred to as “happy wake-up,” the kind that happens when you’ve successfully finished a job and your whole system knows it. You wake up completely rested and feeling ready for anything, though the hour is patently absurd. On this particular morning, dawn was just turning things pink and gold at the edges in the eastern sky when Maj wandered out to the kitchen, enjoying the blessed stillness before the rest of the family really got moving.

Classes felt as if they were half a day away, though in reality she would have to be ready to leave in an hour and a half. She started the kettle, then slipped into her work space, leaving it “open” to the kitchen so that she could see if Laurent or the Muffin surfaced all of a sudden.

E-mail immediately appeared all over the desk, which was — in this overlapped merging of reality and virtual reality — stuck to the kitchen table. A quick reconnoiter of the contents revealed many congratulatory notes from the other members of the Group. The Group of Seven had done spectacularly last night. Part of it, truth be told, was just Bob’s good planning. He had a twisty mind, that one, and made a good squadron leader in a fighter-group situation. But the rest of it was so much a matter of teamwork that Maj hardly knew where to start praising the others — Shih Chin’s go-for-broke courage, Kelly’s chilly accuracy with the pumped lasers, Mairead’s eyes-in-the-back-of-her-head that missed nothing happening around her, whether to friend or foe. They had done well from the standpoint of scoring. All of them got in, shot up a goodly portion of Didion’s insides, and they all got out again before the cluster nuke went off inside the station.

There had been disappointments. They had not been involved in the final attack that fought its way in to emplace the nuke. They had not made it as far into Didion’s tortuous insides as Maj had hoped they would. Weapons charges ran low, and the Group of Seven had had to beat it out of there before the Black Arrows caught up with them and minced them all. Still, the retreat had been orderly, and they had been on hand for the Big Bang, and had been included in the distribution of bonus points for those involved in the planet’s destruction. The Archon would think twice about trying to establish a base so close to the Cluster Rangers’ home space again. And now the Rangers could get back to concentrating on carrying the battle deeper into the Archon’s space, working slowly on the master plan to force him out of the galaxy entirely….

Maj smiled. Entirely satisfactory, she thought. The whole thing. And she had gotten an odd charge out of having someone in the seat behind her for a change, someone absolutely blown out of the water by everything that was happening. Oh, eventually little Laurent would get over the novelty of it all, and calm down. But in the meantime, his unbridled enthusiasm was too cute for words.

Maj finished sorting through her mail, making sure she told everyone what she thought of them — which, today, was an unusually pleasant task since today she thought everyone in the Group was wonderful. Once that was done, she sat quietly with her tea for a few minutes, basking in the glow of the previous evening’s success.

It was not an unbroken glow, though. The sound of a somewhat lost-sounding little voice saying, I wish my father could see this…. was still very much with her.

“Computer…” Maj said.

“Ready, boss.”

“Put me together a general review of recent history of the Calmani Republic. Video, audio, and supplementary text.”

“Depth?”

“Average.”

It took the system a few seconds to assemble what she wanted from her work space’s link to the Britannica databases. “Ready.”

“Go…”

The pictures began to display themselves all around her, a little grainy at first, as the oldest flat film and holos tended to be when rechanneled for virtuality — soldiers marching down country roads, politicians making angry speeches, great crowds gathered together in city streets. Calmani was only one of the remnants of numerous countries that had torn themselves apart just before or after the turn of the millennium, due to the exacerbation of old hatreds or new tensions. Sometimes the troubles were caused by newly independent peoples using their sudden freedom to resurrect the arguments of two or three or five centuries past, old “grudge matches” interrupted by the interference of one or another of the great powers and resumed at the first possible moment. Or sometimes the rivalries that broke out involved one side or another of the old border suddenly having more money or more power than the neighbors did. While everyone had been poor together, things had been fine — but when one country suddenly started doing better than the others around it, tensions rose. For these and many other kinds of reasons, some of the local histories in that part of the world had turned unimaginably bloody.

Maj watched the images of soldiers and speechmakers unfolding around her and thought, suddenly, of the last time she and her mom had gone crabbing together. After you caught the crabs, you hauled them out of the trap and put them in a bucket before taking them home. Naturally the crabs all started trying to escape — but their preferred method for doing this seemed to involve pulling each other down in order to climb up the others’ bodies and get on top. None of the crabs seemed to notice that, as a result of all the pulling down, none of them were escaping. Now Maj thought of all those small countries, desperate, struggling, and yet succeeding mostly at keeping one another down as they struggled (they thought) up.

Elsewhere, though, power had changed hands with relatively little fuss beyond mass demonstrations in the streets and some shootings of people in high places. Romania was one of these places. After many years of truly astonishing repression under a Marxist-style dictator, the country shook him off suddenly and relatively unbloodily, and settled down into what everyone had thought would be a slow but steady process of “Westernization.” But there were still surprises in store. After the Balkan difficulties of the turn of the millennium had trailed off and a long weary quiet had settled over the area, suddenly the nationalist urge awakened in Romania, and over the space of several months the country shuddered, convulsed, and split itself in three. The southernmost and most urban part, which named itself Oltenia after its northern hills, kept the cities of Bucharest and Constante (and incidentally most of the region’s trade with the West, since it had the Black Sea ports at Constanle and Mangalia). The midmost part of the country became Transylvania as a nation as well as a region. It had stayed fairly calm and settled, even while the dust of secession was still in the air, and had continued to do a brisk business in tourism to the former haunts of Vlad Dracula, both for those tourists interested in the ancient Voivod as a nationalist hero who fought off the Huns, and those more interested in his (theoretical) career as a vampire.

The northernmost area of what the newspeople routinely called “the-former-Romania,” the area which now called itself the Calmani Republic and contained most of the mountain chain stretching down from that area, had at first seemed likely to go the same way as Oltenia had. But when the revolution had almost finished, and the candidates whom it seemed the local people wanted to run things were about to take power, there came a hiccup that took everyone by surprise. Several of the candidates for the new ten-man “Senate” died under strange and violent circumstances — shot in the streets by unknown assailants, or bombed in their beds — and other candidates pulled out of the Senate within days. When this new and terrible cloud of dust settled, there were only three senators left, and the new small country as a whole was so unnerved that no one argued much when the three of them took power as a “caretaker government” until a new set of elections could be held, if they ever would be held….

“I don’t know,” she suddenly heard her father say, from down the hall. “I’ll ask, though. Maj?”

He put his head around the kitchen door. Her dad was wearing his sweats, which was normal this time of morning; usually he went out running as early as possible, on summer workdays, to take advantage of the cooler temperatures.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Were you going to order some workout clothes for Niko? He’s going to run with me. All he needs are sweats, nothing fancy. And he’ll need shoes.”

“Sure, I’ll take care of it. He’ll have to tell me his shoe size, though…the machine’s no good at that. At least none of our machines are…. The GearOnline computer might be able to pull something from the measurements it took the other day. Just in case, what’s the size?”

“Thirty-six,” Laurent said, putting his head around from behind Maj’s father.

She goggled at him. “What are you doing up at this awful hour?”

“It is lunchtime in Europe,” Laurent said.

“I don’t mean that. I mean, not just that. It’s not that long ago that we finished things up—!” And indeed Maj was feeling a little grainy around the eyeballs herself from lack of sleep.

But Laurent grinned at her. “I am fine.”

“I’m not so sure. Is thirty-six really a shoe size where you come from?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Maj said. “I’ll tell GearOnline…we’ll see what they make of it.”

Her father and Laurent vanished around the door again, down the hall and out the front door into the morning. Maj raised her eyebrows, then said to the computer, “Go ahead again…”

A few moments later she was watching things get strange in Calmani, twenty years or so ago. The “troika” caretaker government look office and functioned well enough for a few months. But then two of them died, also under strange circumstances…and the country was kept so busy by trying to work out what the third one was going to do that they had little time or, later, opportunity to find out exactly what had happened to the others. They were too busy dealing with their new ruler, Cluj.

Daimon Cluj was an “elder statesman” who was a child in the bad old days when Ceaucescu had begun to lose his grip on a country he had dominated ruthlessly with the connivance of the old Soviet Union. Some never forgave him, or the Soviet Union for that matter, for growing so weak that the “good old days” of absolute order went away, that time when there was no drug problem and little crime in the streets because drug dealers and criminals were tortured to death when they were caught, and when there was no political unrest because anyone who got unrestful was arrested and shot.

Cluj, remembering those good old days, was determined to bring them back. And with the help of some thousands of vicious hired thugs — no one knew for sure where they came from, but there were plenty of such people still wandering covertly around the region, looking for someone to hire them and turn them loose — he brought those old days back, in spades. He established an old-fashioned one-man dictatorship, Marxist-Leninist in spirit, full of talk about solidarity and brotherhood and the people, but in fact all about keeping Cluj himself in power and putting his country “back the way it should have been.” His version of “should have been” involved large numbers of secret police, industry being taken over by the government and making what the government thought it should make, people eating what they were told to eat and seeing what entertainment or news they were told to watch, and otherwise keeping quiet and behaving themselves like enlightened citizens of an enlightened socialist state.

This all went well enough for several months, and people saw trains being made to run on time and markets having a lot of food in them — not a whole lot of different kinds of food, but a lot in terms of quantity — and drug dealers and thieves being put up against walls and shot. There was a lot of good feeling expressed about this. But then the prices of food in the markets began to go up, and the trains, though they ran on time, were not allowed to go any farther than the Oltenian or Transylvanian or Hungarian border; and as for the New Army, the grim-faced men with the submachine guns, it seemed no one had given much thought as to what they would do when they ran out of drug dealers to shoot.

Predictably, they turned their attention elsewhere, closer to home, to the ordinary people they had “liberated.” The secret police — no one called them that to their faces; Cluj’s name for the organization was the Interior Security Forces — ran out of organized crime figures to terrorize and started in on those who were neither organized nor criminals — the people of Calmani’s larger towns, Iasi and Galati and Suceava, who were assumed to be “decadent” because they lived in cities. Those who had no reason to be “living in luxury” were turned out of their homes and driven into the countryside to work on collective farms and be reeducated out of their decadent ways. But not everyone was driven out. Some, the ones that the government — meaning Cluj — wanted something out of, were permitted to stay in the cities…but they had to work for the privilege.

Laurent’s father, Maj now realized, was one of these. A scientist would be useful…a biologist much more so. And so very specialized and talented a biologist would be a big asset. They would never willingly let him go, Maj thought. Especially when things were beginning to heat up a little over there, as they were at the moment. Oltenia and Transylvania were doing well for themselves — despite Cluj denouncing them every other day as malicious or deluded lackeys of the Imperialist West, they were building (or in some cases rebuilding) infrastructures to support a slowly more affluent population. They had access to the Net, and much better access than the poor censored (and bugged) public-service terminals, which were all Cluj would permit for the people other than his military and creative elite.

Oltenia and Transylvania were actually making noises about joining the European Union. And worse, on the northern border of Cluj’s country, the Moldovan Republic had just concluded an arms deal with Ukraine. Cluj had apparently found this particular piece of news unnerving, and Maj thought she knew why. Though his ground forces were vicious and had plenty of small arms, Cluj was short on tanks and had no long-range weaponry worth speaking of. To his mind, a deal between Ukraine and Moldova could only mean one thing — Moldavia was planning to invade him while he was vulnerable. This was obvious to Cluj because it was what he would have done himself.

At a time like this, Maj thought grimly, there’s only one thing Cluj’s mind is going to be on. Weapons. He needs weapons.

And Dad said that the government there was beginning to look at Laurent’s dad’s work as something besides medical technology….

Maj shivered. “That’s enough,” she said to the computer. “Virtual call. Tag it nonurgent/accept if convenient. Leave as a message if unavailable or no response.”

“Whom are you calling, boss?”

“James Winters.”

“Working.”

There was a pause.

A moment later, “Maj,” James Winters said. “Good morning.” He was at his desk in his office at Net Force — a plain office, with some steel bookcases and a laminated desk, covered with work as always. The Venetian blinds were pulled up to show the mirror-coated windows looking out onto a sunny day, and, with one exception, showed an inspiring view of the parking lot.

“Mr. Winters,” Maj said. “Wow, you get up early.”

“Actually I slept in this morning,” he said, and grinned very slightly, so that it was hard for Maj to work out whether he was pulling her leg or not. “But congratulations for taking so long to make this call. You’re learning the art of restraint.”

Maj blushed. The last time they had worked closely together, Winters had upbraided her for being impatient. Maj didn’t think she was particularly impatient — it wasn’t her fault if she could figure things out faster than some people, and make up her mind much faster. Unfortunately she suspected James Winters of perceiving her as impatient…and perception was everything, in the game she was preparing to play in Net Force. Assuming they ever hired her…which would almost certainly be a decision that would have to pass across this man’s desk.

“Restraint?” Maj said, playing the innocent for the moment.

“Must be at least a day since you found out what was going on,” he said. “I would have thought you would have called to pump me yesterday.”

Maj could only smile at that, and at the idea that this man could be pumped without his permission. “No,” she said, “that’s not what I’m interested in at the moment.”

“Oh? What, then?” He glanced at the one window that didn’t show the parking lot. Maj knew that window was tasked to show the view in Winter’s backyard at home, where a small brown bird was currently pecking enthusiastically on an empty bird feeder.

“I didn’t know you had clout.”

Winters raised his eyebrows, looked at her sidewise. “I think I’ll take that as a compliment…for the moment. ‘Clout’ how, specifically?”

“You got a whole spaceplane diverted.”

“I did?”

“Oh, come on, Mr. Winters!” She gave him a look that she hoped wasn’t too exasperated. “You were on the link to my dad early yesterday morning…and no more than half an hour later that flight came down two airports away from where it was supposed to be.”

“Mmm,” Winters said, “interesting, isn’t it….”

His attention was on the little brown bird again. “Go away,” he said, “it’s summer, can’t you see that? Come back in October.”

Maj held her piece for the moment. After a breath or so, Winters turned back to her and smiled, just slightly. “Well,” he said, “just so you know. I didn’t divert that plane. But there was an air marshal on it,” he said as Maj was opening her mouth. “On the spaceplanes, there always are. And I shoot with the air marshals and some of the FBI and Secret Service guys, once a month or so. This fellow knows me…and I was able to convince him to go have a word with the pilot and convince her that there was a need to land elsewhere. The airlines do this kind of thing all the time for much less reason. And when it happens, they’re happy enough to send sky-jitneys for the passengers so that everyone gets where they need to be on time.”

Maj nodded. “You were that sure that someone was going to try to intercept Laurent….”

“Not that sure,” Winters said. “Let’s just say that, after talking to your father, I didn’t see any harm in throwing a wrench into the works, one that could possibly be mistaken for an accident. Assuming, of course, that there were ‘works.’ And I think it’s safer to assume that there might have been. Some of the people we’re dealing with here are…not nice.” The grimness of his expression belied the casual phrasing.

“So Laurent’s father is pretty important,” Maj said.

“Not politically. No, I take that back. We’re not sure how important he might be, politically. Scientifically, there’s not much doubt he’s irreplaceable. But either way, your father was very concerned…and let’s just say that there are people who take your father’s opinions seriously. Me, for one.”

This was one of those things that Maj was still getting used to, and still occasionally finding hard to understand. She was uncertain exactly what it was her father had to do with Net Force, and he had not been very forthcoming about details.

“Anyway,” Winters said, “how’s Laurent doing?”

“He’s okay,” Maj said. “He’s out with Dad at the park, running.”

Winters raised his eyebrows. “I would have thought he might still be sleeping,” he said. “Jet lag, or just general fatigue…”

“Not a chance. He was in here not twenty minutes ago, looking terrific. You’d think he hadn’t just come six thousand miles at all. It’s abnormal.” Maj grimaced — she always suffered terribly from jet lag, especially traveling East to West. “Or just unfair.”

Winters made a rueful face. “I know someone like that,” he said. “His mother’s a Nobel Prize winner in medicine — I think she must have fed him some magic potion when he was a baby…or just passed on a hereditary ability to ignore time zones. He flies halfway around the world and it doesn’t even make a dent in him. Makes me sick just to think about it.” He laughed a little. “But anyway, I see that you took the opportunity, while he was out of the way, yadayadayada…”

“Uh, yes.”

The little brown bird was back at the feeder again — Winters looked at it with a resigned expression. “So, Maj,” Winters said. “Is he a problem, this kid?”

“Not at all,” she said. “Very nice, in fact. Maybe he acts a little old for his age.”

“It wouldn’t be strange,” Winters said, rather quietly, as if more to himself than to her. “It’s not exactly a peaceful environment he’s been growing up in, though superficially it may look that way. There’s a lot of stress…a lot of fear. And it’s going to be worse for him, now that some of the pressure’s off.”

“He’s pretty worried about his dad,” Maj said. “Though he’s trying to cover it up.”

“He has reason to be worried,” Winters said. “How much has your dad told you?”

“Most of it,” Maj said, feeling it smarter not to be too specific.

Winters nodded, and to Maj’s disappointment, refused to be drawn on the subject. “The country from which he’s been taken,” Winters said, “is not exactly a friendly one. They’ve been smarting under technology and trade sanctions for a long time, and it’s not a situation that’s likely to change. They will not take this lying down.” He paused. “I think your father may have mentioned that some extra security is in the offing….”

“Yeah.”

“Good. I’m thinking about what else we can do. Meantime, keep an eye on Laurent. I wouldn’t let him run around town by himself.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me. Anyway, he doesn’t seem interested in that…he’s a lot more interested in our Net setup.”

Winters grinned a little. “Yes, I would expect he might be…their Net back where he comes from isn’t anywhere near as involved as ours. The government there keeps a pretty tight stranglehold on communications, generally. It wouldn’t do to have the people get any clear idea of how much greener the grass is on the other side.”

Maj made a face. “Well, I’m trying to break him in gently. Not that it’s easy…he wants to dive right in. When we finished a six-hour battle last night, he wanted just to jump right back in again as soon as he’d gone to the bathroom.”

“I just bet. Well, again, keep an eye on him — you wouldn’t want him to overdo it.”

“That’s what his dad said, supposedly.”

“Oh?”

“To my dad, yeah. He wants to spend some time helping Niko find his way through our Net when he gets here, apparently.”

“A wise parent,” Winters said, and leaned back at the chair, looking at the brown bird, which steadfastly refused to notice that no amount of pecking at the feeder was producing any food.

“You don’t suppose…” Maj blinked, trying to sort out a sudden new thought.

“What?”

“That his dad hid anything important in his son’s Net space when he had it cloned here….”

Winters paused visibly, then gave Maj an approving look. “That’s the first thing we checked,” he said. “No.”

Maj’s heart sank a little — she had hoped the idea was original. “But then I guess,” she said, “that it would have been the first thing the other side would have thought of, too.”

Winters nodded. “We moved his material onto one of our secure servers from the one to which it had originally been ported,” he said. “We’ve been through that space with a fine-tooth comb, Maj, and there’s nothing there but some private writing — not in code — some simple games, and some schoolwork. Though your boy’s quite a linguist.”

“Yeah,” Maj said. “I think he’s been holding back to make me feel less ignorant.”

Winters laughed out loud at that. “Stings, does it? I’m not surprised. I know a couple of people who have the language gift, and it makes me feel like a dolt when I hear them being so fluent. Never mind…I’ll have more time to start studying languages when I retire. And your whole life’s before you…you’ve got plenty of time.”

“It won’t be before me if I stay on here much longer,” Maj said, for her mother suddenly put her head into the kitchen, from the hall, and Maj could see her through one of the doorways in her work space, mouthing words which probably translated into something like “Get in the shower now or you’ll be late for school.” “Captain Winters, thanks for your time. I just wanted to check with you myself.”

“Always pleased to help,” he said, and turned his eyes back to the piles of work on his desk. “Give a shout if you need me.”

“Right. Off,” Maj said, and Winters’s image flicked away to blackness, followed a moment later by her work space. She was sitting in the kitchen again, looking at her mother.

“The phone company called,” she said. “I can’t believe your father told them anyone here would be conscious at this hour.”

“He was,” Maj said.

“Yes, and look who got to answer the call when it came,” said her mother. “Well, they’re sending their people over this morning. I just hope they’ll be gone by the time you get home.” She looked annoyed. Maj suspected this was because her mother, not being able to leave well enough alone, would stand over the installers and watch everything they did all day, and then afterward complain that she had lost a day’s work. There were few things better calculated to fray her temper.

Maj got up, stretched, glanced up at the repeater and did the little interior “blink” that shut her implant’s connection to it down. The work space behind her went away, leaving her in a kitchen rapidly growing brighter with the new day. “Yeah, I hope they’re gone by then, too,” she said. “Oh, one thing I have to do before I leave…order some sweats for Niko….”

“I’ll take care of that, honey.”

“Have fun. He takes a size thirty-six sneaker.”

“Is that a real size?” her mother said suspiciously.

Maj made her way down to the shower, chuckling.

Maj spent all that day thinking more about Laurent than about anything else. Her morning went by in a strangely disoriented way, and she had trouble concentrating on her class-work, which was unusual for Maj. She plunged through math and physics with no difficulties, but when she hit history, she found that the Teapot Dome scandal seemed unusually remote. Somehow, the history with which she had been dealing at home, the more recent events of a place thousands of miles away, seemed far more concrete and important. In her house, drinking her tea, was someone who had escaped from that history — a particularly nasty piece of it. And will he ever go back? Maj wondered. She couldn’t imagine wanting to go back to the place where he and his father had been forced to live in such fear. But at the same time, home was home. He may even love the place, Maj thought.

If that was the case, she wondered how he managed it. Maj tended to be very sensitive to the emotional atmosphere around her; a fight or a disagreement in the Green household would make the hair stand up all over her until it was resolved, and even then she would be twitchy about everything everyone said for a day or so afterward. He must have known, she thought, that they were watching him and his father all the time. I could never stand something like that. Yet at the same time, possibly it was something you could get used to, like air pollution.

Laurent certainly didn’t seem particularly damaged; though maybe this was simply because he was smart. Intelligence, applied to your daily circumstances, was probably a big help. And it was also possible that Laurent was simply a lot tougher than he looked. His slightly delicate appearance could very well be hiding a much more robust personality than you might expect at first glance.

Nonetheless, Maj fretted about him on and off all day, as if her mother wasn’t perfectly capable of taking care of Laurent while Maj was going about her own business. He’s only thirteen, she kept thinking; and yeah, said the back of her mind, a thirteen-year-old who is perfectly capable of being shipped thousands of miles away from his normal life at the drop of a hat, and hardly turning a hair. Maybe you should get used to the idea that there are other people at least as competent as you are, even if they are three or four years younger….

But the end of the school day still couldn’t come soon enough for Maj. She felt antsy enough to take the local bus home from her high school and walk the two blocks to the house, rather than walking the whole two miles as she preferred to. The last few steps, the last half block or so, she found herself hurrying, and she took the steps up to the front door nearly at a run.

But when she bounced in the door and looked around, everything was quiet. She wandered down the hall and saw that her mother’s office door was slightly open. Her mother was sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap. “Mom?” Maj said softly.

Her mother looked over her shoulder, stretched, and yawned. “Oh,” she said, “you’re back. I wasn’t expecting you for another hour yet.”

“This late in the year,” Maj said, “there’s not as much to do as usual….”

Her mother looked at her with barely concealed amusement. “I would have thought,” she said, “it might have more to do with our guest.”

Maj gave her mother her own version of what her mother described as “an old-fashioned look.”

“Oh,” Maj said, “I don’t know.” But she wandered farther down the hall before her mother could get any more of her guesses right.

“Nice try, honey. He’s online,” her mother called after her. “In the den.”

“Why does this not surprise me?” Maj said softly as she turned back to her mother’s office and leaned against the door. “Are the phone people done?”

“With the concrete part of the installation, yes,” her mom said. “They said we might lose service once or twice this afternoon before business hours are over — it seems they have to do some tweaking at the exchange. It shouldn’t affect us too much, though. I wouldn’t start anything vital right now, that’s all.”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

Maj wandered down the hall again and looked in the den door, saw Laurent sitting there quietly in the implant chair. The Muffin was sitting in his lap.

Maj smiled a little and went into the kitchen. She dumped her book bags and the light jacket she had brought home from school with her, rooted around in the fridge briefly for some milk and a peach, and sat down at the table to line her own implant up with the doubler over the sink.

From her own work space she opened the transit door and looked through into the Muffin’s. Sure enough, in the midst of the ancient Cambrian rain forest, all waving with giant horsetail ferns and club mosses, there was Laurent, with a crowd of dinosaurs sitting or standing around him, while the Muffin sat a little elevated on a nearby rock and read to them all.

“‘Ay,’ Puck said. ‘I’m sorry we lost him out of Old England—’”

Laurent looked up at the slight rustling the dinosaurs made at Maj’s approach. He was wearing the new sweats Maj’s mother had ordered for him, and looked extremely relaxed.

“All right, you guys,” Maj said, “shove over…”

She pushed a couple of the larger tyrannosaurs out of the way and sat down on the grass next to Laurent, composing herself for the Muffin to resume.

“I was nearly done,” Muf said with some dignity. “You almost missed everything.”

“Well, go on,” Maj said. “I’ll just have to fill in the blanks. It’ll be suppertime soon, and you’ll need to wash up. But I’d love to sit here and listen to you finish this first.”

It took about another twenty minutes for the Muffin to plow through to the end of that chapter of Rewards and Fairies. Maj and Laurent kept quite still through this — the fierceness of the Muffin’s concentration was impressive, and none of the dinosaurs dared to move. Finally, when she was done and closed the book, Laurent applauded a little. The Muffin beamed at him.

“You are very young to be reading that,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

“I’m not that young,” said the Muffin, with the air of a grand dame explaining that she wasn’t that old. “Daddy started reading when he was three. So, what else do you want me to read you?”

“Nothing right now, Muffaletta,” Maj said. “Mom is going to want to give you supper, and then Daddy will be home.”

“Oh, good,” the Muffin said. “I’ll come back later, then.” She put down the book and vanished.

Maj and Laurent looked at each other with amusement. “She really is reading above her age level,” Maj said, “but it’s traditional in the family. Have you read that one before?”

He shook his head. “It was not familiar.”

“Kipling,” Maj said. “It’s never too late. I’ll lend you a paper copy.”

“They would not have let us have such literature at home,” Laurent said, leaning back and looking up at one of the dinosaurs. “It has kings in it.”

“Presidents, too,” said Maj, “of wicked foreign countries. That part did, anyway.”

He made an amused snorting sound which reminded Maj, somehow, of her father. “Yes, we are always warned about the dangers of dealing with decadent Westerners.”

“Decadent,” Maj said, and sighed. “I wish I had time to be decadent. Lying around doing nothing, you mean, eating chocolates and making a lot of money?”

“That is always the kind of picture I had in my mind,” Laurent said.

Maj laughed. “Well, you can lose it. I don’t know anyone who does that. Well, there’s a lot of chocolate in my life, I admit that.” She thought she might as well be honest about it, because whenever her brother showed up, he certainly would be. One of his less desirable nicknames for Maj was “Miss Hershey of 2025.”

“But I know some government people, and they don’t seem to have time to do anything but work like dogs all day.”

“Oppressing people, my government would say.”

Maj snorted, definitely a copy of her father’s sound of derisive amusement. “You want oppression, take a look at my dad when I tell him I need new clothes,” she said. “If I’d known there was a way to get the kind of results you seem to be getting, I would have started pretending to be an escapee from your part of the world a long time ago.”

Laurent’s grin acquired a slightly sad edge, and he didn’t reply.

“I don’t suppose,” Maj said, “there’s been any news about your dad….”

He shook his head. “Nothing yet,” he said. And he sighed. “There are moments when it seems like all this is some kind of dream. A moment ago, just a day or two ago, we were sitting in the apartment, and he said to me, ‘Lari, time to go now. But one glass of tea before we go.’ It was the way he said it — it was not going to be just another walk up to the train to go to school. And I said, ‘Now?’ and he said, ‘Ten minutes.’ Then everything started to move very fast….”

Laurent made the small snort again. “Now all of a sudden here I am in America…and I have flown with the Group of Seven against the Archon’s Black Arrows…and bought clothes without even trying them on—”

“Do they fit?”

“They fit fine.” He laughed out loud at that. “It is just all so strange. Like another planet.”

Maj thought that his was the world that sounded like another planet — but that was not anything she would have said to him out loud.

“And the Muffin,” he said, with affection. “Children are not so friendly to strangers at home. When they meet you, you can see them looking at you and wondering, Is this person safe? For we are told from very young that our country is full of spies and saboteurs who want to overturn our good government and put something worse in its place.”

Like what? Maj thought, another reaction she would not have spoken out loud.

“And so you always look at the person and think, They always told us, anybody could be an enemy….”

“And people from my side of the world,” Maj said, “definitely.”

Laurent looked at her with a rather dry expression. “We also learn young,” he said, “not to necessarily believe everything they tell us. Or at least some of us do. You are certainly not my enemy. Nor the Muffin.”

“I imagine your president would say we were, though,” Maj said.

Laurent swallowed. “I think,” he said, “that my president would also say that my father is a traitor and a seller-out to the imperialists, and other things that are not true.” He shook his head. “A scientist, yes. But I think my father saw that something wrong was happening, that he had invented something that was going to be good, originally, and now was going to be made bad…. Sorry, I don’t have the vocabulary for this.”

“Are you kidding?” Maj said. “I wish I spoke Romanian like you speak English. All I can do at the moment is sort of stagger around in Greek and German and a little French, and my accent makes grown men cry.”

Laurent smiled at the image. Behind him, a stegosaur lay down with a grunt. “I think, though,” he said, “that Popi decided he couldn’t do it anymore, that he had to stop or it would be too late. I would see him sitting home, sometimes, looking sad…as if something had gone so wrong. It hurt me that he couldn’t talk about what was the matter. But we couldn’t talk about it…not even when we would go out to the lakes, out west, to go fishing sometimes. You can never tell when somebody is listening. And if you’re important, they listen more, not less….”

“He must have had ways of telling you, though,” Maj said, her heart wrung by the thought of not being able to openly tell your family what was going on in your head. She knew there were people who probably would think she was out of her mind, but this was how she had been raised — some occasional shouting and stamping, yes, but no uncertainty about where you stood. “Somehow or other…”

“When it was very important, he would write me notes,” Laurent said, with that dry smile. “He would leave them on the kitchen table. Always facedown…”

The image, and what it implied, left Maj speechless for a few seconds. “But it sounds as if you don’t know a lot about what he was doing,” she said.

Laurent shook his head. “He didn’t think it was good for me to know too much. It is too easy to become…useful….”

“A tool,” Maj said. She shivered, though the forest was tropical.

“I know in a general way,” Laurent said. “He was building micromachines that could walk around inside you and repair cellular damage. Or disassemble tumors, cell by cell. They would have been wonderful things. But one evening he left a note on my pillow, facedown. It said, I am not going to let them make me a murderer. You are going to leave soon, and I will be right behind you.”

“And here you are,” Maj said.

“Yes,” Laurent said. “But where is he?”

She had no answers for him.

“It is foolish,” he said. “But I wish, now, that I had taken longer to drink the tea, and look at him….”

Around them the ancient forest suddenly tattered and split at the seams, leaving Maj sitting at the table and blinking.

“Uh-oh,” she said.

“There it goes,” her mother said from down the hall. “I hope you weren’t doing anything important.”

Maj refused to comment. A moment or so later, Laurent wandered in. “Did I do something wrong?” he said.

“No, it was the repair guys, they’re still fiddling with the lines,” Maj said.

“Good. I would not like to think I messed up your sim somehow. I would very much like to fly again later….”

Maj gave him an amused look. “Yeah,” she said, “I think that can be arranged. Meanwhile, come on, let’s see what the fridge wants us to eat before its use-by date.”

Laurent blinked. “It is going to tell us what to eat? I am not sure I approve.”

“See that, you’re getting decadent already,” Maj said, and pulled the refrigerator door open. “Let’s graze. But if you don’t want to hear this thing get really ugly, stay away from the butter….”