Safe House

6

The spaceplane was much more comfortable than it had any right to be, even in coach, and the major sat there by the window, looking out at the curvature of the Earth, and could feel little except a vague sense of offense that such an experience should routinely be denied to her people. The Western countries could blather all they liked about the danger of terrorism to the planes, and their right to attempt to negate it by strictly controlling access to them. It was all finally about keeping the “banana republics” in their place — keeping down small independent-minded countries whose only sin was disagreeing with the big and powerful ones, refusing to dance to their tune. The major disliked having to travel on forged documents — she was pleased with who she was, and with the nation which had raised her, despite all the attempts of the big countries to interfere, in its own moral and economic tradition. Still, sometimes work made you do things you didn’t care for…and right now, getting the job done was much more important than indulging her personal preferences.

Besides, there was always the matter of promotions to consider.

She glanced up one more time at the light for the Net cabin at the end of the “coach” area — still red. She glanced one more time at the screen in front of her, still blathering in 3-D and full color about some inexplicable service it wanted her to buy. In one corner of the stereo display (rather annoyingly good for such a small one) was a red digit 2, blinking steadily. Two people ahead of her in the queue. The sheer spoiled impatience of these people, she thought. Only three hours in this thing, and they have to be indulging themselves on the Net half the time? Why don’t they just stay home hooked up to their darned machines if they can’t do without their drug for that long? Especially when people who really needed to use the Net, like her, were kept waiting.

And as for what they did with it…well. The Net could have been a wonderful tool for education and commerce, but like anything else sourced in the Western countries, it had become a tool for endless hucksterism, a way to make jobs for more people selling things that people didn’t really need, services simply designed to make you more lazy or stupid than you already were…a goal which she suspected the Western democracies fully supported, since they kept themselves in power by the votes of the few human beings energetic enough to haul themselves out of their houses to a polling place, but still naive or dim enough to believe that their voices made a difference, or were paid attention to. It could have been an endearing illusion, if the countries encouraging it in their citizens had not been so overwhelmingly, unfairly powerful, sitting on coffers and arsenals fattened by centuries of this operation.

Indeed, she thought as yet another screaming, out-of-control child ran down the aisle nearest her with its parent in leisurely pursuit, there was a truth there which the democracies were missing — one which would have made them more powerful still if they had ever gotten to grips with it. Individual persons might be clever, or useful, but people in the mass, the great enfranchised mobs that constituted the North American and European democracies, people were stupid. If you really meant to keep your working population well fed, productive, and obedient, the best way to manage this was to completely ignore their ideas about how to run a country — since mostly they didn’t have any, or only ones which had never been thought through. Tell them how it should be done, show them how it should be done…and if they complained, if they didn’t like the way things were run, let them go somewhere else. After you had gotten anything out of them which made a fair return for the money you had spent raising them, of course.

This last part of her viewpoint was possibly heretical, and not one that she would ever have shared. The major doubted that the president thought it fair that anyone on whom the State had spent funds should ever be allowed to exit it except for the most pressing reasons, or possibly any reason at all…and certainly not just because they felt like it. That being, of course, the whole reason for this whole exercise.

The stereo display began showing a rechanneled version of some ancient film, and the major sat back in her seat and sighed; and the digit in the corner of the display turned to “I” as a woman came out of the Net booth and a man went in. I could almost find it in my heart to feel sorry for poor Darenko, she thought, when we finally force him out of hiding. Except that there will probably not be much left to be sorry for. Once a man has betrayed him, especially a man who has so much to be grateful for, and a man of such gifts, Cluj is not the sort to readily forgive. And under the circumstances, she could understand it. How a man could do all the work necessary to lay a mighty weapon in his nation’s hand, an invaluable tool — and then, with the work almost finished, simply get up and flee…? It was insanity at best, and treachery at worst. In either case, putting the man out of his misery was the best and quickest option. And in the case of treachery, doing it as publicly as possible was always a good idea. Every now and then, she thought, the people, stupid as they are, will understand an example set before them if it’s nasty enough. If they—

The digit “I” turned to “0” and began flashing as the man came out of the booth. To the man sitting reading beside her, the major said, “Excuse me—” and got up to slip past him, heading for the booth. She sidestepped skillfully around yet another child plunging down the aisle and hurried into the booth — shut it, leaned back against the 85-degree support couch that leaned forward from the wall, lined up her implant, and when the temporary work space came up around her, set it for scramble and gave it the necessary address.

She waited for the encryption protocols to come up and breathed out in annoyance. They can’t even discipline their children, she thought. Here they are running loose like so many hooligans, free to annoy anyone they like. You wouldn’t see this kind of behavior at home, our children know that they’d—

Then she found herself looking at the minister, Bioru, in his office. “Sir,” she said, and not being in uniform, did not salute. “I had thought I would be talking to—”

“I intercepted the call. We have had some movement, Major.”

Her heart started to pound. “Has he been found?”

“Not as yet. But one of his associates has begun telling us what we want to know.”

She had wondered when they would start getting results. Questioning was always such a tricky business — those who seemed most potentially resistant sometimes cracked immediately through fear or overimaginativeness, while others who seemed least likely to put up a fight sometimes produced astonishing amounts of resistance, either due to high pain thresholds or plain obstinate stubbornness. In all cases it took a professional to work out how much force to apply, and in what form — and there were too many chances for accidents, as she’d seen. She had been dreading another. “I am very glad to hear that,” she said.

“The details,” said Bioru, looking grim, “are rather less cause for joy. Darenko’s work was nearly complete, the final stage of his construction almost ready for delivery. But apparently he had reservations which he did not share with us about the purposes to which his work would be put. As if he had any right to such.” The frown got blacker. “Apparently he has been feeding our agent on his team false progress reports for some good while…and, during that time, he has been both sabotaging his other associates’ work and destroying or undoing work which he himself has done. Various ‘partial’ prototypes of the microps have been destroyed or rendered useless in ways which were undetectable until someone actually tried to activate the mechanisms. And we have none of the fully functional models left, none at all. Darenko destroyed them before he left, possibly with something as simple as a Net-borne command to their programming centers.”

He sat going through his papers and that terrible smile appeared again, so that the major shivered. “Thousands of hours’ worth of his and his colleagues’ work,” he said, “all gone in a moment…. Though I misspeak myself — it was not a momentary act. The man must have been planning this for a long while…the worst kind of treason. He worked until the project was almost ready, then destroyed the active prototypes. All but a few…”

“Where are they?” she whispered, shocked by the enormity of what Darenko had done. “Does he have them?”

He glanced up at the major again, and that smile got more feral, something that she had not believed could happen. “No,” he said, “but someone else does.”

She opened her mouth, closed it again. “The boy,” she said.

Bioru nodded. “Darenko was not so indifferent to the value of his work,” he said, “that he was willing to simply throw it away. The boy is carrying fully enabled microps in his body. They are so small that it would have been no trouble at all to simply give them to him in a glass of milk, a cup of tea. To judge by what the associate has told us, they are now floating around in his bloodstream doing general maintenance work, their ‘default’ programming — stripping cholesterol off the interiors of his arteries, killing passing germs, and taking apart noxious compounds like lactic acid and so forth.” The smile fell off. “Major, I do not care for the idea that a weapon which could do our country great good in its unending battle against spies and enemies inside and outside is presently meandering around in the circulatory system of a traitor’s son, protecting him from the ill effects of Western junk food!”

“I will recover him immediately,” she whispered.

“No you will not,” Bioru said.

The major’s eyes widened.

“There is something that must be done first,” the minister said. “I had some hint of this material, but I was unwilling to go on the record until it had been confirmed, and this is why I told you earlier that you were to be ready to pick the boy up on signal but not before. You will not be the only one receiving a signal.”

“The microps,” she said.

“Yes. The associate has been most forthcoming as regards the activation codes and the necessary methods for instructing the microps in what their new role will be. We will activate them and set them to work on the boy’s central nervous system — with predictable results. We will make sure the father knows about this. We have a good guess, now, where he is and how he is equipped — but there is no need to go digging him out. In perhaps thirty-six hours from the microps’ activation he will come to us without hesitation. Otherwise, if he does hesitate—” Bioru shrugged. “We will not countermand the routine the microps have been running, and it will really be too bad for the boy. I have seen the slides from the test animals,” he added, turning over some more paperwork and glancing at a photocopy of something the major could not clearly see from this angle. “There was apparently a mistake in one of the commands given in an early series of tests. After this particular ‘erroneous’ command is given to the microps, the resemblance of the subject brain at the end of the process to one which has been infected with one of the spongiform encephalopathies is quite remarkable. Sponge is definitely the operative term.”

“But if the father should not respond in time, if the boy should die—”

Bioru shrugged again. “Morgues are routinely even more lax in security terms than hospitals are,” he said. “We can as easily harvest the microps from a corpse as we can from a live body. More easily — corpses do not need anesthesia. Either way, with the boy alive or dead, we will have no problems with Dr. Darenko in future. If the boy survives, we will keep young Laurent as a hostage to further work by his father. If he does not, we will at least have recovered the microps and can pass them on to some other expert more loyal than Darenko for further work.”

The major nodded. “When will the activation happen?” she said.

“We are still working on the details of that,” Bioru said. “We think Darenko may have warned his son to stay off the Net, fearing that someone might work out how to send an activation or reprogramming burst to the microps.” The smile began to grow again. “In any case, the warning seems not to be having much effect. Granted, the boy has not yet ventured anywhere much except the Greens’ household Net — unfortunately this has become inaccessible from outside. They seem to have had some work done on their bandwidth just now, and the work included some unusual one-way traffic protocols. It seems from the phone company’s records that the good professor is extremely paranoid about colleagues stealing the articles he writes for his various journals.” Briefly that smile went merely malicious. “Other than that, the only other place he has been is this”—he peered at another piece of paper—” ‘Cluster Rangers’ entertainment, which the daughter seems presently to favor.”

“My department has registered with that server,” the major said. “Their registration should be going through shortly.”

“It has already gone through,” said Bioru. “However, the boy has not yet ventured back in. Once he is in active ‘gameplay,’ we will be ready to send the reprogramming burst. After that, it will take no more than eighteen hours for him to begin showing symptoms, and we will at that point notify the father, through public media to which he has access, of his son’s condition. If he cooperates, we will send a ‘stop’ burst and hold the damage to the boy’s system at whatever level it has reached when Darenko turns himself in. Then you will bring the boy home. He should at that point be ill enough to be taken to the hospital…and that is the point at which, if you have not already found an opportunity to move, you can easily do so. No one questions an ambulance crew fetching a sick child when they have called for it themselves. After that, a quick trip to our embassy, and he will come home the same night in the ‘diplomatic pouch,’ under seal, where none of the local police or security forces can touch him. It will hardly be the first time our embassy has designated a carrier large enough to contain a person as the ‘pouch.’ Notice is unlikely to be taken…and even if it is, there is nothing any of the various intelligence or security forces can do — they will not dare interfere with diplomatic immunity.”

The major smiled, too, now, just slightly. “I will see to the details.”

“I doubt there will be much in the way of interference from the Green family until it is too late,” said Bioru. “The only sensitive part of this operation will be happening when they will be too distracted by the symptoms to suspect the cause, let alone to delve far into it. However, if there should be any interference—”

“The father’s ties to Net Force…”

“These are mere cronyism, as far as I can tell,” said Bioru. “He seems to lecture to their people a great deal. He is not an active operative, and they are hardly likely to go out on a limb for him. Do what you have to to get the boy, Major. This matter is too important for me to enjoin you against deadly force. If this weapon falls into the hands of our enemies — even of some of our present allies — many of our people in the field could die as a result. What is the saying? ‘Do unto others as they would do unto you — and do it first’?”

She nodded. “I will take care of it.”

“See that you do,” Bioru said, and vanished.

She was left in the unornamented black work space of the booth, sweating slightly. The major sighed, stroked her hair back into place, and then turned — the door opened, and she stepped out.

Yet another small child, a little boy of about eight, barreled full tilt into her legs. She caught him. “Uh-oh,” she said, “look out, sweetheart!” and pushed him off gently in the direction of his mother, who was coming down the aisle after him.

Then she walked back to her seat, smiling gently, and thinking about young Laurent.

“Look,” Maj said. “At least give it some thought.”

The Group of Seven were in session later that evening, sitting around in Kelly’s present work space, a bizarre multistory log cabin located in some mythical backwoods surrounded by mountains high enough to make Everest feel slightly inferior. Kelly changed work space styles the way some people changed their underwear, so the Group made it a habit to meet regularly at his place, just to see what he was up to — mostly never the same thing twice.

The Great Hall of this particular cabin was scattered with animal hides which would have been extremely politically incorrect if they had been genuine. However, they weren’t, and some of them were simply hypothetical. Mairead was presently curled up on one of the five huge sofas, absently petting one of the pelts, an amazing thing streaked in midnight blue and silver. “This is really pretty,” she had commented when they first all came in. “They should make an animal to go with it….”

Now, though, she looked across to Maj, who was sitting on the sofa closest to the huge open fireplace. Maj had always been a sucker for fires, and she was presently gazing into this one, estimating idly that you could probably roast a whole cow in it, assuming you had a block and tackle to swing the cow into the flames with.

“Look,” Mairead said. “It’s not that he’s not a nice kid. He is. But I’m just not sure how committed he is to simming.”

“Lots of people think it’s simming they’re interested in, when what they really want is to be a fighter jockey,” Kelly said. “Nothing wrong with that. But it’s not what we do. If we start diluting the purpose of the group, adding people who’re going to pull it in different directions, it’s going to start coming to pieces. I’ve seen that kind of thing too often before.”

“Yeah,” said Chel.

Shih Chin frowned. “Kel, it’s easy to say that. But what about the other side of the argument? Do we want to shut ourselves off entirely from new blood, good people, just because we’re not sure they fit some narrow little definition of our own purpose? Don’t we have the room to grow a little?”

“Yeah, but—”

It had been going on in this vein for the better part of three-quarters of an hour now, and Maj felt like getting up, creating a can of spray paint, and graffiti’ing right across the biggest of the log walls YOU ARE ALL UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT. That might at least get their attention. However, it was considered bad form to trash others’ work spaces, no matter how sorely one was tempted — though there had been the time Chel had purposely built the Castle of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and everyone had lost their composure in unison—

That was unison, though, and the occasional outbreaks of unison were one of the things that made the Group of Seven worth sticking with. Maj sighed.

“Guys,” she said.

There was a lull in the argument. This was not necessarily a good sign — there had been several so far, to no effect.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not asking for an answer today. I’m not even sure I want an answer today, whether everybody has one or not. I just felt the need to let you know that Niko really likes what we were doing. He thinks he might be good at it…and he’d like to ‘try out.’ He wants a chance to get to know you better. And possibly to fly with you on a regular basis, if possible. But otherwise, he just would really like to fly with us sometimes…for now.”

“How long is ‘now’?” Chel said.

That was where Maj had gotten stuck the last time, for she was unwilling to let them know or guess too much about what was going on. “His folks may be moving over here,” she said. “They’ll be coming to visit for a while — his dad, will, anyway — but I’m not sure how long it’s going to last. I’m not even dead sure it’s going to be permanent.”

“Not that it matters when we’re all virtual,” Mairead said.

Yeah, but some of us are more virtual than others. Laurent had briefly shown her his small bare ported-over work space — just blackness with text and pictures hanging in it — and she had been at pains to cover up her embarrassment for him in a hurry, and to show him how to build it into an environment he could sit in and get comfortable with. He was a fast learner, but it was still going to take him time to get used to all the “special effects” now available to him, things that everyone else here had long taken for granted.

“What is likely to be affected is how often he can get in,” Maj said, “after the immediate present. This is sort of a quiet time for him.” She sighed. “Look, do I have to spell it out? He’s lonely. You guys made him welcome.”

Shih Chin made an aggrieved face. “Some of us called him ‘Goulash.’”

“He didn’t mind,” Bob said.

“No,” Maj said, “he didn’t. He’s a good-natured kid, for someone so young.”

“There’s that, too,” Del said, a little dubiously. “I mean, it’s nothing personal, we were all thirteen once—”

“Some of us may have done it twice,” Mairead muttered into the fur she was still stroking, looking sideways at Sander.

There was some muted snickering about this — the juvenility of Sander’s sense of humor was legendary in the Group.

Maj refused to be distracted. “In this case,” she said, “I’m not sure how much chance he’s had to be thirteen in the first place. He’s had a bad time of it at home. I’m not going to get into details. There has been family stuff going on for him, and he’s had to grow up fast. A lot of work, not much play, and not a whole lot of smart people who’re also nice to play with.”

“‘Play?’” Sander said, a little archly.

“‘When I became a man,’” said Bob suddenly, in a quoting tone of voice, “I put aside the concerns of a child, including the fear of looking childish, and the desire to seem very grown up.’”

Everyone looked at him. “Well,” he said, only a little defensively, “we’re old enough to cut each other some slack when we act underage, aren’t we?” He looked at Sander. “We can surely make a little allowance for someone who’s a little older than his age.” He looked at Maj. “Does he have any previous simming experience at all?”

“You’re not going to believe this,” Maj said, “but he had never even been in a sim before last night.”

“God,” said Shih Chin, in complete astonishment. “Talk about deprivation.”

“It’s not like they don’t have the Net over there, Maj,” Kelly said. “What was the problem? Financial or something?”

“I think maybe so,” she said. “Look, guys, please, there’s no need for any ‘final’ decisions. But he’d like to fly with us a couple of times, get the feel for what we’re doing. If it becomes obvious that he really is just a rocket jockey, I’ll take him aside and show him where better to practice the art. But, meantime…”

There was some silence. “When are we scheduled up next?” Bob said.

“You’re the squadron leader. You don’t have the schedule?”

“Schedule,” Kelly said to his work space. With a flourish of trumpets, there appeared in midair before them a meter-long parchment scroll supported at each end by a small flying cherub. The parchment unrolled, showing a Day-Timer page made large.

Mairead gave this apparition a look. “Very rococo,” she said. “Obviously you’re unconcerned that Della Robbia might sue.”

“Wednesday,” Kelly said.

“That’s the old schedule. I can’t do Wednesday,” Bob said. “I have jazz class that night.”

“Tuesday?”

“Cripes, that’s tomorrow already,” Sander said.

“No good for me,” Mairead said. “My turn to cook at home.” She looked at Sander. “And by the way, what about those chiles you were going to get for me?”

“Uh, I forgot. Tuesday’s out for me, though.”

“I can do Tuesday,” Bob said.

“Me, too,” Kelly said. “Who else can’t do Tuesday?”

Maj searched her mind. “I’m okay, I think.”

“I’m in,” Del said.

“Me, too,” Robin said. “I have a half day. What time?”

Time zones…Maj thought. “Six o’clock Eastern?”

“I think I’m going to have to pass for me,” Mairead said. “I have a ton of homework that night, and then a six A.M. bus the next morning. Sorry. I’ll come in the next time.”

They played the “schedule game” for a few minutes more. Finally Maj agreed to meet Del and Robin and Bob on Tuesday night at seven. “We can show him some of the underpinnings of what we’re doing,” she said. “See if he catches fire at the idea of building one of these from scratch rather than just playing in someone else’s sim.”

“Fair enough,” Bob said. “We’ll report off to the rest of the Group. If this doesn’t work out, though, Maj…even if he is your cousin or whatever….”

“I’ll let him down gently,” she said. “I’m not going to ride you guys about this. I appreciate what you’re doing, anyway.”

“Okay,” Bob said. “Kelly, for cripes’ sake will you get those things out of there? They’re creating a draft.” He waved one hand at the cherubs.

“Begone, bugs,” Kelly said. They and the “parchment” vanished.

“Okay,” Bob said. “Down to work.”

In the air in the midst of them appeared the wireframe model of the Arbalest fighter. It rotated in three axes, its usual “presentation” spin, and then fleshed itself over in black mirror alloy and settled in “plan view,” horizontal to them. “Right,” Bob said. “I think we can get rid of any worries about the camber of the wings, because they worked just fine. Now, here’s what we might look at next….”

Maj breathed out a sigh of relief and leaned in to see what Bob was going to propose. One less thing to worry about, she thought. We’ll see how Tuesday goes….

In the next room, or six thousand miles away, depending on how one looked at it, Laurent stood in the apartment he shared with his father, looking around him.

It was not really such a bad place. A work space, he thought. He was going to have to learn the terms that they used here. Maj had been able to take a few minutes to show him how to manipulate the bare space into which his own files had been moved.

It was still all so strange…. He was unused to experiencing virtual life as anything but dry text, flat or stereo images, everything a little remote and forbidding, concepts and pictures appearing in darkness and disappearing into it again…with always the hint that somewhere, out in that darkness, someone was listening to you, waiting for you to say something wrong.

It had been as unlike the waiting, welcoming darkness of the Cluster Rangers universe as anything could have been. That, Laurent thought, is the way virtuality always should have been. Friendly. Oh, naturally there will always be things that are scary — nobody wants to be protected all the time. But there’s more than enough of that in the real world. Why does the virtual world have to be the same way…hard and chilly and always so determined and serious? Why won’t the government at home let people have at least this kind of thing…this room to let their imaginations run free a little?

Of course, that might be the reason, right there. Free. Imaginations, stimulated, in constant use, could be dangerous things. The most dangerous thing, he remembered his father saying. Every good thing there is started as someone’s dream. So did nearly every bad thing that man has made — as a dream that went wrong, or one that was purposely twisted into a nightmare from the beginning. None of them could happen without imagination. It is the thing that most frightens people, after enthusiasm. Against the two of them together, there is no defense….

Except, Laurent thought, when whatever is chasing “imagination” and “enthusiasm” down the street has a gun, and they do not…

He sighed and wandered off to the window, looking down onto the little bare courtyard that lay in back of their house. A hedge bordered it, and there were sidewalks on the other side of the hedge, and to either side were concrete multistory apartment buildings exactly like their own. Off in the distance straight ahead was a line of trees, and far beyond that a shadowy line against the sky, almost the same color as the sky in this weather — the hills of the north. And over those hills…the rest of the world, the world he had believed he would never see.

But now all that was changed. This was the world he had given up, the world he would — strangely — now give anything to be standing in again. He would turn around and see his father—

Laurent turned around…but the room was empty. Cupboards, the dining room table, the little kitchenette where the two of them made their meals, the doors leading to each of the two bedrooms, everything very white and plain and neat — there it all was. But his father was not there. On the kitchen table was a note, turned facedown.

Laurent let out a long breath and went over to the table, stared down at the note. Before Maj went to take care of her own business, she had shown him a little about how to bend his mind against this space, ordering it to manifest visual and tangible links which would hook into other resources on the Net and also make the place look less bare. The standard virtual work space was endlessly malleable, and would give him, in illusion anyway, anything he wanted.

Laurent pulled out one of the chairs and sat on it, looking around at the cool afternoon light that was filling the apartment. Everything was very quiet. Properly, he knew that he should instruct the program to fill in some background noise, but he was in no hurry about that.

Maj, Laurent thought. She had been very kind to him…a lot kinder than she needed to be. The whole Green family had — Mr. Green, his father’s friend, and the Muffin, who climbed up in Laurent’s lap and looked around her to make sure no one was within earshot, and whispered very conspiratorially, “Are you sure you aren’t my brother?” They felt like family — it was almost as if the cover story was trying to come true.

But he was still a little shy with Maj’s mother. It was not that she reminded him specifically of his own mother, gone six years now. Those memories were faint already, getting fainter all the time — the memory of a hand touching his shoulder, the echo of a voice, laughing. He was already finding it hard to remember his mother’s face, and this troubled him. It felt obscurely like some kind of disloyalty. But you couldn’t make your mind remember what it refused to. Sometimes it just let go of things, he thought, because they hurt too much. He shied away from Maj’s mother a little, not because she was unkind, but because if he too freely accepted the kindness, he might be further tempted to forget the touch, the echo, completely…and he didn’t dare. Besides, there was always the fear lingering at the edge of things, not to get too involved, not to commit yourself…because just when you’re getting used to it, when you think things might change, it can all be taken away from you again, leaving you emptier than you were to start with.

Laurent sighed, looked toward the closed front door, which led into Maj’s work space. She was elsewhere, he knew. He thought he would invite her in when she was free. But then the idea of what she might think when she looked in here, after being so used to the sumptuous spaces she routinely moved through, began to chill him a little. She would be polite about it. But he knew she would be thinking how poor it all looked, how barren. She would know it wasn’t his fault…but she would still think that. And he had been embarrassed enough lately.

No, let it wait awhile, let him find time to do some more work. There was likely to be too much time to work anyway, for a while, until they found his father.

If they found his father…

He turned around, then, and made the image. The tall man in the worn dark coat…. Popi never had a coat that wasn’t a little too short for him in the sleeves. He just had unusually long arms and wrists and hands, and they never failed to hang out of the State coats, which were made to averages and not for individuals. Tall and blond, a little hawkish looking, the high cheekbones and the long nose reinforcing the look — but the glasses always adding that last touch of owl, turning the hawk-expression friendly and quizzical. There he was — his father. Laurent turned.

The figure standing there was incomplete — it had no face.

I’m forgetting already, Laurent thought, in rising panie. It’s only been a couple of days…! “I won’t! I won’t forget!” he shouted. “Go away!”

When he looked again, the figure was gone.

He stood there, breathing hard, feeling silly for having overreacted. Finally Laurent let out a long breath, a sigh, and reached down to the table, to the note — turned it over.

The other side was blank.

He let it fall.

Laurent got up, then, and turned to the shelf by the window, where he had placed one thing which did not exist in the real apartment. It was a model of an Arbalest fighter — an icon leading to Maj’s fighter in her Cluster Rangers account. She had, she said, put the “training wheels” on it for him, so that he could fly it with minimum experience, inside her own simming space.

Laurent decided not to wait. She’ll understand, he thought, and went over to pick up the model of the fighter. I really need a break, something to take my mind off…

Say it. Off the fear. That your father will never come back, never get out. That they have him in some dark place, and they’re doing to him what they did to Piedern’s father two years ago, when they caught him handling foreign publications. But what they do this time will be worse, much worse, because your father was one of the special ones…and he turned on them. They never forgive that. Never.

Laurent took in a long breath, let it go. Took another breath.

All right, he thought. Let’s get a grip, here. Let’s go somewhere that the dark is friendly, just for a little while. I won’t stay long. I promised I wouldn’t overdo it — and Mrs. Green will probably have dinner ready in a little while…it would be rude to be late.

He put the model of the Arbalest down on the shelf again and stood there touching it. “Guest ingress,” he said.

Laurent vanished, leaving the model there by itself, the one black thing in the white room.