Safe House

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?”