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
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.
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,
“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.”
