Safe House

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.