Safe House

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….”

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,