Safe House

“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