Safe House

sigh, and reached down to the table, to the note — turned it over.

The other side was blank.

He let it fall.

Laurent got up, then, and turned to the shelf by the window, where he had placed one thing which did not exist in the real apartment. It was a model of an Arbalest fighter — an icon leading to Maj’s fighter in her Cluster Rangers account. She had, she said, put the “training wheels” on it for him, so that he could fly it with minimum experience, inside her own simming space.

Laurent decided not to wait. She’ll understand, he thought, and went over to pick up the model of the fighter. I really need a break, something to take my mind off…

Say it. Off the fear. That your father will never come back, never get out. That they have him in some dark place, and they’re doing to him what they did to Piedern’s father two years ago, when they caught him handling foreign publications. But what they do this time will be worse, much worse, because your father was one of the special ones…and he turned on them. They never forgive that. Never.

Laurent took in a long breath, let it go. Took another breath.

All right, he thought. Let’s get a grip, here. Let’s go somewhere that the dark is friendly, just for a little while. I won’t stay long. I promised I wouldn’t overdo it — and Mrs. Green will probably have dinner ready in a little while…it would be rude to be late.

He put the model of the Arbalest down on the shelf again and stood there touching it. “Guest ingress,” he said.

Laurent vanished, leaving the model there by itself, the one black thing in the white room.

7

Elsewhere, another room was very small and dark. It had been a coal bin, once, in the cellar of this house, in a time when people still used coal for heating in the cities; its walls were all black with soot, and a few forgotten lumps of coal still lay around on the rammed dirt of the floor. The coal cellar had just one way to the outside, a pair of metal doors at a forty-five degree angle to the stucco of the building. The doors’ hinges were long since rusted shut, as was the padlock through the old hasp, connecting them. They had been painted over, for good measure, some time in the last decade, with (in a gesture of optimism) a rustproofing paint. Plainly, from its external appearance, no one could possibly be in here…which made it an excellent place to hide.

Armin Darenko sat as comfortably as he could, leaning against the sooty wall, concentrating on the tiny line of light that came to him through those old doors, from a not-quite-painted-over crack on the right-hand side of one of them. He had come in a couple of days ago, in the dead of night, through the tunnel in the middle of the floor. His clean clothes were down in that tunnel, now, so as not to become smirched with soot that would draw attention to him when it was time to leave. He knew that time would come in the next few days — his friends were working for him, out there. But that did not stop him from being very afraid, as he sat here, and his mind ran in frightened circles like a rat in a particularly inhumane Skinner box, always looking for the cheese and never finding it, and being shocked again and again by the same fear.

He sighed, took a deep breath, and tried, for the thousandth time, to break the cycle. Laurent was safe. Of that much he was sure. Laurent was in Alexandria, with the Greens, and was almost certainly coping splendidly. His son had all his mother’s old toughness, that ability to deal with what was happening around her and not be more trouble to others than necessary. And he was carrying the silent little helpers which would keep him healthy, protect him by brute force from passing infections against which he might not have been inoculated, keep his system chemistry in kilter, and otherwise make themselves useful. Very useful indeed they would be, some day, when they were in the right hands and turned loose to help a suffering world. For the moment, though, Laurent was their unwitting custodian, and in a safe place…so the two things about which Armin Darenko had been more concerned than about anything else in the world were now where he did not need to worry about them. Now Armin was free to concentrate on getting himself out of here.

Getting in had been easy enough, for a man who for a long, long time had been idly considering that there might come a day the events of which called for a sudden departure. Escapes planned at the last moment rarely do well, he knew. So quietly Armin had begun, about twenty years ago, keeping his ears open for information which might come in handy eventually. And sure enough, it came. When the governments started changing over with more than the usual speed, rumors started turning up here and there about tunnels under the city. Some of them were just that, rumors — but occasionally they were true. This particular network of tunnels, which apparently went right back to the bad old Ceaucescu days, was one of the true ones. They did not lead anywhere really useful — just from cellar to cellar of some of the houses in this part of town — but that fact in itself made them useful, since tunnels which actually led directly to escape would have been found long since and filled in, or blown up. Right now a simple place to hide was all that Armin could want in the world.

He had enough food and water to keep him going for a couple of days yet, and a cache under a rock in the nearby park where he could, with the greatest caution and in the dark of night, slip out and get more, if he needed it. He was intent on not going out if he could avoid it, though — not until he heard, on the tiny radio he was carrying, the coded news from the people who had agreed to help get him out. Armin had risked enough going out to the lakes, three days ago, to leave the false trail that he much hoped would concentrate the authorities’ search in that direction. It was too much to hope that they would keep looking there for long, after they found no sign of him in the space of a couple or a few days. They were not stupid people. But even a couple of days’ distraction would allow the friends who were helping him here to complete their own plans. With luck, in a couple of days, maybe less, he would go to join Laurent.

And then the world would have to be started all over again, for both of them. He knew the medical community in the States would welcome him. So would others…and this time he would have to be more careful than he had been here. It was not as if there were not cruel, venal, and evil people in the United States, just as well as here; people who would see, in the delicate and intelligent little machines he had created, a weapon instead of a tool. He would have to work with Martin, and with Martin’s friends at Net Force and elsewhere in the intelligence and scientific communities, to find ways to control his creations so that they could not be modified for deadly purposes.

He sighed, alone there in the darkness, and knew that it would be an uphill fight, if indeed this purpose could be achieved at all. There was no putting the genic back in the bottle, as the old story had it. It was out, now — out walking around the world in his son’s body. Soon enough it would be in the lab, being studied by other scientists. And after that…

Armin felt around him in the darkness for the plastic bottle of springwater, took a swig, sealed it, and put it aside again. At least he had left no working prototypes here. What hurt him most now was the price he suspected that some of the people who had been working with him must be paying. But there comes a time when one must, however reluctantly, weigh lives in one’s hand — one’s own life, as well as those of others — and decide whether sparing two lives, or five or ten, here and now, is worth losing thousands, perhaps millions, later on. For Armin was not so naive as to think his invention would stay inside his country’s borders if he completed it and turned it over to the government. Cluj desperately needed hard currency. He would sell the microps to anyone who would pay him. Terrorists, intelligence organizations, criminals, common murderers, other countries with better intentions would all pay well for them. And chaos would ensue. Soon the negative uses would proliferate, outnumbering the positive ones. No one would know whether anything they ate or drank was normal food, or something that could take them apart from the inside — either slowly, molecule by molecule, or very quickly indeed.

Armin’s only consolation was that he had managed to destroy all the locally held records about the section of coding which told the microps how to “breed,” how to reproduce themselves from raw materials, protein chains and mineral ions, inside their host. He had destroyed not only the code, before he left, but all his notes, and as many of his associates’ notes as possible. Not all of them had been accessible…but he had made sure that it would take a long, long while before anyone remaining behind here would be able to retro-engineer the microps from the bits and pieces which were all that remained when he left the laboratory for the last time the other night, having that afternoon sent his son off, ostensibly to visit the vampire’s castle.

Half his work was done. Now all that remained was to get himself to safety as well. The quiet people who