Safe House

Laurent’s shoulder and vanishing out the end of the carriage.

Laurent left his “auntie” once, ostensibly to go to the toilet, but though he went right up to the loco end of the train and back again, he could find no sign of his “uncle.” He couldn’t imagine how the man had vanished from a moving train. Shortly, as the “Wiener Walzer” came up to its full speed, he was once more too distracted to care very much about the whereabouts of his temporary Uncle Iolae. He was beginning to tire a little, and later what Laurent mostly recalled was how, where the track curved, he could look ahead and see little birds of prey, kestrels and merlins, circling or hovering over the fields and grassland to either side of the track — waiting for the mice and other little creatures which would be frightened out of hiding by the sudden whack of air displaced by the train’s passing.

They’ve learned the train schedule, Laurent thought. They’ve found a new ecological niche for themselves, and learned how to exploit it.

Am I going to be able to do as well without my pop? he wondered. This new world was so strange…. But shortly Laurent was distracted again by the MGV pulling into Wien Westbahnhof and settling down onto the track with a sigh; and “Auntie Dina” led him off it and over to the platform to where what she told him would be the last ground leg of the trip was waiting — the Tunnel Train, the “sealed” UltraGrandVitesse evacuated-maglev system which would connect under the Alps with the Swiss NEAT system, completed five years ago and the wonder of its time. This last leg would be all in the dark — but it would be only one more hour to Zurich, at near-supersonic speeds, to meet the very last leg of Laurent’s journey.

The train closed up and pressurized itself, levitated above the T-shaped “podium” it rode, slipped softly out of the Westbahnhof, took itself up to 550 km/h without any fuss, and dived into the tunnel beneath the Alps. An hour later, only slowing to enter the “vacuum-locked” part of the tunnel where it could run supersonic without having the nuisance of air pressure to deal with, the NEAT “train” called Edelweiss after a distant wheeled ancestor broke out of a darkness only briefly punctuated by the lights of stations where it didn’t stop, and pulled up in the station below Zurich AeroSpaceport. On the far side of tube security his “auntie” turned Laurent over to a young woman from groundside escort services, along with another ID that Laurent had never seen but had been told to expect — Hungarian, this time — and a purple EU nonresident “transit” chip. She clasped Laurent’s shoulder as she said goodbye, and he nodded and watched her go.

“Come on,” said the escort officer, and Laurent followed her. Upstairs they went from the station, ascending via three levels of escalators past a slightly unbelievable array of shops and kiosks and stores apparently selling everything on earth. Sixteen hours ago Laurent would have goggled at it all. But now weariness and repeated spasms of fear and even a little irrational impatience were making a jaded traveler of him. What was really going to interest Laurent, now, was stopping — just standing still somewhere, sitting down somewhere that didn’t move, and going no further.

He missed his father more than ever. He kept wanting to turn around and say, Pop, Popi, look at this! — but his father wasn’t there — and then the awful thought would occur to him, Maybe he never will be. Maybe—But he pushed that thought aside again and again. I’m just tired. He’ll come for me as soon as he can get out…as soon an he can finish what he’s doing.

The airline staffer talking to him as they went got so little by way of response, as she led him through the white or glass-brick corridors full of bustling people, that finally she gave up trying. But as they went through the last security check, which Laurent hardly noticed, she smiled just a little — and moments later they came out into the great shining curvature and acreage of the main spaceport concourse, the newest and latest-completed part of that century-old Zurich facility. Straight across the white-shining floor the view went, nearly half a mile straight through one of the biggest enclosed spaces in the world under the famous glass “buckyball” dome, and out the far side through the world’s biggest single window, to the boarding pan where not one but three “jump” craft sat — a EuroBocing “hybrid” spaceplane in Swissair livery, the new Tupolev lifting body in Lufthansa gold and blue, and the “nonhybrid” American Aerospace “Double Eagle” spaceplane, in silver with the blue and red stripes.

Laurent stopped stock-still and his mouth dropped open. The escort officer smiled as he looked over at her after a moment. “That’s what I thought,” she said, “the first time I saw it.”

“Which one am I taking?” Laurent said finally.

“The AA,” said the escort officer. “Come on. They’ll preboard you, and maybe you can have a look into the cockpit before they go sterile.”

He followed her. This was everything he had imagined — a brave new world, shining, modern, new. This was what he had always wanted. All he had to do now was step out into it…all by himself.

Just so, proud, but (despite the airline staff) still terribly alone, Laurent Darenko — now Niko Durant — went across the concourse and into the boarding tube, into the unknown…

…and never knew how closely the eyes whose scrutiny he had most feared were watching him still.

1

It was Friday afternoon about two-thirty in Alexandria, Virginia, and in a sunny kitchen of a rambling house near the outskirts of the city, Madeline Green sat looking out of her virtual workspace, across the kitchen table, to where her mother was building a castle. Her mother swore.

“Mom,” Maj said wearily, brushing aside the piece of e-mail she had just finished answering, “you’re going to give me bad habits.” The e-mail bobbed back again, the little half-silver-half-black sphere seeming to float toward her in the air — she had failed to hit the half of it that meant “erase.” She hit the black half now, a little harder than she had intended, and the sphere popped and vanished with a small bursting-soap-bubble sound.

“Whatever habits I give you, they won’t be as bad as this one,” her mother muttered. She was bent over what, from a distance, would have looked like some sort of small light table for an artist. It had a flat square insulated plate on the bottom and a small, very bright gooseneck lamp attached to the back of the plate.

Right now her mother was holding a square of something that could have been mistaken for red-and-white- swirled plastic close under that lamp, and trying to bend it, with little success. “Heat it up more,” Maj said.

“If I do, the colors will run,” her mother said, “and they’ve run too much already. Maj honey, do me a favor and don’t ever let Helen Maginnis talk me into another of these last-minute projects again.”

“I tried to stop you this time,” Maj said, “but you were the one who kept saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s no problem at all, of course I’ll make this big fancy centerpiece for the PTA dinner when you said you were going to do it and now you ran out of time. Again.’”

Maj’s mother growled softly.

Maj laughed at her. “This is the third time she’s done this to you, Mom. And you always say you’re going to let her get herself out of trouble the next time. You’re just a big sucker for Helen because she’s your friend.”

“Mmmf,” her mother said, and laid the piece of sugar plate back down on the heating element to resoften. “I don’t care if it does run. The heck with perfection. You’re right, honey…”

She turned back to her work, and Maj looked over her shoulder into her virtual space to see if any more e- mail was waiting. But the air behind her was empty, clear to the white stucco walls. Above them, through the high windows above the bookshelves and the brushed stainless-steel furniture, the remains of a furiously red-and-blue Mediterranean sunset were burning themselves out, speaking of considerable heat outside on the Greek beach where the idea for this virtual workspace had originated, and more such heat tomorrow. Three years ago now, it had been, since the family had been able to synchronize both schedules and finances to go to Crete and the Greek islands for a few weeks, and Maj sighed, wondering when they would be able to get there again. It wasn’t that they were poor — not with her dad working as a tenured professor at Georgetown University, and her mom pulling down a better-than-average income as a designer of custom computer systems for big corporate clients. But having jobs as good as those also meant that both her parents seemed to be busy almost all the time, and getting everyone’s vacation time into the same calendar year, let alone the same month, was a challenge. At least, with her workspace linked to the weather reports and the live Net cameras sourced in that part of the world, Maj could experience the gorgeous Greek weather vicariously, if not directly. Maybe next year we’ll go again, she thought. Yeah, and maybe the moon will fall down.