Runaways

Sunday.'

'Working on that for you. Do you have a name to search for?'

'No. Just get me whoever's on supervisory duty for the facility where Burt Kamen was staying.'

'Very well. Waiting for an answer.'

Megan stood up behind the desk. A moment later she found herself looking at another desk, in a handsome office done in mauves and grays, colors she suspected had been picked for their restful qualities. Behind the desk was sitting a handsome middle-aged woman, conservatively dressed in a dark business jacket, a woman whose face reminded her a little of her mother's: high-cheekboned, with eyes slightly slanted, the skin around the eyes and mouth a little lined, but in ways that made Megan think of authority rather than age. 'I'm Donna Killester,' the woman said. 'How can I assist you, Miss, uh, O'Malley?'

'I'm looking for my friend Burt Kamen,' Megan said. 'I understand he was staying with you until earlier today.'

'He was,' Ms. Killester said, 'but I'm afraid I can't tell you anything about where he's gone. We've already had a couple of inquiries about him today, but I'm afraid I couldn't help them, either.'

A couple? Interesting. Did his folks finally get off their fundaments and do something? 'You can't tell me,' Megan said, 'or you won 7 tell me?'

She tried hard not to sound too challenging as she said it. Ms. Killester smiled just slightly and said, 'Obviously there are confidentiality issues involved. But in this case, I mean 'can't.' Mr. Kamen didn't leave any indication of where he was going, or when he might be back, if indeed he intends to come back at all, since he didn't leave any personal effects deposited with the facility where he was staying.'

'He can come back, though, if he wants to?'

'Of course he can,' Ms. Killester said. 'Our charter is very clear on our responsibilities to any young person who comes to us. We turn no one away unless they're chronically violent, or chronically involved in criminal activities… in which case other social services organizations get involved, as you might imagine.'

Megan nodded. 'Is there any way I could leave a message for him, in case he does come back?'

'Yes, of course. His Net access and virtmail accounts here are still active, so that friends and relatives can get in touch with him. They stay that way for a year. Or even longer, if a review indicates the extension is warranted. It's a very basic part of our service, one that's easy for us to provide, and it's not one we would cut off without good reason.'

'All right.' Megan thought for a moment. 'Is there anything you can tell me about who else might have been in touch with him recently?'

'I'm sorry, but that would come under the heading of information we have to keep confidential.'

Of course it would. 'Right,' Megan said. 'Ms. Killes- ter, I appreciate your help… thanks a lot.'

'Thank you,' Ms. Killester said. 'I'm sorry not to be able to be of more help to you… but I appreciate your concern for your friend. Should he turn up again, of course we'll encourage him to get in touch with the people who've been trying to reach him.'

'Thanks again,' Megan said, and touched her desk in the spot which signaled to her workspace manager that she wanted to kill a connection. Ms. Killester vanished.

Megan sat there for a moment, considering whether 'the people who've been trying to reach him' was a slip of the tongue confirming what she'd said about several attempted contacts, or just a general plural. No way to tell, she thought. And I'm not sure whether it matters right now.

She sat there thinking for a few moments more. 'Please restore all the research material I had in here earlier,' Megan said.

'Restoring from Save.'

It all appeared again, the various text sources and interviews frozen in midspeech, people in suits sitting or standing and talking earnestly. One of them was the Breathing Space founder, Richard Page, a tall handsome silver-haired man with a cultured accent. He was an immensely successful businessman who had decided to turn his 'spare money' into something that would live on after him and do good, and who spent all his spare time (when not riding steeplechasers) shaking down other rich people for their spare money, to be applied to the same cause. Megan walked out into her space and stood there looking at him for a moment.

Then she said to her workspace, 'I want another Net connection.'

'Please specify.'

'Contact the same Breathing Space facility I visited Sunday. I want to try to reach a client calling himself 'Bodo.' '

'Working on that for you.'

She turned her back on Richard Page and looked up at the white tiers of her amphitheater, running up to the black sky. A moment later her workspace said, 'The client has flagged himself as available for a limited time.'

'Great. Open an access.'

'Opening. Please note that this access is controlled. All access to the space is by express permission of Breathing Space Inc., and unauthorized accesses or attempts to enter or exit the space by other than officially sanctioned means will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law-'

'Yeah, I just bet they will,' Megan muttered under her breath as her system read out the disclaimer. There were serious holes in this system. That was an issue that someone was going to have to raise with the Breathing Space people after this particular patch of dust settled. Net Force, probably, Megan thought. When Burt has sorted himself out, I want to go have a talk with James Winters about this…

'Do you agree?'

'Yes, of course I agree, let's go!'

Her doorframe appeared in front of her, and the door part of it winked out. A low buzz of conversation came from the far side.

Megan walked through the door and found herself in a place as utterly unlike the peace and quiet of the previous 'mountain' landscape as could have been imagined. Once again, though, once she was through she had to just stop and stand there and stare around her in admiration of the skill, the sheer love that some virtual-experience designer, or team of them, had lavished on this space. Megan seemed to be standing in the middle of a big broad plaza in the middle of a city, a handsome sunny space through which the occasional green tram passed, dinging in gentle reproach at some pedestrian crossing the tracks down at the plaza's far end. The gray stone paving of the central area was completely surrounded by old six-story buildings in some beautiful golden stone, with shutters at all the high windows and windowboxes with red and pink flowers spilling out of them. And it looked as if the bottom floor of every one of those buildings had a cafe in it, because tables and chairs spilled out in front of every one of them, well into the middle of the plaza. Hundreds of people sat there eating and drinking in the warm sunshine, and the whole place buzzed softly with their conversation, a low soft rush mirroring the sound of the river flowing by not too far away, at the bottom of the little 'plateau' on which the plaza and the rest of this part of the city sat. Away in the distance, past the river and the nearer hills, a white line could be seen against the bottom of the blue, blue sky-more mountains.

Someone whistled at her from behind. Megan turned and smiled just a little, for there, near one of the cafes at this end of the plaza, was a sculpture of a giant wooden bear, and leaning against it, his arms folded, was Bodo. 'Looking for somebody?' he said.

'You know who,' Megan said, going over to him. She glanced around her as she came up to him.

'He's not here.'

'I know that,' Megan said. 'That's what I want to talk about.'

'I don't know where he is,' Bodo said.

'That's not what I'm interested in,' Megan said.

Bodo looked at her thoughtfully for a moment… then said, 'Come on, let's sit down. It's summer here… you get hot standing around.'

They headed toward the nearest cafe. 'Quite a place,' Megan said, looking around her.

'No one wants to be alone all the time,' Bodo said. 'Sometimes you want to be with people.'

'How many of them are real?'

'You mean other Breathing Space refugees? Enough,' Bodo said. 'Some of them are worth talking to. But a lot of these are just recordings of normal people. Some of us forget what those are like, after a while… '

Megan nodded. They went to an empty table, sat down. After a few moments a tall thin waiter in a white