Runaways

Roy had apologized profusely, and immediately acquired an illegal sonic.

He wasn't carrying it today, though. The French were paranoid about privately carried weapons these days, almost as bad as the Brits, and it was worth a long sentence to get caught with one. Roy had been specifically warned against it this time out. He wasn't too worried-as far as Roy was concerned, Paris was a safe and civilized place, except for the butcher shops. And now the dark figure across the way turned, wandered off around the corner and down one of the side streets that fed into the square.

Roy relaxed a little, looked up and down the arcade, saw no one; and out in the square itself people were walking through briskly on their business, or strolling by with their dogs. Roy made a little face as a brace of sable- and- white collies went by on the leash, pulling along their mistress, a hard-faced woman in a fox-fur coat. Dogs were all right, but the Parisians' attitude to where their pets relieved themselves was entirely too relaxed, and Roy had stepped in more dogstuff in the past day and a half than he had in Frankfurt, New York, and L. A. combined. He let out a breath at the thought of all the traveling he'd been doing lately, wondering if he would ever get over the jet lag. Half the time his body thought it was some other time than it really was wherever Roy was at the moment, and he always seemed to be hungry no matter how recently he'd eaten. It was a side effect of the jet lag, Roy supposed. At least it wasn't making him gain weight.

If I'd known it was going to be like this when I met Jill… But then Roy let out another breath and laughed at himself a little. Silly even to think, here and now, that he wouldn't have taken her up on her suggestion. He had met Jill maybe a couple of weeks after he got into the Breathing Space shelter in Toronto, while exploring the 'Haven' environment. Whoever built that virtual 'place' had been a real nature freak and had filled it with astonishing scenery, seaside and mountain vistas where you could just sit and relax and let all your troubles seem remote for a little while. The Haven was amazingly complex, and it would take even a committed explorer a long time to find all its ins and outs, but Roy had quickly discovered at least one, when he met Jill.

She had found him sitting under a tree on a hillside in some dusty golden virtual afternoon, reading from a text- windowed version of Kim that hung in the air beside him, while beyond it the mountains of western Alberta reared up, snowy-headed and looking slightly insubstantial in the low and slanting light. 'Pretty,' she had said, with no other word of introduction. 'Boring.'

Roy had looked up at her with some surprise. A lot of the kids using Haven were none too eager to talk to other people. After a few rebuffs he had taken to leaving them alone. But there Jill had stood, small and blond and sharp- faced and slight, wearing bodytights and ankle boots and a smock that rippled with changing colors as Roy watched it. She seemed unusually put-together for someone on the run from her folks, and she stood there looking Roy over with an intensity he found both unsettling and intriguing.

'Wanna get out of here?' Jill had said.

'I just got in,' Roy had said, bemused.

'I don't mean out out. I mean, out of this.' She gestured around her at the mountains, the impending sunset light. 'This pretty cocoon they've put around us to keep us safe while we sort out our troubles.'

'Why should that be so bad?'

Jill snorted. 'Like the life they want us to go back to is so terrific. School. Living on a shoestring on whatever money your folks see fit to give you.' Roy glanced away. In his case this was almost nothing, and the subject was so sore with him that he always avoided it. It was also the reason it had taken Roy as long to leave home as he had. It had taken a good while to pile up enough of what was laughingly referred to as his 'allowance' to make even thinking about leaving a possibility. 'And then working at some jerkwater job for the rest of your life, whether you did well at school or not.'

Roy had laughed at her, poked a finger through the text window hanging in the air to mark his place, and had waved the window away to give Jill his full attention. She was pretty, in a sharp and aggressive kind of way, and her air of absolute assurance and spiky annoyance made you want to listen to her and see what came out next. 'Like you have any better ideas,' Roy had said.

'You'd be surprised,' she said, looking him over again, with some attention to his clothes this time, and this time Roy blushed. He hadn't bothered to do as a lot of the other kids did, and make himself a 'seeming' while visiting Haven-a fake somatype or a fancier representation of themselves, based on the original but taller, brawnier, prettier, more graceful, whatever they thought they ought to look like. The girl in front of him wore such a sense of assurance that Roy felt sure this was more or less what she really looked like. For himself, he hadn't cared until now if his clothes were out of date and showing signs of wear. Now, though-

'You need some money?' she said.

Something about her tone nettled him. 'I don't want charity,' Roy said.

'You're in a funny place to be making statements like that,' she said. 'I wasn't talking about charity. You like to work?'

'Depends on the work,' Roy said. 'If the money's good enough-'

'Do I look poor?' she said.

'How you look and what's real are two different things in a place like this/' Roy said.

She smiled a rather crooked smile at him. 'Maybe,' she said. 'Are you smart?'

Roy let out a snort of laughter. 'Smarter than most.'

'Come on, then,' she said, 'and we'll see.'

She was so annoying, and yet so attractive, that Roy had gotten up and gone with her, without then even knowing her name. He had found that out soon enough, though. And shortly he had met, virtually of course, the people she 'worked with,' the people who were looking for smart kids who were brave enough to hit the road on their own and didn't mind picking up a buck here and there.

Roy glanced down the length of the arcade, and out into the square again, and seeing no signs of the woman he was waiting for, started to walk. Staying in one place around here for more than a few moments at a time was not a good idea. The apartments around the square were fairly high-priced, and the police presence here, his runner had told Roy, could be expected to be more alert and frequent than usual… hence the insistence that he leave the sonic weapon at home. 'Home' at the moment, of course, was a coin-op locker in Gare du Nord, where the sonic lay well wrapped up inside his overnight bag. He would take the Metro back to the station when he'd made this drop, pick up the bag, and then slip into a public Net- access booth to find out where he was supposed to go next. The last time he had done Paris, he'd been sent down to Ziirich on the new maglev TGV service and made a document pickup there. This run might be something similar. Or they might just tell him to go to Orly or CDG and catch a cheap flight back to Toronto, where they'd alert him when they needed him again. That had happened before, too.

Roy turned the corner of the arcade and started walking along the eastern side of the square, down toward where the restaurant was. He would have loved to pause under one of those heaters, but it would have attracted attention after more than a moment, and if there was anything one did not do in this job, that was it. His business was to be as colorless as possible, not to stick out in any significant way. That, Roy thought, was what had gotten him this job in the first place, when-after answering a truly mind- numbing and unspeakably nosey questionnaire with which Jill provided him-he 'met' the people who were going to be paying him. The meeting had taken place in a quiet, plush virtual office which was not part of Haven, but which led out of it through a Net-portal into which Roy did not inquire too closely, since the Breathing Space people had said that such things were both not allowed and supposedly impossible. He had been carefully looked over by people he couldn't see more clearly than as shadowy seated forms, and the few words initially exchanged among his interviewers when he came in all centered around how nondescript he looked. It was, Roy now supposed, a compliment, if a backhanded one.

Roy never then nor since saw anything of his employers' faces. He never heard anything but voices which he was sure had been so completely electronically altered that there was no way he would ever recognize the originals. He had answered their questions with carefully concealed impatience-for they were a lot of the same ones he had already answered on the questionnaire, about his home life (nonexistent) and his relationships with his relatives (ditto) and his family income and so on-and finally one of the three voices which had been speaking to him said simply, 'You'll do.'

'All you'll have to do for us,' said another of the voices, 'is go places, and either drop things off and leave them, or pick things up and bring them back. You finish the job, you get paid. Pay varies, but we start at…' and he named a figure which actually made Roy blink and think he had misheard… but he hadn't. 'Can we work together?'

'Yes,' Roy had said instantly. And that had been the end of that meeting, but the beginning of what would be