'I beg your pardon. I'm told I'm handsomer than most.'
Megan rolled her eyes. 'Leif, just wrap it up tight and put it awayl Like you need to fish for compliments. I mean we need a backstory for you. Something to account for all these languages, and, dare I say it, a rather unstar- ved look.'
Leif had the grace to blush. 'I can starve if I have to.'
'Yeah, well, better get started, because these people may be a little suspicious if you look absolutely in the pink of health. Why would someone with your good looks and talent be on the road all of a sudden? And why can't you produce any ID at all? Why isn't there any previous evidence of you in the Net?'
'There's plenty of evidence.'
'All of it about Leif, not about this nameless kid who turns up all of a sudden looking good and speaking six or nine or thirteen languages! You've got to convince me that you're not a plant.'
'I am a plant.'
'You're so helpful. Don't make me start making unkind remarks about the vegetable kingdom. Start making up a story about yourself that'll hold water.'
He grinned at her. 'All right… I should be able to come up with something in time. Once I've got that handled, and we've seen what can be done about the 'fakery,' when do you want to meet?'
'The sooner the better, probably,' Megan said. 'I'm waiting for a virtmail from Bodo, but I have no idea when it'll come.'
'You're not concerned about if it'll come…'
She thought of Bodo's odd look at her. 'No,' Megan said. 'He'll mail, one way or another.'
'Okay. Time for me to get busy, then. You go get some sleep… You look like you could use it. I'll call you in the morning. You have class tomorrow?'
'Unfortunately, yes,' Megan said.
'When do you leave?'
'About quarter of eight.'
'I'll be in touch with you around seven, then. That okay?'
She nodded, glanced back toward her doorway. 'Leif,' Megan said slowly, 'it's a lot to ask of you, getting involved with this. I feel guilty already.'
Leif leaned against the chilly Cadillac again, dusting at the right front 'headlight' with one sleeve of his parka, and then looked up at her. 'What do you want me to say,' he said, 'that I wouldn't do it just because you asked? Well, I wouldn't.' He grinned at her shocked expression. 'Sorry, I couldn't resist. But first of all, it's not like you're asking me something you wouldn't have been willing to do yourself. But also, this isn't just about your friend, is it? Looks like there could've been a lot of kids our age… younger, even… who these people have used. Putting a stop to that seems like a good thing to be involved with. And as I said, I don't have anything better to do for a couple of weeks, until my dad gets his head out of the corporate filing cabinet and my mom stops speaking in dance notation twenty hours a day. So don't bother feeling guilty about anything. Let's get on with business and make your plan happen.'
Megan nodded and made her way toward the doorway back into her workspace… then paused, turned. 'Leif?'
'You still here?'
She laughed at his gibe. He could be infuriating sometimes… but it was worth putting up with.
'Thanks.'
'You're welcome. Now go away so I can start thinking about my new 'life.' '
Megan went.
In the old Union Station in Chicago, Burt stood near a magazine stand by the foot of one of several flights of stairs leading down into the white-marble main waiting room. As far as he was concerned, the place was earning its name: he was waiting, as he had been for several hours now. Burt was bored out of his mind, and he leaned there looking one more time at the statuary group over the big old door opposite him, surrounding the big station clock. The figures leaning on the clock were (he supposed) intended to represent Day and Night. He could understand why Day was holding, in his hand, a rooster. What was less clear was why Night appeared to be holding a penguin.
It was the kind of thing, Burt thought, that would have driven Wilma crazy. She tended to be very structured about everything, Everything had to make sense. She wanted everyone around her to know his or her role and stay in it. The trouble only started when you tried to slip out of one role into another.
Burt was getting ready to do that… though he had only recently started putting it to himself just that way. Since he had actually left home, it had become plain to him that he was going to have to make things work, now, was going to have to make a success of this new life. Otherwise his parents, if they found out he had somehow messed it up, would never cut him a moment's slack for the rest of his life. If everything went well, there would be a day when Burt would go back to them and magnanimously offer to take them back into his life, even after the way they had treated him. He was counting on his father to refuse, and after that he would be, for the first time in his life, completely free. But first Burt had to get on his feet and start making some kind of living. And if he was ever realistically going to ask Wilma to share that life with him-a request he had been trying to figure out how to make, sometime in the next few years-he was going to have to be able to support her. Burt knew that some people these days would consider that kind of thinking old-fashioned… but it was just the way he was.
That concept had been very much on Burt's mind when he had first met the man called Vaud, the man Bodo and some of the others had said was the one to talk to, on the 'street corner'-which looked nothing like a street corner at all, but was just a blank blue-swirled little pocket of virtual space off a city plaza that Burt hadn't recognized. The pocket into which Burt had stepped from a nondescript doorway in the plaza contained a table, a couple of chairs, and Vaud, a salt-and-pepper-haired man sitting there in a dark suit with his hands folded, on one side of the table. There was no telling what he really looked like, of course; as in most virtual environments, anybody could look like anything they felt like, and this man probably had reasons to want to keep his identity private, considering the kind of work he was offering. He was a short man, but there was no sense of him being small. Everything about him suggested power and control. He had turned on Burt a sharp, narrow, cool-eyed regard, when they were introduced, and questioned him closely about what he thought he was going to get out of this job. 'The money,' Burt said, and that cool face produced just a crack of a smile, the kind of crack you might get in a stone wall-somewhat intimidating with its suggestion that it might possibly split wider, with unfortunate results. Burt told Vaud the truth. His mother and father were not looking for him, he had no intention of going home any time soon, and that they knew this, that his friends weren't concerned enough about him to come looking for him- they knew he could take care of himself. All this the man called Vaud had listened to without much comment. Burt had shown him his driver's license when asked. It was clean, no points-but then there hadn't been time to get many, especially with his father unwilling to let him drive the car much farther than the local shopping center.
'What can you do?' Vaud said to him finally.
'Keep my mouth shut,' Burt said firmly.
Vaud's smile widened, another crack in the wall, an alarming look. Burt didn't react, for what he had said was true enough. He had had endless education in that particular art from his father, who would tell him to shut his mouth about once every half-hour. But Burt also meant the phrase as he strongly suspected Vaud meant it. He would work and not ask questions, and not discuss it with anyone. Doubtless that suited Vaud's needs, but it also suited Burt's. He didn't really feel like discussing, with Wilma or anyone else, where he was going to be getting the money he was about to start making. He preferred to keep its source mysterious, if only because his life had always been short of mystery, and now that he had the chance to insert some, he intended to do just that.
'That'll do,' Vaud had said at last, and told Burt to go on. If he was going to be considered for hiring, Vaud would message him the next day. Burt had gone out into that big busy plaza pretty sure that he had blown it. But the next day the message had come through, and then had come the meeting with the two other people, men-they might have been men-who were never identified to him. The one who wore the black sliktite, a tall young man whose face somehow always managed to be in shadow, even in that evenly lit place, never spoke the whole time. The other, a little round man who wore a suit like Vaud's and a face that could have been cheerful if anything like a smile ever got near it, let Vaud ask all the same questions again. Burt answered them doggedly, with no trace of annoyance at having to repeat himself. And finally, when the three looked at one another and then exchanged nods, Burt could have whooped for joy, but restrained himself.
