happens.'
He vanished. Megan smiled a little, but the smile came off as she looked back at Leif.
'Are you still sure about this?' she said. 'I meant what I said before. This is looking less and less safe… and there are a lot of things that could go wrong.'
'I'm sure,' Leif said, surprisingly gently. 'This is going to be worth doing, Megan. Now, go on. You're going to have to leave for school pretty soon.'
Sighing, she nodded, and headed back for her own space.
When Megan got home from school, the first thing she did was head into the den. Mike was just settling into the Net chair. Megan came up behind him and said, 'Give me five minutes.'
'Go 'way, Megan, you bother me.'
She leaned around him and looked into his face, and batted her eyelashes a couple of times. 'Your birthday,' she said, 'is getting awfully close'
Mike looked at her, and then laughed. 'Five minutes,' he said, and got up. 'Fll go have a snack.'
Megan sighed as she sat down. She had been thinking about that herself, but her guess was that when she got into the kitchen, it would look like the aftermath of Sherman's march on Atlanta, as far as food was concerned. She closed her eyes in resignation and blinked herself into her space.
Night hung over Rhea as usual. Even the Sun's full light on the rocks and methane snow never did more than make it seem like a particularly bright night, lit by a star a couple of times brighter than a full moon. Megan checked the space around her desk.
Her appetite deserted her. There was a virtmail hanging over her desk, bobbing up and down with unusual energy. It had the number 1 on it, like one of the balls that might come out of one of the old lottery machines, but in this case it meant the message was a 'read-once,' sent by some anonymous user from a public access and without the usual routing headers that would reveal its source. Megan hadn't seen many of these, and she was sure she knew who had sent it to her. She went over to it, poked it.
Bodo was standing there looking at her. 'Tonight,' he said. 'Twenty hundred your time.'
He vanished; the mail destroyed itself, popping like a soap bubble, and was gone.
Megan took a deep breath and called Leif.
Leif Anderson had learned very young how to be comfortable in strange and potentially intimidating places. Since he was almost big enough to walk, he never knew where he might suddenly find himself walking: down the Ginza in Tokyo or along a dirt track in Lesotho, down a beach near Rio de Janeiro or along a pathway by the River Thames, in the shadow of Big Ben. Leif had very early become used to the absolute ease that his father's wealth lent someone who wanted to get around, and during his childhood he had learned not to take any particular notice of it, moving gracefully and without too much fuss from the upper east side of Manhattan to the west side of Zurich. Later, as he grew into his teens and became clearer about how very many other people didn't enjoy such ease, he had a brief period of discomfort with his father's wealth and others' needs, and for a while he walked through the beautiful and exclusive places his father took him with a faint aura of guilt, aware that he had done nothing to deserve such good fortune. Now, though, late in his teens, Leif had realized that he was stuck with his upbringing, and it was his job to make the most of the advantages which had been showered on him; to try to make them pay off for the people around him.
The constant movement among continents had left him with what might have started out as a gift for languages, but rapidly turned into just another way to exercise a broad-ranging curiosity about everything that crossed his path. It was hard to ask people questions all day unless you spoke their language, so, when he was very young, Leif started learning how to do that. He was sixteen now, and there were very few languages on Earth that he didn't at least know about. He spoke at least the most important words and phrases in nearly fifty of them now-'please,' 'thank you,' 'Can I have the menu?' 'Where are the toilets?' and 'Can I help?' Other languages he knew much better, speaking them fluently, but he spoke them best when in the right places, a given language's home. He was in one of them now.
Leif looked around him from the little table where he sat in the plaza, and grinned slightly, for he had been here before, more than once-no way to avoid it, when your father was involved in investment banking. This was the Barenplatz in Bern, that city of elegant arcaded buildings six centuries old, of the Bundesrat, the Swiss Confederation's parliamentary body, and of many, many discreetly camouflaged banks, innocent behind mirrored plate glass or behind goldstone facades which revealed nothing but lace curtains and the inevitable windowboxes full of downspilling red geraniums. Those who thought all the big Swiss banks were in Zurich were deluding themselves. In quieter places, like this one and innocent-looking little Zug halfway across the country, much more serious money was stored than lay even under the pavement of the Bahnhofstrasse, for money these days came in many more concentrated forms than gold.
Leif had sat here often enough before, killing a soft drink in the sunshine and listening to the trams go by, while his father sat upstairs in one or another of these graceful old buildings, discussing money in amounts with so many zeroes after them that they didn't seem real. Off to one side, the noble squared green-bronze dome of the Bundesrat building looked down on the revelry, which this time of year never seemed to really die down. Leif could remember at least one warm night in one of the local hotels when the endless mutter and growl of conversation in the plaza had gone on until past three in the morning, causing his father to finally stick his head out the French doors and yell, 'Don't you people have homes to go to?'
He smiled at the memory. But this time his father was nowhere in the neighborhood. This time Leif was on his own, and there was something lying in wait here that was more dangerous than any number of investment bankers.
And the chill went down his back as, in this genial reality, he felt a door open behind him, a door in the air, and someone said in a gentle accent that sounded more Czech than anything else: 'I am ready for you now, Mr. Dawson.'
Leif got up and turned, and saw the blueness behind him through the doorway. No one else saw it. No one else near him was realThey were all generated by the virtual environment program, as background, atmosphere, noise. I could vanish right now, and no one would know, Leif thought, and the thought gave him another chill. There was no consolation in the idea that Breathing Space was supervising this virtual environment. Mark had been able to subvert it without an incredible amount of trouble. What he could do, others could do. Had done. And there was no telling what else they knew how to do that wasn't terribly obvious right now.
Leif got up and followed the voice into the blueness. Waiting for him, as the door closed, he found a table with a chair on either side of it, and a man sitting in one of them: short, salt-and-pepper-haired, with a narrow face and a hard mouth, with gray eyes set close together and very small, fine hands laced together casually as they rested on the tabletop. The man's suit harked back to the turn of the century, as if he had found a style he liked and didn't intend to change it on account of something so ephemeral as fashion.
Leif kept his face straight and his affect flat 'Gruezi,' he said. Sometimes it would have been a matter of showing off to speak German so perfectly in the local dialect, but Bernerdeutsch was as idiosyncratic a form of Swiss German as any of the other forty or fifty kinds scattered around the country, and an ability to speak it well meant not only that the person speaking was linguistically talented, but that they were better than usual at blending in.
The man with the cool thin face looked at him with only mild surprise. 'Gruezi. You may call me Mr. Vaud. Are you local?' he said, speaking formal German, Hoch- deutsch.
'No,' Leif said, 'I live… I lived in New York. I just don't like to stand out.'
'And when you go south,' said Vaud, 'what language do you speak down there?'
'Chei lai sudet?' said Leif, for Romansch was spoken in the southeastern cantons. 'Perei la sojourna da Italia?' And switching languages again, 'Meish al-neimah suv uurneh.'
Vaud laughed softly. 'Young man, you've never been to Morocco!' he said.
'You don't have to be,' Leif said, 'to speak a little of the language.'
'European languages, any?'
'Spanish and Swedish I'm fluent in,' Leif said, taking care to sound sullen. 'Russian, too. Enough French, German, Italian, and Danish to get by. Flemish, a little.'
Vaud sat there in silence for a little while and considered him. 'Unusual talents for one so young.'
'Don't make the mistake everyone else does,' Leif said. 'I'm a machine.'
Just for the moment, Vaud looked confused. 'You look human enough.'
