Runaways nfe-16 Page 7

  Then Megan shrugged. At least he was all right, and his skin was in one piece. If his ego seemed a little raw and tattered around the edges, well, he had an excuse. After the prolonged hell of being constantly told he was good for nothing, this must seem like heaven to him- professionals who were genuinely interested in him and willing to listen, a place to stay far from the troubles of home, access to his friends. If Burt felt like bragging a little about the possibilities that now seemed open to him, who was Megan to ride him too hard about it?

  She made her way back through the beautiful landscape to the preset egress "door" which was standing there, pale against the sunlit hills, waiting for her. Once through it, Megan waved at the guy behind the desk, told the Breathing Space management system the address of her own Net space, and a moment later was standing again in her white amphitheater, watching Saturn slip under Rhea's horizon, only a sliver of rings still showing above. A moment later the Sun set as well, and with that small change of temperature, the moon's thin unstable atmosphere cooled enough for it to begin to "snow" frozen methane out of the lowest layer, which had until now been mist.

  Megan turned her back on it and broke out of her virtual space, for the moment very much wanting some contact with parents she knew loved her, despite occasional friction, and brothers of whom she was very fond, no matter how much she felt they needed to be slightly killed.

  A couple of hours later the brothers had taken themselves out of the house on dates or other business, and her father had emerged from his office to eat and relax a little. Megan took the opportunity to use the office Net machine, which had an implant chair she liked better than the one in the den, and made her way back to Wilma's space. She should have had a little while to get herself back together by now, she thought, as she carefully moved aside the piled-up books which, as usual, were blocking the direct view of the chair and her implant to the Net machine's implant link. Her father never seemed to realize that not everybody in the house was as tall as he was. If she and Burt were saying goodbye for a while, she'll have needed it

  But after she had lined up her implant, snapped into her own space, and used the door in it to Wilma's, Megan found her friend rather more pulled-together than she had expected. Wilma's mood was somber, but knowing he was all right had plainly made a very big difference for her. "Now that I know he's okay," she said to Megan, "I guess I can get on with things. Not that I really like the way they seem to be going… "

  Megan could see her point. "You think he was serious?" she said, as they went out the front entrance of the Taj and looked down the length of the reflecting pools, still slightly vague in the advancing dawn, a light low mist lying over them in the moist, warming subtropical air. Down at that end of things was a great green space with nothing built on it, yet, and behind it only the low hills south of Delhi. Wilma had excised the modern city from this vista. "About not coming home, I mean."

  Wilma stood there and sighed, and then shook her head. "I don't think so," she said. "He sounds so torn up-not at all the way he usually does. I mean, he's always been really good at coping with his folks… but he doesn't seem to be coping real well at the moment." She turned around to look up at the massive dome of the Taj, now flushing pink with sunrise. "I keep getting the feeling that he's just repeating stuff he's said to his folks, to freak them out… or that he's been telling himself, over and over, to help him stand what's going on. If he really had a more concrete plan, I think he'd tell me. I think he's just uncertain… "

  "You may be right," Megan said. "I hope so." She sighed. "What about this work thing? Were you able to find out anything more from him about what he intends to do?"

  Wilma shook her head. "He didn't want to talk about it… said he was afraid of jinxing his chances somehow." She looked at Megan with slight bemusement. "I don't know why I think this, but sometimes it was as if Burt thought someone was listening to him. But he said that was impossible… "

  "Yeah," Megan said. "Well…" She sat down on a marble bench nearby. Wilma sat down, too. "I guess he'll tell us when he's ready. Our job is to make sure he knows we're here to talk to him and help him sort things out, if he thinks he needs help. But I think it's going to be a mistake to assume that he's going to ride the retrial with us, Wil. We're going to have to find a replacement for him."

  "I know," Wilma said. "I just… don't want to start thinking about it right now."

  Megan put an arm around Wilma and hugged her briefly. "Look, it's going to work out," she said. "You should get back out into real life and check in with your folks."

  "Yeah," Wilma said. She sagged briefly, but then she sat straighter. "Megan… listen. Thanks. Really, thanks. I know I've been hopeless, the last few days… but just knowing that he's alive and somewhere safe…"

  "It makes a big difference," Megan said. "Yes."

  "I should go… "

  "Me, too." Megan patted Wilma on the shoulder, got up, and turned. "Door..

  " 'Door' what?"

  "Door, please, Uncle Doug," Megan said, with a wry look. She glanced back at Wilma. "Why is your space manager so snotty?"

  "Minimum wage," said "Uncle Doug," before Wilma could even open her mouth.

  Wilma chuckled. "He was like that," she said. "I like to keep 'him' with me."

  It occurred to Megan that Wilma might have done too good a job with this. But then, she had also done something similar with Burt, who wasn't that easy to hang around with all the time either. Love is weird, Megan thought, resigned. Or is it love… or just habit, the tendency to want to prolong what you're used to…?

  She waved and headed out her door.

  Chapter 4

  On Sunday morning Megan woke up late with a strong feeling of having forgotten something, or missed something, something important. She lay there staring at the sun coming in her window slantwise and glinting off the Miro print on the wall by the window, setting the framed design afire in brilliant crimsons and blues, and tried to think what she might have forgotten. She couldn't come up with anything, except that she should really move the print before it started to fade.

  From outside she could hear a confused mutter of voices coming from the kitchen. The usual discussions about the logistics of breakfast, Megan suspected. She got up, went on down to the bathroom and spent a short time making herself feel human, and then went to see about some breakfast for herself.

  The kitchen was mercifully free of brothers. Mike's whereabouts were unknown, and Sean had decamped into the den to use the Net chair there. Megan went to the cupboard above and left of the sink and started rooting around for her favorite brand of muesli, and discovered, not at all to her surprise, that it was (as usual) gone before she had ever had a chance to get at it. She was unable to find any cereal at all except something called Choco- Hoots, and even that box had barely a bowlful left in it. Megan shook it disbelievingly, popped the package top open, sniffed it, shook it. There seemed to be nothing inside but sugar, something masquerading as chocolate, and some anonymous sort of crunch. "How do they get so big eating food like this?" she muttered.

  "Has to be good genes," her mother said from the table, where she was sitting back in front of a spread-out NewSheet readout, over which the Sunday editorial "pages" were streaming. She pushed up the sleeves of her bathrobe, tapped at the readout to pause it, looked at it with an expression that suggested some editorial writer's work needed a critique, and began folding the readout up. "So, listen, honey, did you see Burt?"

  "Uh, yeah." Meg turned away and opened one of the upper cupboards over the counter by the sink, in search, of a mug for her tea.

  "So how was he?"

  "He seemed okay." She found the mug, and then a tea- bag full of the green tea with toasted rice that she favored.

  "That tone of voice has 'disclaimer' written all over it," Megan's mother said as Megan went to get the kettle off the stove.

  Megan made her tea, then went to sit down with her mother. "Yeah," she said.

  "So what was the
matter?"

  "Oh… Well, just Burt, to start with," Megan said. "Mom, you ever have a personality conflict with someone? The kind you couldn't explain rationally?"

  Her mother rolled her eyes. "Lately it seems to be the story of my life."

  "Well, I've got something like that with Burt. Just… a clash of styles, I guess."

  Her mother shrugged. "It happens, honey. Never mind that. He's well? He's safe?"

  "Yeah."

  "That's the important thing. When's he coming home?"

  "I think maybe he's not."

  Her mother looked concerned. "Mom, it might be better if he didn't," Megan said, "if he's being truthful about the way they treat him… and I think he is."

  "But what will he do? It's not like he's going to find a job that's going to be worth anything… "

  "I know," Megan said, and went off down the hall with her mug, thinking hard. She went into the bathroom, shut the door, started to fill the tub, and tried to think. An hour later, as she came out again, barefoot and once more in jeans and T-shirt, she was no further along toward working out what was troubling her.

  She met her dad in the hallway, coming out of his office, also in his bathrobe and looking a little weary around the edges. "Were you up late?" Megan said, for he hadn't shaved.

  "Yeah…"

  "Done with the machine for a while?"

  "Sure, honey, go ahead… "

  She slipped into the office and once again carefully removed the stack of books that her father had left in front of the implant, pausing as she set aside the stack to look at the title on the spine of the book on top. The Gentleman's Art: 'Fiore de LiherV and Other Swordsmasters' Instruction Manuals of Fifteenth-Century Italy. And right underneath it, something called War in 2000. Megan wondered once again what her father was working on, and which war he was thinking about… But her father tended to be secretive about these things until he was finished outlining a project. There was probably no point in asking him.

  She flopped into the chair, lined up her implant, and blinked the world away. A moment later Megan was standing in the amphitheater again, and she made her way down to her desk. The same virtmails were hanging there in the air around it, but she had no interest in them for the moment, except to notice that there wasn't anything new from Wilma. If she's smart, Megan thought, she's catching up on her sleep. She's had a pretty awful couple of days…

  "Space manager," Megan said.

  "Here, Megan."

  She took a long thoughtful breath. "Link to the Breathing Space address accessed via Wilma's Net server yesterday."

  "Done."

  "Is the party referenced in the link available?"

  "Checking."

  There was a brief silence, and Megan looked at Saturn, rising now for the fourth time that day, and watched the rings slide up through the warming methane mist. 'The party is flagged available," said her workspace manager.

  "Open an access door," Megan said, and walked out into the middle of the space.

  Her doorframe appeared, and the door in it winked out, showing her that Rocky Mountain view again. Megan stepped through and glanced around her. The "place" wasn't exactly in phase with the Rockies, apparently. It seemed to be late in some long afternoon, and the shadow of every tree lay out long across the little hills in front of her.

  Megan looked around her, but didn't see Burt anywhere; so for the moment she just strolled down across the short golden grass of the small hill on which she had arrived, confident that the system would guide him to her. She was interested to see that the landscape was not as empty as it had been before. On nearby hillsides, and in the shade of the little forests and glades that dotted them, she could see people walking at a distance: tiny figures, some in pairs or groups, but the greatest number of them alone.

  After a few minutes, when she still didn't see Burt, Megan sat down underneath the shade of a huge conifer of some kind and made herself comfortable on the pine needles. She knew that the system would have alerted him to her presence; if he wasn't hurrying about showing up, well, that was Burt for you. There was always the landscape to look at, and more to the point, the landscape architecture. She was running her fingers through the pine needles and wondering what modus the programmer had used to create them all, fractal or unary, when above her someone said, "You been waiting long?"

  Burt was standing there, and there was someone else behind him that Megan didn't recognize. She got to her feet, dusting the pine needles off her, and was impressed by the way they stuck to her, as real ones would have. "Burt…" she said.

  "One of the counselors snagged me just as I was on my way here," Burt said. "Sorry."

  "It's no problem. Who's your friend?"

  "This is Bodo. Met him a little while after I got in. He's been here on and off for a while."

  "Hi, there," Megan said, and she held out a hand to Bodo. He shook it. He was an unusual-looking guy, maybe seventeen, shorter than Burt, swarthy, a little heavy- set, and wearing one of the new contoured whole-body slicks that were so popular at the moment. Megan thought the shoulderpads and thighpads were a little silly, but she'd been keeping this opinion to herself, since so many of the kids at school thought the fashion too wonderful for words. Bodo, though, somehow managed to make the slick look good instead of just lumpy in new and interesting places. Maybe it was his hairstyle, which, though it looked strange with the ultra-new slick, suited him very well. It was a retropunk style with a long "tail" down the back and a close-cropped, crew-cuttish front, and the tail was dyed bright blue. "My blue streak," Bodo said, grinning, as he saw Megan noticing it.

  "Bodo," Burt said, "is one of the semiresident geeks."

  She smiled at that. "What do they need geeks for, here?"

  "Geeks make the world go around," Bodo said. "As if you don't know. You look a bit geekish yourself, Megan."

  "Me?" She grinned.

  "I saw you studying the landscape. You do sims, don't you?"

  "I've been doing one lately," Megan said, "but I'm probably not good enough to be counted a geek. Not for a while yet."

  "There speaks the wise woman," Bodo said. "Someone who knows that geekdom is worth aspiring to."

  "Wanna walk?" Burt said.

  "Sure."

  They strolled out from under the trees and downslope, to where a little creek meandered among the smaller hills. "Didn't think I'd see you back here again so soon," Burt said.

  "Well…"

  "Megan," Burt said. "You don't have to play nice-nice with me. I know you don't think that much of me."

  Is it so obvious? Megan thought, in slight panic. Oh, well… "Burt," she said, "look, we may have our differences… but it's not like I don't worry about you anyway."

  He shrugged, sighed. "Okay," he said. "I thought you would have brought Wil with you, though."

  "She's a big girl. She can decide when she wants to visit by herself," Megan said. "And I had some concerns that I wanted to explore without worrying about how she was going to react."

  "Uh-huh," Burt said. He shot a glance at Bodo. "I told you," he said.

  "Told him what?"

  "You were always quick to pick up on the unspoken stuff," Burt said. "You know. 'Work.' "

  'That was exactly what I wanted to talk to you about."

  They paused by a bend in the stream, looked into the water. Under the overhang of the bank, in a still brown shady spot in the water, Megan could see a gigantic brown trout that would have made her brother Mike run for his fishing rod. 'Thought so," Burt said. "Look, Megan… you should tell Wilma not to worry."

  "Why should I tell her that? You can tell her yourself."

  "Because I may not be here to do it."

  Megan blinked. "After all that, yesterday… you're not even going to stay here long enough to relax and get yourself sorted out a little?"

  "I've had all the sorting out I need," Burt said. "There are things going on out in the big world. I want to get on with them."

  Megan swallowed.
She could just imagine what Wilma's reaction to this news was going to be. "Burt, doing just what? It would make me feel a lot better if I had some idea what you were getting into."

  He and Bodo glanced at each other again. "I can't get into it, Megan," Burt said. "I promised I wouldn't."

  "Promised who?

  Burt sat down by the stream on one of a number of boulders that might have been dropped there by some ancient glacier, if this landscape had been real. "Look… I can't get into it, that's all. It's like I told Wilma-and even then, maybe I was saying too much. I've found out about some really interesting work I can be doing, and I'm going to go start doing it in the next few days, if everything works out all right."

  "Just where did you find out about this?"

  "Oh, there are a lot of little nooks and crannies in this virtual environment," Bodo said, smiling slightly. "Including some that the Breathing Space people don't know about."

  Megan looked at him dubiously. "Come on, Megan, don't act so shocked," Burt said. "Is there a single virtual space on this planet that hasn't been compromised at some point or another? Or bent into some new shape by the people who used it, some shape that the builders never imagined? Heck, you can make a case for the idea that the whole old Internet system grew out of the machinations of ten or twenty people who wanted to use their college computers to play starship shoot-'em-up games with other students a thousand miles away. Definitely not what those first network designers had in mind for their machines! This is just more of that kind of thing."

  "Goes on all the time," Bodo said, glancing around him. "This place is full of holes. Some of them were left there accidentally by the programmersThey were good, but they weren't omnipotent. Others…" He smiled a secretive smile.

  "Others were made, you're saying," Megan said. "By someone from outside."