Maj saw Niko’s glance out the window — a casual one, though his face seemed to her to be fixed in an expression of quiet amazement. “Oh, no,” he said, and Maj caught just a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he turned away from the windows. “We don’t have cars where I come from.”
This news astonished the Muffin almost into silence, but she quickly recovered. “What do you have?”
“We have cows,” Niko said, and he glanced at Maj just for a second as he said it, so that there was no mistaking the wicked humor. “We ride them when we need to travel.”
Maj kept her face straight. The Muffin was hanging on every word he said, her mouth open, her eyes big and round. For his own part, Niko had eyes for none of the rest of them at the moment. “And we ride them everywhere. Even to the airport.”
“They would poop in the road,” the Muffin said after a moment.
Niko looked at Maj again, his eyes eloquent of laughter being held under absolute control. “‘Poop’—”
“Uh, excrete,” Maj said. “Defecate.”
“Absolutely they poop,” Niko said to the Muffin. “But it doesn’t matter, because we do not just ride the cows; we make them carry our things as well. The cows we ride have little carts behind them. And between the cows and the carts, we put canvas slides with buckets at the end, and the poop goes down the slides into the buckets.”
“What do you do with the buckets?” the Muffin whispered, absolutely riveted.
“Empty them over people’s rosebushes,” Niko said.
“That’s it,” said Maj’s mother. “You’re moving in with us for at least a year. Someone who understands what rosebushes need is welcome in our house for as long as he cares to stay.”
They were only in transit for another fifteen minutes or so, but Maj found them some of the funniest fifteen minutes she had ever heard, as Niko kept spinning absurd stories about “Hungry” for the Muffin. Her mother, though, once glanced back at her, and Maj found herself knowing exactly what her mother was thinking — that Niko’s funniness had an edge to it, and somehow felt very purposeful — as if he was trying to distract himself.
And who knows, I might do the same thing, Maj thought. Arriving in a strange country, meeting strangers, not even having my luggage with me…And, something at the back of her mind added, not having the slightest idea what was going to happen to me next….
They landed at home, and the Muffin was practically the first one out, pulling on Niko’s arm and demanding, “Come and see my room!”
“He’ll come in a while, honey,” Maj’s mother said. “Right now you have to have your breakfast.” The look she threw over her shoulder at Maj added, And give this poor kid five minutes to breathe!
“I’m not hungry!”
“Yes, you are,” Maj’s mother said with serene certainty. “Maj, honey, show Niko the guest room, and where the bathroom is…”
“Come on,” Maj said to him, and led him down the hallway, pushing the guest room door open. It had been her mother’s office once before the “new wing” had been built onto the end of the house several years back. Now it had a comfy old sofa in it, and a single bed, and a beat-up chest of drawers that had been in Rick’s room, and bookshelves…lots of bookshelves, all full, mostly of “overflow” books from her father’s study. Niko looked around at it all. “You read a lot,” he said, as if he approved.
“Not as much as I wish I had time to,” Maj said, and sighed a little. “Here’s the closet…not that you have anything to hang up in it at the minute! Look, take a few minutes to get yourself sorted out, and we’ll go online and get you some clothes. Come on, here’s the bathroom….”
She showed it to him, and Niko disappeared into it with a grateful look. Maj dodged into her dad’s study, woke the Net machine up out of standby mode, and “told” the implant chair there that it was going to have a new implant to add to its list of authorized users. When Niko appeared again, Maj pointed him at the chair and said, “I’ll access it from the kitchen and show you the way…we have a doubler in there. Sit yourself down, get comfortable…”
He sat down, wriggling a little as the chair got used to him and molded itself to his body. “It’s very strange,” he said. “Mine does not do that….”
Maj grinned at him. “For a moment there I thought you were going to tell me you sat on cows for this, too.”
He grinned back. After a moment he said, “When does it start? I do not see anything.”
“Uh-oh,” Maj said. “Mom?”
Her mother appeared a moment later at the study door. “Problems?”
“He should be in my work space by now. But he’s not getting anything.”
Her mother looked bemused. She came around to stand behind the chair in which Niko sat, and lined up her own implant with the Net computer, then blinked. “It doesn’t recognize his implant,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “The story of my life. Why they can’t just get everyone to agree to standardize these things….”
For a moment more Maj’s mother stood still. “Okay, I see,” she said then. “It’s just a different protocol…. We don’t use that one much over here. Let me just tell the machine what it should do instead….”
A moment’s silence. “Okay, Niko,” her mother said then. “Try that and see how it works.”
He tilted his head a little to one side, then straightened it again. “Oh!” he said.
“It’s a jury-rig,” Maj’s mother said, not sounding entirely happy. “Your implant had a bandwidth limiter written into the code. I just circumvented it. It can be put back the way it was whenever you like. Are the visuals okay now?”
“Yes…!”
“Okay. Maj, check the sales area. It’s getting to be the time of year when they’ll be reducing prices on some of the spring boys’ wear…and this is just for casual wear anyway. Niko doesn’t have to worry about being a fashion plate at the moment. His luggage will be here in a while anyway. If you want to use the machine in my office, go ahead, I won’t need it for an hour or so….”
“Okay, Mom, thanks. Stay there, Niko, I’ll be with you in a minute….”
She went around to her mom’s office and settled into the chair there. A moment later she was in her work space, and Niko was standing there, looking around him in astonishment. “This is…very sophisticated,” he said after a moment.
“A poor thing, but my own,” said Maj. “Computer…”
“Yes, boss?” said her work space.
“GearOnline, please. Boys’ wear.”
“Enter, please.”
“Through here, Niko,” Maj said, and opened the door at the back of her work space, between the bookshelves. Niko went over to it, peered through.
“Bozhe moi,” he said softly.
“I know,” Maj said. They walked through the door together. “I don’t shop here a lot anymore. It’s too easy to get confused….”
The sheer “acreage” of the place always bewildered her a little; the designers had apparently decided to make this space a direct virtual descendant of the old snail-mail catalogs from the distant past, so that every single thing the chain stocked was out here, arranged on a “floor” which Maj guessed was probably roughly equivalent to the area of the surface of the moon.
“Come on over here,” she said, and led him over to what looked like a single changing room, standing there by itself in the middle of the vast floor full of clothes hanging up on racks and stacked up folded on shelves. “I don’t see why we should wander around in all this and get lost. See this grid?” Maj pointed to a lighted square on the floor, all crisscrossed with grid lines. “Just stand here….”