“Good,” Maj’s mother said. “Because the Muffin is giving me grief at the moment that you are not available to be played with.”
“Oh. I will be right out.”
The hangar ceiling was almost finished shutting, and the huge space began to repressurize.
“‘Niko,” said Maj’s voice in the middle of the air, suggesting that the Muffin was indeed within range, “what are you doing in there?”
“Just letting the air back in.”
The process finished as he got down onto the floor again. The flashing light over the door turned green, and the door opened. Maj came strolling across the syncrete as Laurent went through the walk-around, which Maj told him was traditional among pilots, to make sure that nothing had fallen off their craft — or if it had, to find what it was so that someone else could be charged for it.
“And where have you been?” she said, trying to sound severe.
“Flying,” he said. “I finished with my work space for today….” He sighed a little. “It will take a while to get it the way I want it.”
“You didn’t take it out in the real game, did you?” She looked at him narrowly.
“Well,” he said. “Yes.”
“Oh, come on, Laurent,” she said. “I promised I would make sure you didn’t overdo it. And what if the Archon had come along with one of his fleets?”
“But the Archon was blown up. In the Big Bang.”
Maj blew out an annoyed breath. “You know they’ll just clone him from the bits and pieces.” she said. “In fact, there are probably clones sitting around on Darkworld right now waiting to be uncanned and reprogrammed. He could have turned up the next day!”
“But he did not. And besides, you said it would have been tactically unwise.” He grinned at her.
“Space lawyer,” Maj said. “Come on, lose the suit. I hear that Mom is going to make her famous impaled lamb chops with garlic stuck all through them.”
Laurent concentrated and vanished the suit. “What does it mean,” he said as they walked back to the door to Maj’s space, “when you try to make something in the work space, and it fails?”
“It’s just incomplete visualization,” Maj said. “All kinds of reasons for that. In your case, you’re still getting used to the hardware-software interface…failures are common.” She looked around her at the soft evening light coming through the high windows in her own work space as they stepped through the door. “You should have seen how long it took me to get this right. The lighting, the synchronization to local time. The sounds, the smells…” She looked at the floor with amusement. “And the carpet kept changing color. It drove me crazy until I found out why it did that. I’d stolen the ‘template’ from a carpet company ad online…and every time they changed the ad, the rug changed, too….”
“But there is no rug here.”
“No, I got rid of it.” She smiled a rather embarrassed smile. “See, I didn’t find out what I was doing wrong until much later. I vanished the carpet and put in hardwood flooring…and then found out. But look, Laurent, really, your dad said that he didn’t want you to spend too much time Netside, and I—”
The door on the other side of the work space opened, and a tall, gangly young man wearing fluorescent floppy clothes and a marked resemblance to Maj’s father looked in. “Maj, is your friend — Oh, here he is. Hi there.”
“Laurent, this is the famous Rick you keep hearing about,” Maj said. “The phantom stranger.”
“When I’m home all the time, she complains,” Rick said, coming over to shake Laurent’s hand. “When I’m not home all the time, she complains. Let me give you advice — don’t have any sisters.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Laurent said, a little shyly, as they made their way back to the door. “Yours seem all right.”
“Huh,” said Rick, an all-purpose sound of skepticism, and embarked on a list of Maj’s weak points, all spurious as far as Laurent could tell, while Maj followed her brother through the door into his own work space and made scathing comments about his dress sense. Laurent smiled a little as he followed them through the space, which resembled nothing else so much as a huge warehouse piled up with wildly assorted objects of all kinds. “Welcome to Icon World,” Maj said to Laurent. “My brother is a little object-oriented, as you can see. Rick, was there a reason for this intrusion, or were you just practicing being a nuisance?”
“Oh, I heard you doing the ‘Behavior Police’ act and thought I’d come see what it looks like when you do it to other people…. This door shuts your implant off,” Rick said to Laurent while stepping over the sill of another doorway which was standing, incongruously, in the middle of the huge warehouse space. “I understand that your presence is being requested in what we laughably refer to as the Real World.”
A moment later Laurent found himself sitting in the implant chair in the Greens’ den, and the sound of someone running down the hall made him stand up. A few seconds later the Muffin came charging in and grabbed him around the legs. “I have to read to you now,” she announced, breathless.
“That depends. When is dinner?” Laurent said.
“Half an hour,” said Maj, putting her head in through the doorway. “Muffin, no dinosaurs now. You’ve exceeded your Net time for today. And so have you,” she said, wagging a finger at Laurent, “so behave.”
“We will be good,” Laurent said, with a rather helpless smile as the Muffin grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the den and toward her room. Maj smiled at him and went off; and Laurent, following the Muffin, reflected that though the family he preferred the most was his own, there were others which could, very temporarily, make an acceptable distraction.
He found his hands shaking just a little, a fine muscle tremor, as he sat down on the Muffin’s bed and watched her start rooting through her bookshelves. The jet lag is finally catching up with me, he thought. Or maybe it’s just nerves. Why am I spending time scaring myself? Things are happening as fast as they can. And Popi is smart…smarter than they are. He’ll be here soon enough, and if I’m wrecked with worrying, he won’t be happy.
Laurent let out a long breath and watched the Muffin settle down on the floor and open the book….
The Quality House Suites in Alexandria was as relentlessly chainlike as most of the other hotels in the chain, or so the major heard one businessman telling another over drinks in the hotel’s downstairs bar. Herself, she could not understand what his problem was. There was nothing wrong with one hotel being like another. The same kind of service everywhere, what was wrong with that? These people were too individualistic for their own good.
She tried to put the locals’ quirks out of her mind, though it was hard, stuck here among the millions of them, trapped in all this offensive opulence and conspicuous consumption. This whole country was vulgar, a vast expanse of expenditure for its own sake, money spent just to prove it was there in the first place. Other countries would have used these resources more wisely…if they had had them, and if this country had not spent so much time and spite making sure that other countries did not.
Well, the major thought, sipping her mineral water as she sat alone at the little table in the hotel lounge and made shorthand notes on a pad, they will soon see the tables rather painfully turned, for a change. Once this recovery operation is over and the results start to be developed, our balance of payments should show a great improvement…and the countries around us which have been so busily shoring up their connections to the Western democracies will start wondering whether they should instead have looked closer to home for financial aid. Not that they will get any from us…not now. They have shown all too clearly where their loyalties lie.