by Tom Clancy
"What?" Megan said as Wilma ran up to her. "They change our marks or something?"
She immediately regretted having said it, but Wilma was bouncing up and down as if she hadn't even heard it. "He called! He called/"
"Who, Burtr She blinked. "Just now??"
"On my mobile. He said he didn't want to worry me while I was getting ready for the competition," Wilma said. She was still actually grinning as she said it.
Megan could do little but stare at Wilma in astonishment, for the complete backwardness of Burt's reasoning simply filled her with awe. It's true, she thought. It's true what they say. Males and females really are members of different species. I always thought my brothers were alien beings… now I know it's true. And as for Burt…! She took a long deep breath, reached out and grabbed Wilma's arms to stop her jumping up and down, and said, "So where is he?"
"He wouldn't say, but that's normal. He's at one of the Breathing Space facilities."
Megan had heard of these once or twice. They were a kind of combined online-offline refuge for kids who were having troubles at home and needed a "neutral" space to renegotiate the business of putting their family lives back together. Right now, though, all Megan felt able to do was sag against the side of the little prefab building and let out a long breath of complete relief that Burt wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere. Later, she thought, after I have a few words with him, he may wish he was… But that could wait.
She looked at Wilma, whose face also reflected that great relief. "So," she said, and shook Wilma a little. "You feeling a little better now?"
"A little better!!"
"Yeah." Megan sighed.
Wilma did, too. "I wish I'd known about this two hours ago," she said.
"Yeah, I wish you had, too… "
"Megan." Wilma's face fell. "Oh, Megan, I'm so sorry, I messed everything up so completely-"
Megan restrained herself from saying what she thought. "Look," she said. "It's not the end of the world. They'll let us ride it again in three months. By then the season will've quieted down, there won't be any rush about it, and not so much competition… "
"And this time," Wilma said, "we can ride it with Burt." The satisfaction, the relief on her face, were complete. Megan kept her face as completely still as she could, for her first thought was, Will he be in any position to ride it? His parents would be furious with Burt for doing what he had done… what he had been threatening to do, if quietly, for so long. If he did come home, would he find himself permanently grounded until he graduated? That would leave the team as badly off as it was already. Would they possibly even just throw him out to find his own place…? Dressage practice would be the least of his problems, if that happened-
She sighed and shook Wilma by the upper arms again, in a companionable way. "Wil," Megan said, "get a grip. Let's go have a talk with him and see how he is first. Will they let us do that?"
"Yeah," Wilma said, "I think so. He left me a 'non- designated' Net address to check in with-it's both a message drop and a meeting space."
"Great," Megan said. "So let's see to the animals, and then get ourselves out of here."
Wilma nodded. "We'll be back," she said, turning, "and this time we'll get it right."
As long as you're still going out with Burt, Megan thought, I wish I could be sureBut she sighed, and said nothing, and went after her friend.
Much later Megan got home to find her mother sitting in the kitchen. The kitchen table was covered with printouts, a few books, a couple of research pads presently showing pages from what looked like legal documents, and what was almost certainly about her tenth cup of tea. Megan's mother and tea, the blacker the better, were in a love-hate relationship that turned into "hate" about nine p. M., the time at which it was no longer safe for her mother to drink tea if she intended to sleep. Not that she stops drinking it then, Megan thought, with some amusement, as she glanced at the slender little blond woman hunched over the paperwork, dropped her dressage jacket over the back of one of the chairs, and dumped her helmet on the seat.
"Daddy's stuff all over the office again?" Megan said.
"Mmmh," her mother said, making a note on one of the pads, and then looked up. "Why can't people be tidy when they're working?"
Megan gave the surface of the table a meaningful look, which her mother caught and raised her eyebrows. 'There's method to my madness," she said. "Whereas in your father's case, I still have my doubts. How did you do?"
Megan pulled the scoring paper out of her jacket's inside pocket and handed it to her mother, then went to get herself some iced tea from the fridge. Her mom unfolded the scoring sheet and gazed at it thoughtfully for a moment.
"Daughter mine," she said, "this looks like Linear B to me. But I gather from the look on your face that things didn't go the way you planned."
"We came in twelfth of thirty teams," Megan said. "And you're right, this wasn't what I had in mind. On the other hand, it turns out that Burt is okay."
"Is he!" her mother said. "Where is he?"
"Physically? I don't know," Megan said. "One of the Breathing Space facilities, though."
Her mother sat back in the kitchen chair and twisted herself around a litile in an unsuccessful attempt to get comfortable. "That could mean any one of twelve different cities," she said. "You going to look in on him?"
"As soon as I have a shower."
"I smell a horse," said a voice from down the hall. "And guess what? It's my sister/"
"Let me kill him a little, Mom," Megan said, glaring down the hall. "Just a little. I promise I won't do anything permanent."
"I've heard that one before," her mother said. "No, honey, it would start out with the best of intentions, but it wouldn't stop there. Let him live for the moment. We can only hope to collect on his life insurance at a later date."
Megan smiled a small thin smile, for her mother's tone of voice suggested that the boys might have been getting on her nerves today as well. "Is the Net link in the den free?"
"I don't recall it having been free for the better part of this century," her mother said, smiling slightly and turning her attention back to her paperwork, "but if you find any of your brothers in there, go ahead and throw them out. I've heard nothing but sarcasm from them all day… and after your father and I fed them for so long, too. You'd think gratitude was dead."
"After eating Dad's cooking," said another voice from down the hall, "we're the ones who should be dead. He did that thing with the chilies again, last night. Bleaugh!"
Megan and her mother exchanged a sardonic look. "Is this the new article for TimeOnline?" she said.
"No/' her mother said, with some bemusement, "that one's finished. Would you believe Bon Appitit asked me to do a feature on copyright issues as they affect the great chefs of the world?"
Megan shook her head. "Weird."
"Not if you look at their price per word, it's not," her mother said, glancing at the fridge. "I may take up cooking in my old age."
Megan snorted and headed down the hallway to the bathroom. "Last warning, you guys," she said to the immediate neighborhood and anyone who might be listening. "I'm gonna be in here for a while"
The announcement was greeted with loud applause from down the hall. Megan grinned, locked herself into the bathroom, and spent the better part of half an hour showering herself clean of people sweat, horse sweat, and the emotional detritus of a mostly disagreeable day. When she came out again, dressed in jeans and a plain floppy white T-shirt, Megan felt positively human again, and this feeling was now not impaired by putting her head into the bookcase-lined den and seeing Sean sitting there hogging the big black body-contoured Net chair. He was staring into space and looking glazed, but this merely meant that he was immersed in some other reality, and for the moment Megan had no qualms about throwing him out of it. "Sean," she said, "I need the machine, pronto."
"Mmm-hmm," he said.
"Mom says cut it short," Megan said. "I have a real- people issue to deal with.
"
He blinked. "Like depriving your brother of his share of the household's recreation time isn't a real-people issue?" Sean said, turning his long self in the chair to look at her. "Give me another half hour to clean this up."
"Now," Megan said. "Clean it up on your own time, or when Dad lets someone else have a run at the office machine."
"Be well into the next decade, at this rate," Sean muttered, getting up out of the chair as slowly as possible and stretching himself. Megan heard joints creak as he did so, but she had no sympathy for him. If he was going to spend that long in the chair without tweaking the muscle- massage program to his requirements, it was his problem.
He then came lumbering across the room at her like some kind of slightly deranged Frankenstein's monster. "Sean, I don't need it right this minute," Megan said, but nonetheless Sean came at her with his arms out in front of him and an idiotically aggressive expression on his face that looked very silly on an architecture student. "Sean-!" Megan said.
"Arrrrrhh,99 Sean said, and Megan resigned herself to the inevitable as he came within reach. She stepped aside and took him by the right wrist, bending it back in a way that wouldn't hurt him unless he struggled. Sean yelped and tried to turn around in the way best designed to break the hold, but Megan glanced down and saw where his feet were-mostly very badly placed for any kind of balance. He tried to shift them, but too late. Megan simply knocked the side of her left riding boot against her brother's right shin. He fell past her, halfway out into the hallway, though at least he managed to roll as he did it.
"I keep telling you," Megan said with the slightest smile as she stepped over him and went into the den, sitting down in the implant chair, "leverage is everything. Keep working on it, bozo, you'll get it yet"
"I wasn't set!"
"As if the next mugger who comes along is going to wait for you to be set. You guys don't practice, that's your problem."
"Other guys have sisters who cut them some slack,"
Sean moaned, already well down the hallway. On his way to the fridge, Megan suspected.
"Other guys have sisters who don't throw them over the horizon often enough," Megan said under her breath, and smiled. She lined up her implant with the "eye" on the Net server box, closed her eyes, and did the particular muscular tic that brought the implant up.
She stood at the bottom of the white tiers of amphitheater seats, with a black sky full of hard white stars overhead, and the Sun, a brighter than usual star, now away off on the right, for Rhea had swung right around her primary, as she did once every six hours, and Saturn lay swollen and nearly full near the horizon-the planet's rings edge-on and nearly invisible, a glittering razor of light against the darkness. Megan smiled at the sight, but had no time to play her usual game with herself and try to work out what time it was by Saturn's phase and position in the sky.
She paused by her "desk," the white stone slab that hovered in the air at the bottom of her amphitheater, looking to see if any more urgent e-messages or virtmails had arrived since she was here last. Things looked more or less as she had left them, which was a relief, but then it was the weekend, and a lot of her friends were away, or busy with recreational stuff as important to them as her riding business had been for her today.
Though there was one virtmail, its iridescent sphere icon juggling itself up and down in the air, that hadn't been there earlier, and this one caught Megan's attention because the golden iridescence that tagged it was her signal to herself that it was from another Net Force Explorer. She walked over to that mail and poked it with one finger, and in the air off to one side, the message's address and routing information appeared. It was from Leif Anderson, who was the events liaison for a number of the East Coast-based Explorers who occasionally got together to do simming workshops or visit recreational Net venues as an informal group.
"Go," she said to the virtmail.
A moment later Leif was standing there in the virtual flesh, slight, red-haired and freckled, silhouetted against the background of his workspace, which this week looked like an ice cave. To her bemusement, behind him Megan thought she could see what appeared to be a Cadillac of the middle of the previous century, carved out of the ice. "Sorry for the group message," Leif said. "This is just a follow-up to find out if you saw the virt I sent out last week about the 'expedition' to the new dinosaur exhibition at the Smithsonian. Right now I mostly just need to know if you're going to be able to make it on the first date, the twelfth, since a lot of people seem to have schedule problems. We can reschedule to the nineteenth, but if we do we won't be able to have the paleontologies fellow from NatHist in New York along with us. So mail me, people, so I can figure out what to do about this-"
Megan sighed. I completely forgot about this in the runup to the Potomac Valley event… Til mail him when I get back. She didn't normally treat her contacts with other Explorers so casually. Megan was acutely aware that the networking they were all doing now might stand her in good stead at some later date… like when she finally had enough credentials under her belt to apply to actually work at Net Force herself. The day couldn't come too soon, as far as she was concerned. Net Force was policing the cutting edge of life, helping maintain the collective sanity and safety of an existence that was becoming increasingly virtual year by year. And if things went well, she would be working with some of the kids she was seeing recreationally now; they were all acutely aware that as far as Net Force was concerned, they were all prime intake material. All she and her group would have to do would be convince Net Force's Explorer liaison, James Winters, of that when the time came… and the best way to succeed was for everybody to sharpen their Net skills by working together in the virtual realm as much as they could, in what little time was left from school and the rest of real life.
But "unreal life" had taken a backseat these last few weeks. "Got to do something about that," Megan muttered. Right now, though, there were more important matters to attend to. She poked the mail-sphere again. It closed, and Leif vanished.
"Door," Megan said. Immediately a doorway appeared in the middle of the space at the "bottom" of the amphitheater-an incongruous sight, since it looked like one of the doors in her house, wood frame, a six-paneled wooden door with a regulation knob. "Destination?" her workspace management program said to her in its usual dulcet female voice.
"Wilma's space," Megan said.
Everything but the door's "frame" vanished. Through the frame, Megan could catch a glimpse of something she had always admired-Wilma's reconstruction of the interior of the Taj Mahal. It appeared to be dawn there, and only the faintest pale pearly light suffused the marble interiors.
Megan stuck her head in through the "doorway." "Wil?" she said.
"In here…"
Megan walked through, under the soaring expanse of the great central dome, while outside the dawn began to strengthen toward day. Wilma had told her that this vast polished expanse of carved marble was "only for practice." The virtual interior she was presently working on building was the one that even Shah Jehan had never managed to complete while living, the pure black twin to the pure-white Taj. Jehan had intended to build this shadow of the Taj's light directly across from the first building, at the end of another series of reflecting pools. Wilma had told Megan that she was going to build it again in her virtual space, but not as just a copy of the white Taj. She had been researching the original plans, of which copies had turned up some years ago in the "Buried Library" outside Tehran, and was going to resurrect the planned building, along with the planned sculptures, as a surprise for Burt.
Now Megan strolled in under the slowly brightening dome and shook her head, looking up at veils and screens and columns of delicately pierced marble, delicate Mo- ghul calligraphy and wall-carvings all painstakingly reproduced, and wondered whether Burt appreciated what Wilma was doing as a present for him. If he doesn 7, she thought, he needs his head felt…
But then maybe that's just the point. She wondered whether psychiatri
c screening was any part of what they did for you in Breathing Space. It wasn't anything she would have ever felt comfortable suggesting to Burt herself.. but the thought had occurred to Megan, often enough, that someone who'd been through what he'd been through with his folks might possibly benefit from a little counseling…
She strolled across the marble floor to where Wilma kept the "work" part of her workspace. This was a replica of her home's dining room table, a massive thick-legged artifact of polished teak, its top all inlaid with beautiful light-wood curlicue designs that were the work (Wilma had told her) of an eccentric uncle who had lived in New Zealand. The ornate surface was covered, as usual, with school notes, notebooks, virtual pads like the one Megan's mother had been working on, and as always, a set of rolled-up duplicates of the Black Taj codices, three flaking-edged folios of ancient parchment written all over in Hindi or Urdu… Megan could never remember which was which. Wilma, in an electric-blue T-shirt and leg-sliks surprisingly tight for her usually more conservative tastes, glanced up at Megan as she came. "What kept you?"
"A long shower," Megan said, "and the inevitable brother. Dad keeps saying he's going to have them come and install another Net server, but somehow he keeps getting distracted."
Wilma sighed. "Tell me about it," she said. "My little sister practically lives in our Net chair. I don't know why she doesn't develop bedsores."
She straightened up from the paperwork and looked around her. "Hey, Rube!"
"Yeah, what, boss?" said an annoyed, gruff male voice out of the air. This was Wilma's workspace management program, which for reasons Megan couldn't quite follow appeared to be some sort of eternally irascible reincarnation of Wilma's uncle who'd made the table. For her own part, Megan preferred management programs to have a little less personality, but there was no accounting for tastes. "Hey, Megan."
"Hi, Uncle Doug," Megan said.
"Stop socializing and get busy!" Wilma said.
"It'd help if you told me what you wanted me to be busy with. I don't read minds," said "Uncle Doug," "and I don't think you're about to buy me enough processing power to fake it."