Hormat forgave him his need to be certain. “No, Mike.”
“Can they, like, probe your brain and find out?”
The dwarf shook his head. “In theory they could. But I am going to be home before I’m missed, now. There will be no reason to suspect me of complicity with you, and I cannot be made to undergo a probe without grounds.”
“Will they be able to track us down?” Annie asked.
“I don’t think so. Not if you are careful. We are…not like Conway. Not hunters. And we dare not hire such a one, lest he notice our existence. If you stay out of sight long enough, my people will decide their safest course is to stop looking for you and pray that you are dead.”
The totality of his predicament slowly washed over Mike, as if his mind had just decided he was ready to deal with it now—and he did not agree. “Annie,” he said, hearing the growing panic in his voice, but unable to suppress it, “where are we gonna go? What the hell are we gonna do?”
She blinked at him. “We’ll think of something,” she said calmly.
“What the hell do you mean we’ll think of something?”
“Hormat, once we’re over eighty klicks from Dreamworld, you can drop us wherever you like.”
Mike could not believe she was shrugging the whole matter away. “Annie, don’t you get it? We haven’t got any money. We have no ID. We’re gonna have to live off the books—do you have any idea how hard that is?” He could hear his voice rising. “I did that for almost three weeks while I was figuring out how to get Under, and I broke my butt just to get a safe place to crash and admission money. Nobody’s hiring kids or midgets out there, Annie! I mean, Jesus Christ, you’ve been…you’ve been living in a dreamworld!”
She laughed in his face at that line, and Hormat chuckled, too, and after a moment’s pause, Mike had to join in; he was too tired to fight it.
“Good lad,” she said when she could. “As long as you can still laugh at yourself, you’ll be okay. I’m going to be laughing at myself a lot in the near future, too, and I hope you’ll join me.”
The laughter had taken the edge off his panic, but Mike was still upset, and his face must have showed it.
“Mike,” she went on, “you’re exactly right. I’ve been living in a dreamworld…a small one. I’ve been living off the books for thirteen years there, in plain sight, with warrants out for me. The outside world is going to be a lot easier to fool, I suspect. Don’t worry about it: we’ll get by.”
He didn’t believe her. But the “we” reminded him suddenly that she had claimed him as her son before Phillip Avery, and he became so confused he shut up. Hormat went back to pretending to drive. Annie cleared her window and watched less privileged drivers fall behind on their right. Mike sat in silence and tried to sort out his emotions.
After a while he decided he was mad as hell.
He was mad at everything. At Annie, and himself, and God if there was one or Fate if there wasn’t, and Hormat and all his friends, and Conway, and…and especially…
An idea dropped into his head. He prodded at it, held it before his mind’s eye for inspection, shook it to see if it rattled. Slowly he began to grin.
“Annie?”
“Yes, Mike?”
“What’s Haines gonna do?”
She turned and regarded him curiously. “I don’t understand your question.”
“Hormat’s friends get him and delete a week from his memory. Right, Hormat? About a week?”
“Perhaps more. Back to before whenever it was he first thought of hiring Conway.”
“So now he forgets he ever knew us, or the Free Lunchers, or Conway. But what does he still want to do, more than anything?”
Her eyebrows rose as she took his meaning. “Destroy Dreamworld! Make his disgusting Thrillworld the number one theme park in the world.”
“Right!”
She glowered for a moment, then brightened. “Well, at least Avery is warned now; he said he’d take care of it, remember?”
Mike found he was still grinning. “Maybe he can. Maybe. You want to bet Dreamworld he’s right? He has to stay within the law, remember.”
“What are you driving at?” she asked suspiciously.
He could not stop grinning. “Now, Ms. Elf, for the dining-room set and the orbital vacation package, answer this next question within twenty seconds. Listen carefully: what is the one place on Earth where not only could people of our size and skills probably get themselves hired…but neither Haines nor the Free Lunchers would think of looking for us in a million years?”
Her jaw fell. “Oh, no. Oh, you rotten, rotten child, you’re not seriously proposing that we both go Under in—oh my God, in Thrillworld?”
“You got a better idea?”
Annie blinked at him in horror—then put her face in her hands and groaned.
In the front seat, Hormat began to laugh and laugh.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Spider Robinson is the winner of many major SF awards, including three Hugos, one Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is best known for his Callahan books: insightful, lighthearted science fiction stories centered around the most bizarre blend of barflies you’re likely to meet in this or any other galaxy. Other well-known works include three novels in the Stardance sequence, Stardance, Starseed, and Starmind, written in collaboration with his wife, writer/choreographer Jeanne Robinson. They currently reside outside of Vancouver, British Columbia.
For further information, contact www.spiderrobinson.com
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