"All right." Megan thought for a moment. "Is there anything you can tell me about who else might have been in touch with him recently?"
"I'm sorry, but that would come under the heading of information we have to keep confidential."
Of course it would. "Right," Megan said. "Ms. Killes- ter, I appreciate your help… thanks a lot."
"Thank you," Ms. Killester said. "I'm sorry not to be able to be of more help to you… but I appreciate your concern for your friend. Should he turn up again, of course we'll encourage him to get in touch with the people who've been trying to reach him."
"Thanks again," Megan said, and touched her desk in the spot which signaled to her workspace manager that she wanted to kill a connection. Ms. Killester vanished.
Megan sat there for a moment, considering whether "the people who've been trying to reach him" was a slip of the tongue confirming what she'd said about several attempted contacts, or just a general plural. No way to tell, she thought. And I'm not sure whether it matters right now.
She sat there thinking for a few moments more. "Please restore all the research material I had in here earlier," Megan said.
"Restoring from Save."
It all appeared again, the various text sources and interviews frozen in midspeech, people in suits sitting or standing and talking earnestly. One of them was the Breathing Space founder, Richard Page, a tall handsome silver-haired man with a cultured accent. He was an immensely successful businessman who had decided to turn his "spare money" into something that would live on after him and do good, and who spent all his spare time (when not riding steeplechasers) shaking down other rich people for their spare money, to be applied to the same cause. Megan walked out into her space and stood there looking at him for a moment.
Then she said to her workspace, "I want another Net connection."
"Please specify."
"Contact the same Breathing Space facility I visited Sunday. I want to try to reach a client calling himself 'Bodo.' "
"Working on that for you."
She turned her back on Richard Page and looked up at the white tiers of her amphitheater, running up to the black sky. A moment later her workspace said, "The client has flagged himself as available for a limited time."
"Great. Open an access."
"Opening. Please note that this access is controlled. All access to the space is by express permission of Breathing Space Inc., and unauthorized accesses or attempts to enter or exit the space by other than officially sanctioned means will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law-"
"Yeah, I just bet they will," Megan muttered under her breath as her system read out the disclaimer. There were serious holes in this system. That was an issue that someone was going to have to raise with the Breathing Space people after this particular patch of dust settled. Net Force, probably, Megan thought. When Burt has sorted himself out, I want to go have a talk with James Winters about this…
"Do you agree?"
"Yes, of course I agree, let's go!"
Her doorframe appeared in front of her, and the door part of it winked out. A low buzz of conversation came from the far side.
Megan walked through the door and found herself in a place as utterly unlike the peace and quiet of the previous "mountain" landscape as could have been imagined. Once again, though, once she was through she had to just stop and stand there and stare around her in admiration of the skill, the sheer love that some virtual-experience designer, or team of them, had lavished on this space. Megan seemed to be standing in the middle of a big broad plaza in the middle of a city, a handsome sunny space through which the occasional green tram passed, dinging in gentle reproach at some pedestrian crossing the tracks down at the plaza's far end. The gray stone paving of the central area was completely surrounded by old six-story buildings in some beautiful golden stone, with shutters at all the high windows and windowboxes with red and pink flowers spilling out of them. And it looked as if the bottom floor of every one of those buildings had a cafe in it, because tables and chairs spilled out in front of every one of them, well into the middle of the plaza. Hundreds of people sat there eating and drinking in the warm sunshine, and the whole place buzzed softly with their conversation, a low soft rush mirroring the sound of the river flowing by not too far away, at the bottom of the little "plateau" on which the plaza and the rest of this part of the city sat. Away in the distance, past the river and the nearer hills, a white line could be seen against the bottom of the blue, blue sky-more mountains.
Someone whistled at her from behind. Megan turned and smiled just a little, for there, near one of the cafes at this end of the plaza, was a sculpture of a giant wooden bear, and leaning against it, his arms folded, was Bodo. "Looking for somebody?" he said.
"You know who," Megan said, going over to him. She glanced around her as she came up to him.
"He's not here."
"I know that," Megan said. "That's what I want to talk about."
"I don't know where he is," Bodo said.
"That's not what I'm interested in," Megan said.
Bodo looked at her thoughtfully for a moment… then said, "Come on, let's sit down. It's summer here… you get hot standing around."
They headed toward the nearest cafe. "Quite a place," Megan said, looking around her.
"No one wants to be alone all the time," Bodo said. "Sometimes you want to be with people."
"How many of them are real?"
"You mean other Breathing Space refugees? Enough," Bodo said. "Some of them are worth talking to. But a lot of these are just recordings of normal people. Some of us forget what those are like, after a while… "
Megan nodded. They went to an empty table, sat down. After a few moments a tall thin waiter in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and black pants and a black apron, came along and paused by the table. "Gruezi," he said, nodding to them.
"Hi, there," Bodo said. "Got a Rivella?"
"Red or blue?"
"Blue."
The waiter turned to Megan. "Mademoiselle?"
"Uh, a Coke."
"Right away." He headed off again.
Megan looked at Bodo, raised her eyebrows. " 'Blue'?"
"You'll see." Bodo gazed away across the plaza.
"Bodo, look," Megan said. "You hardly know me. It's nice of you to take the time to see me, and so late in the day."
"I don't mind," Bodo said. "It's not a problem; I'm not doing anything today."
"I'm gladBut, Bodo, I'm really worried about Burt… and his girlfriend, Wilma, is going to be frantic if she doesn't hear from him pretty soon."
"I don't know if that's likely to happen," Bodo said, sounding a little morose. "I don't know him all that well, but he was pretty eager to get out of here."
'That's what I want to talk to you about." They paused as the waiter came back with a tray, a couple of glasses, and a couple of bottles. He put down the glasses and poured their drinks. Megan's Coke looked as she had expected, but Bodo's drink wasn't blue at all. It was a pale golden color like a good ginger ale. They lifted their glasses.
"By the way, just so you know. This isn't real food," said the waiter.
Megan smiled half a smile in amusement at the statutory warning.
"Don't you get tired of saying that all day?" Bodo said.
The waiter looked at him, quizzically. "How could I? I'm a computer. Enjoy your drink." He went away, drying his hands on his apron.
Megan drank some of her Coke, and then put the glass down. "Listen, do you mind if I ask you a question?"