There was nothing new in her in-box — or rather the slick steel-and-hardwood table where such things arrived in her work space — and the briefing told her nothing she hadn’t digested the first time around. We’re going to have a bad time of it was most of what she had learned from the first reading. A big amateur squadron had gone in last night in a preemptive attack on the space station which was the focus of this operation, trying to snatch a little glory for themselves. They had managed mostly just to get away with their skins, and not much more. The defenses of the place were redoubtable, and the Archon’s forces had been waiting for them, not even a particularly large grouping of the Black Arrows…but it had shredded poor DawnSquad, “killing” most of the players and leaving the rest of them with crippled ships. Maj was feeling increasingly nervous at having missed the briefing and the final practice session which had followed it. Nothing to do about it now…. she thought. Just go in there tonight, tough it out, do our best…
…As DawnSquad had done its best. The thought nagged at her as she got up and stretched. She listened to the air around her. Somewhere in the distance she thought she could hear Mom and the Muffin talking together, the Muf still all excited, her mother making sedate calm-down-dear noises as she worked. She was in the household Net, probably working online, and keeping the Muffin occupied and away from Niko’s bedroom at the same time. Quite an accomplishment…. Maj thought.
“Dad?” she said to the air.
There was a pause. “Yeah, hon?”
“You busy?”
“In my office.”
She smiled slightly. “The big one or the little one?”
“Both.”
“Got a moment?”
“Sure.”
Maj went to the door in her back wall, opened it, stepped through.
Books, and the echo — that was always her first impression. Her father was one of those people who read every hour of the day, who read anything, and then filed the information away in their heads, seemingly able to find it again at a moment’s notice years later. She wondered sometimes whether this library was a conscious expression of that trait, a joke, or just good old-fashioned virtual wish-fulfillment, his picture of where he’d like to be if he had his choice. Now, as she walked down the long, long hall full of brown shelves full of books, towering up toward the ceiling, reaching away in all directions, she found herself leaning toward the latter theory. And it made her smile, for her father couldn’t make up his mind where he wanted to be.
There was part of this place, about half a mile along the central hall, which looked like a straightforward reconstruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, burned along with all its books three thousand years ago — open porticoes and columns, that ruthless Mediterranean sun burning outside, the sea lapping up nearly against the steps. The part to which she was now coming looked more like the old British Museum Reading Room — a high, light dome, a huge circular room full of shelves and ladders for getting up them without killing yourself. But out one of the side doors, Maj knew, was a part that looked more like the National Library in Dublin, all carved mahogany shelves with busts of philosophers on pedestals at the ends of them, and the Book of Kells in a glass case down at one end. Another hallway favored the Stiftsbibliotek in St. Gallen in Switzerland — thousands of shelves in light wood, aged dark, high stained-glass windows half a millennium old, a floor worn smooth by twenty lifetimes’ worth of readers. A third one led out the front hall of the New York Public Library and left you standing on the stairs between the two white lions, Patience and Fortitude. “I always have a soft spot for that one,” her dad had told her once. “They threw me out of there once when I was six….”
She kept meaning to ask him what he’d done. But for the moment there was other business. She wandered through into the light streaming down through the dusty air from the windows set high in the dome of the Reading Room, and made her way over to where her father’s desk sat incongruously in the middle of it all. He looked up as she came over.
All those Eastern European books and magazines were still scattered over the desk. He pushed a few of them off to one side to make room for her to sit down. “Quiet out there,” he said.
“For the moment,” Maj said. “Mom has the Muffin. Niko’s had a collapse.”
Her dad raised his eyebrows. “Nothing serious, I hope!”
“No,” she said as she swung herself up onto the desk and got comfortable. “Just jet lag, I think. But, Daddy,” Maj said, “his name’s not Niko.”
Her father turned a rather shocked expression on her. “What did he—”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Maj said. Then she smiled slightly. “He doesn’t answer to it, that’s all. Not the first time, anyway.”
“Oh,” her father said. “Oh…” He sighed. “Well, this was why I wanted to talk to you, anyway. What is it with the timing of things, this weekend? Everything keeps getting messed up….”
She idly picked up one of the bound sets of Eastern European magazines. “He’s not really a relative of ours, is he,” she said.
Her father shook his head. “Not by blood.”
“So what was that big story you told us yesterday?”
“I knew you were going to pick right up on that,” he said, looking rueful. “I would have preferred to tell you and your mom right then, but the Muffin was there…and if she didn’t think she had an immediate handle on who our guest was, she would have started asking questions. And probably in public as well as in private. And the fewer questions asked about our guest, the better.”
Maj was inclined to agree. The Muffin had the family curiosity in full measure, and if she thought someone had a secret, she would pester them mercilessly. For her, all secrets smacked of Christmas or birthdays. “Simpler to let her think he’s what his ID says, I guess.”
“I thought so. But truly, Maj, I didn’t want you to think I didn’t trust you. It was all just bad timing.”
Maj nodded. “Daddy, it’s okay. You told Mom, didn’t you?”
“Last night.”
“I think she tried to tell me this morning. Just bad timing again. The Muffin arrived in the middle of it. So what is he really?”
“A thirteen-year-old kid,” her father said, running one hand wearily through what was left of his hair, “whose father is very big in biotech in his home country. Which is the Calmani Republic.”
Maj had to search around in her head for a moment to think why the name seemed familiar. “It was part of Romania, wasn’t it?” Maj said. “It split up.”
“Sort of the same situation as Carpathia,” her father said. “Worse, in a way…from the historian’s point of view, anyway. Never mind that. His dad has been working on some cutting-edge research in biotech. Stuff that would be advanced even if it were being done on our side of the cultural divide. Nanotechnics…”
“Microsurgery,” Maj said, “that kind of thing?”
“More involved,” her father said. “I don’t understand the details. Frankly, I don’t think a lot of people are equipped to understand the details…which is probably the source of the trouble. He’s really one of the brilliant ones, a groundbreaking scientist in his particular art. Which is building the smallest machines anyone’s ever seen, and programming them to do the most delicate work possible…at the molecular level, maybe even the atomic level.”
He folded his arms and looked thoughtful for a moment. “He and I met at Georgetown together when I was doing my master’s-level work. One of those unusual friendships — heaven knows, ‘interdisciplinary’ stuff is considered strange enough on campus. When a physicist or a biologist starts to hang around with humanities people, there are those who’ll start to question the sanity of both sides. And there was the language barrier as well. And even beyond that, a certain amount of mistrust. Everybody knew why his government had sent him over, and Armin wasn’t too sure at first that we weren’t all spies. But despite everything, Armin and I hit it right off. And he amazed me from the very beginning. I knew he was going to be big at whatever he decided to do.”