Intruder Read Online Free

are you packed, son of mine?” she asked.
    “Yes, honored Mother,” he said quietly, properly, though sneaking a glance over the papers she had out on the desk. One looked like a building plan. He thought it might be Najida. But it looked different. The rooms were all wrong.
    It was, he realized, the new apartment, showing how the rooms were laid out. And she drew from under it another diagram that might be just an enlarged part of that plan, with several rooms attached.
    “This is your suite,” she told him, and he looked hard, and tried to memorize it on the spot. It was a proper suite, the way he had had at Najida—well, except the hall it opened onto would not be the main hall of the Bujavid, but a hall inside the larger apartment, where there was no hope of getting outside unobserved.
    But it had its own sitting room and a second little room for some purpose, and there was a master bedroom and closet, and beyond that a little hall, and a pair of rooms next to the bedroom, each, he decided, with closets. That pair of rooms would be for his aishid.
    And she did not take the diagram away. She turned it so he could better see it.
    “This will be your suite,” she said, and pointed out the numbers on the sides of the room. “These are the dimensions. You will have your own little office, do you see, for your homework.”
    The extra room was about the size of the closet in the bedroom, but if it was an office, it would be a place for his projects, and that was excellent. His things would not be in danger of being stepped on. And he would have a table. And bookshelves.
    “But you do not have enough furniture to fill it, son of mine,” she said.
    One had supposed furniture would just turn up. Furniture always had turned up. He never had any choice in it.
    His mother pulled out another paper and laid it atop the plan, a paper which had official-looking printing and a red stamp with the Ragi crest.
    “This is an authorization,” she said, “for you to go down to the storerooms.”
    “Storerooms. Downstairs?” The Bujavid had a lot of levels, and most of them were storage, all the way down to the train station. But he had never been there. Outside the apartment. Outside the apartment was an exciting notion.
    “There is a warehouse office on the fifth level, which your aishid will have no trouble finding by this number.” She pointed it out, at the top of the paper. “Give the supervisor this paper. I have a copy. You are old enough now to have some notion what you would like. Your father and I thought you might like to apply your own energies to this matter. So in storeroom 15—it says here, do you see? —is your furniture from when you were a baby. Some was damaged in the coup; some was not and has been warehoused since. But one is sure you will have outgrown that. You have the floor plan, with its dimensions, do you see? This will show you what will fit, and you may ask your aishid for their help, but you must
not
show this paper to the supervisor: Everything about the new apartment is classified and not in his need to know. He may see
this
paper, which has the generaldimensions.” Another paper, with little written on it. “You and your aishid may pick out any furnishings you please. They simply have to fit the space you have.”
    “Anything?”
    His mother briefly held up a forefinger. “Within the bounds of size and taste, son of mine.”
    “A television?”
    “No.”
    “Honored Mother, it is educational!”
    “When one has a good recommendation from your tutor, one may consider it. Not until then.”
    He sighed. He was not in the least surprised. Even mani had not let him have a television.
    “One day, son of mine. Not now. And because you are young, there must be a few other restrictions. You may pick antiquities, but they must be only of metal or wood, nothing breakable, nothing embroidered, and nothing with a delicate finish or patina.”
    “One has never broken anything! Well, not often. Not