In the Valley Read online

  Hopefield had weathered it all, from the American Civil War to the Glimmer drive and beyond. There was one main street, State Route 151, and old Highway 22 passed through on the north side. Along ancient 151’s permapave were a few stores providing nothing much and a cemetery. There were the rotted remains of a railroad trestle, willow trees, and numerous gardens.

  In the ancient two-story, white clapboard farmhouse that Paul had been born and grown up in, nights were still, and the days were long. If one listened very carefully, you could even hear the whisper of ground-cars as they sped down the two lanes that crossed in front of his house.

  His childhood had consisted primarily of caring for the family’s goats and going to school. Sometimes Paul and his childhood friends would walk to the swamp and catch frogs. On a really big day, they’d haul a snapping turtle out of the bog and poke it with sticks.

  Paul had a large extended family, with an uncle in Rio who dealt in solar applications and a cousin in Los Angeles who worked on cloud support. His father sold niche goat products and serviced drones in Wintersville, a nearby town, for a living.

  In other words, Paul was the typical product of rural Northern Pan-America. He was ethnically mixed, patriotic, mildly religious, and eager to go someplace else. That morning, eighteen years before he met Bashir, he heard “the call.” At the time, though, he would have called it something else—“the disaster.”

  There was nothing different about the day. He woke up in his room, a three-meter-by-three-meter cube set on the top floor of his ancestral house. He yawned, rolled over, and smote his alarm clock. It shut up with an indignant squawk. Dumb artificial intelligences like his clock were still smart enough to hate rough treatment. He kicked out of bed and went to the bathroom; splashing water in his face always finished the job of waking up.

  He returned to his room and made the bed. It was a Thursday, and from time out of mind, that meant school for a minor male like Paul. So he put on his student halo and walked downstairs. As the icons in the upper left of his vision told him, his father was at work; his mom was out with the goats; his sister, Mary, had him blocked; and the ground-bus that would take him to Harrison Hills High was 21.5 minutes out. Also, he needed to complete his calculus homework, and graduation was three months away. With a gesture of his left hand, he clicked each icon away. He knew what he needed to know.

  So he poured himself a tall glass of goat milk and kicked back. It was too early to ping Rhoda, even though he wanted to. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, and he wasn’t sure if it was love or simple lust. If he asked his halo, it probably would have given him a short and earthy reply, but he really wasn’t going to pose a question to it that would be viewable by his parents. Student halos were amazing, but they did have their shortcomings, and his parent’s access to his queries was one of them.

  The bus was two minutes out. He left the house. With a sigh, the tired, old ground-bus came to a halt in front of his place. Paul stepped on and grabbed a seat, buckling in, as he had done since his fifth birthday. With a mild shudder, the bus accelerated. Paul looked out the window at his town and the rolling hills and promptly fell asleep.

  His halo woke him up with a ping as the bus approached Harrison Hills High.

  Earlier generations would have thought Harrison Hills was a barren, sparse brick-and-Plastlar box filled with chairs and a cafeteria and little else. There were no signs, menus, cheesy educational slogans—nothing. There were just the classrooms, the principal’s office (with the M-74 on hooks above his desk), and an athletic field. Students weren’t authorized ground-cars, either, so there wasn’t the crowded parking lot that had been familiar to earlier generations.

  The Harrison Hills School District, in one form and location or another, had been educating students for over four hundred years. These days, over half the students would end up in the spreading human diaspora, tens or hundreds of light-years away. Generally, it was a one-way trip—like the trip to the stars had been for his uncle Jack, his father’s brother.

  When Paul got off the ground-bus at the school, his visual icons lit up. He liked to keep them neatly arranged in rows on his left. He clicked off the majority of them, except for Ms. Janowski’s, his calculus teacher. With her he would have to buy time. He saw the latest slogan on the side of the school in neon blue: GO HILLS BEAT CREEK. The slogan referred to the coming football game with a neighboring district—but if you didn’t have a halo, you’d just see a bare wall.

  Thanks to the headband-looking doodad he had known since his second year, his optic nerves, through a link to the device via skin contact, broadcast the lunch menu to him. An icon appeared with his family food chit, and he ordered and paid in the blink of an eye.

  He was relieved that his parents had filled up his school lunch account. Usually they were pretty good at that, but sometimes his account showed zero lunch money, and then he would have to go through the bother of putting a query into his mom’s bank account. Distracted by the quick financial transaction, Paul almost ran into Annie Borchard.

  She hadn’t noticed him, and her halo broadcast that she was recording, a definite social no-no if you hadn’t asked the people involved. He stepped aside and sent her a frown icon. Startled, she looked at him and went off-line. Nothing needed to be said, and the incident shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

  It was a truism that once something was in the cloud, the images or text stayed there. He figured someone would really straighten Annie out if she kept messing around recording people, or a teacher would catch her. After all, their halos could peek into a registered student’s view.

  Something was a little different today, however. Paul saw a man in a dull, splotchy brown set of multicams (he would learn that name for the uniform later) seated behind a desk next to the door. As soon as the recruiter saw him, an icon appeared again, and this one, in glowing green letters, said, “YOU ARE ACCEPTED FOR SERVICE.”

  The recruiter already had his info—just like that. The feds had access to his medical records, his school records, and his county and state records under the Expedited Selective Service Act of 2071. Without a single exchange between Paul and the recruiter, it was a done deal. There was no need for tiresome and duplicate medical examinations, interviews, or anything else. All Paul had to do to get his very own splotchy brown set of clothes was follow the link that was glowing green on the left side of his visual.

  Of course, if he wanted the human touch, the recruiter was there and waiting. Paul guessed the poor sap would have to field the dumbest questions all day long.

  Like a lot of his peers, Paul had thought about joining the forces. He had fantasized about shooting down waves of Chi-coms on Szeged 7, jumping through buildings in his suit, saving the (well-endowed) heroine, and going on to live happily ever after, a hero on a government sinecure. Paul could picture showing up at Rhoda’s house in his snazzy dress browns and sweeping her off of her feet (literally) and depositing her in bed. Or maybe sweet Amy Brown in chemistry—Paul wasn’t that picky, especially in his thoughts.

  He wasn’t sure if he had the guts to join. He loved his home, he loved/liked/lusted after Rhoda, and he was sure that if he joined the forces it would be a long time before he saw his family and friends again, if in fact he ever did. Soldiers had a higher priority for earthward travel than settlers. However, time back on Terra Firma for a soldier or sailor could be counted in months on one hand over a twenty-year career, from what he understood.

  He knew something about a soldier’s life because of his fabled uncle Jack. Jack had enlisted some forty years ago. He had fought dissidents and competing governments on any number of campaigns. Jack had come home twice and then retired on Mumbai 3, some 213 light-years distant. Presumably he was still alive. His dad had had a message from long-lost Jack pop up in his inbox a couple of years ago.

  Ships travelling between worlds always carried mail in caches on board. When a ship popped out in a given solar system, the onboard cloud contacted the r
elevant halos planetside, and—ping!—the message from whomever would appear in the recipient’s inbox.

  Uncle Jack’s message had upset Father—his dad had gotten drunk and stayed that way for a week. Did he feel like doing that to his parents?

  Paul clicked off the glowing green SERVICE icon with his left hand, making a stabbing gesture in the air. The man in multicams looked somewhere else. Paul entered the main hall, and his school day began.

  In theory, the students had no physical need to be in a building at all. They could receive instruction at home through their halos, interact with the other students, see the educational materials, and follow a lesson plan—all without ever leaving their bed. It had been tried in the past for cost-saving reasons.

  The experiment failed when it was found that students educated in such a manner became contact freaks—actually physical interaction was needed for socialization. It turned out that halos, while wonderful tools, could not duplicate actual physical interactions. The same applied for virtual porn. The halo could give a very complete sensory experience, but the caveman inside knew at a genetic level what was real and what was not.

  Pure physical interaction explained Paul’s rutting for his favorite girl, Rhoda. He dared not bring up his recordings of her in school, especially not in calculus. Ms. Janowski was too sharp. He swore she could tell just by the look in his eyes that he was mooning away in her class. Damn those geniuses that doomed him to a physical presence at Harrison Hills!

  Nine hours later on that fateful day, he boarded the ground-bus to go home. He brought up Rhoda’s icon, but it was blocked! What the hell? In a foul mood, he stepped off the bus twenty minutes later in front of his house. As he shambled up the front walk, he had an ominous feeling that something was amiss. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but the feeling was there and had been gathering since the mystery of Rhoda’s blocked icon had appeared.

  His father was waiting for him in the house.

  “Paul, take off your halo,” was all his father said. Paul took it off, with that slight tingling disconnect you always had when the halo came off. The unit shut off when it felt the lack of chemical-electric skin contact.

  This must be serious, Paul thought. Usually the family left the headbands on until bedtime—unless there was a serious family conversation, like his gut told him this was going to be.

  “Have a seat, buddy; there’s a few things we need to go over.”

  Paul sat in the overstuffed loveseat like it was an electric chair. He didn’t know where this was going, but it wasn’t going to be good. He had felt an increasing friction with his father for the past year, and it usually involved his future plans, Rhoda, or school. He tried mentally selecting which one it was going to be this time but drew a blank.

  Father sat and waited patiently. Paul could see his face in his father’s and knew in broad outline what he would look like in fifty years. The salt-and-pepper hair; the deep care lines in his face; the reddish, sun-weathered tint to his skin: Father’s face was no stranger to sorrow, to a lifetime of work.

  He looked serious and slightly annoyed when he began to speak. Father’s words came out in a tumble; they were more a proclamation than an invitation to conversation. “You’ve almost reached majority, Paul. As you know, majority is a big step in your life. Have you figured out what you’re doing yet? I just spoke with Billy Lathrop, and he tells me that Rhoda is joining the forces.”

  Bam! Just like that his dad hit Paul in the face with a double whammy—asking him some bullshit about what his plans were (none, and scared to death) and telling him his girlfriend had signed up for a hitch, effectively dumping Paul on his ass! Get out of here, Paul thought.

  But he hadn’t reached the point yet of disrespecting his father to his face. He wanted to rage; he wanted to fight. Instead, to his undying embarrassment, Paul began to weep.

  Suddenly finding a reason to tend to the goats, his father stood up and said, “I’m sorry, Paul, but some things you just can’t dance around.” He then made his exit; the living room door sighed shut behind him.

  Numb, Paul put on his halo. He called up all his icons; sure enough, there was Rhoda’s icon; it was surrounded by the fuzzy dark that indicated he was blocked. Enraged, he started deleting the icons one by one, beginning with Rhoda’s.

  Maybe he had loved her. He pondered the thought bitterly. How could she? Why had she made this move and not said the first thing to him? His mind reeled through all the conversations they had had in the past few months, but nothing hinted at this blockbuster bomb.

  And why couldn’t his old man lay off? He dried his eyes and tried to think. He stood up stiffly and walked through the living room to the upstairs steps. The third step, as usual, creaked under his tread. The handrail had a little play to it, and he could smell a faint air of bat feces from the attic. His father and he had cleaned the attic every winter—a nasty job. But the smell lingered.

  It was one of the smells of home. Years later, beneath the light of distant stars, he would swear he could still sense the smell in his mind, the smell of his distant home.

  He shut the door to his room and dived upon the quilted double bed. It was amazing how long a quilt could last; his great-grandmother had told him how her mother had made this very quilt, from a pattern her mother had shown her. It had been constantly repaired. The quilt’s story was one of strong family love, passed from generation to generation. Paul smelled the detergent in the quilt and the faint, acrid reek of bat poop.

  It was time to move on. One icon he had not erased: SERVICE. He clicked it and followed the instructions.

  Bashir was pissed—that much was crystal clear. Paul already had his hands full; he didn’t need the drama with his Juneau Army counterpart. He was passing information to the colonel; he was listening to people yell and scream. Paul maintained situational awareness with the erratic gunfire, and he managed Z while his medic delayed death for the wounded shitheads. It had been a busy morning.

  Oh yeah, and somewhere floating around was a wounded Second Company soldier whom no one could locate. If the wounded troop could be found, his care would take precedence over the shitheads. Sorry, but that’s how it went from Paul’s perspective. It was shaping up to be a humdinger of a day, no doubt. Paul summoned the clock icon; it appeared in his lower left field of vision: 0716 local. Damn, it felt like it should be noon or something.

  Bashir, to Paul’s relief, had turned away without saying a word after the confrontation about the prisoners. He was walking away and swearing. Bashir wasn’t happy, but at least he wasn’t going to draw down on Paul. That was a definite plus.

  Paul didn’t consider at the time that maybe Bashir had bigger plans.

  “Two-Three,” said the voice in his head. There was the colonel again. “Two-Three, my micro view is breaking up, and I’m having trouble getting a visual on you from my suit halo.” Shit—loss of micro coverage was a bad thing. “Can you pop smoke for me? That’ll help out,” he said. The colonel always had a plan—primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency. Colonial Special Forces was good for having the bases covered, and the colonel was a product of their rigorous school.

  The emergency plan called for the pitifully low-tech smoke grenades Paul was carrying. There was an almost zero chance of ever needing the things, assuming one had good micro coverage. But on Juneau 3, you had to expect that only half of the technological whizbangs were going to do their trick. Paul’s team had learned that hard fact in battle.

  Every command suit came equipped with six micros in reloadable launcher tubes. A micro, otherwise known as the Multi-Mission Capable Consolidated Aerial Observation Device, was a nifty 1.5 cm drone that was expendable, just like other munitions. And they could do wonderful things for a poor mud-foot at their service ceiling of about 400 m AGL (above ground level): things such as watching Second Company assault a village, getting thermals on all the squirters (people who ran for the hills), and counting rounds fired and where from. Micros generated lots
of useless and useful trivia known as “battlefield intelligence.” Used by skilled soldiers, micros painted a complete portrait of the battlefield.

  Micro drones were great when they worked, as they did almost all of the time—unless you were in majestic, harsh mountains with innumerable ridge-lines, hogbacks, and perilously sharp valleys. The aforementioned terrain features pretty much defined the ground Paul’s team had been operating in for almost a local year now. The micro drones were hit-and-miss on Juneau 3 and, worse yet, in short supply.

  Smoke grenades always worked and could be locally produced. So Paul carried three—red, yellow, and purple.

  “Roger, Five—popping smoke,” Paul said, as he dug in his ammo and cig pouch and produced a colorful grenade, not one that went boom. Boy, he thought, that’d be a heck of a final error. He held the grenade upside down in his left hand, with the spoon tucked under his thumb. He gave a hard jerk on the pin with his right hand and tossed the grenade underhand into a clear spot opposite the unfortunate burning man/bush combination.

  Can’t have the colonel mistake the greasy-black-man-and-marijuana smoke for my position, after all, he thought. But then again, the colonel had probably seen the grisly sight through his halo feed—and there was no such thing as a burning-flesh-and-marijuana smoke grenade, God be praised.

  Paul waited. No smoke: he counted backward from eight—still no smoke. What the hell? What else was going to go wrong? First the micro doesn’t work; now the lousy smoke grenade won’t pop? Murphy had been hard at work on this day of days.

  Paul had an inspiration. He’d just throw another smoke out. After all, the more smoke grenades he threw, the less weight he had to carry out of this shithole. It was a genius idea.

  So he chucked another smoke grenade into a slightly different spot. He was rewarded with a nice pop, and yellow smoke started to pour out of the cylinder. However, one second later, Paul heard another pop, and red smoke started coming out of the “dud” grenade. Great, he thought, confusion on the battlefield.