Valentine's Resolve

by E. E. Knight

  "Let's see how clean that kitchen is," Ariel said, looking past Hornbreed. Did she have a tear in her eye? The kids led the procession away. One of the guards didn't like the look of Valentine, and watched him.

  "Argent, wait for me in his office," Pyp said. Valentine listened as they walked toward the kitchen. "Last chance, you two. I'm going to fight to get this commuted to a labor term in California. You resist me on it, and, well, I've got old friends in the church, right up to the Archon. I'll make sure there's a set of eyes on you both every time you draw a breath. You so much as yawn during services..."

  Valentine hoped for Hornbreed's sake that Pyp could get it done. He returned to the office.

  He could still smell Hornbreed's aftershave on the chair. Valentine found the rest of the math impossible.

  * * * *

  Pyp didn't return until after 1500, according to the twenty-four-hour clock on the wall. Valentine spent the time looking at the photos around the office, and didn't like what he saw.

  "I'm so tired," Pyp said, sinking into Hornbreed's chair.

  "Who was that Ariel to Equality?" Valentine asked.

  "How'd you work that?"

  "There's a picture of them on the shelf next to the running trophy."

  Pyp looked up. "I see. She's his sister. He half raised her after their father disappeared. His mother was useless, from what I know about her. I need some food, or I'm going to upchuck."

  "I'm not sure that I want to go back to the cafeteria," Valentine said.

  "I know," Pyp said. "Let's go down to the ready room. They have a pizza oven."

  The ready room was mostly maps on the walls and old books and magazines on the chairs and chipped tables. A shower hissed down a hall that was marked hygiene. Comfortable armchairs and recliners were grouped around a somnolent television, where Noonside Passions played out the melodrama. Valentine noted that the aging Rebeccah had a new, matronly hairstyle and a church ribbon around her neck. With a better angle Valentine recognized one of the pilots from the rescue helicopter, reading his Guidon. Maybe he was resolving to be a better example of mankind's evolution toward the communal spirit. Or maybe he was just memorizing a phrase or two to trot out to the next purifiers.

  They found some congealed pizza and warmed it in the oven.

  "Want a milk?" Pyp asked. "I'm having one." bure.

  They sat. Pyp lifted his carton, held it up until Valentine did likewise. "A good man."

  "A good man," Valentine repeated.

  The milk didn't do much for the greasy pizza. Both men ate mechanically. Another pilot came in and turned up the volume on Passions.

  "Crap, a repeat," he said to the reading man, but sat down to watch it anyway.

  With some noise cover Valentine finally spoke.

  "What the hell was that?"

  "Fair question, son," Pyp said, taking some napkins from a metal dispenser and wiping his hands. "It's just how they keep us on our toes. I spent some time researching it, if you want to hear. Pretty clever. You interested in mass psychology?"

  "I'll take the short version."

  "I think it started in the early years of the Redemption," Pyp said, setting his elbows on the table and leaning close. "In the Southeastern United States the Kurians started using pretty, teenage girls as spokespeople every time they opened a new medical center or fair-housing block.

  "They find some young folks useful. They're good at picking out an elite, grooming them. Pretty soon the young and the beautiful were acting as spokespeople, passing news, bad usually. Up in the Northeast they were using kids as informers. If they turned in a ring of renegades, saboteurs, terrorists, whatever, the kids got rewarded pretty handsomely, positions in the church and whatnot.

  "Practice spread. Down South, where they were having a lot of trouble with the old faiths, they started having the kids of a 'purer generation' rooting out those who didn't have their minds right. Our leaders adopted it. Having a couple kids go around picking out the wild hairs focused the resentment somewheres besides up."

  "How do they get the kids to do it?" Valentine asked. "Turning in your own brother, even if he hasn't committed a real crime."

  "The real crimes take place up here," Pyp said, tapping his temple. "The kids are actually pretty good at picking out those who have some kind of resentment. Good antennae for picking out those who don't fit in."

  "Or maybe less empathy," Valentine said.

  "You have kids?"

  Valentine shrugged. Depends on the definition.

  "Me neither," Pyp said. "Not that there haven't been women who've tempted me to settle. No. Some little shit telling his teacher who visits me in my own home at night."

  "Why the interest in the purification, then?"

  Pyp looked around without moving his head—a skill most older people in the Kurian Zone possessed. He used the shiny side of the napkin dispenser like a rearview mirror. "I was one. One of them. Raised in a church orphanage. I led up the first purification in Aztlan.

  Mind spotless as an Archon's bedsheets. Zealotry comes easy at that age. They used fine words on us, oh, yes. We were a new generation who'd tear down all the old injustices, the old prejudices, the corruption. But twenty years, passed and then it was our turn to be judged corrupt."

  Valentine decided to probe: "Ever think about putting your planes in the air and blowing up some of those towers?"

  "You're kidding, right? I thought you were a traveling man. You know the teams, I'm sure. We got it better here than ninety percent of the world."

  "You're on tight rations."

  "Ahh, that'll pass. Same thing happened back during the Lincoln-Grande War. They'll swap a couple hundred square miles and it'll be put right."

  "They're having a tough time containing Texas, now that they're linked up with the Ozarks. Suppose Denver throws in with them, or with that fellow up in the far Northwest, what's-his—"

  "They'll just drop some new virus on 'em and that'll be the end of it. Now, Argent, listen. You seem bright enough. I know the towers give you the twitch. They do everyone. But that doesn't mean you can't do well in the shade of 'em. Learn a vital skill. Purifications don't come about closer together than six or eight years, and I've got a good chance of getting Hornbreed sprung."

  "Seems to me no purifications would be better."

  "That kind of operation would take weeks, hundreds and hundreds of sorties. We'd land and get throttled by—"

  "So you have thought about it," Valentine said.

  Pyp drew back. "Don't think you're going to inform—"

  "I'm no rat," Valentine said. "Just heard someone say something about, if given a gun, they'd be tempted to point it in the other direction."

  "I've been on Internal Security work groups. Renegade pilots are rare, but it's happened. They have contingencies. I'm sure there are contingencies I don't even know about. I'll tell you this: There are tunnels under this base, under the housing areas. Not sure what's down there. I don't want to find out."

  A jet engine rattled the airfield with the noise of its passage.

  "They have long memories," Pyp continued. "You do them enough damage, they'll get rid of you one way or another. Even if you flee to the rebels. Assuming you survive touchdown. They chop men like me up, one joint at a time."

  Frustrated, Valentine sat back and pushed away the crumbs of the pizza. The man was just as right as he was wrong.

  "Anyway," Pyp said. "Pressure's off now. I can arrange your trip north anytime."

  "Speaking of valuable skills—I'd like a couple more flying lessons," Valentine said. "Equality gave me an ultralight, I think he called it." Was that just this morning? "I'd like to know more about it."

  "So you did listen. Good man. I need to get out of here anyway. Think I'll take you up myself."

  Chapter Seven

  Southern Washington, May: Most people thinly of the Pacific Northwest as a cloudy, rainy woodland, fragrant with the moldy, rotting-pine smell of a temperate rainforest. But beyond
the rain-catching Cascades, the eastern plains of Washington have more in common with the high plains of the Midwest than the foggy harbors of salmon fleet and crab boat.

  Wolves trot through the open country in the summer, pursuing the prolific western antelope, retreating to the river-hugging woods when winter comes.

  The former ranching and orchard country of the dry half of Washington is sparsely inhabited but frequently patrolled for reasons unique to this part of the country. A few Kurian outposts, fed by rail lines running up from Utah and Oregon or in from Idaho, circle their lands with towers like teeth, easily visible from the air thanks to the irrigation technology still in use. But these are the terminal ends, for nothing but one Grog-guarded set of rail and highway line runs up the Pacific coast, thanks to the highly effective, organized guerrilla army under their "Mr. Adler."

  * * * *

  The Osprey-style jump jet touched down on an empty stretch of highway, cutting over a high, dry plateau. The Cascades ran in a blue line in the distance, darkening as the sun descended to meet them. Valentine, ears popping in the change of pressure, drank a final pint of milk in memorial to Hornbreed.

  It felt like a long flight, and ended with several low passes to find a suitable stretch of road for landing. Valentine had grown used to short training hops in his time with the autogyro, gliders, and small training craft. The jet, a courier craft for high-level Quislings, was plushly appointed beyond anything Valentine had ever experienced and had ample space in the cargo bay for the autogyro, with its rotators folded away. He rode in the cockpit for an hour or two, listening to Starguide's stories of Utah and Nevada.

  "That's right, a big chunk of the Salt Lake City folks just disap­peared, almost overnight. Some say they all marched up a mountain and killed themselves. Others say they went to another world. I think it's kinda both—Mormons always were weird," he said as they viewed the Great Salt Lake from fifteen thousand feet.

  After a refueling stop at a combination armory and coal-processing plant, featuring the first Grogs Valentine had seen since coming West, they took the rest of the hop up to Washington. The jet had enough in its tanks to make it back to Utah.

  "I don't believe it. We're out," Gide said. She'd regained the color she'd lost when they hit turbulence leaving Utah.

  Much of the past few weeks had been occupied with Gide's "Exit Authority," a polite term for a sheaf of papers representing a series of undercover transactions that allowed her to leave the Confederation. It wasn't difficult for Valentine to convince Pyp that he'd fallen hard for the girl and wanted her up on the family land in Washington. An allied Kurian enclave in northern Utah agreed to buy her, in exchange for three children—one partially deaf and another in a foot brace— who were to be apprenticed to the New Universal Church in Tempe. The Circus arranged for her Utah paperwork to be "misfiled" using some of Valentine's reward.

  She stood well clear of the plane now, lost in a heavy military jacket and knee boots, her dark-and-light-pleated hair bound up atop her head like a swirl ice-cream cone.

  His pilot instructor, Starguide, helped Valentine take the ultralight from the cargo hold and give it a final flight check.

  "What do your people raise, anyway?" Starguide asked, helping Valentine roll out the autogyro from the cargo bay doors.

  "Pigs," Valentine said. "There's a catfish hatchery too. That's where spare feed and pig shit goes."

  "You must really love him," Starguide hollered over to Gide.

  With that, he closed the cargo hatch with a hydraulic whine. "Well, Argent, I still say you might make a good pilot someday. Come back if you get tired of slopping the hogs."

  "I just want to be far away from everything," Valentine said.

  "The sky doesn't qualify?"

  Valentine shrugged, already composing the part of his report about the Flying Circus. Like the sailors on the Thunderbolt, at least part of the Circus took to the sky to be free of the Kurians, if only temporarily.

  He and Gide stood well clear of the jet as it turned around, plug­ging their ears against the thunder of its exhaust. Starguide used a more fuel-efficient, traditional takeoff. When the Osprey took its run­ning start back into the brassy late-spring sky, they were alone with the wind.

  "We're out," Gide repeated. She hugged him. "Fuckin'-A."

  "Feels good, doesn't it?" Valentine asked.

  "I'll say. Let's take our clothes off. Like little kids in the sun. I'm so in the mood for a frolic 'n' fuck."

  "I think we should get going. That jet might have drawn attention."

  She broke contact. "You're a torqued kite, Max."

  Valentine considered telling her his real name now, and his destination—though not his purpose. Travel was a lot safer with a companion in case of illness or injury, he rationalized. "How's that?" he asked instead.

  "Never taking a run at me. Queer?"

  "No."

  "Balls blown off?"

  "No."

  "What, then?"

  "Don't have much luck with women," he finally said.

  "Just sex, you know. It's healthy. Might get that stick out of your ass.

  Valentine opened the autogyro's canopy, revealing the twin seats, the passenger above and behind the pilot. He grabbed the steering-wheel-style stick and turned it so the little ship was pointed down the road, and opened the tool pouch. His nose detected something rotten in the right cargo compartment. Sure enough, Jimmy had left him a dead rat as a going-away present. Valentine extracted it and flung it into the dry, weed-pocked soil beside the road. "Wouldn't work that way with you," Valentine said.

  "How's that?"

  "I like you."

  She stared at him for a moment, her upper lip working back and forth, then tousled his hair. "I know you do. Otherwise you wouldn't have gotten me out."

  "I'd like to think I'd still have tried even if I didn't."

  "You hide behind a lot of ifs, Max. I know you're a pretty good card player. That's about it."

  "Let's change the subject. What's next for you?"

  She squatted beside him and lowered her voice, even though there was no one to overhear them but the grasshoppers. "I'm joining up."

  "Joining what?"

  Her eyes brightened. "The resistance. There's a big army up here, out in the mountains to the west. The flyboys tell me they're tearing assholes out of the KO. I'm gonna join them. I didn't tell you before because ... because I didn't want you to be an accessory. Just in case they picked me up or something."

  "Or in case I was some kind of informer."

  She shrugged. "I suppose anything's possible."

  "How do you know they'll take you?"

  "Can I fire off a couple from your gun?"

  "Help me get this thing ready first. I want to be able to take off quickly if we need to."

  She helped him stow their gear intelligently enough. "You keeping this thing, or you going to trade it?"

  Valentine sat down and tested the simple cable controls. "I'm wondering how easy it'll be to find fuel. I'm more of a horse-and-pack-mule person, most of the time."

  "Thought you were a biker, with those leathers."

  Load balanced in the little cargo spaces to either side of the chute­like cabin, they were ready to go. "I think it's time to come clean with you, Gide. I'm aiming on the resistance up here too. I just had a few hundred more miles to come."

  "Fuckin'-A!"

  "If you like, I'll give you a lift to the mountains. Safer for two to travel together."

  "You're this gal's knight in shining armor, Max."

  "With a motorcycle engine attached to an oversized food processor as a mount."

  "So how were you going to get all the way up here without the flyboys?" she asked.

  "I've had some experience with ships and boats. Thought I'd get to LA by hiring on with a convoy, then work north up the coast. But an opportunity presented itself, and I always wanted to know more about the Circus."

  "Seen them buzzing around?"

&
nbsp; "Something like that."

  "I'd still like to try that gun. I've only ever shot over open sights since I was little."

  Valentine showed her the points of the rifle. "You cock the first with the bolt. Crosshairs are zeroed for one hundred yards."

  "Regular 7.62?"

  Valentine nodded. She sighted on an old wooden post perhaps seventy yards away, peeping like an owl from a patch of brush next to the road, and fired. They walked over and inspected her shot. She'd almost centered the post.

  "Again?"

  Valentine decided that ammunition used in practice wasn't really wasted, and he wanted to test the stuff he'd picked up in Yuma anyway.

  He fashioned targets by inking a couple of pieces of toilet tissue and fixed them to a tree trunk back toward the autogyro. She was an even better shot than he was at two hundred yards, using the stabiliz­ing built-in bipod.

  The only thing they disturbed with the gunfire was the birds.

  "I'm convinced," he said.

  "The old man sent me to bed hungry if I missed with my bullet," she said. "One shot, meat and all that."

  Valentine examined the road. It had been used recently, light trucks by the look of the tread. Someone was taking care of the pri­mary roads out here. He unrolled and studied his map of Washington State.

  This could be one of the highways that communicated between the forces in the Cascades and Mount Omega—which wasn't really a mountain, of course. Strange that over all these years the Kurians had never located it. His contact with Southern Command was there. He hoped he'd have reason to visit.

  Valentine cleaned and stowed the gun and they climbed into the autogyro. Valentine had flown it tandem before while learning, but never with his food, weapons and accoutrements, blankets and bam­boo sleeping mat, and spare clothes aboard.

  He worked the throttle and opened the engine all the way up. The autogyro ate highway as it sped up, and finally jumped into the air. Gide let out a gasp.