by Marko Kloos
“Here we go,” Halley murmurs when she spots her father on the plaza in front of the transit station. He spots us roughly at the same time and waves.
It’s very obvious which parent Halley takes after when it comes to looks. She’s tall like her father, their hair and eyes are the same color, and she has inherited his nose and cheekbones. Halley’s dad is a good-looking guy, trim and lean in the carefully sculpted manner of a ’burber with access to decent health care and exercise equipment. You could put a ’burber and a PRC hood rat in a lineup next to each other without clothes on, and you’d be able to tell from fifty meters away who belongs where. And Halley’s father is the stereotypical upper-middle-class ’burber, right down to the even teeth and the tan. He waves at us again as we cross the transit plaza toward him. Then he pulls an electronic key fob out of his pocket and casually points it over his shoulder.
“Hello, you two,” he says to us. He gives Halley a hug and extends his hand to me. “How was the ride down?”
“Not bad,” I say, and shake his hand.
“Terrible,” Halley says simultaneously.
“Well, you made it,” he says. “It takes a lot longer now to get up north. I have to go up to Bethesda twice a year and hate it every time.”
Behind him, a sleek and shiny hydrocar rolls up to the curb and chirps its proximity alert. Halley’s dad nods toward our bags and then toward the car that is now automatically opening its doors and trunk lid for us.
“Well, load up your stuff. At least the last leg of your trip is going to be comfortable.”
We leave the city center behind and head into the suburbs on smooth and well-maintained streets. Halley’s parents live in one of the nicer parts of town, but the other ones we see as we’re gliding through them aren’t exactly shabby, either. Houses with front yards, plenty of personal transportation, neat shopping squares with food stores that have no lines in front of them. Halley’s dad lets the computer drive the car almost the whole way, only taking manual control once when we enter a highway that has a secured access ramp. We have to slow down in front of the barriers that block the ramp. Then a little transponder module high up on the car’s windshield lets out a friendly chirping sound and flashes a green light, and the barriers in front of us retract into the ground. We cruise through the access gate at low speed, and as soon as we’ve passed the barrier, it shoots back up behind us, far faster than it had receded. The highway we’re on now has only light traffic on it, and the walls on either side of the roadway are ten meters tall and topped with security wire.
“Little job perk,” Halley’s dad says to me when he notices that I am looking up at the top of the barrier that delineates the side of the highway. “I get to take the express lane whenever I need to.”
It’s hot in San Antonio, but even though the roof cupola of the hydrocar is a big bubble of transparent polyplast, it’s cool and pleasant in here. Invisible air vents are gently blowing cool air into the passenger compartment, and the roof automatically darkens to filter out the sunlight when it’s beating onto the car directly. It’s the most comfortable and luxurious way I’ve ever traveled.
With the hydrocar gliding along at 150 kilometers an hour, we are in the Olmos Park suburb in less than fifteen minutes, half the time it took us to get out to the city center by public transportation. We exit the highway through yet another secured ramp, and then we are in the upscale neighborhood where Halley grew up.
Halley’s parents live on a quiet street lined with trees. All the houses are obscenely large by PRC standards, single-family dwellings as big as the two-story units back in Boston that housed eight parties. All the houses in this neighborhood are spaced apart generously, and each lot has a big front lawn. This is where the top layer of the middle class lives, the people who work upper-echelon jobs for defense contractors or the colonial administration and who have never been within ten kilometers of a PRC their entire lives. Real food, bought with real money. Hydrocars in every driveway, expensive air filtration and climate systems humming next to every house, and lawns that have real, bio-engineered grass on them. Even the trees are real. It looks even more manufactured than Liberty Falls, like a set from a Networks show. Just a few hundred kilometers away, there’s a metroplex with a dozen PRCs ringing it, and the space allocated to a single family in this suburb would be enough for a ten-story Category Three housing unit for five hundred people.
When we pull up to the house, there are a dozen hydrocars parked in the driveway and along the curb of the street.
“Dad,” Halley says in a slightly pleading tone of voice. “Don’t tell me that you’re having a party tonight.”
“Just a small dinner with a few friends,” her father says.
“We just got here. We’re wearing fatigues, and we’re all sweaty. We’re not really dressed for a dinner party. And I wouldn’t be in the mood for one even if I wasn’t in rumpled cammies.”
“It’s no big deal, honey. It’s not a formal thing. Your mom just invited a few people over for drinks, that’s all.”
“You know it’s never that simple,” Halley says. Then she looks at me and rolls her eyes with a sigh.
Halley and I walk up to the house while her father parks the car in the garage. I know that the house has very good security and surveillance systems, and that Halley’s mother was aware of our arrival the moment we got within fifty meters of their front door, but she still lets us wait a good twenty seconds after Halley rings the doorbell before her face appears on the security screen next to the door. She smiles and unlocks the door, which glides open and lets out a gust of cool air.
“Diana,” she greets her daughter. Halley makes a little grimace at hearing the first name she never uses. They exchange a stiff-armed, awkward hug that looks like both of them are performing the act for the first time. Then Halley’s mother looks at me and gives me the same not-quite-genuine smile she flashed at the security screen.
“Andrew,” she says. There’s an awkward moment when we both try to figure out whether to shake hands or hug, but then she seems to have decided to err on the side of gregariousness and upgrade me to a hug, which she gives me in the same stiff-armed way she hugged her daughter. “It’s so good to see you. Both of you.”
“It’s good to see you, too,” I say.
“Well, come in,” her mother says. “You must be tired from carrying those packs around all day.” She eyes the sidearms in the leg holsters Halley and I are wearing. “I really wish you’d not bring those into the house, though.”
“Regulations, Mother,” Halley replies.
“We are required to be armed at all times when we are off base,” I supply. “In case there’s a Lanky incursion. And for personal safety. Lots of riots these days.”
“There are no riots here, Andrew. The nearest welfare city is hundreds of kilometers away. And this city is perfectly safe, with all the police and military around.”
“No, it’s not,” Halley says. “Not from orbital incursion. Another seed ship comes close to Earth and starts spewing out pods, you could have a dozen Lankies on this street in twenty minutes.”
Halley’s mother looks uncomfortable at this flatly stated fact. Then she shakes her head as if she’s trying to shoo away a fly.
“Well, who am I to argue with military regulations,” she says in an airy tone.
The house is air-conditioned and quiet except for the muted din of low conversations from the dining room. The floors are covered in synthetic laminate that looks just like wood—not even Halley’s parents would be able to afford real wooden floors—and the place looks more like a suburban lifestyle museum than a dwelling. Maybe it’s the years I’ve spent in military berthing, or my childhood in the PRC, but the living space Halley’s parents have for just two people seems wastefully excessive. The house is so big that you could subdivide it and turn it into half a dozen PRC apartments at least. There’s a big entrance foyer, a living room bigger than my mother’s old two-bedroom unit, a kitchen full of gl
eaming appliances and shiny gray countertops, and three separate bedrooms. They even have two bathrooms, both with showers, and both more spacious than an officer berth on a warship. This is only the third time I’ve set foot into this house, and I’m even more appalled by all this waste of space than on my previous visits.
“I had the guest bedroom made up for you,” Halley’s mother says. She leads us over to the door and slides it open. “The dresser is empty, if you want to unpack your things, but it doesn’t look like you brought much. Why don’t you freshen up a bit and then come say hi to everyone before dinner?”
We drop our alert bags in the guest bedroom and unpack the little weekend bags we brought while Halley’s mother wanders off toward the living room to tend to her guests again. Neither of us brought civvie clothes—I haven’t even worn any nonissued clothing in over a year, and I’m pretty sure Halley doesn’t even own anything but CDUs and flight suits anymore. Halley takes her PDW out of her alert bag, removes the magazine, checks the chamber, and aims the weapon at the floor while peering into the electronic sight on top of the gun. Then she smacks the bolt release of the little submachine gun with her palm, to let the bolt ride home in the noisiest and most mechanical-sounding manner. She looks at me and smirks.
“I want to wear this thing slung in front of my chest when we sit down for dinner,” she says. “Next time I’ll bring an M-95 and lean that meter-and-a-half-tall son of a bitch against the kitchen counter while we eat.”
“Why stop there? I’m sure I can get a MARS launcher out of the armory,” I reply with a grin, which she returns.
She stows her PDW back in the alert bag and fastens the stickythread strips that hold the weapon in the bag firmly.
“On the other hand, this may be our last visit,” she says. “That would be the only good thing about buying it on Mars.”
There are a bunch of people in the dining room when Halley and I make our entrance, and all heads turn toward us. I sense Halley stiffen when she recognizes someone in the group, but they’re all people I’ve never met before.
“Everyone, you know Diana,” Halley’s mom says to the group. “And this is her husband, Andrew.”
She introduces me to everyone separately. The guests are two couples about the age of Halley’s parents and just as clean cut and well dressed, and a younger guy who looks to be in his late twenties. He’s handsome in the same regularly and carefully maintained way as Halley’s father, and I know he can smell the PRC on me the second we shake hands even though I left Boston for good over seven years ago.
“Andrew, this is Kenneth Harris. He went to school with Diana,” Halley’s mother says. “Ken, this is Andrew Grayson. He’s Diana’s husband. He’s an officer, too.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Ken says.
“I’ve not heard a word about you,” I counter.
He smiles at me, exposing the typical straight and white teeth all ’burbers can afford. “Well, Diana and I go back quite a bit. We were together in school, before she went and joined the military.”
I exchange a look with Halley, who looks a little hot under the collar already. She sits down at the table, and her mom directs me to the chair to the left of her. Ken sits down in the chair on the other side of Halley, who almost but not quite flinches when she realizes how her mother has arranged the seating order.
“Hands off your sidearm,” I murmur, and she lets out a soft chuckle, but we both know that I am only mostly joking.
The dinner is a strange and awkward affair. Halley’s mom introduces us to the other couples at the table and tells them about our history together, our jobs in the military, and our contributions in the Battle of Earth last year. The ’burber friends make appropriate noises of wonder and appreciation, but it’s all as forced as a recruiting commercial on the Networks. She also gets so much of our job descriptions incorrect that we find ourselves taking over her explanations and bending them back into something resembling reality.
“Well, I’m not a military person,” she says when we’ve corrected our job descriptions for the audience at the table. “I’ve never been a fan of guns.”
“They came in pretty handy last year when the Lankies made planetfall,” Halley says. “Worked better than strongly worded petitions.”
Guns are what keep your little paradise from getting overrun by half a million pissed-off welfare rats, I think, but I’m too polite to toss that out in front of the dinner crowd. Instead, I just look around in the dining room and imagine what a bunch of soy-fed, hardened PRC gang members would do to this air-conditioned place and its immaculate floors, inhabited by people who look down on the soldiers and cops that keep this place safe from the unwashed masses. Is this what we fought for all these years? So these squeaky-clean, stuck-up suburbanites can keep thinking of us as something necessary but embarrassing, like the ugly guard dog you keep in the basement when visitors stop by?
The family friends at the dinner table are pleasant and polite, but the difference between them and people like me has never been clearer to me until now. Their outlooks and experiences are so different from mine that we may as well be separate species. They mean well, and I know they don’t want to sound like they’re talking down to us, but they are. We progress through a dinner of salad and grilled fish, and every minute of awkward and cautious conversation feels like an hour. I notice that Halley’s mother tries to steer Halley and Ken toward talking about their time in school together, attempts that Halley shoots down curtly and abruptly.
For dessert, Halley’s mother serves up fresh fruit with a side of real cream, a decadence worthy of Chief Kopka’s restaurant. Halley and I enjoy the slices of melon and the grapes and strawberries carefully one by one.
“We haven’t had any fresh fruit in the fleet since last year,” I say, and the statement is met with polite interest around the table.
“So the quality of the military meals has gone down?” Ken says next to Halley. “That’s a shame. I thought that was part of your contracts.”
“Not the food,” Halley says. “That was always understood to be a perk. But it wasn’t set in stone. We have less to go around now, and the priorities are with the Orions and the new battleships.”
“Yes, we have spent a great deal of time on those missiles,” Halley’s father says. “The Russians and the Chinese even sent over teams for collaboration, if you can believe that. They have good ideas, but they have this crowbar approach to hardware.”
“They have that approach to battle, too,” I say. “But they know their stuff. I’ve worked with a few of their people.”
“Everything’s changing so quickly now. We used to fight the SRA; now we’re designing weapons with them. And the military is letting in way more people than they did before. When you two joined, it was much more selective. That’s part of the reason you don’t get fresh fruit anymore. Same budget, just more mouths to feed.”
“I’m okay with eating soy if it means we get more bodies into uniform,” I say. “Against the Lankies, we need everyone willing and able to hold a rifle.” I can’t help but give Ken a pointed glance, who looks fit and healthy sitting next to Halley.
“It’s not for everyone,” Ken replies. “I mean, I have the utmost respect for what you do up there, but it’s not something I’m cut out for. I’m better with the theory than with the practice.”
“You’re better with the talk than with the action,” Halley says matter-of-factly, and I can see her mother flinching a little.
Ken smiles at her and shrugs. “Look, there’s a need for both. Thinkers and doers. Don’t think less of those of us who choose computers and blueprints over attack ships and rifles.”
“A lot of people don’t get that choice,” she replies. “Be glad that you don’t have to risk battle for a shot at some fresh honeydew melon.” She pushes the dessert plate away from her and gets up.
“Excuse me for a bit. I think I need some fresh air. It’s getting a bit stuffy in here.”
My wi
fe stays gone for the rest of the dinner, leaving me to pick up the conversational slack for her. Halley’s mom looks visibly steamed over her daughter’s absence. Her dad just looks a little sheepish and embarrassed, and I know this isn’t the first time he’s had to be a spectator when Halley and her mother lock horns over something. There’s a good reason we don’t go down to San Antonio more often, and why I dread it when we do.
Halley’s parents see their guests out an hour after the meal, when feet start shuffling under the table with boredom and we run out of polite conversation subjects. Ken, Halley’s old school friend, gives me a firm good-bye handshake as we exchange the usual courtesy phrases, but it seems that his interest in the whole evening went out the front door with Halley when she left. As soon as she sees the guests out of the driveway, Halley’s mother disappears upstairs, and I am left to make strained and awkward conversation in the living room with her dad, who wants to pretend that nothing’s wrong with the evening at all.
Halley returns half an hour later. Her father answers the doorbell, and she strides right past him and into the living room. Then she puts a hand on my shoulder and kisses me on the cheek.
