In the Valley (37 page)

He got out of the ground-car and leaned up against the fender. Paul willed himself not to fidget while he waited. After all, it had been well over a decade since he had seen her. This meeting could be awkward. Eventually, he caught sight of her leaving the building; she started down a path between the beautiful, spreading, red-leaved trees.

She saw him by the ground-car, smiled, and waved. Her steps became hurried, and she spread her arms to hug him. He hugged her back—she smelled wonderful, just like he remembered. He allowed himself to bury his face just a little in her hair and remembered her in his room.

Down boy, he thought to himself. He had no idea whether she was still interested in him. It had been a long time since they’d been together. Finally they released their embrace. Amy stepped back and took his hand and smiled.

“Well, you’re just as handsome as I remember!” Her eyes crinkled a little at the corners. “It’s so good to see someone from home out here. What a coincidence!”

“Yeah, it’s crazy. You’re only the second person I’ve ever seen out here from home, and I’ve been gone sixteen years.” He felt like crying. This chance meeting seemed too good to be true. If he were a puppy, he’d have been jumping all over her and licking her face.

“Well, let’s get out of here and get something to eat, if you’re hungry.” She looked at him questioningly. He nodded his agreement. Amy reached out and touched his scarf and then looked him in the eye. It seemed to Paul that so much had been lost. But here she was again, briefly, in his life. They separated for the time being and stepped into the ground-car.

When they got in, it seemed to him that her wonderful smell filled the car. He drank it in. He had anticipated her request and had already looked up a couple of promising locations.

“What do you feel like eating?” he asked. “Here in Canton it’s pretty much North American food, though there are some good Indian restaurants.”

“Pick a place, and we’ll go. Hopefully it’s quiet, so we can hear each other.”

He reached over and took her hand and away they went.

Later, over a good meal of native grains, rice, and fish, Paul’s fears of an awkward evening were banished for good. They talked and they talked. She told him of events at home, he gave her a few vignettes about his service.

He learned that she had been married for about ten years, but she and her ex-husband had been amicably divorced for several years. Paul told her a little about Darlene, his only real attempt at a serious relationship since he had been in the force. Most of all, he told her of his homesickness, his desire to see Old Earth’s trees again, to see his family, to see her.

“Well, you kept the scarf, Paul. I must have left a good impression on you years ago.” She shot him a coy look.

He smiled back gently. “More than you know, Amy. Our circumstances were just bad—that’s all.”

They kissed, gently at first and then with more passion.

Giggling, Amy said, “Well, we’ll just have to make up for lost time then. What a shame we only have three days.”

Paul held up his hand for the waiter; it was definitely time for the check. “Let’s see if we can make it three good days, love.”

Amy, it turned out, had a small apartment in Tallahassee. Hand in hand they went into it.

Much later, Amy looked up at him over crossed arms; she was lying on her belly. Propped up on one elbow, Paul looked down and admired her wonderfully feminine form. She was speaking about why she was on Canton 2.

“Our team is allotted three months per world. What we are trying to do is correlate geological records from the worlds of the diaspora. The similarities in forms of life, roughly correlated to Earth’s geological record, are astonishing, even though there are significant and fascinating local variations. As you’ve probably seen, most worlds have semidesert environments with Earth-cognate early life-forms. The workers in my field at home have been scratching their heads for decades as to why that is. To date, as you know, no worlds have been found with organisms approaching Earth’s complexity.” She paused.

“The bigwigs at home have several schools of thought for why that is, and they never get tired arguing about it.” She laughed. She had a wonderful throaty chuckle. It was just as Paul remembered it.

“Sounds like a pretty interesting job, being an exogeologist, travelling from world to world, and then being able to go home again on West Virginia University’s tab.” Paul thought Amy definitely had it better than him. He was genuinely interested in her work, and it showed.

“Yeah, it has its moments. I think this tour I’m on led to the friction between my ex and me; he didn’t want to be apart for years at a time.” She looked down. “Maybe I’m just selfish.”

Paul rolled over and put his arm around her. “I think he’s fuckin’ nuts, personally. After all I’ve seen and done—hell, I’d wait forever for someone like you. A couple of years are nothing.” She rolled into him and kissed him. He murmured in her ear, “I’ve waited a lot longer than that, Amy. I’ve been crazy about you since chemistry class at Harrison Hills.”

The long night got longer, and Paul was glad for it.

The next morning, Amy had to leave for work, but she was free the following day. Paul relaxed in her apartment for a while; then he went out on the town and got some greenhouse flowers. He drank coffee and just generally lounged. This pass, which had threatened to be a boring dud, was looking fantastic.

He walked to the Washington River and scouted promising spots to bring Amy to after her work. He sorted through his feelings for her: was this just plain lust, a revisiting of a long-lost relationship, or did she mean more to him than that? He drew a blank and decided to just enjoy their star-crossed romance for what it was—a flicker in the dark next to all the years of loneliness he had endured.

The flowers were on her apartment’s table when she came home. She crossed the threshold and spotted them immediately. Old Earth flowers were still an expensive rarity in the diaspora; they had cost Paul a fair bit of his pay.

Seeing her face, however, he knew it was money well spent. She walked over to him and kissed him; then she walked back to the vase of flowers and arranged them, humming as she went. She stepped back, looked at them with her head tilted to one side, and smiled.

“They’re wonderful, Paul.”

“Pretty flowers for a pretty lady, I’d say.” If she was happy, then so was he.

“Have you thought any about what we could do tonight?” She looked over at him. He was leering. With a tart tone, she said, “Get your mind out of the gutter, you. I mean other stuff. We only have just a little while.”

Paul suggested a walk by the river, followed by a play at the local theater. Resolutely, he banished the thought that, indeed, their time was short.

So for the next two days, they laughed, filled each other in on what they had done for all these years, and made love.

As with all good things, it finally had to come to an end. They decided it would be best if they said their good-byes in Tallahassee. As he prepared to get into his ground-car, they exchanged gifts.

Paul had bought her a native Cantonese beryl crystal, left in the stone’s matrix, as a geologist would find it. She cooed over it and gave him a kiss. She gave him a new civilian halo. She had kidded him about his clunky outdated one the entire time they had been together.

He put it on and looked at his preset icons; one said, “Amy.” He decided to click on it later, after they had parted. He kissed her and chucked her chin.

“If I ever make it home, Amy, would it be OK if I pinged you?”

She kissed him again. “When you make it home, you had better.”

With that, Paul turned and left the wonderful apartment in Tallahassee. He felt numb the entire trip back to the town by the force installation. He returned the ground-car to the rental company and reported back to base.

With leaden feet, he climbed the stairs into the drab barracks building. Guys from the team were already there. Dirty was in the hallway, talking about some skanks he had hooked up with on pass. Freak and Crusty listened in and piled on their own unsavory tales.

Crusty saw Paul and called out, “Hey, look what the cat dragged in! Haven’t seen you for days, LT. We thought you’d gone AWOL!”

Paul wearily shook his head. “Love you too, Sergeant Crusty.”

Freak spoke up. “So’d you get any action, sir?” He had a sleazy leer on his face.

Paul thought back on his time with Amy. There was no way he would share a good experience like that with this pack of jackals. For this crew, it was all about balling some freak in a stinky club somewhere.

“Just met up with a friend from home who happened to be here.”

That shut the crew up. Such visits were rare for a soldier, and every one of them held those uncommon occurrences holy. There would be no further questions.

Paul unlocked his room and walked in. He took off his scarf. Paul opened the wall locker and accessed the bottom drawer. He took the plastic bag with the quilt in it and put it on the bed and opened it. He took off his new civilian halo and folded it up in the scarf, pleat for pleat. Now it was safe. He put his treasured possessions away.

Paul decided he would wear the halo only on special occasions and look at the files under “Amy” one by one, much as one would savor special chocolates.

He looked around his room and thought it profane. He looked at the drawer. The treasures in there did not fit the room.

He took off his suit, wadded it up, and threw it into the trash. He didn’t need it anymore. He put his clunky old-model halo back on. He reached into the wall locker and produced a fresh set of cams. He got dressed, back into regulation uniform.

He placed a wall around his heart, for he felt sure he would never see home again.

W
hen the dog barked, Paul saw his chances of ever making it home dwindle considerably. Paul looked over at Bashir. He was visibly tense. Never a good sign, he thought. Urgently, Bashir waved his men to fan out to either side of him. The cordon wasn’t complete yet, and the cat looked to be out of the bag. Men hurried, crouching in the dark as they half ran to get into position. The dog kept up its shrill chorus.

A minute later, Paul heard a voice yell something unintelligible from the other side of the wall. He turned up his halo noise amplification. The guy was close by. The man on the other side of the wall yelled again. “Who the fuck is out here?”

No one answered. Bashir’s men had stopped moving; Paul could hear his heartbeat in his ears.

Suddenly, Paul’s vision was filled with brilliant muzzle flashes. He swore he could hear the action of the Kalashnikov working back and forth as the man fired off a full magazine.

“God is great!” screamed the man.

Bullets struck the dirt all around Paul and Z-man. Miraculously, neither of them was hit.

With the burst of fire, pandemonium broke out. Juneaus to Paul’s left and right started firing over the wall.

Paul briefly wondered if he should throw a fragmentation grenade. In a split second, he decided not to, following clear lines of reasoning. Time seemed to slow. First, there were numerous tree branches overhead. Wouldn’t do to have the frag bounce back on him. Second, he didn’t know how thick the wall was. It would suck to be blown up by one’s own grenade. Third, kids usually walked the street in the early morning hours on Juneau, doing predawn chores. Paul really didn’t want to kill a kid if he could avoid it. So he decided to shoot back instead and get the fucker. One second had passed.

Paul whipped up his rifle and shot it over the wall; he had to step up on tiptoe to do it. Even with his mil-grade halo’s night vision, the other side of the wall was a dusty green—very little could be seen. He switched to thermal and had better luck; his targeting chevron rested on a blob, and he pulled the trigger.

Maybe he’d hit the fuck, but the evidence was inconclusive for the time being. He kept firing for effect, pumping round after round in the direction of a house about twenty-five meters away. The bucking rifle felt good in his hands; he was focused like a laser on killing the fucker who’d tried to kill him.

There seemed to be half a dozen enemy shooters in his sector; tracers flashed back and forth across the dawn half-light.
Boom boom
—an antiarmor rocket sounded. Men screamed; fleeting shapes darted. The noise was deafening.

Boom blam!
Paul was knocked backward. Rock chips and dust flew all around. The fuckers had hit the wall in front of him! Paul jumped back up and resumed firing. Paul felt mad as a shithouse rat, berserk as a blue-painted Scot. Muzzle flashes lit the night.

Guess that answers whether I could have thrown that frag, thought Paul. If the village wall had just stood up to an antiarmor rocket, his little firecracker wouldn’t have done shit. Paul was pissed.

He looked to his left and his right. A Juneau was preparing a rocket to fire. Another was sitting on a man’s shoulders and firing a belt-fed machine gun over the wall. Z-man was laying down rounds like a professional gambler throws down chips. Sparks and smoke flashed in the night; there was the smell of fireworks and marijuana. A plant nearby was hit, showering Paul with pot petals.