Lines of Departure

“Almost, Mom. Fifteen minutes to go. Check it out—it’s snowing out there.”

 

 

I point out of the window, where the wind is making bands of fine snowflakes dance among the trees as we’re passing through rural Vermont at two hundred kilometers per hour. The train could cover the distance from Boston to the fringes of Vermont in less than two hours at full throttle, but they have to go slowly through all the urban centers, and New England is all urban centers until you’re right on the edges.

 

“Well, will you look at that. I haven’t seen this much snow on the ground in ages.”

 

The snow that falls in a PRC is already dirty before it hits the ground because of the perpetual layer of smog and dirt in the atmosphere above the big cities. Out here, the snow looks pure and white—clean, untouched, inviting. The world outside looks like a snapshot from a long-forgotten past: untidy rows of trees covered in white, and only the very occasional wireless power transmitter spoiling the scenery.

 

“Beautiful,” Mom says. “Like an old oil painting. I had almost forgotten that the world isn’t all covered in concrete.”

 

“Most of them aren’t, up there,” I reply.

 

Liberty Falls is so small that we pass through the outskirts only a few minutes before we reach the station. There are no tenement high-rises here, just neat rows of single-family houses lined up on tidy streets.

 

The train glides into a clean and well-lit station that has a transparent roof. I see patches of snow on the polycarb dome above us, and a blue and gray sky beyond. The sun is mostly above the horizon now, and the clouds are painted from below in a pale shade of pink.

 

The transit station is an airy structure, widely spaced support struts with large windows in between. There is plenty of daylight, and unlike the windows at South Station, these aren’t projection screens that give people the illusion of a clear sky outside. We step out of the train and into the station. There’s no heavy security out there, just a bored-looking civilian guard loitering on the platform and a pair of smartly dressed city cops standing at the entrance to the station. They give us friendly nods as we walk past them into the street.

 

When we walk out of the station, the air is so clean and cold that it hurts my nose. I had only been back in Boston for a few hours, but my nose had gotten used to the bad air in the metroplex again. Out here, it smells as clean as it did out at NACRD Orem, my Basic Training depot in the middle of the Utah desert.

 

Liberty Falls is a mix of old and new architecture. Out on the street in front of the transit station, the buildings are a blend of brick houses from the last century or the one before it, and modern polycarb-and-alloy structures. The older houses are well kept, renovated and restored, not crumbling and covered in spray paint like their counterparts in Boston. There’s a snow-covered green in front of the station, and it has real trees on it. The streets here are lined with little stores—books, groceries, auto-serve restaurants—and few of those stores have a security guard at the door. There’s no litter on the sidewalks, and the people walking around look better fed than the government employees at South Station. We’re only two hundred miles from the Boston metroplex, but this place feels like a different world altogether. Now that we’re out here, I’m once again glad to be wearing my fleet uniform, because my old civvie clothes would have me sticking out like a dirty rag on a dinner table.

 

Mom wanders over to the little green in front of the transit station and walks across it, ignoring the cleared sidewalks that line the green. The snow on the green is knee-deep in spots, but Mom plows through it, undeterred. I join her as she makes her way across the green, leaving a narrow rut in the clean snow. When we reach the other side of the green, she stops and leans against one of the trees that stand around the edges of the green like an orderly row of fence posts. She bends over, scoops up a handful of the pristine snow, and holds it out for me to see.

 

“I haven’t seen snow this clean since before you were born.”

 

She raises her hand to her mouth and touches the snow on her palm with the tip of her tongue.

 

“Tastes like nothing,” she proclaims.

 

“Colony planet I was on last year, their planetary winter lasts three years,” I say. “All rocks and dust in the summer years, and forty below in the winter. Lousiest place I’ve ever been. Your suit malfunctioned, you’d be dead of exposure in a few hours.”

 

“We went up to central New Hampshire the year before you were born,” Mom says, as if she hasn’t heard my little anecdote. “We went up Mount Washington. There was snow up there, in early October. Most beautiful place I’ve ever been. No cities for miles, just mountains and trees as far as the eye could see. Just this big blanket of orange and red and green, stretching all the way to the horizon.”

 

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