“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.