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“You have to do that here now,”
said Papa, who sat in the driver’s seat regardless as the vehicle drove itself
through the city. “Calgary’s gotten too big to let people drive themselves. Of
course, that means whenever people from Calgary come up to where we live and
decide that they want to drive, they get into accidents because they’ve
forgotten how to do it.”

“We can’t even take the other car
into Calgary now because it doesn’t have auto-drive,” said his mother. Despite
her objections, she sat in the front passenger seat, while Philippe sat in the
back.

They asked him about his trip. “It
was fine,” said Philippe. “I had an interesting conversation with one of the Special
Forces guys on my way to Earth. He’s quite the character. He joined the SF when
he was 16, because it was that or juvenile detention. He was blowing up
abandoned buildings for fun—I don’t think he was even going to school by then;
it sounds like his parents weren’t around much. Anyway, when he finally got
arrested, they realized he was making his own explosives. One of the officers
knew some people in the SF, and they were, like, ‘We’ve got the job for you.’”

“‘Can’t let that talent go to
waste!’” said Papa, laughing as they passed a sign indicating that they had
traveled outside the mandatory zone. He promptly clicked off the auto-drive and
took the controls. “Sounds like the Special Forces, all right.”

It was the sort of comment Philippe
would have unthinkingly made himself just a few months ago, but he found it
mildly irritating now. “Those guys saved my life,” he said.

Maman asked him about the
migraines—he had told them about those but had kept the PTSD to himself.
Predictably, his parents agreed with the decision to see if cutting out
stimulants and taking a break to de-stress would do the trick, rather than
relying on medicinal patches, or worse yet, brain implants. They both meditated
and were eager to share all they knew.

“So, are you going to be here for a
month?” asked his mother.

“At least,” said Philippe. “It
wouldn’t be fair to the guy who’s filling in for me—that’s Arne Ljungqvist, I
worked with him in the Sudan—to just be gone for a week or two. This way, he
gets some time to get to know everybody and settle in. And then the next time I
want to go on vacation, he’s not just going in blind.”

“Maybe you two can split the job,”
said Maman. “Trade off the post or something.”

Philippe laughed. “I think that’s
what Arne wants; he’s really excited to be there.”

They sat in silence for a few
minutes, watching the countryside roll past. Philippe’s father began to clear
his throat.
Uh-oh,
thought Philippe, and watched his mother. She looked
at Papa, sensing—as did their son—that he was getting ready to broach an
uncomfortable subject.

The decision whether or not to do
so would be Maman’s, so Philippe watched her instead of his father. Papa
cleared his throat, and then did it again. He did it a third time, and Philippe
knew that he was stealing a glance at Maman.

“Kathy Zobrist,” Papa continued.
“She said that she was a friend of yours from Ottawa, but that she’d lost your
personal address and was afraid that if she sent a message to your work
address, it’d get lost in the shuffle. So she wanted us to either send a
message along from our address, or hang onto it until you came to visit. Of
course we said yes—”

“She
said
she was your
friend,” said Maman, looking at Philippe over her shoulder.

“And we accepted the message
without opening it, of course. And not an hour later—”

“Maybe 10 minutes later, if that,”
said Maman.

“—the police call.” Maman’s remark
hadn’t even interrupted Papa’s rhythm. “And they say that this Kathy person has
been fired by the DiploCorps because she’s been sending you threatening
messages. And the corps put a restraining order on her—”

“—that she was trying to get around
it by messaging us, but of course when they put an order on someone like that, they
tag all their outgoing messages.” Papa’s voice came to a halt.

They were silent some more.

“I don’t know what you want me to
say,” said Philippe.

“Who
is
this woman?”
exclaimed Maman.

“When I was in Ottawa,” Philippe
began carefully, “she and I were dating. But she was, as I’m sure you’ve
gathered, emotionally unstable, so I broke it off.”

“You didn’t tell us any of that,”
said Papa. “We found out about her from the police.”

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you,”
Philippe replied

“What happened?” asked Maman. “I
mean, I always liked your other girlfriends. They always seemed like sensible
women. Why were you seeing someone like that? The police said that she could be
really dangerous. She was warned several times by the DiploCorps not to contact
you, and she just kept doing it until she got fired. And then she did this, and
I don’t know what they’re doing with her now.”

“Look, I made a mistake,” said
Philippe. “But the police and the DiploCorps are handling it, and I’m sure it’s
going to be fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Fine! Fine! Everything’s fine!”
his mother exploded. “Ever since Cuba, it’s fine, you’re fine, everything’s
fine. It’s not fine! We are your parents!”

“You can’t just edit your life for
us,” said Papa, calmer but obviously also upset. “We need to know the whole
story.”

Philippe sat in silence.
The
whole story of Guantánamo?
he thought.
People suffered and died. I wrote
a useless memo, and for that I’m considered a hero.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about
her, I really am,” he said. “I guess I was just hoping that if I didn’t bring
the problem up, it would go away.”

The house was the same as always, comfortable and cozy.
Luxury was in the small things—real food (
real food!
), sunlight, fresh
air. Being able to see the horizon. Scented soap. Animals and birds. Blue
skies.

It didn’t take long for him to
settle right in. It never did; whenever Philippe came back to his parents’
farm, no matter how long he’d been gone, he felt like he’d never left it.
Despite his age, Philippe had never really established a permanent home for
himself—since he didn’t have a family of his own, there was really no need for
one, and this way he could just pack up and move whenever his assignment
changed.

Farm work, while not the most
intellectually stimulating activity, had its appeal—it was concrete and
physical, you could take pride in helping things to grow and flourish. And
Alberta in the late summer was glorious.

It was wonderful—hard work, good
sleep, beautiful weather, good food, loving parents. The days began to run into
each other, and when Papa came out to tell Philippe he had a live message, he
was surprised to see Patch and to realize that the SFer’s leave was very nearly
up.

“Yeah, guy,” said Patch. “I’m in
Beijing and gonna board, like, any minute now. Korea was
awesome
—I’m
glad I took your advice.”

“Great!” Philippe replied.

“Yeah, the koffie shops in
Pyongyang are
amazing.
They really know their alpha D.”

“Alpha what?”

“Alpha drive?” Patch grinned with
enthusiasm. “Guy, that’s the best shit to fly on—you have got to try it
sometime. It’s incredible. They call it alpha D ’cuz it puts you in
space.
”

Philippe smiled tightly and changed
the subject. “So how did the ordinance disposal go?”

“Oh, that was awesome, too. Some of
that shit that the national armies and militias use is, like, rabid. Totally
fucking unpredictable. We nearly lost a couple of guys.” Patch imparted that
grim bit of information with no discernible lessening of enthusiasm. “Oh, but I
didn’t want to talk to you about that—I’m leaving in a few, so I gotta tell you
about the alpha D. Usually I don’t see shit when I’m on it, but this time, I
totally did.”

“Hmmm,” said Philippe, not feeling
especially at ease with the subject.

“Yeah, and it totally had to do with
you, so one of the guys said it probably meant I was, you know, maybe a little
worried and should check up on you.” Patch looked concerned.

“Oh, well, I’m fine,” said
Philippe, eager to reassure him. “I’m really enjoying visiting home—it’s very
relaxing, and I haven’t had any migraines, which is great. I’m just really
having fun spending time with my family and working the farm, you know? It’s so
nice to be home.”

“Yeah, you guys need to buy some
cloned animals,” said Patch. “Support Shanti. Poor kid.”

Philippe laughed.

“I’m glad to hear you’re good,”
said Patch. “’Cuz that vision I had, it was actually kind of freaky—it was
really cool, but it was also sort of freaky. There was, like, this Host there.
And he was, like, glowing, which was really cool, and maybe because of the
glow, he was yellow, you know? Not red like they usually are. Anyway, he kept
asking me about you—you know, how’s Philippe, guy? How’s he doing? He’s seeing
really bad things, all the time, do you think there’s something wrong with him?
He told me that you, like, had had a birthday party for me in your head—that
was nice, guy—but it ended with his being cut up and set on fire, which, you
know, doesn’t make it sound like it was a very good time.

“It was stuff like that, over and
over again, like he was really super-anxious. It kind of creeped me out—the guy
seemed really worried that something might be wrong with you, and it made me
worried, too. But, yeah, you’re fine. And you know, he looked so awesome—I’ve
never seen a Host like that, it was like he was giving off light. He was really
incredible.”

Other than that, messages were few
and far between. Philippe had already sent off the Cyclopes recordings to
linguists at McGill, and whatever was happening there with them didn’t seem to
require his assistance. Arne very quickly stopped asking for help, and since
Philippe was no longer on the station, the flood of mail had stopped. Instead,
there were routine reports, which Philippe first read, then skimmed, and then
ignored altogether.

The media interest in him had ebbed
as well—his attack was old news, and his going to the station was older still.
By local standards, Philippe supposed that he was something of a celebrity, but
in a small farm community, that was necessarily a low-key affair: Most people
just wanted to know if the earplant hurt. He was asked to make a presentation
at a nearby school, which made the local news, and he and his parents received
a lot of invitations to dinner from people they already knew and were happy to
see.

Philippe helped feed the animals
and fix the fences, and he noticed that the leaves were turning. After a month,
Arne asked if he could stay on the station a bit longer, and Philippe said yes.
He got some of his warmer clothes out of storage and put them in his old room.

Don’t I?
Philippe wondered.

“No, I think that was pretty much
an isolated thing,” Philippe replied. “It’s just that—there were some weird
things happening there. I was having these repeating dreams with this glowing
Host, and then I was seeing the glow when I was awake—”

“I thought that was the migraines,”
said his father.

“That’s one explanation,” said
Philippe.

He paused for a moment, looking
thoughtfully at Maman and Papa. He hadn’t mentioned this to anyone—not to
George, not to Shanti, certainly not to the debriefers.