Northern Minnesota, the thirty-ninth year of the Kurian Order: He grew up in a pastoral setting among the lakes of upper Minnesota. David Stuart Valentine was born during one of the interminable winters in a sturdy brick house on LakeCarver. The scattered settlements of that area owed their survival not so much to resistance as to inaccessibility. The Kurians dislike cold weather, leaving the periodic sweeps and patrols of this area to their Quislings. The Reapers come only in the summer in a macabre imitation of the fishermen and campers who once visited the lakes between May and September.
In the first few years after the Overthrow, myriad refugees supported themselves amid the abundant lakes and woods of what had been known as the Boundary Waters. They exterminated the remaining disease-infested Ravies hotzones, but the settlers refused aid to would-be guerrilla bands, as most of them had already tasted Reaper reprisals elsewhere. They wished nothing more than to be left alone. The Boundary Waters people were ruled only by the weather. A frantic period of food storage marked each fall, and when snow came, the families settled in for winter, ice-fishing for survival, not sport. In summer they retreated into the deep woods far from the roads, returning to their houses after the Reapers were again driven south by the cold.
Young David's family reflected the diaspora that found refuge in the region. He had a collection of Scandinavian, American Indian, and even Asian ancestors in a family tree whose roots stretched from Quebec to San Francisco. His mother was a beautiful and athletic Sioux from Manitoba, his father a former navy pilot.
His father's stories made the world a bigger place for David than it was for most of the children his age. He dreamed of flying across the Pacific Ocean the way some boys dream of being a pirate or building a raft and drifting down the Mississippi.
His early life came to an abrupt stop at the age of eleven, on a cool September day that saw the first frost of the northern fall. The family had just returned from summer retreat to their home, but a Quisling patrol or two still lingered. Judging from the tire tracks that David found later, two trucks- probably the slow, alcohol-burning kind favored by rural patrols-had pulled up to the house. Perhaps the occupants were also liquor fueled. The patrol emptied the larder and then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon raping David's mother. Attracted by the sound of the vehicles, his father had died in a hail of gunfire as he came up from the lakeshore. David heard the shots while gathering wild corn. He hurried home, accompanied by a growing fear that the shots had come from his house.
David explored the too-silent house. The smell of tomatoes, which his mother had been stewing, filled the four-room cabin. He found his mother first, her body violated, her throat slit. Out of spite or habit, the intruders had also killed his little brother, who had just learned to write his own name, and then his baby sister. He did not cry-eleven-year-old men don't cry, his dad said. He circled the house to find his father lying dead in the backyard. A crow was perched on the former pilot's shoulder, pecking at the brains exposed by a baseball-size hole blown out of the back of his skull.
He walked to the Padre's. Putting one foot in front of the other came hard; for some reason he just wanted to lie down and sleep. Then the Padre's familiar lane appeared. The priest's home served as school, church, and public library for the locals. David appeared out of the chilly night air and told the cleric what he had heard and seen, and then offered to walk with the Padre all the way back to his house. The saddened priest put the boy to bed in his basement. The room became David's home for the remainder of his adolescence.
A common grave received the four victims of old sins loosed by the New Order. David threw the first soil onto the burial shrouds that masked the violence of their deaths. After the funeral, as little groups of neighbors broke up, David walked away with the Padre's hand resting comfortingly on his shoulder. David looked up at the priest and decided to ask the question that had been troubling him.
"Father Max, did anyone eat their souls?"
Every day at school they had to memorize a Bible verse, proverb, or saying. Often there was a lot of writing down and not much memorizing. Sometimes the lines had something to do with the day's lesson, sometimes not. The quotation prescribed for the rainy last day of classes had an extra significance to the older students who stayed on for a week after the grade-schoolers escaped the humid classroom for the summer. Their special lessons might have been called the "Facts of Death." The Padre hoped to correct some of the misinformation born of rumor and legend, then fill in the gaps about what had happened since the Overthrow, when Homo sapiens lost its position at the top of the food chain. The material was too grim for some of the younger students, and the parents of others objected, so this final week of class was sparsely attended.
The Padre pointed to the quotation again as he began the afternoon's discussion. Father Maximillian Argent was made to point, with his long graceful arms and still-muscular shoulders. Sixty-three years and many long miles from the place of his birth in Puerto Rico, the Padre's hair was only now beginning to reflect the salt-and-pepper coloring of age. He was the sort of pillar a community could rest on, and when he spoke at meetings, the residents listened to his rich, melodious, and impeccably enunciated voice as attentively as his students did.
The classroom blackboard that day had fourteen words written on it. In Father Max's neat, scripted handwriting, the words THE FARTHER BACKWARD YOU CAN LOOK, THE FARTHER FORWARD YOU CAN SEE.-WINSTON CHURCHILL Were written with Euclidean levelness on the chalkboard. Normally Valentine would have been interested in the lecture, as he liked history. But his eye was drawn out the window, where the rain still showed no sign of letting up. He had even used the leaky roof as an excuse to shift his desk to the left so that it pressed right against the wall under the window, and the chipped white basin where his desk usually sat was now full enough with rainwater falling from the ceiling to add a plop every now and then as punctuation to the Padre's lesson. Valentine searched the sky for a lessening of the drizzle. Today was the final day of the Field Games, and that meant the Crosscountry Run. If the Councilmen canceled the games because of weather, he would finish where he now stood in the ranking: third.
The youths came from all over the Central Boundary Waters to compete against others in their age group each spring as part of the general festivities that ended the winter and began the great Hideout. This year Valentine had a shot at winning first prize. Second and third place got you a hearty handshake and an up-close look at the trophy as whoever came in first received it. The prize for boys aged sixteen to eighteen was a real over-under shotgun, not a hunting musket, and fifty bird-shot shells. A good gun meant a bountiful hunting season. The Padre and David needed all the help they could get. The Padre taught more or less for free, and Valentine didn't earn much at his job chopping endless cords of firewood for the neighbors. If Valentine won, he and Father Max would be dining on goose, duck, and pheasant until well after the snow flew.
"Mr. Valentine," Father Max said, interrupting David's mental meal. "Please rejoin the class. We're talking about a very important subject... your heritage."
"Funny," whispered Doyle from a desk behind. "I don't remember him saying anything about what a stupid son of a bitch you are."
Plop, added the basin to his right.
The Padre cracked his knuckles in a callused fist; profane jokes out of Doyle were as natural as water dripping into the classroom when it rained. He evidently chose to ignore both, keeping his eyes fixed on David.
"Sorry, Father," Valentine said with as much contrition as a seventeen-year-old boy could summon.
"You can apologize to the class by reviewing what you know about the Pre-entities."
Another whisper from behind: "This'U be short."
The Padre shifted his gaze. "Thank you for volunteering two hours of your free time to school maintenance, Mr. Doyle. The roof and I are grateful. Your summary, Mr. Valentine?"
Plop.
Valentine could hear Doyle slump in his seat. "They go back to before the dinosaurs, Father. They made the Gates, those doorways that connect different planets. The Interworld Tree. It's how the Kurians got here, right?"
Father Max held up his hand, palm outward. The thumb was missing from his right hand, and his remaining fingers were misshapen. They always reminded Valentine of tree roots that could not decide which way to grow. "You are getting ahead of yourself, Mr. Valentine. Just by sixty-five million years or so."
The Padre sat down on his desk, facing the eight older students. The classroom should have contained forty or so, had all the teenagers within a long walk attended. But education, like survival, depended on initiative in the disorganized Boundary Waters.
Valentine settled in for a good listen, as he always did when the Padre parked himself on the desk in that fashion. The rest of the class, not having the qualified joys of living with the Padre, did not know as he did that when the Padre perched there, he was imitating another teacher from his own youth, a determined San Jose nun who had woken a hunger for learning in the ganja-smoking teen he still had trouble imagining the Padre had been. His mind insisted on wandering off to the games.
"We know so very little about these beings, the Pre-entities, except that they predate everything else we do know about life on Earth," the Padre began. "I was telling you about the Doors yesterday. No, Mr. Doyle, not the Old World rock-and-roll band. I know we think of these Doors as a terrible curse, the cause of our trouble. Everything we know would be different if they had never been opened. But long ago they were marvelous things, connecting planet after planet in the Milky Way as easily as that door over there connects us with the library. We call the builders of this Interworld Tree the Pre-entities, because we are not even sure if they had bodies-in the sense that you and I have bodies, that is. They probably didn't need our little chemical engines to keep going. But if they did have bodies, they were big. Some of the Doors are said to be as big as a barn.
"We know they existed because they left the Interworld Tree and the Touchstones. A Touchstone is like a book that you can readjust by laying your hand on it. They don't always work correctly on our human minds, however; there are always a few who touch them and go insane from the experience, which I find easy to believe. But a person with the right kind of mind who touches one has what we might call a revelation. Like the downloads I was telling you about when we were talking about the Old World's computer technology."
The Padre looked down and shook his head. Valentine knew the Padre had a love-hate relationship with the past; when he was in his cups, he would sometimes rave about the injustices in the Old World, which had the ability to feed and clothe all of its children but had chosen not to. This might lead to tears over missing something called McDonald's fries dipped into a chocolate shake, or overpriced souvenir T-shirts.
"The Pre-entities existed by absorbing energy; a very special kind of energy, produced by living things. Plants make it at a very low level. All animals, us included, possess it to a greater extent. This energy, which we call a 'vital aura' for lack of a better term, is determined by two factors in an organism: size and intelligence. The latter predominates. A cow, despite its size, gives off a smaller vital aura than a monkey. A monkey being the 'brighter' of the two in more ways than one, if you understand."