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A change will do
me good.”
    “Oh yes. You’ve been becoming weirder every
day, Peter. Don’t get me wrong, I always thought you’d end up a
nutty, old professor one day. But not at thirty-two.”
    It was Peter’s turn to laugh now,
“Thirty-two, yes? I forget that. Sometimes I feel like I’m a
hundred years old.”
    Luke told him it was probably normal, he felt
like that too sometimes. And while Peter Wagner packed his suitcase
and made calls to arrange for a boat to France, the ticket that
originally belonged to Duncan Wagner, the ticket that was assumed
lost, the ticket that had never been used to fix a broken computer,
almost burned a hole in another man’s pocket.
    * * * *

Chapter 10: Bazaar
    She woke with a start, once more surrounded
by the strange people she had encountered before. They were talking
at her; to no avail, because try as she might, she couldn’t
understand them. Their language was utterly foreign to her. And
everything was moving wrongly, giving her a headache that made it
hard to stir, or even see properly. Mostly everything was a blur, a
foggy haze at best. It was painful, and it got worse with every
moment.
    Until she all but resigned. She fell back
into the softness she now seemed tied to, and merely observed the
images that were unfolding around her. She didn’t even try to give
it meaning, she simply waited for it all to go away.
    It was yet another perfect day on
Alternearth; with a beautiful sun that was warming the earth below,
bathing every lifeless and living thing in wonderful light. Even
the dirt streaked emergency medical tent looked chipper and
cheerful in the sunlight.
    Inside was just enough room for a gurney and
a table with a couple of instruments. Dr. Paige had hopelessly
stressed the tiny space by putting up two IVs and a chair for
herself. It was all make do, but it had to suffice until either the
colony’s hospital wing was finished, or the woman was fit for a
transport to Earth. It didn’t look like it for now, though. Dr.
Paige had cleaned her up, and beneath the mud and dirt was a woman
perhaps in her twenties; that was all she could say about the
patient for now. Because she didn’t speak. Not a word, not even a
sound had left her throat so far. When she awoke shortly after the
first blood tests were done, a few hours after she had lost
consciousness, she looked at Dr. Paige in horror. She tried to get
up, and when she found she was tied to the gurney, which was for
everyone’s protection, a measurement Captain Eleven had insisted
on, the expression in her eyes shifted from horror to confusion,
then to pain, and after that her eyes glazed over and her body went
limp. But never did she utter a syllable.
    Dr. Paige tried talking to her, so did
Eleven, but after the woman had given up, or so it appeared, she
didn’t come back. She just stayed apathetic, seeing everything and
nothing, as if she resigned herself to whatever would happen
next.
    Summer Paige didn’t stop talking to her,
though. She had treated comatose patients before, and this woman
reminded her of them, with the only difference that her eyes were
open. But they might as well be closed, she pondered, it was
unlikely she even saw what was going on, much less understood
it.
    Yet Dr. Paige was relentless. She held up
another photo, in case the woman would choose to look at it, and
continued, “This is the village we built in the meadow. The meadow
that is now a forest, actually. I’m not sure what really happened
there. I wonder if you know. I wonder what you saw with those
beautiful doe eyes of yours.” She softly stroke back a curl from
the woman’s face. It was a lovely face, pale from want of sunlight
though it was.
    “You know what? I’m hungry. I bet you are,
too. Let me see what I can find in my endless supply of candy and
nutrition bars.”
    She put away the photos and fished her
personal bag from under her chair.
    “I have a couple of cereal bars, if you like.
Not the healthiest of food,