Blame Charlie ©

by K Pelle

Chapter 4

There's just something about waking in familiar surroundings that puts you at ease with the world, unfortunately that comfortable feeling can be easily dispelled.  The fact that I awoke with a very full bladder convinced me that I had to leave my comfortable bed - the fact that I hadn't been strong enough to sit up by myself the afternoon before didn't even enter my mind.  So I flipped back the covers, sat up and put my feet on the floor, then I discovered that my robe and slippers weren't by my bed where I usually kept them.  Okay, so what, my bladder's demand was too darn insistent to worry about insignificant details like that and the bathroom was only a few steps away.  Besides, it was early in the morning, so it wouldn't bother anyone if I walked to the bathroom in my birthday suit and right about then I didn't really care much.  I needed relief, and I needed it, NOW!  If I had even considered it, my answer would have been that this was my house, so if someone happened to be visiting and they saw me running around naked, too bad, any offended feelings were their problem!

I pushed myself upright and managed to stand on my own, then discovered that I felt weak and could hardly stand, let alone walk.  I managed two small steps, then decided it would be safer to lean one hand on the bed to steady myself.  Another hesitant step meant I could reach out the other hand to steady myself against my dresser and I was able to shuffle along beside that until I could reach the door to the hallway.  The doorknob and the door weren't the steadiest of supports, but they worked.  Then came the challenge of three short, unsupported steps to cross the hallway and reach the door to the bathroom.  Once inside that cozy little room, support was easier to find, but for the first time I could remember I sat on the porcelain throne to 'drain the bilges.'

That short, early morning venture had been one of the most difficult walks I had ever made, but the feeling of relief that washed over me in the following seconds made it all worthwhile.  As I was relaxing afterward, the memory of the previous afternoon came back to me, but was any of what I'd heard, recalled or seen real?  Was it possible that I'd been hallucinating?  Or had I really been rescued by extraterrestrial beings?  Had I been transported from  Earth to some other planet circling some other star?  Had I really met an extraterrestrial being who communicated by telepathy?  I remembered everything that I'd felt at the time and I recalled all of the things that had been explained to me.  I even felt that I had believed the explanations - at the time, but was any of what I'd experienced real, - or had it all been a dream?

Since I was sitting on the same 'throne' that I had used for years and since the room was completely unchanged from what I remembered, I began to doubt my recollection of the previous day.  And yet it all seemed so real!  The problem was that I could remember everything that happened  up on the dome, at least until I'd passed out from the pain of being burnt so badly.

Wait a minute.  Something there didn't make sense!  I knew I must have been burned horribly and as a former volunteer fireman I'd seen the scars of others who had been badly burned.  I knew that the scars from deep burns almost always made a victim's movements stiff or even impossible at times.  Yet I had been able to get out of bed and although I felt weak, I had been able to walk.  If I had been burnt as badly as I was certain I must have been, I would never have been able to walk again.

One way or another, my present situation seemed impossible.

Hold on - let's go back to what I remembered.  I'd shot my rifle, and seen the explosion, then I'd ducked, but I'd been laying on my belly.  I remembered the heat on my hands, then pulling them back and tucking them against my body.  Maybe they wouldn't have been badly burnt, but I knew the backs of my shoulders and upper arms hadn't been protected and I knew I could check those quite easily.  I could reach my hands back far enough on either of my shoulders to feel any scarred areas, so . . .

Damn, my right arm was hard to lift, but I slid it up my left arm and over the edge of my shoulder.

Whoa! What goes on here?

There were no signs of scarring under my fingers . . . none at all.

All I could feel was clear skin - no scars, no tight ridges, nothing like that?

How was that possible?

Maybe that shoulder had been protected, I had to try lifting my left arm to check the right shoulder . . .

Argh - I had the same struggles as the other arm.  Same results though, unblemished skin!

What the hell!

If I'd been badly burned that was impossible, at least I had thought it was impossible.

I had to see for myself and there was a large mirror above the vanity not two steps away. 

I struggled to get up, but finally lurched to my feet, grabbed the edge of the vanity sink, leaned on it for support, raised my eyes and stared at the reflection in the mirror.

Unbelievable!

The face staring back at me wasn't the face of the man I remembered! 

Well, no - that isn't right either - it was my face, but a much younger face - at least twenty-five years younger!

I hadn't looked that young in years.

There was no way that what I was seeing was possible.

Then I noticed the arms and the chest on the reflection in the mirror.  There was no way my body had ever looked anything like that either!

Even when I'd been in the volunteer fire department and working out regularly I'd never had shoulders or biceps like that.

In fact I'd never had muscles like that in my whole life.

Just what the hell had happened to me? 

Not only that, but considering all those bulging muscles, why was I feeling so bloody weak?

Oops, I shouldn't have reminded myself of that, because suddenly my legs felt like they were made of rubber.  I needed to lie down before I fell down.

I managed to make it back to my bedroom, but I bumped against the bedroom door, then my dresser, finally flopping face down on the edge of my bed.  Talk about a noisy old fart though, banging around like that!  If there was anyone in the house, they must be awake now.

Oops!  There definitely was someone around, because I could hear running footsteps. Somehow I felt like a kid caught trying to swipe a chocolate bar, so I thought I'd better try to act innocent.  Only I was still struggling to crawl all the way into bed when Donna came charging into the room.

"What are you doing?  We told you to rest, dammit!  You shouldn't be trying to get out of bed," she snapped, quite loudly.

I'm not sure if it was the volume of her voice or the tone that set me off, but I growled at her even while heaving myself onto the bed, then rolling onto my back.

"It's my bloody house, dammit.  Can't I even go to the can by myself, for cripes sake?" I snarled, then my brain and eyes awoke to what I was seeing.

Holy crap, what a woman!  More curves than a plate of spaghetti and all of them on display - which is when I realized she was wearing the same costume as I was - bare skin, from head to toe.

"I'm sorry," she stammered.  "But, I'm supposed to help look after you and . . ."

She'd leaned forward to help me adjust the bedcovers, then she paused, her eyes glued to my midsection.  Suddenly I knew just where she was staring and if anything that stare made my body's natural reaction to her physical allure even worse.  While she seemed to be stunned and her face developed a slight flush, I couldn't help finding our combined reactions to be funny. Somehow, I managed to lift my head and shoulders to look down at my body's 'gallant' reaction.

"Well, at least that seems to be working okay!" I managed to chuckle.  "Nothing else is working the way it should though."

She seemed to jerk in surprise, her eyes flicking up to meet mine, then she giggled like a school girl so I winked at her.

"Of course I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, considering the view." I grinned and winked again.  "Your figure could cause a reaction in the week old corpse of a hundred-year-old man."

I couldn't believe it, but that comment brought on a blush that started at her breasts and raced upward to her hairline and her giggle became much louder.

"You're terrible," she managed to slur through the giggle, then she became all business and twisted, bending forward to grab the bed covers and pull them over my lower body.  "There . . . out of sight, out of mind . . . for now!"

"That almost sounded like a promise," I grinned.  "Now, can you tell me why my body seems to look about twenty-five years younger and has a lot more muscles than it should?  When I went up that hill, I was a fifty-year-old wreck, but now when I look in the mirror I see the body of a young man who exercised a lot."

"Hah, welcome to the club!" she snorted, then leaned back against the wall and sighed heavily.  "When I came to attend Maria's 911 call, I was a forty-two-year-old, overweight policewoman, who'd had two kids and looked like a middle-aged matron.  I had been spending too many hours of my day just sitting in a patrol car to be in very good shape.  My boobs and my butt drooped and my belly bulged.  I was out of shape, so I looked and felt middle aged.

"Now look at me! I look about as old as my eldest daughter.  My boobs are a large 'C' cup and perky as a teenager's.  My gut is solid muscle and my butt is firm.  My daughters are both jealous of how I look, though they don't have any reason to be jealous, since both of them look gorgeous.

"Anyway, we can both blame it on the 'Fox Folk,' who are the people responsible for our restoration, but they used Maria's description of both of us as models when they restored us.  I think she needs an eye exam, because she only saw me for a few seconds when I stopped at the main ranch for directions to fight she'd called about.  In your case I think she gave them an idyllic description from memory, but I don't know how close to reality her memory was."

"Not very darn close," I shook my head, then frowned.  "But, you lost me when you said the Foxes restored us, just what did you mean by that?  It doesn't sound like any hospital procedure I've ever heard of, but then since they're supposed to be extraterrestrials, I suppose they have different techniques than our doctors did."

"I'm not even sure I understand what they did to us," she sighed.  "You see all four of us, José, Diego, you and I were all so close to the original explosion and fire that our bodies were almost destroyed.  Sawish told me that our skulls protected our brains, but our bones are most what was left from our original bodies and even they've been repaired.  She explained that everything else was 'grown' from our basic DNA structure while our brains remained in stasis, at least most of the time.  I think what they did must be something like cloning, but not quite, because they used our brains to stimulate 'body memory' as everything else was developing.  I don't know about you, but I had weird dreams while I was being restored, memories about my former life and stuff like that."

"Did you spend a long time all alone - with nobody near you, unable to touch, or hear, or see, or smell anything else?" I asked.

'Unh huh, total sensory deprivation, almost . . . well, a sensation of floating, but later there was a . . . a weird sort of ticklish feeling.  Every time I tried to find out where that came from though, I'd drop off to sleep, then I'd dream some more," she nodded.  "From what I understand of Sawish's explanation, when we dreamed of running, or swimming, or any activity they used our memories to trace muscle groups and stimulate them to grow.  You must have been very active in your former life, because you look like a real athlete now."

"Maybe I look like some kind of athlete but I feel as weak as a butterfly in a hurricane." I grumbled.

"That's only natural, since your brain is still trying to accustom itself to independent movement once more.  Up until now our rescuers have been helping it to flex your muscles through some sort of outside assistance.  Don't ask me how that works though, I went through the same thing you're going through now.  In my case it was a couple of weeks ago and I was given a somewhat similar explanation when I bitched about feeling weak.  I can tell you that after a few days of gradual exercise and solid food I'm in far better condition than I ever was before. Even then Sawish says I have about another month or two until I reach my body's full potential."

"So you were 'awakened' (if that's the right term) just a short while ago, yourself?"

"About two weeks ago and I think 'awakened' is a fairly good description of what happens, but I don't know if that would be how Sawish would describe it," she frowned slightly then.  "I have a difficult time understanding just what the 'Fox Folk' are trying to convey to me, so that might not be what they would say has happened to us.  She's going to have to try to explain to you what happened, because she says we weren't really asleep, just placed in some sort of stasis. She was trying to put across a strange concept of slowing or stopping the electrons and atoms in our bodies - things of that sort, which I didn't really understand.  Then she was going on about light years and eons, but I'm afraid I'm not good at that sort of stuff, so I was completely lost. All I really understood was that while we've been travelling here we weren't aware that any time had passed."

"Umm, how does that work?  I saw Maria here too, and she wasn't up on the Dome with the rest of us?"

"Oh, the four of us weren't the only ones who were in that stasis thingy.  That wierdo Kalibrod-whozitz had set off his stun and transport gizmo which lifted a huge chunk of the local geography in one big bite.  A globe of soil and rock and air that had a forty-mile radius, right from your ranch all the way out to the coast and then some.  Only that hole was forty-miles deep too, which kicked off a massive volcano that must have been devastating to the area nearby. 

That's when more agents of the Fox Folk arrived though.  They went bananas and picked up anyone or anything that was going to be destroyed by the lava and the gas clouds or lahars from the volcano too.  They salvaged anything living that couldn't escape and would have been killed by the initial effects or anything that would be buried by tons of ash from the volcano.  After they rescued us, they tamed the tsunami that would have resulted from the theft of that big hunk from the planet, then they shifted us across a huge hunk of space.  The Fox Folk live on a planet with a sun almost like ours, so they adapted an uninhabited planet almost like Earth that sits in a tighter orbit than theirs, then set us down on it.  So we have neighbours on other planets that orbit around this sun, friendly neighbours."

"Are you for real?" I stared at her in disbelief.  "Do you really believe all that horse pucky about travelling in space and other planets?  Come on, pull my other leg."

"I'm not kidding, it's real, this planet is different.  Heck it even has two moons.  All you have to do is go outside at night and you can see the difference, there are so many stars in the sky it's almost bright enough to be able to walk around," she protested, then she snapped her fingers.  "I just remembered something else.  Part of the reason you feel weak here is the gravity.  Sawish said the gravity is higher on this planet than it was on Earth, because its core is bigger."

I was about to argue more, but just then Sawish entered the room.  "She is right and you are wrong.  You are on a different planet, with greater gravity, so you should not have strained yourself to arise hurriedly just to micturate, not  until you have full control of those muscles you were admiring in your mirror.  You had no need to struggle that way since you were not showing any undue distress compared to the same time period when under our care."

"Yeah, but I'll bet you had a gizmo hung on my dick while I was unconscious that allowed me to piss whenever I needed to, didn't you?"  I threw back at her,  "Check the hospital records and see what I did when I was awakened from a long sleep, or did you ever allow me to fully waken?  If you didn't, then whoever was tending me probably had some other way of emptying my bladder when it got too full for comfort.  Besides, this is my bloody house and I'll do things my way any time I want to."

Sawish paused then, twisting her head off to one side in an almost human gesture as she looked at me from a slightly different angle before she grinned and chuckled.

"Psych was right.  You are someone who must be convinced by facts before you will accept a statement as truth."

"So?"

"So today you will learn facts that you may find unbelievable, but perhaps hearing those facts from others than I will help you to understand your new situation," she said quietly.  "As well as that you will meet with some of those you know well, but also with new faces and new entities who will assist you in the future.  You have abilities and talents which will be of great assistance to those around you and it would be advantageous if you were to employ those abilities and talents as soon as possible."

I didn't know what to say to that so I just looked at her questioningly, not commenting in any way.  I simply wasn't about to commit myself to any course of action until I had some idea of what sort of obligation I would be taking on.

"Well, are you willing to see your friends and neighbours today or not?" Sawish asked after a moment.

"Oh, are you giving me a choice now.  Before you were making a statement, not asking a question,"  I snapped. 

Donna snorted, drawing what I took to be a frown from Sawish - let's face it, since I was looking at a face covered in fur, I found it hard to tell.

"I think I'd best leave," Donna giggled.  "I'll get dressed and start cooking breakfast."

"I am not chasing you out, Donna," Sawish sighed.  "Actually it might be wise for you to be nearby to aid David if he needs assistance in any way, so you need to hear much of what he will learn as well.  Of necessity, this might develop into a long term commitment however, so perhaps you should consider your answer somewhat deeply."

"What are you asking me to do then?" Donna frowned.  "I still consider myself to be an officer of the law, with a job to do.  I did contact the office and officially I'm considered to be on leave to recuperate from my injuries."

"I realize that, however your assignment could easily be changed to protecting El Patrón as well as this area."

Having her call me, patrón brought a frown to my face.  I wondered if she had any idea what the term meant and if she did, I was really curious about what sort of task she was expecting me to tackle.

"What's wrong, Dave?  Have I done something to offend you?" Donna must have misread my frown and thought I was frowning at the idea of having her nearby.

"I wasn't frowning about you." I reached a hand out and touched one of hers in reassurance. "I was frowning at the implication that I might need protection and I was wondering why my safety might be at risk."

"You are not the only one who needs protection, so does your land, your ranch." Sawish stated in a flat tone.  "The hill you refer to as the dome is an anomaly, a rarity of mineral wealth, not just on your former world, but  throughout the galaxy.  The science of your former world does not even have a name for the mineral which is buried there, but it was the reason for the attempted theft by the Kalibrodzax.  You see it is the element by which space travel is made possible.  Usually that element is concentrated in the core of a relatively few planets or scattered amongst the stars as asteroids, asteroids which came from the cores of planets which have been destroyed."

"Is it dangerous, like uranium or something of that sort?"  I asked instantly.

"No, nothing like that," she shook her head slightly.  "Instead it can be used to shield from the radiation produced by uranium or other radioactive elements.  It is extremely dense and non reactive, so it is used as a material of containment, especially for what your scientists refer to as anti-matter, which is the material used to power space vehicles.  To my knowledge there are only two races who travel far in space however, the Eritol who rescued you and the Kalibrodzax, who stole the technology from the Eritol.

"Surprisingly we have found reference to an analogous material in your language, but the only references to it are found in fictional tales.  In some of the tales of dwarfs and myths there is mention of a material called 'mithral' which seems to have many of the same properties. Then there are science fiction stories which refer to 'collapsium' or a somewhat similar name, and many of those stories mention it being used as either armour or a containment material."

"So I suppose you're going to want to mine the dome then?"

"No, Dave.  The Eritol easily obtain all the supplies of shield material they need by mining asteroids in deep space.  In fact they prefer the smaller asteroids to larger ones because then they can handle them, in a mine they would have to use extreme force to reduce a vein of raw ore to a handy size.  The rogue Kalibrodzax you were forced to confront was a pirate and probably had intentions of mining the dome, but you easily and thoroughly prevented his attempt.  I doubt that you meant to be so violent, however that was the only way that pirate could have been stopped, considering the weapons you had.  As a result though, I'm positive no one would consider establishing a mine on your property, certainly not without your permission," she smiled slightly.  "Actually your destruction of the Kalibrodzax and his minions was an essential act in the endeavours which resulted in your rescue.  The closest Eritol ship was trapped within the transfer globe when he initiated his attempt and they freely admit that they would have been unable to escape.  Then you destroyed his mechanical contrivance and the shock of that destruction released their ship, so they were able to initiate a protective stasis field within seconds.  That stasis was the only saving factor for the four of you who attacked that group of thieves.  If the full core temperature had expanded out to where you were hidden, there would have been no chance that you could have been revived, let alone to have recovered the way you have."

"Is it going to take you very long to tell us all this stuff again?" Donna fussed.  "I've heard it before and didn't really understand a lot of it then.  I learn details and stuff much better if I can read it, not just hear it.  Besides, I need to fix breakfast."

I think there was a slight confrontation between Donna and Sawish then, but I didn't hear a word, so it must have all been some sort of tight beam telepathy.  Neither of them seemed happy about it and I wasn't really interested in being caught in the middle, so I leaned back and closed my eyes.  That might have been a slight mistake, because I must have dozed off for a bit.  At least it seemed like only a moment later when Donna came into the room and began setting up a rolling table at my bedside.

"Did you have a good nap, Dave?" she asked with a smile as she helped me sit up and slipped cushions behind me.  "I brought you some breakfast"

"Thanks," I told her, then looked down at the tiny portions on the serving tray - little more than a couple of spoonfuls of cooked cereal with an ounce or two of milk, as well as a tiny glass of fruit juice.  "That's it?"

"Yep," she grinned. "I know it doesn't look like a lot and what there is of it is pretty bland, but I think you'll find it quite filling.  Until your stomach stretches back to normal size, you'll be eating small portions, but we'll be feeding you quite often."

I didn't argue, not since I remembered how full I had felt the evening before after only a few sips of that broth they had fed me.  Of course being an independent SOB, I attempted to use the spoon and feed myself, but just lifting the spoon was a struggle and controlling it was impossible. Luckily I didn't make a mess, but in the end Donna had to help me, even if it did make me feel rather pathetically dependent.

"I wonder how long I'm going to need to be treated like a baby?" I asked myself.

"Estimated lessening of major weakness . . . ten to twelve days.  Partial debilitation . . . additional sixteen to twenty days.  Full recovery . . . ninety to one-hundred days.  All times Terratoo standard. " I 'heard' in reply, but in my head, not through my ears.

"What the hell was that?" I whispered softly.

"Pardon me?" Donna looked at me strangely.

"I'm hearing things, but not out loud.  It's like there are voices in my head." I said tentatively, worried that it was a sign of a problem.

"Ah, that would be the Eritol.  They're still helping us adapt to this world.  All of us hear them to some extent, but some more than others.  I try to think of that voice as a vocal assistant, something like an encyclopaedia, only available on demand and only keyed to your thoughts and questions," she smiled.  "The Eritol don't interfere unless they see you getting into a dangerous situation and even then they just make you aware of the dangers, but if you accept the risk they don't attempt to stop you or anything.  I've learned to look on my personal 'voice' as a guide, not a nag, but you'll see what I mean as time goes by."

Donna paused and smiled, looking as if she was recalling something pleasant.  "Remember what it was like when you used a computer and called up 'Google' or 'Wikipedia' to ask a question?  Well now all you have to do most of the time is 'think' the question to yourself and the Eritol will do their best to provide you with an answer."

"So are you saying that we have a computer connection in our heads now?"  I frowned at her explanation.

"Not really, but both the Eritol and the Maminai are telepathic. So that's how we communicate."

"Okay who are these 'Eritol' and 'Maminai' beings?  Are they the fox like things, like Sawish?"

"Sawish is one of the Maminai and although I call her one of the 'Fox-folk,' they're really not much different from the lemurs we had on Earth, just more developed and a lot more intelligent.  She explained to me that their natural habitat used to be arboreal and their society developed from the various clans in the different forests of their world.  All of their clans are matriarchal and her clan was famous for being diplomatic, which is why she is living here with us.  She is our diplomatic link back to Mamina, their home planet.  In fact Sawish is literally the head of the local delegation to Terratoo, which is what everyone is starting to call this world."

"So she's a big deal of some sort - a major political player or something?"

"Well, yes she is." Donna frowned slightly.  "From what she has said you are definitely expected to become a big player in the politics of this world, mostly because of the fact that you're the reason this area was salvaged and we were saved from dying.  The Eritol literally revere you for that, but at the same time they know you didn't even realize that they existed or that one of their ships was trapped in the Kalibrodzax's stasis field.  However, since the Eritol think so much of you, the Maminai agreed to help salvage us.  That might originally have been because the Eritol provide the means of space travel used by them and the Maminai, but it's more than that now.  What the Maminai are doing now is almost some sort of religious thing, which seems to revolve around your ability to play musical instruments, as well as your music collection."

"What?  I'm nothing more than an amateur musician who ran a music store for a while.  I don't have a fantastic music collection." I argued.  "Besides, why would the Maminai or the Eritol be so darn interested in music anyway?"

"Have you looked closely at Sawish's hands?" Donna grinned and laughed.  "She's a typical Maminai, so she has one broad finger and a thumb on each hand, which means playing most of our instruments is an impossibility for her.  We have five digits on each hand and our instruments are often designed to use all ten digits a lot of the time.  The Maminai sing a lot and they play simple instruments like pan flutes, drums, glockenspiels, stuff like that, but that's about the limit of their musicality.  So, when the Eritol sent the Maminai a copy of a DVD of you and your cousin playing the 'Flight of the Bumblebee' as a duet on the violin and piano, they went absolutely bananas.  From that point on both races decided to do everything possible to save every one of us 'five-fingered folks' and bring us to a planet near them so they could protect us."

"So are you saying that they saved us because of our music?" I stared at her in astonishment.

"Well, partially, but the DVD was recorded digitally, probably on a computer or something of that sort.  At any rate it was recorded on a base two system, which is totally natural and completely understood by both the Maminai and the Eritol.  Our base ten system seems to upset them, but boy, do they understand our computers that work on base two.  So the DVD set them convinced them that we were quite intelligent and they started to research our other forms of technology.  To put it mildly, some of our mechanical and electronic developments just blew them away, because they approach everything from a different angle than we do.  For instance they use either DC current or hydraulics for almost all their controls.  They've never really spent much time developing AC current applications, but then since most of their technology is an Eritol development and they're marine animals, I suppose that's not surprising."

"The Eritol are marine animals?"

"Oh, yeah, I guess you haven't seen them in their natural form, have you?  Actually the Eritol look something like an octopus and have eight tentacles, but two of their tentacles are split at the end, so they have two digits on each of their manipulating tentacles.  The strange thing is that they're hive animals and when they travel through space the whole hive lives in a space ship that looks like a manta ray, only it isn't a space ship, it's another animal.  They developed that manta ray space craft thing by manipulating the genetics of a marina creature that lived in their oceans. But before that they had developed something that looks like a cocoon which allowed them to explore the dry land of their planet.  That's how they met the Maminai."

"Wow, are you telling me that the civilizations of both the Maminai and the Eritol developed on the same planet?"

"Yep, one on land and the other in the water, but from what they've told me they met hundreds of thousands of years ago and it took thousands of years for the two races to learn to cooperate.  I suppose that's natural though, since the only thing they had in common was mathematics, based on the number two," she grinned at me.  "What really brought them together though was a mutual enemy, the Kalibrodzax, and doesn't that sound familiar?"

"I suppose you're saying that 'the enemy of my enemy must be a friend' or something along those lines, aren't you?" I frowned.

"That, and the fact that once we were locked in stasis and jettisoned from the Earth's orbit they couldn't put us back.  There's a huge volcano where this ranch used to sit and it did a major job of setting off wars, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and what not, which led to disease and starvation for millions.  Even the Eritol couldn't prevent the calamities from happening and they could only rescue so many of the potential victims from the worst tragedies.  Earth is finally starting to settle down, but from what I've heard, you and I wouldn't recognise it."

"I'm surprised that it's settling down already."

"What do you mean, already?  It's been more than five hundred years since we were living on Earth.  We've spent most of that time in stasis and travelling at faster than light speeds, so we haven't aged, while the rest of the universe has.  Not only that, but in order to be able to survive on a higher gravity planet we've been modified - we're all clones of whoever we were, but with genetic modifications to our DNA.  Outwardly we look much like we did before, but our skeletons, our muscles and many of our internal organs have been modified in order to allow us to live and work on a planet where we weigh a third more than we did on Earth.  The only portions of us that have remained close to the same are our brains, so we could retain our memories, the rest of our bodies are new and improved versions of what we were."

I'm afraid I just stared at her in sheer disbelief, not having any idea of what to say or even what to ask.

Chapter 5