GKW

By the year 3221, Earth had become the kind of place people on vacation from other planets sent electronic picture postcards from to their home planet. It was a peaceful place, green, lightly populated and ecologically spotless, a pleasant backwater in the Local Group Alliance, which by then was nothing more than a trading partnership. There hadn’t been a war since the Perseus Rebellion in 2571. Why that war was fought was recorded on history files that no one was any longer interested in reviewing.

Raj Hammerstein, twenty-nine, a smidgen under six feet tall, black hair, blue eyes and light brown skin, was the son of a mother who was legally Hindu and a father who was legally Jewish. She was from central Italy, his father from northern Germany. They had met at a wild week-long music festival in a place called Wacken, in Germany, when they were both 18. Their love had now lasted over thirty-five years and was solidly based on a true appreciation of very loud music and an ability to make mutually intelligent decisions about how to navigate the future.

After seven years together, their careers secure, they had Raj. He was the child both of them had hoped to have, a boy who was most always in a good mood, who learned to read early, and thankfully preferred to read books printed on paper and actually written by human earthlings. He played chuckball and jumpit and all the other normal sports kids play while growing up. After qualifying as a rig driver, he got one of the best jobs you can get, working for Interstellar Commerce Inc. delivering Earth-made products to other planets and bringing back goods that were useful to earthlings.

Raj drove a T21 transport rig. In the transport trade, rig drivers were called truckers, an old word that probably had something to do with goods transport because the motto of Interstellar Commerce was Keep on Truckin’.

Raj’s cargo on this trip was seeds and fertilizer for a farming colony in the fourth quadrant. The only route that would get him there before the one week delivery window closed was Wormhole Passageway 9X9.

“Entering passageway in thirty seconds,” said the voice of the rig’s resident system. The voice Raj had chosen for the resident was a synth-copy of his grandmother’s voice, in that special tone she used when she disapproved of someone or something.

“Grats Nonna,” Raj said with an inflection of humor in his tone.

“Raj, I am a resident system, not your grandmother, and you know I am not programmed for humor.”

“Just navigate please Nonna.”

The rig accelerated toward the entrance to the wormhole. Raj strapped himself into his chair and waited. The screen went black for about 30 seconds. He experienced the normal G-forces associated with warp speed in a wormhole, but something under the hood made a coughing noise, the lights went red and Raj lost consciousness. He wasn’t sure for how long because the numbers on the digital Earth-time clock had frozen. He shook his head, checked the screen. Slowly the stars stopped looking like smeared streaks of color. Raj rubbed his eyes. The numbers on the digital clock resumed advancing.

“Nonna. Report.”

“Warp drive malfunction. Cause unknown. We have exited the passageway at a point I cannot identify.”

“Why?” 

“I have no data.”

“Call dispatch for location info.”

“All wavelengths in the cosmic communication spectrum are silent. No one there, Raj.”

If you slide into the wrong hole you end up in GKW.

Nobody actually knew what GKW stood for, but every trucker had heard about GKW. It was what you casually mentioned when you wanted to see if a rookie trucker could scare easy. Nobody Raj knew personally had ever disappeared into GKW, but everyone had heard the stories from truckers in trucker feed and drink joints in the Local Group. Now he was going to be one of the stories.

Remember what you learned in trucker training, he told himself. Epiclesis is universal.

He didn’t know exactly what the word Epiclesis meant, but apparently the meaning of the phrase was that anywhere you went in the universe there would be some planets that had gone through transformations into places habitable for humans. All he had to do was find one and get there.

The power gauge showed a little less than a quarter green. No communication. No data. No power source stations. Raj stared at the meter for a while. Then he said out loud what his father always said when things didn’t turn out as expected: “Well, at least we didn’t get deracinated into dark matter.”

“Human humor. You know I don’t laugh Raj. Instruct me,” said Nonna.

“Scan the star and galaxy patterns. Find me a place where I can breathe, a place we can reach on what energy is left.”

The scanners hummed at power conservation level. Raj went to his nook, found a handcrafted paperbook and read a chapter.

Nonna’s announcement, in that tone of voice Raj had chosen for her, didn’t sound at all encouraging: “There is a planet 2 parsecs away, within range of remaining power. Liquid water H2O. Oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Gravity slightly above Earth normal.”

“Inhabited?”

“Unknown. There are life signatures, but they are faint. Could be purely animal.”

“Large animal? Small animal?”

“Pastoral animal most probably.”

“Great. Take us there.”

He strapped himself in for the short burst of warp speed needed to traverse the distance. The rig’s Earth-time digital clock display advanced 20 minutes.

From the slowed down approach, Raj could see the planet was enormous, at least two and a half times larger than Earth, and as the rig descended closer to the surface, it looked like the green felt on a cueball  table with an uneven blue smear near the horizon. Nonna put the rig down smoothly on a grassy plain not far from a body of water so large that it reminded Raj of his home planet’s Mediterranean. As a child and young man, his family had spent Ferragosto in a small seaside town called Scario, south of Napoli, almost every year. Sometimes they went to Germany, to the far north, a place called Hammaborg, where his father’s parents lived. But after they died it was Scario and sometimes Trasimeno, where his grandmother with the scolding voice lived.

“Shut everything down,” Raj said. “Everything. Conserve whatever power we have left.”

“Shutting down, Raj.”

“Rest peacefully, Nonna.”

He opened the forward hatch manually and climbed down the ramp. The air was pleasant; it carried the scent of wild grass. He gripped a bottle of Vinvinrosso in one hand and a ration pack in the other. At the bottom of the ramp, his boots on the grass, he paused to contemplate this new place, a place he might never escape from, a place he might die in, alone, more alone than he had ever been in his life. The sky, blue melting toward violet, clean and cloudless, gave him no solace. He could see no birds, no insects in the grass, no animals anywhere, nothing but those stems of boot-high grass moving slightly in what was actually a rather pleasantly warm breeze. Impossibly far away and heading toward the far horizon, a tiny white dwarf star served as the planet’s sun; its tender heat caressed his face.

Raj clicked off his gravity boots, sat down on the slight slope that edged toward the water, pushed open the top of his Vinvinrosso with his thumb, and took a sip. It was the best thing he had tasted since his sojourn in Montepulciano near that Trasimeno lake in Italy where his parents took him on his 18th birthday to the shrine of La Littrice. That day he had been able to sip the holy Nobile liquor made exclusively for visitors to the shrine. Nobile was a deep red drink made from crushed and fermented Earth grapes. Vinvinrosso was similar in taste but had the telltale aftertaste of synthgrapes, a product that would not spoil, no matter how long it remained in storage. He opened his ration box and spooned up synthmeat with fennel. He watched the water. It looked like it could be synthetic too. He got up, walked to the water’s edge and tentatively dipped his toes in it. Cool. Refreshingly cool. And wet. He reached down and scooped up a palmful, tasted it. Yep. It was water. Just plain old water. No salty taste. No synth aftertaste.

After he ate his synthmeat and fennel ration and drank about half of his Vinvin, he lay back on the soft grass and thought about his mother. Would she light a joss stick for him in front of her favorite picture of him in his black trucker’s utility jumpsuit with the IC logo over his heart? No one in the family was religious, but there were traditions that remained. A joss stick burning in front of a departed loved one was such a tradition.

 His father, listed as Jewish on Raj’s birth certificate, was what earthlings referred to as an no-godder. He denied the existence of anything spiritual, regarded such beliefs as fantasies made up for the gullible, would never hold back his opinion on that score to anyone, and therefore only had friends who were likeminded. If anyone asked him about Raj, he would probably say “Raj is a trucker. That’s all you need to know. Truckers keep on moving until they dissolve into dark matter—like we all do.”

Raj drifted off.

When he awoke, he noticed that the little white star sun had slid closer to the horizon. Then a shadow fell over his eyes. He sat up abruptly. He looked about him and saw he was surrounded by a group of men. All of them were smiling and babbling at him in sounds he couldn’t decipher.

There were six of them, tanned and cheerful and dressed in pastel shades of blue, violet (like a part of the sky), rose pink, and one, who was extremely good looking by anyone’s standards, wore a bright cherry red short sleeved shirt and white shorts. His arms and legs were tan and covered with soft blond, well, what earthlings called peach fuzz.

 The men were all speaking at once. Raj held up his hands and made the universal gesture for “I don’t understand.”

The handsome one laughed, reached into the cloth pouch that was on his belt and held out a tiny bead. He signaled to Raj to put the bead in his ear. Then he gestured for Raj to speak.

Raj said: “My name is Raj, I am from the planet Earth in the Local Group. I come in peace.”

“…isn’t he adorable? — Look at that shiny hair. — Where do you think he’s from? — Look at his clothes. — He’s not a tourist for sure. — Ask him.”

“It’s working,” said Raj.

Six voices answered at once: “It’s working!”

They introduced themselves one by one, but the only name he could remember was Zeeko, the handsome blond man in the cherry red shirt. Raj assumed he was the leader of the group from the way he took natural command. Raj put on his boots, got up and saw an extremely large white object hovering over the water with its lip at the edge of the shore. It was shaped like a scallop shell and he could see that there were couches and seats on what you could call its deck, and tables and a bar on one side, and somewhere near the back a raised platform that he assumed must be like the bridge on his rig.

While the others continued to chatter among themselves—mostly commenting on his looks, Raj explained to Zeeko what had transpired and how he had arrived on this planet. He could see that Zeeko was a bit skeptical of the terms wormhole and warp drive, but made no big deal of that. He told Raj that travel off his planet had probably never occurred. This was not because they lacked the technology but because there had been a mutual decision not to ever do that. Raj was not the first to have lost his way among the stars and come here. In the very, very distant past, he said, a group of around 50 strangers had landed here. The Jogians had welcomed them, but the strangers were violent and caused havoc. The Jogians [he referred to the planet as Jogi and himself as a Jogian] had used the tactic of absolute social exclusion and neglect. After their supplies had run out and they could get nothing from the Jogians, the invaders had no longer been able to survive.

Raj tried to calculate how long he could survive on the supplies still on his rig. This was supposed to have been just a short delivery and pick up trip. A month, maybe two with emergency supplies included…

“Come with us,” said Zeeko. The group was now going to return to what the bead in his ear translated as Beach Resort Town. He thought about going back to the ship and staying there. But these guys seemed friendly, and well, if they had wanted him dead, they would have killed him while he slept, so what did he have to lose?

“Beach Resort Town is a lovely place. You’ll like it there.”

It was Zeeko’s shell. Raj used the word yacht, but the word shell kept coming back to his ear so he imagined that shell and yacht were interchangeable words for the same thing—a luxurious craft that hovered over the water soundlessly. Zeeko and his friends were on what Raj interpreted as a pleasure cruise. Darkness was approaching. The group walked up the gangway onto the lip of the shell and Raj was offered a seat on a very comfortable couch. The men sat in armchairs that they somehow maneuvered into a semicircle facing him, all smiling in anticipation.

Zeeko smiled at Raj. “Go ahead, tell us something about yourself.”

By the time the shell had cruised at a leisurely pace across the water to Beach Resort Town, Raj had told them about his life on Earth as a child and his training as a trucker and answered whatever questions the men could come up with.

As the shell silently approached what the men referred to as BRT, Raj noticed that none of the buildings were more than two stories tall. They were all designed similarly, wide windows on the ground floor, with a large terrace on the second floor. And the buildings were painted in the same pastel shades that the men wore.

When they arrived at where the shell was to be parked, on a piece of land to the right of what seemed to be the main street, the shell settled, everyone got off, shook Raj by the hand and left him with Zeeko. Together, they walked along what Raj had assumed was a kind of main street, with varicolored lights now illuminating the evening. The street was filled with cheerful men and women in colorful clothes. Raj assumed this was normal clothing for a BRT [Beach Resort Town].

Zeeko took him to a pink building, also only two stories high, but with wider than the others, with no second floor terrace. Over its entrance was a large circular logo, in green, of two hands shaking. The glass doors slid open and Zeeko walked up to a desk and introduced Raj to the person behind it.

  The smiling officials who came out of offices to greet him wore solid-color shirts of blue or orange or violet. This led him to believe that Zeeko too was some kind of official. After introductions were over, Zeeko took him to a feed and drink joint about 200 meters down the street from the pink building. The food, spicy, warm and lacking the taste of anything like meat, settled nicely. The drinks were refreshing, with a slightly rhubarb taste. A good complement to the food.

Zeeko then took him to one of the houses on the waterfront and showed him an apartment of the kind that he had once seen on Scario when his father took him to visit a canvas-painter friend of his who had done so well that his canvas-paintings were famous on various planets in the quadrant. This place had a large living room, with those broad glass windows he had seen on the other houses, a bedroom with a wide double bed, fully provided with bedding that to his eyes looked extremely comfortable after the sparse confines of his nook on the rig, a bathroom with shower, bidet and a separate toilet next to the bathroom. Raj asked what it would cost.

“It will cost you nothing. You are a guest. We don’t have what you refer to as money. We keep credits. You earn them for what service you provide for others, or for the whole town. Food-makers feed us, builders make places for us to live. A server serves. A repairer repairs. You’ll find something to do. You’re our guest in the meantime.”

“That’s remarkably civilized,” said Raj.

“Thank you,” said Zeeko. “Sleep well.”

It took him a few days to settle in and grasp what kind of society he was now living in. He understood, finally, from a conversation with his young guide, a cheerful young man named Hok. One morning, over breakfast, Hok casually asked him whether he’d left a partner behind on his world.

“No,” said Raj. “No, I haven’t got a partner. There was a girl on Centuri7, but that was never going to work out. She didn’t want to come back to Earth and settle into life on what she called a ‘backwater’ so…”

Hok’s face was politely puzzled.

“A girl,” Hok said. “You mean, a woman? You were together with a woman?”

“Well, yes.”

Hok considered this for a moment as if Raj had said he could flap his arms and fly. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, I learned about that. In history, when I was learning history of the Jogi. It used to happen among us, a long, long time ago. Do you, you know, copulate?”

Raj had been raised to speak openly, without shame. “Yes. If we like each other enough. Yes. If we both agree that it is OK to do that. Yes.”

“Men and women?”

“Yes,” said Raj, “Why? Is that strange?”

Hok shook his head in wonder and gave Raj a wry smile. “Men have men partners, women have women partners. It’s how we have always been. Some of the women choose to bear children, as a gift to society, and men make donations, the arrangements are very commonplace. But men don’t copulate with women. That just doesn’t happen.” He smiled. “Is men with men and women with women very strange where you come from?”

“No. It’s not strange at all. But it’s not the rule. It’s just some people. I’m not sure of the percentages, I’ve never checked the statistics. Nonna could probably tell me.”

“Nonna?”

“My resident system on the rig. She has data banks with all the information anyone could need.”

Despite the pleasant conversations with Hok and the cheerfulness of everyone he had met so far, Raj Hammerstein, who had been to forty-one planets in the Local Group, had met green, silver and spotted creatures with intelligence, had eaten snake-like creatures that appeared to study him from the plate, for the first time in his life felt deep down that he was now really an alien.

None of the Jogi were unkind. That was the trouble. They were warm, they were curious, and they wanted him to be happy. They set about arranging his happiness the way a village sets about helping a neighbor whose house needed repairs. Zeeko introduced him to his cousin. Hok’s older brother sent tasty cakes made from roots and grass that Hok said meant his brother was currently single and looking for a partner. A handsome musician named Bronzen asked him to dinner three times. And each time Raj said, with real regret, that he was very flattered. Bronzen said, “Perhaps another night,” and was extremely kind about it.

It was impossible. He tried. He truly did, because he was a fair man and a polite guest, and he sat across a table from a perfectly lovely person and waited for something to happen, and nothing did, nothing at all. His heart sat in his chest like a stone in a puddle. He felt like a man trying to sing, but he couldn’t find the key he was supposed to sing in, nor could he find his voice.

He took a job as a technical advisor for the local communication system. After he went back to his rig he got a portable communicator so he could stay in touch with Nonna and ask her technical questions or show her wires and chips and plugs, so she could figure out what was what. He earned credits. He was good at his job. He learned to appreciate the local food, and after he discovered the nuances of the various dishes, he liked it. It was something similar to the South Asian dishes his mother would prepare for the Diwali festival, but certainly nowhere near as spicy. He liked the music and the songs. Some of them had melodies that were in keys that made him nostalgic for that woman on Centuri7.

But his mood turned darker. The sky was relentlessly beautiful, the water was mostly serene, the wind never causing the waves to rise to an uncomfortable height, and everyone was kind and warm and wanted the best for him, but nevertheless he felt like he was trapped in a very large golden cage.

He slept badly. He spoke to Nonna on the communicator channel and she logically explained to him that survival in a social system meant that you had to become part of that system. “You are human,” she said. “Humans adapt. So adapt.”

One of the only places in BRT that had drinks resembling alcoholic drinks was the LingerOn Lounge. People went there to be loud. It was a low single story house with a roofed-over bar area and a large patio outside. Because it was at the edge of BRT and not near any residences, the music was played loud and everyone who went there felt allowed to talk loud and get raucous. Raj drank what he had named—for himself—a Sloppy. It was a mixture of two drinks they served. One was the rhubarb-tasting drink and the other was the alcohol-similar drink they called Gustino.

One evening, while sitting alone at the end of the bar with his Sloppy and his special kind of perpetual loneliness, the table behind him broke into laughter. It was the kind of laughter he recognized as disdainful, and that surprised him because he hadn’t run across any disdain since he had been here.

“...and she told the tourist’s mother that she was ugly!”

“Maddy Spitzthorn,” said one of the women at the table.

“Maddy.” Raj wondered if the earpiece had translated that correctly. He turned around and asked one of the women, “Maddy?”

“The worst woman in BRT,” she said.

“The worst woman anywhere,” said another woman with suppressed anger.

“Maddy has never had a partner who lasted longer than a week!”

“Tell me about it,” said the woman who was no longer trying to suppress her anger. “She wouldn’t recognize kindness if you brought it to her on a tray.”

“Because she’s rude, that’s why. To everyone! To men, to women, even to the BRT council!”

“I heard she threw a bucket of water at Zeeko.”

“But she loves her Trombys.”

They went on, and Raj listened. He was not a man who usually sat around listening to gossip, but he had been lonely for eleven weeks now, and a woman who was the worst in town sounded, if nothing else, like a refreshing change of pace. He leaned over and asked the woman sitting next to the angry woman, “Where can I find her?”

The woman did a double-take. She elbowed the angry woman. “He wants to go see Maddy.”

The angry woman gave him a broad smile. “I wish I could be there to see how she treats you, but I wouldn’t go near that place even if you gave me all your credits for the month.” She shrugged her shoulders and said: “She runs a Tromby place on the southern slopes over by the big hill. Ask anyone, they’ll show you how to get there.”

By this time the whole table, six women and four men, had fallen silent, as if they were at a funeral.

He thanked them and walked toward the door. The table exploded into loud conversation behind him. “Crazy.” — “Lost.” — “He doesn’t realize…”

The next morning, early, he went to the communication office and asked for some personal time. Cheerful and kind as always, he was granted the whole day by his team leader.

He knew more or less where the big hill was, but as he got to the edge of the BRT, he asked a guy wearing a plumber’s suit where the Tromby place was. The guy looked at him, rather astonished and asked him if he wanted to ride a Tromby or what? Raj told him that he just wanted to find out what a Tromby was and learn more about the Jogi way of life. The man shook his head and said, “Maddy Spitzthorn is not part of the Jogi way of life.” But he gave him the directions, and about 45 minutes later, after walking up the big hill for a while he saw, on a rather flat piece of ground, a small house of a similar architectural design to the houses in BRT, but with a radically weird paint job on the walls: solid broad stripes at about a 60 degree angle—black, gold, yellow, green, and a silver that sparkled in the light.

The door was open but there was nobody to be seen. He walked around to the rear of the house and about 100 meters away he saw a paddock with animals that to him looked like earthly Kangaroos. As he got closer, he saw that their rear ends were considerably larger and their front arms [legs?] were longer and had what he thought looked like elbows and paws. They—about 11 of them at a quick count—had noticed him approach and all stood very still watching him. As he got closer to the fence one of them let out a high-pitched whistle that continued for about 10 seconds. The others kept watching him carefully.

The woman who came charging across from a barn-like place with feeding troughs and water troughs beside one of its walls, was a bundle of furious energy in muddy boots, with very curly hair like the copper wires of an ancient earthly communicator system. Her face was red from the kind of rage he had only seen once, when his grandmother in Trasimeno had smashed a bottle of Nobile in a shop near the shrine. She accused the man of selling synth-laced Nobile and when the shrine authorities came, they used a chemical kit and indeed the Nobile was tainted and the man’s shop was shut down.

“Go away! Tromby rides have to be booked three days in advance. And we don’t do solo riders. Go back to BRT.”

“I’m sorry,” said Raj, “I’m looking for Maddy Spitzthorn.”

She put her hands on her hips and gave him a skeptical glare. “You found her. What do you want? If it’s a complaint from your partner, send it by electro. I’ll never answer it anyway.”

“I don’t have a partner, and I don’t want to make a complaint” said Raj.

“Then what the hell do you want?”

“Well, besides wanting to meet you, I wanted to know what a Tromby is?”

Then she looked down at his strange gravity boots [that he just couldn’t part with], his communicator outfit, which he chose to wear in a solid dark gray color, and then up to study his face, his blue eyes, his dark hair, and at that moment Raj, who had spent the past eleven weeks being looked at with sad kindly glances felt as if he was now under a microscope.

“Ahh. You’re the one from the stars,” she said. “The lost one. Rumor had it that you were OK to look at.”

“I heard you were exceptionally rude to anyone who crossed your path.”

“I am. It’s a gift.” Her dark eyes pierced into his. “You’re not here to try and be nice to me or something, are you? People try to be nice to me for a day or two and then I make it so they just can’t stand me any more. What is it exactly that you want?”

“I’ve had eleven weeks of everyone being kind to me and I think I’m going to hurt myself if it continues like that.”

There was a very long pause.

“Well,” said Maddy Spitzthorn. “You’ve come to the right place.”

The argument began over what a Tromby was, because Maddy, contrary to all Jogi teachings, believed that a Tromby was just a less developed form of a Jogi. Raj told her about evolution on Earth and she, for the first time during their conversation, nodded in agreement. But that didn’t last long. He mentioned how calm and friendly BRT was and how well he had been received and she immediately said “BRT is a town full of people who are polite because they can’t imagine a life without a partner—like my life.” She said the last part with just a slight tinge of what Raj felt could be regret.

Raj told her about why he didn’t have a partner.

“Oh, so now you think you are allowed to be a professional sad person.”

He called her a professional malcontent.

She smiled at that. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

They argued on the porch in front of the house. They argued inside over a pot of something she was cooking, which turned out to be a thick spiced stew that made him close his eyes in delight “Don’t you dare give me a compliment.”

“Too much water, too many spices.”

“Thank you,” she said, calmer than she had been before.

He told her everything. He told her about the rig, and Nonna, and the cargo of seed and fertilizer that was sitting in the hold of the rig on the far side of the water. He told her about wormholes and Earth and the Local Group and about his parents.

She perked up for a moment. “Your parents are a man and a woman?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s normal on Earth.”

“And you can’t,” she asked, “with the men?”

“No.”

“And I can’t with women.” She announced it the way she would probably tell her customers that she was closed now and they should all go back to where they came from. “I tried. Everyone knows I tried. Seven different women in the last five years. The way they ran away from me, inside I thought I was broken. OK. I treated them badly, I know, but I thought it was because I was just a bad person.”

“You are a malcontent,” said Raj. “You’re also quite a good cook.”

“Shut up.”

She was laughing, though. She was laughing the way a woman does who has not been allowed to laugh in a long time. She threw her head back and put her hand over her mouth. Raj looked at her copper wire hair and sun-browned face. For the first time since he had set down on this green and blue planet, he felt that special churning in his chest that meant juices had been awakened that had lain dormant for a long time.

She stopped laughing and gave him a strange look. “What was that?” she said.

“What was what?”

“In my stomach. Or just around my chest, I don’t know.” She put a hand flat against her heat. “It felt like I swallowed something very hot that settled down here and is radiating a warmth I have never felt before.”

“Yes,” said Raj. “I know. I have it too. And I haven’t had it in a long, long time.”

It took a few weeks, but as time went on, they saw more of each other. He had his communication job of course, and she had the Tromby rides thing, but in between, on days when he wasn’t servicing and when the rides were closed so that the Trombys could rest, they met and in between the arguments they laughed. He told her trucker stories and she told him tourist stories.

Then one day she asked him if she could visit his rig. He hadn’t been there since he got his communicator so he could keep in touch with Nonna and use her knowledge storage system for his job.

“Sure,” he said. “When would you like to go?”

“In eight days from today.”

That was very specific, so he asked her why eight days.

“BRT celebrates the Changeover Festival in 8 days and I want to be as far away from it as possible.”

“What is the Changeover Festival and why do you want to avoid it?”

Maddy scowled and walked in a small circle, her anger rising. “It lasts for 5 whole days and takes place when the wind comes from the southern parts and brings with it the sky water and the Breems so that the grass gets fed and can grow for the rest of the year.”

Raj knew that the year on this planet was 500 days long, and he had wondered how the grass managed without clouds and rain. “What are Breems?”

Maddy puckered her lips and made a face that looked as if she had smelled something awful. “They are slimy little beasts that hide in the sky water and fall onto the land and dig down under the grass where they live until the next Changeover.”

“And…”

“And they stink and crawl around and wiggle and dig and if you get them on you they stick to you with little suckers that they have. They’re disgusting.”

Raj pictured leeches and shuddered at the thought. “Do they also suck your blood?”

“Of course not. Why would they do that?”

“We have creatures like that on Earth and they suck blood out of people.”

“How horrible. No, Breems don’t do that. They just stink and are slimy and I hate them. But the BRT people love them. In fact they gather them up when they fall on the street and they cook them and eat them for all five days. Ugh!”

“So that’s why you want to go in 8 days.”

“Yes. But I also want to see your rig, since you talked so much about how cool it is to be a trucker.” She gave him a slightly snide sideways glance. “And I want to know what seeds are and what fertilizer is.” 

So 8 days later, just as the southerly wind began to blow and Raj for the first time saw what could be described as dark rainclouds coming slowly up from the south, they took four Tromby, two to ride and two as transporters, because Maddy was not going to use up credits on a super shell or a flat shell to get to the far shore when you could skirt the water, exercise the Trombys and get to shelter in the rig before the Breems started falling.

Raj was not comfortable riding the Tromby although Maddy had let him ride around the paddock on a shoulder seat a few times.

“You’re doing it all wrong,” she said.

“I feel completely out of balance.”

“That’s because you’re gripping the straps too tight, he’s not going to throw you off!"

“It feels like he’s trying to get rid of me.”

“Talk to him, nicely, say sweet things in his ear, not too loud. And relax your grip, sway in rhythm with his gait.”

The rig was still sitting on the shore where he had left her. Nonna had been warned of their arrival and lowered the ramp. Maddy got off her Tromby and unbuckled Raj from his seat. They went up the ramp into the rig.

Nonna, in her acerbic voice asked “Who is this?”

“Nonna, this is Maddy. Maddy, this is, well, Nonna, the resident system on the ship. She controls everything.”

“I am a navigational intelligence,” said Nonna.

Maddy stared at the lit screen and the lights of the bridge and said “Does she always talk in that tone?”

“Yes.”

“I love her,” said Maddy.

“What about the Trombys?” asked Raj.

“Oh they love eating Breems and having sky water fall on them. They won’t go far from here. Don’t worry about them.”

Nonna raised the ramp and the hatch closed automatically. Just after that they heard the first drops of sky water hit the rig, and then the constant smack of what Raj assumed were Breems. After 5 minutes of noise Nonna raised a minimum energy shield so that the sky water and the Breems no longer were able to reach the hull and the unpleasant noise stopped.

Raj played tour guide and took Maddy through the rig. First thing he did was show her his cabin nook, with his paperbook collection.

“What do you do with these things?”

“I read them.”

“How?”

Raj opened one of the books and explained that the lines in them were lines of words made up of letters from one of the alphabets that existed on Earth.

“We Jogi only have one alphabet. And we don’t have to read anymore anyway. At least not after the learning years. After that you can just ask and one of our machines will give you the answer. Like when you ask Nonna.”

Nonna used her criticizing tone: “He can’t stop bothering me with the simplest questions. He can be very annoying.”

“Nonna, please.” Raj was embarrassed.

“Please Nonna, go ahead,” said Maddy. “Has he always been like that?”

“When he was in his formative years he could never shut up at the dinner table. One day in Trasimeno after he spent a day chasing frogs…”

Maddy interrupted Nonna. “What’s a frog?”

“They are slimy like Breems but live in and out of the water.”

Raj broke in. “Nonna, we will be here for the next 5 days, so you can spend time telling Maddy whatever you want, but right now I’d like to show her around the rig.”

“Talk to you later Nonna,” said Maddy.

“Message received. Just don’t ask me to explain any technical terms while you are acting like a tour guide.” Nonna made a clicking sound as if she was turning off a switch just to show her disdain. There was never an on or off switch sound unless she was particularly disturbed by Raj.

All the manuals reassured truckers that onboard systems had no real emotional intelligence, but Nonna had been able to feed off Raj’s history with his parents and his real Nonna as well as all his emotions for so long that she was excellent at reproducing moods that came across as very real indeed.

After explaining more about paperbooks and his alphabet, they moved on to look at what was “under the hood.”

“This door hatch only opens after a palm and retina scan.”

“Why?”

“Because under the hood is the power system for the rig.” The hatch opened and they walked through.

He explained as best he could how mini fusion engines worked and how they generated power through infrared beam particles that were able to collide with the rest particles left over from the big bang and push the rig toward wormholes where light speed was not necessary because the wormhole served like a vacuum tube and sucked you through to the other side with minimum energy expenditure.

“Then why do you need so much power under the hood?”

Raj had an itch to ask Nonna but remembered her admonishment. His information about the details was rather sketchy so he said “Well, you need it to get across large distances in space. In the Local Group where Earth is located, there are plenty of energy refueling stations, so it’s easy to tank up, but out here we have no data and can’t talk with anyone so we have to just conserve what we have until…”

“Until?” Maddy let a flicker of concern cross in there behind her eyes.

“Until it gets cold under the hood.”

“How long will that take?”

“We can ask Nonna that later. Right now, let me show you the hold.”

The hold was full of cargo, seed crates from 57 different terraformed planets in the 7th Quadrant. There were also a thousand 500 kilogram sacks of rich dark micro fertilizer. It was biologically pure and compressed so that with one bucketful you could fertilize about 400 hectares of land. Maddy rummaged around among the crates. She took a Tromby foot-scraper from her utility belt and tried to pry one open.

“That won’t work. Here. You see this number pad? You have to give in the seven digit code and… hey presto!” The crate lid hissed and an edge was raised. Raj gripped under the lid and revealed the contents.

Maddy thrust her hand into the tiny black seeds. “How do they work?”

“You clear a patch of ground…”

“Get rid of the grass?”

“Yes, and then…”

Maddy looked satisfied. “Excellent. It’s what I have to do for the Tromby paddock, otherwise I have to clean the sticky grass stems from between their foot fingers all the time. That’s why I have this thing.” She showed him the foot-scraper she had tried to use on the crate.

“So, you clear the ground, a big patch of it, dig a few rows deeper into the ground, sprinkle some of these seeds into the trench, cover it up with soil, add some water from time to time and in a few weeks the plant will start to grow.”

“Plant?˙

“Yes. For instance, these seeds here are for squash.”

“Explain.”

“A squash is long, green, grows from a flower thing that comes out of the ground, from the seed, and it has an inside, under its skin, that you can cook and eat. It’s quite good.”

“So these seeds are for food?” Maddy was intrigued.

“Right.”

“All these crates have seeds for food?”

“Yes.”

“So what is this fertilizer stuff?”

Raj really wanted to ask Nonna for technical information but instead he said “It’s stuff that you can spread over the cleared ground where the seeds are, or even on cleared ground where there are no seeds and it will make the ground help the seeds to grow.”

 “Do you know what grows here? Nine different types of grass, six from the northern parts and three from the southern parts. And roots. Roots are gathered by hand from near the mountain rivers on the far side, are processed in root factories and then distributed to all the people on the surface. The only other thing we have to eat are Breems, but they only come to our region once a year. In the southern parts the sky water falls three times a year, so they gather all the extra Breems, cook them and distribute them to the other regions in glass jars.”

“Well here are all sorts of seeds for all sorts of plants: cabbage, cauliflower, eggplant, beets, spinach, lima beans, chickpeas, lentils, onion, garlic, ginger, tomato, watercress. And there are more crates back there. I’d have to check the manifest to have a complete list.”

“Can we take some seeds with us when we go back? I want to try some of these vegetable things.”

“Sure.”

“Tell me which ones taste best.”

Raj and Maddy exited the hold and kept talking about vegetables and how to make them grow, and after a while it was clear that both of them were tired, so Raj showed her the other nook. It was equipped with a comfortable bed, a bath area which included towels and soap and of course a private toilet, a closet with four different solid-color rig jumpsuits [all too large for her] and a ration hatch that would serve her anything she wanted to eat or drink. All she had to do was touch a picture of the item on the screen above the hatch.

Raj showed her how to make the door slide closed and then he turned to go away, but Maddy reached out and stopped him with her hand on his arm.

Maddy looked at him in a way she hadn’t done before. “Thank you.”

Raj felt heat rise up within him, but then Maddy turned away abruptly and gave him a curt “Goodnight.”

He stepped through the  door. “Goodnight.” He heard the door hiss shut behind him.

In his nook he washed, changed into a thin bedsuit and pushed his pillow into a form that could support his shoulders. He waved the light on over his bed and picked up his paperbook. He found the chapter he wanted to read but couldn’t concentrate properly on the words. Something had happened there between him and Maddy. He felt it. And he was sure that she felt it too.

Oh well, he thought, it either is or it isn’t. We’ll see what we will see.

The five days passed quicker than either of them wanted. They were getting comfortable being in each other’s company despite being confined in the rig. Maddy and Nonna had developed the kind of relationship that comes when two people have similar personalities and like to explore aspects of each other that, yes, men often can’t or won’t take the time to explore.

Apparently Maddy and Nonna had long conversations after Maddy entered her nook for her night’s rest. It became obvious on day number three when Maddy came to Raj and said “So you are a heterosexual.” She was smiling.

“Uh, yes. But how…?”

“Nonna explained it all to me. Heterosexuals have partners that are not the same gender as they are and they, well, they can reproduce by doing physical things with each other.”

Raj felt as if they were getting into dangerous territory. “Y…e…s…”

Maddy was grinning now. “She showed me on the screen.”

Raj was embarrassed. He wasn’t a prude by any means but for some reason this was embarrassing.

“She showed me your gender and how it works.” She was looking directly at him now waiting for his facial response.

Raj said “OK.” He wasn’t sure what his face muscles were doing.

“You have one of those things; she called it a phallus. Is that right?”

He hesitated a moment. “Yes.”

“Nonna is very good. I watched a screen show that explained exactly how it functions when it is inside my gender.” Her smile was still there but no longer a grin. “And when the stimulation from my gender is right, it makes the baby juice come out and that gets absorbed by my gender and after a while a baby is born.”

He was glad she kept it simple. Nonna hadn’t allowed anything prurient to be shown to her.

Then Maddy said “Do you know how my gender gets to that right kind of stimulation?” Now she was a little more serious.

Raj was getting more and more uncomfortable. “Yes. Yes, I know.”

“Have you been able to stimulate the other gender correctly when you were with them?”

Oh boy thought Raj, this is getting really awkward.

“As far as I know, yes, I’ve had no complaints.”

“Good.” Maddy turned away and walked over to the big screen table where they had drawn squares which represented her house, the paddock and some fields that they wanted to clear and use to start their planting venture. She steered the conversation into that direction and Raj felt both relieved and yet curious. Something was happening and he didn’t know what it was exactly.

The end of the Changeover came and Nonna unsealed the hatch and let the ramp down.

The Trombys came waddling over. They looked as if they had put on some weight and their eyes were shiny. Maddy said that shiny eyes in a Tromby meant that they were happy. They put the back-saddles on the two they were going to ride and loaded the other two with seeds and some fertilizer. They had chosen seeds from 5 different vegetables, including beans, tomatoes, squash, eggplant and cabbage. Raj only took less than 100 milliliters of fertilizer because that would be more than enough for the small patch they wanted to use as a test to see how or even if the plants would grow.

Nonna reminded him that the flowers of the plants needed to be pollinated, so either they would have to do that by hand or they would have to find some kind of insects that could do that for them. Maddy wasn’t sure what an insect was because she had never actually seen one anywhere around BRT. When they got back she would consult the machine to find out if there were such things on the surface.

On the way back he was much more comfortable riding the Tromby. He whispered soothing words in its ear, and even though he was sure the beast understood nothing, he felt that it responded to the dulcet tone of his voice and waddled smoothly and rhythmically along the edge of the water.

They went straight to Maddy’s place, unloaded the seeds and fertilizer, stored them in a dry room in her house, drank a cup of root tea and said almost nothing to each other while they sat on the deck at the front of her house watching the white dwarf star sun edge slowly toward the horizon.

“Well,” said Raj, at a loss for words, “I guess we’ll meet again to work on the field?”

Maddy was staring dreamily at the purple part of the sky. “What? Oh, yes, of course.” She got serious and businesslike again. “In 7 days the warmer period begins. I think that would be a good time to plant.”

“How long does the warm period last?”

“Until moon nine appears on the horizon just after the sun goes down, in about 200 days or so. Moon nine is not the most reliable moon. Sometimes it’s late, sometimes it’s early, but soon after it appears, the temperature changes from warm to not so warm.”

“Cold?”

Maddy shrugged. “Some people say cold, some people say not so warm. I say not so warm. The Trombys like it better when it’s not so warm. They run around the paddock and bump into each other a lot. Now I wonder if it’s that gender thing you heterosexuals get up to.” She gave him a little smile, but replaced it with her usual non-smile as soon as she noticed what she had said.

“Yeah, OK. Sounds good. See you in 7 days.” Raj said it quickly, hiding her embarrassment and his.

Raj felt as though he should give her a hug or at least shake her hand or make some kind of gesture, but she just stood there with that non-smiling face and so he bowed his head slightly and said “See ya!” Then turned and walked away.

He was yearning to look back but didn’t dare to, just kept going until he got back to BRT and his place where, for the first time since he’d been here it felt good to be home.

Home. That’s what this place is now. Home. He let out a sigh.

Seven days later he went to see her and found that she had already cleared a patch of ground on the far side of the paddock, far enough away so that Tromby customers couldn’t see it, but still close enough so that she could reach it easily whenever she wanted. Raj showed Maddy how to turn the soil and set the seeds. Her house had water, so it was easy to fill buckets with water and keep the patch wet. The warmer days had started and the white dwarf looked like it was closer now and stayed up longer in the sky.

Raj kept working at his communicator job in BRT, servicing customers who had issues with their systems, and kept being friendly with the men and women he knew or met. But he had noticed that they treated him a bit differently now. They no longer looked at him with those sad Oh poor creature looks that he had gotten before. He wasn’t sure why until one day he ran into Zeeko at the LingerOn.

“Zeeko, hello, how are you?”

“Well Raj, how are you?” Zeeko gave him a crafty look. “I hear you have been spending a lot of time with Maddy Spitzthorn.” He smiled.

“Uh, yes, we, we have some common interests.”

“Well that is just wonderful Raj, we are all very happy for you.” He paused a moment then added “For both of you.”

Raj wanted to explain but Zeeko said he had an appointment that he had to get to and left after patting Raj softly on the shoulder.

Later that evening he overhead a conversation about Maddy. Two men and two women were at a table and one of them said: “I saw her at the service exchange office and she was actually being nice to the lady at the desk. She was smiling and talking in a normal voice.” “Really?” said the man across from her. “The rumor is that she’s turned into a… what do they call it again?” The other man at the table said: “Heterosexual.” They all laughed when they heard the word, as if it was a joke.

The next day he went to see Maddy and told her about Zeeko and the conversation he had overheard at the LingerOn.

She had a brush in her hand and was brushing the hair on a Tromby’s back. She wouldn’t look at him directly. “Oh,” she said. “Is that so?”

Raj put his hand on her arm. She stopped brushing the Tromby. “This is serious.”

She turned and looked him in the eyes. “Is it serious?”

Her eyes were wide open and searching his eyes for an answer. He felt a kind of charge coming from her to him, a force that drew him a step closer. “Yes. It is serious.” His voice had changed tone. It was a touch deeper, a touch quieter, and it held a gravity he had never used with anyone before.

“Good.” She said. She didn’t lower her gaze, she didn’t step back, but neither did she step closer to Raj.

“What do we do?”

“You said you know how to make my gender feel good. Right? OK. Then let’s see how you think that should go.” She went back to brushing the Tromby. Then she looked over her shoulder at Raj, who was more or less frozen in place. “Not right now. I have to finish with the Trombys. Come back tomorrow in the evening and we can sit together, eat something, maybe talk. I don’t know. It’s all new for me too.” She smiled at him.

Raj perked up, took a deep breath and said “OK. Yeah. Sure. Sounds good. Uh. Yeah, I’ll come back tomorrow and, uh, yeah, we can talk and, uh eat and…”

“Just go now, I have to finish with the Trombys.” She turned away and continued brushing.

“Yep! OK. I’ll do that. Bye!”

“Bye” she said without turning to look at him.

Raj walked back to BRT and to his house in a kind of dreamy stupor only half realizing what had just happened. He ended up lying in bed awake for a while, staring at the ceiling, wondering if what he thought was happening was actually happening. Then he fell asleep and had the strangest of dreams. He was back on Earth talking to his mother and telling her about his adventure on this other planet where he’d met this little bombshell of a woman and… then it was morning and he had to get ready for work.

He tried hard to concentrate on his service but people at the communications office had to repeat things two, sometimes three times before he snapped out of his bubble and understood what they were trying to say. He blamed it on his in-ear interpreter, but they gave him strange looks, as if they only half believed him.

After service he went home, took a long shower, put on fresh underclothes and ordered a new royal blue one piece jumpsuit which arrived 20 minutes later through the pneumatic tube system connected to every house in BRT. He took the jumpsuit out of the cylindrical container, closed the container and put the empty into a rack next to the in and out tube box.

It was perfect, fit well and looked good on him.

Raj felt as if he should take something with him, a present of some kind. But what? Something useful. Maddy liked useful things. Too bad they had no flowers in BRT. Actually, he hadn’t seen flowers anywhere around the lake. Maybe that was going to be a problem with the vegetables too. No insects, no flowers get pollinated. Then he thought of something. He spoke with Nonna and a few minutes later rented a hoverboard and rode it back to the rig.

Around sundown, which came later than usual after the Changeover, Raj arrived at Maddy’s. As usual, the door was open and the lights were on and Maddy was nowhere to be seen. He called out her name a couple of times, decided instead to walk over to the paddock, but she wasn’t there either. The Trombys knew him well now and hardly reacted to his presence. He walked around the rear of the house and back to the front door. He called out her name once more at the entrance and then walked into what earthlings would call the living room, the largest room in Maddy’s house. It had a comfortable sofa that faced the broad front window all the houses were designed with. It was where they spent their evenings after a meal, talking, with the lights dimmed so that the star-studded sky was clearly visible.

He decided it would be safer to just put his little package on the low table in front of the sofa and sit down and wait for Maddy to appear. He certainly didn’t want to do anything that would cause her to click into angry mode. Not tonight. He sat there looking out through the window into the gathering darkness and wondered if he was perhaps just engaged in some magical thinking. Was what he felt in his solar plexus the same thing that Maddy felt? Was tonight going to be a special night, or just another night of root soup and long conversations about vegetables and Earth and Nonna and the rig?

Raj recognized the soft music that began playing over the speakers hidden in the walls near the corners of the room. He had actually seen and heard a musician play the melody on the lead instrument in the music at the LingerOn one evening. In earthling terms he could only describe the instrument as  resembling a forked clarinet, long, black, held to the mouth and then shortly after the mouthpiece diverging into two long black tubes with a flared bell at the end of each. The player had one hand on each tube and worked the keys on it to make the sounds rise and fall. The melodies came out in strange sometimes dissonant harmony. It was not unpleasant to his ear. In fact, it immediately changed the atmosphere of the room and he leaned back on the sofa and relaxed into its softness, closed his eyes and let the music in.

The smell of spicy root soup drifted over to his nostrils and he opened his eyes and saw Maddy setting the table on the far side of the room near the entrance to her cooking room [kitchen in earthling terms]. Raj had been noticing that lately he was using BRT terminology more, even in his thoughts, not translating them in his head like he had previously—sky water, cooking room.

Maddy looked different. Her usually untidy red curls had been fluffed up and set nicely around her face, which looked softer and more serene than usual. She also wore a brand new jumpsuit, but hers was a soft pastel yellow, a color she would never wear if she had to work with the Trombys or was going to the vegetable field. In fact he doubted if she’d ever wear a color like that to BRT, where pastels were normal for both residents and the holiday crowd.

Raj got up from the couch and started toward Maddy but then stopped and went back and picked up the small box he had brought with him.

Maddy had finished setting the table. She turned to face Raj and he immediately felt his heart jump a little in his chest. He overcame his hesitation and said “This is for you,” handed her the small box and took a step back so he wouldn’t crowd her personal space, something she had made clear she wasn’t fond of letting happen.

Maddy looked up. Her eyes sparkled. She smiled. “For me?”

Raj allowed himself to smile back. “Yes.” Then he said “Or, for us.”

Maddy maintained her smile as she pressed the button on the lid and the box hissed open. She raised the lid and took out a small glass vial. A puzzled look came to her face.

Raj, unable to suppress his excitement said “Samarian one-day fly eggs.” Maddy’s puzzled look didn’t change. “The vegetables will sprout flowers soon, when they start to emerge from the ground, those flowers need to be pollenated or the vegetables won’t bear their fruit. You checked and said there aren’t any insects here. On Earth and the terraformed planets in our quadrant, it’s the various insects that go from flower to flower and do the pollination work. Samarian flies only live for one day. They won’t upset the eco-balance here and they’ll do the work we can’t possibly do as well as they can.”

Maddy took a step closer to Raj and put her arms around him. This had never happened before. Raj was unsure of how to respond, but he tentatively put his arms around her as well. The hug lasted for about 10 seconds and she let go, so he did too.

“Let’s eat,” she said.

The root soup tasted better to him than it had ever tasted before. Was it because he was finally getting accustomed to the planet and to the food, or did it have to do with something else.

“Did you notice?” asked Maddy.

“The root soup?” She nodded. “Yes. It tastes better than ever.”

She smiled at him. “It’s Nonna’s recipe. She called me over the network and told me she had analyzed the roots and grass and various spices we have here and then suggested I cook it following her instructions.”

“Suggested?” Raj was a bit surprised by that.

“Oh she’s very nice when she talks with me.”

“Oh,” said Raj, a little surprised. “Do you talk often?”

“Every day,” said Maddy with a smile. “She’s very helpful.” Maddy finished her soup and put her spoon down. “We talk about the vegetables of course and how much water they should get in this weather, how much fertilizer I should use. But she even had some helpful things to say about the Trombys.”

Raj was taken aback. He had always considered Nonna to be his, and was disappointed to realize that he was not the only one who talked so intimately with her. He would ask her some questions about why the next time he spoke with her.

After dinner Maddy and Raj went into the living room, sat on the couch and for a minute or so said nothing at all, just looked out through the window into the starry darkness.

“There is something I would really like for you to do for me—for us,” said Maddy, her eyes sparkling again.

Raj could practically hear his heart beating in his chest. “Yeah, sure, anything.”

“I would like you to move the rig over here next week, closer to the house and the vegetable field. Nonna said it can be done. She already has a spot picked out. But you have to be in the rig and command it to come here.”

Raj was thrown off course by that. “Why?” He put his hand up to stop himself. “Uh, I mean, I have nothing against it, but why?”

“Because besides having all the supplies we might need to expand the vegetable field, once the tourists return, we can get extra service credits by taking them through the rig and showing them how it works.”

“That is a good idea.” Raj nodded and then said, “And I’ve noticed nobody has entertainment screens here, just service screens. We could use the large command screen to show what we call films. People who act in front of a camera, you know?”

“Pretenders?”

“Is that what you call them here?”

“Yes, but they only service in places like the LingerOn, and sometimes during the star festivals during the cooler time in the meeting hall in the center of BRT.”

Their conversation continued on, animated by the new possibilities that were emerging with the ideas. It got so late that Maddy suggested Raj stay the night. He was willing to sleep on the sofa in the living room, but she insisted that he come upstairs with her and showed him a small room next to hers that had what looked like a comfortable bed in it.

“Do you think that is OK for you?”

“Of course,” said Raj.

“I’ll go to the bathroom first, then you can go in and wash, or whatever it is you do before you go to bed.”

“Thank you.” Raj watched her walk away and enter the bathroom. He went into the room, sat on the bed—it was very comfortable—and clicked off his boots. He had nice fresh underclothes on, so he unzipped his jumpsuit, stepped out of it and folded it across the chair that was in the corner. He went back to sit on the bed and wait.

Maddy said “Your turn,” as she passed his door. She was carrying her pastel jumpsuit across her forearm. Her underclothes were light pastel and revealed her feminine form without showing any skin, except of course her arms and legs, which in the short glimpse that Raj had of them, looked to be esthetically pleasing arms and legs.

He carried out his ablutions, regarded himself in the mirror and saw that his body had not deteriorated during his stay. He got plenty of exercise, ate well, and there didn’t seem to be any real diseases here. He had seen people with what on Earth was called the common cold, but nothing more serious. In fact nobody ever mentioned doctors or hospitals or emergency services. It was as if those things either didn’t exist or were just not really very necessary.

On his way back to his room, he saw Maddy standing in her door frame. She was looking at him with those sparkly eyes of hers. She smiled while she held up her forefinger and crooked it at him, beckoning.

Raj walked toward her without any hesitation.

Life carried on as usual for Raj and Maddy.

She took care of her Trombys, preparing for the new tourist season, while Raj continued at his job with the communication center. The only noticeable change was that Raj spent sometimes three, sometimes four days at Maddy’s place during the Jogi week, which was actually only six days long—four service days, two personal days. People were allowed to arrange personal days however they wanted, as long as their personal days didn’t interfere with general service to the people. In the second week he went over to the rig with her and prepared it for transfer to the spot Nonna had picked out near Maddy’s house but far enough away from the Trombys and the vegetable field so that neither would be affected.

Raj was in his element and, it must be said, was showing off a little in his role as trucker in his rig. Nonna’s voice had not moderated for him even though she was aware of the changed circumstances. He was used to it. Even in their private communications in the past two weeks she had not ceased to give him advice in that tone of hers. He really didn’t mind. It sometimes woke up a little nostalgia for his previous life on Earth.

After the rig was settled, Nonna made sure that the solar panels which had been hidden under the skin of the hull were revealed and deployed for energy capture so that what energy still remained under the hood could be conserved.

The ramp was lowered, Maddy and Raj walked down it and stood for a moment on the grass taking in the scene. Nonna had chosen a small flat spot on a rise about 400 meters from the house and paddock. From where they were now they had a view of the house and paddock to their left, and down to their right they could see BRT in the distance where it skirted the body of blue water.

Maddy took Raj’s hand and they walked toward her house. The ramp went up behind them.

“Rig secure,” announced Nonna into both of their in-ear communicators.

The End