((NOTE: I have tried to find time, but the time will not be found. So, yeah, it's sort of half a chapter instead of a full one, but... well, anyhow. This is a hard bit to write. Shut up! Yes it is! ...Also thanks to whoever it was for the Entwives idea...))
Each morning Marshall Dillon took his hover-scooter from his run-down second-story flat in Yasnai out to the solar panels to do maintenance. He visited the fields in rotation - just as he completed checking up on the final area in his queue, the first on the list would be ready for his attentions again. It was a boring job, but it paid well, and he wasn't about to complain. He was twenty-three; he'd worked on solar collectors since high school. In the thousands of hours he'd logged in the desert, Marshall had seen a lot of odd things - dust storms that descended from a clear sky and moaned with human voices; patches of trees that migrated from one end of the horizon to the other over the course of a single month; a random wandering elephant, half-starved and piteous, that smashed three panels before it ran bellowing into the distance; phantom mountains shimmering in the far west - but never anything quite so inexplainable as this.
He had been realigning a gear, humming a folk song, minding his own business - and then suddenly he felt the hair raise on his neck, as though he were being watched; he turned around, and there was - well, he couldn't quite tell in the long light, and the figure was half-hidden behind a panel support - but he thought it was a girl.
"Hello," he said in astonishment. "Can- can I help you?"
She stared at him blankly and didn't move. Marshall was reminded of a movie he saw once in which scientists brought prehistoric humans into the future - or maybe they travelled back in time, he couldn't remember which - but at some point the scientists in the movie used a butane lighter to start a fire. Slowly out from behind trees and rocks crawled awed cavemen, gaping and jittery, curious but uncertain. This person (certainly grimy and disheveled enough to be one of the movie's ancient hominids) was behaving very much like that. He wondered if this situation weren't something similar.
"Hey," he said, "you wanna come over here? I won't bite; I promise." He moved a step closer, holding out his hand as he would to a frightened animal to show his trustworthiness - never mind that he was holding a spanner, it couldn't look all that menacing. She frowned, said something in an Arabic-sounding language, and backed up a step. Marshall sighed. "You want me to just leave you alone? I have food," he added, rummaging in his pocket for the half of a candy bar stored there. After a brief search, watched by his guest with quizzical suspicion, he produced a melty Reeses peanut butter cup, broke off a small chunk and put it in his mouth to show its safety, then held the remainder out to her. The strange girl seemed to realise then that he was not an enemy; she accepted the proferred Reeses and upon examining it for almost a minute took a small bite. Immediately her face lit up; she began babbling in that peculiar language (on second thought, maybe it was African - Swahili or something... or maybe Scandanavian - not like the panel repairman knew anything about languages), finished the candy, and then drew a little pictorial map in the sand with her finger, pointing at it emphatically and babbling some more.
Marshall shook his head, baffled. "I'm sorry, kiddo, but I can't understand a word you're saying. Look, it's getting dark; why don't you come back to my place and we can get you cleaned up?" He managed to convey this proposition to the girl - heaven knows how - and to coax her onto the scooter; though clearly wary, once they began to move she seemed surprisingly unafraid. Cool night air rushed past them - twilight was really the only cool time in Yasnai - the flickering fluorescents of the city grew near, and within the hour they were at the discoloured door of his apartment. "Welcome home," Marshall announced, waving his arm to indicate the seedy neighborhood with its potholed cement, drifting newspaper, burglar bars on the windows, drug dealers in the alleyways. Somewhere a stereo or a television set was blaring; a dog barked and a couple was screaming at each other in a house down the way. But when he glanced at his visitor, it was clear she saw not a trashy ghetto but some kind of mystical fairyland - she was looking around with the unbelieving awe and big saucer eyes of a child on a snowy morning, like one seeing something incredible for the first and only time. "Mani... Sina yamen... ai, Yavanna!" she murmured while Marshall dug through his pockets for the key. After he got the door unlocked he had to call her three times and tap her on the shoulder twice before she saw and followed him inside. One would think his brown shagg carpetting woven from gold from the way she stared at it. It was kind of flattering, actually.