JOURNEY OF REMEMBRANCE
Part II
Light fell in brilliant yellow bars across the thin top sheet of the bed she lay in. She was in a hot, stuffy room that smelled of dust, rust, and a tiny bit of blood. The walls – what the woman could see of them, appeared to be made of metal plates rough-welded together. The window through which the sunlight filtered was barred with flat iron slats.
Rem lifted her right arm to find it covered in bandages. It hurt and her head felt hazy. She could feel nothing below her waist. She was horribly thirsty.
"Good to see you awake," a soft, deep voice said. Rem looked for where the voice had come from. She felt something warm touch her left hand and saw a bearded face above her.
"Water," she whispered. It was the only thing she could think about at the moment. The man looked behind his shoulder and shouted to someone Rem couldn't see.
"Mirabelle, fetch us some water, pronto!"
A gruff female voice responded. "They're running the Hydro-Plant at the limit of capacity. We can't spare water for the dying."
"Just a pint, Mirabelle. Have a heart! She'll make it."
"That's whatcha said about the last one. By the looks of her, I'd say she ought to be given a lethal now and besides, how's she gonna survive out here wit only one leg?"
Rem lurched up in bed, appalled at what was being said about her. "No!" she choked with her dry and burning throat. "Must live...gotta...find my boys..." she fell back down into her pillow.
"Easy, easy now," the man beside her bed intoned. "Don't mind Mirabelle. She's all talk and nonsense and she is going to fetch you some water. Right, Mira?"
"Yeah, yeah," Mirabelle groused as she left the room. She returned a few minutes later carrying a glass, which she handed to the man. The man gently placed the vessel's edge to Rem's lips. She drank deeply, choking and coughing a few times in the process, being a bit overzealous in the drinking. The water slid down her throat in a cool, refreshing wave.
"Th-thank you." she whispered to her companion. "Where am I? I've got to find Vash and Knives."
Rem tried to get up again, only to fall back. The bushy-bearded man placed his hand on her forehead. "Easy," he said "You just got out of surgery yesterday and you won't be going somewhere for quite some time."
"Surgery?" Rem asked, "Huh?"
"Listen. You've been through an awful lot. We're in the hospital – I guess you could call it a hospital... it's so ramshackle, but the best we could manage. We're in Sedona. Sedona... it's what we call this town. You were the only survivor from your ship. We found a few from your vessel – from the Coldsleep cargo - several days after the Crash, but they all perished before we could get them into undamaged cryo-chambers."
"They all...died?" Rem questioned, barely managing a squeak.
"I'm sorry." The gentleman replied. "I know, I know. Don't cry. We've had you in Coldsleep for nine months. I didn't want to take you out so soon, because of the extent of your injuries, but the power began failing. You suffered many second-degree and a few third-degree burns to the right half of your body. Your left..." He sighed, continuing on, "We tried to save your leg, but it was a lost cause. Had to amputate just above the knee. We can fit you with a prosthetic... if you survive."
Rem stared at the man.
"I'll make sure you survive. My name is Greer, Dr. Salem Greer. I was a member of the cargo on SEEDS vessel 171. From what data we could gather, we know you were on Alpha Ship. Your survival is critical if we are to find out what happened... why we crashed on this desert world. No need to speak now. You need to rest. I do need to ask, Miss, can you tell me your name? Do you remember your name? Most of the crew records we found-"
"Saverem..." Rem whispered, "Record keeper and Plant Technician Rem Saverem. Has anyone found..." Rem felt dizzy and had to pause for a moment, "Has anyone seen my boys? Twins... they look around eleven years old, blonde... Knives has blue eyes, Vash has light green eyes... very fair skin, spiky hair – at least Vash... Knives' hair is shorter..."
Greer calmly interrupted her. "No one around here's found any children matching that description. Miss, I'm sorry, but no one from Alpha Ship except for you survi - "
"No." Rem said as forcefully as she could muster, squeezing Greer's hand and looking straight at him, her eyes clearer than Greer had yet seen them. "I sent them in an escape pod. I must find them."
"Whoa, girl! You can't get up! You're forgetting you've just had your leg sawed off! You don't feel it now, but when the morphine wears off - "
"Aah!" Rem screamed upon inadvertently stretching a particular muscle.
"See?" the doctor scolded. "We'll find them. Rest now. I'll be here for anything you need."
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It was several days before Rem was allowed to see, firsthand, the extent of her wounds. She was given a mirror with which to see her face. A rather elegant smattering of light burn scars ran up the right side of her neck and right cheek. The markings reminded her, vaguely, of the markings of a Trill in the mythology of "Star Trek," one of her favorite ancient science fiction television universes.
Her right arm was a web of scars, puckered white and red. Dr. Greer remarked that it was quite a lucky thing that she could still move it without much trouble. He helped her in physical therapy, getting her out of bed and onto a crutch. He took her outside the confines of the hospital for brief periods, where she could witness the life and building of Sedona firsthand.
In the center of the village was a massive glass bulb, the main Plant. Around it, built from scavenged spaceship scrap and adobe, were tiny houses and shops. Most of the windows on these were made from polymer scraps and special heat-shielding glass, scavenged from the ship that crashed here. However, there was a working glassblower in town who made use of the plentiful local sand.
"We named it after a place in the Arizona region of the old United States back home," Greer explained. "Sedona – it was the name of a town surrounded by red canyon walls." He pointed to the high cliffs that surrounded the budding city. "These red cliffs reminded a few of our people from the Arizona region of Sedona. The original Sedona was said to have special energy vortexes. I don't know about this place, but it was a lucky thing, if you could call any part of the Crash lucky, that a ship crashed right here. We have a main plant and a small Hydro-Plant to keep us going and to build the city around. These cliffs make a perfect shelter from typhoons and stand storms."
"Typhoons?" Rem asked. "Is there an ocean near here?"
"No, no, no," Greer replied. "As far as we've heard from transmissions from others... no one on this planet has seen anything resembling an ocean. We just call the fiercer windstorms typhoons because they act that way. Furious, like typhoons and hurricanes, but born of the seas of sand."
Rem's recovery was a slow and painful process. Salem Greer told her that she was healing astonishingly fast, but her burns pained her for what seemed eternity and learning how to use the crutch effectively was a long process through which she endured many falls.
The most painful part of the process was the attachment of the prosthetic. It had to be done without anesthesia or pain reducers of any kind. The cybernetic leg Dr. Greer and the other physicians of Sedona fitted her for needed to have some of its inner wiring connected directly into nerves for it to work properly. The nerves of the remaining leg needed to be alive and fully active in order for the major connections to be made in the correct places.
Rem screamed in agony and writhed with every connection made. Mirabelle, and another nurse, a muscular woman by the name of Sforzando Bluesummers, held her down as the procedure was done.
Salem Greer took her to his home to recover from the attachment. Rem had a leg again, but would be sore and unable to use it for several days. The staff of the hospital felt that, since she was otherwise healthy, that she was taking up valuable bed space. In any case, Rem really had nowhere to stay, no home of her own.
Most of the citizens of Sedona lived with people who had no familial relationship to them. There were many couples and groups of threes, fours, and fives, and even more – who had all been strangers before the Crash, living together in the same small houses. Salem Greer was a lone widower. He lived with the Bluesummers family.
Rem thought the Bluesummers a lovely bunch. There was Sforzando, a woman in her early forties who was the daughter of a farmer back on Earth. Her husband was a rather thin, tall man by the name of William. They had a son and daughter between them, ages nineteen and twelve, respectively. They were Soprano and Melody. The children both had the strangest blue-violet tint to their hair, inherited by their father. The hair was a natural feature, surprisingly, for the color. William Bluesummers explained that his grandfather had been a "designer baby", a genetic modification before such practices were outlawed. Anomalies that presented themselves in the body of the original "designer" were occasionally passed down to their offspring.
Among "designers" were genetic results unforeseen by the doctors who modified their embryonic DNA. Most of these results were rather harmless, such as unnatural hair and eye colors. Some of these were dangerous deformities. Sforzando herself was descended from a "designer", as well. Her hair was brown and her eyes green, but she had what she called "mind-empathy", a low-level ability to feel the emotional anguish and to read the emotionally charged thoughts of others. She claimed that she could never really "read anyone's mind", but that she could know what someone was truly feeling, the agony behind a faked smile, to know when someone was telling a lie.
Through all of this, a rather disastrous clerical error occurred. The city of Sedona had the name of Rem Saverem among their Crash survivors, holding her in high esteem as a friend in the village and knowing what her rank and duties had been. Somehow, however, the village record keepers had forgotten to mark her down as a survivor in their files, due, in all probability, to the confusion among who belonged to what ship among the residents of Sedona. Most of the villagers were from the ship that had crashed precisely within the canyon of hard red rock, but there were many citizens who had come from other crashed vessels scattered around the area within a 20-mile radius.
In any case, the record that was sent out to all the other budding villages and remaining intact ships that could be contacted listed the Alpha Ship of Project SEEDS as having "No Survivors." Sadly, for a certain red-clad gunman, that was an error that would never be corrected.
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To be Continued!! Turn to the Next!!