Jeffrey opens his eyes slightly. He's lying on his back on something soft. It is light around him. He scans the room. In the corner someone is sitting in a chair. Where is he? Who is that person? What happened to him?
"Hey, you're awake." The person in the corner jumps up. From the sound of it, it's a girl. "I'll get Dad," the girl continues. In three paces she is out of the room.
Jeffrey moves so he sits up in the bed. A bed, an actual bed. He hasn't slept in an actual bed since he doesn't know when. The room is small, but nice. Any room would be nice to him. There's the bed, the chair the girl was sitting in, a wardrobe, and a few pictures of flowers and rocks on the wall. He certainly isn't in 1779 anymore. How did he get here? He tries to remember. He barely can. He was working on the plantation, and then Bogg showed up. He looked much older. He doesn't remember the rest of it. It felt like a dream. But now he's sitting in this bed. Perhaps it wasn't a dream.
The door opens. A man enters.
"Bogg!"
"Jeffrey." The man rushes over to him, and gives him a hug. "I'm so sorry I didn't come to get you sooner, but I couldn't find you." Bogg holds Jeffrey at arms length for a moment, then pulls him into another hug. "But I never gave up. I'm glad we finally found you. I'm sorry we couldn't get to you five years earlier."
Had it been five years? He had lost track of time. Jeffrey tries to free himself from Bogg's hug and take a good look at him.
"I've missed you so much." Bogg puts his arms around him again, and holds him as though this is the way he is going to prevent them from ever being separated again.
"I've missed you too." He gets out of the embrace. "You have aged a lot in five years."
"Well, actually, for me a lot more than five years have passed." Bogg smiles a little uncomfortable. "But I never gave up looking for you."
"Who's that?" Jeffrey points to the girl that stands beside the bed, smiling.
"This," Bogg takes the girl by the hand, "this is the wonderful Kate. She helped me look for you these past few years. She's my daughter."
"Hello, Jeffrey. Dad told me so much about you I feel like I've know you for years."
Jeffrey shakes the hand she extends. "I didn't know you had a daughter."
"I had her after I lost you."
"But you just said that was five years ago. But she's not five, she's more like fifteen."
"Eighteen, actually," Kate says.
"Eighteen. No one grows to be eighteen in five years."
"I said it was longer than five years for me. It's been twenty-one years since I last saw you."
"Twenty-one!' Jeffrey falls back into the pillows.
"I didn't even know where to begin looking for you. We were separated on the voyage, so you could be anywhere, any time. I don't know how that happened." Bogg tries to explain.
Jeffrey looks at him through his eye lashes; He remembers again how he felt when he first realized he had lost both Bogg and the omni. He tries to shake of the memory. No more thinking of that. He's got Bogg back now.
"They say there was something wrong with my omni. In the first years I voyaged from time to time from place to place trying to find you. Kate's mom helped me back then. That wasn't very productive."
Jeffrey looks from one to the other. Slowly it starts to sink in that this is Bogg. Bogg has finally found him. After all these years. Bogg is really happy about it too; he can't stop smiling. Maybe he should try a smile as well.
Even though his main emotion is still utter confusion Jeffrey manages a smile. Bogg grabs him in another bear hug.
"I'm so glad I got you back, kid."
"Don't call me, kid," Jeffrey says in a reflex. It surprises him.
"Sorry about that. I know how much you hated being called kid."
"It's okay. It -- it means it really is you." And as though for the first time that morning he realizes it is Bogg in corporeal form sitting on his bed he touches him. It really is Bogg. His shoulders, his arms, his bear hug.
"How did you find me?" His voice sounds muffled. Bogg's embrace is nearly choking him.
Bogg lets go, and checks if he hasn't done any damage to him. "We started going through all those data things we have in the library. We thought that there may be some record of you, that you are some place and time. And that's how we found you, looking through all the records trying to find your name, or a description of you."
"But then, why didn't you come five years earlier?"
Bogg gives an appologetic smile. "This is the first time you showed up in any records. We tried to go back further, but we couldn't find you. I'm sorry. You must have lead a horrible life."
"I did." Jeffrey looks down. "I don't want to talk about it."
"That's all right. Would you like something to eat? Or sit outside?"
"Yeah. Both I think."
"There are some clothes in the wardrobe. I hope something fits." Bogg gets up from the bed. "I'll see you downstairs then, in a while."
Bogg holds the door open for Kate. She gives Jeffrey a wave of her hand as she walks out. Jeffrey retuns a little wave. After Bogg has closed the door behind him Jeffrey sighs and gets out of bed. He walks over to the window and looks into the garden. A beautiful Spring day.
Jeffrey's still not sure whether it's a dream or not. At least it's a pleasant dream. He decides to enjoy it to its fullest. He doesn't have many dreams, and most of them aren't pleasant. He opens the wardrobe to pick out some clothes to wear.
-oOo-
When Jeffrey gets down the downstairs living room is empty. Through the window he sees Bogg sitting outside.
"Hi." Jeffrey steps out on to the patio.
"Hi." Bogg beams another smile at him. "Have a seat. We didn't know what you'd like to eat, so we just put out everything. And if you rather have a cooked meal, just say so, I can make you something."
"No, this is fine." Jeffrey sits down, and takes a sip from the orange juice. "Ooh."
"Not good?"
"No, it's good. I just haven't had much fresh food in ages. It usually was just some stale bread and dried meat."
"Well, we're going to try to make up for all that here. So tuck in."
Jeffrey loads his plate with stir fried egg and toast. Bogg and Kate watch him eat. Jeffrey finds this a little embarrassing, but he's too hungry to make them stop. Bogg keeps pushing more food at him. Jeffrey tries a little of everything. It's been a long time since he's had any food that was worth eating. When he truly thinks he can't eat another bite Jeffrey puts his fork down on his plate.
"That was delicious," he says.
"Good to hear," Bogg replies.
"Best meal I've had in years."
"You must be enjoying yourself; you're already making jokes."
"I guess I like it here. Where is here anyway?"
"Here is Voyager Island," Bogg replies. "You've been her before."
Jeffrey nods. He remembers. "But you didn't live here then, did you?"
"No, I got the cottage here after I quit voyaging."
"You quit Voyagers?!"
"Not entirely. Just the field work. I figured it had become too dangerous, what with you gone missing and all. Then Kate was born." Bogg beams a smile at her.
"Why didn't you settle down somewhere in time?"
"I still had to find you. I would never give up looking for you, Jeff." Bogg extends a hand and squeezes his shoulder. "I have to go now, tell the Council I have found you. We'll talk some after that, all right?" Bogg gets up.
"Should I come too?"
"No, you can stay here. It won't take any time. I'll be right back." Bogg tousles Jeffrey's hair "I like the hair cut. I'm so glad I finally got you back."
"Me too."
Bogg leaves the garden in his long stride leaving Jeffrey and Kate behind. They sit quietly for a while. Jeffrey tries to think of something to say. It's been a long time since he had to use chit-chat. It's also been a long time since he could talk to someone in English. He would talk to himself from time to time, just so he wouldn't forget how to. He tried to teach some English to the others on the plantation, but they weren't really interested. The planter used him a couple of times as an interpreter when doing business. He had tried to use that position to talk to people about being enslaved on the plantation. They just laughed at him, and after that he had given up, usually tried to make himself scares when the planter had business with English speaking folks.
"So, your mom is a Voyager?" he finally asks.
"Mom used to be a Voyager."
"Anyone I know?" Stupid question. He only knows two female Voyagers: Susan and Olivia. The girl looks a bit like Olivia, but it's been six, almost seven years since he's seen her. The picture of her in his head isn't very clear anymore. Half the blond girls in the world would look like Olivia.
"I don't know who you know."
Funny, Jeffrey thinks to himself. "Are there many female Voyagers?"
"A few."
Obviously this conversation isn't going anywhere. Jeffrey wants to stick out his tongue at her. He sits back and crosses his arms. He hopes Bogg is coming back soon. That's the person he really wants to talk to. They've been apart for so long. Five years. Twenty-one for Bogg. He wants to know what he's been up to during that time. Why did it take him so long to find him? Well, obviously he had a kid of his own. That probably got in the way. Bogg had a family of his own. He didn't need his orphan companion anymore.
Jeffrey tries to push those thoughts away. Bogg would have never thought a thing like that. Just like he would have never given up on Bogg if things had been reversed. He has tried looking for Bogg; he has tried to escape from the plantation. But they came after him, shot at him. He's lucky to still have both his legs.
"Did it really take twenty-one years to find me? What did Bogg do in that time?"
"Look for you."
"For twenty-one years? Why did it take so long?"
"He didn't have a clue as to where or when to start looking for you."
"He must have had some idea. When we got separated, he could have thought maybe I was left behind, or that I had landed where he did only a little further away."
"Dad looked into all of that."
Jeffrey racks his brain trying to think of the things he would have done to try and find Bogg.
"Don't you have some kind of Voyager tracking device, that you know who's voyaging and where they go to?"
"There is an omni tracker, the Omnitron." Kate shakes her head. "It shows where and when omni's are. It doesn't show where individuals are who have voyaged. Or where they are going during the voyage. If Dad had lost grip of his omni, he could have ended up anywhere himself."
Jeffrey gets up and starts pacing up and down the patio. Kate continues talking to him. Sure, now she wants to talk to him, when she's telling him things he doesn't want to hear.
"Omni's are not supposed to do that. Once the voyage starts, anyone who's on it, should also reach the end of it. Dad's omni was faulty, but they could never find what was wrong with it. They just advised him not to travel in pairs anymore."
Jeffrey snorts. That was of course helpful. Shees, they only figured out there was something wrong with the omni after he got lost in time? What about when Bogg first dropped into his bedroom? Or how the omni kept dropping them into times they didn't want to be going because they were on their way fixing other problems?
"Why leave me there for five years?"
Kate gets up. She's about as tall as he is. Not surprising seen as her dad is pretty tall.
"I'm sorry," she says. "Dad did try. Very much. He blames himself for losing you."
"Wasn't there a way to get to me sooner?"
"That was the first time we found any records of you. They didn't always keep good records in those days, or at least they didn't make good back ups of them. I can show you if you want to see."
Jeffrey thinks about this. Yeah, he really wants to know why it took so long to find him. He nods.
"Show me."
"Come with me."
-oOo-
Jeffrey follows Kate to a building he remembers seeing before, Voyager Head Quarters. Bogg was on trial here, set up by one of his old class mates. They walk round the building until Kate stops at a window. With a pocket knife she jimmies the lock of the window and pushes it open.
"After you," she says.
Jeffrey climbs through the window. He looks around while Kate climbs in after him and closes the window. It's dark, but he can make out a number of wooden desks and chairs. It looks like a class room. He takes a few steps and stumbles over a chair.
"Quietly. We're not supposed to be here."
"No kidding." Jeffrey scrambles back up.
They hear a sound outside the room.
"Hide here." Kate pushes Jeffrey underneath a desk and dives in beside him. They wait. Jeffrey feels his heart pounding in his throat. The door to the class room opens.
"Kate? I know you're in here. You might as well show yourself."
"How did you know it was me?" Kate jumps up. "You hadn't even seen me."
"No one likes to be in school as much as you do. Particularly after hours." The man switches the light on. "Who is that with you?"
"That, Alexander, is the famous Jeffrey Jones," Kate says.
Jeffrey comes out from underneath the desk and stands up beside her.
"Jeffrey Jones. It is my honor to meet you." Alexander extends his hand to Jeffrey. He shakes it. "May I welcome you, on behalf of all Voyagers, to Voyager Island. We heard much of your good works, and are very pleased to finally have you in our mids again."
"We forgot to say that."
"What did you forget?" Alexander asks Kate.
"Welcome back on behalf of everyone. Totally slipped my mind. Of course all Voyagers are happy you are here. Over the years everyone has contributed some time to help find you," Kate says to Jeffrey.
"But none as much as your dad," Alexander adds.
"Right. And that's what I'm here to show Jeffrey. How hard my dad worked to find him. If that's all right?" she asks in a quieter voice.
"Of course. Anything for Jeffrey Jones now that he is back with us. You know, you could have used the front door this time."
"It hadn't occurred to me."
"I'm sure it didn't. Well, you know where to be. I'll see how much damage you did to this window."
"Come." Kate takes Jeffrey by the hand and they leave the class room.
"What is this building?" Jeffrey looks around. The hall is high and wide, with wood paneling, a few doors and little alcoves. Historic maps and pencil drawings in frames line the walls at regular distances.
"Voyager school. This is where young Voyagers get there education. You know history and things. Dad's a teacher here."
"Bogg teaches history?" Jeffrey's mouth falls open with surprise, making it difficult to articulate the question.
Kate laughs. "No. Dad teaches basic survival skills. He's quite good at those. Well, you'd have to be if you have such a bad grasp of history as he does."
"I thought this was the courthouse."
"Courthouse?" Kate gives him a puzzled look.
Jeffrey explains how he knew the building.
"Oh, I see. We don't really have a courthouse. But the school is also used to confront Voyagers who are not doing a good job, give them the proverbial slap on the wrist. Apparently, such a thing is educational."
Jeffrey suddenly stops.
"What's the matter? Oh."
He's looking at a picture of himself. Voyager Missing in Action, it says above the picture.
"Dad had that put up there. It seems only right. You are a Voyager after all."
Jeffrey notices Kate glances to the right, to a picture under the words In Loving Memory.
"How long has this been up here?"
"Always, as far as I know. Well, maybe not that long. You are one of us, Jeffrey, and Dad made sure no one would forget. Come, that wasn't what I wanted to show you."
Jeffrey takes a last look at his picture, and the short biography next to it. Then he follows Kate down the hall. They go up a few flights of stairs. Turn to the right and enter into the room at the end of the corridor. They're in the courtroom.
"Have a seat."
Jeffrey sits down and looks around the room. It hasn't changed a bit since he was here for the trial of Phineas Bogg. That must have been twenty-two years ago. Jeffrey has to laugh. He is now nineteen so even on Voyager Island he was present at an event that took place before he was born. Voyager Island exists out of Earth time, and it is technically not possible to travel in time on the Island, or so they've told him. Jeffrey realizes that's not true. He is here twenty-two years after he first was here, but in his life that's only six years ago. It feels like he's gotten one back over the Council. It feels good.
"So this is the courtroom."
"You could call it that." Kate reaches underneath a cupboard, takes a key from the bottom of it and uses that to open the cupboard door. She takes an omni from the cupboard.
"Recognize this?"
"That's an omni."
"More particular. This is Dad's old omni. He still used it the first few years when he was looking for you. It's in here now he doesn't use it anymore." Kate puts the omni in the projector.
"He got a new omni?"
"Sort of. He doesn't voyage much anymore. He uses the omni that used to belong to my mom. It is more reliable." Kate pushes a few buttons and a picture appears. "That's my mom."
"So it is Olivia. I already thought you looked like her when I first saw you."
"I don't look like her that much. My mouth is all different." Kate makes faces with a twisted mouth.
"You have her eyes. And the same hair."
"That I do." Kate looks at the frozen image of her mom and smiles. "Are there any other memories you'd like to see?" Jeffrey looks puzzled. "You know what I mean. The omni has kept a record of everywhen it has been. Would you like to see any of those places and times again?"
"You said you wanted to show me how much time Bogg has spent looking for me, I guess I'd like to see that."
"Are you sure? It's quite depressing."
Jeffrey nods he's sure.
"All right, that can be done." Kate pushes the buttons and as the projection starts she sits down next to Jeffrey.
On the screen a younger Bogg appears searching for Jeffrey. Jeffrey feels a pang when he hears Bogg call his name. He sees how Bogg is looking for him, but can't find him. He goes back to the previous time they were and is also unsuccessful there. After a while Bogg is brought to VHQ because the Omnitron has detected a little irregularity in one of his voyages.
"A little irregularity? A bug in your system, you say. That bug must be the size of an elephant. I just lost Jeffrey; that's not a little irregularity." Bogg is shouting.
Jeffrey recognizes the other three from his previous visit. They put the omni in the Omnitron to see what information it has stored. Perhaps Bogg has on landing accidentally pressed the activating button again, thus making him voyage to another time while leaving Jeffrey behind. The information stored in the memory of the omni can't rule out this has happened.
"The omni keeps a record of everything," Susan explains, "but it only collects data from landing until leaving. There are no flight records."
"In other words Jeffrey could be anywhere."
"I'm sorry, but yes."
"I have to find him. The kid doesn't deserve this. First I take him away from his family and his home, and then I loose him in time."
"You can't find him, Phineas. Where will you start looking?"
"I don't know. But I will find him."
Kate has seen the recordings before. Her mind wanders to a few days earlier.
-oOo-
"I've found him," Kate says in a soft voice.
"You have?" Bogg leaps up.
Kate gives him a sheet of paper. "He's on the inventory list of a coffee plantation." She points at the name.
"Are you sure? Where is this plantation? We must go get him."
"You must know this is not the Jeffrey you last saw ... he's older. He's nineteen."
"How do you know that? There is no age here."
"I found some other things." Kate puts a book in Bogg's hands. He opens it to a page she marked. He reads out the highlighted sentence.
"'For my twentieth birthday I received twenty lashes'. What is this?" He lowers the book.
"That's a book written by Jeffrey." Kate shows him the title page. "It's quite interesting. It relates about the voyages with you, that that suddenly ended, how he was a slave at a coffee plantation, how he escaped, etcetera. It's nice to finally get his perspective on the adventures you two had."
Bogg gives her a wry smile. "It says here it was his twentieth birthday. How do you make it he was nineteen?"
"I found a list of punishments handed out on the plantation in April 1780. He's on there. More than once." Kate gives him the list.
Bogg glances it. "Poor kid."
"The inventory list is the oldest record I could find of Jeffrey. It's six months older than the punishment list. But a few months before it there was a fire at the plantation and all older records were lost. It could be he's been there for years. It could also be he just arrived the previous day. Jeffrey's book isn't helpful there either, he makes no mention of when he came to the plantation, or where he'd been before that. No mention I can use to track him. I'm sorry, Dad, but Jeffrey lost five years is the best I can do."
Bogg sinks back into his seat. He shakes his head. "Poor kid."
Kate is silent. She doesn't know what to say.
"Give me the book." Bogg says to her. "May be you've missed something."
"I hope so," Kate says as she gives him the book. She leaves the room to let him read on his own.
-oOo-
Kate gets up to turn of the projector. Jeffrey wipes the tears from his eyes.
"It's okay to cry. I would cry if I'd been through everything you've been through."
"Yes, but you're a girl."
Kate squints her eyes lightly. "I'm letting that one go. Dad cried when he learned what you had been through, or would go through."
"What do you mean? Would go through?"
"I shouldn't have said that." Kate bites her lip.
"You've said it. Can't take it back. You might as well explain."
"I don't know if I'm supposed to tell you this."
Jeffrey glares at her. He has always hated it when people kept secrets from him. "Tell me anyway. If it has anything to do with me being missing in time I have a right to know."
"I guess." Kate stares at her feet for a moment. Just as Jeffrey thinks he needs to persuade her a little more, she starts to talk. "We found a book. I found it. It was written by you. It looked like your autobiography. I guess other readers would have though it was an early Jules Verne or H.G. Wells. At least the parts where you tell about your voyages. You also tell about how you were imprisoned, and later enslaved, and how you got out and wrote the book when you were old, or, rather, the one you would have written if Dad hadn't come and gotten you."
"But ..." Jeffrey rubs his forehead and tries to come to grips with what he has jusst heard. "If you know everything about me through the book, then how come he didn't come and collect me earlier?"
Kate is silent, she turns her eyes back to her feet.
"Why not?"
"I should not have told you about the book."
"Tell me," Jeffrey demands. "Tell me." He grabs Kate by the wrist and makes her look at him. She has tears in her eyes.
"You're hurting me."
He twists a little harder. "Tell me."
"You didn't know where you were imprisoned; you didn't tell us in the book." Kate says. Jeffrey lets go of her arm.
"It's my fault you didn't find me sooner. I didn't tell you in the book." He stumbles back. "I know where I was. Why didn't I write it in the book? It's my own fault that I was a slave for all those years." Jeffrey's eyes start to water up again.
"No, no. You mustn't think like that." Kate stretches her arms out to him. "Even if you had written it in the book we couldn't have used that information. I've looked for you. I've looked for you in all the data records we have of that period in Ceylon. I couldn't find you anywhere. If only I hadn't limited my search to Ceylon, if I had taken the whole of Asia, I'm sure I would have found you elsewhere." Tears are rolling from her eyes. "If we'd had tried harder we would have found you younger. It's our fault you've been there for such a long time, not yours. Your book has helped us. That way we knew it was really you."
-oOo-
"The first few years," Jeffrey starts. Kate and he are sitting on the tables in the courtroom opposite of each other. "The first few years, I was sure Bogg was coming to get me out sooner or later. We've been separated before, and one always came to get the other. But as it took longer and longer for him to come, I started wondering what was taking him. Had he forgotten me? Had he died? And as a result, would I die in this prison? Then I started thinking that he must have lost the omni too, so he was somewhere else entirely and couldn't leave there either. I took some sort of comfort that we were both lost in time. It felt like I wasn't alone, even though I was. And I could tell myself that I wasn't still there because Bogg had forgotten about me."
"Dad has never forgotten about you."
"When I first came here, and heard he had an eighteen year old daughter, that's exactly what I thought. He may have looked for me for a few years, but then he had a daughter, a real family of his own, and I just slipped his mind. He had someone else to think of."
"It wasn't like that. He never stopped thinking of you." Kate shakes her head. "At night, when he tucked me in, when I was little, he would tell me a bed time story, and it would always be a story about you. I used to love those stories. He never stopped looking for you. When I found your book last month, he was thorn between getting in immediately and searching a bit more to find you younger. The way you are now is the closest to the separation we could find you."
"Unless I tell you when I first arrived, then Bogg can get in and get me there." Jeffrey jumps up. "I don't know the exact date, but I landed in Ceylon in the first week of March in 1775, near the town of ..."
"That wouldn't work," Kate interrupts him. "The you that you are now would disappear, never have existed actually. So you wouldn't be able to tell me where the fourteen year old you is. You can't change your own history."
"Oh." Jeffrey sinks back down on the table feeling defeated. He had never thought about it, but it makes sense in a way, that you can't change your own history.
Kate gets up to take the omni from the projector.
"So that's Bogg's old omni. Does it still work?"
"Barely."
"Can I see?"
"Sure." Kate gives him the omni.
"I have so many happy memories through this thing. In a way they are what kept me going." Kate squeezes his shoulder. "But at times I thought it was all just a dream. That we would hold on to each other, click the button, ... "
