“With berries that are dangerous and no lumina stones or fireflowers or mosslings and strange uses for electricity and such odd names for pces,” Serru said, “I think you must come from farther away than anyone I’ve ever heard of. How did you come to be here?”
“I don’t know. I woke up here. Before that I remember...” I stopped. Fshing lights, red and blue and white, ripping through the night. Multiple voices screaming. It flickered through my mind and then it was gone. I ate a berry, cautiously. It was sweet and tart and tasty, but I couldn’t really compare it to anything I knew. It helped banish the dry fuzzy feeling in my mouth.
“I remember... getting ready for work. I was running a little te. I was up ter than I should have been on a video chat with Grace, she’s... she’s sort-of my girlfriend, it got complicated when COVID happened. She had a really bad day at work yesterday and needed someone to listen and some friendly sympathetic company to distract her other than her cats. She’s a vet tech. We met online a few months before the pandemic, on a forum where someone was being stupid about a medical thing, and then realized we live in the same town, which was pretty improbable. We haven’t given up on the idea of finding an apartment together but we’re both so exhausted and so close to burnout that it feels like a huge project so I don’t know. I remember scrambling to get ready for work because I slept through my arm, and scribbling a note to my roommate on the fridge door apologizing for the dishes in the sink. I don’t... I don’t remember anything after that. Then I was here, waking up lying on the ground, and that groundhog-thing showed up.”
Serru nodded. “What work do you do?”
“I’m a paramedic. Do you have those?”
“We do.” She looked thoughtful. “But do we mean the same thing by it?”
“Two years of college? I don’t do ongoing care, but in an emergency, I’m your guy. When someone is hurt or sick and can’t get to help by themselves, paramedics are the ones who show up to do initial medical care, assess the situation, and if necessary transport someone to a pce where they can get more advanced medical care. If there’s a big crisis, we’re among the first ones on-site.”
“Wardens do many types of jobs to keep their community safe. All of them know at least how to handle a crisis until a healer of some variety can arrive. Paramedics are wardens who seek out more advanced training, particurly the ones in smaller settlements that might not have their own full-time doctor or in pces where they might need to help travellers at some distance from a settlement. If the situation is complex or the injury severe, they will do what they can until a doctor can be involved, one way or another, but sometimes they can solve it alone.”
“Yeah, that actually sounds like functionally the same kind of thing.” I sighed. “I’m not normally as disoriented as I am right now. My whole job depends on being able to adapt to the unexpected and keep my head and make decisions quickly. This is just... a bit outside the normal range of the unexpected. Although I still don’t get how we can be speaking English in whatever weird pce this is. Unless I really am dreaming, or I’m hallucinating or something.”
“You mentioned that word before, English. I don’t know it. We’re speaking Common. Some of the more isoted species have their own nguages, but otherwise, everyone speaks Common. You use words at moments that I don’t understand but around those, you speak my nguage perfectly.” Her smooth forehead furrowed, as she ate another berry. “I don’t know of any invention that could do that, especially not without your knowledge, although I admit that it isn’t a subject I’m well-acquainted with. It would be a very odd sort of magic, I should think. Perhaps the Quincunx sees a reason.”
“Magic? Really? That exists?”
“Yes, of course. You aren’t surprised by the existence of sunlight or trees, why is magic strange?”
“My home doesn’t have any magic.” I wasn’t in the mood to argue about the definition of that even with myself.
“How very odd.” She tapped a pink-nailed finger against her lips thoughtfully. “I think you must be from another world, somehow. Your home has no magic, you have no knowledge of mosslings, even berries are different. But how you come to be here, and speaking my nguage perfectly except for a few words that I think we must not have, I have no idea.”
“I’m speaking English, I... I think?” I stopped to listen to myself.
The sounds were wrong.
Meaning was absolutely clear, without the effort required to transte to and from my limited French. When I tried thinking of concepts like tree, sky, water, berry, even paramedic, the sounds were not the ones I was accustomed to, I was sure of that, but I couldn’t actually summon up any sounds that were less alien.
Head injury, cognitive damage, a stroke?
“Why haven’t you just decided that I’m dangerously crazy?” I asked Serru.
“Crazy?” She sounded like she was tasting the word.
“A sng term for serious mental illness. Not perceiving or processing my environment properly. My brain not functioning the way it should.”
“Can that happen in your home? It doesn’t here, other than perhaps eating something toxic or a bad head injury. That sounds terrible.”
Not in Kansas, Toto.
“Okay,” I sighed. “I gotta think this through. Either something bad has happened and this all exists inside my own head, or something bizarre has happened and it’s real. If it’s the first one, I have no way of determining that from inside and even less means of helping myself. I’m going to have to count on someone else to help me. One of my co-workers if I was at work, my roommate if I was at home, someone calling for help if I was in-between. There’s nothing I can do, no matter how much I hate that. Alternatively, if it’s the second one, I need to figure out how to survive and look for a way home. That at least gives me some kind of agency and a direction to work towards. It won’t interfere with someone else’s intervention if it does turn out to be all in my head. So the rational thing to do, even in an irrational situation, is to behave as though it’s real, but keep an open mind.”
Serru tilted her rosy head to one side, and nodded. “That sounds quite sensible. There are tales of people appearing here as adults, very rarely, instead of being born here. I don’t know how true they are but it seems the most likely given the facts we have. There is one way out of this world, but it isn’t a quick one and I have no idea whether it will take you back to your home specifically. It’s the only path I can think of, although I’ll keep trying to think of others or of someone we could ask who might know of others.”
“Is it going to be hard to find?”
“I know where we need to go. It will, I’m afraid, take several steps. The first one is only two or three days away.”
Travel appeared to be at a different pace than I was used to. No cars.
“I...” I should probably just shut up and accept the help, because I desperately needed it, but I had to ask. “That isn’t going to take you away from something else?”
“I appreciate the thought, but no. I gather materials to sell to those who use them, directly or not. I can continue gathering wherever I go. We’re not far from a settlement, a rge vilge. There are supplies we could use.”
At least I was in good shape, and had my sturdy, comfortable boots. My back wasn’t even bothering me. A hike was the least of my worries right now.
“There’s just one thing. If this is real... it’s not impossible that I’m carrying a really nasty disease. There’s a pandemic...” I paused. The word didn’t seem to transte right. I was sure I was hearing it in the same sounds that it would have been in English. “Do you know what a pandemic is?”
“I’ve never heard the word.”
“It means there’s a disease that’s spreading between people so enthusiastically that it’s a risk to everyone. It’s less intense now than it was a couple of years ago but people are still dying and a lot more are having long-term bad effects that we’re still trying to understand. It doesn’t always show itself right away, and sometimes people can carry it and give it to others without showing any signs of being sick. Because of my job, I’m at a very high risk even when I do things to protect myself and my patients. I absolutely do not want COVID loose in your world because of me.” I really wasn’t buying the bullshit about it being over or being just like the flu. Even if it were true that the only people suffering were elderly or had chronic health issues, which it wasn’t, that should be relevant only if you were a fan of eugenics.
Actually, for all I knew, I could be carrying any number of things that my system could cope with after generations of experience but could devastate people who had never been exposed to them. It had happened before when poputions met for the first time. A few stories weren’t enough to reassure me that it was safe.
“That sounds horrible. You don’t have Panacea?”
“We... what?”
She fished around in the satchel at her side, pulled out a red box and flipped it open, and tossed me a small gss bottle. It held maybe a hundred millilitres of what looked like water with a bright lime-green tint. Stamped on the cork was an unfamiliar symbol.
“If you’re concerned, drink that. It will cure any form of illness. If you aren’t sick, it will do nothing at all, although if you need another very soon that will be less effective. Most commonly they’re used for the illness caused by rodent bites. They’re common and easily repced, and it’s worth it if it will bring you peace of mind over this. You’ve mentioned the subject several times in different ways, I think it’s weighing heavily on you.”
That was a gracious way of putting it.
I eyed the bottle warily, but by my own logic, either it didn’t exist, or I was somewhere the rules were different, and I saw no reason to believe that Serru would give me anything harmful. If it might reduce the risk of becoming Patient Zero for her and everyone she knew, it was worth it.
So I uncorked it and drank the contents in a single long slow gulp.
It had a faintly citrus-and-mint tang, and the consistency of water. If these existed in my own reality, it probably wouldn’t be hard to get people to take them.
Who was I kidding? There were people who would have refused even this while coughing up their own lungs.
“Thank you.”
Serru nodded. “The bottle can be broken down and reused.” I gave it back to her, and she tucked it back into her satchel.
While we ate the st of the berries, which were more satisfying and filling than a pint of berries had any right to be, and then while we walked downstream keeping the water in sight, Serru asked me questions—about my job, my home, my most recent memories and anything remotely strange I might have seen or heard or even smelled. I did my best to answer, since she sounded to me like any specialist trying to analyze a problem and work out what had caused it.
In sight of a cluster of buildings, she shook her head. “I truly am at a loss, Nathan. And I’m sorry I can’t think of a quicker way or more certain method to get you home, because even from what you’ve told me, it’s quite clear that you’re going to find our world perplexing. Socially, perhaps, as well as simple mechanics of everyday life.”
“Sorry?” Had I done something horribly offensive?
“I’ve noticed that you seem uncomfortable looking at me.”
“Oh. Um... you’re really... really attractive.” A conversation like this was a guaranteed no-win, in my experience. How do you tell a woman, outside limited contexts, that her substantial breasts, trim waist, rounded hips, and long firm legs, all highlighted and dispyed by clothing that was probably not meant to be sexy, kept prompting the animal part of your brain into inappropriate thoughts?
“I don’t understand how one leads to the other.”
“And, um, by the standards of my culture, although I totally know it’s not universal, the way you’re dressed is a bit... provocative.”
She gnced down at herself. “Really? I chose, in this case, clothing practical enough to suit my needs. I often walk long distances in varied terrain. The Grassnds are often warm during the day, especially during exertion. Anything not determined by that, I chose because it’s comfortable and I like it, not for anyone else’s sake or to gain any particur reaction. That isn’t how people dress in your home?”
“No, I mean, yes, I mean... sometimes? It’s complicated. People spend lifetimes studying a lot of very confused and confusing associations between body-image and self-presentation and how people feel about themselves. There are women who would do serious violence to their bodies and spend a fortune to be built anything like you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I’d be very happy there. I’m sorry you’re uncomfortable. The vilge may be more so. Would you prefer to wait outside and I’ll take care of business and come find you?”
“No, I’m okay. I’ll get used to the differences.” Eventually. And meanwhile, I could keep reminding myself that they were people, not fantasy pinups or something.
Serru’s expression, as she looked sideways at me, held some doubt, but she didn’t voice it. “As you wish. Welcome to Quailbrook.”
