The Second Wave (14 page)

This change of plans led to another
complication, though. Not only did he not have enough time to
construct a sound fake background for himself, he was also heavily
restricted in thinking up something. Because Peter knew his real
name. Because in a moment of weakness, which was what he called it
now, he had wanted to make a connection with the one person who
didn’t seem to judge him. It wasn’t as stupid as hoarding food to
run away and then telling a notorious blabbermouth about it, but it
hadn’t been his brightest moment, either. The only thing John could
do now was go with parts of the truth and spin some plausible yarn
around them. He could do it, but half-baked lies never lasted long
enough; he’d have to be extraordinarily careful.

So he met with Peter and the colony’s mayor,
who promised not to send him back to Earth to go to jail, if he
agreed to continue talking to the crazy girl, since she may hold
valuable information about something he didn’t want to discuss
further at that time. When John asked, the mayor simply pressed his
lips together and evaded further questions.

Playing interrogator for a girl who was
clearly not all there, to get some information out of her about
something he knew nothing about didn’t sound like a job John wanted
to take on. He didn’t like not knowing which side he was on, and
sitting in the mayor’s living room he didn’t even know which side
he was supposed to be on.

“With all due respect, mayor,” said John
therefore. “I’d rather take my chances in jail.”

Peter gasped softly next to him, but John
knew his cards. The mayor looked like a man too desperate to let
the one chance to make sense of the girl slip through his fingers.
He played for a better offer, for more information, but Rochester
disappointed him:

“With all due respect, John, it’s not your
choice to make. From this moment on you will be Miss Gust’s
liaison, or guardian, if you prefer. You will at all times answer
to Dr. Paige and Captain Eleven. All information about what you
speak about gets back to me at all times.”

Dr. Paige gave him a reassuring smile from
across the room. Captain Eleven glared at him from the wall she was
leaning against. John just nodded. Guardian for a crazy girl it
was, then. At least it was something he had never done before.

On their way to the canteen, so John could
finally grab a bite to eat, he turned to Peter, “I am in your debt
for getting my back. However, there was no need to put yourself on
the line as well. Should we act a couple now?”

Much to his surprise, Peter grinned
good-naturedly. He made a dismissive gesture. “That’s okay. Telling
them we planned this together made me sound much less like an idiot
than the truth.”

“And what is the truth?”

“That a colleague conned Duncan’s ticket from
me, and I was fool enough to believe him. Besides, what I said
isn’t far from reality—had we met prior to our departure, and had
you asked me for help, I’d have done exactly what I told them I
did.”

“What about tabula rasa and no more
lies?”

Peter’s grin gave way to a more serious look.
“Let’s just not lie to each other, John. Friends shouldn’t do
that.”

“Friends?” John raised an eyebrow to cover
how much that statement unsettled him. It was one of those things
he knew fairly little about. In his experience, friend was a
synonym for weakness.

“Yes,” Peter said simply. He patted John
lightly on the back, then held open the canteen door for them.

John didn’t know how he was supposed to
respond to this, so he opted for, “Why is the chef wearing a pink
dress?”

“Because he’s a princess boy. Try the bacon
sandwich, it’s quite, quite delicious.”

Peter didn’t stay, he had to go to the geo
lab to see if everything was in order. So John sat down at one of
the tables by himself. The bacon sandwich was indeed delicious. He
concentrated on it, so he didn’t have to acknowledge the fact that
he didn’t know how to be a friend, but that he’d like to be one to
Peter. He wasn’t sure which part perturbed him more.

* * * *

Time elapsed. A week went by, then two, then
three. The events of the first night soon drifted into the realm of
forgotten incidents. There were new things to discover on this
planet, in this reality. There was a lot of work to do.

Prior to the first week, most of the building
elements and food came from Earth, but the goal was to make the
village self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Soon the timber
needed to finish some of the buildings had to come from the forest;
since the plant-life had drastically altered from a year ago, the
new teams of scientists had to find out which plants were harmless,
which were poisonous, and which were edible.

Ground samples were collected to find out
more about their host world. The surroundings were explored to draw
accurate maps of the area and also to seek out a good location for
the next colony. The hydro power station at the river needed to be
manned and kept running so electricity was available at all times,
albeit with limitations. Most of all, the newly cultivated crop
fields had to be farmed. There was cattle to look after, children
to be taken care of, a school to be run, and daily life, without
the previously known and enjoyed comforts, to be mastered.

All of the settlers had been chosen because
their profession or experience contributed to the project: farmers,
fishermen, scientists, teachers, doctors, cartographers. A cook, a
blacksmith, a tailor, a watchmaker, a vet, even a librarian. Many
more still, and of course the workmen, who were there temporarily.
People and professions needed to keep a civilization running. And
everyone was busy in the first week. Especially the children.

When the kids weren’t at school or
kindergarten, they flipped around the village to find new, exciting
things to play with, watch the grown-ups work, or simply chase the
animals around. It wasn’t before long that they began to expand
their area of exploration to the immediate surroundings of the
village; then the farther surroundings of the village; and lastly
the river. They were allowed to roam; it was confirmed that no
harmful fauna was about. As long as the kids didn’t approach the
vegetation that was deemed dangerous, they were fine.

The river was to the east of the colony,
behind grassland. A smooth, steady stream between two and three
hundred yards wide that quietly flew southwards. Simon Jones built
the hydro power station he had designed exclusively for this spot
and purpose at the access point of the river nearest to the
village. The children, who wanted to enjoy sand, mud, and water,
were the first ones to follow the stream northward. Here they found
the waterfalls where the mountains began.

It was a beautiful spectacle: the water
jumped off the rocks like a cliff diver, cascaded down for what
seemed a mile, until it plunged into a small lake with a deafening
splash, then it whirled around rocks and pebbles, tiring itself
out. The little lake was surrounded by blooming flowers and thick,
green grass. A row of saffron colored petals blossomed where the
lake became the river. The sunlight was refracted by the myriads of
water droplets, thus creating an almost sheer rainbow around the
falls.

The whole scenery was, alas, completely lost
on the children. They had no appreciation for the beauty of it
whatsoever. They enjoyed the fine mist of moisture that surrounded
the place where the waterfall met the lake; here, they stood until
their clothes were soaked. The older kids took off their shirts and
dove headfirst into the lake; the younger ones merely slipped off
their sandals to enjoy the feel of mud between their toes. It took
no more than ten minutes until they began splashing each other,
doing underwater somersaults. They even held a contest to find out
who could scream the loudest whilst standing inside the small
cavern behind the cascade.

They didn’t notice anything wrong until they
came home that afternoon and their mothers broke into sobs on
seeing them.

Isabel was a skinny ten-year-old with short
cut hair and small feet. She was the daughter of Selena, the
village’s librarian, and Eliseo, a primary school teacher.

At the lake she raced Emma and Louis
underwater, hence her clothes were still dripping when she came
home almost in time for dinner. The family lived in house number
eighty, close to the south gate, one of the few houses that was
completely finished when they moved in.

Isabel, sandals and socks in her hand,
pitter-pattered across the kitchen and into the living room, where
her father was setting the dinner table and her mother was talking
about her workday. She didn’t wait for them to notice her, but
shouted, still breathless with excitement, “Mum! Dad! Guess how
long I can hold my breath!”

Selena gave a gut-wrenching screech. Eliseo,
a strong hearted man, who, having worked in a ghetto school for the
last years, claimed to have seen it all, dropped the plate he was
carrying when he laid eyes on their only child. Isabel didn’t know
what was wrong with them. Her mother threw herself on her knees in
front of her, repeatedly touching her hair, patting her down. Her
father raced to the library to fetch a book on curses and black
magic, or so he yelled over his shoulder as he left the house. It
was curious, Isabel noticed just now, that her hair seemed longer
than this morning. And the reason she wasn’t wearing her sandals
was because they had apparently shrunk—or maybe she just
accidentally swapped shoes with Emma, whose feet were smaller.

Eliseo and Selena were not the only parents
who dragged their child to see Dr. Paige that night. No less than
eleven kids sat in the waiting room at the hospital, their fathers
and mothers in various states of horror and denial.

Summer examined them all, listened to what
the parents had to say, then listened to the stories the children
told her. Her conclusion was, as she repeated that night at the
agora, that something, probably in the water or around the
waterfalls, had made all eleven children age approximately one year
in less than a few hours.

An uproar followed—the afflicted families
wanted explanations, or for someone to reverse the process, or
demanded to at least be allowed to go back to Earth this very
instant. It was a delicate situation, one which Mayor Rochester
only just succeeded to calm down. He promised he’d find out what
was happening, whether it was indeed the water that had been
poisoned in a way. Eliseo was one of four people who volunteered to
help with that.

The next morning, Eliseo and the other
volunteers met with Peter and three protectors, Sophie, Gavin, and
Carl. They met at the entrance to the colony, the south gate.
Equipped with rucksacks and an iron will to find out what had
happened, they headed to where the kids said the waterfalls were.
Peter took soil and water samples along the way and from around the
lake. Luke filled several dozen small containers with specimen of
flora.

“I can’t find anything wrong with it,” Peter
told Luke later that day. Back in the bio/geo lab complex, all his
samples were scattered across a large worktop. They had examined
everything under the microscope, had run several tests on them, but
could find nothing.

“The frustrating thing is,” he explained as
Luke stood hunched over one of the microscopes to look at some mud
from the bottom of the lake, “we can only test the samples for
known substances! But what if it is something new, something unique
to this planet? We wouldn’t even register it. This is not only
frustrating, it is also quite futile.”

“Or maybe,” returned Luke, “nothing is wrong
with either soil
or
water.”

“Or that, yes.”

“Maybe we should look at the whole picture.”
Luke stepped away from the microscope to look at Peter, who shot
him a quizzical glance. Tousling his hair as if it helped him
think, Luke theorized, “Eleven children aged roughly a year. Twelve
children played at the waterfall. The question we should probably
be asking ourselves is: what did little Savannah do that the others
didn’t do? Or perhaps even: what did everybody else do that
Savannah didn’t do?”

A good question to which nobody had an
answer, certainly not the parents. So Mayor Rochester invited all
twelve children into his home, handed out chocolate and lemonade,
and asked Luke to handle it, who was, albeit childless himself, a
favorite among the kids for his pancake faces at lunch.

“I can hold my breath for
really
long!” said Isabel, when he asked her if she could remember
anything out of the ordinary from that day.

George declared, “I swallowed a wriggly worm
by accident, but it’s okay, I got sick right after and the worm was
all right, too!”

Emma demanded a princess face the next time
they served pancakes at the canteen. Toby said he had lost his
cowboy hat behind the water but he didn’t remember who won the
screaming contest. Savannah was scared of dark spaces, Astrid
proudly wore a bra now, Pavel got water up his nose when he had
attempted an underwater handstand. Julian was only three years old
and didn’t know what was going on. Max had cut his toe on
something, but admitted that it could have happened on any other
day as well, he didn’t keep track of his injuries; he was an
accident-prone boy. Zinna especially liked the flowers on the
bottom of the lake, and Rose didn’t say anything, she broke into
tears because Max accidentally knocked over her glass of lemonade
when he tried to sneak some more chocolate from across the table.
As far as interrogations went, this was easily the most interesting
Luke had ever had the fortune to be part of.

The sun set and he still didn’t have any
usable information, so he sent the kids home. They were probably in
a lot of trouble already for having no more appetite for dinner; he
didn’t want to make them late on top of that.