Excerpt

KRS Zephyr

about 5 lightyears from Rigil Kentaurus

9 Teleftmina, 1382

Sharon Manders woke up screaming.

Then stopped because she couldn't remember why she was screaming. It hadn't been much of a scream. Mostly it was just the thought of a scream, as very little sound had left her dry, raspy throat. She also didn't remember being in bed, but she was.

Sharon tried to remember going to bed, and discovered that she couldn't remember much of anything at all. She opened her eyes with a squinting, fluttering, almost painful motion. The room was dimly lit from some light coming from outside her field of vision. She could also see what looked like LEDs, and hear the soft humming of electronic equipment.

All of this went through her mind in mere moments before the lights came on, causing her to close her eyes tearfully.

She heard the sound of a door opening and sensed that somebody entered the room.

"Simmons!" a man said with a sound of total surprise.

Sharon cracked her eyelids open and tried to sit up. That is to say, she sent the signals from her brain to her spinal cord to start the process of sitting up, but nothing happened. It was difficult to tell where her body stopped and the rest of the universe started, as if her entire body was paresthesic and unresponsive.

The man was about thirty, clean-shaven and had short, neat hair. He looked horrified, paused only a moment and then became very busy studying medical instruments and mumbling to himself.

Hospital. I'm in a hospital. Something happened. Am I paralyzed?

She could see an IV bottle of clear fluid connected to her arm. The words on the label were too small to read.

Sharon made another effort to sit up and her muscles tried dutifully to respond, but this only brought on dizziness, pain, and a reaction from the man.

He said something in an accent that was so foreign that Sharon didn't immediately understand, but concluded that it was something like, "No. Don't try to sit up."

"Good idea," she mouthed, but it sounded hoarse, dry, and unrecognizable, so she sucked on her tongue to generate saliva. She wanted to examine her head with her hand, but her arm felt like molten lead, and responded by going in random directions. She let it fall back down.

"Simmons," the man held a light in front of her face. "Follow the light with just your eyes."

Sharon still didn't quite understand the words, but the gesture and intent was obvious. She understood by the cadence and patterns that the man was calling her Simmons.

Who is Simmons, and why is he calling me that?

Her name was Sharon Manders, though at the moment she felt lucky to remember that much, because the rest of her life was a vast darkness. She concentrated on following the light.

"Good," the man said, though it sounded more like "goot". A name patch on his well-pressed shirt read Bradford, MD. "Listen to me carefully, Simmons," he continued. "You had a nasty head wound and brain trauma. Do you remember being injured?"

Though she could tell the man was speaking some form of English, it was like listening to somebody with an extreme regional accent like Creole or Appalachian. Sharon parsed out what she did understand and filled in the gaps as if it was a verbal crossword puzzle. She tried to say "No", but her tongue still felt huge and as if it was upholstered with sandpaper. She tried to shake her head, but only managed a minor tremble.

Dr. Bradford mumbled some more, then produced a cup and a spoon. He offered her a spoonful of ice chips. "Here, let these sit on your tongue."

The ice melted in her mouth, lubricating her tongue and throat. It felt marvelous.

She swallowed the cold fluid and her larynx no longer felt like a gravel road.

"No," she finally whispered.

"Your EPU died," Dr. Bradford said as if it should mean something. "You'll have to make do without until we can grow you another."

Sharon could feel the spot in her head that had been damaged. It was numb. Or more accurately: it was more numb than the rest of her body.

"Simmons, this is important. You've been in a coma for twenty-three days. Your body will take some time to recover. Don't try to move yet. Get your equilibrium back."

Sharon wanted to tell Dr. Bradford that she wasn't Simmons and that, beyond that, she couldn't tell him who else she was.

Did the head wound have something to do with why I woke up screaming?

"What do you remember?" the doctor asked.

While pondering questions of memory, Sharon's mind made wild associations between faces, places and events that seemed fantastical, she realized that her eyes were closed and she'd fallen asleep. The dreams hinted at a past life in which she did important things.

She lay there, listening to gentle electronic beeps and the occasional muffled sounds of human speech coming from beyond a door while sorting out the dream images.

As she opened her eyes, the room lights came on dimly. With great effort, she carefully rolled onto her side. While this was a vast improvement over her previous attempt at fine motor function, there was still a sense that her body and brain were learning to cooperate again. She had to concentrate on one movement at a time. When she finally succeeded, she saw that she was the lone occupant of a long, narrow room with half a dozen empty hospital beds.

It was a medical room, but beyond that she had no idea where she was. There were no windows. She was looking at a handle-less door. There was some writing on the wall, but it was too small, and the room was too dark to read it.

The door opened by sliding sideways into the wall. Dr. Bradford walked in, causing the room lights to brighten.

"Good evening, Simmons," he said with a forced smile and his strange accent. "Glad to see you're back among the living." He started mumbling to himself again.

Sharon made a successful attempt to find something akin to a voice. "Uh … hi. I'm not Simmons."

Bradford continued mumbling for a few seconds then looked directly at Sharon's face. "I beg your pardon?"

Sharon spoke again, this time doing her best to duplicate Bradford's drifted vowels and mutated consonants. "Hee. Uhm net Zeemuhns."

After a few moments of awkward silence, he said, "Well, then. That will certainly come as a surprise to everybody else." He pulled up a chair. "Who are you then?"

Sharon was overcome with the feeling that she had said the wrong thing — that she should have kept quiet about her identity.

But why?

"Sharon Manders. Was there an accident? Maybe we were mistaken for each other."

Bradford chewed his lip, mumbled some more, folded his right arm across his chest and rubbed his jaw with his left hand. "Not unless you and Specialist Carol Simmons have identical DNA."

Sharon struggled to figure out what all this meant, and her brain was too sluggish to give concrete responses.

Bradford looked worried about something. "What year is this?"

Sharon had no idea, but numbers seemed to form in her consciousness. "Thirteen?"

Bradford kept a straight face. "Thirteen what?"

Sharon shook her head. "I dun' know," she said with a puff of breath.

"What else do you remember?"

Sharon tried to remember anything. Her mother. Her job. The president.

She asked, "Who's the president?"

"The president of what?"

Sharon almost said the name of something … a country. She closed her eyes trying to conjure up images of important things.

✴✴✴

Sharon ran, swam, and even jumped rope while singing some inane rhyme. She mastered one physical skill and moved to another. She threw a ball, performed some archery, and rode a horse. Her body was remembering how to do all these things. The year was nineteen —

Then she woke up.