And one more time, the faded dream is saddened by the news.

Slippy and Bill prowled around the forest looking for the Bio-weapon. A new dose of courage in the form of Radley McCoy’s vintage ‘66 had made them idiotically brave. “Oh BIOWEAPONEAPONEAPONEAPON!!!!!” Bill screeched, and giggled. “Heh heh, that was funny. See, I didn’t say the biow part. Isn’t that ...funny .... Uh,Slippy?  Nevermind....it’s not very funny....who am I kidding! Of course it is! HAHAHAHAHA!”

Slippy had somehow gotten separated from Bill and found himself back at the tent. He cavorted drunkenly inside and stuck his index finger in the air. “I love you!!!” he announced.

Peppy looked up blankly. “Who?”

Slippy pointed at the the tent pole purposefully. “Laura!”

Peppy blinked. “Okay.”

Fox, sitting in a heap on the floor, an undistinguishable figure swathed in multitudes of blankets, swami-style, swayed drunkenly on the floor. It wasn’t Radley’s cup of cheer that was getting to him; it was the heavy sedatives Peppy kept making him and Katt swallow. Peppy wasn’t a guy with a surplus of medical knowledge; he figured that as long as they were off somewhere in Happy-Land he wouldn’t have to deal with the wounds. But it wouldn’t keep; the bottle was already a quarter shy of being full, they’d barely made it through the last night with the help of Bill and Slippy’s weak fire, and there was still no word from Falco. It had been two days since they’d all arrived on Fortuna and the fuel in their Arwings was frozen solid. Bill said Katt’s ship had a heater and the fuel was all right, but she was, in all logical terms of speech, tripping, and nobody else wanted to fly around for no reason. She didn’t have enough fuel to get anywhere, really, anyway.

Radley McCoy haunted their camp from time to time with outrageous tales of yore and plenty to drink. Bill and Slippy didn’t mind. Katt and Fox thought everything was psychedelic and when they were semi-conscious all they could do was be amazed by the pretty colours. Peppy secretly wished McCoy would go away; the wine wasn’t doing Slippy and Bill any real good, and in his opinion they would function much better without the hangovers they had woken up with that morning.  Anyway, Slippy collapsed on the floor seconds after his declaration of love and Peppy shoved him into a cot and gave him a couple of sedatives. Bill wandered around for a few more hours and once he thought he heard the Bio-Weapon behind him, so he got spooked and came back to the tent.

Things went this way for almost two weeks. It was a life, but not much of one; the bottle of sedatives had only a few pills left in it, and Peppy fretted constantly.  Slippy had caught a cold almost immediately, and Bill was always out in the woods wasting time. The only person who was always there was Radley McCoy, who spouted off old medical cures he used to know that had to do with herbs and all that rot, but every time Peppy asked him if he could make one of them, Radley would turn his head and say something to the effect of “Eh, what’s this you say? Herbs? Herbs don’t grow on Fortuna, you twit! It’s an ice chunk! All these years I’ve been here looking for herbs, and do you think I’ve found any? LOOK AROUND YOU! What I wouldn’t give for a hot bath and some chocolate cake,” and then he’d be off talking about all the things he missed from his old home, which seemed like it was on Corneria, or Katina, or somewhere nice, but he never really said exactly where.

*  *  *

Falco was lost in a world of indescribable terror and stifling beauty. He could not think of any experience he had ever undergone that had been more enjoyable or more agonizing; but he couldn’t really think then, at least not in the sense of the word we usually attribute it to. Indeed, there were many things he couldn’t do when the original meanings of the words were held; see, for example, or move, or hear, or feel. But there was a higher sense that took control of him now, and it was one that he could never after describe. Once Fox had made the mistake of saying “of course the experience was much too vague to describe it in words,” when Falco had once tried and failed to do so.

Falco had turned on him almost immediately, not in anger, but almost in despair. “No, it is words that are too vague--this experience is much too definite for language to ever be able to give even a distorted picture of it.” Fox had kept his mouth shut after that.

The terrible scenes from his past, his present and eons into his future that had been so unignorable and horrifying before had ended, and a different kind of horror had taken its place. But along with the horror had come such a remarkable peace, a joy of equal magnitute and yet at the same time almost synonymous with the terror he felt.

Wherever he was, he felt an uncontrollable desire to get away from it, but something inside him wanted to stay, to stay forever, to--to do what? He had almost thought “to see this,” before he remembered he wasn’t seeing anything--was he? No, he was sure he wasn’t. What he was doing instead of seeing was far better and far worse. And it was still something he knew he would never be able to express in our meager, ugly language.

And still it continued. Time had no meaning, but it dragged on meaninglessly nonetheless. It was not over yet. It would not ever be over.

Chapter 5