The other night I took the long way home,
Out past the old schoolyard,
it’s funny how you keep it all inside,
dreams they do die hard.

Peppy could have cried out with despair. The sedatives were gone. All of them. Bill had now officially caught a cold, and that meant there wasn’t a single well animal among them. The painkillers were gone as well, and now that the sedatives had finally worn off everyone was awake and in plenty of pain. There was nothing Peppy could do, and there weren’t enough cots for everyone, so Peppy lay on the floor all day feeling just as miserable as everyone else.

He could remember that morning, as clear as the nose on his face. Peppy himself had again woken up first, Katt not long after.

“My ear!” she shrieked as soon as she woke up. “What’s in my ear?!”

“Nothing,” said Peppy weakly.

Katt had grimaced and held a paw to her ear, wincing. “I don’t suppose you have a Q-tip.”

“Noooo....”

“What’s going on?” Still groggy, Katt looked around the tent.

“Everyone is sick,” Peppy explained. “We’ve been on Fortuna for two weeks.”

Katt examined each cot, as if she were taking inventory. “Well, if this is everyone, where’s Falco?”

Peppy bit his lip. He didn’t want to have to be the one to tell anyone that Falco hadn’t reappeared since he had taken the sick pine marten to Corneria a fortnight before. “Falco...uh....hasn’t come back.”

“Eh?” Her mouth dropped open and it hung there stupidly.

“Falco went to take the pine marten to Corneria,” Peppy explained patiently, feeling as if something was chewing up the back of his throat. “We haven’t heard from him since.”

Katt said nothing else. She flopped over in her cot, shoved her face into her pillow, and thought hard. It’s like a nightmare, she thought. Stuck on this lifeless hunk of rock and snow, and Falco left and didn’t come back. Like what happened after flight school. All the worst moments of my life are reliving themselves, she thought, with a pang of guilt and regret. What’s next, getting shot down on Zoness? Getting scarred for life? It’s not enough Andross took Falco and Aurelia from me, he has to take them from me twice? Aurelia Javensen, Katt’s best friend since elementary school and a commanding officer in the Cornerian Army, had been missing in action for over seven months. Not many people who had disappeared during battle with Venomians ever returned. And when Aurelia had joined the army and Katt had not....and when Falco had joined up with Starfox and Katt was left all alone....it was all Andross’s fault, all of it. Everything abominable that had ever happened in her short life was his fault.

Everything.

Curse you, Andross, she finished bitterly. Curse you and all that you stand for. If I have to kill myself to make sure you don’t hurt anyone else, she promised the ape, although he couldn’t hear her, God help me, I will. She would not allow herself to cry, not here, but the tears came silently.

*  *  *

Falco awoke he knew not how much later. He had been so zonked out before he got here, he hadn’t even checked out his surroundings, he realised suddenly. He peered suspiciously out the window to see what kind of rock he’d gotten stranded on. He could see no grass, but he appeared to have landed in a field. The plants about him grew in tall green stalks, and some sort of fruit or vegetable seemed to be growing at the top of them, but he couldn’t see what it was from inside his Arwing.

Cautiously, he opened the bay doors for a second to see if the air was all right. He closed them immediately and took a deep whiff of what had come inside. A smile spread across his face before he even knew it; the air was fresh and sweet, more so than Corneria’s air, which had become choked by smog in the big cities. It was still sweet out in the country, but Falco never got chances to go out there. And it was much better than the air on Great Fox. It was all recycled oxygen up there, and although it was refreshing enough, it often tasted stale to him more so than it did for the others.

“Well, there’s no poison in the atmosphere,” he said to himself. He said it out loud for no reason in particular, and it was a sudden shock to hear a voice speaking.

He said it again, more slowly. “No poison in the atmosphere, but I could have guessed that from all this vegetation. I wonder where I am.” He checked his Arwing’s fuel supply. Enough, he wagered, to get him about as far as the entryway of Sector Z to Venom. Not enough to be of much use in actual space flight, but enough to do quite a bit of trullying around on one planet. Before he went flying around looking at stuff, though, he wanted to stretch out.

He absentmindedly felt in his jacket pocket, and, to his surprise, the remote control for his Arwing was still there. He clicked the button and the top of the Arwing popped up.

Falco jumped out almost immediately, taking in great gulps of the air and shaking off his stiff joints. He bent down and examined the soil. It was a greyish colour, but appeared very rich and moist. Patches of it could be seen through the thick stalks, and between them it took on almost a greenish tone. He craned his neck to see the tops of the stalks and suddenly felt very small among them; they seemed too large, somehow, as if this were a giant planet. Pulling one down, he examined the substance growing on the end. It appeared to be in a shape similar to that of corn, but it was rather a bluish tinge and he wasn’t sure he should eat it. He pulled off a kernel anyway and popped it in his beak, ready to crack the hull if need be. But it wasn’t hard, and it went down easily with a nice smooth aftertaste reminiscent of cucumber.

He waited a few seconds, ready to wash out his mouth with his canteen of stagnant water or something equally as dramatic. No...no burning on the tongue, no sudden dissolution of his stomach......and boy, was it good. He decided to grab a whole ear of the stuff, but the stalk was thick and rubbery. He could not tear it. He pulled at it for all he was worth, the stalk bending lower to the ground, menacingly like a catapult.  Finally it snapped off and Falco fell heavily on his backside. He munched the cool, sweet vegetable and stretched out one more time before climbing back into his Arwing and closing the lid.

He took off and flew fairly low over the countryside. There were fields everywhere. He didn’t see any buildings or trees, but he did see what must have been kilometers of the rolling blue-green sea of the corn-like vegetation.

He flew on for only about five minutes before he came to a little pond. The stalks of cucumber-corn towered over it, as tall as trees, and he landed to sniff at the water. He took a sip of it, and it was good beyond description when compared to the warm, old water his canteen was full of. He dumped his canteen out on the ground and filled it with the pond-water after drinking his fill. Then he climbed back into his Arwing and flew around for a few more hours. He caught sight of a beautiful silver river, thin and twisting, but he still saw no signs of civilisation. He was still pretty exhausted from his whole black hole ordeal, so he returned to the pond and fell asleep inside his Arwing, which was tightly locked--just in case.

*  *  *

Gerdendrul could not smile; it was not part of Andross’s program. But if he could, he would have been. He had been disappointed that his Falco clone had never done anything except lie there by the base. It had never moved or anything. Gerdendrul didn’t understand, although Andross might have. But that didn’t matter. Katt had awoken, and once he got that straight, he had been able to call to the slug of rock that had embedded in her brain. He liquefied and seeped into the icy dirt, ready to continue his journey subterraneously. There were caves under the surface; remnants of a long-forgotten Fortunese base, and Gerdendrul had been making full use of them. He rolled through the tunnels, coming ever closer to the homely, sopping tent.

*  *  *

It was much too cold in this tent and there was nothing anyone could do. Fox would not sacrifice his dignity, ever, so he was biting his lip to keep from whimpering. Bill was not in such bad shape, but he had a terrible case of the flu and was sitting on the floor so Peppy could have a cot. Blankets were few, and only one went to a critter. Bill was wrapped so tightly in his he couldn’t even move. Freezing was a very real danger now that there was no one to build a fire; not a one of them was fit to gather firewood.

Radley McCoy had been by earlier in the day to find everyone in such condition as “gave his old heart a start.” He’d gone trullying off into the woods to “help” a few hours earlier. Peppy wanted to stick his tongue out when the badger came back, but he was afraid it would freeze that way.

*  *  *

Falco woke up in his Arwing sometime in the morning to the sight of a beautiful sunrise. The fiery colours he had always seen back home on Corneria were absent, however; Solar was a red star, but apparently the one of this system was blue, or some other icy colour. Perhaps it was even white; he had no way of knowing how far from the sun this planet was, so he couldn’t relate the temperature to anything he knew.

He opened the Arwing and climbed out. The morning was crisper than he had expected, and now he regretted the impossibility of having a bit of anything warm to eat the whole day. He sat down, Indian-style, a few meters from the pond. Staring into its depths which now appeared icy and dark but still somehow welcoming, he wondered to himself if there were any fish in it. He wouldn’t eat them, of course; he’d declared vegetarianism sometime during high school, but he still wondered if perhaps he wasn’t the only sentient being on the whole planet.

He edged closer to the water and put his beak just a few centimeters from the surface. He didn’t see any movement. But there was something down there-- it was covered with dirt, but patches of something glinted in the sun, shining through the dinge and rust. He looked harder, puzzlement making itself known on his face.

Suddenly, his breath caught in his throat as he realised what it was. A great choking sob almost escaped, but he caught himself just in time. Dazed, he stumbled back to his Arwing and tumbled inside.

Of course......how could he have been so blind? He knew this place. He knew that pond. He had been here before, many years ago.  Somehow he’d never remembered it before, but now that he was here all the memories came rushing back in torrents. They were good memories, some of the best he’d ever had and better than whatever future probably awaited him; good, but unimaginably strange nonetheless. He could not think clearly. First his freakish experience in the black hole, and now an equally freakish remembrance of times past. He couldn’t faint, of course; he’d just woken up from his first full night of sleep in ages and couldn’t have gone to sleep to save his life. So he just put his head down on the control panel and didn’t move for an hour.

But the hour passed as all things do, and Falco knew he must do something. He couldn’t sit there moping until he rotted away. He climbed back out of his Arwing and tottered back to the pond. It wasn’t very deep; maybe one or two meters at its deepest. He plunged a wing into the frigid waters to retrieve the object and pulled it out, the water rolling off his dark blue feathers.

Before he got a chance to really look at it, though, his thoughts were interrupted. Something that felt like the tip of a sword jabbed him in the back. “On your feet, Master Lombardi,” an unpitying voice commanded.

Falco stumbled to his feet and turned around. “Hullo, Rhandon. Isn’t this a pleasant surprise.”

Rhandon bowed low. “Indeed. Welcome back to Gluncandron. Now, if it pleases you to explain how you got back here?”

“I can’t really be sure. I was flying a mission with my team when--”

“Flying? You know as well as anyone that you cannot fly, Falco. What do you mean by this? Have you been hallucinating again....?”

Falco blushed deeply. “I didn’t mean that..”

“Prithee,” Rhandon said politely, “what did you mean, then?”

“I flew in that.” He indicated the somewhat unimpressive Arwing by way of vague gestures.

Rhandon, a rather imperious sort of goat, glanced at his sheep compatriots.

“He’s been out in the sun too long,” he muttered.

“He was no bargain in the shade,” tittered a sheep.

Rhandon ignored that. “We’d best get him back to the House.”

“I should think you’d be more courteous than this,” Falco remarked, irked. “I didn’t lie about the Arwing. I know it looks strange, but it flies.”

A sheep, it seemed, had just found the Arwing’s fuel tank. “My LORD!” he yelped. “The junk heap is full of some evil-smelling liquid!”

Rhandon sniffed the air. “It’s petrol. Well, then, Master Falco, it seems you’ve been having fun in the melotin fields, but now ‘tis time to venture indoors. Let us away to the House.”

“Yes, let’s!” squealed a couple of sheep.

Afterwards, Falco never thought it peculiar that Rhandon and the sheep hadn’t asked any more about his team. For some reason they just didn’t seem to care; and at the moment, neither did he.

*  *  *

General Pepper presided over another meeting. “What’s going on this time?”

“You see, General, sir, we’ve not heard from Star Fox for over two weeks, and, you see, General, sir, they should, quite frankly, General, sir, be back by now, if you take my meaning. General. Sir.” Shalwast hated it when the other officers made him deliver all the news.

“Yes, I’d thought of that myself...” Pepper said slowly.

You had not, Shalwast thought disrespectfully. But no one else seemed to care.

“He’s psychic!!”

“Oh, what does he need us for....”

“It’s a good thing he’s the leader of this army!”

“But anyway, sir, I...we....us...I mean, these guys....and me....that is.....well, they’re in trouble....at least, that’s what we thought. I mean I thought. Or you thought. Uhhh.....”

Pepper pondered over this. “Shalwast, I want you to send out an experienced squadron of Cornerian fighters to Fortuna to see if Star Fox needs any help. Make it the Light-Bearers.”

“Yes...yessir. General. Sir.” Shalwast nearly knocked over his chair when he got up and backed out of the room, bowing.

Pepper rolled his eyes.

*  *  *

Falco sheathed the long-handled sword he had found in the pond and followed the sheep and goat for a good three hours before they finally came to a rolling dirt-covered hill that rose out of the Gluncandran vegetation. Rhandon parted the stalks of two melotin plants and revealed a low doorway chiseled into the earth. Graciously indicating the threshold, he stepped aside and let Falco pass.

It was almost stranger than the black hole in hindsight. He knew he had been here before, after his wings were crippled when he was a child. But how did one get to a world like this (not to mention the getting off of a world like this) and then, years later, somehow come back and realise that one had not had any memories of it until one was there again? And all of it was like something you felt you had read somewhere in a storybook when you were very young. Or even perhaps not so young, but something that had happened in centuries past if it had ever happened at all. Whatever the cause and its nature, it was odder, mayhaps, than the entire black hole experience, because in the black hole he had known he was experiencing something in more dimensions than three, but here it was so like what he knew and yet so different that if he had not fallen back into it so easily, the shock might have killed him.

Falco strode down the corridor but stopped a few meters down, not knowing exactly where he was supposed to go. “Second door on the right,” murmured a lamb, who had suddenly appeared in one of the doorways. Falco nodded and ducked into the appropriate opening.

“Is it so? ...once more thou art returning?” a voice spoke out of the darkness. Falco knew it well.

“It is,” said Falco with a graceful bow.

“Hast thou found what thine heart desired?” the great eagle, Aravit, inquired.

“I..... don’t know,” answered the bird, confused. Had he? He couldn’t remember all of a sudden.

“Shalt thou stay with us this time, or depart again as once before?”

“If it is in my power, lord,” responded Falco, kneeling, “I will not leave again.”

Chapter 7