"Ah. Well. You're lucky you didn't cut an artery." She took a syringe from her kit and filled it. "Something for the pain before I clean and stitch."

Tomas started to protest, but that was for show. He looked relieved when the needle went in.

Turk backed away and tried to give Diane room to work, not that there was a whole lot of space in this little hut. He wondered what it must be like to make a living as a breaker—to sleep under a tin roof praying you wouldn't be hurt or killed before your contract played out, before you got the payoff they promised you, a year's wages and a bus ticket to the Port. There was an official camp physician, the breaker boss had explained, but he only came in twice a week, usually to fill out forms. Diane did most of the routine cut-and-stitch duty.

Turk watched her as she worked, a silhouette cast by lamplight on the gauzy bug screen. She was skinny and she moved with the calculated caution of the very old. But she was strong, too. She worked methodically and smoothly, occasionally muttering to herself. She might be around Tomas's age, which the sailor variously gave as sixty or seventy—maybe older.

She worked, and from time to time Tomas swore with fierce intent but a certain drugged lethargy. There was a stink of antiseptic, and Turk stepped out into the rising dark. His first night in the New World. In the near distance there was a stand of flowering bushes he couldn't name, six-fingered leaves moving in an offshore breeze. The flowers were blue and smelled like cloves or cinammon or some other Christmas spice. Farther off, the lights and fires of the industrial beach guttered like lit fuses. And beyond the beach the ocean rolled in faint green phosphorescence, and the alien stars turned grand slow circles.

* * * * *

"There's a potential complication," Diane said when she had finished with Tomas.

She came and sat with Turk on the edge of the wooden platform that held the floor a foot or so above the ground. She had worked hard cleaning and closing Tomas's wound, and she mopped her forehead with a handkerchief. Her accent was American, Turk thought. A shade southern—Maryland, maybe, or those parts.

He asked her what kind of complications those might be.

"With luck, nothing serious. But Equatoria is a completely novel microbial environment—do you understand?"

"I may be dumb, but I'm not ignorant."

She laughed at that. "I apologize, Mr.—?"

"Findley, but call me Turk."

"Your parents named you Turk?"

"No, ma'am. But the family lived in Istanbul for a couple years when I was a kid. I picked up a little Turkish. And a nickname. So what are you saying—Tomas might come down with some local disease?"

"There are no native human beings on this planet, no hominids, no primates, nothing remotely like us.