There are a few types back home. Those that leave the first chance they get. Others that stay because they like it. Then they’re the ones that plan on leaving. That’s all they ever do; plan. Six decades pass, and they never leave. Even if they tell themselves, they still can one day.

I don’t know what Becky would have fallen into if it wasn’t for my deal. Thanks to ‘The Package’ she got free college tuition. She could have gone to New York or California or even one of the foreign countries. Although, how foreign was it anymore? She went to a respectable college about two hundred miles away. Before the Volardi, that was a three-hour drive from college to her old home.

To there and back was doable in a day. Thanks to the Volardi, the world was smaller now. They could cross light years within hours. Crossing state lines was nothing for a personal air car and the trip was only a few minutes.

So she made trips to make sure he was fine.

Pa was country folk, and that’s got a cart full of implications. The first that came to mind was self-reliance. Thanks to his arrested health scare and the Volardi treatments, he had another twenty years of life if not more. He was going back to working the farm, and Becky kept an eye on him. Just in case. My Pa was the last person that would admit he couldn’t do anything. We didn’t want him to push himself too hard even if he was healthier.

Through Becky, I heard he was thinking about changing the farm into a petting zoo. People could see how it used to be before the Volardi and provide therapy. Seems there are plenty of people that get healed, if only mentally, by being around animals. He didn’t need to run the farm for finances, but he had to be useful. From my deal, there was enough to give him everything he needed – material wise.

Heh. He wouldn’t do that.

In his words, every man had to find his own role in life. I suppose the same could be said for me, even if I could now give birth.

I brought myself back to reality and finished a story about how Matros and I went out looking with our Oma for a new triangular shell. Soon we would look for a Dara or Beta as they were called on Earth. We needed a new shell to symbolize our union. She shook her head, and I saw the beginning of a tear. My intuition was new, but I got it.

She felt guilty for what she did even if I wasn’t innocent myself. Things ended up well or at least more than we could have reasonably expected. The Volardi would call it serendipity and it was hard to argue against that.