"Perturbations of Perambulation"

Six: ‘Perturbations of
Perambulation’

CASEY AND SASHA watched Arturo Gyp fade in the dawn light behind them. The blood-sun had just risen in the air like awakened pestilence; the first aching streak of red shot into the sleepy yellow sky above them. In every direction blinding, screeching white sand shimmered like an insubstantial mirage.
They were making good time, although it had cost them a few swigs of the precious hide waterbag that slogged at Sasha’s side. Logan had given it to them. They had also taken Cody’s advice to heart and left at least one layer of clothing on to protect them from the harsh sunlight. Otherwise, Cody said that ‘old Sol’ – what he called the sun – would ravage their bare skin and sap their energy – and they both knew now in their swimming dizziness that he had been right.


AFTER THREE hours, it was midmorning, and Arturo Gyp was no longer even visible other than as a shimmering small brown speck.
The faint ring of mountains at the hazy horizon still encircled them and the wasteland across which they traveled, seeming to creep along with them. It was as if the mountains quietly kept pace, tipping along on stony toes when no one was looking. Then they would halt with suppressed giggling, making certain the duo always remained in the exact center of their circumference.
“I wonder whether this was a stupid idea,” Casey said dejectedly. “Maybe we should have just stayed in town.”
“No, we’re doing the right thing,” Sasha replied, hacking the dust-puffs out of her dry throat. “We have to find Mr. E. That’s why we’re here. And he went this-a-way.” When Casey didn’t laugh, she said more seriously, “Besides, we’re basically trapped here without the Arch.”
“Yeah, that stupid Arch. I wonder where it went?”
“We need to face it: Mr. E might be our only ticket back home,” Sasha said glumly. “We have to find him.”


THE HIKE, as Sasha started to call it, had begun well enough. They had gotten up before dawn, washed, and packed their knapsacks. Wordlessly, Cody had checked their boots to make sure they were sturdy enough; that they had laced them up properly and wouldn’t sprain an ankle. He had given each of them hearty loaves of cornbread wrapped in some kind of wax paper.
The whole thing felt a bit like summer camp.
Cody had tried to talk them out of going, as had Logan, but half-heartedly, as if they knew there was no stopping them.
“Look. We have to find Mr. E. That’s why we’re here. We don’t have a choice,” Casey had explained. “He’s got a day’s head start on us, maybe a little more. We can’t wait any longer.”
“Life or death, huh?” Cody said, completely serious.
“Yes,” Casey replied. “More than you know.”
“Well, then I guess there’s nothing for it: you have to go.”
Casey had half hoped Cody might offer to come with them, but he didn’t seem the least inclined to do so. And Casey wasn’t going to impose.
When the sun had at last peeked up between the black mountains, the duo had started off down the hill of Arturo Gyp in the exact opposite direction, towards the West. They discovered that the town abruptly ended past the Victorian mansion at the end of the main thoroughfare. Just behind it, the hill dropped into a vast flatland, a huge sea of desert, a cliff before a white void.
Cody had been oddly distant as they left. Casey had kissed his cheek, clearly not wanting to stop at just that. But Cody just smiled and hugged her and then waved goodbye as he faded in the distance. He didn’t seem sad to see her go at all, which kind of miffed Casey. Logan stood off a little ways watching. Under his dusty, weathered top hat and behind his darkened glasses, he smiled to himself as though enjoying his own private joke.
And although they did not see him, a lone sleepless figure stood at the window on the second floor of the Victorian, watched them walk into the breaking ragged dawn wordlessly, anxiously, while absent-mindedly fingering a black revolver with intricate gold fire-leaf swirling along the length of the barrel.


For the morning of The Hike, their energy had been good and their spirits had been high. They had stopped for ‘Brunch on the Beach’, as Casey put it. The cornbread had stayed amazingly cool and moist inside the wax wrapping; and they were famished – the meal tasted amazing the way only a meal can after you’ve hiked a long way. They tried to guess the distance they’d covered already but simply had no idea. They finished, and rose to resume their trek, feeling the first twinges of stiffness in their legs.


AFTER ANOTHER HOUR, a great gnarled tree suddenly appeared in the distance ahead of them. It was little more than a twisted black silhouette, jutting up from the hardpan like a defiant rugged root, shouting into the air.
“Behold. A tree in the desert,” Casey said sarcastically. “Looks like something can grow in this sandpit after all.”
As they neared the strange tree, they could see it was completely covered in ash-black bark, like it had recently been on fire. It had no leaves whatsoever. Flame tongues had been its only foliage as of late. The thick cherrywood trunk twisted up out of the ground like a thing in agony, as if it were struggling to escape from the very earth in which it lay.
Sasha gasped: a skeleton slumped at the foot of the tree, nestled in sand and roots. The bones had been bleached so white that the macabre thing had blended invisibly with the sand until she was nearly stepping on it. One bone wrist was clapped in an iron bracelet, which in turn was chained to a giant spike driven deep into the very flesh of the wood.
A chewed wood sign was nailed to a branch of the tree. It said:

The Tree of Pain

Casey took off her sunglasses for a clearer look.
“Great,” she snarled. “Now we have creepy trees with creepy signs appearing out of nowhere.”
Casey looked up to a branch near the ground: a tattered rope had been slung over it. It twirled in the wind. Despite the fraying, she recognized the loop and the distinctive knot tied in it: it was a hangman’s noose.
“Oh, that’s just lovely also,” Casey muttered.
Sasha bent down and dug around tentatively in the sand where the skeleton lay. Scraps of clothes still clung to him, but they didn’t look like cowboy clothes. But there was something familiar about them…
Familiar?
Her hand curled around something metallic. She pulled it up from the powdery sand – and immediately, she had to shield her eyes from the sun spangling off it. As her vision adjusted and she angled it differently, she saw at once that it was some kind of a sleeveless jacket, or breastplate, made of an extremely reflective golden material. It was metal fabric, pliant and lightweight, yet diamond-hard: it would easily stop a bullet, or disperse an energy weapon blast along its millions of interwoven threads.
And to her mounting chagrin, she knew exactly what she was holding. She’d seen it before.
“Casey!” she shouted in panic, frightened by the sound of hysteria creeping into her own voice.
Casey was at her side in a heartbeat. “Centurion armor!” she hissed dangerously. “Here? That’s impossible!”
Sasha shook her head. “Oh, believe me, I’m sure of what this is. I polished enough of these stupid things for Mafdet.”
Casey nodded slowly. “Oh I don’t doubt it. But I don’t understand…how did this get here? Did Niburians try to invade earth before? Back here in the old West?”
“Maybe,” she said, and then calming down now, she starting thinking more clearly. “Or – wait. We’re missing something obvious. This is just one guy. He’s not an invasion force. Maybe he’s a scout. Or —” she said hopefully, brightening now, “he could have even been a good guy. Like Abdiel.”
“Maybe Mr. E was looking for him,” Casey said quietly. “Maybe he came out here to meet this guy. But he got here too late. And now he’s dead.”
“Well, if Mr. E came through here, he must have kept on going to the next town. He didn’t hang around the old cheery Tree of Pain. And he certainly didn’t go back to Arturo Gyp – we would have run into him.”
“We’d better keep going then,” Sasha said. “We want to be sure we’re at the next town by sundown. I sure don’t like this desert during the day, but I have a feeling I’ll like it even less at night.”
A crow landed on the tree branch looped with the hangman’s noose and cawed in agreement, like a harbinger.
Wordlessly, Casey picked up the centurion’s armor. It folded with surprising ease. Picturing herself wearing it under a poncho like a gunfighter in an old movie, she tucked it into her pack.
Centurion armor might come in handy here.

THEY TRUDGED on across the alkali playa, quickly putting the spooky tree behind them. Its many-fingered black tendrils clawed at the sky for a bit and then disappeared in the haze. Casey and Sasha, both sun-bit now and growing weary, faced the steady slap of heat best as they could.
A hot wind had picked up, breathing on their shoulders, blowing gritty sand particles around. A barrage of tiny pinpricks pinged their soft skin as they walked. Miniature mouths nipped at them and even seemed to get inside their clothing.
Scant scarves of cloud slipped across the sky, dancing away from the baleful, swollen crimson eye of the sun, quickly hurrying along as if they were frightened of it. Old Sol, the crotchety, jealous flame burning like a lump of old coal in the yellow deeps above, plodded along in his daily journey to the opposite horizon. And it was late afternoon: he was starting to get close now.
Casey thought suddenly about the almost smug attitude Logan – and even Cody -- had given them before they had left town. It bothered her now more than it had at the time. Something of it smacked of ‘teaching them a lesson’. If this journey was indeed dangerous for some reason, why the hell hadn’t they just warned them? Told them not to go? That is was too dangerous? And if this was some stupid macho thing, a let’s-let-the-girls-find-out-how-weak-they-really-are thing, designed to get them to come crawling back to Cody and Logan for help…well, she was going to kill them both. If she survived this, that is.
The word sunstroke skittered across her brain, jibbering like a mad thing.
Where in the hell was this fabled next town? She squinted at the horizon: there was only nothing, nothing and more nothing.
What if Cody and Logan had been wrong? What if there actually was no next town within a day’s walk…?
“Whoa,” Sasha said suddenly, stumbling. “Ack. I’m starting to feel dizzy, Case,” she confessed.
“Here. Drink.” Casey pulled the sloshing hide waterskin from her own shoulder, tossed it at her.
“Thanks,” Sasha muttered stupidly. She uncorked the end and tipped it up. The water was warm, splashing down her throat, but clean. It was springwater from a well in Arturo Gyp. The water tasted faintly of leather, but she couldn’t have cared less.
“We’re dehydrating. It’s all this dry wind. It’s evaporating our body water.”
“Casey,” Sasha said weakly. “Case, this is not good. I don’t feel so good.”
Casey looked at Sasha, and was shocked by what she saw. Her face was red, sunburnt.
She looked like a sore with eyes and a mouth.
My God, when did that happen? Casey thought. And her poor pug nose –! It was almost bleeding, it was so thoroughly cooked. Sasha didn’t seem to feel it. Not yet. But she would, that was for sure.
With a start, Casey realized that she probably was just as badly burnt. She had far fairer skin than Sasha. Her skin was as blonde as her hair. It must be sun-savaged worse than Sasha’s by now.
“Yeah,” Casey wheezed, tasting dust in her mouth and answered her unspoken question, “We’re going to make it.”
But her body screamed Liar! She felt wobbly and weak. She wasn’t in nearly the physical shape she thought she was in: the machines at the gym put you in machine shape, not real-world shape. Not walking or hiking shape. It was different.
Casey shuffled and shambled, a zombie of the sands. The constant feeling of stepping through sandy slush, the dreamy slipping feeling with each step, was sending dull jolts through her aching legs and lower back.
She was going to be so sore --!
Sunstroke!
A quick look at the spaghetti walk of Sasha told her that she was a bit tottery as well. And between the two of them, Sasha was supposedly the athlete. She had been the stunt-whoosher in the Serps, and nowadays the kick-boxer and track star. This little hike was getting to her also. They were not doing very good.
Nope, not very good at all.

After few more hours, and the sun was huge and red over the horizon, just like it was going to be at the end of the solar system when it expanded and swallowed the world in a single gulp. Wordlessly, they continued their numb march westwards towards it. The mountains grew steadily blacker in the distance, lumps of hardened lava beneath a bloody fireball.
Not much daylight was left. Which meant there would soon be no more sun, thankfully, but what night-time horrors did this desert hold? It would get cold. The traitorous ground would not hold the day’s heat, nor would the air. Temperatures would plummet. They would have no fire. There was nothing to burn. She would sleep out in the open, in the cold. She would dream of tarantulas and skittering scorpions.
But then in the distance, a hulking…something crouched in the sand.
Was it a rock? Casey didn’t know. It was huge and black against the white sand.
As they got closer, it became obvious that, whatever it was, it was man-made. The surface was too curved, too regular. It was engineered. It was not a natural feature.
Whatever it was, it was mostly buried in a mound. Which was strange: the desert was flat, not a naturally rolling, dune-laden place: there were no mounds. Was this mound man-made as well? Maybe it was a dwelling of some kind. She had heard of such things. Native American Indians built them. Pueblos? She couldn’t remember. She wished Ian were here: he would know a stupid factoid like this. A desert mound-adobe. Casey’s sun-addled brain could hear the educational program in her head: “And here, we have the Native American Mound-Dwellers of the Southwestern United States…”
Surely this wasn’t the hitherto mythical town they had been promised?
Maybe the town was underground, Casey thought stupidly. Maybe this was just the entrance.
Sasha reached the thing first. Something about the angle was suddenly obviously agog, haphazard: it was more like it had struck the ground and remained half-buried there, rather than having been intentionally constructed that way. For the second time today, she had the feeling of familiarity. She knew this thing, it resonated with some part of her.
And then she knew what it was.
“Looks like our friend chained to the Tree back there crashed his little ship.”
It was a Sky Chamber, pounded deep into the earth, such that only a small bit of it remained visible peeking above ground. Great holes had been gouged out of part sticking above the sand. And not a single omphalos gem remained that they could see. Perhaps they had been pried out long ago. Mountings meant to cradle the rare, psychic gems gaped emptily, eye sockets with their eyes missing.
The ship had crash-landed in the desert, churning up this massive mound before it as it had skidded to a halt. It seemed to have happened years and years ago: wind erosion had already soughed into the surface of the craft, sand-blasting the features of the once-proud ornate faces adorning the hull into a dull series of vague lumps.
Sand rattled noisily against the side of the ship. The wind was really whooping it up now. Sasha entered through a tear in the hull that looked like a lopsided toothless grin. Casey was just behind her, grabbing at her flying blonde mane and straightening her rippling shirt.
The insides of the ship were round, organic, just like the Sky Chambers they remembered. The passageways were white, pearly tunnels. But now they were coated in grit. Greasy grime smeared the pristine walls. Eddies and dust-devils danced along the tilted floors.
The Sky Chambers they had seen in New York had been alive: they had thrummed with life. Energy and light had seemed to soak every pore of those ships. But this hulk was dead. A discarded shell, a broken corpse. Deeper into the ship, just beyond where they stood, it was dark and forbidding.
“What is going on here?” Casey breathed. “First a centurion, and now a Sky Chamber?”
“Well I think it’s safe to assume this was his ship,” Sasha replied.
“But what happened to the rest of them?” Casey asked. “Don’t tell me he came in this thing all by himself. There had to be more of them.”
“Probably there were, at least originally,” Sasha agreed. “But from the looks of things, this crash happened a long time ago. They’re all gone. Dead. Or maybe they walked to a nearby town for help.”
“Hah,” Casey snorted. “Wonder if they had better luck finding it than we are?”
“I don’t see any bodies,” Sasha said looking around. “No skeletons. Of course we haven’t checked the whole ship – and someone could have carted the bodies away -- but on the surface it looks like they lived.”
Then a terrible thought occurred to Casey: Was it possible that survivors from this crash, that centurions, were still hiding out in the old West? In Arturo Gyp?
Blackthorne?
Could he be a centurion?
It was possible.
Had Enki known about this crash? Was this why he had come back to this time period – was it somehow connected?
Maybe the Niburians who crashed here were friendlies. Like Abdiel, as Sasha said. But Blackthorne certainly didn’t seem like a friendly. He wasn’t the sort that Enki would hang with, that was for sure.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sasha said, reading her eyes. “I don’t think I agree. Blackthorne seems like a real cowboy to me; not someone just pretending to be one. He doesn’t seem…I don’t know…out of place enough.”
“Well, the centurions would have probably tried to blend in. It wouldn’t be hard: Niburians look just like we do. It’s not like they have three heads or something,” Casey replied. “And you said it; this crash happened a long time ago. Blackthorne may have had a lot of time to learn how to act like a cowboy.”
Sasha chewed on this for a moment. She and Casey wriggled around a half-open door and entered a room inside the ship. A small smelly swamp festered in one corner – trapped rainwater that, amazingly, had not fully evaporated yet. Several concentric yellow rings of algae marked where the waterline had previously been. Flies buzzed near this biotic oasis.
“Oh, no. Do you think he knows we’re from the future?” Casey asked in a scared voice. He may have recognized their clothes…
“No,” Sasha replied. “Even if he is a Niburian, he’s from this time. He’s never seen clothes like ours before. Why, for all he knows, this might be the height of fashion in Paris right now. Remember, we came here in the Pyramid of the Arches. A place made by Enki. But I don’t get the impression many Niburians have ever seen a time-portal device like that, much less have any idea how to create one. Most of them aren’t like Enki. They just use stuff, without really understanding how it actually works.”
But something bizarre was definitely afoot. Sasha had to admit that.
“Wonder if the next town will be crawling with Niburians,” Casey muttered. “I mean, if they didn’t go to the Gyp, it would be the other logical place for them to have gone.”
“And the other town is nearer to this crash site. Well, assuming this stupid town exists, anyway. We may have to go back and beat up your new boyfriend if it doesn’t,” Sasha teased.
Casey almost winced as she watched Sasha smile; it looked like it hurt her cheeks. “Yeah,” Sasha said, catching her gaze. “You look about the same, I think. You’re not winning any beauty prizes today either.” Casey actually did smile at that. She remembered a time when a crack like that, especially from Sasha, would have infuriated her and made her feel worthless – but that time had long since passed, and now it was simply the ribbing of a close friend.
“Okay. Let’s say this Sky Chamber crashed ten years ago,” Sasha continued. “There probably would have been a fireball streaking across the sky, and an explosion of some kind upon impact. You would have seen it from the Gyp for sure, and, assuming this other town is just up the road a little further, you would have seen it from there also. Someone would have come out to investigate. They also would have seen the fireball from the Gyp, but people from the other town would have gotten here first. They would have collected up the injured, probably, and brought them back. So if there are other Niburians skulking around still, yeah, I would guess they’re in the town we’re headed for, not the Gyp.”
Casey nodded dizzily. “Great. Just what I was hoping. Well, let’s get a move on.”


THE WIND was in a rage now as the sun set. It had become a poltergeist of the sands, jumping around and tumbling, throwing clouds of dust into the air like a brat djinn.
The evening sky was already thick with stars, a billion suns burning with a cold fire. Ragged red simmered on the horizon, marking where old Sol had finally, mercifully, taken leave of his domain of sky.
Sasha and Casey walked straight towards this burning ember, the remnants of the day. What had been a furnace blasting down at them was now as wispy and insubstantial as a candle flame. And it would soon be gone, and then nothing but scattered starlight, a vault of crystal, would light their way.
“That sun is the only thing telling us which direction West is,” Casey said mournfully. “And after it sets, we’ll have a harder time walking true.”
“Yeah, walking in a straight line is actually a lot harder than it sounds,” Sasha agreed. “Without something to correct on, I’d say we’re in trouble.”
“That is, if the Moron Brothers were even right about this town,” Casey replied. “I’m starting to really want to punch Cody right in the mouth.”
“Yeah, I’m starting to feel the same way,” Sasha replied. “I don’t get it though. They’re not stupid: I think they really think there’s a town out here. And they’re not mean. So why the hell would they send us on a wild goose chase?”
Casey shook her head. “We must have drifted off somewhere,” she moaned hopelessly. “It’s the only explanation. We must have not walked perfectly West.”
“No way,” Sasha replied emphatically, waving a finger. “We walked away from the sun in the morning, and then towards it in the afternoon. We couldn’t have walked more perfectly West if we had a compass taped to our foreheads!”
“It doesn’t make any sense, then…” Casey complained.
The void of sand beneath their feet had immediately gone cold the very second the sun deserted it. Temperatures had plummeted drastically over the course of a few minutes. It happened so fast that they were both left stunned at the reversal. One second, the world was a deadly furnace; the next, they were shivering, the sweat on their skin now in danger of giving them a cold from the chill.
Casey sighed and hugged herself to try and stay warm. She had put on a gold and maroon Starland High hoodie sweatshirt over her white button-down shirt. Sasha had done the same. But even with hoods up, the cold was shivering its way into their clothing. And the cool night winds both soothed and irritated their exposed sun-cracked faces.
Casey still wore her sunglasses to keep the blowing sand out of her eyes, but Sasha braved the open air in order to see. She squinted at where the sun was sending up one last flare of bloody red light, and she felt a bolt of excitement surge through her.
For right in their path was the distinctive orange wink of a campfire.
“Casey!” Sasha screamed and pointed.
Casey whipped her sunglasses off. Yep, somebody was there alright. “How far away is that?”
“Looks like maybe an hour more.” Casey sagged. “But…there’s a fire at the end of that hour,” Sasha encouraged.
“Amazing that after getting torched all day that a fire sounds so good right now. But it does. Do you think it could be the town?” Casey asked hopefully.
“Maybe,” Sasha said. “It’s the most likely explanation, I think. It’s right where the town’s supposed to be. Maybe Cody walks faster than us. Actually, I’ll bet he does. For him, that could be an honest day’s walk from Arturo Gyp.”
“It’s gotta be the town then,” Casey said, feeling hope swell in her. She felt giddy, almost like laughing out loud. She fought down the worry spiked in her that it was crawling with Niburians from the crash. So what if it was? They were obviously stuck here: otherwise, they would have left already.
Niburians hated being on Earth. Earth was ghetto.
Or maybe they did leave. Of course! That was it. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? The crash survivors were rescued. They certainly would have had a Whispering Stone with them. And they would have called Nibiru as soon as they crashed. A rescue ship would have come. That’s probably why all the omphalos from the crashed Sky Chamber were missing: they had been salvaged by the rescue crew. No sense in leaving powerful jewels laying around for the Black-Headed Cowboys to discover; that wouldn’t do: no, not at all.
She told Sasha her theory. “Oh, of course,” Sasha replied, agreeing with her to Casey’s surprise. “That’s it. My brain is addled, I should have thought of that. I doubt the centurions are still hanging around. Although, it doesn’t explain what happened to our friend in the desert. You know, why he was chained to the Tree of Pain.”
“Maybe he was the pilot,” Casey suggested. “He might have been the guy who screwed up, the one who caused them to crash. Sounds like something centurions would do to someone who made a mistake like that, doesn’t it?”
Sasha had to agree again: it did.
“Oh, now I can’t wait to get there,” Casey suddenly said, referring to the town, and ignoring the pain grinding in her lower back. She picked up her pace. Casey felt stupid for doubting Cody and Logan. She felt stupid for thinking the town was going to be crawling with centurions.
The orange flicker ahead of them beckoned like the nightlight of heaven.


AFTER AN HOUR, what had at first appeared to be a single orange campfire had divided into a group of campfires clustered close to one another. It was also evident that they were all raised up on a hill.
“A town,” Casey explained. “It’s a bunch of fires in a town.” She couldn’t wait to get to a hotel, eat some food and collapse on a soft bed. Thank the gods Cody and Logan had given them some money!
They were very near now. They could actually smell the smoke from the fires. A hint of steak. The sound of voices carried on the wind. Laughter. Yelling.
At last, the ground started to tilt upwards. Even though it was harder on their sore legs, it meant ‘the Hike’ was at last coming to an end. This was the last stage.
The stars shimmered in the yawning blue-black deeps above, a multitude of burning powdered diamonds. Casey smiled to herself as the hill became steeper, forcing her to look up at them.
“Another cemetery,” Sasha said, pointing. Just as in Arturo Gyp, the cemetery was the first thing to greet them. “Guess it’s a cheery western tradition. Like the welcome wagon.”
The hill leveled off, and they were on a stone path leading into town. There was a sign nearby. Casey ran up to it, getting in as close as she could to read it under the starlight. It said:


ENTERING THE TOWNSHIP OF
ARTURO GYP
In Reverant Memorie of Our Founder


Horror whorled in Casey’s stomach. Sasha arrived behind her, sensing trouble. She looked up at the sign.
“Whaaaaat?” Sasha hissed. “That’s impossible! We walked in a straight line, the whole time! I’m sure of it!”
Sunstroke!
“We must have… We couldn’t have. Something went wrong. The sun screwed us up, made us dizzy…We got turned around…”
“No. Way. Casey. I’m telling you: We walked in straight line!”
Casey wanted to cry. She stared in horror at the sign, trying to comprehend. “Perturbations in perambulation,” she breathed numbly.
“What does that mean?” Sasha asked.
“That’s what the bartender Eldon said. When we told him we were leaving the Gyp. It means --”
“Difficulties and tribulations encountered while walking,” a man’s voice finished. They looked up. It was Cody, standing there in his ridiculous Daniel Boone outfit. He stepped out of the darkness and they saw he was holding thick Indian blankets, which he offered now to the two of them. Logan White Cloud stood behind him with another hideskin water pouch.
“I was starting to wonder when you two would show up,” Cody said with a bleak smile.
“Cody!” Casey screamed and grabbed him, crying dry tears. Cody latched on to her and held her tight. At last, he pulled away and looked her in the eye.
“Yep, walking out of the Gyp has always been a problem,” Cody sighed wistfully. “It has been for all of us, ever since we first got here.”