Epilogue
Isabella started thinking that maybe this was a mistake. It had been several weeks since she’d last seen Robert, and this was not the right time to have another meeting with him. She wasn’t even sure if he wanted to see her right now, and strictly speaking, he hadn’t even invited her to attend. Nevertheless, she and her two… captives wasn’t the right word. It’s not like she was actually holding them as prisoners after all… She and her two associates walked out into the street from the hangar bay’s unimposing front door and into the Martian colony’s Main Street.
It was still hard to get used to all of this. Isabella had been working aboard the Accoucheur for quite a while now, and had gotten to know Doctor Smith quite well. He had helped her understand and cope with all of the nuances of time travel, but sometimes, like now when she was in the wrong time, nothing really helped her to sort out how all the pieces fit together. It was disorienting to say the least.
This was Mars she was walking on. It seemed weird to her to accept that fact, especially given the old movies she’d seen about Martians. She had always liked those sorts of films and old radio programs. This wasn’t Earth at all, and not even the moon or even some spaceship for that matter. It was a whole other planet, with two moons of its own! Doctor Smith, bless him, had told her not to go looking for any moons in the sky. “Bella,” he had told her, “One is simply too small and distant to see from the ground, and the other is not much to see.” She argued that seeing any foreign moon would be exciting, but he insisted that Phobos only looked like a potato floating through the sky. She didn’t mind though, in fact, she rather liked potatoes.
The whole thing might as well be a dream for how odd it all was. Maybe it was that Isabella handled oddity so well that she had been picked for her job in the first place. Robert had told her that it was for other reasons, of course, but without being accepting of the strangeness of it all, it was unlikely she would have remained with the program. The strangeness now included the orange streets and rusty red buildings that now surrounded her, as well as the few wispy clouds she noticed overhead. This was an internal environment where people had figured out how to make their own clouds! Through them, she could see the clear ceiling, but only in places where condensation gathered, or where the setting sun glinted off it. The same sun she’d spent her youth playing beneath, distant and small as seen from this world. A little farther above the dimming horizon glimmered a bright little light, the ‘evening star’ here, Earth.
She’d been very curious to come here, ever since she found out that humans had settled the planet. Never having a reason made it a pointless venture however, especially given all the work she still had to do. Now, because of her associates, Adam and Audrey, she finally had a reason to come. Hopefully Robert wouldn’t be too angry with her. It seemed he was never angry for very long. And hopefully she’d be able to see some of the sights while she’s here.
As they ventured down the subdued street, there were a few people going about their business, but much fewer than she would expect of a facility this size. She asked, “Is it always this empty?”
“No,” Audrey answered with a little giggle. Was it disbelief in her voice? “Most of them are at the church, or at work in the shops or farms. Afternoon is the best time to farm here, since it’s the warmest. Mars is usually pretty cold.”
Adam shuffled his feet a little as he walked, kicking at the red dirt that had accumulated a little, even in the controlled environment of the Colony. “I remember,” he added, “how quiet it was out here. I stepped out into the alley behind the church for a few minutes to get some air, and remembered the silence. It seemed like the whole Colony was in that church right then.” The tolling of bells, chiming the hour, pierced the quiet lane. On Earth, she would have expected to at least hear the breeze, but there wasn’t one here.
“Is that it there?” Bella asked, to which her associates both nodded in reply. There was what looked like a church you would find in her hometown, in her home time. Even then, however, this style of chapel would have been long outdated though. Here it was in pristine condition, with its white wooden plank face, and three stone steps leading up to the large oak double-doors, complete with wrought iron hinges. Up above the doors, on what looked like a partial third floor, was a modest bell tower and cross; simple, like the ones built in the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds all over the Americas. A small chapel with its small steeple: the perfect place for a big wedding.
The bells had just finished chiming six o’clock as they mounted the steps, and cautiously pulled open one of the doors. The music was playing inside, probably prompted by the bells, and they could see through the short entrance hall that everyone had risen from their seats. The ushers had apparently all moved up to the front, leaving latecomers to fend for themselves. The three of them quietly snuck in and, without anyone noticing, stood behind the back row against the wall.
Standing on her toes, Isabella was still having a hard time seeing up to the front of the crowd over the rows of heads. The chapel somehow seemed much larger on the inside than it appeared from the street. This, she thought, was nearly always true of churches. “What can you see?” Bella whispered to Adam, who was several inches taller than both she and his wife Audrey was.
“It looks like I’m already up there, looking only a little nervous but trying to act like everything is under control,” he answered quietly. “You can’t even tell that the other me feels like he’s about to faint.” A funny, crooked sort of smile crossed Adam’s face as he watched himself.
“Really?” Audrey asked him. “I thought you were excited about all of this.”
Adam blushed a little, looking at his wife. “I was excited, but I wasn’t very good at coping with the excitement, that’s all.”
A woman just ahead of them, also teetering on her toes, trying to steal a glimpse of the front of the room, took a moment to glare over her shoulder at the three of them whispering to each other, apparently not realizing that Adam was in the front of the room as well as in the back.
“I wonder how Daniel and Arthur felt about walking up the aisle with Egypt and Ire instead of with one another? It never really occurred to me at the time,” Adam thought aloud.
“They did walk up another aisle together only a few weeks later, so it couldn’t have bothered them too terribly much,” Audrey answered. “I still think they caught the wedding bug while they were at ours, despite the fact they say they’d been planning it for a long time.”
“Egypt and Ire are here?” Bella interjected curiously. “I have always wondered about their very interesting names.”
“Nanny said that all the girls from my compound were named for their countries of origin.” Adam answered. “Egypt would have been the daughter of a pyramid builder or something, and Ire would have been from, well, Ireland. They weren’t sure where I was from exactly, not originally anyway, and I was the first male they were successful in changing, so I guess Nanny just named me after the first human.”
“I’ll have to ask her about it some time. I didn’t realize that Nanny was responsible for naming all of you.” Bella noted.
Trying to get a view of the bride and her father, Bella bounced from foot to foot, wishing, as always, that she were taller. The father of the bride scanned the crowd as he waited for the last maid and groomsman to separate near the alter. She gave a little wave as Admiral Chan turned his head their direction. His face lit up in a smile that he seems to reserve for Bella. Her Robert was such a sweetheart when you could get past his stuffy military demeanor.
“Father seems to like you,” Audrey whispered to her. Bella didn’t turn to see her face, but assumed she was grinning by the tone of her words. Admiral Robert Chan, in full dress uniform, gave her a little wave, and then turned to start down the aisle.
Adam started, “I wondered who he was waving at…” but trailed off as the woman in the back row shushed them.
The bride, Audrey, and her father walked slowly down the aisle, and Bella couldn’t help noticing how nice he looked when he wore his uniform. The lines were straight, and the medals carefully placed. Robert’s walk was steady and even. How she loved walking with that man! “How long has it been for you?” Bella asked her associates, the wedding couple attending their own wedding at the back of the audience.
“Six months, I think,” answered Audrey. “It’s hard to tell when you move around in time this much. It took Adam almost two whole years to propose, but once he finally did, I made sure the engagement was short.”
“Will you,” a voice echoed from the front of the room, “Adam Sydney, take Audrey Chan to be your lawfully wedded spouse…”
“That dress is so beautiful!” Audrey commented, whispering to her husband over the official’s words. “I was so wrapped up in how I looked in it then that I don’t think I ever truly admired it as a whole.”
“I could only see you,” Adam responded sweetly. Bella thought to herself how cute they were together, critiquing their wedding as if they were watching it on television.
“Shhh!” added the woman maybe a little too loudly from just in front of them. “You’re going to miss the whole thing!”
After a short pause, Adam answered her jokingly, “It’s alright, we’ve already seen it.”
“Adam!” Audrey scolded him quietly, “I didn’t mean for you to repeat that!”
