"Where is Gonzalez?"  Bill asked Jimmy.

    Jimmy dipped a french fry into ketchup and bit off the red tip.  "I'm not sure.  He said he wanted to take in the sights.  Somehow he is attracted to rural Arkansas."

   

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   Jimmy Carter folded the paperback novel in half and placed it face down on the hot ground beside his chair.  Rubbing his hands down his trouser legs, he closed his eyes and felt the August sun beating on his face.  Sweat formed on his brow and ran down his cheeks onto his neck.  Was this really how the Good Lord intended him to spend his life?  Sitting all day at the curb under the Slick Willie's Used Car World sign, listening to the cars race by on Highway 70?  Haggling with a half-dozen customers a day, making one or two sales a week, just enough to pay his bills?  Not to mention breathing in the fumes of the passing car exhausts all day long, or swatting those big, black, ugly Arkansas suckers that drank all your blood right through your skin!

The three peacekeepers ignored the urging of the colonists to begin searching immediately.  Instead they spent the night sleeping in a small hut.  Anila was a restless sleeper, awaking a half-dozen times, always envious at how Hadar slept so soundly he might have been comatose.  Jov moved around in her sleep, her tail twitching almost constantly, but she seemed content.  Eventually Anila gave up her efforts to sleep, instead sat cross-legged and meditated.  That relaxed her almost as much as sleeping did anyway.

 

    Anila was the first person off the shuttle.  She was greeted by two dozen colonists who gathered around the landing grid.  Standing in front of the group was the apparent leader.

    Anila wore a peacekeeper’s jumper, dark brown with beige ornamentation on her wrists, shoulders and waist.  The uniform blended with her dark brown skin and black hair.  All the colony’s men wore black pants and shirt with a large straw hat, while the woman wore bonnets and ground-length dresses.  Anila was not surprised since Penn’s World had been settled by Quaker revivalists.

   

The purpose of this life journal is to post fiction, mostly science fiction, but occasional historical fiction.   There might be some discussion as well, but that  is a secondary  aim.