As he drove, Mark Bennett's leg was shaking with nervousness for the first time in at least a decade. Well, a decade of bio-time, as everyone called it now. If he included the deepsleep on the big transport ship over here, it was closer to a century since his leg had bounced with this much energy. That last time, countless millions of miles away back on Earth, his leg had shook when he went to pick up his prom date. This time, he was picking up his wife.

Fiancee, he reminded himself. She's your fiancee. You ain't married to her just yet. With one hand and two knees steering the covered buggy down the dirt road, leaving a cloud of dust behind him, he reached his free hand over to the cool glass Nutri-Drink bottle and took another long sip of the thick, faintly chalky liquid. Despite the bottle's claim otherwise, it did not in fact taste like 100% Real Oklahoma Vanilla. But it did allegedly have one-hundred percent of his daily vitamins and minerals, and was certainly more filling than his usual breakfast of nothing. His blue-gray eyes, with faint dark circles underneath the reflective sunglasses, darted to the other cupholder, grabbing the metallic thermos and washing the "Vanilla" down with a wretchedly bitter sip of strong hot coffee. Ahhh. Hopefully the Yukon Strawberry in the back seat, the one intended for his wi -- fiancee, was a little more true-to-its-name. Deepsleep had left him miserably hungry - something about the way they IV'd you just enough to keep you alive and safe, but miserable when you awoke. The front seat was occupied by a plank of unfinished wood, hand-painted in plain block letters with the name Sara J Liddell.

He turned his fiancee's name over again in his head before once again wondering what she'd looked like. What she'd BE like. He only had two things he knew about her for right now. The name, and that her transport landed at oh-eight-hundred. The buggy display read oh-seven-twenty-one right now.

It was a good enough name as names went. Sa - ra. Sara J Liddell. Sara wasn't a trouble-woman's name. Not like Victoria or Jessica.

Of course, it wasn't just that she'd be landing soon that told him something about her. It's that she made the journey at all. Eighty-nine years of deepsleep and God knows how far away from anything you ever knew. The only people who would do something like that were those with nothing else worth back home. So he knew that about her, too.

For him, going had been a simple decision. His father had left one day when he was six, never to be seen again. When he was sixteen and Matt eighteen (he'd suddenly changed from Matthew to a much more slick "Matt" the year before), the older brother left for the big city, hardly ever coming around anymore, even at the holidays. Then, at twenty-eight, he found Mom in bed next to two empty bottles - one of her pain meds and one of whiskey. He knew that the former was a full bottle at least, having picked it up for her the day before. She looked peaceful now, in a way she never quite did before. And now, at bio-age thirty-one, he too had been the last to leave that God-forsaken Kentucky town.

The buggy slowed as he turned onto the highway, mercifully paved. The orangey-red sunrise that had been behind him was now on his right, exploding into sharp color in the dry clear air over the next few minutes as he easily pushed the needle past 200 kilos on the empty road.

When he applied to "Be a Bright Part of The Future of Humanity!", as the digital billboards and commercials said, he lacked the same high-minded enthusiasm as those ads. But he couldn't deny that a fresh start sounded real nice. And a whole place of his own. And they'd even partner him up, if he so chose. Find him a wife. As he filled out the Personality Questionaire on the little screen, part of him wanted to let out a soft chuckle at the foolishness of what he was doing, trusting some silly scientists to play matchmaker for him. But another part of him re-read and double checked his careful answers to every question. He didn't have much luck on his own.

He didn't need a supermodel. Shit, even if she was older than him, he wouldn't mind too much, maybe. A good pair could cover for a lot of other sins. Or a good backside. Or being nice to talk to. It's not that he didn't mind being alone, he thought to himself. He'd had a nice enough time since his own transport had landed last week. Life and thought had returned to him in one snappy moment, along with that overwhelming hunger and a great achy soreness. The pod was just a hair too small for his long legs and broad chest. Upon landing and getting his house key and papers, he'd unpacked his few belongings and explored the new house, furnished simply but adequately with four bedrooms. They expected the settlers to stay busy, apparently! He made a mental map of the fifty acres and house and sheds that now belonged to him and Sara J Liddell (what a lovely name. Simple. But cute), and ran into town a few times to prepare for the upcoming Spring planting season, gathering tools and seeds and some how-to books. That all was fine to pass the time. Being alone was fine. It's the being lonely that got to him.

In the big clear sky to his left, he could see the sunrise gleaming off the shiny transport ship, no bigger than his thumb for now but massive up close. His chest jumped softly as he was struck again by the thought of his wi -- fiancee being right there. Right there in the sky! On THAT ship!

His mind mercifully came back to him as he realized he'd pushed the buggy well past 250 kilos, a bit fast as the traffic started appearing now, and slowed it back down until he turned off into the dirt lot surrounding the big warehouse where the ship would dock. Did his leg have to shake so goddamn much right now? Had so much coffee been a bad idea? He'd woken up early, well before sunrise, but was neither quite alert enough to do anything useful, nor drowsy enough to go back to sleep. And - oh God, did he have coffee breath? Or perhaps even worse, Oklahoma Vanilla breath? Where the hell do you get breath mints on Planet Kepler-Newton 769b-beta or whatever this planet was called anyway?

He made a pit stop in the long narrow men's room, with a good half-erect piss that didn't quite remove the steady burning nervousness in his gut. He stared back at the figure in the mirror, spending a long moment fixing his hair, fixing his jeans, and deciding whether that second-from-the-top button on his flannel button-down should come open or be shut. Open? Shut? Open. Shut. He tried each before finally fixing it shut.

With the hand-painted Sara J Liddell sign in one hand and the Yukon Strawberry Nutri-Drink in the other, still cold against the warming air, he took his place towards the front of the small crowd that gathered under the big floodlights. And, just as expected, a few long agonizing minutes later, the ramps slowly descended and the throngs of people in those ugly deepsleep bodysuits began descending down the ramps. Some looked all around in awe at their brand new planet, or had their eyes fixed on some loved one waiting for them - or perhaps a soon to be loved one, as was probably the case for a few others with their own hand-painted signs and papers. And, to be quite honest, there were quite a few pretty women that he wouldn't mind the name Sara J Liddell belonging to. But one by one those women walked right past him and the whole thing repeated itself.

The minutes of disembarking started to feel like hours, and the constant stream of people, families, couples, singles, began to thin as the worry crept into his mind. Had something gone wrong? Or perhaps the whole thing was some sort of sick joke that the Space Transportation Agency was playing on him? The noise of the crowd gently faded away, and the people became fewer and fewer in number. He scanned the faces of those still wandering around - then back at the ramp as another perfectly fine young woman, this one a cute blonde of perhaps twenty-five, walked right past him too. The aft-most ramp had even been taken over by dock-workers now, with big wrapped pallets being hoverjacked down and away down the street. He looked up at the ship pondering who even to ask about if anything had gone wrong - when he felt it.

The gentle weight startled him, and he lowered the sign to look down and around it to find its source, which happened to be a pair of small arms hugging around his waist, and the torso leaning against him. Attached to them was a pair of big shining blue eyes, wide open, and a mouth somewhere between an open O of surprise and a happy grin on a pale small face. Around this tiny thin frame blew a cloud of light brown hair, carried by the wind from the transport's engines, and the whole of her was clad in that awful deepsleep bodysuit, this one a faint pink.

His brow furrowed, and his mouth opened, but no words came out just yet as he wondered just what exactly this little girl was doing hugging him, and each face looked at each other for a long moment, one overcome with apparent joy, and the other with confusion. He began to put it together, at last, realizing it before he could think the words of what exactly had happened, the terrible mistake, the awful misunderstanding, but as he finally tried to speak, she did first, clearing her throat of eighty-nine years of inactivity and squeezing her arms tighter around his hips as she greeted him, in a high and soft voice,

"Hi Mark!"